counts is counted. Although I was alive then, I effectively missed the 80s: Madonna, Calvin & Hobbes all passed me by because I was looking at cats, lots of them, with a view to understanding their genetic and geographic distribution. I didn't do a very good job of it; having been oblivious to the presence of Viking cats on the Azores, for one example. When I got my first proper job in NE England, I told the hiring committee that intended to extend my vital research documenting cat coat colours to studying plumage variants of Columba livia the feral pigeon. My plan for that was to take photos of pigeon flocks in parks and squares and count how many were black, red, barred and white spotted. I bought a Nikon SLR camera with a modestly long telephoto lens and read the literature on pigeon genetics - starting with Charles Darwin, who hung out with pigeon fanciers. Several months later, I wrote up my findings and submitted the manuscript to Ibis, the premier ornithological journal. It was quick rejected and I lacked the resilience and ambition to revise it and re-submit: my central failing as a scientist was lack of finish. The reason I chose a SLR snap-shot methodology was because my boss had published a paper on the cats of São Paulo Brazil doing exactly that.
My internet pal Сергей Холин from Vladivostok has more recently taken the technique back to the world of cats specifically those of 青島 Aoshima aka Cat Island in the Japanese Inland Sea. It is called Cat Island because the cats outnumber the permanent residents by ~50:1 and it is a tourist attraction for that reason. Although it's a rather long multi-mode trek to have the chance to feed and pet a bunch of scruffy looking felines. Don't miss the ferry back: there are zero tourist facilities on the island. Сергей obtained three different high quality photos of some of the cats blew them up digitally, numbered each individual and essayed a genetic diagnosis of each cat in the sample. Here's one of those pictures:
It's quite unsettling to be looking at so many cats returning your gaze; inscrutable as zen monks in their orange robes. But at least the buggers stay still. What Сергей showed is an extreme example of founder effect, almost all the cats are either orange or tortoiseshell giving probably the highest frequency (0.58) of the O allele in the world - certainly 2x higher than nearby mainland populations. otoh the frequency of non-agouti [black, to normal folks] is disproportionately low on Aoshima. These discrepancies are surely due to the random genetic make-up of the cats which were imported in the 19thC to get on top of an intolerable infestation of rats.
The last 6 residents are all elderly and the homes, shops and school of the once thriving fishing community [N = 900 in 1945] are quietly decaying for lack of care and attention.
♬ ♪ Came to de market before daylight ♫ ♩
Gotta sell me biltong before de night
At the start of my very expensive education, I was parked in school in the 1960s, at least partly because my father was away at sea for unpredictable periods and we moved houses every 18 months. At least if the school was the same, that provided some continuity and grounding for me. In those days, abandonment, separation anxiety were ignored despite John Bowlby writing about attachment theory and normal development in the 50s!
Another of the detached chaps at my school was the son of a hotel magnate in Kenya. When he returned from the holidays in Nairobi and the beach at Malindi, this fellow often bought several parcels of biltong [beef jerky] to replenish his tuck-box. It was different from the gob-stoppers and sherbet fountains with which the rest of us courted dental caries and was, therefore, tradable. When I final arrived in Africa [teaching a binfo course in Pretoria and Capetown] 35 years later a chew of biltong was on my bucket list.
Accordingly, when TGWIH went up the Okavango last month, more as a quip than a quest, I asked her to bring me back some biltong. But, regrettably, EU food&ag theatre forbids the import of cured meat products from outside the Union. I'll just have to fantasize about giving my gob a braw workout. Interestingly the ToC for Original Sliced Springbok Biltong is, like Nestlé Munchies, engagingly vague about exactly what's in there:
Meat (kudu and/or eland and/or impala and/or gemsbok and/or wildebeest and/or springbok in variable amounts); seasoning [salt, spices (irradiated), cereal (maize, flour, salt), sucrose, acidity regulator (E262), preservative sodium sulphite (E221), MSG flavour enhancer (E621), spice extracts, flavour enhancer (E635)], vinegar, worcestersauce, pimaricin.
Note 1 E635 enhancer is a combo sodium salts of the natural compounds guanosine (E626) and inosine (E630) two of the many bases that are found in nucleic acids. Basically another blast of umami.
