Why do people hate vegans?

 It has left the beige-tinted margins and become social media’s most glamorous look. But why does veganism still provoke so much anger?

By George Reynolds (theguardian.com)

25 Oct 2019

From the hunger strike to the edible projectile, history offers abundant examples of food being used for political ends. Even so, the crowd of vegans who gathered in central London earlier this year are unlikely to forget the moment when Gatis Lagzdins skinned and ate a raw squirrel.

Along with his co-conspirator Deonisy Khlebnikov, Lagzdins performed his stunt at the weekly Soho Vegan Market on Rupert Street. He would subsequently demonstrate at VegFest in Brighton (although this time his snack of choice was a raw pig’s head) as part of a self-proclaimed “carnivore tour” intended to highlight the evils of a plant-based diet. At the London event, he wore a black vest emblazoned with the slogan: “Veganism = Malnutrition.”

The war on vegans started small. There were flashpoints, some outrageous enough to receive press coverage. There was the episode in which William Sitwell, then editor of Waitrose magazine, resigned after a freelance writer leaked an email exchange in which he joked about “killing vegans one by one”. (Sitwell has since apologised.) There was the PR nightmare faced by Natwest bank when a customer calling to apply for a loan was told by an employee that “all vegans should be punched in the face”. When animal rights protesters stormed into a Brighton Pizza Express in September this year, one diner did exactly that.

A charge commonly laid against vegans is that they relish their status as victims, but research suggests they have earned it. In 2015, a study conducted by Cara C MacInnis and Gordon Hodson for the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations observed that vegetarians and vegans in western society – and vegans in particular – experience discrimination and bias on a par with ethnic and religious minorities.

Mushroom cloud cauliflower
 Illustration: Lee Martin/Guardian Design

Once a niche interest group parodied in TV shows such as The Simpsons (in which a character describes himself as a “level five vegan” who refuses to eat anything that casts a shadow), in the past two years, vegans have been thrust into the limelight. A philosophy rooted in non-aggression has found itself at the heart of some of the most virulent arguments on social media. In November 2018, Good Morning Britain hosted a debate titled “Do people hate vegans?”; the political website Vox tackled the question in even more direct fashion a week later, asking: “Why do people hate vegans so much?”

These recent displays of enmity towards vegans represent a puzzling escalation in hostilities, just as a consensus is starting to form that eating less meat would almost certainly be better for everyone – and the Earth. Of course, eating less meat does not mean eating no meat whatsoever, and the extreme prohibitions associated with going vegan (no animal products, no eggs, no leather, no wool) suggest it could have been just another Atkins diet or clean-eating fad – a flash in the pan that blows up and then dissipates, leaving behind nothing more than a dose of mild regret. Instead, just when the growth might have been expected to plateau, it kept on growing. A 2016 Ipsos Mori survey suggested the total number of vegans in the UK had increased more than 360% in the preceding decade, to more than 500,000.

Big business has been quick to cash in. The Los Angeles-based company Beyond Meat, producer of plant-based burgers whose taste and texture are as much like minced beef as possible, recently went public and soon afterwards hit a valuation of $3.4bn; huge conglomerates such as Nestlé and Kellogg’s are moving into the fake-meat market; supermarkets and restaurant chains have introduced vegan ranges. Yet perhaps the definitive proof of veganism’s mainstreaming – and the backlash against it – came in January this year, when the beloved high-street bakery chain Greggs announced it was launching a Quorn-based vegan sausage roll. It was pilloried by Piers Morgan, who tweeted: “Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns.” It turns out Morgan was mistaken: the vegan sausage roll was such a hit that the company’s share value leapt by 13%.Advertisement

Of course, what we grow, harvest, fatten and kill is political. A Tesco advert showcasing vegan produce met protests from the National Farmers Union who claimed it “demonised” meat, while Shropshire deputy council leader Steve Charmley unleashed a tweet-storm when confronted with pro-vegan advertising in a county he claimed was “built on agriculture”. This moment, and this conflict, were a long time coming. The rise of veganism is a question less of personal taste than of generational upheaval; less about meat and fish and dairy than the systems that put them on our tables in such excessive quantities. Ultimately, the vegan wars are not really about veganism at all, but about how individual freedom is coming into conflict with a personal and environmental health crisis.

In many cultures, the practice of abstaining entirely from animal produce has an established history: with their belief systems rooted in nonviolence, many Rastafarians, followers of Jainism and certain sects of Buddhism have been swearing off meat, fish, eggs and dairy for centuries. In large swathes of the west, though, public awareness of what veganism actually entails has been sketchy. There wasn’t even a commonly accepted English-language name until 1944, when a British woodworker called Donald Watson called a meeting with a handful of other non-dairy vegetarians (including his wife, Dorothy) to discuss a less cumbersome label for their lifestyle. They considered alternatives such as dairyban, vitan and benevore before settling on the term we use today, a simple contraction of vegetarian on the grounds that “veganism starts with vegetarianism and carries it through to its logical conclusions”.

But those logical conclusions did not stop at abstaining from certain foods. The original vegans were not pursuing a diet so much as a belief system, a wholesale ideology – one that rejected not just animal protein but also the way animals had become part of an industrial supply chain. In the 1970s, Carol J Adams started work on the book that would appear, two decades later, as The Sexual Politics of Meat: a seminal feminist text that positioned veganism as the only logical solution to a social system that reduced both women and animals to desirable, but disposable, flesh.

In the early 70s, other activists were considering how veganism might provide a viable alternative to existing food systems. In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet by the social policy activist Frances Moore Lappé introduced an environmental justification for going vegetarian or vegan to a global audience (it eventually sold more than 3m copies). In the same year, counter-culture hero Stephen Gaskin founded a vegan intentional community, The Farm, in Lewis County, Tennessee, bringing together some 300 like-minded individuals. Four years later, The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook by Louise Hagler announced: “We are vegetarians because one-third of the world is starving and at least half goes to bed hungry every night,” and introduced western audiences to techniques for making their own soy-based products such as tofu and tempeh.Advertisement

The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook fixed a certain vegan aesthetic in the minds of mainstream meat-eating culture for decades to come. Veganism became synonymous with soybeans and brown rice, with ageing hippies spooning beige bowlfuls of worthy grains and pulses – not the glamorous, vibrant, youthful practitioners that now radiate positivity from their Instagram feeds.

BBQ pulled jack fruit tacos with avocado and lime: a long way from the beige vegan food much parodied in the 70s.
 BBQ pulled jack fruit tacos with avocado and lime: a long way from the beige vegan food much parodied in the 70s. Photograph: LauriPatterson/Getty Images/iStockphoto

It is hard to overstate the role social media has played in transforming veganism’s image, with its facility for fostering an instant sense of community. Witness any number of viral internet phenomena – from Woman Laughing Alone with Salad to acai bowls and this generation’s staple, avocado toast – that have helped free it from its musty old associations. Instagram in particular gave vegan food mainstream exposure, repackaging it (good for you and photogenic!) for the low-attention-span internet age. Not everyone sees this as a positive development: the vegan writer and podcast host Alicia Kennedy considers it troubling that the internet has transformed something with such a rich political history into “a wellness thing” that allows would-be consumers to label themselves vegans without having to engage with the “excess baggage” of ideology. Another American writer, Khushbu Shah, has argued that the popularisation of veganism via social media has erased non-white faces and narratives from the dominant discourse, as white bloggers and influencers fashion a lifestyle in their image.

