Food Blog: have cake, will travel

source: keenhaven.com

Vegan recipes that don't require expensive (artificial) alternatives for animal products are often hard to find. And also vegan cookbooks that aren't trying too hard by thinking of the most exotic recipes are rare as well. Fortunately, I found the perfect vegan cookbook a few years ago: The Complete Guideline to Vegan Food Substitutions by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman. It's a cookbook that not only offers simple recipes, such as like vegan pancakes or vegan feta cheese, but also guides on how to "veganize" traditional recipes. They provide a huge list of alternatives for certain animal products, such as milk, cheese or eggs, at the beginning of each chapter.

Although this book really simplifies vegan cooking, I still like to read food blogs to find new ideas. I usually stick to German-speaking food blogs (mostly because of the measurements), but when we were asked to write about an English-speaking food blog, I thought of looking up what the authors of my favorite cookbook are doing. And it wasn't surprising at all that they had their own food blogs as well.

I instantly fell in love with Celine Steel's blog "have cake, will travel". I have to admit that this is mostly to her breath-taking photographs, as everything in her photos looks so natural and like it's straight out of grandmother's kitchen. But as soon as I took my eyes off her photos (which is very hard, because they take all the attention away from the text), I recognized her witty writing style from the book. In her posts, she usually starts with a personal story about the ingredients or how she craved for something special. This is followed my mouth-watering pictures of the recipe's target and the recipe itself. Unfortunately, her blog (in difference to their book) offers more food for people with a sweet tooth like muffins, tarts, cookies, syrup, and so on, which actually isn't quite my cup of tea.

Soylent, or: The Man Who Stopped Eating Food

picture source: John Suder

I know the header picture is misleading: I won't post about the movie Soylent Green (maybe another time), but rather about something that has a very similar name: Soylent. It's a "thick, odorless, beige liquid" which has the potential of stopping world hunger, saving the environment and turning humanity into healthy living-beings.

But let's start from the beginning: Rob Rhinehart (his blog: robrhinehart.com), an engineer from the U.S., counted up how much time, money and nerves buying and preparing food costs. The shocking result led him to the following question: is it really food we need to function and survive or the elements and chemicals in them? Is it, for example, the bread as a whole or the carbs in it? So he started an experiment: he would mix only the elements and chemicals itself and create a nutritious liquid, called "Soylent", which contains the perfect diet to gain all the energy, vitamins and everything else we need. And: he would not eat any other food for a minimum of 30 days.

He states on his blog:

I feel like the six million dollar man. My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone. My resting heart rate is lower, I haven't felt the least bit sickly, rare for me this time of year. I've had a common skin condition called Keratosis Pilaris since birth. That was gone by day 9. I used to run less than a mile at the gym, now I can run 7. I have more energy than I know what to do with. On day 4 I caught myself balancing on the curb and jumping on and off the sidewalk when crossing the street like I used to do when I was a kid. People gave me strange looks but I just smiled back. Even my scars look better.

He also explains how his mental performance improved, and how much money he saved while his diet consisted solely of Soylent (according to his blog, the average American spends $604/month for food while Soylent costs $154.82/month). If more people switched to the Soylent diet, we would not have to produce that huge amount of food on fields and in factories anymore. Also, people in the Third World Countries would benefit by having a perfectly nutritious meal without big effort (although clear water is essential for the preparation of Soylent).

It surely sounds like science-fiction: an odorless and low-cost liquid you drink a few times a day and you are perfectly healthy and energetic. I'm just wondering if humanity would really give up the joy  and culture of eating when Soylent was established around the world (although Rhinehart stated that it can be combined with traditional food as well, but he doesn't crave it anymore). I personally like almost everything that helps deprived people and the environment. If it was available in stores I would most likely try it out.

However, I think preparing and eating food is deeply rooted in our culture(s) since hundred and thousands of years, so even if it is beneficial in many ways -- I don't think that it can replace food as a whole.

Sources:
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
http://www.vice.com/read/rob-rhinehart-no-longer-requires-food

Why I'm not a good Blogger

source: ler0c

I was doing a bit of brain-storming for our first homework of this semester today, you know, how we plan to improve our blogs and what we like best about the blogs of our fellow students. All I could think of during gathering my thoughts was: why is it so hard for me to post regularly? How did the other students manage to post so much, while I was struggling with it all the time?

Blogging is not even new to me. I have always been writing about my private life, starting in 2004/2005 with shamelessly spamming my blog with writing ridiculously detailed posts about my everyday life (which mostly consisted of going to school back then). Obviously, I wasn't the only one doing this -- I knew lots of people on the internet who did the very same, although it wasn't that "mainstream" during that time. It was kind of a scene you belonged to when you managed to let your readers believe that your life is always full of adventures and fun. It made me feel good to present the kind of impressive parts of my life, because most of my readers didn't know me personally. This made it easier to act like a super heroine since they couldn't prove the opposite.

When social platforms like MySpace and Facebook came along, presenting your life on the internet became much more common, and slowly but surely also privacy on the internet became a topic. It was (luckily) the end of my glorious time of thinking "Notice me, internet! I'm interesting!". I started becoming more careful with my privacy, thinking twice whether my posts are worth being posted or not.

However, there was also the other direction: out of a sudden, a lot of people started blogging about their everyday life as well and/or posted their opinions about certain topics with sheer passion, while I more and more hesitated posting on my blog. I just felt that my everyday life was not interesting enough. I felt and still feel that blogging was yet again a way of showing off. My personal impression is that lots of bloggers think of themselves as being extraordinary, and that their metaphorical voice on the internet is loud and of big importance. On the internet, I am one person amongst millions and so in most cases, hardly anybody will be interested in what I ate today or why I don't like ridiculous high temperatures in summer.

In the end, I might be on the way of finding an answer to my question at the beginning: either I'm not self-confident enough to write down my personal opinions or I take blogging far too seriously. Either way, I have to find a better solution to be able to post on this blog more regularly than not posting at all -- at least for the sake of a good grade.

What is a hillbilly?

I think I have mentioned quite a few times that I really like watching TV shows. One of my current favorites is "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" from the 90s.:

There are four actors who play out different improv games, which contents are based on suggestions from the audience or from the producers of the show. The actors work notably well together and think of the most hilarious things off the top of their heads. In some games they have to fulfill character suggestions, which are often stereotypes. One is quite often suggested: the stereotype of a hillbilly. Wikipedia defines a hillbilly the following:

Hillbilly is a term for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas of the United States, primarily southern Appalachia but also the Ozarks. Owing to its strongly stereotypical connotations, the term can be offensive to those Americans of Appalachian heritage.

Here's a good example of how the "Whose Line" cast likes to interpret the hillbillies:



The reason I'm posing is that while I was reading about Appalachia for the next Progress Check, the actors of the show doing their hillbilly parodies kept popping into my head. They do exaggerate a lot, but like we also mentioned in class: stereotypes do help to get a slight image of what it's really like there. And now I finally know who the cast of "Whose Line" are trying to show.

Help, I'm procrastinating!

You're spending your precious study time watching television, reading stuff on the internet and/or drink your fifth coffee just to avoid studying? And it doesn't feel good at all, because you're feeling guilty for doing nothing productive? Cleaning the litter box of your cat seems incredibly attractive all of a sudden? This, my friends, is procrastination: the student's worst enemy.

I'm one of these people that are procrastinating until the very end of a deadline, and that's a horrible trait to have. You basically just keep doing things that are kind-of-fun instead of doing what you're supposed to do. And the guilt doesn't even let you enjoy this. I often look at the clock and say to myself: "the next full hour, you start studying. And you will be studying for hours until you know just everything!". And then, after spending some time doing "fun" stuff, I look at my clock again; it's five minutes past full hour. And I say to myself: "okay, the next full hour will be the start of your studying marathon. This time for real!". And you know what? Nothing happens. Nothing!

However, yesterday I read an article on HackCollege named "Understanding Procrastination". It basically says that the cure for procrastination is to simply understand procrastination. The author says that we tend to spend our time doing everything but studying because our brain wants us to be happy and/or entertained now, and not after studying vocabulary for hours.

But, according to the article, you can trick your brain by visualizing your future success on a test. The good feeling you have when you get a good grade is much better than the things we suddenly want to do instead of studying. And this is something our brain has to understand. With a positive attitude it's possible to reach the goal of a good grade. I think the author describes it best with these wise words: "just know that you get out what you put in". With the future positive feeling in your mind, textbooks and worksheets won't look that mean and evil anymore. This doesn't mean that studying for hours will be suddenly possible; rewarding yourself after mastering a chunk of study content is important too and will get you motivated though.

It sounds too simple, I know, but today I was more productive than the whole past week. I also don't feel that scared of our assessment anymore. Maybe HackCollege's article will help some of you as well -- even it is just by lessening your fear.