I ate dinosaur tongue!

Over the holidays I stayed with my sister.  She invited a friend over on New Years for hors d’oeuvres.  This friend told me she would never eat shrimp and explained to me that it was 'dirty' and shouldn’t be consumed.

I leaned over to inspect the plate of shrimp between us.  It was deveined, rinsed, and organized in a circle around the horseradish sauce - all in all, it looked pretty clean to me.

I didn’t understand what she was really getting at so she described how shrimp are ground feeders, eating all the ‘garbage’ on the ocean floor.  Because she did not want garbage in her body, she would never eat shrimp.

Taking a big bite of shrimp, I just had to laugh.  That 'trash' tasted pretty good.  If she remembered anything about the most basic and fundamental law of physics,  Conservation of Energy, she would probably starve.

Basically, the Law of Conservation of Energy states that in an isolated system (the earth in this case) energy can neither be created nor destroyed.  Our total energy remains constant, it’s conserved.

It can move within the system and appear in a different form, but the energy itself remains constant over time.  For example, a worm eats the compost from my kitchen scraps.  The compost is turned into worm castings (essentially worm poop) which is the dark, rich soil that I use in the vegetable garden.  The seeds that I plant use the minerals and energy from the castings to produce roots, stems, flowers, and pollen.  The pollen, along with nectar, is taken by a bee back to it’s hive and is turned into honey (essentially bee vomit). 

This honey is harvested by a neighbor who sells it to me at QFC and I mix it in my herbal tea.

So really, we are constantly using energy that has been here all the time.  It is a gift to transform energy into other forms like tears of joy or breast milk for a child.  This is the natural order of things in the world.  The cycling of energy is necessary for our very existence.

When I think about it, I’m quite happy that the shrimp eat all the garbage on the ocean floor - if not, it would get pretty ugly down there.

So where does the dinosaur come into the picture, you ask?  Well, my herbal tea was harvested from special mountains in Japan.  The dirt that the plants grew in came from a decomposed Stegosaurus who was gleefully chewing shrubs just before a volcanic eruption...


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