Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenter’s The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children’s animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes. Noot, Noot.
For a second I didn’t realize it meant “high” as in a stoner--I thought “High Geologist” was like a rank of geologist or something and he was insulted you would challenge him to naming stones
This sounds like it’s being sung by a passive-aggressive 1920s radio host wearing a very dapper suit and threatening me with a cartoonishly small pistol, bearing a large grin on his face that indicates that he will not hesitate to put a hole in my forehead, not for a second
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
mediocrity-uwu
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
To @kushandwizdom this is a rather unfair portrayal of Africa as a whole since half of these are literally just South Africa. So Instead to add to this post and better dispel the myth of Africa as the vast wasteland of poverty most people think, I found a much more mixed collection of pics from various countries.
Luanda, Angola
Agadir, Morocco
Lagos, Nigeria
Cairo, Egypt
Port Louis, Mauritius
Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire
Algiers, Algeria
Tripoli, Libya
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Tunis, Tunisia
So, there, a much better case demonstrating the various major cities around Africa showing it isn’t some technologically backwards continent, but actually pretty up-and-coming in the world of commerce.
I once was talking to my Ethiopian manager about ignorant people asking her dumb shit about her life before she moved to the states…
the worst story she told me about was when she told a fellow student (at a fairly prestigious university) about a concert she went to back home. The other student responded with “omg you have music there!?” 🤦🏾♀️
A redneck neighbor once asked my mom (in the 80s) if they had cars in Peru. Sigh.
This is the product of poor world history in school & little current affairs coverage outside Western Europe, except for catastrophes, so all we see are the war torn, poverty stricken, disaster-affected parts on the news. And racism, of course.
I bet most Americans who think that African countries are just completely poverty stricken have no idea what the US looks like in its poorest areas, not everywhere in the US is nice suburbs or unrealistically large apartments on tv