Cooking. Eating. Reading.

Cauliflower, Pea, and Coconut Curry: adapted from a NYTimes recipe (link)
I prepped the food and made the recipe up until I took this photo — then Len took over the cooking.
It was the first time in a couple of months that I have cooked, as I recover from major surgery.

The curry. I added potatoes to the recipe as it was written, and omitted the rice.
Substitutions: I used green onions instead of cilantro, and peanuts instead of cashews.

Chicken thighs with potatoes and onions, which Len cooked earlier this week.

Carol’s fruit tart.

Reading about humans and other creatures

An interesting natural history book about “mutualisms,”
that is, examples of inter-species cooperation.

Rob Dunn, the author  of The Call of the Honey Guide, explores a number of interactions of humans with other beings, from micro-organisms to beavers and many others in between. The book is full of historical examples and quotations from literature and poetry that create a very interesting and unusual reading experience.

For example, the human relationship to trees: “Globally, humans have cut down, burned, or otherwise destroyed roughly half of all the forest that once was. … Nature is never just one thing or another. Trees offer extraordinary benefits to those, like us, who partner with them; they offer their fruits, their bodies, and their services. The poet Ross Gay has written that ‘our capacity and willingness to learn the language of trees, to study the language of trees, it’s so obvious to me now, might incline us to be less brutal, less extractive. It might incline us to share, to collaborate. It might incline us to give shelter and make room.’  Like the shaman in Peru, we can learn from our trees.” (p. 48-51)

The human relationship to dogs: “So far, I’ve avoided answering whether we are actually still engaged in a mutualism with our dogs. That we once were is clear, but on average, are we today? We certainly benefit our dogs. But how should we consider whether they benefit us?” The author’s conclusion is that walking one’s dog conveys many mental and physical health benefits to the dog owner, although many of the former tasks that dogs did (such as herding flocks of sheep or cattle, participating in the hunt, or watching for intruders of whatever other species) are no longer needed by most dog owners. (p 227 ff)

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Living Rivers

“One way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as ‘natural resource’ is to class them as fellow beings – kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination. — Ursula K. Le Guin (2017)” Quoted in: Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, p. 45.

I have read two of the three major parts of this book. At first, I found author Robert Macfarlane too exaggeratedly poetic and pretentious in the way he discussed natural history. I was not convinced by his over-the-top rhetoric about “living” rivers. However, when he came to specifics, about the rivers of Ecuador and about the Ganges River in India, and when I began to understand exactly what he meant by seeing a river die, I found much to interest me. Here is a quotation that illustrates the perspective that I find useful:

“Both the Ganges and the Yamuna have their sources in the glaciers of the Himalayas: the Ganges at the Gaumukh, or snout of the Gangotri Glacier; the Yamuna further west at the Yamunotri Glacier. The Yamuna flows south to Delhi, before bending eastwards through Agra and past the Taj Mahal, to unite with the Ganges – and, supposedly, the mystical underground Saraswati river – in the city of Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad). Until it reaches Delhi the Yamuna is a life-bringing river, who carries in its cold blue waters the memory of its glacial birth. In Delhi, it becomes one of the most polluted waterways in the world. Oxygen content collapses to near zero. About the only life is extremophile bacteria – and the thousands of pilgrims who bathe in the waters of the river each year, believing it will spare them from hell in the afterlife. Many of these water-worshippers emerge from their baptism covered in toxic river-sludge. Further downstream, where the Yamuna flows past the mintcake-white, hyperbolic love-token of the Taj Mahal, its waters are oily-black and rancid. For the Yamuna, as elsewhere in India, holiness does not equal cleanliness.” (p. 190)

In sum, this book held my interest for two of the three parts, and I may return to read the last part. The human dependence on rivers is profound, and ancient, and worth thinking about. I found it strange that the author missed two great writers whose works would be relevant: Langston Hughes (quoted below) and Henry David Thoreau on the world’s watery identity.

I do love seeing rivers!

Rivers I Have Seen

The Seine, from Evelyn who is in Paris this week. When we lived there for a time,
I walked along the quays many times.

The Huron River last Saturday.

The Mississippi River in 2024.

The Thames River with historic bridges and landmarks, 2016.

The Isis River in Cambridge, England from our trip in 1999.

Langston Huges: A River Poem

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander 

So Much to Learn!

 Books!

My longtime favorite little library. Around a mile from our house.
(Yes, they still keep going.)
I seem to read everything on ebooks.

Our Garden

Serious Book

Quotes from The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

“Electricity is a wily force. It itself is not alive, but it is very often the best sign of life. It’s a proxy for aliveness.”

