Grok Say 'Uff Da'

Hans and Petra Skari

I went ahead and sent my spit to a DNA company, because I feel there is such a thing as too much privacy, and also because I was curious about my genetic heritage. Lots of you have done the same thing, including some 589 close relatives of mine, which is extraordinary, inasmuch as I thought my family tree had been reduced to a stump with a few of us suckers coming out of it. (I haven't paid the extra to be introduced to these people, because of the risk they'd be a lot like me.)

I generally describe myself as half Norwegian. Americans like to do that. We have only the single citizenship and no familiarity with other languages or cultures or anything but you ask any of your basic paler Americans what they "are" and they'll start ticking countries off their fingers. We're real proud of our immigrant heritage as long as it has at least a few decades of antiquity to it. So I say I'm half Norwegian because my mom's parents were both from the old country and it was assumed their parents were too, and so on and so forth. I describe the other half as a dull mixture of pasty peoples in the English realm, but don't get too specific. I figure they're all interchangeable anyway.

But I was surprised to discover that I actually am 43.7% Norwegian. Surprised, because this DNA business goes back a long way and it seems to me people should have moved around a bit more than that, or, in the case of the Vikings, conquered more people than that, and so I would have expected my DNA to reflect inferior vanquished overrun peoples' DNA. Your Russian, your French, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, Greek, Italian, maybe even some Mi'kmaq from Newfoundland. Could I possibly have come from Viking stock? Oh looky there! I'm 0.4% Northern African! The Vikings conquered Morocco in 845. Boo-yah!

So I am quite tickled about the results,  because mild-mannered folk like myself like to imagine we harbor an inner Viking. Robust! Hearty! Swinging a broadsword through a cranium like it was butter! In fact--if we are what we eat--buttery! And that includes us womenfolk, with our fat blond braids tucked into our belts alongside our battle axes, ready to bash people over the head with our krumkake irons. Uff da!

All I've got to threaten people with is writing them into my novels.

Anyway, sure enough, the rest of the story was mixed and pasty. Until we get to the good stuff. The stuff I was most interested in.

Yes, folks, read it and weep. I have way more Neanderthal in me than most of you. Nearly 4%. The reconstructions of Neanderthal skeletons are not as dreadful-looking as most people imagine, I'll have you know. The Neanderthal is short and stocky and has thicker, denser facial bones than their skinny-ass compatriots in the H. sapiens school. I can relate. I am short and--oh, let's substitute "sturdy" for "stocky," why don't we--and I have empirical evidence that my head is not fragile, because I keep falling on it, and nothing has spilled out. Between my inner Vikings and Neanderthals I'm pretty sure I could keep my smug inner Irish and English portions in line. I like to think they didn't contribute much to the wonder that is me.

Maybe just the eyebrows.

Please Pass The Placenta!

So I guess it's been a thing for a long time. Some new mothers eat their placentas. See, I didn't know that. I know my mother didn't eat her placenta even though I never asked her. As a Norwegian, she enjoyed a number of menu items that don't appeal to normal people, and placenta might conceivably have fit the bill as long as the butter held out, except that it's not beige. It's not remotely beige, in fact. A placenta looks like a massive blood clot in flapjack form.

Anyway I'm basing my conjecture on the fact that when I asked her (in the flush of my all-knowing teen years, at the dawn of the hippie era) why she didn't have a natural childbirth, she said "I stayed awake just as long as I wanted to." She didn't say it so much as she snapped it off, with emphasis. My thought is that when the medical personnel brought her back to consciousness and handed her a neatly wrapped baby, she didn't think to ask if she could eat the placenta. Even though she was a very tidy person.

Animals routinely eat placentas for a number of reasons and tidiness may be one of them. Dogs eat them because it's a good source of iron, it's important to tidy up so as not to attract wolverines, and oh who are we kidding? Dogs will eat anything, hork it up, and eat it all over again.

Modern humans don't deal with wolverines as much as they used to and we are a little fussier about what we eat, for the most part. But hormones can make a person pretty peckish. Still, the eating of the placenta is usually done for a variety of reasons that may or may not hold water. It's considered to be good for the child, for lactation, or for the mood of the mother. It does sound sort of ancestrally legit. But on the other hand, if we were meant to eat the things our body has already expelled for some reason, we'd be eating babies too, wouldn't we?

I never gave birth but I'm not liable to have jumped on that bandwagon. I can't even deal with oysters. I'm pretty sure my first reaction to seeing my placenta would be "Thanks, I'm done with that." Fortunately most of the women who eat their own placentas these days have them sent to a company that dehydrates them and puts them in capsule form. Then it's just a matter of popping pills. That's how fecal transplants are done too. And if it ever turns out that pus, bile, or barf becomes a cure for anything, the capsule industry should be seeing boom times.

But don't pills seem like cheating, somehow? I'm pretty sure it would strike one of my family members as being over-delicate. She tried using one of those nasal syringes on  her infant when he got snotty and very shortly decided it was inefficient, and she channeled the spirit of her own foremothers and planted her mouth on the baby's face and shnorked all the shnot out of his nose and spit it out and it worked splendidly, just as it had for her tribe from day one. I think it's one of those things that isn't gross after you've done it once, much like another thing I can think of.

The very day I first heard about placenta-eating, I mentioned it to a man and woman who joined us for beer-thirty, and scored a hit right away. It was the man who had eaten the placenta. It wasn't his wife's, either. It was at some sort of hippie community event. Sauteed placenta canapes with toothpicks in them, or something. He explained that he ate the placenta because he was polite. "You don't get offered someone's placenta and say 'yuck,'" he said. "That would be rude."

I'm glad I wasn't at that soiree. To this day I'd be trying to keep straight in my mind who still thinks I'm a vegetarian.

Please Hold The Assiago

Greatest news ever. Scientists have quit messing around with genomes and cancer and trips to Mars and have finally buckled down to making cheese out of feet bacteria. They're using belly button and armpit bacteria also. Some day we will be able to give our loved ones personal cheese that smells like us. I'd be interested in a cheese that smelled like my own feet, because I haven't been able to get my nose close to my feet since I was ten months old.

They got the idea because some of the stinkiest cheeses contain bacteria that are very similar to armpit and toe bacteria. And they discovered that a cheese made from an individual's feet bacteria would in fact smell like that individual. Many of us do smell like cheese, so it might not be much of a distinction.

You make cheese by conflagellating milk protein until it drops its guard, and then you can bomb it with rennet and bust it up into curds and whey. Rennet is an enzyme found in an animal's stomach, and you pretty much have to kill the animal to scrape the rennet out of it, which is one reason vegans disdain cheese, although another reason is they think milking animals is rude in general. I'm not sure it is. Milking a cow and squirting your little city niece who only wants to see what you're doing in the barn is rude, in my opinion.

You could make a cheese yourself if you had some milk and some stomach scrapings from a deceased cow. The only thing else you'd need is a nice wad of bacteria or mold for flavor. Lucky for you, you have tons of choices here, if you don't soap up much, and aren't a whackadoodle about keeping a clean kitchen. Just rub a cloth between your toes and wipe down the counter once a month or so and wring it out over your milk and dead cow bits. Presto Cheeso.

It is thought that cheese might have been discovered accidentally when someone decided to store milk in an animal stomach, as one does. The oldest preserved cheese ever found was found in China and is over 3600 years old. It was fed to a Norwegian to see what happened. Nothing happened. The Norwegian ate it right up on a cracker and asked if there was any rotting fish to pair it with, and then he took his clothes off and rolled in the snow.

The researchers involved in the Personal Cheese breakthrough first gather their bacterial jam from pertinent personal areas and then identify an individual's personal scent signature using gas chromatography, which means they detain the bacteria in a sealed room and interrogate them until they confess. Progress has been slow. In nearly all higher learning institutions with an active program for concentrating armpit odor, the laboratories have been consigned to the edges of the parking lot, and turnover is fierce. What with the researchers having to whack their way through the throng of bib-wearing Norwegians on a daily basis, most have concluded it just isn't worth it. The remainders have produced acceptable foot cheese and discovered it smells like cheese, and even so, they have difficulty getting published.

It's just as well. I'd be mildly curious to try a cheese made from Dave's footular bacteria. He walks 15 miles a day and most of his bacteria are squashed flat, but even if they could harvest some around the toe intersections, if the cheese smelled like him it wouldn't smell much at all. He is mildly salty. I'm guessing he'd make a decent mozzarella stick and that's about it.

The Snot Garden

I have this little weather app on my phone. It's been pretty reliable. And that is how I learned that we were about to dip below freezing. I stood at the back door and looked out at my garden. Flowers and tomatoes were sparse, but everybody looked plump and green and contented. The next day, they would all look like something that's been in the back of the refrigerator for a year. It'd be a massacre. It was like looking at a passel of pink pigs lined up outside Hormel.

Plants, most of them, can't get out of the way of an arctic blast. They are famously stationary. They might flap around a bit, but they've basically got their feet in a bucket of concrete, and winter comes on like the deep dark sea. Some of them have ways of coping. They might have nastic movements, which is not what you're thinking it is. A nastic movement is one that is triggered by something like sunlight or cold. All their little cells are lined up like subway tiles and as each cell shrugs or slouches or stretches in response to a stimulus, the whole apparatus moves admirably. The sunflower tracks the sun across the sky. The rhododendron curls its leaves inward and toward the ground, reducing transpiration. That's about the extent of it, for plants. Mostly they have to stay put and take what comes.

