I love the whole world

Good morning friends, it's Monday!

I love my mom a lot. Out of all the people and things that exist in the world the one that comes first to my mind when I think of love is my mom. Our relationship isn't perfect, we fight and generally disagree. I don't tell her every thing that's going in my life, but when something is bugging me or I'm overwhelmed I call her first. Maybe I'll have a friend or a partner some day who I'm close enough with that I can share the things I'm most proud and most afraid of but for now it's still my mom.

I love books and Libraries. They are one of the most important things in my life. When I'm stressed or going stir crazy I don't go to the mall I go to the Library. The quiet and the smell of books relaxes me. Books are one of the only things that can completely take my mind off things. when I'm reading I so immersed in someone else's world that I can forget about my own, forget about my own problems and worries for a while.

These are the two things I love the most. Of course I love the rest of my family and I love my friends. But their impact isn't quite as far reaching, they don't hold the same place in my heart.

Love,

Allysa

All you need is Love?

So, I was thinking about what theme I could set for this week. In honour of Esther Day, which was Wednesday, I've decided to dedicate this week to things/people we love. Oh, and just in case you haven't seen Hank's Esther Day video, here it is :

I'll leave my post till next Thursday, but I'd like to see what you guys have to say on the subject :)

summer break :(

It's summer „break“ over here, which basically means all students either do internships or are locked in their rooms writing papers. It's the latter for me, which is rather a shame considering how nice it's outside, and how big my books are (way too big and heavy to take to the riverside). So I'm trying to keep myself from procrastinating too much (so far I've seen neither Friends nor The West Wing in their entirety, which is rather an improvement over the last years).

So basically I'm not going out much, and spend most of my day reading up on the medieval Flemish art and court scene, which means I have absolutely nothing to talk about. Yay. I could tell you about medieval feasts featuring orchestras playing in giant pies and stuff, but I'm too lazy to scan the pictures. One day I'm going to use my accidental expertise in early stage design for something useful (it's an utterly fascinating topic, since they did all sorts of crazy stuff you wouldn't expect them to be able to do back then (and that would be way to expensive to do today), but, you know...)

Ooh, a few days ago we saw a semi-staged reading of Dracula near a pseudo-medieval tower above town (the one we like to bullshit tourists into believing is the Rapunzel tower, despite it having been build after the Grimms snuffed it – it's a bit of a hobby among towns that have any connection to the Grimms ;) we like to lay claim on Little Red Riding Hood as well). Anyways, the play was awesome (mostly thanks to the great actors). We were sitting outside, in the middle of the forest, and the sound was so astonishingly good that you really couldn't tell whether the birds you heard in the background were real or not. Plus they served really strong (vampire-themed) drinks, so the audience was rather giggly by the end. Only getting back down to town was rather an adventure (it was dark, near midnight, and none of the buses went where they were supposed to go. By foot it would've been a ten minute walk through a dark forest potentially full of mines or a 90 minute walk along deserted roads (... and highways).)

QotD: What's your most useless area of expertise?

Slap in the face

I say eat the way you want to eat!

I use to eat everything, but for almost 6 years now I haven't eaten pork, at least not consciously. But only because suddenly I can't stand the smell and taste of it anymore. My sister is pescatarian but that doesn't mean she's healthier than everyone else.

As to being healthy, I think diet is just 10% of the battle. You can be vegetarian or vegan but eat french fries everyday and still get a heart attack. What you really need to do is exercise. But, although it should be, health isn't exactly my focus in terms of food but taste.

If you don't like how it taste then don't eat it. But at least try it once, otherwise how will you know if you like it or not. I actually got slapped in the face for being adventurous with food. We have a delicacy here in the Philippines which is called balut. It's a duck embryo, around 16-21 days old, boiled and eaten with salt and/or vinegar. I told my roommate that I have and liked eating balut. She slapped me in the face, jokingly of course. I'm not saying I didn't deserve it cause I told her the story partly to freak her out a little. We were having a debate about prop. 2. Mind you my roommate eats more meat than I do. That's a whole other story that I really don't have time to talk about and isn't that interesting anyway.

My point is try it and if you don't like it don't eat it.

QOTD: What's the most exotic thing you've eaten?

Hear from you guys soon

RUBEN IV

P.S. Sorry for the late post =P

Lions And Antelopes

Terminology legend for those too lacy to Google or use dictionary:

Vegetarian
- a person who does not eat or does not believe in eating meat, fish, fowl, or, in some cases, any food derived from animals, as eggs or cheese, but subsists on vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, etc.

