Shrove Tuesday

 

Shrove Tuesday is the day before the 40 days of fast. In the past, at this day a bell would be  rung to call the people to confession, that means that all the people must have a good fast start, the meaning of a good start is to the confession and traditionally, Shrove Tuesday was a day for using up food that could not be eaten during Lent, so families were packing away their food. Therefore people made pancakes using leftover eggs and butter.

To Shrive also means to pardon.

Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent). Shrove Tuesday is observed by many Christians. It begun over 1000 years ago when a monk wrote: “In the week immediately before Lent everyone shall go to his confessor and confess his deeds and the confessor shall so shrive him.”

A special traditions on Shrove Tuesday is the pancake racing where people run a couple of kilometres with a pan filled with a pancakes in their hand. According to  a legend, pancake racing first started in the 15th century when a Buckinghamshire woman rushed to confess her sins while making pancakes and took her pan to church.

On this day they make pancakes, this began when people were still farming to survive and Shrove Tuesday was the last opportunity to use their eggs, milk and fats. The simple recipe to use up these ingredients was to combine them with some flour and make pancakes.

They don’t only eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, but also Paczki and Fasnacht . Packi is a traditional Polish dice, that is made of fried dough and filled with jam. Fasnacht is the English name for fried doughnut.

Several days leading up to Shrove, the streets are filled in Rio de Janeiro with large processions of people marching, singing and dancing, before they need to fast. They celebrate carnival not only in Rio, but also in New Orleans, Venice and Sydney and of course also Aalst.

The carnival of Aalst is the biggest carnival event of Belgium. The last day of carnival, Shrove Tuesday, they celebrate till really late and they drink a lot of alcohol. On this day the men dress as women, this tradition descend from the 19th century, when the men didn’t had the money to buy carnival clothes, so they were wearing the old clothes of their wives.

I think that nowadays Shrove Tuesday is kind of useless, we are just celebrating it because we like a reason to eat pancakes and there are a minimum of people who really know the meaning and origin of Shrove Tuesday.

Passover

Passover is a Jewish celebration, they celebrate their escape from the slavery in Egypt. In this tradition they thank God for their liberty.  This feast is celebrated all over the world by the Jewish people. They celebrate it the 15^th till the 22^nd of Nissan (a Jewish way to name the months)

The food they’re eating is special and symbolic. They’re eating for example Matzoh, a bread without yeast, it symbolise the time in the desert, where they hadn’t the time to rise the bread. Maror, a bitter herb, that symbolise the bitterness of slavery. Charoses a mixture of cinnamon, it represend the claying buildings. Beitzah stands for life and Karpas for hope. Zeroah is roasted shank of a lamb. Is symbolise the blood they had to put on the doors so God knew who Jewish was. And of course they couldn’t miss the wine, they have to drink 4 glasses for the four-fold promise of redemption.

I think that it’s a nice celebration because they’re celebrating freedom. The one thing I find odd it’s that the Jewish people are still celebrating Passover with the same intense passion.

Food Inc

The way meat is produced is horrifying. They’re beating and tormenting the animals, letting them in the slaughterhouses with too little space, so that there’re walking above each other, there’re already dying before they are slaughtered. Those animals were already sick before they arrived at the slaughterhouse, they were standing in their own droppings, their body is filled with stress-hormones and diseases. So why do we want to eat sick meat? Just because we like the idee to eat meat? All lot of people don’t know the way meat is produced, so it is the task of food documentary’s as Food Inc to open the eyes of the population.

But what we know for certain, it is that we are eating too must meat, we all know that by producing the meat, the greenhouse-gasses are floating more in the air and the world is heating up. Eating less meat can reduces the greenhouse-gasses, but not if you’re doing it alone.

What if we’re thinking that the world is an utopia, then the whole world would eat less meat. It is not possible that no one wouldn’t eat any meat, but there will be a change, a big change that people would eat less. Less of everything, there’re more people dying of obesity then there are people dying of the hunger. That says enough.

So will we make our own utopia and reduce our meat consuming so that more people will follow our lead?

Hunger Strikes

What is the goal of a hunger strike? To make a statement, to scream ‘stop it’ without saying one word?

People all over the world are protesting against almost everything and the supposed criminals how are in prison are doing the same thing but with a different strategy, they’re doing it on their own way. Their protest is a hunger strike.

A hunger strike is a silent protest, they’re refusing to eat. Nothing wrong with that.

But in many prisons, the prison where they torture their prisoners, they see it different. They don’t want the prisoners to die. Not because they want them to live, but because they want them alive.  They force food on the prisoners, with a psychiatrist or with violence. They do everything to keep them alive, but the prisoners can’t really live. So why would they keep on going in the system, they chose freedom over food, safety over violence. They just want to live a normal live.

Did you know

1. 100-150 gram of meat a day is more than enough

   The most people need circa O,8 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. So the limit off meat per day is 100-150 gram, and in a week you can eat maximum 500 gram meat, or else you will have health issues.

2. All the food with proteins

   Of course proteins are important for your muscles, organs, nervous system and blood. Proteins form the basis of our cells, so when the muscles are demised during sport your body will be able to repair itself with the proteins you get from your food. Proteins are not only in meat, but also in bread, pasta, rice, nuts, mushrooms, fish, milk and eggs.

3. Is a human really a carnivore?

    

   The human was mainly an omnivore. The survival changes were larger when the human was an omnivore, to be fussy was not an option, but now we can be fussy. So are we still omnivore’s? Through evolution meat has become more important, not only cultural, but also biological. But we’re still omnivores, because we still need vegetables to survive, more than we need meat.

4. Is it utopia that everyone will become a vegetarian?

   There are more and more people how are concerned about the way the meat is produced, and they try to reduce their meat consumption drastically. But in the other countries in development, the meat consumption will only rise. Not everyone will become a vegetarian, but there will be more people how will reduce they’re meat consumption.

5. The water needed so you can eat meat.

   The amount of water needed to grow crops for animals to eat and to drink is enormous. A single cow can drink up to 50 gallons of water per day. It takes more than 683 gallons of water to produce just 1 gallon milk and it takes more than 2400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. By going vegan, one person can save 219000 gallons of water a year.