logisticslad (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
logisticslad) wrote2007-07-14 09:59 pm
logisticslad) wrote2007-07-14 09:59 pm
Zucchini Bread Post Mortem
Thanks to everyone who offered their advice through my very first poll (which I can do now that I have a Permanent Account). I did indeed take it to my family BBQ, where my cousins and nephews devoured it with gusto (sorry puzzld1, there wasn't any left to save for you). I did feel kind of dirty enabling my young impressionable relatives develop a taste for the evil zucchini (but I suppose it beats buying them cigarettes or alcohol :-) Anyway, we had a lovely time celebrating my Dad's 80th birthday with my brother's family and my visiting cousins from Arizona.
For those who don't know, zucchini has become my Totem Vegetable - that of which I do not eat. This is because back in college, I spent 2.5 years working on The Great Zucchini Project for my undergraduate thesis. This consisted of growing thousands of baby zucchini plants in the dark and then harvesting their stems and mashing them up in a Cuisinart in order to extract proteins out of them to study for my experiments. I helped characterize the function of the growth hormone transport protein, which would allow the world to build bigger and better zucchini (It turns out that zucchini have the biochemical oddity of concentrating this protein in the base of their cells, making it much easier to isolate). This resulted in a successful thesis and my very first paper published in the journal Plant Physiology. After all this slaughter of countless zucchini plants, I completely lost my taste for it (not that I liked it much to begin with). The last time I knowingly ate zucchini was when my supposed "friends" (to those of you reading this, you know who you are) bought me an order of fried zucchini sticks to celebrate my thesis defense (oh the irony!). Since then, I have avoided the stuff in vegetable medleys, Chinese food, stealthily baked into chocolate cakes, and wherever else it may lurk. I have extended this dislike to the creation of a personal policy by which I do not consume anything that I have done experiments upon. In addition to zucchini, this list includes: rats, rabbits, scorpions, sea amenones, and pufferfish. Good thing I don't work on people !-}
puzzld1, there wasn't any left to save for you). I did feel kind of dirty enabling my young impressionable relatives develop a taste for the evil zucchini (but I suppose it beats buying them cigarettes or alcohol :-) Anyway, we had a lovely time celebrating my Dad's 80th birthday with my brother's family and my visiting cousins from Arizona. For those who don't know, zucchini has become my Totem Vegetable - that of which I do not eat. This is because back in college, I spent 2.5 years working on The Great Zucchini Project for my undergraduate thesis. This consisted of growing thousands of baby zucchini plants in the dark and then harvesting their stems and mashing them up in a Cuisinart in order to extract proteins out of them to study for my experiments. I helped characterize the function of the growth hormone transport protein, which would allow the world to build bigger and better zucchini (It turns out that zucchini have the biochemical oddity of concentrating this protein in the base of their cells, making it much easier to isolate). This resulted in a successful thesis and my very first paper published in the journal Plant Physiology. After all this slaughter of countless zucchini plants, I completely lost my taste for it (not that I liked it much to begin with). The last time I knowingly ate zucchini was when my supposed "friends" (to those of you reading this, you know who you are) bought me an order of fried zucchini sticks to celebrate my thesis defense (oh the irony!). Since then, I have avoided the stuff in vegetable medleys, Chinese food, stealthily baked into chocolate cakes, and wherever else it may lurk. I have extended this dislike to the creation of a personal policy by which I do not consume anything that I have done experiments upon. In addition to zucchini, this list includes: rats, rabbits, scorpions, sea amenones, and pufferfish. Good thing I don't work on people !-}