To go back to my previous post, for a plant-based diet to be attractive, we need to help people choose plant based alternatives to meat for more or less all occasions. So meat is no longer the default
That's what we need good chefs for: to help turn traditional foods into vegetarian/vegan alternatives that are tasty and easy to prepare.
Most traditional dishes are surprisingly modern. Our tastes can easily be changed...

As an example, in France, the markets are laden with charcuterie and cheese, BUT ALSO, beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables - a nudge towards the latter would improve human health, animal welfare and reduce emissions...

https://fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/114856950779865966
Ruth_Mottram - Have been in France for week + a half now, it's not impossible to get vegan food + vegetarian is straightforward if you eat dairy.
But I was struggling to find good traditional style French #PlantBased food.
This site however is outstanding making french cuisine vegan

https://menu-vegetarien.com/

I saw a handfull of posts by US Americans, detecting backward-ness in Germany's and/or Europe's lack of air conditioning in homes.
They explained it with an alleged fear of technology.

Well, Germany's southernmost latitude in the Alpes(!), is about on the US border to Canada. Range from 47°N to 54°N.
Extreme warm temperatures simply weren't the rule here, before 2018, except for areas in the far South-West.
I grew up on 51°N = Calgary, Canada, in a 2-storey terrace house built 1961 with double glazing, outside blinds, and cellar. We never had hot summers but long, cold winters galore. A ski lift just up the hill.

The US are more like Southern Europe, L.A. or Texas are Northern Africa...

So why do Southern European homes not have AC (yet)?
People in these old-world latitudes had thousands of years of experience with high temperatures and built their houses, villages, cities accordingly.
Thick walls for proper insulation, outside blinds, narrow alleys and backyards keep out the midday sun, awnings across streets or alleys, arch ways along city blocks for shopping streets and the like.

The comparison to US suburbia with thin-walled, low-quality houses makes it clear why some sort of cooling seemed "necessary" already in the cooler past.
And living "in Northern Africa" – without heat-adapted building codes? 🤷🏽‍♀️

#heat #ExtremeHeat #heatwave #ClimateChange #ExxonKnew

Good God. A restaurant uses AI to generate menu and this is what it reads.

Source: Restaurants shouldn't use AI for description https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1lzmx3o/restaurants_shouldnt_use_ai_for_description/

was telling kid that birch is generally accepted as an European substitute for Japanese oak for bokutō swords, having similar softwood properties of denting without splintering and resisting breaking on impact etc. kid asked, what about Brazilian woods?

I said I don't know—lots of people made ipê swords but ipê is one of the "ironwoods", super hard, meaning it will shatter and will shatter badly, so it's in the same category as ebony, beautiful wooden swords that are for swinging alone but not for fighting. and I said if I wanted to look up good woods maybe I would check what were historical woods for tacapes/bordunas—heavy clubs used by various different indigenous peoples in the Amazon and Atlantic, many of them suspiciously sword-shaped.

turns out it's actually quite hard to find out reliable info on what premodern tacapes were made of (a common difficulty with indigenous things), but I found on Parellada 2017 that the Xetá from my home state used "alecrim" wood for weapons, which was surprising for me because I only know the word as the Portuguese for "rosemary" (from the Arabic, إِكْلِيل, more like "crown" or "garland"). thought I myself didn't know that, the word is also used for a couple different native trees, and I think Parellada means Holocalyx balansae aka alecrim-de-campinas, Guanari: ybyra-pepe. According to Remade it's a dense wood good for billiard clubs and tool handles, so it fits
https://www.remade.com.br/madeiras-exoticas/324/madeiras-brasileiras-e-exoticas/alecrim

(the Xetá/Héta are a Tupian folk that the farmer colonisers genocided all the way down to 8 survivors in the barbaric, remote historical past of the 1950s).

> At the Paraná Museum, the 9 bordunas, "aura haimbé", are oar-shaped in alecrim, with length varying between 78 to 135cm,, width 16 to 23cm, with the widest part hardened with hot coals. The wooden surface was polished with ipê bark, ash and water, giving it a rusty brown tint (Fernandes, 1959, 1961; Kozák et al., 1981). Kozák documented narratives, later illustrated, of these bordunas used for fighting. The handle could be used in daily life to grind jerivá fruit or pound meat meal...

other sources say that the oar shape—BDSM people would surely call this a paddle—is specific to the Xetá, and was used as a sort of multi-tool; you could dig roots with it, or hit against trees for percussion communication, etc.

The UK Environment Agency has some tips for the public to help conserve water, including

> Deleting old emails to reduce pressure on data centre servers

I kid you not.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/england-faces-5-billion-litre-public-water-shortage-by-2055-without-urgent-action

Reposting this because now I know her name.

FIFA let Trump walk off with their trophy. Every Republican in office let Trump walk off with their integrity. MAGAs let him walk off with their Medicaid, just a lot of them don't know it yet.

In a world full of cowards and sycophants, be a Rebecca Torres. 👏🏼

#ICE #California #resist #fascism #Trump