Baby carrots first appeared in US supermarkets in 1989. There are two
types: true baby carrots, and
manufactured baby carrots. In the 1980's
supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and colour. Anything else had to be sold for juice or
processing or animal feed, or just thrown away.
One farmer wondered what would happen if he peeled the skin off the
gnarly carrots, cut them into pieces, and sold them in bags. He made up a few test batches to show his
buyers. One batch, cut into 1-inch bites
and peeled round, he called "bunny balls." Another batch, peeled and cut 2 inches
long, looked like little baby carrots.
Bunny balls never made it. But
baby carrots were a hit. They
transformed the whole industry. A
"true" baby carrot is a carrot grown to the "baby stage",
which is to say long before the root reaches its mature size. The test is
can you see a proper "shoulder" on each carrot. These immature roots are preferred by some
people out of the belief that they are superior either in texture, nutrition or
taste. They are also sometimes harvested
simply as the result of crop thinning, but are also grown to this size as a
specialty crop. Certain cultivars of
carrots have been bred to be used at the "baby" stage. One such cultivar is 'Amsterdam
Forcing'. You will see them in the stores and are normally very expensive
and displayed with some of the green showing to "prove" they are a
"real" carrot. There is also a
baby variety called Thumbelina, or Paris Market shaped like a golf ball. "Manufactured"
baby carrots , or cut and peel, are what you see most often
in the shops--are carrot shaped slices of peeled carrots invented in the late
1980's by Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, as a way of making use of carrots
which are too twisted or knobbly for sale as full-size carrots. Yurosek was unhappy at having to discard as
much as 400 tonnes of carrots a day because of their imperfections, and
looked for a way to reclaim what would otherwise be a waste product. He was able to find an industrial green bean
cutter, which cut his carrots into 5 cm lengths, and by placing these lengths
into an industrial potato peeler, he created the baby carrot. The much
decreased waste is also used either for juicing or as animal fodder. Perhaps most important, the baby-cut method
allows growers to use far more of the carrot than they used to. In the past, a third or more of a carrot crop
could have been easily tossed away, but baby-cut allows more partial carrots to
be used, and the peeling process actually removes less of the outer skin
that you might imagine. They are sold in single-serving packs with
ranch dressing for dipping on the side. They're passed out on airplanes and
sold in plastic containers designed to fit in a car's cup holder. At Disney World, and MacDonald's burgers now
come two ways: with fries or baby
carrots. There is nothing
"wrong" with manufactured baby carrots. They are a food that humans have enjoyed for
centuries, probably millennia, chock-full of goodness that we need to keep our
bodies functioning. Mr Yurosek died in
2005. Read
the full story here. It also helped
lift the industry out of a rut. In 1987,
the year after Yurosek's discovery, carrot consumption jumped by almost 30
percent, according to data from the USDA.
By 1997, the average American was eating roughly 14 pounds of carrots
per year, 117 percent more than a decade earlier. The baby carrot doubled
carrot consumption. Read more and see
pictures at http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/babycarrot.html
A loanword (also loan
word or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language (the
donor language) and incorporated into another language without translation. This is in contrast to cognates,
which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share
an etymological origin, and calques,
which involve translation. Most of
the technical
vocabulary of classical music (such
as concerto, allegro, tempo, aria, opera, and soprano) is
borrowed from Italian, and
that of ballet from French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loanword See also http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/loanwords.html
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_country_or_language_of_origin
Cops & Doughnuts first opened in 2009 when nine officers in the police department of
Clare, Michigan purchased the Clare City Bakery, which was about to go out
of business due to the economic decline at the time. Greg Rynearson, one of the officers, retired
to focus on the bakery full time. In
addition to a full-scale bakery serving coffee and doughnuts, the store also
features a diner and gift shop which sells police officer-related
merchandise. In 2015, the store had more
than 500,000 visitors. The owners also began distributing their doughnuts
and coffee to other local retailers, including a "precinct" inside
the Jay's Sporting Goods store in Gaylord.
A second location was opened in the former McDonald's Bakery in Ludington in
2016, and plans were announced to open a third location in Bay City.
Public Libraries Harness the Power of Play by Donna C. Celano, Jillian J. Knapczyk, Susan B.
Neuman Sara, a librarian at a Texas library,
closes The Seals on the Bus by Lenny Hort, a book she has just read
with a group of 2- and 3-year-olds.
Seated on the floor around her, the children each wear a name tag in the
shape of a car. With their parents and
caregivers nearby, the children sit calmly, listening to books about
transportation and occasionally answering questions or making comments. In between books, Sara leads them in rhymes
and songs about cars and buses. Other
words pop up as the adults and children
play: road, wheels, grocery store, traffic
jam, crash, direction, stacked up. The parents and caregivers start their own
conversations about intersections with traffic jams, the parking lot at the
grocery store, monster trucks, remote-controlled cars, drained car batteries,
and directions to various places. The
children echo these conversations as they play:
“Here comes a monster truck!”
“Get out of the way, you’re about to crash!” While it seems spontaneous and carefree, the
din erupting in this library community room is actually a carefully planned
strategy to strengthen parents’ (and other caregivers’) abilities to help their
preschool children develop early language and literacy skills. Thanks to a nationwide parent education
initiative called Every Child Ready to Read (ECRR), an increasing number
of librarians are focusing on helping parents interact with their young
children in meaningful ways to increase vocabulary development. These parent–child interactions in libraries
involve activities in addition to reading books, such as the play session in
the vignette. What looks like play,
however, is actually an important part of helping parents—and other family
members and caregivers—prepare their young children for later success in
school. (It is important to note that
while we often refer to parents and related terms like parent
engagement, we believe in an inclusive concept of the parenting role. Many children are raised by adults other than
their parents, including grandparents, other family members, fictive kin,
etc.) Every Child Ready to Read emerged
with this movement. Developed in a joint
effort by the Public Library Association and the Association for Library
Service to Children, the program’s principles are seemingly simple: reading is
an important life skill, learning to read starts at birth, and parents play
instrumental roles as children’s first and best teachers. Librarians encourage parents to engage with
their children using five practices crucial to literacy development: talking,
singing, reading, writing, and playing.
While these practices are already part of many families’ daily routines,
ECRR librarians see their role as affirming that, and explaining why, parents
are important to children’s literacy development. The ECRR initiative, adopted in some capacity
by nearly 50 percent of the 9,000 libraries throughout the United States, is
rooted in a wealth of research showing that parent–child interactions are
critical to children’s cognitive and social development, and are also a key
predictor of later success in school.
Read much more and see graphics at https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/jul2018/public-libraries-harness-play
From: Alex
McCrae Subject: ailurophile & nidifugous In this
feline-inspired scenario I’ve co-opted a page from the Broadway stage, namely,
the smash-hit musical, “Cats”, or perhaps a snippet from cosplay culture,
where our rather alluring cat-like ailurophile cuddles up with her for-real
pussycat, their tails lovingly entwined to form a furry symbolic heart. Perchance an expression of their mutual
affection? Cosplay is a portmanteau of the words “costume” and “play”. Essentially, a fantasy-based youth subculture
where participants gather, dressed up as their favorite animal, comic book, or
graphic novel superhero . . . or
villain.
From: Eric Kisch
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: A hungry man
is not a free man. - Adlai Stevenson, statesman (5 Feb 1900-1965) Your Thought for the Day prompted me to
remember an older sentiment on the same idea that was a great line in the
Threepenny Opera of Brecht/Weill. The
line in the original German is Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Morale. As translated idiomatically and brilliantly
by Marc Blitzstein, it goes, “First feed our face, then let’s talk right and
wrong.” That has the proper bite, and
certainly conveys the German text and idea:
Literally “First comes the eating, then morality.”
Pun Fun Do twins ever
realize that one of them is unplanned? The
word "swims" upside-down is still "swims". 100 years ago everyone owned a horse and only
the rich had cars. Today everyone has
cars and only the rich own horses. Why
are goods sent by ship called CARGO and those sent by truck SHIPMENT? Why is it called 'Rush Hour' when traffic
moves at its slowest then? Thank you,
Muse reader!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY
It's best to give while your
hand is still warm. - Philip Roth, novelist (19 Mar 1933-2018)
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2065
March 19, 2019
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