I Heart This Ben Lord

“If you like nerds, raise your hand. If you don’t raise your standards.” Today's episode, like vertebrate lungs, comes to you in two parts. The first is a celebration of the joy of finding people who share your love of something, no matter how unusual it is. The second is a celebration of the joy I’ve found with people who love science in particular. So grab your pocket protectors and push your glasses up your nose.

The world is on fire both figuratively and literally. How do we deal? In this episode, delivered as a live talk for UCONN chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Ben draws on poetry, science, history, and philosophy to explore how we all might live in a world where we have no idea what is going on.

Many of us enjoy talking about politics about as much as we enjoy paying taxes or going to the dentist. But this month on I Heart This,  I suggest that we have good reasons to feel grateful for political disagreements.
ReferencesGreen, T. V. (2021, November 23). Republicans and Democrats alike say it’s stressful to talk politics with people who disagree. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/23/republicans-and-democrats-alike-say-its-stressful-to-talk-politics-with-people-who-disagree/
Josh, L. (2022, January 6). “A republic if you can keep it”: Elizabeth Willing Powel, Benjamin Franklin, and the James McHenry Journal | Unfolding History: Manuscripts at the Library of Congress. Blogs.loc.gov. https://blogs.loc.gov/manuscripts/2022/01/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it-elizabeth-willing-powel-benjamin-franklin-and-the-james-mchenry-journal/
Jurkowitz, M., & Mitchell, A. (2020, February 5). Almost half of Americans have stopped talking politics with someone. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/02/05/a-sore-subject-almost-half-of-americans-have-stopped-talking-politics-with-someone/
Kolbert, E. (2017, February 19). Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds
Thich Nhat Hanh. (1991). Peace Is Every Step. Toronto Bantam Books.

Bread might seem like the boring food, the backdrop for the stuff you put in the sandwich. But actually, in a world of strange foods, bread may be the strangest, most unlikely substance that humans have ever ingested. The story of what bread is and how we came to eat it, is one of alien biology and lost civilizations. It turns out that we only have bread because of a long chain of bizarre and unlikely coincidences.
ReferencesArranz-Otaegui, A., Gonzalez Carretero, L., Ramsey, M. N., Fuller, D. Q., & Richter, T. (2018). Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(31), 7925–7930. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801071115
Bietz, J. A. (1982). Cereal prolamin evolution and homology revealed by sequence analysis. Biochemical Genetics, 20(11-12), 1039–1053. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00498931
Cassidy, C. (2020, May 4). What Do We Know About the Neolithic-Age Woman Who Invented Leavened Bread? Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/leavened-bread-yeast-invention-history.html
Encyclopedia Brittanica. (2023, December 25). How did Neolithic technologies spread outward from the Fertile Crescent? | Britannica. Www.britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/question/How-did-Neolithic-technologies-spread-outward-from-the-Fertile-Crescent#:~:text=The%20earliest%20farmers%20raised%20barley
Gregory Clark. (2007). A farewell to alms. In Internet Archive. Princeton University Press. https://archive.org/details/farewelltoalmsbr00clar/page/286/mode/2up
Igbinedion, S. O., Ansari, J., Vasikaran, A., Gavins, F. N., Jordan, P., Boktor, M., & Alexander, J. S. (2017). Non-celiac gluten sensitivity: All wheat attack is not celiac. World Journal of Gastroenterology, 23(40), 7201–7210. https://doi.org/10.3748/wjg.v23.i40.7201
Kim, K.-H., & Kim, J.-Y. (2021). Understanding Wheat Starch Metabolism in Properties, Environmental Stress Condition, and Molecular Approaches for Value-Added Utilization. Plants, 10(11), 2282. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants10112282
Liu, W., Wu, Y., Wang, J., Wang, Z., Gao, J., Yuan, J., & Chen, H. (2023). A Meta-Analysis of the Prevalence of Wheat Allergy Worldwide. Nutrients, 15(7), 1564. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15071564
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease. (2020, October). Definition & Facts for Celiac Disease | NIDDK. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-diseases/celiac-disease/definition-facts#:~:text=gluten%2Dsensitive%20enteropathy.-
Piperno, D. R., Weiss, E., Holst, I., & Nadel, D. (2004). Processing of wild cereal grains in the Upper Palaeolithic revealed by starch grain analysis. Nature, 430(7000), 670–673. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02734
Revedin, A., Aranguren, B., Becattini, R., Longo, L., Marconi, E., Lippi, M. M., Skakun, N., Sinitsyn, A., Spiridonova, E., & Svoboda, J. (2010). Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(44), 18815–18819. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1006993107
Shewry, P. (2019). What Is Gluten—Why Is It Special? Frontiers in Nutrition, 6(101). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2019.00101
The Serious Eats Team. (2021, March 7). What Is Gluten? The Science Behind Great Dough. Serious Eats. https://www.seriouseats.com/what-is-gluten-free-bread-dough-pasta
Urade, R., Sato, N., & Sugiyama, M. (2017). Gliadins from wheat grain: an overview, from primary structure to nanostructures of aggregates. Biophysical Reviews, 10(2), 435–443....

