When biologists play with their food...

...It looks a bit like this.

Kale, 40x

 I was eating some salad earlier as I thought about curriculum for teaching high school students microscopy. Then I wondered what my salad greens looked like up close. This resulted in me looking at salad under my microscope for some thirty minutes. It was fun!

Yes I do have a microscope at my apartment, we don't try to hide our geekiness at my abode.

Kale, 100x

This was the underside of a leaf of Italian kale. If you look closely, I think the little dark spots are stomata.

A piece of kale under the microscope. 

Kale isn't the best plant for observation without any sort of special treatment, though, because the leaves are very bumpy and I had a heck of a time trying to get the leaves in focus at 100x.

Radicchio, 40x 

 I had never actually looked at a non-green leaf under the microscope before. I was struck by how pretty the radicchio is, almost like stained glass.

Radicchio, 100x

Dandelion greens, 40x

I tried again with a much flatter leaf, some dandelion greens.

Dandelion greens, 40x

Dandelion greens, 100x

The 100x view reminds me a bit of a jigsaw puzzle.

I'll post an actual recipe sometime later this week; I just could not help posting pictures of salad up close.

Farm vs. factory farm eggs

I tend to be suspicious of claims about food. For instance, I understand that high-fructose corn syrup is not a good thing to be pumping our bodies full of, but I am skeptical of drinks and snacks that claim "no HFCS! Real Sugar!" like that in and of itself is a health claim. If it has 45 grams of sugar, HFCS or cane sugar, it still isn't good for you. I am also a bit dubious about if organic food actually has more nutrients like some sources say. I figured the benefit was more that it didn't have pesticides.

I was also pretty suspicious about eggs. That is, people say that eggs not grown on a factory farm have much yellower yolks. I was like "pff, I think they are exaggerating."

Nope, that particular claim is true, it turns out.

Factory farm eggs on the left, eggs from my aunt's chickens on the right.

I would say they are noticeable different colors...

Actually there is some science behind this. To paraphrase what I learned in developmental biology, chickens make "white" (I think it is actually pale yellow) and orange yolk. They make layers of the white yolk while it is day time, or while it is light out. They make layers of the orange yolk at night, when it is dark. Because factory-farmed chickens live in buildings with perpetual artificial day, very little of the orange is made.

Is it weird that I think about developmental biology almost every time I crack open an egg? Probably.

The real reason why I try to get eggs from farms is because I am trying to be ethically and environmentally responsible, but the farm eggs are quite pretty.