Howdy! I'm from Texas, and I'm studying chemistry. I'm a big fan of a lot of different things, but especially mobile games and comic books. Still a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire. He/him, 25yo, lemme know what needs to be tagged FGO: 322,009,186 for Montag Azur Lane: 69660071 for GBeason Hatsage7 on Ao3 and twitter
I ran into this post years ago and to be honest, it has completely reoriented the way I engage with food.
Like. I’ve always sorta understood that things grow moldy or stale or sour or such if left out, but I never really internalized it in a meaningful way.
But now I’m just like.
Yeah. The hungering dust. There exists omnivorous dust in the air that will eat my food if I don’t.
Those bagels have been sitting there for a week. Are we going to eat them soon or are we leaving them for the hungering dust?
Pizza’s been sitting out on the counter for an hour. Everyone’s enjoying the pizza, but if we don’t want “everyone” to include the hungering dust then we should probably put it away soon.
That’s just. That’s how food works to me now. There exists an invisible predator in the air that hungers for your yummies, and it will not hesitate to eat your food if you don’t make the effort to protect and preserve it. And eat what can’t be preserved before the dust can.
it's made entirely with ingredients i can buy at the local co-op in backwoods michigan, and also tteokbokki i bought online because we still don't have that. i call it topokki because the first time i had tteokbokki was at a place called Witch Topokki where we left early because we got seated next to a really vocal q-anon guy.
ingredience:
7 oz tteokbokki (around 200g)
7 oz cheapest ham you can find, diced (around 200g)
2 tbsp unsalted butter (around 29g)
10.75 oz can condensed tomato soup (around 300g)
1 cup full fat cottage cheese, small curd preferred (around 225g)
.5 cup full fat sour cream (around 120g)
1 tsp gochujang (6g?? maybe???)
medically speaking the amount of gochujang i am supposed to have is 0 grams so if you do not have that limitation and want real spice you can use 2 tbsp gochujang and 1 tbsp gochu-garu instead. i am also not supposed to have alliums and i feel like i'm already pushing it with the gochujang so feel free to add onions and garlic if your digestive system isn't a little bitch. works with cheap ham steaks, leftover spiral-cut hams after the holidays, weird ham scraps they're selling at the deli for whatever reason, etc.
procedure:
cook the tteokbokki according to the package directions, i just boil mine in the same pan i'll be cooking with and then let it sit in a colander for a bit
fry up the diced ham with the butter, this is also where you add the onion and garlic if that's a thing you're doing. i let it go until the ham is trying to pop out onto the stove and there's a nice fond on the bottom of the pan
deglaze with tomato soup, then add everything except the sour cream
stir periodically to keep the tteokbokki from sticking to the bottom of the pan
cook until the cottage cheese curds have disappeared into the sauce, or until you get impatient and decide it looks good enough. i prefer to keep large curd cottage cheese around for snacking on and that takes longer.
Maxxing is not a natural feature of human life; though most of human history it could barely exist. Take the early Middle Ages. Chris Wickham estimates that in the period 400-800 AD, around ninety percent of the European population were rural peasants, and almost everything they consumed was produced inside the household. [...] In such a situation, maxxing is almost impossible. It doesn’t matter what you think about women; you can’t reduce yourself to a single principle when you need to be able to farm crops, build and thatch a house, sew clothes, and occasionally die in someone else’s aristocratic squabble. You would starve long before you managed to extend your maxximand anywhere near infinity.
The only exception was a dedicated caste of pietymaxxers. These were, like all maxxers, celibate. In the early part of this period they would usually hermitmog the sincels by starving themselves in the desert; eventually this was formalised into a network of monastic hype houses. Throughout the medieval period, pietymaxxers would swear off food, whip themselves, or become anchorites, walled like a fig wasp into a tiny cell attached to their local church. It makes sense that this would have its germ in religion; if a maxximand is a principle extended until it resembles a god, then God can equally be described as a maxximand that’s lost all qualities except infinity. But the clergy could never really sustain it; the infrastructure wasn’t in place yet. Instead, there was a well-established monastic treadmill, in which new orders would spring up, committed to poverty and the mortification of the flesh, but within a generation they’d all be rapacious landlords drinking from silver goblets. There’s nothing more repulsive than a larping maxxer. Clergymen who’d decided to start living more holistically were frequently massacred in chiliastic peasant revolts.
was outside earlier and a bird Came Up, squatted down, fluttered it’s wings at me and opened its mouth like a hatchling begging for food (it was a grown female) so I went and checked the seed cube in the feeder and the thing was completely covered in mold. this is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. how did she know im the one in charge of the birdseed. How Did She Know To Pantomime Hunger At Me. Hello.
