Ingredients for healthy beverages are free for the taking outdoors if you can get past the introduction stage.
Hemlock tea, one of my favorites, is a good example. This is not the recipe poor Socrates used, which was made with the toxic perennial herb, poison-hemlock. The kind I serve is a vitamin-C-rich infusion of needles and young shoots from the stately eastern hemlock tree, Tsuga canadensis. This hemlock tea is great with a touch of honey, and the good part is that you can drink it more than once. Plus it’s fun to see the reaction when I offer it to guests. » Continue Reading.
The ‘fungus among us’
We humans fancy ourselves the masters of our own destiny, or at the very least, feel that we make choices of our own free will. The idea that someone or something might be able to control our thoughts and actions is terrifying. We desperately hope that “mind control” is limited to Jedi mind tricks in Star Wars, or mass brainwashing in The Manchurian Candidate; pure fiction. Yet the clichéd phrase “the devil made me do it” suggests that from time to time, we might fall victim to outside influences.
Well, real-life research has shown that if we act against our better judgement, the cat might be to blame. Even more bizarre is the fact that, beyond a doubt, our intestinal bacteria can strongly influence our emotions and behavior. That’s right; it could be that faulty feces are at fault. And for insects, their excuse is “a fungus made me do it.”
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