Organic Food Day + A Cornucopia

September 22 is International Organic Food Day. The date was selected to occur near World Peace Day and the fall equinox. In honor of the date I am reprinting a post I wrote as I meditated on what it means to seek out fruits and vegetables that have not been sprayed or treated with pesticides. – Jadi

I just made a salad for lunch that had a cornucopia. “Ooh! ‘Ow lovely!” you exclaim. I thought so too at first. Cornucopia conjures up autumn bounty.

The word makes me think of a table covered in baskets full of vegetables, bowls of late summer berries and fruits, and vases of showy fall blooms. Oxford Dictionaries define it thus: “A symbol of plenty consisting of a goat’s horn overflowing with flowers, fruit, and corn.”

Merriam-Webster goes Oxford one better, “a curved, hollow goat’s horn or similarly shaped receptacle (such as a horn-shaped basket) that is overflowing especially with fruit and vegetables (such as gourds, ears of corn, apples, and grapes) and that is used as a decorative motif emblematic of abundance — called also horn of plenty”. Vocabulary.com puts it in more simply. “A grocery store with a large selection of fruits and vegetables could be said to have a cornucopia of produce. A cornucopia is a lot of good stuff.”

A cornucopia salad must be tasty, right? Keep reading….

I often buy produce at a family store with greenhouses a few blocks away. She sells a large variety of lettuces and a sign claims they’re all ‘eigene ungespritzt’ or grown in-house without using sprays or pesticides.

I know from experience her salad greens need washing, and when I got home I set the lettuce in a bowl of water to soak. A few minutes later I returned to the kitchen to drain the water. I discovered a cornucopia floating on top of the bowl.

Three drowning slugs.

The sight got me curious about slugs and their particular animal family. Had I included them in my The Animal Kingdom blog thread already? In the course of research I discovered that in the Animal Kingdom a cornucopia is the British term for a family of slugs or snails. [1] I also read that most fresh water slugs and snails are hermaphroditic. Further, “[s]ome species regularly self-fertilise. Uniparental reproduction may also occur by apomixis, an asexual process.” [2]

I’m just glad I’d already eaten.

I’ll skip a photograph this time. But I can assure you: the salad was delicious.

“Ooh! ‘Ow lovely!”

Happy International Organic Food Day, everyone!

NOTES: © Jadi Campbell 2017. Previously published as The Animal Kingdom: A Cornucopia. [1] In the US, it’s named a rout of slugs. [2] Apomixis is explained at Mating of gastropods. PS: Posting this made me miss all those gorgeous meals we ate in South Africa!

My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out. Books make great gifts!

Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. Broken In: A Novel in Stories was semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award from Hidden River Arts and Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book of the Year Award (Short Stories). The Trail Back Out was the 2023 San Francisco Book Festival Winner for General Fiction, American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies, Runner-Up for the 2021 Top Shelf Award, 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist, and awarded a 2021 Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award.

Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.

Merry Christmas

MERRY CHRISTMAS !!

Here’s the annual round-up of my blog offerings. I grew insanely prolific this year, and went from biweekly posts to once a week. Happy Holidays and we’ll meet again in 2018. —Jadi

Art: Burma took center stage with A Burmese Spirit Guide and Sand Paintings. Food as Art was a tasty diversion. Andalusia was featured in Granada Heights, Alhambra Walls & Water, and Cordoba’s Arches. And we always have Paris! J’aime la Vie

Book excerpt: From my first book Broken In: A Novel in Stories, about a little boy and other people’s belongings. Carl Possessed 1 & 2

Current Events: I opined (quietly) concerning the mood in America, hurricanes, and the refugee crisis with Flags and Houston, We Have a Problem

Food: Always a fun subject…. A Cornucopia, The Seeds of Summer, Food as Art, and the local specialties here in Christmas Markets, Flammkuchen, and The Seeds of Summer

History & Cultural Heritage: Flags, In Search of Inspiration, J’aime la Vie, Christmas Markets and Death by Yawning

Holidays: Halloween, Japan’s Jidai Matsuri, plus Germany’s Christmas Markets

Memory: A tricky topic involving both emotions and events. I explored memory in The Seeds of Summer, Going Home (this one resonated deeply with readers), Granada Heights, Alhambra Walls & Water, Cordoba’s Arches, and Sevilla Song and Dance

Music: The sound of castanets and flamenco guitar in Sevilla Song and Dance

Nature: I went nuts writing a thread dedicated to my father. It began with The Animal Kingdom: 1 and so far 19 (!) posts have gone live. Since that wasn’t enough for me, I wrote special posts concentrating on individual critter families, such as A Clowder, A Cluster, A Cornucopia, and A Brood. I wrote a post on natural disasters, too: Houston, We Have a Problem

Places: America, Andalusia, Burma, Estonia, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Paris…

Religion: I was lucky to revisit a glorious spot where Christianity and Islam coexisted in Granada Heights, Alhambra Walls & Water, and Cordoba’s Arches

Writing: A goodly dose of humor helps on those baaad days… In Your Shoes or  In Search of Inspiration

Take a look around and see if you find old friends or stumble upon posts you may have missed. I like to think that these blog posts are my gifts to the world. As always, I welcome any and all feedback. See you next year!