At the same time, a similar transformation was happening to the food vegans were eating. A blossoming street food scene in major cities influenced a dirtier, trashier vegan aesthetic that gave the diet a further boost. Recipe channels on YouTube and Facebook such as BOSH! – a glossy young male duo – used video to make stunt dishes (apple pie tacos; a plant-based take on a McDonald’s McMuffin; a watermelon “Jaegerbomb”) that injected some much-needed fun into the diet. (Tellingly, the BOSH! dudes, Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, refer to themselves not as chefs but “food remixers”.)Advertisement

The language began to reflect a new, more approachable veganism. Descriptors such as “plant-based” gained in popularity, effectively rebranding the worthy brown stodge of popular imagination into something green and vital. Other neologisms such as “flexitarian” (a term denoting someone who is predominantly vegan or vegetarian but who occasionally eats meat or fish, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014) recast daunting vegan ideology as a fun, healthy, casual thing to try.

Cultish initiatives like Veganuary (an annual campaign encouraging people to go meat-free for the first month of the year, launched in 2014) and Meat Free Mondays tapped into this spirit – moving away from wholesale dietary transformation and towards something more manageably sporadic, with the added gloss of being able to share (that is, brag about) the experience online. Beyoncé declared an interest in veganism – at least, for breakfast – while athletes such as Venus Williams (who took up a raw vegan diet to combat a health condition) and Lewis Hamilton played a vital role in raising awareness and turning something once seen as weird and a little annoying into a desirable lifestyle.

Helping the cause was the growing body of scientific literature suggesting that some of the processes that produce the modern western diet were catastrophically bad for us. Bee Wilson wrote in these pages about the health effects of processed pork in a piece titled “Yes, bacon really is killing us.” Food in the Anthropocene, a report commissioned by the Lancet in conjunction with the global nonprofit Eat (a startup dedicated to transforming the global food system) concluded that “unhealthy diets are the largest global burden of disease”, and that meat-heavy food production is “the largest source of environmental degradation”. A major study led by a team from Oxford University, published in the journal Nature in October 2018, showed that huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to slow the rate of climate change. Livestock production has been shown to lead to dangerous levels of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Factor in pop-science phenomena like the documentaries Cowspiracy! and What the Health – available on Netflix – and your diet suddenly seemed like a way you could save the world.

Big Meat continues to lobby aggressively in favour of our God-given right to eat animal flesh, resulting in a series of legal prohibitions surrounding what can and cannot be called “meat”’ or even – in one US state – a “veggie burger”. But veganism’s virality has proved irresistible. From about 2015, vegan and plant-based cookery manuals started to proliferate at a dazzling rate, with the BOSH! boys selling upward of 80,000 copies and spending four weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list (today, Amazon lists more than 20,000 results for the search term “vegan cookbook”). Sales of plant milks skyrocketed; financial results at the manufacturer of plant-based protein Quorn soared as what one analyst referred to as the “battle for the centre of the plate” began to draw (fake) blood. By 2018, Byron, M&S and Pret had invested heavily in vegan ranges. It was, this paper proclaimed, “the year that veganism moved out of the realms of counter-culture and into the mainstream”. In 2014, Veganuary’s inaugural campaign had attracted just 3,300 participants; by 2019 the number was greater than 250,000, with 53% of them under the age of 35.Advertisement

But veganism’s explosive growth alone does not explain why it attracted such controversy. There is something inherent to veganism and vegans that arouses deeper feelings. What is it about the vegan lifestyle that stirs such strong emotion in those who don’t happen to share it? Why do people hate vegans so much?

Early attempts to establish a vegan utopia did not go well. In the 1840s, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May) founded Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts – a vegan community intended to be nothing less than a second Eden. But Alcott’s insistence that crops had to be planted and fields tilled by hand meant that not enough food could be grown for all of the members (even though the population peaked at just 13); a diet of fruit and grains, typically consumed raw, left participants severely malnourished. Just seven months after opening, Fruitlands closed – derided, in the words of one biographer, as “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias”.

The timing was unfortunate for American vegetarians, who were already engaged in a pitched battle with public opinion. Vegetarians and vegans in the 19th century – known as Grahamites after the Presbyterian minister and diet reformer Sylvester Graham, who campaigned against meat-eating on the grounds that it was both unhealthy and morally repugnant – were the subject of frequent vitriolic editorials in the popular and medical press of the day, which described them as “cadaverous”, “feeble”, “half-crazed”, “sour-visaged” and “food cranks”.

In the 21st century the terminology may have changed but the sentiment remains much the same. The 2015 study conducted by MacInnis and Hodson found that only drug addicts were viewed more negatively among respondents. It concluded: “Unlike other forms of bias (eg, racism, sexism), negativity toward vegetarians and vegans is not widely considered a societal problem; rather, [it] is commonplace and largely accepted.”

In 2011, sociologists Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan observed a phenomenon they called “vegaphobia”, demonstrating that the British media consistently portrayed vegans in a negative light. In the days after her story broke, Selene Nelson, the freelancer at the centre of the Waitrose magazine row, was called “humourless”, “combative” and “militant”. In 2017, residents of the Swiss town of Aargau reportedly called for a vegan foreign resident to be denied citizenship because she was “annoying”, and the glee with which the global media retold the story revealed a widespread and casual prejudice.

Beyond Meat’s Beyond Spring burger.
 Beyond Meat’s Beyond Spring burger.

Veganism’s opponents outline a host of objections to the lifestyle to justify their hostility. Per a now-familiar joke (Q: How do you know if someone’s vegan? A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you), vegans are portrayed as preachy and sanctimonious, a characteristic that rankled among MacInnis and Hodson’s respondents in particular, who viewed “vegetarians/vegans more negatively when their motivations concern social justice rather than personal health”.Advertisement

There are rational motives to oppose vegan diets on health grounds. They can be deficient in crucial nutrients such as vitamin B-12. This is especially notable in the case of extreme diets (such as fruitarianism) advocated by some vegan bloggers or Instagram influencers with unorthodox approaches to nutritional science. Various supermarket chains have also attempted to meet the burgeoning demand for vegan products with highly processed vegan ready meals – from the Impossible Burger to plant-based meatballs, goujons and hot dogs. As Bee Wilson argued in these pages, the high proportion of processed ingredients in these products means the so-called health halo they enjoy may well be illusory.

Perhaps all we are doing, as veganism truly goes mainstream and companies such as Beyond Meat reap windfalls, is replacing one kind of industrialised system with another. Evidence suggests that intensive livestock farming is a poor solution to world hunger, given its impact on personal health and the environment, but intensive industrialised farming of soya, maize and grains comes at a significant carbon cost, too – as does flying in the ingredients to keep berries and nut butters on acai bowls or avocado on toast.

Veganism, of course, is rooted in social justice – a detail that has faded from view as it has gone mainstream. But even in its dilute 21st-century form, veganism remains confrontational: it casts people’s dietary choices in harsh relief, and people are by nature defensive. In countries where meat is prohibitively expensive for many, people are sometimes vegetarian or vegan by necessity; in the affluent west, not eating meat is an active choice. This makes it a rejection of a lifestyle and a rebuke to the majority’s values – especially in a country (such as the UK) still struggling to escape the long shadow of rationing. We are conditioned to like animals and decry animal cruelty, and yet we are also brought up in a culture that revels in the bacon sandwich, the Sunday roast, fish and chips. One simple explanation for why people don’t like vegans is because they show how confused humankind is about food choices and how illogical its decision-making can be.

