Food for thought

I just finished some Japanese curry over rice for lunch today. The curry was leftover from a batch I made for some people that came over to watch a movie – although we didn’t end up getting to the movie. I made a basic vegetable curry with potato, carrot, onion, and green beans, and then people brought their own main ingredients to go with the curry. For myself, I had a piece of tonkatsu (to make it katsu-kare), but other people brought other food such as chicken, croquets, and squid to go with their meals. I also made a salad using all of the leafy greens that I had acquired throughout the week: green leaf lettuce, cabbage, and a bitter leaf that is often used in hot pot dishes. I had lots of salad left over from the night, as well as some un-cooked squid, so I cut and cleaned the squid, fried it up, and had squid salad with sesame dressing! Fantastic!

For breakfast lately, I’ve been eating toast with peanut butter, strawberry jam, and mashed up banana over top. Usually I used to slice the banana, but I started mashing it into a banana paste after an Australian friend treated me to his mashed up variety – I haven’t sliced a banana since. For someone like myself with a high metabolism that needs to be fed often and doesn’t have a lot of disposable income – or time for that matter, peanut butter and jam has always been a staple of my diet. I find it very strange when people get excited about me eating peanut butter and jam – apparently nobody really eats it, but really enjoys it when they do. I brought peanut butter and jam sandwiches to a potluck dinner around Christmas and everybody loved them (as I knew they would). When I tell Japanese people that I eat bread with peanut butter and jam, they find this very strange. They believe the combination to be “way too sweet.” Maybe I’ll have to teach them the phrase: “goes together like peanut butter and jam.”

Some other foods that I’ve cooked recently have been: sushi rolls, chicken salad, chicken sandwiches, Gyudon (beef over rice), nabe, fish filets, and I’ve also been trying my hand at Indian curry.

I was originally going to try to include a blurb about how the molecules that make up the cells of our bodies are replaced over a certain amount of time and that certain parts of our bodies replenish faster than others. The entire human body itself is said to replace itself somewhere around the 7-10 year area – mostly on account of our dense bone cells that take longer to replace. Other softer tissues like eyeballs and skin cells replenish themselves much faster. I was going to then measure the amount of time I’ve been in Japan (268 days) and make estimates on what parts of my body have become entirely Japanese. For example, if the cornea replaces itself in 24 hours, the skin every 14 days, blood cells every 90 days, and soft tissue every 6 months, then each of these parts of my body would – in the sense that I’ve been eating the same food that Japanese people eat since I’ve been here in Japan, essentially be Japanese. When I return to Canada, certain parts of my dense body structure, such as my bones, would also then retain some of this Japanese-ness within them for an additional 7-10 years.

Anyway, after searching the Internet for a while, I could not find any definite answers to what the actual regeneration periods are for different parts of the body. There is actually a lot of contention over whether this theory of molecule replacement for the entire body actually takes place. Many scientists believe that certain parts of the body, such as brain cells, don’t in fact replenish themselves at all.

It’s also worth mentioning that Japan only produces 40% of the food that they consume – the rest is imported. You can see a video on this on another blog: Strange Japan.

Some of you may think it odd that a few days ago, I mentioned that I started work at a new agriculture school last week that focused on growing produce, flowers, and raising animals, but only showed a few photos of cherry blossoms from the school grounds – and hence, neglected any visual data pertaining to the odd looking barnyard animals available to me. I didn’t have a chance to go to the farmlands, which are apparently a bit farther away from the school grounds, but the cows and chickens were indeed raised right next to the school building, and I did get a chance to look at them with my camera. There were also at one time, pigs that were raised at the school, but now the pig building (stables?) are only used for storage – I’m not sure why.