Category: Sustainable living

The weather Friday was perfect (67 degrees F, quite a change from the polar vortex a week ago), so we had Simple Friday rather than Simple Saturday this week.

Why is cooking and eating outdoors so much fun? In any case, I’m starting to get the hang of cooking on the firebox. I’d kill for a brick-made outdoor range, with an oven for baking bread. Ken spent most of the day working on a second chicken house. There will be photos of that soon.

One of my sayings is that I can always squeeze one more meal out of an empty kitchen. Today is a squeeze day.

It’s Tuesday morning. Starting Friday evening, snow started falling. By Saturday morning, it looked like a blizzard, with 10 to 12 inches of snow on the ground. That night, the low temperature was about 8 degrees F. On Sunday night, the low was about 5 degrees F. The kitchen was prepared for being snowed in, though fresh food was started to run low. I had not been to Whole Foods in more than two weeks. Nor am I going to Whole Foods today. The Smart car is still very much snowed in and is not going anywhere for a while. Even though the Jeep would get out perfectly well, I’d rather cook from the bottom of the kitchen than clean the snow off the Jeep and drive it on salty roads.

I call this “cooking from the bottom of the kitchen.” In the refrigerator, there are eggs, milk, plenty of wine and ale, lots of butter, and all sorts of sauces and such. In the cabinets, there is no shortage of flour or oil or things that come in cans. It’s fresh food that is always the problem. I just took an inventory. I have half an onion, a lot of celery, and a winter squash. There are lots of sweet potatoes (I had bought a bushel of sweet potatoes a few weeks ago). We are nowhere close to starving. But the objective, of course, is not to avoid starving but to make something good out of a kitchen in which supplies are dwindling. Cooking from the bottom of the kitchen is a good exercise in frugality. It gets you to use up things you’ve been ignoring but that need to be used. The beets that I had been ignoring got eaten last night.

So then, for supper I’m thinking butternut squash soup (with lots of celery), a whole wheat flatbread, and tuna salad (with lots of celery).

After supper, I’ll clean the refrigerator to get it ready to be filled up again. And tomorrow I’ll go grocery shopping.

Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, by Roger Penrose, Princeton University Press, 2016, 502 pages.

Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, The University of Chicago Press, 2005, 362 pages.

What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, Cambridge University Press, 18th printing 2016.

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Most of Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy is over my head. But, as always with Penrose, I absorb what I can. Penrose ought to be a rock star as a physicist and mathematician. In some circles, he is. I think he’s the Einstein of our age.

But, tough reading though it is, and though it’s not the primary concern of this book, there is one concept in this book that is increasingly clear to me. It’s something that has puzzled me for years. Here is an uncomplicated way to think about the question. Why is it that fresh-squeezed orange juice is such a potent medicine and health-builder, but reconstituted orange juice is not much better for you than soda pop or any other sweet drink?

The answer, I believe, has to do with entropy.

Penrose’s book contains this illustration (I believe it was drawn by Penrose himself). I’ve also quoted the text that appears with the drawing:

Figure 3-16: Life on Earth is maintained by the great temperature imbalance in our sky. Incoming low-entropy energy from the Sun, in relatively fewer higher-frequency (~yellow) incoming photons, is converted by the green plants to far more numerous lower-frequency outgoing photons, removing an equal energy from the Earth in high-entropy form. By this means, plants, and thence other terrestrial life, can build up and maintain their structure.

What is entropy? Entropy is a lack of order. The concept of entropy has everything to do with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the total entropy (or disorder) of an isolated system always increases over time.

As a living organism, your body is in a highly ordered state. Without a mechanism for ingesting order and eliminating disorder, your body would decompose, and you would die. Your source of the order you ingest is in your food.

Walk into a grocery store. Do you see any food that could have been produced without the sun? Of course not. All food contains negative entropy — that is, order. And the source of that order is the sun. It’s not just the energy of the sun that matters. It’s the fact that the sun is a very hot spot in a cold sky. All life on earth depends on that hot spot in the cold sky. This huge thermodynamic imbalance, or gradient, allows life to create order and avoid entropy.