“Already, scientists have found compelling evidence that language is not entirely confined to the human realm; prairie dogs appear to use adjectives, specific repeated sounds they use to describe the size, shape, color, and speed of predators. Japanese great tits have syntax; they use distinct strings of chirps to instruct their comrades to scan for danger, or tell them to move closer. We’ve heard about songbirds using backchannels for alarm calls, and risk-averse chipmunks screaming at the slightest spook. Perhaps it would be small-minded of us to foreclose on the possibility of a sound-based plant language emerging too.”

“If plants can’t do something for themselves, they find other things that can do it for them. But when those other things are living creatures with their own agendas, that might take a little bribing—or manipulation. Legumes, for example, form associations with bacteria in their roots to lock in a steady supply of nitrogen fertilizer.”

“Agency is an organism’s capacity to assess the conditions it finds itself in, and change itself to suit them. Yes, we do this all the time. So do plants.”

“Intelligence is a loaded word, perhaps overly connected to our ideas of academic achievement. It’s been weaponized against fellow humans for millennia, used to divide people into hierarchies of worth and power. I wouldn’t want to apply that schema to a whole additional category of life. Yet it is, by its very definition, still a word that contains the germ of what we mean by alert, awake to the world, spontaneous, responsive, decision-making. From the Latin interlegere: to discern, to choose between. So science may or may not ever deign to use it for plants, for exactly the reasons of the social implications; humans have contaminated the word with their humanness. But words are merely symbols. They draw a perimeter around a feeling for which there is no language. In that sense, intelligent might be the tightest word-perimeter we’ve got to describe what we are seeing plants do.”

Not-so-Serious Book

The Kamogawa Food Detectives is a light-hearted book, but unfortunately it’s quite repetitive. Each chapter begins in the secretive restaurant of the Kamogawa family, the father, Nagare, and the daughter, Koishi. In each case, a person comes into the restaurant with a request to the “detectives” to identify a blurry food memory, usually from their early childhood. 

Before hearing about this request, Koishi and Nagare serve him or her a remarkable, delicious, and ultra-traditional Japanese meal. The descriptions of these over-the-top Japanese meals really seem to be the main motivation for the novel. Here’s an example:

“‘From top left,’ began Nagare, tucking the tray under his arm, ‘Miyajima oysters, simmered Kurama-style, miso-glazed baked butterburs with millet cake, bracken and bamboo shoot stew, chargrilled moroko, breast of Kyoto-reared chicken with a wasabi dressing, and vinegared Wakasa mackerel wrapped in pickled Shogoin turnip. In the bottom right you have a hamaguri clam broth thickened with kudzu starch. Tonight’s customer asked me to create something that evoked both the lingering winter and the onset of spring, which led to the dishes you see here.’”

After the client eats and describes the food memory they wish to recapture, Nagare travels to somewhere in Japan where the seeker lived as a child. This consistently requires two weeks, after which he will prepare the dish that haunted their client. In contrast to the lavish meal served two weeks before, these nostalgic dishes are usually very simple — in one case, it’s a simple dish of spaghetti with hot dogs, served in a special way; usually it’s a simple food typical of Japanese childhood, but also slightly unusual in some way. 

Each chapter is so much like the others that I quickly got tired of reading. There’s even a cat that makes an appearance at the same point in each story. Note, however, that I did finish all 201 pages of the book.

UPDATE: A recent New York Times cooking article described the Japanese “Spaghetti Napolitan” that featured in the story I mentioned. It’s spaghetti fried with seasoned ketchup — based on Italian cuisine, but invented in Japan, and a definite favorite of kids there. (NYT Article Here)

Alice in Amsterdam

Alice sent me some photos of her visit. I love this street art!

At the Reijksmuseum

Wonderful dollhouses. I try to see them whenever I am there.

“The Nightwatch” is being cleaned. A previous time it was cleaned was in 1976, and we
(Len, Evelyn, and I) saw it then, in a workshop. So it’s funny that Alice is seeing the same thing.

I’m sharing this weekend post with Eileen’s critters, Sami’s murals (The Nightwatch is DEFINITELY a mural!) and with Deb’s Sunday Salon. © 2025 mae sander.

