#and then its either fridge or oven time aka out of my control

[a-dash-in-the-middle]

going out in cold to buy sweets: no way

seeing if i have enough cocoa sugar and butter to mix it up: yeeea

[lexilooloo7]

Justice league fanfiction- Flash' s Silence Part 1?

My heart pounded the sound rapid against my ears the noise reminded me of my feet as they hit the pavement.

Worthless.

Too smart for your own good.

Too slow.

I could vaguely hear my fathers voice being tricked to determine what was reality and what was the past. My mind was rushing to catch up to my surroundings. I slowly opened my eyes wincing as a pain in my head began shutting my eyes and counting softly to try to stop the race of my heart. Sound finally catched up with me listening to hear a car honk it’s horn outside as the birds chirped away. I groaned as I sat up a pain in my chest. Sighing as I took in the bruising lack of nutrition leaving it more visible but I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat all my meals at the watchtower I was already burden enough. At least captain cold was locked up the rest of the rogues shouldn’t cause too much trouble til there captain gets out. Smirking I stood and stretched grateful for finally having a day off from work hopefully the newbies don’t mess up my crime scene to much.

Making the pull out couch and heading towards the kitchen it wasn’t anything special fridge oven microwave with a small counter space. It was more then most people had so it was good enough for wally. Pulling a speed bar from the cabinet while hoping up to sit on the counter. He frowned at the memories of the league chewing him out for advertising them but he donated all the money to the orphanage besides he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get the year supply of food the income from his job as a forensic scientist only helped so much with the amount he had to use to pay for food.

His thoughts were pulled away he finished off 3 bars in seconds saveing some for later. The taste wasn’t great but it was better then nothing. Turning towards the the oven the numbers were dimmed from the old age of the machine but the time was still clear.

“Shit” he murmured he was late for a league meeting

Again.

He quickly span pressing on his ring the lighting bolt made a soft click as his suit came to the bright red making him smile as it covered his fiery red hair making sure the mask covered his dull green eyes as while as hiding the bags that layed beneath them.

Running his way to the nearest beam while mumbling profanities.

“Beam me up” wally said as he put on a half forced smile

Wally still couldn’t get used to the feeling of it beaming him. It made his body tense as he lost control finally coming to he looked over and saw green arrow gave him a knowing smile.

“Late again flash” Green arrow teased

I laughed as the pain in my head increased slightly.

“You know me GA hot date I overslept” the lie slipped easily off his tongue wally could add up all the times he lied to his friends but it was better this way. Pain changes people. Trust less over think more. Shut people out. Maybe that’s why batman tends to keep glaring his way through things. His cheeks slightly blushed at the thought off Bruce.

Green arrow opened his mouth to reply but was quickly caught off with the flash giving him his signature grin.

“SorryGAgottsgobeforesupesandbatsgettomad” wally said

Taking off as words flying out of his mouth at a pace only a speedster could follow.

Wally entered the conference room passing by other league members but giving them nothing more then a grin and wave few returned it but wallys smile stayed in place.

 “Hey guys!” Wally said cheerfully and he hoped in his seat the lighting bolt painted on its back made him smile. He put his legs up on the table arms behind his head as he turned in the chair.

 “Whatsup?” He asked as Shayera Hol glared at him no longer hawk girl after the invasion but she was back with the league not many trusted her but wally knew she deserved forgiveness.

 “What took you so long?” She demmaned arms folded across her chest eyes set in a glare that had no real heat.

 “Gonna make us wait up ever time hotshot?” John Stewart aka green lantern asked with a slightly a small smirk

 “What can I say I had to go out for a big breakfast I mean there was a new breakfast place how could I not go!” Wally examined putting on a sheepish smile  

“Wally” Diana prince also known as wonder women said with a soft smile

 “But D waffles! How can you say no to waffles!” Wally said huffing the pain in his head grew stronger the thought of food not helping Batman showed a rare smile showing Bruce Wayne’s teeth but it was gone as quick as it came wally being the only one to have scene it. It made wally’s cheeks heat at the thought he was able to make batman smile. He drew his arm across hid chest grabbing his neck a habit he’s never been able to get rid of.

 “Please start coming on time flash we have important things to talk about” Superman started and the league meeting took off how it normally starts a lecture from supes he new Clark nly wanted to make him take the meetings more seriously. And wally did it was just hard to sit through meetings when everything goes so much faster for him. ________________________________________________________________

 “-nd that’s how I ended up barefoot doing the charleston!” Flash choked out laughing with supergirl and he finished his story.