And yet none of this really gets to the heart of what it is about vegans that makes people so upset. Calling them humourless or militant, sanctimonious or annoying or hypocrites – all of these terms are just smokescreens for what it is that people really feel, which is fear. Vegans are unsettling and uncanny: they live among us, speak like us, behave like us – but for one significant exception. Meat may be murder, but to some people, the prospect of life without it is even worse.

There is no justification for the amount of meat we eat in western society. The resources that go into humanely rearing and butchering an animal should make its flesh a borderline-unattainable luxury – and, indeed, in the past, it was. Meat always used to be the preserve of the wealthy, a symbol of prosperity: “A chicken in every pot” remained an aspirational but impractical promise across the best part of a millennium, from the days of Henry IV of France (when the term was invented) all the way through to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign.Advertisement

It was only through the technological advances of modern agriculture that meat became attainable and available at supermarket prices. From the mid-1800s onwards, farmers could raise animals bigger, better and faster than in the past; kill them quicker; treat their flesh to prevent it from spoiling; transport it further and store it longer. A commonly cited psychological turning point was the second world war, which engendered what Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times, later described as a kind of “beef madness”. GIs were sent to the front with rations of tinned meat; once peace had been declared, there was no better symbol of the brave new world than a sizzling celebratory steak. In the course of just over a century, meat went from unattainable luxury to dietary cornerstone; these days, we feel entitled to eat meat every day.

In March this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was discussing the Green New Deal on Showtime’s Desus & Mero US TV talk show when she observed: “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real.” An apparently innocuous comment, rooted in the same common-sense good science that informed the Lancet report on meat and environmental degradation published around the same time? Not if you asked the Republicans, it wasn’t.

Representative Rob Bishop of Utah seized on Ocasio-Cortez’s comment, claiming that under the Green New Deal the eating of burgers would be “outlawed”. Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka went one better, using a speech at the Conservative Political Action conference to proclaim: “They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved!”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing the Green New Deal, part of which would aim to reduce meat consumption.
 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing the Green New Deal, part of which would aim to reduce meat consumption. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

Stalin was, in fact, full of admiration for the American burger, going so far as to send his minister of foreign trade to the US on a fact-finding mission (the result, the so-called Mikoyan cutlet, would remain an affordable Soviet staple for decades). But “they’re taking our meat” is as evocative a rallying cry as “they’re taking our jobs” or “they’re taking our guns” – it conveys the same sense of individual freedoms being menaced by external forces, a birthright under attack. Ted Cruz (wrongly) alleged that his Democrat rival Beto O’Rourke planned to ban Texas barbecue if elected senator in his place: like the personal firearm, animal flesh has become an emblem of resistance against the encroachments of progressivism, something to be prised from your cold, dead hand. Men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson is famed for following a beef and salt diet; Donald Trump is renowned for his love of fast food and well-done steak with ketchup; there is even a subset of libertarian cryptocurrency enthusiasts who call themselves Bitcoin carnivores.

In the internet age, the consumption of meat is visibly aligned with a certain kind of conservative alpha-masculinity. Before he found infamy eating raw flesh, Gatis Lagzdins was best known for hosting a YouTube channel peddling racist ideology and rightwing conspiracies about the Illuminati. Among the alt-right and affiliated circles online, the derogatory term “soy boy” has been adopted along with other terms such as “cuck” and “beta” as a way of mocking so-called social justice warriors for their perceived lack of vigour. This echoes a finding in the MacInnis/Hodson study, in which respondents from a rightwing background, who seek to uphold traditional gender values, see something alarmingly subversive and worthy of derision in any man who prefers tofu to turkey.

This loaded use of food-derived epithets cuts both ways. In the UK, the term “gammon” gained currency in the early 2010s as a pejorative apparently inspired by the puce skin tone of enraged, middle-aged middle Englanders. Food has always been bound up in personal identity, and thus inextricable from politics. In their etymology, common terms such as “diet” (Greek for way of life) and “regime” (Latin: rule) are metaphors for a struggle over what it means to lead one’s life correctly. The very concept of orthorexia (whose sufferers obsessively exclude foods from their diet that they consider harmful) has at its root a corrupted idea of “correct” eating. It is impossible to talk about diets without also talking about the implied inadequacies of those who do not follow them; to paraphrase Brillat-Savarin, tell someone what to eat and you tell them who to be.

The vegan conversation, then, is a stand-in for much bigger things. When we talk about veganism we are talking about environmental and social change; we are also contemplating the erasure of tradition (Texas barbecue! The Sunday roast! The sausage roll!). We are also tabling a long-overdue referendum on how our food choices affect us and the world around us. And as much as its popularity has been pumped up by concepts like flexitarianism, ultimately veganism’s goal is a world in which the annual per-capita consumption of animal products is precisely zero. No wonder things have got so heated.

Food can be a powerful conduit for our anxieties, too. Half a century ago, a letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine described a terrifying new condition whose symptoms – headache, sweating, heart palpitations – were associated with a common ingredient of dishes served in Chinese restaurants: monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The flavour-enhancing additive was so demonised that it was banned in some US cities. Despite multiple studies conclusively proving otherwise, the belief in so-called “Chinese restaurant syndrome” remains widespread today: Asian-American chefs still find themselves having to justify the use of MSG despite its widespread use in non-Asian foods too. It is a neat example of the persistence of food-related urban legends. There was no doubt a racist element to the way the MSG myth spread; those involved in its dissemination were also motivated by a gnawing fear of obsolescence as a new threat to their existence began to gain popularity.

Those opposing meat-eating have a struggle ahead of them. It is clear that what is at stake here is not steak, but identity. A movement that preaches such wholesale change is bound to stir up anxieties, chief among them the sense that vegan dishes such as the Greggs Quorn sausage roll are being positioned not as alternatives but as replacements.

With a few notable exceptions – most of them religious – meat has retained its primacy in cultures across the world. It originally became a status symbol because it was harder to obtain than plant matter – even a small animal could run away, and if caught, was capable of inflicting wounds that could prove fatal in a world before antibiotics. As society became hierarchical, there was no greater token of status than the ability to eat meat on a whim. In her 2016 book Meathooked, Marta Zaraska records the discovery of Egyptian tombs in which the pharaohs had been buried alongside “meat mummies”, baskets of beef and poultry that had been embalmed in preparation for the afterlife. Our fetishisation of meat has not lessened – on the contrary, forecasters predict rapid increase in meat consumption in developing countries over the next decade. As a ready source of protein, meat remains the great aspiration, the surest proof of prosperity.

As Carol J Adams wrote, the words we use shield us from the moral consequences of carnivory: we eat beef, not cows, pork, not pigs, while a cabbage remains just a cabbage wherever it is in its life cycle. Our language ennobles meat at the expense of veg: strong, muscular types are “beefy”, lazy people are “couch potatoes”, unresponsive ones “vegetables”. Turning our back on meat-eating is not as simple as changing from pork to Quorn: it requires us to reject some entrenched values.