NOTES: © Jadi Campbell 2017. To see  Uwe’s animal photos and pics from our trips, go to viewpics.de

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

The Animal Kingdom: A Brood

Patiently waiting for the full moon to rise, Hampi, India

India is good for a surprise around any corner and on any street. We once passed a band of musicians blowing horns and banging drums, marching nonchalently down the middle of the road. Cows, of course, are sacred in the Hindu faith and go wherever they damn well please.

And on our way to the airport near Bhopal, our taxi driver asked if we wanted to halt and watch a truck feed the passengers.

They were transporting a brood of hens to market. [1] Properly defined, a brood is the family produced at a single hatching. This group had to be several broods. [2]

Unbuckling the passengers, so to speak….
Hey! Are we there yet?
Everyone likes a chance to stretch their legs

We were bemused by how healthy the hens were, and how agreeable to being transported together in baskets. They promptly headed for the field and their feed – and then back to the roadside to be placed again in baskets.

Chickens can’t fly (although they will get a running start and stay airborne for a second or two). There are more chickens than any other bird. According to  Wikipedia, “[t]he domestic chicken is descended primarily from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus).” They’re a gregarious species, and chicks are both incubated and raised communally.

The brood didn’t brood long with lunch being served [2]

We didn’t witness any of the usual pecking order. Maybe these hens were too hungry.

What’s for dessert?

Later that night over dinner (no, I don’t recall if I ordered a chicken dish) we talked about animal husbandry. The fowl transport truck seemed to both of us much less cruel than an industrial chicken factory.

Don’t be such a cluck

NOTES: [1] We were told these were Chinese hens, but I have not been able to find that breed anywhere. If my readers can identify this bird for me, I would be grateful. [2] Brood as a verb is also when a bird sits on the eggs to keep them warm with his or her body heat and hatch them. © Jadi Campbell 2017. All photos © Uwe Hartmann. To see more of Uwe’s animal photos and pics from our trips go to viewpics.de. Go to A ClowderA Cluster, or A Cornucopia for earlier posts on specific animal groups.

Sources for chickens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken and https://animalcorner.co.uk/animals/chickens/

Fun animal names from www.writers-free-reference.com, Mother Nature Network and www.reference.com.

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

 

 

 

The Animal Kingdom: A Cornucopia

I just made a salad for lunch that had a cornucopia. “Ooh! ‘Ow lovely!” you exclaim. I thought so too at first. Cornucopia conjures up autumn bounty.

The word makes me think of a table covered in baskets full of vegetables, bowls of late summer berries and fruits, and vases of showy fall blooms. Oxford Dictionaries define it thus: “A symbol of plenty consisting of a goat’s horn overflowing with flowers, fruit, and corn.”

Merriam-Webster goes Oxford one better, “a curved, hollow goat’s horn or similarly shaped receptacle (such as a horn-shaped basket) that is overflowing especially with fruit and vegetables (such as gourds, ears of corn, apples, and grapes) and that is used as a decorative motif emblematic of abundance — called also horn of plenty”. Vocabulary.com puts it in more simply. “A grocery store with a large selection of fruits and vegetables could be said to have a cornucopia of produce. A cornucopia is a lot of good stuff.”

A cornucopia salad must be tasty, right? Keep reading….

I often buy produce at a family store with greenhouses a few blocks away. She sells a large variety of lettuces and a sign claims they’re all ‘eigene ungespritzt’ or grown in-house, without using sprays or pesticides.

I know from experience her salad greens need washing, and when I got home I set the lettuce in a bowl of water to soak. A few minutes later I returned to the kitchen to drain the water. I discovered a cornucopia floating on top of the bowl.

Three drowning slugs.

The sight got me curious about slugs and their particular animal family. Were they on my list already? In the course of research I learned that in the Animal Kingdom, a cornucopia is the British term for a family of slugs or snails. [1] I also read that most fresh water slugs and snails are hermaphroditic. Further, “[s]ome species regularly self-fertilise. Uniparental reproduction may also occur by apomixis, an asexual process.” [2]

I’m just glad I’d already eaten….

I’ll skip a photograph this time. But I can assure you: the salad was delicious.

“Ooh! ‘Ow lovely!”

NOTES: © Jadi Campbell 2017. [1] In the US, it’s named a rout of slugs. [2] Apomixis is explained at Mating of gastropods.

Merriam-Webster.com, Oxford dictionaries.com, Vocabulary.com. More fun animal names from www.writers-free-reference.com, Mother Nature Network and www.reference.com.

Click here for my author page to learn more about my books and me.

 

%d bloggers like this: