The truck with all the trees
Rolls slowly down the street.
The gypsy calls
To sell! The trees!
But no one comes to buy
And the truck just rolls on by.

If there’s anything cooler than a British Classics professor with a mean sense of humor, it’s a vegetarian British Classics professor with a mean sense of humor. Today I was walking along in the hot afternoon sun, and who should I happen upon, but Raish! “Sarah! Just the person was looking for,” says he, and proceeds to ask what this lignan is that’s in his flax. I tell him it’s a fiber that causes ground flax to gelatinize, making a good egg replacement in baked goods. It’s also an antioxidant. “I knew you would have the answer,” he said, and I walked on with a big smile on my face.

Another reason to smile is Passover. I’m not Jewish, but one of my good friends here is. Becky showed me how to make charoset, an apple and walnut topping for matzo, and we feasted on this as well as carrots, and dates and dried apricots from Istanbul, all while watching Die Hard 4. But the biggest success of our seder was the pomegranate truffles. These were the easiest thing in the world to make, and they turned out perfectly divine. Becky and I were reeling with success, and new ideas are tumbling out of our heads: orange-juice truffles rolled in candied lemon zest? Mexican truffles with cinnamon and cayenne pepper? I even have some crazy ideas involving balsamic vinegar and sea salt. We’re already planning a truffle-making marathon for May Day weekend, and after that, potential careers as chocolatiers.

A while ago my dad pointed me to an excellent article from Smashing Magazine about cool new technology designs. I especially like the simple Pock-It, a sticky-note that forms a pocket, and the Dual Music Player which unfolds like a beetle to play CD’s. Even the less practical devices are still creative and beautiful. It’s always sad when concept designs get dialed down in the end, but I suppose when you’re trying to appeal to broadest market possible, you don’t want things to be too distinctively styled. I wonder if that’s why designers tend to prefer bold niche-market products, even when they sometimes sacrifice a bit on ergonomics and aesthetics. Yet I believe that the most beautiful objects are those everyday things that are a joy to use, invisible in their perfect rightness, and inherently elegant in form.

Despite all the impressive technology that makes me drool, I check my desire to own the cool new thing. I actually have an almost unhealthy aversion to spending money, so I also have to be careful not to be pound-foolish or miserly. If I need something, I should purchase what will do the best job and make me most happy. Most people seem to have the opposite problem, but in the end we all want to own only possessions we love.

In other news, I have spent my weekends knee-deep in flowers at Olympia and Delphi, both the ancient sites and the quaint one-road modern villages. Seeing statues that I studied back in Freshman year was thrilling, especially when the emotion on the faces of frightened Lapiths or dying Argives was so much more keenly felt than when seen in photographs. Prof. Nicola also saved us from a day wasted on museums by taking us to Pylos, where we hiked through a fort, clambered the rocky shore, and fed fish by the docks.

And the Friday after I went on a hike for my Natural Environment class on Mt. Parnassis. Burned and scarred though it is, the place we went was not lacking in sub-alpine meadows and scrubby forests. It was great fun, especially spending the entire day talking with Becky, a girl after my own heart. I could reference things in fantasy, sci-fi, old movies, literature, science, and other geekery without getting odd looks or being questioned about “who Ares is” or “what lingua franca means.” Instead, we laughed and shared stories and recommended books to each other.

Speaking of books, I just finished Persuasion by Jane Austen. Is it sacrilegious to say I liked it far better than Pride and Prejudice? It started out slow enough, but pretty soon I was loving the characters and fretting or squealing far more than I ought to at all their interactions.

Oh, and I forgot to mention two weeks ago, when I was still a bit sick, I went to the Olympic torch ceremony in the stadium next door. Never will you see so many Chinese in one spot in Athens ever again…

Weird fact of the day: Luke Skywalker was originally going to be a girl!

Stop reading health advise. Right now. I am completely fed up with the contradictory information: suffice to say that there are peoples who live or have lived on every sort of diet imaginable for generations and not come down with horrible diseases or deficiencies. There are those that eat tons of calories, tons of red meat, tons of saturated fats, what have you. And there are those that eat only vegetables. Are the French, those lovers of butter and cream, sick and overweight compared to the Cretans, famed for their Mediterranean diet? The only thing anyone can agree on is to avoid processed, industrialized foods, and stick to whole, natural foods. The people dropping like bloated flies are the modern Americans and their cultural colonies, who sit around getting their so-called nutrients from isolated chemicals stuck together in a jelly-mould.

So for heaven’s sake, eat what you want, just make it food! (And yes, I really need to read Pollan’s latest book.)

Except… vegetarianism feels right. I don’t like the idea of animals dying for my appetite. Healthy and natural or not, are humans so superior to other animals that their lives and deaths mean nothing except the satisfaction of our taste buds? Because what nutrients they provide can honestly be found elsewhere. And don’t think dairy escapes guilt-free, either: mothers need to be pregnant to give milk, and the babies for which the milk was intended have to go somewhere. The dinner table would be a good place to look.

If you’re okay with killing animals, at least consider that factory-farm-raised animals, even those labeled free-range and organic, are treated horribly and fed unhealthfully. This translates to unhealthy meat, dairy, and eggs, which then have to be fortified with the same isolated nutrients that are used to pass off processed edibles as real food.

The reason it’s so hard to figure out what’s healthy and what’s not, is that all the chemicals in food act in concert. Some help and some hinder the digestion of other chemicals, making any fuss over a single nutrient just plain silly. And imagine the folly of trying to study the effects these complex interactions on the infinitely more complex human body. No wonder the health professionals are so confused! But of course they’re not confused: each one of them thinks they know what is best for our bodies. So stop letting them swing your diet from extreme to extreme like a spastic monkey. Keep a clear head, a kind heart, and a pantry stocked with whole foods, and I don’t think you can go too wrong.

(My source for a lot of this information is Vegetarian Food for Thought.)