For the non-hardy plants in my garden, they're not going to take it well. They're going to turn into snot. What was giving them such good posture all those months was their cell walls, and once the goo inside the cell freezes up, it busts the walls apart, and your plant has all the bodily integrity of pudding. All those plants do just fine in warmer climes. You get far enough south, your lantanas grow to be the size of Volkswagens. But up here, they hit the freezing point and they take to their beds with the vapors. "I swan," they drawl briefly, and then it's game over.

But what are those other plants doing--the ones that sail right through the winter? Most of them concentrate sugars in the spaces between the cells, and that acts like antifreeze. In fact this ploy can take some plants down to -40 degrees (that's Fahrenheit--and Celsius is even worse). The plants that survive below that are dehydrating, evacuating water from their cells, and what remains inside is basically jam. It's the same thing Norwegians do, only they replace their body fluids with butter.

The wood frog has the same idea. A better idea might have been to live south of Alaska like a normal frog, but the wood frog is a non-conformist. He sugars up his cells and goes right ahead and freezes, stuck in the pond mud. The wood frog is, for several months of the year, basically a puck. And then when he thaws out, he reconstitutes his former glory bit by bit until he can hop away. Takes upwards of 24 hours and he's good as new. He doesn't much feel like having sex for a while longer, but eventually he gets a notion.

My Agapanthus plants are the ones that surprised me most. They're really not supposed to be hardy here. But they still look fine, all fat and fleshy, unless it gets really cold, like it did last winter. Then they turn into snot. But they store their secrets and passwords in fine stout roots, and the next spring they pop out again, although they won't flower; if they have a mild winter after that, they'll flower the next year. So they're just like the wood frog when it comes to sex. They don't want it quite yet, but just you wait.

My heart twists a little for those innocent tender plants in my garden, who don't know what's about to hit them. But then I realize: they're not like us. They don't have grief. Because they don't have existential dread.

Because they don't have an app.

No Whey Out

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration is still struggling weeks after the Great Cheese Tunnel Fire of 2013. A trucker escaped with his life after abandoning his load of twenty-seven tons of flaming cheese in the tunnel. No injuries were reported. The PRA administrator, Kjell Bjoern Vinje, commented that in his fifteen years at the helm, this was the first time cheese had caught fire on Norwegian roads. They’re still all bound up.

The United Nations took note of the tremendous energy output concealed inside the tunnel and, initially, demanded that inspectors be allowed in to determine if Norway’s intentions were peaceful, but backed off when the Mr. Vinje weighed in. Mr. Vinje, who had his hands full, communicated “bite me” in such an adorable accent that the Security Council was mollified and withdrew its request. In much the same way India became a nuclear state.

After a week of intense heat, the cheese seems to have burned itself out, leaving only a molten lake on either end of the tunnel. Traffic in the region is expected to be snarled for months, but the cleanup operation itself is coming along nicely, after platoons of volunteers showed up armed with flatbread and cardamom crackers.

Genuine Norwegians I am related to.

Brunost is a goat cheese and is considered a delicacy in Norway. The phrase “is considered a delicacy” is universally applied to things ordinary people find revolting—things with lots of little legs, for instance, or things made from testicles, or things cured for months in fermented camel spit. Brunost is brown, it smells like a biohazard, and my mother loved it, but then again she was Norwegian. She didn’t have to share it with anybody in the family. The Brunost occupied a position of honor in the refrigerator with a moat of air all around it to prevent cross-contamination. Mom cut herself a slice whenever she wanted a little time by herself. I never tried it, but I remember hating it. At that age I found mayonnaise a little spicy. The way I figured it, there was no really good reason to make goat cheese if cows had not gone extinct, which they hadn’t.

Not too many other animals contribute to the cheese world. Mozzarella is made of water buffalo milk, and there’s certain commerce with yaks, sheep, and even pigs, but the rest of the mammal order is largely untapped. Probably the accessibility and size of the udder is the main determining factor in using cow and goat milk, but theoretically any mammal can be used to produce cheese. It is not true that every mammal produces milk. Almost all the males are terrible at it, although some are fine with the milking process.

But you can run upwards of twelve dugs on a dog, and that should count for something. Dog cheese remains a rarity, however. Early experiments with milking barn cats were risky and unproductive, but did lead directly to the development of Laughing Cow cheese. Wolverine milk looked promising at first, but there was no good way of removing the tranquilizer from it. Enterprising Australians once proposed that marsupials’ pouches might be induced to stand in for the udder, and milk be harvested with a baster and spatula, but they found the kangaroo too combative, and the product from smaller marsupials was unacceptably high in contaminants like wombat fuzz and tiny pink bandicoots. Mostly, we’re stuck with cows and goats.

Kjell Vinje will be charged with assessing the damage to the tunnel after the cracker crew has completed its task. He is hopeful that the toll will be light, and anticipates the bulk of the damage will be at either end, where the roof of the mouth of the tunnel was badly burned.