Already, there are signs that a great migration is underway. The UK university caterer Tuco recently reported that record numbers of canteens are going meat-free, describing the adoption of vegan or vegetarian diets among students and staff as a “mega-trend”. On the high street, too, there is a growing recognition that vegan ranges are not just opportunistic cash-grabs but potential best-sellers. After the success of Greggs’ vegan sausage roll, Tesco announced it would be increasing its range of dedicated plant-based products by nearly 50% to keep pace with demand.Advertisement

Sales may be growing fast, but they are barely making a dent in the $1.7tr global market for animal-derived protein. Certainly, a change of culture will not happen without the involvement of government, industry and science; as the past few years have shown, widespread change is also unlikely to happen without a fight. This makes the current field of conflict an unfortunate one – in the real world, we can practise moderation, emotional flexitarianism. Online – where many of the vegan wars’ most intense skirmishes are currently being fought – we do not find compromise or even look for it. The internet has made communication highly charged and polarised; the only way to be heard in such a screaming vortex is to shout louder.

But the body of evidence suggesting that we eat too much meat is approaching the point where it becomes undeniable. This summer, a UN report identified destruction of forests and emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices as major factors driving the climate crisis towards a point of no return.

Some are proposing urgent action, such as the QC Michael Mansfield, who recently suggested (in a speech given at the launch of the Vegan Now campaign) that meat-eating could become illegal. He drew a parallel with the smoking ban, and it is indeed eminently possible that in time meat (especially red meat) becomes the new tobacco – a vice enjoyed by a small number of people in full awareness of its negative health consequences.

But in coining the term “ecocide” – and classing it as a crime against humanity – Mansfield framed the debate in different terms. We might portray the current moment as a precipice, and the growing interest in plant-based diets as the surest way back to safety. In this interpretation, the war on vegans is the act of a doomed majority fighting to defend its harmful way of life. Vegans might well be vociferous and annoying, holier-than-thou, self-satisfied and evangelical. But as their numbers grow beyond the margins, perhaps the worst thing they could be is right.

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Can you brew tea in milk?

Do you ever wonder if there’s anything you can drink that would taste better than water?
Well, the answer is yes!
There are plenty of drinks out there that you can enjoy without having to worry about drinking too much water.
There are several different types of teas that you can drink.
Some of these include green tea, black tea, oolong tea, white tea, etc.
All of these teas come in various flavors and strengths.
In this blogpost I’m going to explain you how to brew tea in milk.

Other FAQs about Tea which you may be interested in.

Yes you can! But if you want to get the best taste from your tea, you should not put any milk into your cup. It will only dilute the flavor of your tea. Instead, pour hot water into your teacup and let it cool down. Then add your tea leaves and wait until it gets cold enough before drinking.

1. Good quality tea and water –

Good quality tea and good quality water are essential ingredients for brewing great tasting tea. To brew good quality tea, you should use freshly drawn water. This is because old water contains minerals that can affect the taste of your tea. For best results, you should use distilled water. Distilled water does not contain any impurities. 2. Steeping time – Answer: Steeping time refers to how long you should steep your tea leaves. Different types of tea require different amounts of steeping time. For instance, green tea requires less steeping time compared to black tea. Green tea is usually brewed for 3 minutes while black tea needs to be steeped for 5 minutes.

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Infusion refers to adding flavor to your tea. Infused teas are very popular among people who enjoy drinking tea. It is important to infuse your tea properly. The process involves soaking the tea leaves in hot water for a certain period of time. Once the infusion is complete, you should strain the tea leaves from the liquid using a strainer. 6.Storing tea – Answer: Tea bags are convenient but they lose their aroma after a short period of time. Therefore, if you want to store your tea for longer periods of time, you should try making loose leaf tea instead. Loose leaf tea keeps well for several months.

4. Steeping –

Steeping is the process of preparing tea. In order to steep your tea, you should put the tea bag or tea leaves into a cup. Then pour hot water over the tea leaves. Let the tea steep for 3-5 minutes. After steeping, remove the tea bag or leave the tea leaves in the cup. 3. Brewing – Answer: Brewing is the process of preparing your tea. To brew your tea, you should place the tea bag or tea in a cup. Pour hot water over the tea bag or tea. Let the tea brew for 2-3 minutes. Remove the tea bag or leave it in the cup. 2. Serving – Answer: Serve your tea in cups or glasses. Add milk and sugar to taste. 1. Drinking – Answer: Drink your tea slowly. This will help you get the full benefits of the tea.

Can you brew tea in milk?

Yes, you can brew tea in milk. But if you want to brew tea in milk, you should use 1/4 cup of milk per cup of tea. How long does tea take to brew? Answer: It takes about 5 minutes to brew tea.

2. Ratios –

Ratio is the proportion of ingredients used in a recipe. For example, a ratio of 2 cups of sugar to 3 cups of water is equal to 1 cup of sugar to every other cup of water. 3. Ingredients – Answer: Ingredients are the raw materials used to make a product such as bread, cake, cookies, pasta, pizza, soup, stew, salad dressing, sauce, yogurt, and many others.

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3. Right water temperature is important-

Water temperature is very important while making any type of food. It affects the taste, texture, color, and overall appearance of the final dish. Water temperature plays a vital role in baking, boiling, poaching, and sautéing. 4. Cooking Time – Answer: Cooking time depends upon the quantity of food being cooked, the method of cooking, and the desired result.

How to brew tea in milk?

To brew tea in milk, pour hot water into a cup. Add two teaspoons of sugar and stir well. Now add three tablespoons of milk and let it stand for five minutes. Then strain the mixture and serve.

Five steps to make a perfect cup of tea

Step 1: Pour hot water into a cup Step 2: Add two teaspoons of sugar Step 3: Stir well Step 4: Let it stand for 5 minutes Step 5: Strain the mixture

Can you brew tea bag in milk?

Yes, you can brew tea bag in milk. But, if the tea bag gets soaked in milk, it will get spoiled. So, you need tsoak tea bag in cold water. After that, you need to add hot water. What is the difference between black tea and green tea? Answer: Black tea is produced from the leaves of Camellia sinensis plant while green tea comes from the leaves of Camella sinensis plant. Green tea is known to help boost metabolism and lower cholesterol levels. It helps to prevent cancer and heart disease.

Is it OK to put tea in milk?

Yes, you can put tea in your milk. But, if you pour hot milk into tea bag, it will get spoiled because tea contains caffeine. So, you need to soak tea bag in cold water for 5 min. After that, you can add hot water. How many cups of tea can you drink per day? Answer: A cup of tea contains about 60 mg of caffeine. For adults, it is safe to consume 2 cups of tea per day.

Should You Remove tea bag before adding milk?

Yes, you can use tea bags for making milk tea. But, if you put them directly in hot milk, it will get spoiled. It needs to be soaked in cold water for 5 minutes. Then, you can add hot milk. What is the difference between black tea and green tea? Answer: Black tea is made from the leaves of Camellia sinensis plant while green tea is made from the buds of the same plant. Both are very healthy drinks but green tea contains more antioxidants.

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Should you take the teabag out before adding milk?

You should remove the teabag before adding milk. This will prevent the milk from getting into the bag and spoiling the taste of the tea. How long does tea stay good after being brewed? Answer: Tea stays good for about 3 days. After that, it gets stale. So, you should store it properly.

Can you make milk tea by putting a tea bag in milk?

