13 September 2013

Are cat food cans better value and/or better for the planet than pouches?

A friend recently asked the question: "Are cat food cans better value and/or better for the planet than pouches?" Here is (a slightly edited version of) the response I offered:

Inasmuch as a can can (cue Parisian cabaret orchestra) be, and is quite likely to be, recycled, possibly to make a new can, whereas pouches may not be recyclable at all, cans win an easy first point.

The amount of fossil fuel burned to make / recycle a can compared with the petrochemicals that go into making a pouch requires a little bit of calculation.

It takes approximately 4kWh of energy to produce a kilo of recycled aluminium, which means that manufacturing a 15g aluminium can of fizzy pop consumes 60Wh of energy (equivalent to a 60W electric light bulb burning for an hour).

It takes approximately 2kWh of energy to produce a kilo of recycled steel, which means that a 45g steel pet-food can consumes 90Wh of energy. To produce 1 kWh of electricity requires approximately 0.16 litres of crude oil, so to produce a steel pet-food can, 14 ml of crude oil would be required.

It takes 23.6 kWh to produce a kilo of plastic. Assuming that a pet-food pouch weighs 10g, it would take 236Wh of energy to produce the pet food pouch (38 ml of crude oil).

In conclusion, then, to the second point, ideally, one would buy pet-food in aluminium cans, but the manufacture of steel cans is still less energy intensive than the manufacture of plastic pouches.

Soup without

I prepare a lot of soups, mostly for lunch. A soup often provides the opportunity to use up left-over cooked vegetables and small quantities of uncooked vegetables that got left behind. Sometimes my soups can be closer to a stew than a broth. Some soups invite bread or toast, whereas others don't. I rarely garnish, although I probably should, and I rarely prepare croutons because they involve a lot of fiddle for not a lot of result. I rarely even consider buying soup in a can, tub or packet. (I did buy, about a year ago, a can of Blue Dragon, 'Wonton Soup', mostly because it was labelled as suitable for vegans.) Cooking soup from scratch is much more satisfying.

It must be a couple of years ago now that I prepared a tasty green-coloured soup which I served to my wife and daughter for Saturday lunch. I usually make a pea-based green soup on Saturdays, and whilst on this occasion the soup was the same colour as my Parisian pea soup, it tasted different, and had a mouth-feel more akin to the watercress soup that I sometimes make. With minimal discussion, my wife and daughter each decided, perfectly reasonably, that I had made and served  them asparagus soup (which I do anyway from time to time). After they had mopped up the last of the 'asparagus soup', I disclosed that there was no asparagus in the soup. Earlier that day, begloved, I had gingerly cut nettle tops from an overgrown part of the garden and cooked up a nettle soup.

Not long after that, I was in the process of preparing a rich miso soup with tofu, shi-itake mushrooms, arame seaweed and ramen noodles, which makes an excellent evening meal, when I discovered that I had already used up the last of the miso. It was too late to drive to the shops to buy some more, so I decided to improvise. Suspecting nothing amiss, my wife and daughter enjoyed their 'miso soup', as they usually do. On that occasion I did not reveal that there was no miso in the 'miso soup', although my wife found out about it some months later when she read my weblog posting about the occasion.

A few days ago I planned a soup for our evening meal. Although it was not my intention to prepare anything special, I was keen to experiment using a herb and a spice, each new to me. The process began at breakfast time, but required little further attention until the evening. When it came to the eating, what we tasted was a gorgeously creamy mushroom soup - much creamier than my usual mushroom soup - with fried shreds of onion (stirred in, because I rarely garnish). In the context of writing this piece it is almost needless to say that all the mushrooms (common [Agaricus bisporus], shi-itake [Lentinula edodes] and oyster [Pleurotus ostreatus]) remained untouched in the fridge.

Reflecting about these experiences, several interesting observations can be made. Expectations play an important role in determining what we perceive. If I anticipate eating miso soup, and am then presented with a dish that looks just like miso soup, then I expect to taste miso soup. If nothing significantly contradicts my expectations, I am likely to experience what I expect. (Isn't this one of the reasons why statements given by witnesses to an event can vary so greatly?) However, I think that the business about the 'miso soup' goes deeper than simply a Jedi mind-trick. According to its Wikipedia entry, the McGurk effect is a phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound (sound A) is paired with the visual component of another sound (sound B), leading to the incorrect perception of the sound. That sound heard could be the perception of a modified version of sounds A or B, or even the perception of a different sound (sound C). The attention that sighted people give to what their eyes are seeing can easily over-ride what their ears are hearing. When expectations are added to this brew, that is, when a person expects a certain visual or auditory appearance based on the semantic information leading up to it, the McGurk effect is greatly increased.

Although we tend not to think about it, speech is perceived by various senses working together. Taste is similar. The brain is often unable to separate the various different sensory components of what it perceives. The basic tastes (salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami) contribute only partially to the sensation and flavour of food in the mouth, other factors include the look, smell, pungency/spiciness, texture and mouth-feel. Therefore, soup that conforms to miso soup in all other respects, is quite likely to be experienced as miso soup.

Memory also has a role to play. If I am familiar with the taste of asparagus soup, but am unfamiliar with the taste of nettle soup, it makes sense to relate any new experience to past experiences, regardless of whether this is a conscious act of cognition or an involuntary process of which I am unaware. If I am not specifically attending to the soup I am eating, provided that it does not depart too far from what is already familiar to me, then I am likely to relate it to what is already familiar: mushroom soup. (At this point I am reminded of the role played by memory in the Seagull Sandwich Riddle q.v..)

