"It’s easy to assume that we sit at the pinnacle of human knowledge and achievement. Zettabytes of information are just a click away..."

"... we jet halfway across the world in hours; we talk to anyone, anywhere, all while satellites circle the globe, DNA is sequenced and spliced and small packets of electrochemical energy hum with power at our disposal. And yet archaeology consistently turns up hints of ancient accomplishments, buried for centuries. Just this year, researchers have discovered poisons used by early Homo sapiens, wooden tools carved by early hominins, well-engineered Maya plazas, terraces and other architectural feats and a centuries-old board game...."

From "How Did Greek Fire Work? And 6 Other Lost Inventions" (NYT)(a gift link, like all NYT links now).

I think I'm seeing "zettabytes" for the first time. What is a zettabyte?

"At first, he kept his apartment and a few changes of clothes. But gradually and methodically, Greenfield embraced asceticism and dedicated himself to it full-time."

"He let go of his possessions, as well as his connections to the government and commercial society. He has no phone, car, driver’s license, passport, health insurance, property, bank accounts or credit cards. He wears biodegradable clothing and has not paid taxes or taken pharmaceuticals for more than a decade. He lives under the poverty level, and said he has no romantic or sexual attachments. He brushes his teeth with a twig.... He likens his practices to those of wandering sadhus, holy men who take vows of poverty and celibacy to pursue spiritual freedom in India....  In June, he offended a group of women in California who had picked him up in a car to look for mushrooms. He was expecting just one person, he told them curtly, announcing that he did not like surprises, recalled a woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is part of a tight-knit foraging community where Greenfield is revered. The difference between the mild-mannered online persona — an amalgam of Henry David Thoreau and the Dude — and the aggravated guy in the back seat was upsetting, she said."

From "He Wants to Be One With Nature. But He Can’t Quit Instagram. Once, Robin Greenfield aspired to wealth. Now, he has no home and eats from the earth. He chronicles it all on social media, but does the persona match the man?" (NYT).

I blogged about Greenfield a couple weeks ago, here, but there's different material in this NYT article and more skepticism about the man. 

Also, here's the list of 100 things Greenfield came up with back in 2020 — positive changes he wanted to make in his life — to "live free of lies and corruption." Much of it is what you might predict from a radical environmentalist, so let me — a connoisseur of travel critique — focus on the part about travel:

"'It was a miracle for my brain. All the food noise was gone.' But when her husband of 20 years would ask her where she’d like to go for dinner..."

"'I’m like, "Here’s the problem, dear. I don’t care about food anymore, so it doesn’t matter where we go,"' she said. 'That part was very frustrating for him.'"

From "Is this the era of the GLP-1 divorce? Taken for weight loss, the drugs can dramatically change people’s marriages, for better and worse" (WaPo).

"A lot of people look at me, and they think I’m extreme, and I’ll be the first person to say that: I’m extreme."

"However, the only reason that I am extreme is because I’m a product of an extreme society. We are actually, I would say, one of the most extreme societies that have ever existed on the face of the Earth. We are in a society of extreme disconnection and extreme destruction and disharmony. It’s all sold to us as absolutely normal. But it’s not. Right now, we’re going through the sixth extinction. It’s human-driven. Millions of species are going extinct because of our actions. That’s extreme."

Says Robin Greenfield, quoted in "He forages all his food but calls your diet ‘extreme’/Robin Greenfield seeks to challenge ideas about what counts as normal food" (WaPo)(gift link).

I see that he's in northern Wisconsin, and he eats a lot of "wild rice, acorns, wild pecans, black walnuts, hazelnuts, plums, fish and deer."

How do you eat acorns? We could forage a lot of calories from our own little yard if we knew how to eat acorns. Hint: It's a lot of work!

By the way, I remember Euell Gibbons. He was big enough, back in the 1970s, to be satirized on "The Carol Burnett Show": 

"Like many of the earliest competitive eaters, Mr. Janus stumbled into the sport. He was working as a day trader in Manhattan..."

"... hating the stress of his job. One day he went looking for a way to relieve the pressure and found it in a St. Patrick’s Day eating contest — corned beef and cabbage.... 'He brought this unique level of thoughtfulness and earnestness to competitive eating,' Jason Fagone, the author of 'Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream' (2006), said in an interview. 'He took this thing that a lot of people just throw off as a joke, and he took it seriously.'... After he took up competitive eating, he began working nights at a pizza parlor, and eventually quit day trading to make pies full time. He never earned enough money in the sport to live off it exclusively — at the time, no one did — but he also insisted that money didn’t interest him. 'It’s never been about the cash; it’s always about the adventure.... One of these contests recharges me more than a week at the beach ever would.'"

