Room View Goals

“Once you’ve had a glimpse of reality, there’s nothing you can do to stop the ego from dissolving in time.”

— Adyashanti (via sacredfemininegypsyheart)

So I just learned something that pisses me off. Y’know quinoa? The ~magical~ health food that has become so popular in the US that a centuries-long tradition of local, sustainable, multi-crop farming is being uprooted to mass-produce it for the global market? Potentially affecting food stability and definitely effecting environmental stability across the region?

Ok, cool.

Y’know Lamb’s Quarter? A common weed throughout the continental US, tolerant of a wide variety of soil conditions including the nutrient-poor and compacted soils common in cities, to the point where it thrives in empty lots? These plants are close relatives, and produce extremely similar seeds. Lamb’s quarter could easily be grown across the US, in people’s backyard and community gardens, as a low-cost and local alternative to quinoa with no sketchy geopolitical impacts. You literally don’t have to nurture it at all, it’s a goddamn weed, it’ll be fine. Put it where your lawn was, it’ll probably grow better than the grass did. AND you can eat the leaves - they taste almost exactly like spinach. 

This just… drives home, again, that a huge part of the appeal of “superfoods” is the sense of the exotic. For whatever nutritional benefits quinoa does have, the marketing strategy is still driven by an undercurrent of orientalism. You too could eat this food, grown laboriously by farmers in the remote Andes mountains! You too could grow strong on the staple crop that has sustained them for centuries! And, y’know, destroy that stable food system in the process. Or you could eat this near-identical plant you found in your backyard. 

“Am I a cat?”

jalilnajafov on ig

Wild bananas contain large seeds. Our commercial bananas (which are, for the most part, the Cavendish variety) have been specially bred so that they are seedless triploids (with three sets of genes, instead of just two) that do not form mature seeds (genetic engineering). If you’ve noticed little black dots in the middle of the banana, you’ve discovered immature seeds that won’t develop, which happens with triploids.

To people who use "þ" as an aesthetic "p"

þink again.

It’s pumpkin season guise.

goldbugsofficial

Visually stunning and laced with racks of spines. An evolutionary marvel from our deep past over 350 million years ago. Trilobites were masters of evolutionary specialization and this Quadrops is one of the most bizarre examples. Carefully exhumed from hard limestone, this trilobite fossil is evolutionary marvel and quite the natural sculpture!