Cricket du jour

A lot of people -- including two in this household -- struggle with their affinity for eating bread, pasta, and other carby foods. However, I have found myself thinking that shunning carbs may not be such a bad thing. Particularly if it means not consuming crickets.

It has never occurred to me to be concerned about eating crickets, until I read about a cricket farm in California. In an effort to find an inexpensive source of protein, the company wants to grind up crickets and use them in foods like pasta, shakes, and pizza dough.

The company has already made a pizza dough in this manner and, incredibly, has not been forced to attend psychological counseling.

I'm not saying Ground Cricket Pizza Dough is necessarily coming to a store near you soon. But you might want to think about it. Possibly you, like me, would be happier not thinking about it.

The company emphasizes that a lot of hungry people can be fed this way.* Crickets are cheap, and require far fewer natural resources to raise than do other sources of protein, like cows.

The same can be said of stink bugs, presumably, but you don't hear anyone saying we should put them in our pasta. (If you do, please immediately incarcerate that person.)

Furthermore, the company asserts, the crickets are treated humanely, their body temp being slowly lowered until -- well, until they're humanely ground up into powder and added to pizza dough. A "protein supplement," the company calls it.

We can't help wondering how such foods would be labeled. Maybe "Supplemented with Humanely Raised Cricket," or "Contains Cricket Parts from Whole Crickets Happy in Their Lifetime."

If ever there was an unlikely ally in the efforts of the meat industry to stir up more interest in meat, this cricket farm must be it. Now just don't start putting cow parts in my pizza dough.

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*For the record, I am not a hungry person. Particularly if there's a chance crickets are on the menu.

Where jerks stay

We have been trying, of late, to break our habit of being maximizers. This tendency causes people to, when faced with a decision—be it small or life changing—consider absolutely every possibility to be sure that the final choice is the absolute best possible one and and will assure one's perfect happiness.

At least, given any time constraints. If you'd had more time, of course you might have found an even better option. 

But according to people who study happiness, this tendency does not make one happier. In a perverse irony, the happiest people are satisficers. These are individuals who analyze their choices but who are able to peacefully come to a decision without having to excruciatingly examine every possible choice or scenario ‘til death do take the decision from their hands.

I say we have this maximizing problem, but really the issue is mine, and the Hero unfortunately gets dragged along. When at the grocery store, he does not feel compelled to look over every single container of blueberries, or every last bulb of garlic, to find the perfect one. He goes off to locate seventeen items and cheerfully returns with all of them—plus a few others—while I am still scouting around to make sure that there is no other, hidden bin of garlic I need to check out before I make my final selection.

This new resolve to be satisfied with something that is good enough has been sorely tested during our effort to find a place to stay during our upcoming trip to New Orleans. The number of reviews of lodgings on Trip Advisor is staggering, seemingly greater than the total traveling population in the US. And I have to read every one.

Fortunately, some of the reviews help us make rather quick decisions to not stay at a particular place. For example, of a small inn one person wrote, "It's a nice place, as long as you're not a jerk about every little thing." 

We pondered what this might mean, what might qualify as "every little thing" and "jerk." You smile when an army of roaches marches through your bedroom? You don't run screaming when you notice mold several inches thick in the shower? You don't rant and rave that the bath towels seem to be held together with string, or perhaps hair?

In that case, we're sorry to admit it, but we just might be jerks.

A lodger at another establishment noted that her gallant husband slew four roaches in their room the first day. I am mystified that there was a second day. And a third and a fourth. I can only conclude that these people, unlike us, are not jerks. 

At this point in our search, the Hero made a unilateral decision—albeit one wholeheartedly supported by me—to seek lodging at a hotel rather than an inn or a bed and breakfast. "One with at least 95 floors," he announced. “We'll stay on the top floor, and any roaches that might be thinking of invading will be too exhausted by the thought of climbing that high to even attempt it."

