Who knew: Canada on a platter

Happy Canada Day, folks!

Time to bust out some maple syrup for your pancakes, opt for a 100% Canadian beef or salmon burger, and treat yourself to a big, chocolately nanaimo bar for dessert.

I don't know what qualifies as "Canadian" food (here's Wikipedia's take), but I did have fun getting food to represent Canada for an art exhibit I made back in high school.

The fast food meal above consists of a burger, some fries, an English muffin, and a straw, all served on a platter.

If creating art were one of my talents, you'd probably have an easier time seeing how it's linked to Canada and attempts to capture all four of my exhibit's themes: optical illusions, hidden images, word play, and Canadian pride.

• The burger: Nothing shows Canadian pride like sewing a Canadian flag on your backpack -- unless you're an American trying to pass for one of us (and who can blame them?).


• "French" fries and "English" muffin: Bilingualism and our French/English background rock.


• Straw: Paired with an English muffin/puck, this hockey stick is just the thing for a game of one of Canada's two national sports, hockey!


• Platter: So it doesn't look exactly like a beaver tail, but it beats the one below (though that BeaverTail sure looks tasty!).

Hope you were able to sample some tasty Canadian treats today; let us know if you had anything particularly interesting -- flipper pie, nougabricot, and bakeapple pie come to my mind.

Who knew?: Ronald McDonald, lady's man

Believe it or not, that creepy-looking fellow up there is Ronald McDonald the First, starring in McDonald's first commercial.

He may have been beaten out of the role of the national Ronald McDonald by this dude:


(he blames his chubbiness), but he did get quite a few perks, including this: "Women would offer themselves to me. I actually had groupies who followed me from gig to gig."

For a string of fun "Who Knews" about McDonald's (e.g. Did you know that more than 50,000 students from all over the world have graduated with "Bachelor of Hamburgerology" degrees from "McDonald's Hamburger University"?) check out the following Pop-up Video-style mockumentary of four McDonald commercials. The last commercial is particularly awesome, especially if you're a So You Think You Can Dance fan like I am!

Be sure to watch till the end -- there's a surprise! Let me know what you think.

Who knew?: Coprophagy, or, eating poop

Me: Guess what I won't eat?

AA: I dunno... manure?

Me: Uhh... that too, but...

I was all set to write this post on the things I won't eat (based on another conversation I had with AA about eating not-quite-dead animals), but of course my train of thinking led me to write instead on this far more intriguing topic -- coprophagy/coprophagia, or, the consumption of poop/feces/manure/two four-letter-words/you-get-the-picture.

Though my initial reaction to AA's response was "Who on earth would eat poop?", my mind immediately flashed to a scene from the film Fast Food Nation, which revealed that -- get ready for this -- fast food hamburgers contain cow manure. As the cow's guts are being removed during the butchering process, the poop spills out of the intestines, and gets mixed in with fast food-grade meat.

So --I'm sorry to break it to you -- but if you've eaten a hamburger from a fast food place, you've likely eaten poop.

Don't feel bad though. Apparently, we all have, at one point or another, eaten poop. "One of the main ways that diseases and parasites spread is through the consumption of food and water contaminated with feces. This happens because people don't wash their hands carefully after pooping or changing a diaper or scratching their butt. It can also happen through careless disposal of diapers."

What I find most interesting is the fact that there are people out there who eat poop on purpose. It could even be/have been you.

"In rare instances, people with severe developmental and psychological disorders practice pica, the consumption of non-food items, including coprophagy, the ingestion of feces. The behavior may also be observed among very young toddlers."

"Coprophagy is also listed as an unusual sexual practice in the encyclopedia of that name. Some people who practice sexual coprophagy say that only a lover's poop is good to eat; all other poop (including their own) makes them gag."

And, as you're probably imagining, "you can definitely get sick from eating poop, even in minute quantities! Although urine emerges sterile from the body (unless the person has an infection), poop emerges loaded with bacteria and sometimes other life forms. Many diseases, including food poisoning, cholera, and typhus, are spread by fecal contamination. Many parasites, such as the notorious tapeworm, can be spread through deliberate or accidental ingestion of poop."

Some parasites, such as pinworms (found in the large intestine), depend on people eating their own poop to keep the population up.

Talk about disturbing: "The females emerge from the anus at night to lay their eggs. Their activity makes the anal area itch. The person scratches the itch (often doing so in his sleep), procuring a small amount of fecal matter and eggs under his fingernails, and then puts his fingers in his mouth. Once the eggs are consumed, the person is infected with a new generation of pinworms."

This raises the question: are these people all sleeping in their birthday suits, or are those parasites just that eager to get out of our pants?

Apparently, almost everyone has pinworms.

If you want to find out if you do indeed have them, get someone to gently touch around your anal area with Scotch tape while you are sleeping. The worms will stick to the tape and you'll be able to see them.

For more information than you probably ever want to know about poop, check out the Scoop on Poop.

Any thoughts? Interesting personal experiences? Feel free to share! ;)

Who knew?: Bugs for breakfast!

I'm starting my FOODSAFE training in just five minutes, so I anticipate being able to share some interesting facts about food safety - most likely a couple of gross food handling stories, etc.

The worst personal story I can recall at the moment was one time when I was eating a rice and bean dish in a restaurant in the Philippines and saw something that looked like neither a bug nor bean. Turns out, the "bean" was really a small beetle. It was really tiny, so if I hadn't been looking closely, I would have probably just eaten it.

Eating a bug in a meal really shouldn't bother us, since there's bug bits in practically everything we eat. Back when I used to have a membership at Science World, they had a special members-only night in conjunction with the opening of the OMNIMAX film Backyard Bugs, where they had all kinds of foods that contain pieces of bugs for attendees to eat. Up for grabs were bags of chips, peanut butter, bread, popcorn, etc. The take-message was that every time we eat a chip, there are probably crushed bits of ant or grasshopper in them.

And we apparently end up eating an average of eight spiders in a lifetime -- they crawl into our mouths while we're sleeping. Don't quote me on that though -- I quickly googled it to make sure the statistic is out there, but some sources say we eat 10, and I also don't know how on earth they measure that!

There are also all the bugs that eat by choice. My dad used to eat honeybee larvae and said they taste like candy. During the Science World night, they fried up mealworms (the larva form of the mealworm beetle) and I think also served honeybee larvae, but I wasn't brave enough to try either at the time (I was only in elementary school).

Then there are the novelty insects you can buy at candy stores. One day I will try some. They're really expensive though, for less than a handful of bugs!

If you know anywhere in the Lower Mainland that sells insects/bugs (e.g. termites, chocolate covered ants, etc.), or if you'd tried any cool insects during your worldly travels, please enlighten us with your insights!