Tag Archives: food

Food We Eat And Making Carp Bait

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I was searching for ingredients for making my own carp fishing bait over the last weeks as time and interest permitted. I was led indirectly to look up amino acids as the basic building blocks of life and health for any living animal. I found a web page listing ten amino acids as essential to health.

The amino acids determined by the web page to be essential to health are: Arginine, Histidine, Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Threonine, Tryptophan, Valine. That is about all I know about them except I recognize a few of the names from whatever reading about health I have done in the past, or looking through the endless rows of little bottles at health food stores. Some of these items are very expensive, and none of them are cheap.

I decided I was making this too hard, and started looking at basic foods and the amino acids they contain. I hit pay dirt, and I was pretty surprised because companies selling these amino acids leave it open to the possibility that some required amino acids are hard to come by in our normal diet. One of the foods was interesting because it seemed from my understanding of the studies I read (totally a layman’s reading), one of the foods has more of these amino acids available cooked raw. It also happens we only eat it cooked when we have a choice.

I believe going by what I have read and understood, is we naturally do a great job of making sure we are getting everything we need in our diet to survive and thrive in general. I believe this is another case of savvy marketing and greed at work, making us think that in our normal diets we do not receive all the nutrition we need. What did surprise me was wheat grains are not among the basic foods supplying the most amino acids for us.

The four foods I found to provide most of the amino acids considered essential are contained in nothing more than foods I enjoy eating and are part of everyones diet that tries to eat properly. I did not venture too far into many other foods because my intent was looking for foods attractive to carp, not a study of my own diet.

junkfood1So what are these foods that supply our bodies with everything we need in the way of essential amino acids? I think you will be surprised as I was. The four foods I looked up first, and the four foods that together supply everything we need are: Broccoli, Cauliflower, Corn, Potato. Corn and potato are pretty much a staple food in the northern hemisphere, so it should not have been a surprise to me that they are essential foods for us.

I did look up a few other foods out of curiosity because they show in some carp bait recipes, but I am guessing they are there for other reasons than for their completeness in containing essential amino acids. The exception and most surprising food was egg white. Egg white contains all the essential amino acids needed for life. I have no doubt that the egg yolk also contains other essential items we need to live. After I read it, I thought how obvious, egg is the way almost all living things start their journey into this world.

Carp bait making aside, it appears to me that if we are doing the minimum to eat right, and eat as many different foods as we enjoy or can afford, we are receiving everything we need to be healthy and happy, and giving our bodies everything it needs to survive and thrive.

The human side of good health aside, some items come up frequently for carp bait that do not seem to have much to do with complete nutrition. I am guessing from knowing what I know about my own eating habits that we do not always eat foods that are the most complete nutritionally. Sometime we eat certain foods just because they taste good.

Occasionally foods or flavors such as sugar, vanilla or chili, are addicting, and we will pass by better food to eat foods containing certain flavors we love to taste. It has been suspected since I was a child that some pet foods contained flavorings or additives to trigger a eating response in our pets. I do not think the jump from pet food to our food is so great that some commercial foods do not intentionally contain flavors or ingredients for no other reason that we prefer to eat it over other foods without it.

It seems obvious to me that whether you are trying to eat well, or design a killer homemade carp bait, you know everything you need to know by default. Looking at your own diet, and using a variety of common foods is all you need to know, the rest is in the details. It is possible that I am all wet, in both basic nutrition and homemade carp bait, but I do not think so.

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Assembled food, Assembled family, Assembled life?

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Looking around my world these days I see an awfully large number of assemblers every where I go. I am starting to wonder, when I think about the average American family if we do not assemble it also. Perhaps mine is an isolated perception, and the rest of the country is more normal, I am not sure though.

My first observation of assembly happened at a Grocery store of all places. I happened to be in the bakery section early one morning picking up some bread. I noticed that most of the breads could be grouped into a few main groupings. First there is the old standby bread, soft and mushy white air bread. This is followed up with soft, and mostly white, wheat air bread. Finally there is an assortment of more diverse breads, some of which are actually quite different from the rest.

I have noticed that most of the wheat and white breads taste the same. If you look closely at the ingredients label, you may see some have raisin, or other (they do not use the word) coloring, to make the bread look more like wheat bread, so they technically dye white bread made out of  processed wheat – how convenient. More diverse breads are for the most part only diverse by what is added to them, not the basic bread itself, unless it is a sourdough, rye, or some such bread. The rest are the same basic dough with different seeds, and things added to them.