Tea is very sensitive to light and air. It loses flavor quickly. Store tea in a cool dark place away from direct sunlight. Do not refrigerate tea. If you want to brew tea in milk, you can either steep the tea in hot milk or cold milk. Steeping tea in hot milk will give you a stronger tea. But if you want to drink the tea straight, you can steep the tea in cold milk.

Can you use tea bags for milk tea?

Yes, but you will not get the same taste as if you brewed the tea yourself. Tea bags are designed to hold the tea leaves in place while brewing. Once the tea leaves are removed, the liquid becomes free flowing and does not stay in contact with the tea leaves. How long can I store tea in the refrigerator?

Can I put tea in my milk?

Tea bags are usually used to brew tea. However, if you remove the tea bag from the cup before pouring the hot water into the cup, you will get better results. This is because the tea leaves will not be exposed to air and thus will not oxidize.

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How to cook raw peanuts without the shell? (3 methods)

Have you ever wondered how to cook raw peanuts without their shells? Well, here’s 3 ways to do it! How to Cook Raw Peanuts Without Their Shells – 3 Methods Peanuts are delicious snacks that are packed full of protein and fibre. However, if you don’t want to eat them with their shells, there are several ways to prepare them. Here’s three different methods to get rid of those pesky shells. Here are three different ways to remove the shells from raw peanuts.

How to cook raw peanuts without the shell?

Peanuts are a great source of protein and fiber. Peanut butter is a delicious spread that is easy to make at home. However, if you want to enjoy peanut butter but don’t want to eat the shells, you can buy roasted unshelled peanuts. Roasted unshelled peanuts are available in grocery stores and health food stores. To roast unshelled peanuts, place them in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake at 350 degrees F for about 20 minutes until golden brown. Cool completely and store in an airtight container.

How to make Boiled peanuts?

To make boiled peanuts, you need to soak raw peanuts overnight in cold water. Then drain off the water and put the peanuts into a saucepan filled with enough water to cover them. Bring the water to a boil, lower the heat and simmer until the peanuts become soft. Drain the peanuts from the water and let cool down. Once cooled, remove the skins from the peanuts using a nutcracker or a hammer. To make peanut butter, simply grind the boiled peanuts in a blender or food processor.

How to make Oven-roasted peanuts?

To roast peanuts, preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit 180 degrees Celsius. Spread peanuts evenly on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool completely. Store in airtight containers.

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Ingredients are the building blocks of any recipe. It is important to know what ingredients you are using because if you don’t know how to pronounce the ingredient correctly, you won’t get the right taste. For example, if you are making a cake, you need to know what type of flour you are using. Different types of flours give different results. Also, knowing the measurements of the ingredients is very important. For example, if I am baking a cake, I measure my butter into tablespoons instead of cups. This way, I will always get the same amount of butter in each cup.

Pressure cooker

A pressure cooker is a type of cooker used to cook food under pressure. It works by trapping steam within the vessel, forcing the liquid to reach higher temperatures than normal. This allows the food to cook faster and more evenly. A pressure cooker is ideal for making stews, soups, sauces, casseroles, and other dishes that benefit from being cooked at a higher temperature. It is also useful for cooking vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, and eggs.

Instructions are very important part of any recipe. It helps us understand how to follow instructions properly.

Stovetop method

Stovetop cooking is a great way to get meals on the table quickly. It’s easy to set up and clean, and it doesn’t take long to cook. However, stovetop cooking isn’t always the healthiest option. For instance, if you’re using a gas stove, you could end up breathing in harmful fumes from the burners. And while electric stoves aren’t known for being particularly dangerous, they still emit potentially toxic chemicals into the air.

Instant pot method

Instant Pot is a multi-functional electric pressure cooker that works well for many different types of recipes. It is easy to clean and maintain and comes with a wide range of accessories. It is very user friendly and cooks quickly. It is perfect for making soups, stews, sauces, casseroles, beans, pasta dishes, vegetables, meats, poultry, seafood, desserts, breads, muffins, pancakes, waffles, eggs, and even yogurt.

How to make pan-fried spicy garlic peanuts?

Pan-frying is a quick method to cook food. It involves heating a skillet or wok over medium heat until hot enough to sear the food. Pan-fry is a great way to get crispy fried food quickly. To make pan-fried spicy garlicky peanuts, you will need to cut the peanut into halves or quarters. Then, dip each piece of peanut into flour, egg, and bread crumbs. Heat the oil in a skillet or wok until hot enough to sizzle. Add the peanut pieces and stir-fry for about 1 minute. Remove from the pan and drain on paper towels. Serve immediately.

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Other FAQs about Peanuts which you may be interested in.

Peanuts are legumes, not nuts. Nuts are dry fruits while peanuts are greenish-brown seeds from the peanut plant. Peanut butter is ground roasted peanut kernels mixed with salt and other ingredients. Peanuts are a good source of protein, fiber, iron, zinc, magnesium, copper, vitamin E, folate, potassium, phosphorus, manganese, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, biotin, and dietary fiber.

How do you fry raw peanuts?

Raw peanuts are not safe to eat because they carry bacteria that can lead to serious health problems. Raw peanuts are usually found in snack bars and convenience stores. Cooking peanuts kills the bacteria and makes them safe to eat. Peanuts are very nutritious and contain lots of protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats.

Do you have to soak raw peanuts before boiling?

Peanuts are not only delicious but also nutritious. Peanut butter is a popular spread, especially among children. However, peanut butter is also known to cause allergic reactions in people who are sensitive to nuts. This is because peanuts contain proteins called Ara H1 and Ara H2. These two proteins are responsible for causing allergies. It is important to clean peanuts properly after eating them. To remove any residue from the shell, soak the peanuts in warm water for about 30 minutes. After soaking, drain the peanuts and wash them under running water. Then dry the peanuts using paper towels. Once the peanuts are dried, place them in a bowl and crush them using a mortar and pestle. For cleaning the peanut butter, mix 1/4 cup of salt into 2 cups of hot water. Add the crushed peanuts to the mixture and stir well. Let the mixture stand for 15 minutes. Strain the mixture and discard the solids. Pour the liquid back into the bowl and let cool completely. Store the peanut butter in an airtight container.

Do they wash peanuts?

Frying peanuts is a great way to enjoy them. Peanuts are very nutritious and provide many health benefits. However, if you buy them from the store, they usually have been roasted. Roasted peanuts are not only tasteless but also unhealthy. To get rid of the bad taste and smell, you can fry them yourself. Here are some tips to help you fry raw peanuts: 1 Use peanut oil. 2 Heat the oil until it reaches 350 degrees F 177 degrees C. 3 Add the peanuts into the hot oil and stir them around for about 10 minutes. 4 Remove the peanuts from the oil and drain them on paper towels. 5 Sprinkle salt on top of the peanuts. 6 Enjoy!

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How do peanuts get cleaned?

Yes, you can boil dry raw peanuts. Boil dry peanuts are not only nutritious but also delicious. To boil dry raw peanuts, place them into a bowl or pan and pour hot water over them until they become soft. Then drain off the water and let them cool down. Dry roasted peanuts are usually used in making peanut butter.

Can you boil dry raw peanuts?

Peanuts are not only delicious but nutritious. Peanut butter is a great source of protein and healthy fats. However, if you buy raw peanuts, you need to wash them thoroughly before eating them. Raw peanuts are usually contaminated with bacteria such as Salmonella and E. coli. These bacteria can cause serious health problems if consumed. To avoid these risks, wash the peanuts under running water until the water runs clear. Then, soak the peanuts in a bowl filled with cold water for about 30 minutes. Drain the peanuts well and pat dry with paper towels.

Do raw peanuts need to be cooked?

Peanuts are not washed because they are naturally coated with salt. Salt helps preserve the peanut from spoiling. Peanuts are usually stored in a dry place where they are exposed to air.

Do I need to wash raw peanuts?

Yes, you have to soak raw peanut before boiling. It is very important to soak the raw peanuts because if not soaked, the peanut shells will crack during boiling process and the nut meat will get hard.

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VRF vs Mini-Split

Can you confirm if there are any differences in a Variable Refrigerant Flow/Volume (VRF) versus a Mini-Split System other than terminology? @coachbryanhoward I want to make sure I don’t confuse myself

Thanks in advance

I found this:
VRF systems are similar to the multi-split systems which connect one outdoor section to several evaporators. However, multi-split systems turn OFF or ON completely in response to one master controller, whereas VRF systems continually adjust the flow of refrigerant to each indoor evaporator.

1 Like

@algonquin - Really good question and thank you for posting it to the community board. I have had professional experience with VRF systems but I have not yet worked with a mini-split. Your own follow-up is on the right path.

VRF systems can sometimes be used as a catch-all term for duct-less systems that use refrigerant piping fed from central, outdoor units to local (or zoned) blower units, often called heads. However, typically the term “VRF” is used for a specific type of system where the outdoor unit can service a a large number of heads. Mini-split will typically be talking about one outdoor unit feeding to one indoor head and a multi-split system has one outdoor unit feeding a handful of indoor heads. I was seeing a range of 4 to 8 heads that an outdoor multi-split unit could feed. A larger VRF unit can feed more than 8 units.

Hope this helped!

Thanks. I can imagine getting a question related to range. I appreciate your help guys.


Customer Retention Strategies in CRM

Here are Customer Retention Strategies in CRM that every leader should know about: 1. Retain customers by developing multiple channels of communication with customers. 2. Define the roles and responsibilities of your customer-facing employees and enable them to deliver exceptional customer service. 3. Learn about your customers’ needs, wants, and preferences for your products and

The Customer Relationship Management Advantages and Disadvantages

What are the customer relationship management advantages and disadvantages? There are many advantages to CRM, but there are also disadvantages.  CRM has the potential to create a large amount of data for organizations to analyze, which can lead to delays in implementing CRM.  But, this data can also be used to make more informed decisions

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management

What is the importance of customer relationship management? Read on to learn more. What You Need to Know About Customer Relationship Management Let’s be honest. Many businesses do not have a great customer relationship management strategy. If they did, they would know exactly how to put one in place. Customer satisfaction is one of the most

The Ultimate Customer Relationship Management Strategies

Here are the ultimate customer relationship management strategies you need to know to successfully manage customer relationships. Read on to learn more. The Truth About Customer Relationship Management The little-known secret to great customer relationships is using a CRM for your business. Why is that so? The truth is, you will never get a great

Why Is Customer Relationship Management So Important?

Why is customer relationship management so important?  The following article will help you understand all the reasons why it is so important to have a strong customer relationship management strategy in place, as it is the only way to ensure your business will withstand all the challenges and hurdles that come with competition and the

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management

It’s easy to underestimate the importance of customer relationship management systems. With the advent of the SaaS revolution, hundreds of CRM solutions popped up, and a huge chunk of the business technology journalism sector began, and continues to choke on so much material comparing CRM solutions back and forth, reviewing integration of it with other

Customer Relationship Management Strategy

Do you have a solid customer relationship management strategy? As we recently pointed out, CRM isn’t just a software solution, it’s a science which every department in a business (more or less) relies upon for a positive customer experience in practical application. It spans marketing, sales, customer service and everything in between. So, if you


Date of Award:

Document Type:

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Wildland Resources

Committee Chair(s)

Daniel R. MacNulty

Daniel R. MacNulty

Mary Conner

Johan T. du Toit

David N. Koons

Michael H. Cortez

The reintroduction of wolves (Canis lupus) to Yellowstone National Park starting in 1995 is an important case study for understanding the consequences of predation on a prey population. Simulation studies conducted prior to and shortly after wolf reintroduction predicted that wolf predation of elk (Cervus canadensis) would have a modest influence on elk abundance. Predation of elk by wolves has been well documented and elk have remained the primary prey for wolves despite a decline in elk abundance. I used two quantitative approaches to estimate the influence of wolf predation on adult female elk survival and abundance in northern Yellowstone and adjacent Montana during 2000-2017. My results suggest that, while wolves did kill adult female elk aged 2-14 years old, these elk generally had high survival. Elk were more likely to be killed by wolves as they aged. Wolf predation of adult female elk was primarily restricted to older individuals that generally comprised a small proportion of the total elk population. Harsh environmental conditions, such as heavy snow, increased mortality of adult elk, but elk aged 2-9 years old retained high survival regardless of the environmental conditions. The observed decline in elk abundance across the 17-year study was primarily due to mortality of 2-14 year-old elk that died due to causes unrelated to wolves, including malnutrition, harvest, and other predators. I could not estimate the full impact of wolves on female elk abundance because of the lack of data on elk calf and yearling mortality. However, wolves likely had a smaller impact on the elk population than did non-wolf causes of elk mortality. These findings clarify how the impact of predation on a prey population may be limited by the age of the prey that are consumed and the relative importance of the predated individuals to the population (i.e., their reproductive potential).


12.  Buffering and congestion control

      One of the major factors in the performance of a protocol is the buffering policy used. Lack of a proper buffering policy can force packets to be dropped, cause falsified windowing information to be emitted by protocols, fragment host memory, degrade the overall host performance, etc. Due to problems such as these, most systems allocate a fixed pool of memory to the networking system and impose a policy optimized for ``normal'' network operation.

      The networking system developed for UNIX is little different in this respect. At boot time a fixed amount of memory is allocated by the networking system. At later times more system memory may be requested as the need arises, but at no time is memory ever returned to the system. It is possible to garbage collect memory from the network, but difficult. In order to perform this garbage collection properly, some portion of the network will have to be ``turned off'' as data structures are updated. The interval over which this occurs must kept small compared to the average inter-packet arrival time, or too much traffic may be lost, impacting other hosts on the network, as well as increasing load on the interconnecting mediums. In our environment we have not experienced a need for such compaction, and thus have left the problem unresolved.

      The mbuf structure was introduced in chapter 5. In this section a brief description will be given of the allocation mechanisms, and policies used by the protocols in performing connection level buffering.

12.1.  Memory management

      The basic memory allocation routines manage a private page map, the size of which determines the maximum amount of memory that may be allocated by the network. A small amount of memory is allocated at boot time to initialize the mbuf and mbuf page cluster free lists. When the free lists are exhausted, more memory is requested from the system memory allocator if space remains in the map. If memory cannot be allocated, callers may block awaiting free memory, or the failure may be reflected to the caller immediately. The allocator will not block awaiting free map entries, however, as exhaustion of the page map usually indicates that buffers have been lost due to a ``leak.'' The private page table is used by the network buffer management routines in remapping pages to be logically contiguous as the need arises. In addition, an array of reference counts parallels the page table and is used when multiple references to a page are present.