i have spent my afternoon confusedly getting dressed, driving to the store, purchasing a new seed block, driving home, washing the cage, and getting the feeder set back up. i don’t take this much care for my Own nutrition. ive been bullied into a grocery store run by a tufted titmouse. i feel so loved
gonna start keeping a suspiciously detailed hard-copy personal diary & drop numerous “offhand” hints providing valuable historical insight into mundane life in 21st century usa
dear diary, today i wanted to take the bus home (public transit is underfunded and unreliable) so i checked my phone (everyone carries a glowing rectangle with them at all times) but the transit schedules weren’t yet updated so i had to wait half an hour. when i arrived home i microwaved leftovers (we did not cook fresh food daily, despite year-round access to ingredients, heating, and refrigeration) and ate it while answering emails at midnight (work colonized free time)
In a discovery that increased doubt about the popular diet trend, a study published Thursday by Columbia University researchers found that intermittent fasting was no more effective than conventional eating disorders. “While abstaining from food for several hours has gained far-reaching acceptance in recent years, the evidence suggests that it produces comparable results to any of the many eating disorders already in wide use,” said lead researcher Dr. Harold Morgan, urging those thinking about starting a regimen of scheduling meals to alternate between periods of extreme calorie deficits and non-fasting to consult their doctors about which specific eating disorder was right for them.
*grabs america by the shoulders* we have got to lock the fuck in. south asia and the middle east are running goddamn circles around us. we have got to come up with a more dangerous way of cooking food now or we can kiss these quarter finals goodbye
By keeping rodents and small fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.
By Andy Corbley -Jan 27, 2026
A study run by Michigan State University in the state’s upper peninsula has discovered that encouraging American kestrels to nest in cherry orchards also reduces the presence of food-borne illnesses that can be passed via the fruit to consumers.
By keeping rodents—but particularly small, fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.
“Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well,” said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”
The hypothesis of Smith and her colleagues was that by keeping fruit-eating birds away, fewer avian pathogens would reach the shelves of the grocery store. This proved largely correct, as kestrel-guarded orchards showed an 81% decrease in instances of crop damage, including missing fruit and fruit with bite marks, and a 66% decrease in bird droppings on the fruit trees.
“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels in the fruit and vegetable areas on April Joy Farm for over 13 years, told Inside Climate News. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”
There are no shortage of problems for cherry and fruit farmers these days, from wild weather swings to labor shortages. Perching birds are just one more issue to deal with, and they’re quite the issue, causing some $85 million in losses every year among major growing states like Michigan and California.
Growers attempt to prevent the fruit loss in a variety of ways, including chemical repellents, lethal shooting, trapping, hanging nets over their trees, visual and auditory scare tactics, and even deforesting the area surrounding the orchard.
Not only were the kestrels found to be more effective at keeping the birds away, but the detectable levels of Campylobacter, the most common foodborne pathogen spread by bird feces, were lower on branches in orchards with kestrel nest boxes (0.97% compared to around 10%).
Kestrels are already abundant on local cherry farms, but a new study suggests their presence might lower the risk of food-borne illnesses ca
Falcons reduce pre-harvest food safety risks and crop damage from wild birds
It's so strange that - at least in North America - the style of living in which you have your own room but only a partial kitchen, but the building has a large communal eating area in which a paid professional makes food at scale on a fixed schedule every day (with a few options, but nothing made to order) is only available to a) college students, b) prisoners, and c) people in long-term care homes.
Not everyone would want to live like that, of course, but I'll bet you that a lot of people would. It's a great living situation for single people, young people just starting out, and people who are in a city on a temporary basis. Cooking at scale is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than each individual cooking or getting takeout. Cleaning kitchen facilities scales similarly well. Employ a few people who know what they're doing and are paid well to do it, and they'll keep that kitchen running safely, efficiently, and cleanly in a way that a few hundred pressed-for-time 20-somethings never could. And a lot of people simply do not care enough about what they eat to want anything else.
Moreover, not putting a full kitchen in each unit means that the units can be smaller without cutting into living space, cheaper to build, and safer. Lots of people who live alone don't cook a lot, since cooking for one is not very time-efficient, which means that for all those people the kitchen is practically just dead space. You could replace its function with a microwave and a minifridge, and if you do, you've given that person a whole extra room.
And the thing is, this style of living does exist in North America. You just can't voluntarily get it unless you go to college. Why? Because we have - for some reason - decided that this globally-not-uncommon way of living is somehow beneath the dignity of an adult. We should change that.
imagine if you will, a fairly dry survival crafting game in which you live in a bunker and must periodically venture out to scavenge food, set up turrets for attacking monsters, etc
now, your computer inside the bunker has a game-inside-a-game on it which is a charming farming sim of undeniably greater quality and scope than the survival game you're playing. therefore, the object of the game becomes to keep your bunker secure so you can play the farming game more.
now, once you achieve the highest rating in the farming game, a secret shop inside it unlocks, and one of the novelty items you can purchase is a game console, giving you access to games-inside-a-game-inside-a-game. most of the games for it are typical mobile shovelware, but one of them is a highly polished, extremely brutal precision platformer with amazing level design and production values exceeding that of the survival game and farming sim combined.
it is only at this point that the purpose of this entire contrivance becomes clear: to create the most deranged speedrun community the world has ever seen.
baratheonpilled
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