[Reprint] Bird Up, People!
it's just a little snow
Notes from Summer 2025
It’s hot. Hot and wet, on this Father’s Day of 2025. I have so many raspberries right now I’m giving them away to the neighbors. I bought some marked-down meat at Deep Roots yesterday that I plan to grill up for brown-bag lunches at WFIRM next week.
At the checkout I learned that while they can get much of their produce locally, the hacking of their distributor means they haven’t had a processed delivery in two weeks. Makes me feel like I’m not wasting my time in the yarden.
I spent part of yesterday at the East White Oak Community Center doing a visioning thing with Lyndon Rego of Cometta, who I’ve known for several years now, since my more entrepreneurial days. Here’s how he put it in his invitation e-mail:
Tomorrow [the 14th] is a big day for our country and community. If we're not happy about what's going on, we need to stand up and call it out AND work to create what we want. The No Kings protest is about raising our voices. The Community Hackathon is about putting our hearts and heads to work to create the solutions we need right here, right now. I hope you'll join the folks who are choosing to be part of one or both!
It was a reunion of sorts. There were two other permaculture peeps there, as well as one of the principals from Wayward (where I took that self-publishing course back in the spring), whom I had only met over Zoom. And there were new people there, including a recent transplant from Boston who previously worked at the Christian Science Monitor and is currently looking for a physical site to start a board game cafe.
There are lots of groups giving away food right now, from governments to 501 nonprofits to informal groups like Food Not Bombs. But the foursome around our particular folding table wanted to emphasize community, which reminded me of a favorite foraging conference, which had an all hands on deck kind of vibe. There would be people prepping food or cooking, others fishing in the lake, others playing with the kids, still others with instruments providing a soundtrack. We imagined a communal cooking event rotating between kitchen-equipped community gardens like White Oak and some of the larger public parks that have picnic shelters and outdoor grills. People would pick whatever was available fresh, cook it up, and share it out. There might be an ethnic cuisine focus at a given event, or there might not.
Another group was thinking about time banks, which I have a little bit of experience with through a class project run by Elon prof Derek Lackaff a few years ago. This cooking club idea might plug into their initiative, which is exactly the sort of thing Lyndon was hoping might happen.
But On to Some Science
I ate a lot of weird stuff at Wild Foods Weekend: beaver, bear, rattlesnake pate. One time somebody brought a groundhog, which was a lot like skinning a cat in anatomy lab. Field-dressing a freshly killed snapping turtle was not an experience I want to repeat any time soon. Its spinal reflex circuits were still active, so its limbs kept gyrating around while I was trying to work. Super-creepy.
It’s been known for a long time that turtle hearts will keep beating for hours or even days in a dish. More recently they’ve become a model for how to keep human hearts alive for transplant.
More locally, BMI Organ Bank has a box where they can not only keep a kidney alive, but they can monitor its level of function. During the meeting last week, I heard that only 11% of donated organs actually make it into a patient, because surgeons are pretty conservative about donor profiles. But according to CEO Carrie DiMarzio, they recently took two kidneys from a single donor, one of which was bad (meaning only suitable for research, maybe?) and the other of which was fine. Increasing the supply even a little bit would shorten the transplant wait lists a lot.
I saw another machine during my orientation that uses detergents to wash the fatty cell membranes out of a kidney, leaving behind the fibrous protein organ structure, which can be re-seeded with new stem cells. Currently they’re testing pig kidneys, but when it works in humans, that’s more or less the end of tissue rejection and the immune-suppressing drugs they use to combat it. Maybe not the end of the dialysis industry, because they might repurpose those machines for other conditions, but definitely an improvement.1
And just in time. One of the sessions at last fall’s science journalism meeting in Raleigh was about the impending epidemic of kidney damage in people who work outside due to heat exposure.
With that in mind, enjoy this chill reminder that it does still snow in NC, occasionally. Y’know, North Carolina.
Original Post from January 2022
We had a hobo-gang of about a dozen birds huddled in the trees around our bird feeders yesterday, one full of seeds and the other full of the fatty stuff they call suet, which — until Wikipedia just now — I never knew is a specific cut of fat. (Actually, I never knew there were specific cuts of fat at all; fat is like the dark matter of butchery, I guess).
Yesterday’s unofficial log included:
Four Mourning Doves,
Three Blue Jays,
Two Card-i-na-als,
and a Towhee under the gardenia (which spoils the meter, but hey, I work with what the yard provides).
Also a Hermit Thrush, or maybe a Wood Thrush, which I have difficulty distinguishing in the snow, and a bunch of sparrows and chickadees of various flavors.