This brings me to the particular morning I mentioned above about assembly being everywhere. Cookies, and pastries made by the ‘bakery’ within the store all taste about the same. There were some boxes of commercial dough out in the customer area waiting to go into the ‘bakery’. The boxes of dough stated on the label, all the uses this particular batch of dough was good for.

Care to guess what it said on the dough box label? The label explained how different breads, cookies, pastries, doughnuts, etc, could be made from the same box of dough by adding different flavorings, and cooking methods. Now, I understand that dough is really just dough, but having made my living by cooking once upon a time, I know there should be some minor differences between each type of dough used in different bakery products.

For example, if I buy a chocolate cake doughnut, it should not have the same texture and flavor of a soft chocolate cookie, right? Wheat and white bread should have different tastes, and nutritional values? An apple turnover and a cherry strudel should have more differentiating them than the sugared fruit inside? I am afraid this is no longer the case if you are buying from a major grocery store. Everything is assembled with only a few variations from the main product.

Looking around, I noticed most places we eat are no longer restaurants, they are food assembly centers. Nothing is cooked from scratch at these places. All that is done is like the Value Added Reseller in the computer industry, a few modifications are made to the original product, and it is sold to you at a higher price. The ‘cook’ opens a plastic bag of something, heats it up, and feeds it to you in one or more forms.

It is not only happening in fast foods, but more upscale establishments too. Is your stuffed potato really stuffed, or was it assembled in a manufacturing plant somewhere? How about those vegetables, did they come from a fast frozen bag already flavored? How about your fish, wasn’t that caught and processed on a boat somewhere around the Arctic Circle? Your steak is probably the same way all they did here was add value by heating it for you.

Assembly is probably happening in more areas of my life than food. I would guess my company and the way it functions is an assembly too, made up of actual company people, supplemented by contract companies who hopefully offer a better service for less.

So what about American family’s of today? Is the typical American family, a real family any more, or is it an assembled product too?

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Millions of pounds of potential pet food composted?

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I was at a pet store buying yet another weeks worth of cat food at $.60 cents a can, or $.30 cents per day for each cat when I had a thought. I was watching television a few weeks ago and something came on about the number of deer killed on Illinois highways was about ten thousand deer a year! According to the show, the state of Illinois composts the dead deer as it the cheapest way to safely dispose of the dead deer.

And I am in a pet store paying $.60 cents a can for cat food made from venison because it is cheap compared to other flavors, and the cat’s like it! I did a Google search on the words, ‘dead deer landfill’, and the probable national numbers of government disposed dead deer are mind boggling by any stretch of the imagination. Of course as things go I could not find anything worthwhile on that search for Illinois, but I found some numbers for the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. The rest of the country’s daily deer kill can be imagined from those numbers.

One insurance company referenced, estimates about 101,000 deer are killed each year in the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York! There is a problem with wasting disease in some states around the United States, so cutting the numbers I found in half, that still is over 50,000 dead deer that could be used for cat and dog food.

I started wondering why those animals are not turned into pet food? Why is there canned cat and dog food in pet stores all starting at $.50 or higher a can, and a titanic number of pounds of deer meat that could be made into pet food just wasted? Some areas and states are paying high fees to have deer carcasses disposed of because there are too many dead deer to go into landfills.

Guessing that the usable meat on average from even those 50K dead deer is 50 pounds an animal, that works out to 2,500,000 pounds of possible high protein pet food thrown away in those three mentioned states alone! I ran it across my little calculator twice, because that is such an amazing number, an estimated two million five hundred thousand pounds of deer meat wasted each year in just three states. Wow!

The can size I buy for $.60 is six ounces, but for the sake of simple math, let’s pretend it is five ounces. That comes out to roughly 833,000 cans of cat food. 833,000 cans of cat food at sixty cents a can comes out to just short of a cool half million dollars! There has to be some sort of profit in there somehow? That is just from three states! Once that figure goes across the major deer road kill states in the United States…well you get the idea.

The same idea can be applied to the more distasteful animal killings in the world. If we are legally killing a species of animal just for its fur, or some other part of it, why can’t they be transformed into pet food? At least they would not go to waste completely. I am not advocating the killing of any animals only for their fur, but it happens, and we should make the most of it we can.

Here in the Southwest, there are companies that buy used cows (dead cattle) from stockyards and holding pens. They manage to make a profit and they are paying for a cow carcass that is no longer useful for human consumption. I sure am not an expert on business, and I am not sure my math is all that good either, but the concept is there, and I am sure someone could figure out how to make a profit at it?

It sure does seem like there is some money in road kill deer pet food for someone where a pet food cannery exists? Or maybe I don’t have a clue, let me know?

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