Thanksgiving: An “I Heart This Manifesto”
IntroductionIn October of 2022, I decided to start a podcast about things that I loved. At the time, this seemed like a not-terrible idea. It turns out that I am the world’s foremost authority on things that I love, so I was actually somewhat qualified to speak on the subject. And seeing how it was focused on my own obsessions,it was also pretty much guaranteed to interest me . But mostly, in a media world populated with trolls, cynics, and conspiracy-pedaling gadflies … well … talking about delightful things seemed like a novelty. Like I said, all in all, a not-so-terrible idea. 
The next thing I probably should have asked myself was “Who would want to listen to hours and hours of some random guy talking about the things that he loves?” But I kinda skipped that part. 
Instead, I asked myself, “What do I love? What do I want to talk about?” I liked that question better because it meant I got to write a list. And I really love writing lists. In fact, “making lists” is #20 on my list of things that I like, and it will probably end up with its own episode at some point. I put this list in a spreadsheet, because, well, I also really like spreadsheets. (They’re #65). 

But now that I Heart This has reached the end of its first season, it seems like it's probably time to ask the existential questions that I avoided asking at the beginning.

Because, y’all know, the last thing the world needs is a new podcast. We’ve got enough “influencers” and “personalities” and hucksters and reminders to like and subscribe. We’ve got enough people feeding the algorithms, thank you very much. What good could it possibly do to add yet another voice to the media circus. It’s like shouting into the void. 
Why spend hours of a good life scripting and revising and recording and listening to the same sentence over and over again to edit out all the weird noises my voice makes? 

And … why listen? There are a thousand other things you could tune into to right now. You could listen to the news … or someone who will make you laugh … or financial advice … or, y’know, like nine out of ten podcast listeners, you could tune into an endless and moderately disturbing stream of true crime. 

So, even it is a bit belatedly,  let’s go there. “Who would want to listen to hours and hours of some random guy talking about the things that he loves?” Why gratitude? Why a project like this at all? 

Move over Karl Marx.  It’s a Thanksgiving I Heart This manifesto. 

I’m Ben Lord. You’re listening to “I Heart This.” 

Story of me. Kamana Naturalist Training Program. First, let me tell you a bit about how I came to be such a gratitude cheerleader in the first place. 

In my mid-twenties, I enrolled in a nature study correspondence course for cavemen. Okay, it wasn’t really a course for aspiring cavemen … but it was for people interested in wilderness survival and wild edible plants and stalking around in the woods and getting close to wildlife. So … y’know … cave man stuff. And it really was a good old-fashioned, pre-Zoom correspondence course. Assignments would arrive in my literal IRL mailbox. And I would use these things called stamps to send envelopes full of my work back to the school. 

About half of these assignments had me researching local animals and plants in books. But the other half were a kind of in-the-woods practicum. The approach was simple. Go to the same spot in the woods every single day. Sit there until all the things I’d scared away relaxed and returned to going about their business. And then … watch. 

Does that sound boring? I guess that sometimes it was. And sometimes it...

Colin Tudge's amazing book, The Variety of Life is not a field guide, but it is a survey and celebration of all the things that have ever lived. I cannot recommend this book enough.
Newcomb's Wildflower Guide truly is the most effective key that I have ever used. Positively genius.
A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs by George Petrides is the best guide to woody plants in my region.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's first widely distributed field guide was Flore Francaise.
Lawrence Griffings paper about Richard Waller's rediscovered key can be found in its entirety here.
The National Library of Medicine has this amazing series of blog posts on the history of herbals and floras, books that were the precursors to field guides in medieval Europe.
Cornell Ornithology Lab's Merlin app really is amazing and is available to download for free.