 “That’s ridiculous!” Kara said with a bright smile

 “That’s not even the weirdest story I have” flash said smiling Kara rolled her eyes

. “That doesn’t surprise me.” She said fondly elbowing him.

 “Ouch! That hurt beautiful!” Flash called out as she walked to her lunch table. The more people he past the more looked at his try with disgust making wally hide the pain as he went to his normal table green arrow and black canary joining him on his walk.

 “Mind if we join you flash?” Canary asked. “I’d never pass a chance to sit with a pretty lady” flash said

 “Watch it” Green arrow said as he slung an arm over BC who Merly rolled her eyes use to flashes endless flirting.

 “Hey hotshot” GL said as they took a seat at the table known for the founders only people invited will come to sit with them Flash is the only consistent face scene at the table but then agian anywhere food is wally follows. It was one of the rare days all of the founders were there.

 “Heya GL” flash spoke with his cheeks stuffed the founders didnt flinch flashes careless way with food has taken awhile to get use to but now they’ve come to expect it.

 “Still haven’t learned any table manners?” Shayera asked teasingly she was like wallys big sister he knew she was joking but it still left a sting In his chest. Wally slowed taking a sip of water

. “Sorry” flash apologized making Diana’s Clarks and Bruce’s conversation still wally normally brushed off there jokes with a laugh but as they looked closely they could see he slowed His pace.

 “So flash how was your date?” GA asked while taking a bite of his sandwich Wally looks at him with a confused expression as he continued to eat.

 “What?” Wally asked as GA returned his expression

 “Green arrow said you were on a date long night he said you over slept” BC filled in

 “I thought you were late because you were at a new resturant?” Diana asked with a raised eyebrow. Wally frowned slightly making the founders look at him more carefully they’ve been especially over protective since the fight with brainiac. He quickly threw on a smile.

 “Eh it was fine there won’t be a second one thought.” Flash paused throwing some fries in his mouth.

 “Besides I figured if I was already late I had time to get somthing to eat” Flash said well laughing it was almost convincing. 

 Almost.

 “You know what they said always time for some pancakes” Wally grinned GA and BC rolled there eyes flash and food.

 “You got waffles” batman said gruffly

“Huh” Wally asked mouth full

 “You got waffles not pancakes” John said as the others shared a look but flash just gave his usual smile

 “Tomato tomato” flash replies with a shrug

 “Says the man who gave me and hour speech about the difference” Shayera said eyes narrowing but flash either ignored it or missed it because  all’s he did was laugh. Before joining in on green arrows and black canary conversation. Missing the looks the founders were sharing. The pain finally grew to much for wally to handle he couldn’t even take the time to finish his meal

. “Wel-p” flash said popping the p

 “I’m gonna go take a nap”

 “Don’t you want to finish?” Batman asked he could almost sense a tone of concern with the dark voice

 “Nah I’m full help yourself though bats” flash said

 taking off to his room with out another word. When he reached he quickly typed in his number to the keycode before making sure his door was shut and pulling off his mask maybe he could just lay here awhile.

[j-kaiwa]

Discussion Article July 22nd

Good enough to eat? The toxic truth about modern food

We are now producing and consuming more food than ever, and yet our modern diet is killing us. How can we solve this bittersweet dilemma?

Pick a bunch of green grapes, wash it, and put one in your mouth. Feel the grape with your tongue, observe how cold and refreshing it is: the crisp flesh, and the jellylike interior with its mild, sweet flavour.

Eating grapes can feel like an old pleasure, untouched by change. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved to eat them, as well as to drink them in the form of wine. The Odyssey describes “a ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes”. As you pull the next delicious piece of fruit from its stalk, you could easily be plucking it from a Dutch still life of the 17th century, where grapes are tumbled on a metal platter with oysters and half-peeled lemons.

But look closer at this bunch of green grapes, cold from the fridge, and you see that they are not unchanged after all. Like so many other foods, grapes have become a piece of engineering designed to please modern eaters. First of all, there are almost certainly no seeds for you to chew or spit out (unless you are in certain places such as Spain where seeded grapes are still part of the culture). Strains of seedless varieties have been cultivated for centuries, but it is only in the past two decades that seedless has become the norm, to spare us the dreadful inconvenience of pips.

Here is another strange new thing about grapes: the ones in the supermarket such as Thompson Seedless and Crimson Flame are always sweet. Not bitter, not acidic, not foxy like a Concord grape, not excitingly aromatic like one of the Muscat varieties, but just plain sweet, like sugar. On biting into a grape, the ancients did not know if it would be ripe or sour. The same was true, in my experience, as late as the 1990s. It was like grape roulette: a truly sweet one was rare and therefore special. These days, the sweetness of grapes is a sure bet, because in common with other modern fruits such as red grapefruit and Pink Lady apples, our grapes have been carefully bred and ripened to appeal to consumers reared on sugary foods. Fruit bred for sweetness does not have to be less nutritious, but modern de-bittered fruits tend to contain fewer of the phytonutrients that give fruits and vegetables many of their protective health benefits. Such fruit still gives us energy, but not necessarily the health benefits we would expect.

The very fact that you are nibbling seedless grapes so casually is also new. I am old enough to remember a time when grapes – unless you were living in a grape-producing country – were a special and expensive treat. But now, millions of people on average incomes can afford to behave like the reclining Roman emperor of film cliche, popping grapes into our mouths one by one. Globally, we both produce and consume twice as many as we did in the year 2000. They are an edible sign of rising prosperity, because fruit is one of the first little extras that people spend money on when they start to have disposable income. Their year-round availability also speaks to huge changes in global agriculture. Fifty years ago, table grapes were a seasonal fruit, grown in just a few countries and only eaten at certain times of year. Today, they are cultivated globally and never out of season.

What we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death in the world than either tobacco or alcohol

Almost everything about grapes has changed, and fast. And yet they are the least of our worries when it comes to food, just one tiny element in a much larger series of kaleidoscopic transformations in how and what we eat that have happened in recent years. These changes are written on the land, on our bodies and on our plates (insofar as we even eat off plates any more).

For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse. This is the bittersweet dilemma of eating in our times. Unhealthy food, eaten in a hurry, seems to be the price we pay for living in liberated modern societies. Even grapes are symptoms of a food supply that is out of control. Millions of us enjoy a freer and more comfortable existence than that of our grandparents, a freedom underpinned by an amazing decline in global hunger. You can measure this life improvement in many ways, whether by the growth of literacy and smartphone ownership, or the rising number of countries where gay couples have the right to marry. Yet our free and comfortable lifestyles are undermined by the fact that our food is killing us, not through lack of it but through its abundance – a hollow kind of abundance.

With Brexit, food worries in the UK have become political, with panicked discussions of stockpiling and the spectre of US imports of chlorine-treated chicken on the horizon. Woody Johnson, the US ambassador to the UK, has dismissed these worries, suggesting that US food standards are nothing to be concerned about. But the bigger question is not whether American standards are lower than those in Britain, but why food standards across the world have been allowed to sink so dramatically.

What we eat now is a greater cause of disease and death in the world than either tobacco or alcohol. In 2015 around 7 million people died from tobacco smoke, and 2.75 million from causes related to alcohol, but 12m deaths could be attributed to “dietary risks” such as diets low in vegetables, nuts and seafood or diets high in processed meats and sugary drinks. This is paradoxical and sad, because good food – good in every sense, from flavour to nutrition – used to be the test by which we judged the quality of life. A good life without good food should be a logical impossibility.

Where humans used to live in fear of plague or tuberculosis, now the leading cause of mortality worldwide is diet. Most of our problems with eating come down to the fact that we have not yet adapted to the new realities of plenty, either biologically or psychologically. Many of the old ways of thinking about diet no longer apply, but it isn’t clear yet what it would mean to adapt our appetites and routines to the new rhythms of life. We take our cues about what to eat from the world around us, which becomes a problem when our food supply starts to send us crazy signals about what is normal. “Everything in moderation” doesn’t quite cut it in a world where the “everything” for sale in the average supermarket has become so sugary and so immoderate.

At no point in history have edible items been so easy to obtain, and in many ways this is a glorious thing. Humans have always gone out and gathered food, but never before has it been so simple for us to gather anything we want, whenever we want it, from sachets of black squid ink to strawberries in winter. We can get sushi in Buenos Aires, sandwiches in Tokyo and Italian food everywhere. Not so long ago, to eat genuine Neapolitan pizza, a swollen-edged disc of dough cooked in a blistering oven, you had to go to Naples. Now, you can find Neapolitan pizza – made using the right dough blasted in an authentic pizza oven – as far afield as Seoul and Dubai.

We don’t just eat more burgers than our grandparents, we also eat more fruit, granola bars and 'guilt-free' kale crisps

Talking about what has gone wrong with modern eating is delicate, because food is a touchy subject. No one likes to feel judged about their food choices, which is one of the reasons why so many healthy eating initiatives fail. The rise of obesity and diet-related disease around the world has happened hand in hand with the marketing of fast food and sugary sodas, of processed meats and branded snack foods. As things stand, our culture is far too critical of the individuals who eat junk foods and not critical enough of the corporations who profit from selling them. A survey of more than 300 international policymakers found that 90% of them still believed that personal motivation – AKA willpower – was a very strong cause of obesity. This is absurd.

It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups since the 1960s. What has changed most since the 60s is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. Some of these changes are happening so rapidly it’s almost impossible to keep track. Sales of fast food grew by 30% worldwide from 2011 to 2016 and sales of packaged food grew by 25%. Somewhere in the world, a new branch of Domino’s Pizza opened every seven hours in 2016.

But this story isn’t just about one kind of food or one set of people. Across the board, across all social classes, most of us eat and drink more than our grandparents did, whether we are cooking a leisurely dinner at home from fresh ingredients or grabbing a takeaway from a fast food chain. Plates are bigger than they were 50 years ago, our idea of a portion is inflated and wine glasses are vast. It has become normal to punctuate the day with snacks and to quench our thirst with calorific liquids, from green juice and detox shots to craft sodas (which are just like any other soda, only more expensive). As the example of grapes shows, we don’t just eat more burgers and fries than our grandparents, we also eat more fruit and avocado toast and frozen yoghurt, more salad dressing and many, many more “guilt-free” kale crisps.

Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill can identify the year when snacking took off in China. It was 2004. Before that, the Chinese consumed very little between meals except green tea and hot water. In 2004, Popkin suddenly noticed a marked transition from the old Chinese ways of two or three meals a day towards a new pattern of eating. In collaboration with a team of Chinese nutritionists, he has been following the Chinese diet in snapshots of data every two or three years, conducting regular surveys of around 10,000-12,000 people. Back in 1991, Popkin found that at certain fixed times of year, there were treats to supplement the daily diet. During the mid-autumn festival, for example, people would eat moon cakes made from lard-enriched pastry stuffed with sweetened bean paste. But such feasting foods were ritualised and rare, nothing like a casual cereal bar.

In 2004, out of nowhere, as incomes rose, Chinese habits of snacking spread dramatically. The number of Chinese adults between 19 and 44 describing themselves as eating snacks over a three-day period nearly doubled, while the number of children between two and six eating snacks rose almost as much. Based on the most recent data, more than two-thirds of Chinese children now report snacking during the day. This is an eating revolution.

The curious thing about snacking in China is that to start with it actually made people healthier, because they were snacking on fruit: fresh tangerines and kumquats, bayberries and lychees, pineapple and pomelo. These were the foods that people had always aspired to eat, but couldn’t afford in the past. Phase two of snacking in China has been very different. “The marketing comes in,” Popkin tells me, “and boom! boom! boom! the snacks are not healthy any more.” As of 2015, the commercial savoury snack food market in China was worth more than $7bn. When I travelled to Nanjing last year, I saw people consuming the same Starbucks Frappuccinos and blueberry muffins as in London.

China is not alone. Almost every country in the world has experienced radical changes to its patterns of eating over the past five, 10 and 50 years. For a long time, nutritionists have held up the “Mediterranean diet” as a healthy model for people in all countries to follow. But recent reports from the World Health Organisation suggest that even in Spain, Italy and Crete, most children no longer eat anything like a “Mediterranean diet” rich in olive oil and fish and tomatoes. These Mediterranean children, who are, as of 2017, among the most overweight in Europe, now drink sugary colas and eat packaged snack foods and have lost the taste for fish and olive oil. In every continent, there has been a common set of changes from savoury foods to sweet ones, from meals to snacks, dinners cooked at home to meals eaten out, or takeaways.

The nutrient content of our meals is one thing that has radically changed; the psychology of eating is another. Much of our eating takes place in a new chaotic atmosphere in which we no longer have many rules to fall back on. On an early evening train journey recently, I looked up at my fellow travellers and noticed, first, that almost everyone was eating or drinking and second, that they were all doing so in ways that might once have been considered deeply eccentric. One man had both a cappuccino and a can of fizzy drink from which he was taking alternate sips. A woman with headphones on was nibbling an apricot tart, produced from a cardboard patisserie box. She followed it with a high-protein snackpot of two hard-boiled eggs and some raw spinach. Sitting across from her was a man carrying a worn leather briefcase. He reached inside and produced a bottle of strawberry milkshake and a half-finished packet of chocolate-caramel sweets.

More than half of the calorie intake in the US – 57.9% – now consists of ultra-processed food, and the UK is not far behind

We are often told in a slightly hectoring way that we should make “better” or “smarter” food choices, yet the way we eat now is the product of vast impersonal forces that none of us asked for. The choices we make about food are largely predetermined by what’s available and by the limitations of our busy lives. If you go into the average western out-of-town supermarket, you can choose from thousands of different sugary snack bars (many of them protein enhanced in some way) but only one variety of banana, the bland Cavendish.

It might be possible to eat in a more balanced way, if only we didn’t have to work, or go to school, or save money, or travel by car, bus or train, or shop at a supermarket, or live in a city, or share a meal with children, or look at a screen, or get up early, or stay up late, or walk past a vending machine, or feel depressed, or be on medication, or have a food intolerance, or own an imperfectly stocked fridge. Who knows what wonders we might then eat for breakfast?

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Our culture’s obsessive focus on a perfect physique has blinded us to the bigger question, which is what anyone of any size should eat to avoid being sickened by our unbalanced food supply. No one can eat themselves to perfect health, nor can we ward off death indefinitely, and the attempt to do so can drive a person crazy. Life is deeply unfair and some people may eat every dark green leafy vegetable going and still get cancer. But even if food cannot cure or forestall every illness, it does not have to be the thing that kills us. The greatest thing that we have lost from our eating today is a sense of balance, whether it’s the balance of meals across the day or the balance of nutrients on our plate.

“There are so many myths about food,” says Fumiaki Imamura, an epidemiologist who has spent the past 16 years in the west, studying the links between diet and health. One of the food myths Imamura refers to is the notion that there is such a thing as a perfectly healthy diet. He offers himself as an example. Like many Japanese people, he eats a diet rich in fish and vegetables, but he also eats a fair amount of supposedly “unhealthy” refined white rice and high-salt soy sauce. But Imamura is conscious that no population in the world eats exactly the combination of healthy foods that a nutritionist might prescribe.

Every human community across the globe eats a mixture of the “healthy” and the “unhealthy”, but the salient question is where the balance falls. Take ultra-processed foods. The occasional bowl of instant ramen noodles or frosted cereal is no cause for panic. But when ultra-processed foods start to form the bulk of what whole populations eat on any given day, we are in new and disturbing territory for human nutrition. More than half of the calorie intake in the US – 57.9% – now consists of ultra-processed food, and the UK is not far behind, with a diet that is around 50.4% ultra-processed. The fastest growing ingredient in global diets is not sugar, as I’d always presumed, but refined vegetable oils such as soybean oil, which are a common ingredient in many fast and processed foods, and which have added more calories to what we eat over the past 50 years than any other food group, by a wide margin.

The highest-quality overall diets in the world are mostly to be found not in rich countries but in Africa

In 2015, Imamura was the lead author on a paper in the medical journal the Lancet, which caused a stir in the world of nutrition science. This team of epidemiologists – based at Tufts University and led by Professor Dariush Mozaffarian – has been seeking to map the healthiness, or otherwise, of how people eat across the entire world, and how this changed in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010. The biggest surprise to come out of the data was that the highest-quality overall diets in the world are mostly to be found not in rich countries but in Africa, mostly in the sub-Saharan regions. The 10 countries with the healthiest diet patterns, listed in order with the healthiest first, came out as: Chad, Mali, Cameroon, Guyana, Tunisia, Sierra Leone, Laos, Nigeria, Guatemala, French Guiana.

Meanwhile, the 10 countries with the least healthy diet patterns, listed in order with the unhealthiest first, were: Armenia, Hungary, Belgium, USA, Russia, Iceland, Latvia, Brazil, Colombia, Australia.