Penrose again:

By Planck’s E = hv (see §2.2), the incoming [photons] are individually of much higher energy than those returning to space, so there must be many fewer coming into the Earth than going out for the balance to be achieved (see figure 3-16). Fewer photons coming in mean fewer degrees of freedom for the incoming energy and more for the outgoing energy, and therefore (by Boltzmann’s S = k log V) the photons coming in have much lower entropy than those going out. The green plants take advantage of this and use the low-entropy incoming energy to build up their substance, while emitting high-entropy energy [for example, body heat]. We take advantage of the low-entropy energy in the plants, to keep our own entropy down, as we eat plants, or as we eat animals that eat plants. By this means, life on Earth can survive and flourish. (These points were apparently first clearly made by Erwin Schrödinger in his groundbreaking 1967 book, What Is Life?)

Think of it this way:

Question: Why are fresh foods healthier than un-fresh foods, or foods that have been preserved? Answer: Because the fresh foods have the maximum amount of negative entropy from the sun, since plants begin to decompose the moment they’re harvested.

Question: Could we eat compost and other rotten stuff to stay alive and healthy, since compost contains all the nutrients we need? Answer: Probably not, because decomposition has reduced the compost to a disordered, high-entropy state. Simple organisms, of course, can live on compost. Earthworms can live on soil only because they’re very efficient at extracting negative entropy from high-entropy food. They can eat their body weight each day. We humans require food with much lower entropy.

I’ll leave you to think about these concepts, but I think it’s clear how this concept applies to nutrition and health. A healthy diet is about much more than just getting the right vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc. It’s also about getting all those nutrients in the most ordered state possible, as close to the sun as possible. Processed foods are unhealthy not just because they contain a lot of salt, fat, and chemicals. They’re unhealthy also because the processing decomposes the ingredients. If we don’t take in enough negative entropy, some part of our body will surely become disordered beyond the body’s ability to fix it, and we get sick.

The concept of entropy sheds new light on the wisdom of Michael Pollan’s simple rule for eating: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Avoid edible food-like substances.” Those edible food-like substances, in every case, are substances that formerly were food but which were rendered disordered and high-entropy by processing.

Another way of boiling down the concept might be: Choose foods that are as close to the sun as possible, and keep cooking and processing to a minimum to maintain the food’s molecular order.

The garden is producing beautiful tomatoes in generous quantities. Who can resist tomato sandwiches? Though I bought a loaf of bread for the ceremonial first tomato sandwich of the summer, I just couldn’t eat any more bad bread. This is organic sandwich bread made from a recipe in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, the best book on breadmaking I’ve ever seen.

Home-grown organic tomatoes, homemade bread, and homemade pickles. You can’t go wrong.

These are half-gallon jars.

I wanted to make some no-heat, no-cook pickles to be eaten within the next few weeks as opposed to being preserved for the winter. This is an easy process, because the canning process is unnecessary — there is no need to use a water-bath canner or a pressure cooker. I also wanted to ferment some pickles naturally without using vinegar.

The abbey garden is providing cucumbers for the table, but not enough for putting up pickles. So I bought half a bushel of beautiful fresh-picked cucumbers from a farmer who lives just north of here. The cost was $15 for the half bushel.

To further reduce the amount of work, I used half-gallon wide-mouth jars. For about two hours’ work, I ended up with three gallons of pickles.

Two gallons of the pickles involved nothing more than a vinegar solution poured over the packed pickle jars, with some spices. They should be ready to eat in two or three days. The process for the fermented pickles is to fill the jars with brine on top of the packed cucumbers, spices, and a few grape leaves. They’ll take a month or so to ferment before they’re ready to eat. I used airlock caps that I bought from Amazon. The airlock caps allow fermentation gases to escape but keep outside air from getting in, reducing the risk of mold.

Though pickle cucumbers are supposed to be able to take the heat of the canning process, still I like the idea of pickles that have never been heated. They should be nice and crisp.

I had been watching the first tomato for weeks, ever since it was the first bloom. Just two days ago, it had started turning red. It was to go into the ceremonial first tomato sandwich of the summer. But, this morning, Sophia the chicken followed me into the garden through a gate that I had left open. The chickens are not allowed into the garden during garden season. Her chicken eye immediately spotted the red, and my gardener eye immediately spotted Sophia making for the tomato. Before I could head her off, she had taken a bite.

Tomato number 2 will make the first sandwich, and the remains of tomato number 1 will go into a curry.