Doc's Blog

DON’T LET VARMINTS CHOMP INTO YOUR INCOME

This column addresses a subject that I haven’t previously covered. I’ll warn you: My wife, Kris, got the heebie-jeebies when I told her what I’d be writing about … RATS! I don’t intend to write anything crude. But I must confess that my former boss sent me to sensitivity training – three times – for graphically describing such stuff as this.

Rats, according to a report by AgWeb, are sex-crazed, eating monsters. Their modus operandi is to breed multiple times a day and eat to maintain their energy.

Given the chance, they will gobble up significant profit from any farm, feed mill or grain terminal on earth. Cities are also vulnerable to these varmints. Rats cause an estimated $20 billion in damages to the U.S. economy every year.

Mongolia in 1206 was inhabited by numerous tribes. They lived on the steppes (plains with virtually no trees), surrounded by the Altai, Khanghai and Khentii mountains on the Russian border. (I was on those steppes last winter while in Mongolia with the V.E.T. Net mission project of the Christian Veterinary Mission. The steppes are huge, surrounded by sky, mountains and, when I was there, -40^o F air.)

Now back to the 13th century – or just before the turn of that century – when a boy named Temujin and his brother were growing up fatherless. Because of this, they and their mother were shunned from their Mongolian tribe. They scavenged for food, picking through garbage, digging root vegetables and hunting for game while trailing behind the nomadic Mongol warriors.

Part I -- Cellular Time Travel

You probably remember the movie “Back to the Future,” starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. The story I share with you in this column, about an imaginative, daring, life-impacting research project, brought that movie to my mind.

Late one summer night in 2017 four researchers were planning to transport brain cells for a transplant from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to the Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. Bin Song, a stem cell biologist based at McClean Hospital outside Boston, headed up the team. He and his colleagues had spent years developing the protocol for creating these special human stem cells that would develop into dopamine-producing brain cells.

Late on a recent Thursday night I returned home from a week-long dairy consultation trip in Minnesota to find my wife, Kris, coughing and feeling poorly. Even though she put on her brave face, I could tell that Kris was suffering from more than a common cold.

Two weeks before, Kris and I attended a conference in Gainesville, Florida. It didn’t dawn on me until later that perhaps her illness traced back to our flight and stay there.

Since Friday is always a tough time to get in to see our doctor, I suggested that we go to the emergency room to get her checked out. Kris was too ill to argue.

Kris ended up staying in the hospital eight days, diagnosed initially with viral pneumonia, and eventually, coronavirus. She took ill before the virus was classified as COVID-19. She had never before been that ill.

What You Should Know About Chronic Wasting Disease

I can still remember as a 12-year-old seeing live deer for the first time, in the field near my childhood home in Auglaize County. With his Super-8 movie camera my uncle captured four deer jumping a fence after they scouted the field for several minutes. It was an awesome experience for our whole family; none of us had ever seen deer in the wild.

Fast forward to today: We see deer everywhere. We also see the consequences of their presence, like damaged crops, deer-vehicle collisions and trampled flower beds. Deer seem to take a special liking to the security of residential areas, within city limits, safe from hunters. As a plus for the city deer, some people delight in putting out food, apparently in case the moochers are still hungry after plundering their neighbors’ gardens.

With deer as plentiful as they are, we’re constantly on edge as we drive on highways and country roads, especially at dusk, fearful one might run out at any moment into our path or the side of our car or truck. The deer are probably on edge, too.

Remember some of the early franchise fast food restaurants? The oldest was White Castle, founded in 1921. Dairy Queen in 1940. And McDonald’s didn’t come along until 1948, but got revved up in 1955 when Ray Kroc purchased the business from the McDonald brothers.

Others include the regional favorite Burger Boy Food-O-Rama (BBF – Bigger, Better, Faster) and Burger Chef. The last BBF restaurant closed in 1996.

Forgive my reminiscing, but during my teenage years, BBF and Burger Chef were growing like gangbusters, before McDonald’s had reached a full head of steam.

One of the first meals I ever ate on my own, away from home, was at Burger Chef. Specifically, the Burger Chef at the intersection of North High Street and Woodruff Avenue in Columbus when, as a high school freshman, I attended an Ohio FFA competition on the Ohio State campus.

Last month, in Part 1 of the two-part account of my recent mission trip to Mongolia, I may have left you with a bad taste in your mind, as I recounted Mongolian hors d’oeurves I struggled to eat after a Sunday church service. I promise: no more mention of that here in Part 2.

I started my time in Mongolia in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, after 26 hours in the air in four flights, with a layover in Beijing and 13 time zones.

Ulaanbaatar has a population of 1.3 million, scattered over 50 square miles. Compare that to Columbus, where 900,000 people live in 15 square miles. Mongolia has a country-wide total population of approximately three million.

Ulaanbaatar sits on high plains, surrounded by four mountain ranges and the Gobi Desert. Part of the Gobi Desert lies in southeast Mongolia, and the rest in China’s Inner Mongolia.

When I was a boy, my Dad would often use “outer Mongolia” to describe the location of anyone or anything that was a distance from us – including the closest fertilizer plant to our farm, about 40 miles away.

He’d be impressed that I recently returned from outer Mongolia – or rather, the real-life independent nation of Mongolia, situated north of China and east of Siberia, more than 6,000 miles further away from home than that fertilizer plant. I was invited by the Christian Veterinary Mission (CVM) to participate in their V.E.T. Net mission project in Mongolia.

You may remember that I’ve written a few times in this column about false claims made against Roundup – namely, that it causes cancer. In my most recent column on the topic, I wrote about how several respected health and environmental organizations have cleared the popular herbicide of these charges, like the Environmental Protection Agency, Health Canada, the European Food Safety Authority and the German consumer health agency BfR.

Now I want to share with you a news report I recently ran across about how a New Mexico dairy operation is being threatened by cancer-causing nonagricultural chemicals that have contaminated the groundwater.

Many activists proselytize how bad animal agriculture is for the environment. Most of them operate on the premise that big is bad and that we should return to small family farms – or eliminate food animal agriculture altogether.

They also advocate a vegan diet. But I’m not concerned about people who choose that lifestyle for themselves. So long as they don’t mess with my getting a steak once in a while. Regardless of what they say, I’m convinced that we can’t rely solely on small family farms if agriculture has any chance of providing worldwide food security. This leads me to my topic for this month: the recent introduction of fake foods. Namely, the increasing presence and popularity of plant-based alternatives to dairy and meat. Are these fake foods based on good or bad nutrition? Well, it depends.