Vegan
- a vegetarian who omits all animal products from the diet.

Pescetarian
- a vegetarian who will eat fish; also called pescevegetarian, piscatorial.

I’m an omnivore, I haven’t moved on from the nutrition that evolution has created my bunodont teeth to indicate. This is to say that I eat meat, as well as fish, vegetables, fruit and so on. I don’t have a healthy diet, I don’t count calories, and though I’ve considered trying out vegetarianism and pescatarianism in the past, it hasn’t lead to anything. I guess I’m not motivated enough. Once I saw this horrible documentary with no narration that showed the brutal way animals are treated in the food production process in some French factory or something along those lines. The scene I remember the best was one where masses of little baby chicks were moved around on a conveyor belt to these plastic boxes. Some chicks kept falling off and this raunchy looking factory-worker lady just threw them back on, like they hadn’t even been alive. No emotion, no carefulness. It was like she had been throwing rocks, bored as hell. And these poor chicks just sat on that conveyor, fell around, chirping. Still, that documentary wasn’t enough for me to pull a Lisa Simpson and start rejecting meat over night because of emotional reasons (it did make me want to adopt all the poor baby chicks of the world though). I guess all I can do is check the brand on what I eat and prefer local brands. Luckily I don’t eat that much chicken so, yeah…at least I’m keeping myself from contributing to some cruelty. Eh?

As for the versus idea of the topic, I don’t find that particularly interesting. I won’t go to health benefits and such since that’s a topic everyone and their mother has likely gone through multiple times in their lives - I think some were already covered here too. Plus there’s google for finding out pro and con arguments on that. I’m not passionate enough on the subject to fill this post with my own arguments.
What I will say is that I respect other people’s nutritional choices and don’t feel the need to start shoving meat down anyone’s throat. Many of my friends are vegetarians and it’s fine by me since they don’t exactly try to shove their lifestyle down my throat and they are not snobby about it. Vegetarianism is not going to harm anyone, except for the one on the diet if they aren’t careful, so I don’t mind, why should I?

Only unpleasant thing is that some vegetarians and vegans alike show a nasty higher than thou attitude about their ethical and nutritional choices. I think the worst of it I saw on PETA’s forums. One day I figured I’d give the site a look and what I saw was a board full of thousands of aggressive vegans whose attitude was utterly disgusting. In one thread some poor new member asked if she was a bad person for eating meat or something along those lines and a hoard of higher than thou vegans, senior members, pretty much told her that yes she is the worst person in the world and she doesn’t really love animals. It was like witnessing a crowd of 20-year-olds give a 5-year-old little girl the beating of her life. That sort of an attitude is not going to help anyone. I’ve seen somewhat similar rude behavior from the carnivore side too. Mostly crude jokes in the form of face book groups though. Nothing as flashy as PETA forums. I guess I’ve been lucky on that front. Generally I’m surrounded by accepting people in real life so such conflicts rarely come up there. Most of the rudeness I witness is online where it's bound to be harsher than in real life due to a certain degree of anonymity.

I guess I'm done with this ramble. I don't think I had anything concrete to say but... I posted! Late, sure, but better late than never. :P

FOOD!

Since I'd already written my post for last week's topic I'll just post both now.

1. Breakfast!

When I was still in school I hated breakfast. Not only did I grow up in the one region in Germany that is entirely void of good bread (they sell it in plastic bags *headshake*), I simply wasn't hungry that early. I joylessly munched some chewy bread, drank tea and then usually bought a cheese roll or something during recess.

I don't think I really started to like breakfast before I moved to my current town. We're one of those towns that are thoroughly dominated by their universities, and to suit students a lot of bakeries offer affordable small breads that are manageable even if you don't share with your housemates. And then I kind of fell in love with breakfast (and bread, zOMG bread...).

Since I started cycling in the morning I usually split breakfast in two. A wee bit of cereal in milk with berries (frozen) before I head out, and a "proper" breakfast consisting of bread and tea (black, plain or with ginger) once I'm back.

This is what I had the last two days:

Today's was two small slices of rye bread, one with cream cheese, cucumber and nigella seeds, one with almond paste. NOM. No fresh veg or fruit today since I was out :( The one on the left features the best pottery teacup ever.

That I eat bread and savoury topic is the only part that's typically German, I think. Most people drink coffee in the morning, and sausage or cheese (sans veg & weird seeds) on their bread.