      Mbufs are 128 byte structures, 8 fitting in a 1Kbyte page of memory. When data is placed in mbufs, it is copied or remapped into logically contiguous pages of memory from the network page pool if possible. Data smaller than half of the size of a page is copied into one or more 112 byte mbuf data areas.

12.2.  Protocol buffering policies

      Protocols reserve fixed amounts of buffering for send and receive queues at socket creation time. These amounts define the high and low water marks used by the socket routines in deciding when to block and unblock a process. The reservation of space does not currently result in any action by the memory management routines.

      Protocols which provide connection level flow control do this based on the amount of space in the associated socket queues. That is, send windows are calculated based on the amount of free space in the socket's receive queue, while receive windows are adjusted based on the amount of data awaiting transmission in the send queue. Care has been taken to avoid the ``silly window syndrome'' described in [Clark82] at both the sending and receiving ends.

12.3.  Queue limiting

      Incoming packets from the network are always received unless memory allocation fails. However, each Level 1 protocol input queue has an upper bound on the queue's length, and any packets exceeding that bound are discarded. It is possible for a host to be overwhelmed by excessive network traffic (for instance a host acting as a gateway from a high bandwidth network to a low bandwidth network). As a ``defensive'' mechanism the queue limits may be adjusted to throttle network traffic load on a host. Consider a host willing to devote some percentage of its machine to handling network traffic. If the cost of handling an incoming packet can be calculated so that an acceptable ``packet handling rate'' can be determined, then input queue lengths may be dynamically adjusted based on a host's network load and the number of packets awaiting processing. Obviously, discarding packets is not a satisfactory solution to a problem such as this (simply dropping packets is likely to increase the load on a network); the queue lengths were incorporated mainly as a safeguard mechanism.

12.4.  Packet forwarding

      When packets can not be forwarded because of memory limitations, the system attempts to generate a ``source quench'' message. In addition, any other problems encountered during packet forwarding are also reflected back to the sender in the form of ICMP packets. This helps hosts avoid unneeded retransmissions.

      Broadcast packets are never forwarded due to possible dire consequences. In an early stage of network development, broadcast packets were forwarded and a ``routing loop'' resulted in network saturation and every host on the network crashing.


What is white balance in photos?

What is white balance in photos?

What’s the best white balance choice when shooting photos?

Going Automatic on White Balance is a good choice! Of all the settings that affect the outcome of music photography, where we may switch from automatic settings into manual settings as our skills improve, using Automatic White Balance is often the best choice.

What is the purpose of white balance?

White balance is used to adjust colors to match the color of the light source so that white objects appear white. Subjects may be lit by a number of different light sources, including sunlight, incandescent bulbs, and fluorescent lighting.

What do you use for white balance?

The White Balance options usually include some of all of the following:

  • Auto or AWB (auto White Balance)
  • Shade.
  • Cloudy.
  • Incandescent or Tungsten (light bulb)
  • Fluorescent.
  • Daylight (or direct sunlight)
  • Flash.
  • Custom.

What is the best white balance setting for night photography?

The Best White Balance for Landscape Photography

  • Kelvin 3200-4000 is ideal for most types of night photography, either you’re photographing the Milky Way or the Northern Lights.
  • Kelvin 5000-6000 is ideal for most types of ‘regular’ landscape or outdoor photography.

What happens if you don’t white balance?

White balance is important if you don’t want your photos to look unnatural. So, if you’re taking a photo of someone surfing in deep blue waves, without proper white balancing, your captured image will have colors that are different from the actual or correct ones. Your blues can turn orange or red.

What does white balance do on a camera?

White balance is a camera setting that adjusts the color balance of light the you’re shooting in so that it appears a neutral white, and it’s used to counteract the orange/yellow color of artificial light, for example, or the cold light of deep shadow under a blue sky so that portrait shots taken in shade look more natural.

How does white balance affect my photos?

If your camera’s white balance is off the mark, warm light bulbs may produce an orange glow in your pictures whereas a fluorescent tube may produce a green color on the photograph. Also a bright sunny environment may have a bluish cast. You may have to adjust the color temperature in degrees Kelvin.

How do I white balance a photo?

Shoot in the RAW file format. Putting your camera on the RAW file setting before you shoot is important for post-processing flexibility.

  • Aim for consistent lighting. Shooting photos with mismatched sources of light will make it more difficult to edit the white balance in post-production.
  • Use a gray card to be precise.
  • Don’t overcorrect.
  • What is a white balance in photography?

    1) Definition of White Balance. Simply put, white balance in digital photography means adjusting colors so that the image looks more natural. We go through the process of adjusting colors to primarily get rid of color casts, in order to match the picture with what we saw when we took it.


What Is Patination?

tiny hedgehog creation

When creating our animal sculptures, there are plenty of steps that go into the process. While we aren’t going to share with you our deepest darkest secrets in this regard, we did think we would take some time to explain one of these processes: patination.

If you are looking for a new sculpture, the concept of patination may be something that you come across time and time again. But what does it actually mean, and how could it change the look of your design?

What Is Patination?

Patination is actually a natural process. It refers to the impact of weathering a sculpture, often resulting in a change in colour. If you have gazed upon any exterior sculpture before, you may have noticed this change in colour.

But patination can also be a man-made process; it refers to the process of encouraging a sculpture to develop in colour in a particular way. Most commonly seen in bronze or copper designs, patination helps to change the colours of a design to reflect green, blue, or red hues, depending on the base metal.

Instead of waiting for nature to take its course, artists looking to patinate their animal sculptures may choose to utilise chemicals to artificially stimulate the ageing process, resulting in a creation that looks as though it has stood the test of time no matter how old it actually is.

Patination Vs Rusting

Rusting is another method used by artists to artificially adapt the colour and tone of their sculptures. However, it may surprise you to know that both methodologies do not have exactly the same impact on the designs they are used upon.

Rust is caused by the deterioration of a metal substance over time. Because of this, rust can impact the integrity of a sculpture, making it weaker and more brittle. Conversely, patination is conducted through oxidation. This does not require the deterioration of the structure of the metal it is placed upon and is therefore much safer when it comes to the long-term health of the sculpture.

Our Patinated Designs: Animal Sculptures & Abstract Designs

Since we are discussing patination, we thought that there is no better time to let you know of some of our favourite patinated designs. From small animal sculptures to large abstract installation pieces, we use patination for a variety of different designs.

One of our favourite patinated creations is our Horseshoe Sphere Sculpture; its design is simple and elegant, bringing together new and second-hand horseshoes to produce an incredibly intricate piece of work.

To find out more about the sculptures we produce, make sure to check out our website or to get in touch with our friendly team. We are always on hand to help!

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Optimization of the Argentinian pig chain

Collaborating for a high quality, efficient and sustainable pig sector in Argentina.

Pig Chain Argentinia
Pig Chain Argentinia
Collaboration for maximum impact

In the Netherlands, livestock farming is among the most advanced sectors. Our integrated pig chain is innovative, efficient and sustainable. Close cooperation between government, agricultural entrepreneurs and knowledge institutions has resulted in state-of-the-art technology and breeding programs that are both sustainable and animal-friendly.

This public-private partnership Optimization of the Argentinian pig chain is a collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate, the Netherlands Embassy in Argentina, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and representatives of the Dutch pig sector for the next three years.

