Philibuster

Researchers have found a gene that seems to remove pain from mice when they snip that gene out. The mice still react to heat and pressure though.

One of the biggest problems some people have with eating meat is how horrible the conditions are in the meat factories. Now I love me some meat, enough that regardless I’m going to keep eating it, but I do feel that there is a line that should not be crossed when getting me that meat. Animals do feel pain/fear and there is no question about that. Any method that goes overboard in the slaughter of animals for consumption should be curtailed as to not cause undue suffering.

I believe that slaughter should be quick and clean as possible. Of course however you do it there will be that little problem with the pain aspect. Cost vs efficiency is always a debate with any product or service. Which has lead some scientists to wonder if we are just approaching the subject the wrong way. How about we just bred the animals so they don’t feel pain? If the animal doesn’t feel any pain then it opens up a lot of options for slaughter. There is still the fear aspect but that’s a lot easier to control when the animal just doesn’t feel pain.

Now of course this brings up some interesting points to consider that will probably render this idea to the mental trash can before anything comes out of it. It’s all well and good to make it so the animals don’t feel pain when they die, but they have lives too. Pain, while annoying at best, is a useful tool. It tells us to get the hell out or stop whatever the hell you’re doing because whatever it is, it’s fucking shit up. The care for animals who will happily walk into whatever danger because of a lack of pain, will probably be complicated to say the least. There will be/is the concern about the life condition and mistreatment of the animals. Which is right now a large talking point already. The slaughter houses end up hiring people who don’t really care about the animals and with lacks policy enforcement there will be mistreatment, just like there is now, but with the added difference of the removal of guilt. “Hey I can beat the crap out of this animal because it doesn’t feel pain.” That is not the goal nor something that I would nor do endorse.

In the end I think that this is not really the best option at all. There are too many problems with it and it doesn’t really accomplish what can’t and isn’t already being done. Something that the holier than thou vegans don’t tell you is that not every plant is a hell hole. Most slaughter houses do a fine job on making sure the animals die humanely. I’ve seen videos on various different mass farming plants for many different types of animals and have been quite impressed with with what I’ve seen. I have also seen the bad stuff as well and yeah I agree that kind of stuff should not happen. Not every farmer is a dumb animal hater who just got into the business in order to torture.

Via Io9

I have been eating good this week. We had octosquidussel but it turned into mahisquidussel because the store was out of octopus but John’s dad just caught a big old Mahi Mahi on his fishing trip so a nice huge chunk of that went into the pot with everything else. The rest of it was tossed on the grill and blackened. There was a surprise in one of the squids though. During the cleaning process one of the squids had a little bit more to clean out than the usual ink sacs and organs.

What is that? Well I’ll tell you it’s the squid’s last meal. Four whole anchovies (One of them is not in the picture here) Which, you know makes some sense because it’s not like squids have teeth, but they do have beaks and I’m surprised that the squid was able to get the fish in there whole. I’m also a little surprised that they seemed to be just in there loose. In fact the squid’s body seems to be rather, uh open in general. you can stick a finger under the hood and touch guts and stuff.

Last night I grilled up some pork shoulders.

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Tis the season. I had an improv grill on Sunday. I basically called my friend and told him we were going to do some grilling and then got to work. I picked up a chunk of leg of lamb, two racks of ribs, some bread, and corn. I made my own bbq sauce from scratch and put it on one of the racks of ribs, the other one was done in a dry rub by the pope. The lamb I just dumped into the sesame ginger marinate that I always use for it. It ended up getting glazed with my BBQ sauce while on the grill. The bread I cut in half length wise and made some garlic butter that I brushed on the open half. Then when extra herbs and spices, some tomato, provolone cheese with some paprika on top. Paprika works well on cheese it doesn’t burn just sinks into the melting cheese. The bread picked up a really nice meaty smoky flavor, perfectly crunchy on the outside with a warm soft inside. The lamb I cooked medium and while I usually do lamb medium done it turned out amazing. Super juicy I got a good piece this time. The ribs also turned out awesome. It’s too hard to decide which one was better.

I am kicking myself for not taking any pictures because everything rocked so much but at the time I just didn’t feel like walking upstairs to get my cameras. I did take pictures of the beef heart we cooked up last night. I’ll put up a couple pictures of that later today.

Another food post here. This is actaully from last week. I just haven’t gotten around to posting it. It was my turn to cook and I made some brats and apple sauerkraut. I cooked the brats in brandy instead of beer because come on everyone does beer. It’s too common and not actaully as good as brandy. Well starting off with the brandy as a base I add a stick of butter, worshire sauce, balsamic vinegar, a couple dried chillies, ground up mustard seed, black pepper, olive oil, salt, chicken boullion, marjoram, sage, and maybe a couple other herbs I’m forgetting. I let it sit on low heat until it’s all good and mixed and the butter is melted. Then I put on the brats, put white pepper, black pepper, coriander, and honey over top of them. Put on the lid and let cook at between low and medium low heat for 20-30 mins. Flip and recoat with white, black pepper, coriander, and honey. Also stir up the liquid a bit too. Another 20-30 mins or so and the liquid should be just starting to thicken up if you put enough in to begin with. If it’s not thickening or just about to thicken you put too much. Take some out.  Add it to the sauerkraut, just a couple spoon fulls. I leave the lid off the brats at this stage but you have to be careful because that liquid that is keeping them from burning is going away and is going to be less helpful. But you want the skins to toughen up a little and go dark. I sometimes add some more honey around this stage to get the skins to go just a little snappy. They won’t go crispy and you wouldn’t want them to. They’d be burnt. Anyways it only takes another 5 to ten mins to get them perfect and you have to keep an eye on them. They should look similar to the pictures I have. I took that just before they were done.