Note 2 pimamycin is an anti-fungal agent naturally made by some species of Streptomyces and now produced in vats by BigPharma.
Note 3 surely you don't think I'd be satisfied with anyone using English common names for the various artiodactyls which may finish up in this brand of biltong? Nope! Why not use Phofu for eland as in the Lesotho stamp above? Or Spießbock for gemsbok? Here are they are with full Latin binomers so nobody can mistake what we're talking about.
Was I writing about exotic sources of vegetable fats? I was. I went off there down the Shorea robusta [Sal] rabbit-hole pretending that I knew enough about shea butter which comes from the nuts of Vitellaria paradoxa (formerly Butyrospermum parkii). The old Latin name - [Mungo] Park's butter-seed - is indicative of its relevance to botany. V. paradoxa is an, indigenous to Africa, member of the pan-tropical family Sapotaceae.known locally as shí or carité. Irish supermarkets, showing a want of marketing imagination, don't stock any fruits of that family; which include Manilkara spp. (sapodilla), Chrysophyllum cainito (star-apple), and Pouteria (abiu, caniste). I tell ya b'ys we haven't lived: imagining that stodgy old Cavendish bananas are a great treat.
For a sense of scale, those shea seeds [above L] (not to be confused with chia seeds from Salvia hispanica in Mexico) are the size of a chestnut and are found in the centre of apricot sized yellow-green fruit. The seeds are 50% fat, which is rendered from the nuts by pressing - like olives. Raw pressed oil, even extra virgin, is kinda rank from a mess of proteinaceous and alkaloid congeners. The oil can be refined - if only by adding hot water to the mix and skimming the fat off the top and is widely used across Africa as a nutritious fatty source of food. But you're more likely, in the West, to encounter the stuff in a tub of gloop from The Body Shop. It is our modern have vs have-not equivalent of Cleopatra bathing in ass's milk, like, for her peerless skin.
While we are on the subject of tropical yum, don't forget the moth Cirina butyrospermi which feeds exclusively on the leaves of V. paradoxa and whose caterpillars are widely sought after as a fried snack [R, Boromo, Burkina Faso]. Be sure to ask for chitoumou or chenille de karité. Mmmm so good.Still waters run deep. Our nearest neighbour but five lives about 500m further West up our valley. That family were the first blow-ins and built a wooden house at the top of a 2 acre site purchased from one of the local farmers. Over the next 30 years trees grew up on the slope, so that from across the valley, especially with wisps of fog, the house looks like it escaped from Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. And when I say built a wooden house it was Paddy the Dad who sawed, morticed and tenoned the whole edifice himself. Paddy then engaged on a quixotic project to build a large sailing boat by the road side of his property without giving much thought to how to transport the vessel to the sea which at its nearest is 40km away!
The apple falleth not far from the tree! It turns out that Gwen has been on an aw'fy big adventure through the Coronarama years. Shen built her own modest water-craft and has spent the time paddling through Ireland. And she's written a book To The Waters and The Wild - the trials and tranquilities of a journey on Ireland’s waterways by Gwen Wilkinson is published by Merrion Press. I must secure an autographed copy!
When I left home, possibly in antidote to my parents' values, I embraced food-thrifty: nothing edible should go in the bin. And slowly expanded my food repertoire: steak tartare sandwiches for work-lunch in Amsterdam; moules every time I ate out in Brussels; polpo on pilgrimage; whole fried whitebait. I didn't start eating variety meats [wobbly bits] for choice though - eeew. So the timing is ripe [but not over-ripe = putrid] to hear about a crowd-source quiz on food disgust on Metafilter. Lots of interesting sharing in the comments there. But here's the 32 question test, from the Individual Difference Research Lab at ETH Zurich, Department Health Science and Technology (D-HEST). And here - over-sharing as usual is my result:
Charles Darwin as so often had a take on the issue, writing a chunk about it in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal [1872]. He recalled a moment from 40 years earlier on the other side of the world: In
Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved
meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust
at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched
by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty. A smear of
soup on a man's beard looks disgusting, though there is of course
nothing disgusting in the soup itself. I presume that this follows from
the strong association in our minds between the sight of food, however
circumstanced, and the idea of eating it.