"Lost Wonders"

Tales from the Fifth Extinction: Happening Now

Lost Wonders by Tom Lathan is a very depressing book. Not only is it deeply saddening to hear about the loss of biodiversity throughout many parts of the world, it is also devastating to hear of the emotions experienced by scientists who tried to prevent the extinctions. You can’t help reading with empathy about the heroic efforts (in some instances) to keep alive the last survivor, whose death would also be the death of the entire species. Each chapter of the book deals with just one last survivor of a now-extinct species, but ranges more widely about other lost species and the general topic of extinction and how our era is facing this continuing tragedy.

The poet John Donne wrote in 1624;

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

As I read the book, I found myself thinking of this poem about mankind as I read about the loss of each obscure species that has been extinguished in the last quarter-century. As the loss of each man impressed Donne with its human significance, the loss of each bird, lizard, snail, or other species impressed the researchers and humanist-biologists who were studying it or were trying to save it from final destruction.

The Life and Times of Lonesome George

Lonesome George, a native of Pinta Island in Ecuador’s Galápagos archipelago, was the last tortoise of his species. Of all the extinction stories in Lost Wonders, Lonesome George is the only “last survivor” that I ever saw — in fact, he lived out his last years in a comfortable enclosure at the Darwin Center on San Cristóbal Island where large numbers of tourists (like us) visited him. The other last survivors described in Lost Wonders died quietly with almost no notice except from a few scientists — or even just one interested researcher. Lonesome George was kind of a rock star of extinction fame. 

At the Darwin Research Center

Lonesome George as we saw him in 2010. He died in 2012 with worldwide attention.

Lonesome George in 2024: no longer alive, but still on display, having been preserved by taxidermy.

The chapter on Lonesome George and the evolution of the many tortoise species of the Galapagos contains a lot about the entire region and its history as well as details about this single survivor of his kind. When Lonesome George was found on Pinta Island in the early 1970s, his species had long been thought to have gone extinct already, so his survival was kind of a double miracle!

The Charles Darwin Center, where I visited the still-living tortoise in 2010 and the now-preserved body in 2024, offers lots of information. However, the book covers a much wider look at the individual, his own species, and the evolution and history of the many other species of tortoise on the Galapagos Islands. For example, the author writes: “Tortoises have shaped the look and ecology of the Galápagos Islands more than any other animal, earning them the nickname ‘gardeners of the Galápagos.’” 

I was fascinated to learn how tortoises actually sculpted the ground with their heavy shells; how they created indentations where water could accumulate on dry islands, and also how they coevolved with some of the cactuses on which they fed. As with virtually all of the extinct species described in the book, their fate was always related to the humans who entered their space and who changed the climate, the ecology, the plant life and who took extremely lage numbers of giant tortoises for meat, and many other factors that doomed their survival. I was already aware of the fact that tortoises were such good sources of meat for the ships that stopped at the Galapagos — especially whalers in the 19th century. Even Darwin enjoyed tortoise meat as he was studying the biology of these isolated islands. 

The Galapagos Islands are now a preserve that’s carefully protected by the Equadorian government. No major development is permitted, very few new residents are allowed to settle on the islands or create more tourist attractions, and access to the breeding grounds of fragile species is more and more restricted. Even between our two trips to the islands, we experienced way more limits on where our ship could take us and where we were allowed to hike. Good — but too late for the Pinta Island Tortoise and Lonesome George!

Complaint about this book: I desperately wanted to see maps of the locations discussed in the text. Many of these places are so obscure that even google maps and other online resources aren’t easy to use in order to identify where these extinct creatures once lived. In general, most of the illustrations are also disappointing. However, it’s a good though very depressing read.

Photos © 2010, 2024 mae sander. Blog post © 2025.

Not My Favorite Reading, Recently

 

In response to my post about the beavers in my childhood imagination (Beaver Dreams), blogger David Gascoigne at Travels with Birds recommended the book Beaver Land by Leila Philip. I’ve read about half of it, but I’m pausing or maybe giving up on it because it’s too full of people without enough beavers. In fact, up to the point where I stopped reading, the author rarely sees a live wild beaver — if ever. Her experiences are mostly with dead beavers caught in traps or being skinned and turned into meat. Beavers are elusive, no doubt about it. 

I’d like to read some natural history, but at the moment I’m not in the mood to read about a lot of fur trappers, conservationists, quirky animal lovers, and historic voyagers. My negativity about this perfectly good book is about me, not about the book. I’m finding it to be a pretty typical story of a person’s search for information about an unfamiliar topic — quite similar to the works of Sy Mongomery, who similarly relates her interactions with animals and the people who work with them. At least Montgomery usually has some vivid encounters with the animals she writes about.

I’m disappointed in this book, and I guess I’ll save the second half for another time. Now I need a new idea of what to read.

