WCK is still cooking in Gaza—and we want to be direct with you about what is changing and why. Due to significant financial pressure, including rising food and fuel costs driven by regional conflict, WCK is making the difficult decision to reduce the scale of our meal distribution in Gaza. This decision reflects financial reality, not a reduction in need. Our teams remain on the ground, delivering hundreds of thousands of hot meals every day.Since the start of the conflict in 2023, WCK has invested more than half a billion dollars feeding the people of Gaza—surging to one million hot meals a day. But no single NGO, funded primarily by small private donors, can sustain that level of output indefinitely. We specialize in emergency food relief, not long-term food security—and the long-term responsibility of feeding Gaza cannot rest on our shoulders alone. The people of Gaza have lost their homes and their economy. Governments, institutions, and international partners must commit the sustained, secure funding this crisis demands.We know you have questions—here are answers to what we are being asked more frequently.
They note in the email that the upcoming wildfire season is expected to break records. It's shameful to consider how much $ is currently being expended on weaponry and reparations to insurrectionists when basic human needs like this go unmet.
"Rat kings are cryptozoological phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, and excrement. The animals consequently grow together while joined at the tails, which are often broken. The phenomenon is particularly associated with Germany, where the majority of instances have been reported...Image and text from Wikipedia. Credit to Neatorama.
Most researchers presume the creatures are legendary and that all supposed physical evidence is hoaxed, such as mummified groups of dead rats with their tails tied together. Reports of living specimens remain unsubstantiated…
Specimens of purported rat kings are kept in some museums. The museum Mauritianum in Altenburg (Thuringia) shows the largest well-known mummified "rat king", which was found in 1828 in a miller's fireplace at Buchheim [above]. It consists of 32 rats. Alcohol-preserved rat kings are shown in museums in Hamburg, Hamelin, Göttingen, and Stuttgart. A rat king found in 1930 in New Zealand, displayed in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, was composed of immature Rattus rattus whose tails were entangled by horse hair.
The term rat king has often led to the misconception of a king of rats... The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, adapts a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann that features a seven-headed Mouse King as the villain..."
The Animal Clinic of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, got a surprise this week when a city worker brought in six squirrels fused together by their tails...
This particular group of six were nesting near a pine tree and sap fused their tails together. A city of Regina worker found the young squirrels and brought them to the clinic. The animals were sedated and the veterinarian team worked to untangle the mess of tails. Their tails were then shaved of the matted fur and they were given antibiotics to prevent infection. (Via Nothing to do with Arbroath)
[T]hese three white-tailed bucks were found locked during the rut. The bucks were located on a ranch in east-central Texas and, from the information that I received, one of the bucks was still alive when the trio was found. Apparently, the antlers were cut from the dead deer and one very tired buck was lucky enough to run back off into the woods.
"...there is nothing worse than finding a dead buck that you did not shoot, but how would you feel if you found not one, but three dead bucks on your property? Okay, it gets worse. What if those three bucks totaled 450 inches of antler? That is exactly what a hunter in the mid-West found on his Ohio farm..."
"They had the bank of this creek all tore up."Addendum #3: And reader Lisa knew of a ancient example of the phenomenon involving Ice Age mammoths.
Their tails had become entwined with "long-stemmed grasses and strips of plastic their mother used as nest material," the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center wrote on Facebook... "It was impossible to tell whose tail was whose, and we were increasingly concerned because all of them had suffered from varying degrees of tissue damage to their tails caused by circulatory impairment," the post read.See also: A squirrel king, which has this explanatory note -
In the wild, squirrels make their nests of dried leaves and branches... A strange natural accident that sometimes occurs is sap from pine branches that the nest is constructed of can adhere to the squirrels' tails and ultimately to each other's tails. Squirrels normally have litters of 4 to 6 babies. As they are fed in the nest, they are quite "squirmy" and move around frequently. Once their tails become stuck together, movement is limited amongst them and they jump under and over each other trying to reposition themselves. In the process, they literally knot or braid themselves together. The squirrels pull in many directions, thereby worsening the situation. They can actually live quite a long time like this, as the mother continues to feed them.Reposted yet again, to add some information from a Longread article "All Hail the Rat King" -
The Thuringian town of Altenburg houses perhaps the most spectacular exemplar. A mad bramble of no fewer than 32 rats sits mounted on a plexiglass pane in the entrance hall of the Mauritianum, the town’s small natural history museum. It was found in a village not too far away, in a warm space underneath a chimney...So, just in time for Christmas - a new way to interpret the "Nutcracker." My next step was to search Google Images for Rat Kings in the Nutcracker. Most of them are benign and cuddly. At NPR I found Maurice Sendak's version -
The first visual representation of a rat king is in Johannes Sambucus’s Emblemata, from 1564, a collection of moral truths “wrapped up in certain figures.” Sambucus introduced the rat king as both natural phenomenon and symbol, and a sense that its sheer bizarreness has something to tell us has never gone away...
Some have considered the joke to be literal: as old as the discovery of rat kings is the suspicion that they cannot possibly be real. “We present it as a natural phenomenon,” says one of the curators in Strasbourg. “If someone made it a sport to tie rat tails together, it would be a major effort, unless you have steel mesh gloves.” The rat king is just as inexplicable when you think it’s a fake as it is when you assume it’s authentic...
One element that stays mysteriously stable across the centuries is rat kings’ geographic spread: the history of the rat king is uncannily, at times uncomfortably entwined with the history of Germany. Rattus rattus exists across the globe: it spread across Europe and North Africa with the Romans, then across the rest of the globe with European colonizers. And yet rat kings come from a curiously limited area. All but one of the specimens preserved today are from Western and Central Europe. Marten t’ Hart notes that “from 1564 to 1963, fifty-seven rat kings were discovered and described.” The vast majority of those discoveries took place in areas that make up present-day Germany. This curious geographic concentration has led some researchers to suggest that rat kings are cultural, rather than natural phenomena. More bluntly put, they could be elaborate, centuries-old hoaxes...
In 1816, two years before Arndt published “Rat King Birlibi,” E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote Nutcracker and Mouseking, which inspired (via Alexandre Dumas père) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s inescapable ballet.
If you watch The Nutcracker today, the mouse king has gone missing several times over. He has disappeared from the title, only shows up in one of the acts as the leader of an evil army of mice, and goes through a busy and less-than-iconic mass scene before exiting the stage as Masha explores the Land of Sweets with her nutcracker-cum-prince. But Hoffmann’s rendition not only lavishes a great deal of attention on the army of mice and their vicious battle with the nutcracker’s tin soldiers, but also makes it clear that the mouse king is a close relative of the rat king. This is how we first meet the monarch:
Seven mouse heads with seven shiny crowns rose, hissing and whistling dreadfully, rose out of the ground. Soon after the mouse body to which these seven heads were attached emerged fully, and three times the entire army squeaked in triumph at the great mouse garlanded with seven diadems…
These are the sole ingredients of a potluck offering that’s popular in some parts of Minnesota and North Dakota. Some people use breads with a little less flair, like pumpernickel or rye, but the cinnamon version has its die-hard fans, especially in Roseau, Minn...“When you go to our local grocer — we only have one in town — on the Super One display is fresh baked, in-house cinnamon swirl bread with a pyramid of Cheez Whiz displayed next to it,” said Sinnamon Krings, Roseau promotions director. “To someone not from here you might wonder why but to a local it’s as common as peanut butter and jelly.”Those who love the combination are often nostalgic about it and remember eating it as a kid after church services or funerals. In some circles, it’s called “funeral bread.”..The company debuted Cheez Whiz in 1952, first in Britain, where Kraft marketed it as an easy way to make the sauce for Welsh rarebit. When the product landed on U.S. supermarket shelves the next year, Kraft already had the perfect way to introduce it to shoppers — on the company-sponsored television program Kraft TV Theatre... On Sept. 8, Sasser wrote that during that week’s program, Kraft TV Theatre demonstrated a recipe that is very close to funeral bread: Melba toast spread with Cheez Whiz and topped with sliced olives. Could this be the dish’s origin?
The flat-bottom edge is ideal for scraping the brown bits off a pan without scratching the surface. And it has a carved bowl for scooping or tasting a spoonful of tomato sauce for seasoning as you cook.
"...in their native Madagascar, the endangered animals are facing a growing threat: City-dwellers with cash to spare love to eat them. They say that the meat from fruit-eating lemur species tastes sweet and that consuming these primates promotes strength and good health. The meat from these tree-dwellers is valued for its cleanliness and “purity.” The startling revelation comes from the first-ever assessment of Madagascar’s urban lemur trade. Conducted over the past four years, it concludes that more than 10,000 lemurs were sold for pricey dishes across 17 cities in the country...
Though dining on wild species from African forests often evokes people trying to survive hunger in desperate situations, this new work suggests that people from a wealthier rung of society in Madagascar, those making perhaps thousands of U.S. dollars a year, are a distinct threat to these endangered primates...
All buyers and sellers included in the survey reported they were aware of the illegality of the trade and feared being caught, jailed or fined. But the economic benefits motivated their actions. They were also aware of how rare the animals were becoming. More than half of the interviewees said they expected to have fewer lemurs to trade in the future because of declining populations..."
Reconstructions of Eurasian Neanderthal diets based on stable nitrogen isotope ratios (δ15N) typically place hominins at the top of the food web, together with, or above, hypercarnivores, such as lions and wolves. We suggest that these high δ15N values may, in part, reflect the regular consumption of 15N-enriched fly larvae (maggots) occurring in stored animal foods. The ethnohistoric record contains countless examples of Indigenous peoples routinely consuming putrefied animal foods with maggots... We suggest that frequent consumption of animal foods laced with maggots should be considered as a contributor to the high δ15N values observed in Late Pleistocene hominins...Indigenous peoples almost universally viewed thoroughly putrefied, maggot-infested animal foods as highly desirable fare, not starvation rations. Many such peoples routinely, often intentionally, allowed animal foods to decompose to the point where they were crawling with maggots, in some cases even beginning to liquify, and inevitably emitting a stench so overpowering that early European explorers, fur trappers, and missionaries were sickened by it. Yet such foods were viewed as “good to eat,” even a delicacy, and when asked how they could tolerate the nauseating stench, they simply responded, “we don’t eat the smell”. While our Western sensibilities might abhor the thought of maggot-infested foods, one even finds vestiges of larvae consumption in Europe with the delicacy of casu marzu, a traditional Sardinian cheese replete with the larvae of cheese flies (Piophila casei)...Our principal goal in this study was to determine whether 15N enrichment occurred in maggots raised on putrid tissue and whether the degree of enrichment was of sufficient magnitude to account for, or at least contribute notably to, the unusually elevated δ15N values observed in Eurasian Late Pleistocene hominins...Many nitrogen isotope studies place Late Pleistocene hominins alongside hypercarnivores, giving the misleading impression that both had broadly similar diets. They did not. Hominins are primates with largely vegetarian-derived digestive and metabolic systems, not specialized flesh eaters. While it is possible for humans to subsist on a very “carnivorous” diet, many traditional northern hunter-gatherers such as the Inuit subsisted mostly on animal foods, hominins simply cannot tolerate the high levels of protein consumption that large predators can. A modern human weighing ~80 kg, the estimated body weight for a robust cold-adapted Neanderthal male, cannot consume more than ~300 g of protein per day (<4 g/kg of body weight) without serious health consequences. At sustained intakes above that level for as little as 1 to 2 weeks, the individual becomes vulnerable to a debilitating and potentially lethal condition known to early explorers as “rabbit starvation”...In modern medical terms, the consumption of such high levels of protein exceeds the capacity of the liver to up-regulate enzymes involved in the synthesis of urea, with the result that the liver can no longer effectively deaminize the amino acids, leading, in turn, to a buildup of ammonia and excess amino acids (hyperaminoacidemia) in the blood. In notable contrast, a modern African lion can readily subsist on protein intakes that would probably prove lethal to a human in a matter of a few weeks. Thus, northern hunter-gatherers were carnivorous only in the sense that they relied heavily on animal foods, but most of what they ate was fat, not muscle...To stay below the critical protein threshold, hunters deliberately targeted the fattest prey available at a given time of year and harvested mostly the “choice parts” of their kills, i.e., the brain, tongue, briskets, ribs, adipose tissue, fatty organs and entrails, marrow, often the carbohydrate-rich chyme and partly digested stomach contents, and, time and fuel permitting, also the grease in the cancellous tissue of the bones......meat and fish surpluses were procured in the summer and fall; processed by drying, salting, or freezing; and cached for later use…. The preparation of food surpluses was an intrinsic part of the seasonal round.” Such reserves were often repeatedly tapped over periods of weeks or months, many over multiple seasons, and some for a full year or more. Foods were often already maggot infested before they were placed in caches (i.e., in summer and autumn), and, by the time that the contents were lastly exhausted (commonly in winter and/or spring), they were almost invariably in an advanced state of putrefaction and filled with both living and dead maggots...
