Text 10417, 122 rader
Skriven 2008-07-12 12:21:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av MICHAEL LOO
Ärende: pizza
=============
-=> Quoting Michael Loo to Jim Weller <=-

 JW> Just to bug Dave.....
 JW> Title: LAHMA BI AHJEEN - ARABIC LAMB PIZZA

 ML> I don't see him really objecting to this. It's probably close
 ML> to a precursor of pizza.
  
Ah, so that's it: precursors are cool, successors aren't. [g]

 JW> Disorientation as a result of excessive travelling

 ML> Was this Kevin's commentary or that by the writer of the recipe?

The original writer.

And you're right, I've often made a breakfast of pizza often after
a night of beer which reminds me....

Survival of the Sudsiest
  
By George F. Will

Perhaps, like many sensible citizens, you read Investor's Business
Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and
other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled
recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper's front page.
It was in a report on the intention of the world's second-largest
brewer, Belgium's InBev, to buy control of the third-largest,
Anheuser-Busch, for $46.3 billion. The story asserted: "The
[alcoholic beverage] industry's continued growth, however slight,
has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy
turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like
beer." 

"Non what"? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers
or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No
beer, no civilization. 

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which
depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's
marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most
Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the
Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a
horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood
pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion
into a related topic this way: 

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization
itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne
diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For
much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health
issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink
alcohol." 

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and,
later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has
its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis
of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in
your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an
addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a
species-strengthening selection process. 

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that
the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the
manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest
sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town. 
       
To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of,
say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic
advantage that not everyone had -- what Johnson describes as the
body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the
production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This
ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human
DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this
trait could not, as the saying goes, "hold their liquor." So, many
died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from
waterborne diseases. 

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated
by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink
beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is
made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have
largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol." 

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain
of the world's population groups, such as Native Americans and
Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of
alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the
genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high
alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not
entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the
reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of
their ancestors lived in towns. 

But that is a potential stew of racial or ethnic sensitivities that
we need not stir in this correction of Investor's Business Daily.
Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a
health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan,
unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through
rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food
stores. 

So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with
summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin
was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof
that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally,
and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church
and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.

---



Cheers

YK Jim


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