Another trend we noticed in the reviews was the rather close quarters in many inns. One person, for example, noted that the small space did not allow "room for immensities." I imagine not.

A traveler further noted that "the two of us couldn't both fit in the room at the same time." Did they draw straws to see who would get to sleep inside the room? Or maybe they just meant the two of them plus the roaches couldn't fit at the same time. 

But there I go, being a jerk again.

Snooze and not lose

If you are driving through Nevada and happen to see a truck driver who is eating a barbecue sandwich with both hands, and then you see him disappear altogether and return with a beer in his hands, and finally you are sure he is nodding off to sleep, don't be alarmed. He is probably just the lucky benefactor of the latest development in self-driving vehicles. Or perhaps he isn't, in which case you still shouldn't be alarmed. You should panic.

But a few self-driving trucks are now operating on long stretches of Nevada highways. This, as explained by a news article, is to "allow the driver to focus on other tasks." The first such task that comes to mind is the all-important cell phone call—using both hands, of course—to somebody the driver knows so that he can say, "Guess what I'm doing right now!"

After this urgent task, depending on the extent of the driver's social network, there might be several such calls to make. Maybe even enough to last the entire trip across Nebraska, at which point the driver, assuming he is entering another state that frowns upon autonomous vehicles, would reluctantly return to a less important task: driving the truck himself.

What early-20th century drudgery.

Of course, to make his job "more easy and efficient," as the news article notes, the driver would likely take a few naps, being sure to lean against the driver's window with his face all smooshed into it so that passing motorists become quite alarmed and/or panicked. Self-driving is not likely to make their lives easier and more efficient.

But there is hope, hope that they too might someday leave the driving to the car and concentrate on other tasks. I personally could use some extra naptime. With my face all smooshed against the window.

When easy is not so easy

Despite my better judgment, I have decided to try growing herbs in containers outdoors. According to research I have conducted on the subject, growing herbs is by all accounts very easy, judging by photos and videos of people who are living among jungles of flourishing herbs because it is just all so easy.

Unfortunately, their definition of "very easy" seems vastly different from mine.

For example, when planting herbs in pots, you must be sure to use potting mix, NOT potting soil, which despite their similarity in name are not the same. Potting soil is much too dense and will basically strangle your plants. I move that to help avoid confusion between the two, some distinct name be given to potting soil, perhaps Dense Stuff to Help Strangle Plant Roots.

Also, depending on the type of herb, you should either 1) mix the potting mix or 2) NOT mix the potting mix with a) fertilizer, b) compost, c) polymer crystals, d) lime, e) kelp meal, or f) Honey-Nut Cheerios. Easy peasy!

For the best results, according to those who know, you should really mix up your own concoction of soil. There are roughly 16 different ingredients needed to put it together yourself, most of which end in "um" or "ite" and sound like dreaded 17th-century diseases, like gypsum, sphagnum, perlite, and vermiculite. (Indeed, these agents are known to cause massive amounts of dirt to cling to your clothes and person.) The exact combination of these 16 ingredients will vary according to the herb, so I calculate that there are approximately 10 to the 78th power different combinations of soil components one could put together.

But easy peasy!

Accordingly, MY plan was to get some basil, lemon thyme, chives, and approved potting mix, then dump it all into some cute pots and put out a sign reading, "Please adopt me."

No, not really. The sign would say, "Really, she's not trying to kill us. At least we don't think so."

But when I went to the store to acquire all the necessary paraphernalia, I found that the weather was not exactly conducive to planting anything. Indeed, while in the very act of admiring the cute basil and lemon thyme plants at Trader Joe's, I was beset by a rain that with very little encouragement could become snow, and did so very briefly. Several Trader Joe's employees gleefully snapped photos of each other standing in the rain-snow.

I looked at the basil, the lemon thyme, and all the little pots of other herbs and sighed. Easy schmeasy, mmm hmm. I might have known. I promised the plants I would be back another day when it was warmer, like maybe in July, and went home to make that sign. At least THAT would be easy.