2. Meat eater Vs. Pescetarian Vs. Vegetarian Vs. Vegan

Let's have a look at today's groceries:

Yup. Clear case of almost-vegetarianism ;).

I've never been particularly fond of meat and fish. There were a few meat dishes I rather liked, but when my sister turned vegetarian when I was six I started sharing her food rather than my parents' rather quickly. I'd still eat meat if my parents cooked something I particularly liked, but on most days I stuck to veg. When I slowly started to learn how to cook it was usually dinner for me and my sister, or the entire family, so I never really learned how to cook meat (ok, I also absolutely refused to touch raw meat (yuck), that might've been an issue as well...). (As a result the only traditional German food I can make is potato salad... oops.)

It's still pretty much the same. I'm not strictly vegetarian. I don't mind gelatine and rennet, and I'll very occasionally (maybe once a month) eat meat, though not usually prepared by myself. Mostly to make life for my friends easier, occasionally because the dish on offer is just too bloody delicious to refuse. The only thing I prepare myself is the occasional taco beef (well, and I tried to make beef curry a while ago, but it wasn't that great, so I'm unlikely to try again for quite some time)...

My main issue with meat (aside from veggies simply being yummier) are the conditions under which most most meat is raised. Growing up in a small town in a rural traditional farming region our butcher could usually tell us what meadow that cow had been standing on a few weeks earlier, and farmers generally took good care of their animals. Now I live in a bigger city and it's quite a bit more difficult. The only thing I can be certain to have been raised under decent conditions is lamb/mutton and venison, which (of course) are a bit too expensive for a slim student budget (especially when you have no idea how to actually cook them). For some reason it's much easier to get dairy from happy dairy cows than meat from happy meat cows :(

As for my vegetarian diet... I really hate meat substitutes. I guess it kind of figures, since I'm mostly almost-vegetarian 'cause I don't like meat. I just fail to see the necessity, because you can cook much, much better (not to mention healthier) just sticking to traditionally vegetarian dishes. But I guess a lot of people who turn veg for ethical reasons miss their meat.

Did I mention fresh veg is delicious? Because it bloody well is.

Pescy...what?

Hi Nerdy Bunch, it's Saturday THURSDAY. How are we all? I've just started back at uni after the end-of-first-semester holidays. Its good to be back, but it makes me sad that I'm busy already. Anyway, on to the week's topic!

I am a meat-eater. I have nothing against vegetarians, vegans and pesca...tarians? I have to admit that I had no idea what a Pescetarian was until I remembered that one of my favourite vloggers, KatersOneSeven, is one. Anyway, I would go so far as to say that I agree with the philosophy/ies behind the aforementioned dietary ideologies. I do not think that animals should be treated cruelly just for my benefit.

That being said, I can't help but find veganism/vegetarianism/pescetarianism just a little bit silly. Humans, my nerdy friends, are omnivores. In order to be fully healthy we need to source our nutrients from a wide range of places, and yes, that means animals and animal products. That is not to say that I think we have the right to be cruel to animals;  I'm not naiive about where that tasty bit of bacon I had with my lunch came from. I just think that there are widely available sources of cruelty-free animal products such as free-range eggs and meat from animals that have been raised and slaughtered in an humane way. I know that somewhere, an animal died so that I could have a delicious meal, but I try to go for cruelty-free products where possible.

Pescetarianism does have quite a good health benefit, what with all that omega 3, but I personally dislike fish/seafood, so I just couldn't live that lifestyle. Secondary to that is the fact that our seas are terribly overfished, which is pretty bad for the ecosystem.

Veganism is what really gets me. Like I said, there are cruelty-free sources of milk and eggs, and if you go for those, nobody is harming/killing some poor animal for your benefit and you are still able to get essential nutrients from those sources. It just seems...illogical, to me.

If I were to go with any of the alternatives, I'd be a Vegetarian, because I could still have eggs and milk, and could get most of my other nutrients from fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes. I make a mean Dal (Indian lentil-based stew-type-thing). But really, I do like meat too much to give it up.

Anyway, it is not for me to dictate who eats what. One of the great things about the whole thing is that I can choose what I eat. In that way, we're all pretty lucky, really. I mean, if I feel like eating an apple, I can just stroll to my fridge and grab one. Heck, I can change my mind and go for an orange, or a stick of celery, or a sandwich instead. And that's pretty awesome :)

See you next week! Am I right in assuming that I'm picking the topic?