The Photo Gallery: Food

In responding to the prompt here, I was determined to ‘think outside the box.’ I know lots of contributors – there’s a full list of entries here – will have posted lovely pictures of delicious food, ready to eat. Far be it from me to criticise that, or hold it against them. (I’ve enjoyed taking pictures like that myself, more than once.) But take a moment to think about where our food comes from – in particular, the table margarine and many cooking fats we take for granted. Even if you don’t cook much at home, you will very likely be buying food products containing prepared vegetable oils that started off here:

Remember those yellow fields with a heady scent, much hated by those of us who suffer with pollen allergy? Well, this is what follows! Take a closer look…

Each of those pods contains a dozen or so seeds, each around 3mm in diameter, containing around 40% oil by weight – so this is a important crop for the food industry.

And one further line of thought: we wouldn’t care, these days, to have to go further than the supermarket for most of our food. But getting it that close to us involves a non-stop, and enormous, transport operation, using millions of litres of diesel fuel each year. Now, this same oil can be easily used to make ‘bio-diesel’, a non-mineral fuel for diesel engines. It’s interesting to note that, when Rudolph Diesel first demonstrated his compression-ignition oil engine, he was keen to point out that it would, in fact, run on vegetable oil. That was in the year 1905!

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Chain Reaction…

This little story (entirely fictional) is in response to the ‘100 word challenge’ prompt here. In essence, the brief was to write a piece just 100 words long, plus, included anywhere, the phrase shown in bold. Lots more responses can be viewed using the list of links published with the prompt. By the way, I’ve never kept animals, so this prompt was more of a challenge for me than many of the others!

I blamed it on the dog. You see, it was like this: As I was writing, a butterfly came through the window. This excited the kitten, who then danced about on the window-sill. This annoyed the dog, who had quietly entered the room. He gave a sudden sharp bark. This startled me just as I was reaching for my tea mug. I splashed tea all over the controls of the desk fan, causing fizzing and popping. Alarmed, I pushed back my chair hard, tipping it over backwards. I have a bruised head from my collision with the floor. Also, I stubbed my toe on the table…

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The Ultimate ‘Attended Service’

This post is in answer to the ‘100 word challenge’ here. Before reading on, please look at the picture prompt (shown there) to make (some) sense of what follows. All the other responses are also listed there, with links. Thank you.

This picture conjures up in my mind the complete opposite of a modern self service filling station. Here, as you drive up to the pumps, an attendant will take your order, not just for unleaded 95, super unleaded 98, or diesel, but also for tea, coffee, or hot chocolate, noting your choices of milk and sugar. This is prepared for you and served inside the appropriately shaped building behind the pumps. To avoid delays, the attendant will move your vehicle to the adjacent car park after refuelling is complete. Payment is then collected in a suitably genteel manner; your receipt is hand-written!

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