The Less-than-Catastrophically Warmed Earth of 2040
While so many of us are sitting at home under a blanket of snow and ice, I thought I’d point out this documentary, about a pretty good possible future and how we might get there. Importantly, all the solutions proposed currently exist in some form, and only have to be scaled up (meaning no nuclear fusion or other currently science fiction technologies).
Related Solutions on NOVA
One of these I’ve mentioned before
and one I only saw last week.
NOVA: The Great Electric Airplane Race
The official PBS site has pay-walled the actual video but there’s background, clips, and a useful transcript, or you can search for it on YouTube or Vimeo.
Same deal. I give WUNC $5 a month for the Passport, which also allows me to watch Nature and Frontline and other, mostly historical stuff that I like.
Lab-Grown Meat vs Edible Insects
The 2040 documentary above makes some whimsical narrative choices, like green-screening Tony Seba, one of the authors of this book, into the shot in miniature. I’ll return to the book in a future newsletter, but the basics of it for this discussion is that we’re at the beginnings of a fourth industrial revolution. From their webpage:
During the 2020s, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors that underpin the global economy, and with them every major industry in the world today. In information, energy, food, transportation, and materials, costs will fall by a 10x or more, while production processes an order of magnitude more efficient will use 90% fewer natural resources with 10x-100x less waste.
The knock-on effects for society will be as profound as the extraordinary possibilities that emerge. For the first time in history, we could overcome poverty easily. Access to all our basic needs could become a fundamental human right. But this is just one future outcome. The alternative could see our civilization collapse into a new dark age. Which path we take depends on the choices we make, starting today. The stakes could not be higher.
Those technologies are things like artificial intelligence, automation, etc., etc. — individually important and disruptive, but together transformational. Today I’ll focus on one aspect that carries through from the not-eating-animals thread of two weeks ago.
These authors are interested in plant substitutes for meat, but their favorite is lab-grown meat, meaning muscle tissue grown in cell culture with no biological organs and no nervous system. The theory is that this avoids the ethical concerns of this episode of Torchwood, where humans are keeping a regenerating space whale in a warehouse near Cardiff so they can carve living slabs off it for sale on the black market.2
In reality, the people who kept tumor samples from a Virginia woman named Henrietta Lacks and turned them into a billion-dollar industry called HeLa cells, without compensating her surviving family in any way, were still pretty ethically compromised. It has taken sixty years for the lawsuit karma to come around. And anyone who has been following Wake Forest University’s Institute of Regenerative Medicine knows how difficult three-dimensional tissue culture is. That’s why they are still injecting undifferentiated stem cells into living bodies, so the existing tissue scaffolds can guide the stem cells to the right places and tell them what to do. I’m not saying lab-grown meat won’t work eventually; I’m saying that economists and venture capitalists are generally overly simplistic (and optimistic) about technical hurdles.
These authors don’t pay much attention to the insect farming industry, as in the NOVA episode above, but to my mind that’s probably where their dream of automation will bear sooner fruits. If you watch the episode, there’s a section showing robots feeding and watering tubs of insect larvae on racks in temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms, not that much more complicated than today’s existing computer server farms.
Insects also eat garbage, solving two problems (food waste and protein hunger) much more cheaply at this point than generating complicated, pre-digested liquid nutrient broths to feed vats of bird or mammal muscle cells. Another point the NOVA episode makes is that insects don’t “waste” nearly so much energy regulating their body temperatures as birds and mammals do, so they grow faster on less food. The very thing that I was celebrating about our hot-bodied backyard birds above makes them relatively inefficient protein conversion machines.
The biggest downside to insects at this point is the “ick” factor, which is really only a problem in European cultures like ours. The “ick” factor is also there with lab-grown meat to a lesser degree, according to this PLoS study. In vitro (Latin for “within the glass”) means exactly the same thing as tissue cultured in this context.
Through conducting an online survey with US participants, we identified that although most respondents were willing to try in vitro meat, only one third were definitely or probably willing to eat in vitro meat regularly or as a replacement for farmed meat. Men were more receptive to it than women, as were politically liberal respondents compared with conservative ones. Vegetarians and vegans were more likely to perceive benefits compared to farmed meat, but they were less likely to want to try it than meat eaters. The main concerns were an anticipated high price, limited taste and appeal and a concern that the product was unnatural. It is concluded that people in the USA are likely to try in vitro meat, but few believed that it would replace farmed meat in their diet.
Again, the “Edible Insects” episode of NOVA comes to the rescue with a vignette about the rise of sushi. When I was growing up in 1970s America, “raw fish” was essentially a derisive shorthand for rich coastal yuppies. Humans are susceptible to marketing, over time. I’ve got a great story about that for next week.
To be transparent, I did buy some stock in Aethlon during grad school in the 90s, and have been holding it ever since.