From "Tim Janus, One of the World’s Greatest Competitive Eaters, Has Died/He brought rigor and strategy to the sport, rising to No. 2 in the world and eating 141 pieces of nigiri in six minutes in the process" (NYT).

He died at age 49 — and not of overeating. Of lung cancer.

(If that makes you think about the Pope, here's a BBC article about the Pope's lung cancer. He seems to be doing well after the removal of the lower lobe of his right lung. There are photos of him celebrating mass at the hospital, after the surgery.)

I'm giving this post my "sports" tag, but is this a sport? I want to say that it is. Grok agreed with me, here.

"Adult Lunchables are already everywhere in this world."

"Sophisticate versions of juvenile favorites include: tropical cocktails (grown-up Capri-Suns), burrata (string cheese), any dessert (candy wearing pants), smoothies (basically actual baby food). Tinned fish is a funny one, though, because no kid would actually choose to eat tinned fish. It’s an acquired taste, funky and fusty and a little bit offensive, merely presented in a kid way. And so in that way it’s maybe more like whatever’s going on with all these bows on adult women’s clothing...."

From "I No Longer Have to Make Life Decisions Thanks to My Infinite Tins of Fish/Now I can’t even look at the word t*na" (NYT).

Not familiar with all those bows? One example will get you up to speed: "Demi Moore's Tattered Hot Pink Ballgown Comes With a Truly Giant OTT Bow."

By the way, if they can just use OTT like that — meaning "over the top," I believe — there is at least hope for the end of the Mel Ott era in crossword puzzles.

"To the people who insulted Ramses, please remember that our children may someday read your words or watch your videos."

"I don’t want them to search for this memory and find strangers calling their dad a deadbeat. Those are untrue judgments to leave behind about someone you have never met.... My husband is a father, a son, and a person deeply loved by people who know who he truly is. Our children need their dad. I hope and pray you reflect on what you have written."

Woman writes a very lengthy Substack piece laboriously defending her husband after he was mocked (hilariously) by the announcers at a Giants game.

She was caught on camera carrying a baby and a stack of 3 food containers, lumbering back to her seat:

Mom of the year pic.twitter.com/nUTgAhr0nr

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) September 24, 2026

The announcers — Giants announcers Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper —call her "a true definition of a multi-tasking mother" and "an Olympic champion" and "Mom of the Year" — and then we see him grabbing the food and immediately digging into it — and the announcers say "She'll be the last one to eat too."

The clip went viral, with predictable on-line trashing of the man, and now we've got the woman, in another dimension of multi-tasking, writing "I’m the Mom in That Viral Giants Clip. Let Me Tell You About My Husband. You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night."

What else was happening that night? We're told the couple attended the ballgame in remembrance of a recently deceased friend. The woman was carrying a baby and food, but the man was "carrying" his grief: "The camera showed what I was carrying in my hands. It couldn’t show what he was carrying that night."

By the way, the announcers were great, in true baseball-announcer form, so friendly and affectionate, with exclamations like "Holy smokes!" "Oh, my goodness!" and "Bless her heart." I love this part of baseball on TV — the camera finds interesting people in the crowd, and the announcers have gentle fun with it. There's so much affection for the fans. And those fans all know they could be caught on camera at any point. They're part of the show. 

I'd recommend against going into social media to call more attention to yourself. It seems as if it was one more thing the woman had to do for the man.

ADDED: Ramses, now there's a name. Was he named after the Ramses who was Ozymandias, the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" in Shelley's poem? Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

4 videos, arranged in order from wholesome to surreal.

How kids act when teachers do normal things:

"In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, amid the advent of photography, the Victorians shot still-life arrangements of lizards crawling over fruit and dead game birds hanging from a nail..."

"... capturing with their new technology the savagery of hunger, the oneness between natural decay and human appetite. For much of the following century, food photography functioned as a sort of ethnographic art, a form of restrained realism preoccupied with light and shadow, shape and symbolism. But, in the nineteen-thirties, the introduction of color printing to advertising changed how food was shot on camera, and thus conceived of culturally. Dishes were now a thing to be drooled over and sold, products that emphasized the sensual, the luscious, the beautiful.... The surreality of commercial food photography and its later evolution into food porn may have been an artificial and sensationalist representation of the things we ate, but it at least managed to seduce.... Restaurants choosing to showcase computer-generated approximations of the dishes they serve inspire neither gluttony nor lust...."

