All posts by Desiree Zona

Food and Nutrition

Broccoli!

Leave a comment
  1. Origin
  2. Modern Cultivation
  3. Impact
  4. Nutritional Profile
  5. Dietary Concerns
  6. How to Eat it
  7. Recipe: Roasted Broccoli

Origin

Broccoli is a member of the cole crops (also known as cruciferous vegetables), all of which are derived from a singular species known as Brassica oleracea L.. This includes kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, and cabbage and each of these foods share a genome with the wild type, Brassica. As with so many things, it’s difficult to prove exact origin of species, especially when it involves human cultivation and migration; however, most studies indicate Europe, broadly, as the birthplace of these Brassica plants. Very little evidence indicates Asia as a potential origin and within Europe there is a slight divide between the UK and Greece, but there is stronger evidence for the rocky shores of England. There is a fascinating paper that uses linguistic terms for “broccoli” in various ancient cultures to help identify the origin that some of you might be interested in reading. In the end, broccoli is just one form, or cultivar, of a group of plants that has been selected for it’s specific geno-/phenotype that gives us what we, today, call broccoli.

Continue reading Broccoli! →
Food and Nutrition

Welcome & Let’s Eat!

1 Comment

I’m not sure if I consider myself someone who LOVES FOOD. There are foods that I love, sure, and I do enjoy trying local cuisine when I travel. The joke always was that we travel to eat when we lived in Germany. It isn’t as though you couldn’t find any good food where we lived, but they definitely liked to “germanize” the ethnic foods and tame the spice level. It was actually amazing when we found a Thai place in Wiesbaden where “scharf” (spicy) really meant SPICY.

Continue reading Welcome & Let’s Eat! →
Human Health, Opinion piece

A Look Back on 2020: What I Learned

Leave a comment

I could probably write a book on this subject. I generally don’t think we talk enough about the positive things that come from tragedy and disaster. It’s probably why our culture is so fearful and morbid about death or why we are always suffering from “never enough” syndrome. I’m not a psychologist, just an internet expert, so don’t take my word for it – I’m just over here, speculating. That said here is my (not quite complete, but who has time to read these days) list of positive lessons I learned from the pandemic.

Continue reading A Look Back on 2020: What I Learned →
Human Health, Opinion piece

A Look Back on 2020: Enter the Lockdown

3 Comments

I have been thinking a lot lately about our life during the pandemic, partly as it has come up in conversation a lot with friends. This is a blog and not a series of peer-reviewed scientific papers. I would need months to dive deep into the literature we have compiled on the “lessons learned” from the COVID-19 pandemic response, so this will not be that. Rather, I’d like to share some lessons-learned and thoughts on the pandemic that I have heard amongst my group of friends and within my family unit.

Continue reading A Look Back on 2020: Enter the Lockdown →
Nature & Garden

Let’s Hash Out the Ecology of Cannabis

2 Comments

There has been a smell in the air these days, pretty much everywhere I go now: the grocery store, festivals…my backyard. It has the scent of someone who has wandered the forest for days without access to a shower or any modern hygienic amenities, having spent their time wrestling skunks and other manner of wildlife. When you smell it, you are all too aware of what it is, and has become a rather ubiquitous odor in modern society, of late. The grand smell of weed. Marijuana. Mary Jane? Pot! Reefer?! Okay, it has a lot of names in English, and can even go by their vernacular ‘sativa’ and ‘idica’, partially bastardizing the generally agreed-upon species delineation. The reasons for all of the various nicknames is likely as diverse as the names themselves. The real (albeit, general) name, however, is Cannabis (or Hemp, more on that in a second). There is even a debate on taxonomy and classification (is there one plant with different phenotypes or three separate species? The jury is still out).

Continue reading Let’s Hash Out the Ecology of Cannabis →
Travel

Travel and Food: Corfu

Leave a comment

One of the perks of living overseas is all of the traveling you get to do. It isn’t as though we don’t have great places to see in the U.S., but the airfare is generally much higher, the distance to travel is much greater, and the novelty is less enticing. One of our favorite trips during our time abroad was to Corfu, Greece. Although now (post-covid), flights from Frankfurt International to Corfu have increased a great deal, but I also think there was a sudden surge in interest from tourists to see the lesser known islands, abandoning the more frequented Santorini.

Continue reading Travel and Food: Corfu →
Nature & Garden

Basement Gardening by an Unlikely Friend

Leave a comment

Over the Hedge, the DreamWorks movie about a raccoon and a ragtag group of wild animals invading the suburbs in search of food, is a common story around many U.S. neighborhoods. We have foxes, raccoons, opossums, deer, skunks, squirrels, birds…and mice. It’s the mice who may have stirred up a bit of trouble for us this winter. We weren’t sure, at first, but we suspected they had made their way inside, rather than just them scratching on the rooftop, when the bird seed bag had been ripped open. The maddening sounds of something scurrying in the walls was no less concerning than the tap, tap, tapping on a floor as the days went by.

Continue reading Basement Gardening by an Unlikely Friend →