Radishrain

Here are some of the oldest forum posts about tomatoes on the Internet:

• https://web.archive.org/web/19961019103820/http://gardenweb.com/forums/load.cgi/cornucop/msg0315345129248.html?2
• https://web.archive.org/web/19961019104610/http://gardenweb.com/forums/load.cgi/cornucop/msg0421263619358.html?2

Allergy, intolerance, and sensitivity sites:
• https://celiac.org
• http://es-forum.com

Autism sites:
• https://templegrandin.com
• https://wrongplanet.net

Lupus sites:
• https://www.lupus.org
• https://www.lupusresearch.org (click here for community links)
• https://www.lupusuk.org.uk (click here for the forum)
• https://www.mylupusteam.com (a lupus-based social network)
• https://www.thelupussite.com (click here for the forum)
• https://exchanges.webmd.com/lupus-exchange

Seizure and epilepsy sites:
• https://www.epilepsy.com
• https://www.seizure-journal.com

It is unfortunately common practice for people, businesses, and governments to spread pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, miticides, mosquitocides, pollutants, and who knows what else all over the place, often even. They seem to think that once they are no longer the pesticide or herbicide, that they are no longer a concern, and many times seem to suppose that they disappear altogether. What they seem to neglect is that matter doesn't just disappear. It either remains what it is or turns into something else, and you may or may not like that something else.

This post is not comprehensive, but you're welcome to add to it, if you can.

Toxins and issues that appear via cooking include such as these:

• Hydrogenated oils
• Partially hydrogenated oils
• Acrylamide
• Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
• Nitrites (if one considers them toxins)
• If you're cooking tomatoes in a copper pot, you might get lethal amounts of copper in your sauce.
• Burned Teflon isn't exactly nutritious.
• I've read somewhere that the oxalic acid in cooked rhubarb is less healthy than in raw rhubarb. I need to find a source on that to verify it.
• Certain vitamins might be destroyed when cooked. (I'm actually a bit skeptical about this, because when I looked into it, most people were just talking about nutrients leaching out into boiling water, rather than being destroyed, and I didn't find any explanation as to how cooking destroyed the remaining few vitamins, or what they turned into).
• Cooking may destroy some beneficial enzymes.
• Cooking may destroy some beneficial microbes.
• The metal in a pan (if the pan is metal) may interact with the acids in the food.

Benefits of cooking:
• Acylamide in proper amounts can taste good.
• Lycopene is said to be more beneficial from cooked red tomatoes, as opposed to raw red tomatoes.
• Cooking kills many pathogens and harmful microbes (and many pathogens produce toxins).
• Cooking can denature some toxins, and probably some harmful enzymes.
• Cooking may remove some harmful chemicals (such as chlorine or hydrogen sulfide), and degrade some contaminants, according to what John Boyce, the president of Water Softening Systems said on Quora on 20 Feb 2018. Degraded chemicals may or may not degrade into something else harmful, potentially, though, I might add.

Also consider that sometimes toxins and pathogens (which can produce toxins) are removed in cooking; potentially, harmful enzymes might be removed, too.

Don't plant squash next to muskmelons, unless you want squash bugs eating your melons, too. I've had it happen twice, including this year with a squash that I previously though squash bugs didn't like much. (But, apparently, they'll eat it if they don't have anything else nearby.)

Anyway, the squash bugs are on some of the muskmelon fruits in large numbers, it seems.

So, in 2017, I grew a Carolina Cross #183 watermelon plant (probably a cross of one, though, since it was from seeds I saved in 2016). Anyway, it started getting a nice-sized fruit, but it got BER. I saved the seeds, and wanted to find out if seeds from BER fruits were more or less likely to get BER themselves. I grew some of those seeds, this year, and the only fruit has BER. So, this isn't conclusive, but it doesn't look like it builds resistance, so far (none of my other watermelons this year have BER).

BER stands for blossom end rot.

Loads of people are probably wondering how to combat inflation. So, let's address that—

Would you believe that we're already combating inflation, but not on purpose?