Writes Brady Brickner-Wood, in "The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop/Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials?" in The New Yorker.

No 19th century photographs at that link, so I found 2 for you: "The First of September" (1855)(showing 2 dead game birds hanging from a nail) and  William Louis Henry Skeen, "Still Life of Exotic Fruits & Lizard from Ceylon" (c. 1880)(with, of course, lizards crawling over fruit).

Those 2 old photographs are not as exciting as I'd leapt to imagine they were. I should have noticed the promise of dreariness in those words "ethnographic art" and "restrained realism."

My imagination was fueled with images of old still-life paintings like this:

Are you reading all these instructions about assiduously overwashing fruits and vegetables and thinking, I'll just indulge my longterm desire not to eat fruits and vegetables?

I'm reading things like this: "Can washing produce help prevent cyclosporiasis? What experts recommend. The way you prepare produce may make a difference in your risk for the 'diarrhea parasite' that’s going around" (WaPo).

And I'm about to give up on fresh produce. I walk into Whole Foods, and the first experience is, of course, the very grand array of fruits and vegetables, but the news media has demanded that I see invisible filth permeating everything. If you knew there was cyclosporiasis — we can't just say "cyclosporiasis," because it's too hard a word, none of us idiots can be trusted to learn it, so we always need to hear the atrocious word "diarrhea" — if you knew there was cyclosporiasis on a vegetable or fruit you wouldn't even touch it. The issue of bringing it home and washing it to death wouldn't arise. But we are expected to view the entire array of fruits and vegetables as innocent enough to buy in the hope of eating but suspicious enough to plan to subject to some elaborate treatment.

From the article:

"Let's make watermelon fried yogurt."

Lots more great videos from Ms Shi and Mr He: here.

"How did the adults of my youth manage these gatherings so effortlessly? Part of the answer is Oh, Dad, too: Life was simpler."

"Lake houses were more affordable then, and less fancy. No dishwasher, no A.C., no TV. And no choices. Meals happened at fixed times. You ate what appeared. Cleanup by committee followed, and then the moms would declare, 'The kitchen is closed,' with despotic authority. If we got hungry later, there were snacks. Snacks that would make a nutritionist spiral: Ruffles and onion dip, port wine cheese food. Breakfast was sugary cereal. Lunch was mystery bologna. Dinner was barbecue, beans and slaw. Repeat until Labor Day."

Writes Dan Kadlec, in "The Lake House That Taught Me How to Dad" (NYT)(gift link, in case you need to learn to dad).

How to eat like Babe Ruth.

"To feed its millions of troops in World War II, the military turns to food science. Orange juice is reduced to concentrate, potatoes are dried into easily reconstituted flakes..."

"... and Cheddar is dehydrated and pulverized. But the war’s end leaves mountains of surplus cheese powder. Charles Elmer Doolin, riding high on the success of the Fritos he created 16 years earlier, fries extruded puffs of cornmeal and coats them in the powder. Dozens of other food companies take advantage of food technology developed for the war effort, ringing in the heyday of ultraprocessed foods."

That's the NYT, selecting Cheetos to represent the 1940s, in "1776 – 2026/The Pursuit of Hungriness: 250 Years of American Food Innovation" (gift link).

"Limiting food and water has been used to hasten death in people dying at home since long before it had a formal name."

"But to accelerate decline this way for people with advanced dementia, whether their deaths are imminent or not, is uncomfortable territory for many.... While some patients are late enough in their dementia as to be nonresponsive, others may still be enjoying and requesting food and may not remember writing a directive to withhold it. 'Which person do you listen to: the person who had capacity once and made this decision that they wouldn’t want to live this life, or the person with dementia, who may seem very, very happy with the life that they have?' asked Dr. Eric Widera, a professor of geriatric medicine at University of California, San Francisco...."

From "She Didn’t Want to Live With Advanced Dementia. So Why Was She Being Kept Alive? Some consider the regular feeding of late-stage dementia patients to be nonnegotiable. Others see it as extending life unnecessarily" (NYT).

The article cites a paper that presents the idea of minimal comfort feeding: "The nursing staff could provide small quantities of food and liquid if the patient signaled she wanted it, enough to keep her comfortable while still allowing her to die."

"Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn’t mean they grow better when there’s more carbon in the air, scientists say."

"A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. 'As a scientist, it’s really interesting,' said Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey, published in November. 'As a person … you don’t want to see such a shift, because it’s so negative.' For the past several years, ter Haar and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2.... Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels — and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million...."

