I’ll get to the topic presented in the title, but first I’ll give you a quick recap of our day in The Birthplace of America. Laura left this morning (the unearthly hours of the morning), and we will miss her and her stick shift driving skillz. We spent the morning relaxing. I cheered on USA in the Olympics, specifically in sailing. I promise it’s more interesting than it sounds.
As you can tell, there wasn’t going to be much of note to write about today. Until we experienced an enlightening dinner conversation, I was going to tell you about fridge phenology. Yes, with only four Echinacea still flowering we are missing it. But that was before our local expert on fiber, Lea, began what was to be a life changing conversation.
Lea suggested that eating the recommended daily fiber intake was nigh impossible, so I looked up my daily suggested fiber intake. You too can do this on the USDA website. It recommended I eat 38 grams of fiber a day. It was not until later I realized how much this was. Helpfully, the USDA also suggested that I have over 50 grams of protein a day and very surpr
isingly suggested I have 0 grams of arsenic in my diet. Being the curious budding scientists we are, we played a game called guess the amount of fiber a vegetable contains. We were having braised leeks for dinner, so we quickly found out that your average 89 gram leek contains only 1.6 grams of fiber. If you do the math, I would have to eat over 23 leeks a day to satiate my fiber needs. You must be thinking, “Wait, there must be a better way to get my fiber.” I’m sorry to say after searching the fiber content for over 5 vegetables (a massive sample size if you would like my opinion), nothing had a great amount of fiber. An average medium size potato (213 grams to be precise), contains 4.7 grams of fiber while a large potato (369 grams) contains 8 grams of fiber. That is, as Scott would say, some basic math. This seemed like a lot to me until I realized I would have to eat over eight potatoes a day to satisfy my needs. That’s 1722 grams of potatoes or, for those of you who like the imperial system of measurement, 3.7 lbs of potatoes a day. We now arrive at the conundrum of our discussion of nutrition. How does one eat 23 leeks in a day and still manage to eat enough protein? We tried to discover this secret of nutrition, but then realized we would be better off just eating some ice cream and ending our day on a high note.
A local sunflower patch
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