Think of it this way: The less you can do with your money, the less that money is worth. The more you can do with it, the more it is worth. (Inflation-wise.)

Okay, so in the USA, what's the standard of living? Let's analyze things pre-pandemic, since that kind of mixed things up a little.

Here's my perception of what the standard of living has been for other people in recent years (not necessarily for me):

* Food (grocery store visits, frequent restaurant trips, ordering pizza frequently, tipping the deliverer, or the servers, etc.)
* Personal care products (a whole lot of them)
* Child care products
* Cleaning products
* TV and movies (Prime Video, Netflix, movie theater visits, cable, etc.)
* Smartphones (along with phone services), tablets, laptops, desktop computers, e-readers, etc.
* Cars
* Gas
* Many kinds of insurance
* Fees
* Taxes
* Real estate / housing / utilities
* Business expenses
* Pesticides/herbicides
* Lawn care
* Pet supplies and services
* Appliances, devices, etc.
* Supplements
* Travel abroad
* Vacations
* Visiting family or friends far away
* Saving for children's educations
* Education

And so on and so forth.

How much of that is actually 100% necessary to sustain life? Well, it probably depends, but by and large, these things are necessary (and necessity is in the eye of the beholder):

* Food
* Water
* Safety
* Somewhere to live

Imagine if those were the only things people could buy, suddenly. What would happen to all the money people were spending on other stuff? Well, it would cause a lot of inflation, that's what. It would cost a lot more to buy food, since there would be so much more money not being spent on other stuff.

So, how do you handle inflation? You increase the available desirable goods and services that people want (especially if they lack physical presence, and especially if they're not necessary). The more things you can buy, the more your money is worth.

Yeah, there are probably other ways to deal with inflation (e.g. destroying money, reducing the need for money, changing the currency, etc.). …

Digital goods are particularly interesting because they lack physical presence, and there's no limit to them. They don't need to be manufactured over and over again. So, new people can keep on buying them forever.

You might be under the delusion that people buying more digital goods means they'll be using just as-many-digital-goods-as-they've-purchased the same amount they would use one digital good, for each thing, if they had only one good. But, that's not the reality. If someone buys a billion digital movies, they'll probably still watch only a a few to several movies a week (and a lot of those might not be from among those they own anyway). The supplier of the movies isn't going to have to increase server capacity exponentially, in order to accommodate a ridiculous amount of increased viewership from that individual. There's no reason not to worry about viewers owning too many movies in this regard. The more movies they buy, the less they probably watch any one in particular. One person usually only watches one movie at a time. You won't see a thousand movies streaming at once from one person's account. Maybe two or three at the most.

I discovered that if I cook milk just right, and then refrigerate it, that it gets a desirable vanilla-like taste to it. Very interesting. I cooked it on low or medium-low heat for a long time. Think like over 30 minutes. It was Gteat Value vitamin D milk.

I just had a relative taste test several cherry tomatoes: Isis Candy, Eva, Brown Berry, Esterina F1, and Austin's Black Cherry.

She liked Eva, and Esterina F1 the most. From my own taste test of those (not today), I liked Eva and Austin's Black Cherry the most. It looks like we agree on Eva; so, that's really good.

Isis Candy is big for a cherry tomato; in fact, I'd call it a small tomato instead. It's supposed to be super sweet, but it's not really for us (but I do like it a lot—especially its production and hardiness).

It might be nice to cross Eva and Napoli together, to get some super heavy production.

So, I dehydrated these tomatoes last night (and today):



And we got this result:



I had them on 167 for about 5 hours, and 145 the rest of the time. Different temperatures would assuredly get different flavors. Most of them seem to taste like tomato soup with a zing and a little sweetness. Some of the ones I tasted taste different, and sweeter. I haven't tasted all the kinds, dehydrated, yet. Not all of the cherry tomatoes finished dehydrating, so we ate those. Some did, though; they look like dried goldenberries.

I had punctured the skins of all the tomatoes thoroughly to speed up the drying process.