From "Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious" (WaPo). That's a gift link, so you can figure out the science and whether this is a case of lying with statistics.

It occurs to me that percentages of nutrients would change if plants just contain more water, but a plant composed of more water might be more appetizing, so just eat a bit more of it. I'm always suspicious of articles that stir up climate-change anxiety.

"I hadn’t intended to offend anyone, but the B-roll I posted to an account with a scant 100 followers was evidently being promoted as rage bait for the masses — and still is."

Writes Tammy Teclemariam, in "'U Went Viral for the Wrong Reasons Honey'/After I posted a video of some garlic bread, TikTok took over" (NY Magazine). She's getting excoriated by commenters who are mad at her for saying, bossily, "You didn’t ask if you could do that," when her tablemate, who'd ordered the bread, started cutting into it with a spoon.

"Within 23 days of posting, the video surpassed a million views.... Whatever machine learning was needed to push this onto the FYP of so many people, it seems to have worked as designed. Everyone I showed the video to in my real life couldn’t understand the controversy. But everyone leaving comments seemed willing to ignore any reasonable context to insist I must be a horrible person. 'You must be fun at parties,' commented LucyInTheSky. Lucy, I am fun at parties.... Some friends, understandably, suggested I just delete it. While that might seem like a quick escape from nuisance behavior, it doesn’t change the threat of this happening again. In order to speak freely on the internet, you have to take the haters for granted...."

"But much of the ube flavor in foods and beverages doesn’t come from the yam itself."

"In T. Hasegawa’s low-slung building in an industrial district about 10 miles northwest of Anaheim, Calif., teams of food chemists spend their days trying to create concentrates of flavors — some that exist in nature and others that don’t, like 'unicorn' or 'glazed donut' — for food and beverage companies. First, the chemists analyze the composition of real food... to identify the molecules responsible for aroma and taste. Then, natural extracts, oils and aroma compounds are combined to create concentrated versions of the flavor.... 'You can’t just put blood orange juice into an energy drink.... It would require so much juice that there wouldn’t be enough room for other ingredients.' Compared with Dubai chocolate, which exploded in popularity a few years ago thanks to TikTok and its photogenic bright-green filling, ube has been more of a 'slow burn' flavor.... 'It had been on our radar for three years before we named it the flavor of the year'...."

From "A Must for the Next Food Craze? Be ‘Social Media Gorgeous.’ The ascent of ube has little to do with the purple yam’s taste or Filipino origins. It’s the color, flavor experts say" (NYT).

"Stench of 20 Tons of Spilled Tofu Hits Missouri Town 'Like a Brick Wall.'"

That's the Headline of the Day for me.

It's in the NYT: 

The tofu and the truck languished in the ravine for three weeks while the private towing companies that had been hired to clean up the mess tried to confirm that the trucking company had enough insurance to pay for the job....

The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District has referred to the mess on its Facebook page as “the infamous Jerome Tofu Monster” and the cleanup as “the Great Battle of Jerome.”...

We were talking about raspberries.

We were talking about the level of pain and sacrifice Americans are willing to endure to make it through these perilous war weeks.

The New York Times brings harrowing forebodings: "Where Might the Iran War Hit Your Wallet? Start With Raspberries. It takes a lot of fuel to produce this delicate fruit, which can be a sensitive barometer as oil costs rise."

Raspberries are the divas of fresh produce.... They do best stacked lightly in refrigerated trucks cooled and powered with diesel fuel. Even on a plane, the berries must be refrigerated. All this makes them one of the most fuel-intensive items in the produce aisle. And they bear a message from the near future: The Iran war is likely to grow your grocery bill. Raspberries were already expensive, but the wholesale price of fresh berries has doubled since January, according to federal Agricultural Marketing Service reports. At a Whole Foods Market in Atlanta on Tuesday, a six-ounce plastic container of organic raspberries cost nearly $8. That’s about 20 cents a berry....

You know what you could do in support of the war effort? If the price of fresh raspberries doubles, eat half as many raspberries. Or don't buy fresh raspberries when they are out of season. Be more of a locavore and pick something that is in season or buy frozen berries. They're fine in a smoothie. I mean this war with Iran has been going on since the Carter administration and we're currently very heavily committed to forcing it to end decisively. Can't you handle this insanely minuscule raspberry problem? Who is this out-of-season-berry-munching Whole-Foods-shopping lady who won't contribute?

Remember when women dug in and helped: