~Starflower~

Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you.

1. In Japan it’s month/day, so February 9th would technically be the correct date 2. That being said… two Meat Days

Wow holy shit I’m gonna actually give you guys an actual writing tip, being a published and award winning author and all.

Anyways, a great way to work in TOTALLY UNRELATED little details about your setting or what have you that may or may not be relevant later on is through the use of metaphors, euphemisms, etc. in character dialogue.

“This cold is terrible! I’m wearing more layers than an Aenirian bride!”

Congratulations, you now know something about Aenirian marriage customs. You might not even know what exactly an Aenirian is, but you know that their brides wear lots of layers.

not everything in the real world connects neatly and seamlessly with everything else; there are TONS of loose ends in real life because there’s an entire world that keeps going regardless of one particular person or group’s drama

Which is abruptly sobering and worth watching.

She seriously doesn’t deserve the treatment youtube’s been giving her, so please support her as much as you can and make sure this shitty farming channel goes down in flames. 

It promotes EXTREMELY DANGEROUS activities such as PUTTING STRAWBERRIES INTO A GLASS OF BLEACH TO TURN THEM WHITE WHICH IS POISONOUS. AND POURING LAVA HOT CARAMEL ONTO A SPINNING WHISK, WHICH WOULD EASILY BURN YOU AND LEAVE A SCAR.

It’s amazing how youtube still tolerates this kind of behavior just because it’s pumping out videos 24/7 and sucking up all of the views. It’s unacceptable and it needs to be stopped as soon as possible.

Don’t watch content farms videos!

Those of us who are old enough to know better need to do things like refusing to watch the garbage churned out by these content farms, reporting videos that feature dangerous things (such as the aforementioned secret challenge videos and bleached strawberries videos and copyright violations), and probably not allowing kids under a certain age on youtube period or supervising them on youtube to help keep them safe

“And this is really how capitalism usually works. It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.”

For about ~10,000 years bread was a fucking staple of the human diet. we evolved to eat this food, our bodies, our societies were built on this food, but all of a sudden we’re seeing a rise in gluten sensitivity* (distinct from celiac disease). Aka our bodies are rejecting this food we’ve spent 100 centuries eating. Where is this coming from?

Well, a big part of it is probably that less than 100 years ago corporations changed the definition of bread. (Like, figuratively and literally, they petitioned the FDA to change the legal definition of bread so they could put in additives.) In fact, industrialization has changed the process and the ingredients used to make bread, to the point manufactured bread is a profoundly different product from what our ancestors knew as bread. Let’s start with:

1) The Process: For thousands of years, humans relied on naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria found in the air to make (leavened) bread and bread starters (fermented dough used to “start” new loaves. hence the term “sourdough”). you can still do this at home–all it involves is leaving a mixture of water and flour lying around for a few days. notice something missing? that’s right, YEAST. this process of making bread involves yeast–yeast from the air around you–but it doesn’t involve concentrated baker’s yeast. Baker’s yeast refers to various strains of yeast that are added directly to flour & water mixtures as a leavening agent. This allows the bread to rise more quickly and cuts down on the overall production time. Convenient, right?

Now, adding yeast is not automatically a bad thing, and bakers have been doing it for a damn long time in interesting ways (such as using yeast from beer brewing). But lately we’ve taken it to extremes–we’ve gotten too good at creating more and more efficient forms of commercial Baker’s yeast, specifically for industrial use on a mass scale. Manufacturers want bread to rise as fast as possible, because that is how you get more product on the shelves. Making bread in factories now takes a small fraction of the time it used to.

And why is this a problem? Because it turns out a more traditional “long fermentation process allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and gluten in bread, making it easier to digest and releasing the nutrients within it, allowing our bodies to more easily absorb them.” [1] This (added to the fact that some commercial breads contain extra added gluten) has the unfortunate result that the product you buy from the grocery store is less digestible and nutritious than the bread human societies traditionally relied upon. Hence the rise of gluten intolerance–the gluten we are eating is simply more difficult to tolerate than gluten in properly fermented bread. (This is the reason many people with gluten sensitivity don’t experience symptoms when eating more traditionally made, longer-fermented sourdough.)

That’s not the only issue though. There’s also:

2) The Ingredients. not just the countless additives, but specifically: the flour. See, a grain of wheat is…incredibly nutritious, honestly. It has almost everything we need to sustain life and health. Civilizations did–and do–rely on bread as a fundamental dietary staple, to the point that you can track political instability with rising wheat prices. It’s essential. Look at this:

In a single grain, the essence of life.

So yeah, wheat is nutritional. We can build bodies and civilizations out of wheat. But it’s also, like…super difficult to access that nutrition. Well, more so than with most foods. If you eat a handful of wheat grains, a spoonful of flour–your body can’t digest that, you get basically nothing out of that (also raw flour isn’t safe to consume, don’t do that). Unlike many crops, wheat relies on being carefully and correctly processed in order for the final product to be as nutritional as possible. As stated above, part of that process is about fermentation. Another part is the quality of the flour, what it contains and how it has been milled and treated.

And that quality has changed a lot in just a century or two. Take white flour, for instance. White flour has been around for a long fucking time actually, but until the late 19th century it was considered a luxury item, a treat for the very wealthy. White flour was never considered a staple food–until industrialists learned how to manufacture it cheaply. [2] And then it was everywhere. And suddenly, surprise surprise, we started to see a rise in nutrition related illnesses. Because the bran and germ have been stripped away, white flour has only a fraction of the nutritional value of whole grain. But because this gives it a higher shelf life, it was more convenient (and profitable) for manufacturers. So when they learned about the health issues, what did they do? Go back to making healthier flour?

Pshaw. Of course not. No, instead they kept removing nutrients, then artificially adding them back in. And that is how we got enriched flour–flour which is still significantly less nutritious than whole wheat flour. [3] And this is what the previous quote about capitalism was referencing. The food industry created a problem, and rather than undoing the problem, they created a whole new business to “fix” it:

And thus came the mass rise of “enriched” foods.

Eat Wonder Bread! It has as much protein as roast beef! As much calcium as cottage cheese! As much iron as lamb chops! No need to eat real foods, when you can eat highly processed foods instead! Don’t cook your own meals, let trustworthy corporations feed you! Mass-produced factory foods are easy, are healthy! There will be literally no downsides or long-term repercussions to public health & wellness!

So yeah. Much of what we think of as “bread” is chemically and molecularly distinct from traditional bread, and is very different (and less nutritional) than what our ancestors were eating even just a century ago. (On an individual level, I’m not sure how to mitigate this, other than by purchasing the healthiest options available (e.g. whole wheat, sourdough), buying from small bakeries/farmer’s markets, or baking bread at home. Lately there has been a rise of small health-concious brands focusing on traditional fermentation and whole ingredients; some may be available in your area. But ultimately, it’s the entire wider system that needs to change.)

And there you have it! I have never been so incandescently furious about wonder bread. This documentary will do that to you–and will change your whole understanding of modern food. It’s a 4-part netflix series called Cooked (2016), based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. Most of the info above comes from the third episode, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge (but let me know if I got anything wrong).

*I want to be perfectly clear though, gluten itself is not inherently bad. It’s being demonized in the press on no scientific basis, just to push yet another diet fad. Unless your body has actual issues with gluten (e.g. celiac disease, gluten sensitivity) there are no proven benefits to eating gluten-free. There are, however, benefits to eating less processed, more nutritional (delicious delicious) bread.

We’re only around three generations away from that and thus there’s been three generations where people with celiac disease and gluten intolerance have lived to adulthood and had children who have it or carry the genes on to their children.

The preliminary screening test for celiac is a blood test which basically looks for ‘is there a war going on inside your body?’ bc when you have celiac and are eating gluten, your body is literally attacking itself all the fucking time. (Including your brain! Which is why one of the symptoms of celiac that we only just really figured out in the last 10y or so is increased anxiety and paranoia and irritability!) So if you’re on a totally gluten-free diet and have been for a while, that test will probably say ‘no celiac here! lookin’ good!’

But let’s also say that your doctor goes ‘mmm, I’m not sure, let’s do some further tests.’ Well, the definitive test for celiac disease is an intestinal biopsy - they take a tiny biopsy of the start of your small intestine and look at the state of your villi. The villi and microvilli are important bc they increase the surface area of your small intestine something like 600x, and when they get destroyed by celiac disease, your small intestine basically can’t absorb enough nutrition from your food, and, uh, you die. Other things happen too but that’s the tl;dr.

However, for someone like me, who definitely has celiac disease but has been on a totally gluten-free diet for close on to a decade at this point, I could go in to a hospital and have a biopsy and they’ve been like ‘your insides look like someone who doesn’t have celiac disease, good job!’ (This is what my GI said to me at my last biopsy, matter of fact.) The whole point of the gluten-free diet is that I get to keep my villi and microvilli so I can digest my food and don’t get cancer or starve to death. Buuuuuut you can’t really definitively diagnose celiac then. WHICH IS FINE. Most doctors will either have you do a) a ‘gluten challenge’ for like a week before a biopsy to see how your body reacts, bc a week of a glutened diet won’t kill someone with celiac, just make them very unhappy and grumpy and poop forever or b) just say 'you probably have it, let’s act like you have it, stay off gluten forever and ever.’

The other thing about celiac, lest people think they can 'catch’ it from modern bread, is that you have to have a genetic predisposition to it, and we don’t actually know how people develop celiac disease later in life. The best current guess is that if you already have a genetic predisposition toward it and your body goes through a bunch of trauma, your immune system might suddenly decide it’s time to light everything on fire the moment that it spots gluten. We’re pretty sure that’s what happened to me, since my celiac was diagnosed about 10 months after I had major spinal surgery. My dad also has celiac disease and he was diagnosed in his 60s, and he’s been through and out the other side of a skin cancer diagnosis, so it’s probable that’s what kicked him over, though we don’t know.

There’s a lot we don’t know about celiac, but what we do know is this:

It’s been around in humans for at least a couple thousand years; we’ve found evidence of it in skeletons going back that far. Celiac disease is not new, it’s not trendy, it’s not a manufactured thing. As mentioned above, we’re probably just seeing more of it now because more of us get to survive!

It’s an autoimmune disease that tends to cluster with other genetic autoimmune diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren’s syndrome, etc. A lot of us have multiple autoimmune diseases, because the only thing strong enough to kick our asses is us, I guess. For people who have celiac, our immune system detects gluten and then runs around setting the whole fucking place on fire just in case there might be more gluten.

It’s most prevalent in but not confined to white people, because it’s genetic. I have to repeat that it is not confined to white people, because a lot of people do think it’s a “white person disease,” and that leads to underdiagnosis in literally everyone else. Having celiac is shitty, but it’s shittier if you don’t get it diagnosed and start taking care of yourself.

It can in fact kill you and absolutely used to. The life expectancy of someone with celiac disease before a doctor in Holland (I think) accidentally diagnosed it in 1945 (due to food shortages which led to people not eating bread/having access to flour for months at a time) was 5 years or less. If you think you might have it, please talk to a doctor.

If it’s poorly treated, you can end up getting some really shitty cancers (leukemia, small intestine, etc.). “Poorly treated” means not adhering very strictly to your gluten free diet over the long term. There is no such thing as a “cheat day” for celiac disease (unless you are doing like a gluten challenge or smth as above). You cannot safely ingest gluten. Just… ever.

There is no safe long-term amount of gluten for people with celiac disease. Non-reactive is not the same as safe. I know people with celiac disease who do not react to amounts less than 20 parts per million. They don’t feel bad if they get trace gluten. (This is not me, I am reactive down to 3ppm, yay me.) It’s still not safe for them to eat gluten at all. I’ve had many people say 'oh my friend says it’s safe for them to eat [gluten-containing thing] because there’s not much.’ Well, it’s cool if your friend wants to do that, that’s their body, but no, it’s not safe for celiacs to do that, so please don’t feed that to me.

Gluten is in so much processed food and it sticks to everything. It’s a cheap way to make things stick together, and it does not like to come out of stuff once it’s stuck to it. Wheat flour is in Twizzlers. I’ve gotten glutened by barley syrup being used in frozen lemonade. I can’t eat something supposedly 'gluten free’ that was made in the same facility as things containing gluten. If someone uses the same cutting board to cut bread as I use to cut my gluten-free bread, or the same toaster, I will get sick. (I am currently recovering from something like that happening on Friday night.) Once gluten gets in/on a porous material, it will never come out enough to be safe for a celiac to use it to prepare food. The only exception to stuff like that is cast iron, and that’s ONLY because you can put cast iron in a stove, turn that stove up to 500 F for 30m, and burn every trace of organic matter away. No, I cannot eat something out of your tupperware or prepared in your gluten-containing kitchen. I don’t even walk into glutenated bakeries bc inhaling flour is enough to make me feel like shit.

For most of us, it’s almost impossible to eat communally, and that can make us feel really shitty, because eating together is a prime human bonding experience. But, like, gluten is in fucking everything, and for most people, that’s fine! If you find a restaurant your celiac friend can really eat at, or make a point of accommodating them so they can eat with you at parties, you’ll be our favorite friend.

Celiac disease is not the same as gluten intolerance, but some people are at genetic risk of and who might develop celiac disease have gluten intolerance, but not everyone who has GI is at risk. Bodies are weird, okay? And we don’t know entirely why some people who have the genetic risk develop it and some don’t.

You can’t catch it, you’re not going to give it to yourself by eating store-bought bread, at least the best current research doesn’t think that’s the case. When we talk 'trauma’ that makes celiac come out, we’re talking like surgery, car accidents, anything else that causes big trauma to the body.