The GITAH Porcino Cluster wants to extend the invitation to work together with Argentina. Together we can provide the world with more efficient, environmentally-friendly, social and economically sustainable pig products. By working together, we can positively influence the lives of people and animals. Economic growth and jobs for people, improved health and well-being for animals.


Monday, November 15, 2021

A Mother with Suffering Child

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”   ― Maggie O'Farrell

Hamnet is a historical fiction novel about the life of William Shakespeare’s family at the time of his son Hamnet’s death in 1596 and the writing of the play Hamlet around 1600. I was disappointed with this award-winning novel. I found it boring, but even worse was the prose style of the author that succeeded in what I can only call piling on the adjectives and adjective phrases in describing in detail the mundane activities of the characters.

The description of William Shakespeare’s early life, his marriage to Anne Hathaway, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes, the death of his son Hamnet from the plague and the subsequent impact of this tragedy on their marriage and his work comprise the plot of the novel. Will is never named and is referred to as ‘her husband’, ’the father’ or ‘ the latin tutor’. He also has very little to say for himself. This deliberate omission is most likely made to free the narrative from the weight of association that his name carries, but I found it quite contrived considering how much detail we are given about the setting, including the house interiors and streets of Stratford.

The novel begins with Hamnet but the central character is his mother Agnes who is unconventional, free spirited, a gifted herbalist and clairvoyant. It is the events between Hamnet’s parents’ meeting and his birth that provide a major part of the story. At her first meeting with Will she presses the flesh between his thumb and forefinger which reveals his incredible future to her but disappointingly very little subsequently emerges from this insight. There are some interesting descriptions of his former home and the life of the household. The story is narrated in a non-linear fashion with each chapter relating to a different time period. However I found the frequent back and forth an unnecessary stylistic approach that added to my overall disappointment.

Monday, November 01, 2021

The Encheiridion

The Handbook (The Encheiridion)
The Handbook

This is the little (29 pp) book that lays out the essence of Stoic philosophy.  Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Cytium more than three centuries earlier, but it is the works of Epictetus (along with Seneca and Marcus Aurelius) that form Stoic thought as we know it today. Stoicism, while not a well known today as the thought of Plato and Aristotle, was one of the major philosophic schools in Greece and Rome for a half a millenium.

What makes the handbook most interesting today is the practical advice aspect of Epictetus' thought. One can put some of these ideas to good use even in the twenty-first century.
According to Epictetus one makes progress when "he censures no one; he praises no one; he blames no one; he never talks about himself as a person who amounts to something or knows something." And finally, "Never say about anything, 'I have lost it,' but instead, 'I have given it back.'" Follow the Stoic principles and you will not have an unhappy life.

Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

 A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
by Patrick Radden Keefe

“Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.”   ― Patrick Radden Keefe

Patrick Radden Keefe's book captures the history of the Troubles as told through the stories of the individuals involved in the events of the days from the nineteen-seventies till our current age. The narrative starts and ends  with the story of a young widow named Jean McConville and her ten children. Her story provided the backbone for a series of vignettes and set pieces that held my interest from beginning to the end. The details of the various episodes told stories of secrets and violence, both loyalty and betrayals, and events that stretched from the neighborhoods of Belfast to Boston in America and to the Houses of Parliament in London.

The structure of the book with its variety of characters and interrelated events provided a sort of motion that mimicked the changes in the fortunes of the actual participants involved in these events. I enjoyed the set pieces as well as the detail of the lives of the important players with names like Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and the Price sisters; but I also appreciated the stories, sometimes horrific, of the less well-known persons, especially the children of Jean McConville who were shuttled off to institutions after Jean was "disappeared".

Whether the narrative was describing the famous bombings in London, the "hunger strikes" of the Price sisters and others, or the secret documentary "Belfast Project" at Boston College, the author seamlessly tied the incidents, events, and characters together into a riveting story that I found simply fascinating.

No matter how much you may remember about these events, that is if you are of an age like mine that lived through this history as current events, I expect that you will read this history with amazement, similar to mine, at the details that the author puts on display. The book successfully portrayed many intimate moments while conveying history on a grand scale.


Internet-Draft Service Routing in MEC December 2021
Du Expires 25 June 2022 [Page]
Network Working Group
Intended Status:
Z. Du
China Mobile

Service Routing in Multi-access Edge Computing

This document introduces a service routing mechanism in the scenario of Multi-access Edge Computing.

Requirements Language

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft will expire on 4 June 2022.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

The operators are deploying Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) to provide services with lower latency to their users. Comparing to accessing service in the cloud, the MECs can provide service much nearer to the users.

However, in the current architecture of Internet, we need to send a DNS request to get the IP address of the service firstly, and then access the service [RFC1035]. It is not the optimal solution in the MEC scenarios which are sensitive to the latency of service accessing. In this document, we introduce a mechanism that can access the service directly without the DNS procedure.

In the 5G architecture, a UE (User Equipment) need to connect to a UPF (User Plane Function) working as a gateway, and then access service via the destination IP address.

In the scenarios of MEC, the service may be accessed within the MEC, meanwhile the MEC also provides a UPF Function for the UEs. Therefore, in fact, the service access takes place in a limited domain [RFC8799]. In this limited domain, we can use a specific IP address to directly access the service.

2. Proposed Mechanism Description

In the proposed mechanism, a UE should have a session with the UPF in the MEC. Also, the UE should be aware that it can access the service more quickly within the MEC if the service is available in the MEC. The proposed mechanism is described briefly as below.

Firstly, the UE send a normal DNS request if it wants to access a service, such as "". Meanwhile, it can make a destination IP address itself by hashing the URL, and try to establish a TCP connection directly.

Secondly, the UE may establish the connection successfully by using the specific IP address, and get access to the service bypassing the DNS procedure. If it fails, the UE can wait for the normal destination IP address received from the DNS procedure.

In this mechanism, the IP address can contain some information about the service, so we call it service routing in this document. The specific IP address is called the Service Routing IP address or the SR IP address.

3. SR IP Address

There are many options for the Service Routing IP address.

In the first option, we can assume that the UE can receive an MEC prefix for the service routing in the procedure of establishing the session between the UE and the UPF in the MEC. For example, an MEC prefix is 64 bits, and the hashed URL is also 64 bits. In the MEC, the server of the service should use the same hash algorithm to generate the SR IP address, and the 128 bits IPv6 address should be routed correctly within the MEC. Hence, the MEC works like a virtual network node containing services, with the MEC prefix as a Location, and the hashed URL as a Function.

In the second option, we can use a ULA IP address for the SR IP address [RFC8799]. The procedure is similar to the first option, but the SR IP address becomes the format of <MEC_ULA_Preifx: Hashed_URL>. The MEC_ULA_Prefix contains a specific subnet-ID.

In the last option, we can use all the 128 bits as the Hashed_URL. In this situation, the UE does not need to receive a specific prefix in advanced, and all the services in different MECs have the same IP address for the same service to support this quick access.

4. IANA Considerations

5. Security Considerations

6. Acknowledgements

7. References

7.1. Normative References

Hinden, R. and S. Deering, "IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture", RFC 4291, DOI 10.17487/RFC4291, , <>.

7.2. Informative Referenc

Author's Address

Zongpeng Du
China Mobile
No.32 XuanWuMen West Street