Footnotes to a Conversation, July 18, 2022
“The best way to treat obstacles is to use them as stepping-stones.” – Enid Blyton
I have cancelled my trip to Europe this winter. I’m disappointed, but it’s an opportunity to become better acquainted with my new hometown and to finish furnishing my apartment.
Gardens & Culture
I’ve found monthly themes to be an effective way to explore new ideas. Coming up next – gardens with a special emphasis on Japanese and Adriatic gardens. Monty Don, a British garden expert, has produced a number of television programs and books showcasing gardens in countries around the world. One of my favourites was Paradise Gardens that explored the art of the Islamic garden. I’m looking forward to his two-part series on Japanese Gardens as well as one on Adriatic Gardens in which he considers the influence of Venetians on gardening in Venice, Croatia, and Greece. I knew the Venetians were highly influential in so many areas but hadn’t considered gardening to be one of them.
Are You Normal?
I didn’t fit in in elementary school. I had a British accent; I wore the wrong clothes; I was hopeless at sports. That hasn’t really changed. On an intellectual level, I may accept my differences, but there is still a strong desire to fit in and be like everyone else.
Society’s black and white approach to what is right and normal and what is abnormal and bad causes so much unnecessary pain and stops us from appreciating the full range of human potential. Am I Normal? by Sarah Chaney examines the 200-year evolution of the concept of normality from the ideal chest measurement for men and working mothers as the cause of “verminous children” to forced sterilization, eugenics, and homosexuality as a disease. [The Guardian]
Miracle Cures
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But that sounds like far too much work! Instead, we look for immediate results. There was a wonder drug in the 1900s that was deemed a cure-all for everything from indigestion to protecting travellers to the West or South from “the danger attendant upon those violent bilious attacks to which almost all unacclimated persons are liable.” The source of these miracle cures? Why the humble tomato, previously thought to be poisonous and only of use as an ornamental.
“Let no lover of the delicious tomato be deterred from enjoying it for fear of taking anything bearing the slightest resemblance to calomel or any other medicine, but eat as many as he likes without thinking of his liver or his doctor.” [JSTOR Daily]
John Harvey Kellogg believed flavourful foods were sinful and unclean. He and fellow Seventh Day Adventist, James Caleb Jackson, invented cereal as part of a bland, vegetarian diet designed to curb sexual desire and masturbation. The religious imagery continued with C. W. Post creating Elijah’s Manna cereal, a reference to the wafer-like food God provided for the Israelites.
“It seems almost comical that the initial call for breakfast cereal — an ascetic attempt to relieve the American citizen of toxicities and evil temptations — has now become a sugar-laden treat complete with a plastic toy hidden at the bottom as a ‘prize’.” [Mold]
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.
If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.