Elizabeth Strout

My Name is Lucy Barton is ok but predictable. I liked Elizabeth Stout’s other books better, I think, especially Olive Kitteridge. Lucy is supposed to be very self-aware (I think) but I find her a bit whiny. I thought I would read this book first, then the author’s newer ones. However, now I’m not inclined to read any of the sequels including the one that was published this week.

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Insects that Spin

A spider made her web in the doorway to our deck. (Two commenters have mentioned that spiders
are not insects, just similar to them.)

The life cycle of monarch butterflies is given a lot of attention, as they fly away to Mexico in the fall.

The Silkworm and Other Creatures

A very poor treatment of a potentially interesting topic.

In a meandering and undisciplined book titled Silk (published 2023) author Aarathi Prasad presents the story of several insects and a few sea creatures that spin silken fibers. Best known is Bombyx Mori the scientific name for the silkworm, a domesticated insect that can live only in the environment provided by its human owners. For millennia, silk thread has been collected from generations of captive Bombyx and woven into cloth. The life and times of the insect are described in detail, but alas, the book is strikingly free of vivid images of the uses of silk fabrics. The book’s few illustrations mainly show portraits of men who studied the science of silk or the natural history of silkworms and other silk producing creatures.

Prasad covers a huge number of topics about silkworms, including a history of their cultivation in a number of places; the use of mulberry trees for their food; the types of cloth made from spun silk; the insects’ anatomy; the names and accomplishments of scientists who studied their anatomy; military uses for silk in such devices as bullet-proof clothing; medical uses for silk fiber and special-purpose fabric; experimental uses for silk, and much more. Further, the author describes several closely-related wild insects and how people managed to capture their silk for various purposes. Historic efforts to use the silk-like fibers produced by sessile sea animals, which use these fibers to cement themselves in place on the sea bed, is another long topic. The level of detail about the sea creatures is frustrating to read, as these efforts on the whole never succeeded in a practical way, so it’s more of a digression than a relevant topic for the book.

Prasad finds that almost any subject is worthy of a digression. Did a scientist who later worked on silk come from an interesting historic city? You’ll read a long description of the city which in fact had no relevance to silk at all. Did the silk from one of the sea creatures appear in a Roman grave or in a Medieval archaeology site? You’ll find out a whole lot of stuff about that. Why do we need a full paragraph describing all the features of a house in Pompeii where a silk item was found? Silk was used in one of the earliest examples of knitted fabric — does this mean we need to go back and hear about a completely irrelevant city where ANOTHER early knit item made of some other fabric was found? The indisciplined digressions are mostly maddening to read. 

Only one topic is missing that might seem quite relevant: there’s virtually no discussion of how silk textiles look or how they were used in fashion through the ages. There’s very little description of how the threads were spun, processed, dyed, or crafted into fashion items like clothing, upholstery or other uses like for tents or blankets; for example, I would like to have heard about just what textiles were displayed in the numerous silk stalls at the famous Crystal Palace Exposition that the author mentioned.

I did enjoy the one and only description of a popular wild silk fabric from a not-domesticated silkworm in the 19th century, which was shown at the famous Paris Exposition. I wish there had been more about such fabrics — I loved the fact that the wild silk fabric could be dyed fourteen “gem colors” that were “wonderfully named sapphire, emerald, topaz, pink topaz, spinel-ruby, beryl, jacinth, chrysoprase, amethyst, coral, gold-quartz, turquoise, ruby, and peridot, all laid out like jewels in a glass case in the great exhibition hall in the heart of Paris.” (p. 129)

The book is so silent about fashion that I didn’t even find out, from reading it, the functions that silk fabrics played in the fashions of various historic eras, other than generically for clothing. The only memorable description of a garment was of a dress worn by Queen Anne, wife of James I of England, which was embroidered with images of silkworms on the sleeves. The book didn’t include an illustration of this intriguing dress, but I found it online and here it is:

As you can tell, I think you should avoid reading this book. Review © 2024 mae sander.

NOTE ADDED Sept. 10: A review of this book by Jenny Uglow titled “Worms’ Work” summarizes all the interesting parts and leaves out all the irrelevant parts. It’s behind a paywall, but if you can get to it here’s the link:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/09/19/worms-work-silk-aarathi-prasad/

The Unique History of the Galapagos Islands

The Recent Origin of the Islands

Cone-shaped mountain peaks are evidence of the recent volcanic origin of the islands. A geological hot-spot in the Pacific Ocean produced the chain of islands. The oldest islands are around 5 million years old; eruptions continue to the present.