I think that there is a further level at which the soup issue operates, relating to the persistence of what is already in my mind. Despite cognitively knowing that there were no mushrooms in the 'mushroom soup', but aided by my treacherous sensory experience, I was unable or unwilling to over-ride my overall experience of the soup as 'mushroom soup'. It was as though I had some emotional commitment to maintain the fiction that the soup I was eating was mushroom soup. We do this kind of thing a lot, mostly below the level of our awareness, with people and relationships. In counselling, it is termed transference.

I shall continue to make soups, partly because my daughter finds them easy to eat, but mostly because we enjoy them. I shall continue, at least from time to time, to experiment with all manner of interesting ingredients. I made an excellent miso soup yesterday evening. It had all the right ingredients (although perhaps insufficient ginger for my taste), and if it had come in a tin ...

11 September 2013

Incomplete gestalt: Sunday 8 September 2013

My daughter is quadriplegic (unable to use any of her limbs) and spends much of her life in her wheelchair. We have a VW Sharan that has been converted to carry her sitting in her wheelchair towards the back of the vehicle. She enters through the rear hatch door, up an extendable ramp, aided by an electric winch. When the vehicle is in motion, the ramp is folded in half and sits vertically between the wheelchair and the rear hatch door, providing some level of protective safety in the event of a rear-end shunt. When my daughter is boarding or disembarking, the ramp extends about two metres beyond the car. We often choose to park the car bonnet-to-tail with other parked vehicles (serially), leaving a gap of several metres at the back of the car to allow the ramp to be extended and for our daughter in her wheelchair to be lined up in preparation for ascending the ramp. However, in supermarket car parks, parking is in parallel with other vehicles, and when the ramp is extended it protrudes, by about two metres, into the driving lane. As I do not expect motorists, especially those who are looking for a car parking space, to be alert to a ramp temporarily protruding into their path, while my wife secures and loads our daughter and her wheelchair into the Sharan, the process takes a couple of minutes, I stand sentry at the end of the ramp so that there is a sizable object visible for which a motorist in a car park will be on the look-out: me. I typically face in the direction of any oncoming traffic so that I can deliver a Paddington Bear-like 'hard stare' at any motorist with insufficient patience who considers trying to scrape past, although my ploy is not always successful. At worst, in the unlikely event of physical contact with another car, then at least it would be me who was hit and not our daughter.

We were in the supermarket car park of Sainsbury's, Canterbury, having just completed our shopping, moving through the process of loading our daughter and her wheelchair into the back of the Sharan. I was indeed delivering a hard stare at a motorist in a white sports car who was eager to be past. Suddenly I felt a jarring thump on the back of my calves: a car from the other side of the driving lane had reversed into me, and unbelievably was continuing to do so. My wife screamed. Although I felt no pain, I was in a state of shock. Our daughter was in danger from the reversing car. I pummelled on the rear window of the Mini, which then stopped and was driven slowly back into the parking space from which it had emerged. Then, nothing. Neither the driver, nor their passenger, got out of the Mini. The driver of the white sports car, who must have witnessed it all, but did nothing, continued to do nothing, with the implied threat of squeaking past if I moved from my sentry position at the end of the ramp. My wife hurriedly loaded our daughter and her wheelchair into the Sharan. Once it was possible to do so, I part-folded the ramp, at which point the white sports car reversed a few metres and drove down a side lane to search for a parking space elsewhere.

I walked over to the Mini and was ignored. I tapped on the driver's window, which was reluctantly would down. I told the driver, a young woman that she had reversed her car into me and hit me. She said that she was very sorry. I told her that had she not hit me she would have hit my daughter in her wheelchair instead. She said she was very sorry. I asked her how she could not have seen me. She said that she had checked in all the mirrors, but I must have been standing in her blind spot (thus making me responsible). All the while, the young man of about the same age as the driver said nothing. She repeated that she was very sorry, not in a way that was insincere, but without any depth of feeling behind it. Being in a state of shock, I was unable to think clearly, and in fact unable to think of anything further to say, so I walked away.

I felt indignant that it was left to me to take responsibility for addressing the issue, when it was not me who was culpable. I felt discombobulated because the outcome of addressing the matter had been so unsatisfactory. I felt let down because a driver had witnessed the event from t minus one to t plus one, and had done nothing to prevent it or to offer support afterwards. I felt dissatisfied with myself because I had been unable to imagine, never mind bring about, a satisfactory resolution. I cannot even feel consoled that the driver will learn to drive better as a result of the experience, because it seemed that in her view she had done everything correctly. In trying to find some closure regarding the experience, all I can hear are trite clichés such as: "Well, at least you weren't injured." and "It could have been a lot worse had you not been standing there." and "The poor woman was only young. Maybe she'd only recently passed her driving test." usw. In conclusion, I am left with an incomplete gestalt for which I am unable to find adequate closure.

08 September 2013

Sarah Tether to stand down

I composed the following posting for Facebook on learning that Sarah Tether, Liberal Democrat MP for Brent, was to stand down as an MP.

I consider it likely that the political reality of managing a nation state involves interfacing with huge numbers of powerful vested interests, and to achieve anything requires forming alliances with organisations one might personally find distasteful. I have little doubt not only that the issue is the same the world over, but also that one's own moral purity could be preserved only under a highly authoritarian regime, assuming, of course, that one's moral principles aligned with that regime. The part I am not so keen on is that UK government ministers are required to pretend that they like the decisions that are taken in their name. I should rather they were honest, told it like it is, and then MPs such as Sarah Tether, and formerly Estelle Morris and Claire Short, would not be required to say things that we know they don't believe.