Imagine being a hungry child at school, only to have your hot lunch tray taken away and replaced with a cold sandwich in front of your classmates. This is the reality for thousands of children across the U.S. — all because their parents couldn’t afford lunch fees. Debt collectors are literally chasing down families over school meal debt. For children unable to pay for meals, not only have school districts served them separate food from their peers, but some students are forced to wear wristbands or stamps.A few years ago, Valerie Castile put this issue at the top of mind for legislators. She is the mother of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old cafeteria worker who was fatally shot during a police traffic stop in 2016. In his honor, Valerie used her son’s foundation to pay off student lunch debts, ensuring no child would be denied the chance to graduate because of existing debt. Philando’s compassion sparked a movement — and helped shift the conversation in Minnesota and across the country around school meal debt and universal school meals.Back in 2019, more than 40 students at Richfield High who had lunch account debts of $15 or more had their hot lunches removed from their trays, thrown in the trash and replaced with a cold lunch. This was an unacceptable form of humiliation that generated outrage and helped pave the way for real action in our state. Examples like this have been all too common in schools across the country...In Minnesota, I am grateful that the universal school meals bill was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz. Because of this crucial legislation, not only are children receiving free meals at school, but this legislation has effectively canceled all future school meal debt. It has transformed the lives of so many children across our state. If you can’t feed the bellies, you can’t feed the brains...
The artist rearranged the landscape to create a more harmonious image. For example, the lake and house would not have been visible in the same view in real life.So perhaps a sort of "compositional error." I considered other possibilities. I found the location of Google Maps and zoomed in to confirm that the watercourse in the painting is remote from the sea, so the bowing of the fishing nets is not the result of tidal flow.
In order to evoke a sense of the picturesque the architect Woods introduced an arch and bridge specifically designed to look old...End of story? Sort of. At least in terms of the faithfulness of the representation, Constable has been vindicated, and my original concerns are "much ado about nothing."
This painting was commissioned by the Rebow family, so Constable incorporated aspects that would be important to the family - including their eleven-year-old daughter Mary driving a donkey cart on the hillside to the left (inset right).
This book is being published in order to highlight a little-known aspect of animal husbandry in former times, namely the keeping, storing and cultivation of crucian carp (Carassius carassius ), carp (Cyprinus carpio), tench (Tinca tinca) and other cyprinids in man-made ponds... The construction of fishponds began across Europe, and increased rapidly during the twelfth and thirteenth century. At that time, fishponds were constructed on estates belonging to bishops, monasteries and royalty across England... The balance of evidence now indicates that fishponds were introduced into Britain after the Norman Conquest (1066) as a secular aristocratic initiative rather than a monastic innovation... The abundance of literary references to fishponds shows that their possession, along with mills, dovecotes and deer parks, was one of the privyleges of manorial landholders, a badge of rank as much as a practical utility... Many royal castles, palaces, manor-houses and hunting-lodges were equipped with fishponds... An account book for 1632–6 kept by the Duke of Suffolk’s estate steward records the cleaning-out of the Lulworth Castle fishponds at a cost of £9 4s 8d and the purchase of a ‘trammell nett’ (a long, narrow fishing-net held vertically in the water by floats and sinkers, consisting of two walls of large-meshed netting, between which a narrow-meshed net was loosely hung) for catching the fish... The fishing of Stonehead Lake in 1793 produced 2,000 carp ‘of large dimensions’, including one 8 kg specimen... By the 1740s the geometrically-shaped ponds associated with formal gardens were passing out of fashion. Some were abandoned, others altered, as revolutionary ideas of ‘landscape’ gardening encouraged the creation of larger lakes of more ‘natural’ appearance... Yet some advocates of agricultural improvement were still promoting fishponds as a contribution to the farming economy into the early nineteenth century... Frensham Great Pond was still emptied every five years for fishing-out as late as 1858...Constable completed Wivenhoe Park in 1816, so apparently aquaculture was still a going concern at that estate. I wonder if such efforts were revived during the relative scarcities of WWII. I'd especially like to hear any input from British readers of this blog regarding this subject.
In 2012 fewer than 10% of the egg-laying hens in the US were cage-free. Instead the vast majority were raised in enclosures that longtime animal welfare campaigner Josh Balk describes as “the size of a home microwave.” By then, Balk had been pushing his cage-free agenda for the better part of a decade, starting as a recent graduate of George Washington University working with students on their successful petition to remove eggs from caged birds from a campus market in 2005. Less than two years later, more than 100 college and university dining systems had joined the cage-free movement, despite a then-40% price premium over regular eggs...But the real turning point came in 2015. That year packaged-food companies including General Mills and Nestlé, as well as restaurant giants Cheesecake Factory, Starbucks, Subway and others, announced their own plans to achieve 100% cage-free egg status... The Golden Arches then beat its own timeline, announcing in February 2024 that it was sourcing all its eggs from hens that could spread their wings and walk around outside the confines of teeny-tiny metal cages...California passed Proposition 2 in 2008 in a landslide—with 63.5% of voters choosing to require that all egg-laying hens in the state, as well as pregnant pigs and veal calves, be housed in quarters that let them stand up, fully stretch limbs, lie down and turn around. Nine other states, including Arizona, Massachusetts and Michigan, have since passed similar measures. The year after Prop 2 passed, the California legislature mandated that as of 2015 all eggs sold in the state—the most populous in the country—would meet the Prop 2 standards...“There is a lot of talk about cage-free, but are people actually buying them?” he asked. Data from NielsenIQ offers a clear answer: yes. At US retailers, unit sales of eggs labeled “cage-free” were up about 16% for the 52 weeks ended on June 28. Pasture-raised eggs, a category that goes even further than cage-free, were up even more, at 25%. Unit sales of eggs overall were up a mere 1.6% in the same period...Now the Department of Justice is stepping in with a lawsuit against the state of California that it says will protect residents from the “real harm” caused by its “rogue” cage-free egg commitments and the ensuing higher prices, as USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in a press release. “Thankfully, President Trump is standing up against this overreach,” she said... Although the suit blames cage-free laws for higher prices in the state, there’s widespread agreement within the industry that price spikes have been a direct result of bird flu, not cage-free eggs...
"In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza...The traditional home oven is great for lots of things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pliable, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range tops out at 550 degrees...Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusiasts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you insert into your oven...Before making pizza, some recipes suggest that you should leave your oven at full heat for 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two... Even if your oven reaches 750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as the walls of a commercial pizza oven.. So there’s just less heat energy trapped in there..."
"Eyestalk ablation is the removal of one (unilateral) or both (bilateral) eyestalks from a crustacean. It is routinely practiced on female shrimps (or female prawns) in almost every marine shrimp maturation or reproduction facility in the world, both research and commercial. The aim of ablation under these circumstances is to stimulate the female shrimp to develop mature ovaries and spawn.Most captive conditions for shrimp cause inhibitions in females that prevent them from developing mature ovaries. Even in conditions where a given species will develop ovaries and spawn in captivity, use of eyestalk ablation increases total egg production and increases the percentage of females in a given population that will participate in reproduction. Once females have been subjected to eyestalk ablation, complete ovarian development often ensues within as little as 3 to 10 days. The practice was a major development for the commercialisation of shrimp farming in the 1970s and 80s since it enabled reliable production..."