Signs of recent volcanic activity appear on many islands. Here, you can see a lava tube with both of the major types of lava: a’a and pahoehoe.

A crevasse in the ground: another sign of recent volcanic activity.

We enjoyed all these beautiful volcanic landscapes during our voyage from August 17-24.

Life Begins on the Isolated Island

Five million years is very brief in geological time! The new islands, being very far from the South American continent, had no life forms at first. Slowly, birds landed on the island, some blown by storms, many by flying there on their own. Plants and small creatures arrived from the mainland on large floating tangles of branches and roots; birds also can carry seeds or insects on their feet or feathers. In time, these new residents adapted in ways that haven’t really been observed in other places. 

During the last 300 years, humans have been frequent visitors, and a small number of people eventually settled in the Galapagos. The current population is around 32,000. With human activity, some native species have become extinct, and other species have been introduced such as goats and rats. Recently, the fascinating variety of birds, iguanas, giant tortoises, plants, and so on have become a major attraction for tourists. 

From our own photos, here are a few images of the very numerous endemic species in the Galapagos taken during  our two trips to the islands in 2010 and 2024.

Flightless cormorants, unique to the Galapagos (2010)

Endemic Lava Gulls, rarest gulls in the world.

Around 18 species of finches are found only on the Galapagos Islands. Here’s one example.

The Galapagos Penguin is also unique to the islands. (2010)

A giant tortoise at the Darwin Research Station

At the Darwin Research Station many of the endangered tortoises are being bred to avoid the extinction of yet more species. Before human disruption of the island’s fauna, at least one unique tortoise species lived on every major island. Unfortunately tortoises made perfect food for the whalers and other sailors who stopped at the islands in the 18th and 19th centuries, and populations were wiped out.

Galapagos Sea Lions, another endemic species that we have seen on many islands.

Marine Iguanas — perhaps the strangest of the endemics in the Galapagos. Darwin called them “Imps of Darkness.”

Sallylightfoot Crabs are everywhere on the rocky shore; they are also found in many other locations.

I don’t know anything about plants, but this is one of the evolved plants that is unique to the Galapagos.

Charles Darwin and the Study of Natural Selection

Len and Darwin at the Darwin Research Station.

In 1835, Charles Darwin spent several weeks visiting some of the islands in the Galapagos, which were at that time uninhabited by humans. He was traveling as a naturalist and companion to the captain of the ship H.M.S. Beagle, whose purpose was to make nautical charts and collect native species of plants and animals. His work was eventually published under the long title:

On the Origin of Species

BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE

PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

You are probably aware of the history of Darwin’s careful observations and life-long effort to understand how the emergence of the unique plants and animals of the Galapagos as well as the species found in many other places he visited. You probably also know of the controversies about his theories and their eventual acceptance by scientists and natural historians. Many ensuing research projects in the scientific fields that Darwin invented have and vindicated Darwin’s accomplishments.

One evening we cruised past the island of Daphne Major while hearing a talk about an important project done there.

Daphne Major was the site of some very important research to understand natural selection in action. From 1973 until 1989 two evolutionary biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, lived there and intensively studied the various species of finches on the island. They and their students discovered many new details about natural selection and speciation in the birds they observed. Their work was the subject of an award-winning book titled The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. 

I read Weiner’s book some time ago, and I was very interested in seeing the actual island that was involved, though from the deck of the ship one can’t actually see the flat volcanic mountain top where the birds and researchers lived. While we were traveling on the ship I borrowed the somewhat dog-eared copy of the book from the ship’s library and began reading it again. (Having a carefully selected library of natural history, geography, and biology books is a key amenity of Natural Geographic voyages!)

Virtually the entire territory of the Galapagos Islands belongs to the Ecuadorian Galapagos National Park. On Santa Cruz Island we visited the park headquarters and the center for preserving threatened species, especially the giant tortoises. The park has a very well-organized and seriously enforced program to protect these unique resources. The naturalists and staff of the ship take these rules very seriously.

More about the Island’s History

For a brief history of the islands and of Darwin’s visit see this summary from the Galapagos Conservancy. 

The human history of the islands is very brief: in the 1960s there were only 2000 residents, and today there are only 32,000. A few settlements date from the early 20th century, and the airport on Baltra Island was built as an American base during World War II.

The inhabitants today mainly work in the tourist industry, with a very small amount of agriculture and fishing. Needless to say, many volumes of history, scientific research, and accounts of natural history chronicle the fascinating story of the islands.

Where we were.

Blog post and photos © 2010, 2024 mae sander