The apple Sauerkraut is easy. I made way too much. I used two cans of sauerkraut you really only need one. Cut up a couple granny smith apples, a few small red potatos, add some white wine, and herbs. Cook it down while you’re making the brats. Fry up some bacon and cut it up and add it to the pot. Drop some of the liquid from the brats at the end or near the end. As far as the herbs go just stick to peppers, salt, and other stuff that goes well with potatos or sour stuff. You don’t need a lot of herbs the taste from the other stuff will take it far. The potatos will completely cook down and the whole thing becomes a little like mash potatos, it gives it a really hearty taste and it’s super filling. The apples should come across but not like you’re bitting into apple pie or anything. It’s still sauerkraut. The bacon I could have used more on just add it to taste.

Once you’ve got everything done grab a roll slap a brat on it, heap on a ton of the sauerkraut and squirt some mustard on it. Enjoy.

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So having my own kitchen is awesome, possibly even more awesome than the house itself. Only that doesn’t really work because no matter how you slice it the kitchen is always part of the house. But anyways.

I’ve got a couple buddies that like cooking as much or probably more than I do. The most logical thing to do in this case is to have little mini cooking parties. They aren’t really parties but I can think up a suitable word while typing this up. I’ve had about 3 or 4 of these things in the last two weeks but for some reason I never posted anything about them. Well I need a food category so here we go. I’ll post the first one that we did. John or The Pope as he is called made a dish that used octopus, squid, mussels, and a bunch of herbs and veggies. It was amazing. I took pictures and have them up on the pictures section. These pictures or the words I am using to describe it do not do it justice. And this is not something that was made by following a recipe this was just Pope and I throwing things together and bouncing ideas back and forth. I helped but it was pretty much Pope that did the most of the work, this time.

I don’t have a recipe for you because well, I hardly ever use recipes and neither does Pope. I didn’t even catch all the ingredients for it, but in the future if I get a recipe together from something or whatever I’ll post it here as well. All I got for this is buy a bunch of veggies, and mussels and squid and octopus. Cook the veggies down into a broth with a bunch of herbs and spices, then add the octopus with the squid and mussels. Pope had the idea of stuffing the octopus but in the end that doesn’t work all that well because of how much the octopus shrinks. It spat it all out. Cook it until it’s done.

Yeah I know great instructions, whatever.

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I was introduced to this website by a coworker. A coworker who I am now mildly annoyed with, because I am somewhat, though not heavily, addicted to the website. It’s the kind of thing that will keep me occupied for a few weeks or so and then fade out. Which is unfortunate because the cause behind the website is a good one. Of course this may be mitigated by updates to the website to keep me interested.

Basically it is a trivia site but for every question you get right they give 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Not much but it adds up. You can easily, so long as you have some intelligence, rack up hundreds of grains of rice in a few minutes. If you go to it every so often and tear up a few questions there you go.

The totals look impressive. In 2008 they racked up a total of 43,942,622,700 grains of rice. None of which are supported by my genius because I only started on the site here in 2009. Doesn’t tell us how much we really helped out though does it. Well let’s see. According to wiki answers a grain of rice weighs about 20 to 30 mg. Let’s take a median number of 25. That comes out to be about 1,098,565.6 kilograms of rice. The average meal of rice comes out to be about 75 grams of rice according to wiki answers. Which sounds about right since a cup full of rice is 185 grams. So lets whip out the calculator again and see how many meals we fed. Comes out to about 14,647,540.9 meals. Divide by three for three meals a day and for 365 days of the year and we have possibly fed 13,376.7 people three meals a day for one year. Not terrible for answering questions on a website but not really a drop in the bucket considering that there are about 850 or so million people going hungry. That number goes up and down depending on which website you go to. Some have it as high as 953 million. It is doubtful that the rice went to fed the same people three meals a day. More likely one or two meals a day and probably was more likely divided up one cup of rice per person per day. If we take that route then the numbers come out to be about 16,269 people fed for one year. Although at a more meager fare.

So go help feed people. Like now. www.freerice.com

*Edit* The links to free rice were broken. Also a check on the free rice site says that they use about 400 grams of rice to feed a person for a day. This is more than I counted for. 400 grams works out to be roughly a little more than 2 cups of rice. I’m not going to redo the numbers because of that. They also say that they’ve fed millions of people. Which is possible because I only did it for one year and two I only counted the same person fed for a year. I think it’s padding the numers a little but I won’t judge them too harshly.