South Korea: Ban Sale of Dog Meat - Legalize Human Abortions

I recently read in the Korean Times that a nationwide ban on the sale of dog meat was gaining momentum, which I took to be a positive step for their country. Although I have no logical or moral reason against the eating of dog meat, I'm like many Westerners who are emotionally squeamish regarding the practice. I feel like my telling someone they can't eat dog meat however, is similar to someone telling me I can't eat beef or pork.

Still, if the Koreans choose to ban the selling of dog meat for food, then I am all for it.

It bothers me, on the other hand to learn that South Korea's Constitutional Court recently ruled the 66-year abortion ban must be lifted. The people of that country are too 'humane' to eat a certain type of animal, but their version of the Supreme Court is fine with the killing of unborn babies.

Former South Koren Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl said "As a dog owner, I am of course opposed to the consumption of dogs." He later called it "a matter of personal choice." Sounds just like American politicians discussing abortion.

Bread Run

 

I'm sure the situation is different in Manila or Cebu, but finding good quality sliced bread isn't always easy in our neck of the woods. Of course, finding good whole wheat bread is even more difficult than locating sliced white bread. Our family is partial to whole wheat, and we've found the Gardenia brand to be just what we want. It's reasonably easy to locate the bread in Dumaguete, but here in Sibulan, the only store that sells the Gardenia Whole Wheat is Mercury Drug.

Fortunately, the Mercury Drug is within bike riding distance for me. I'd ridden to the drug store in the past to purchase my blood pressure meds. and to the Gentle Paws pet shop next to the drug store for the occasional dog food run.

 

I decided to head that way this morning for a loaf. The most direct route is 2.8 kilometers (one way). I wanted to do a bit more riding this morning, so I planned to travel back thru Tubtubon - that route is 4.4 kilometers.

 

The whole trip would be 7.2 K - more in line with my usual morning run.

Unfortunately, Mercury Drug had no whole wheat bread in stock this morning. Not to waste the trip, I bought a loaf of the Gardenia sliced white bread; good, but not my first choice.

Land O Lakes Changes Their Packaging

Thanks to a meme I discovered on Facebook, I've learned that Land O Lakes is changing the logo they've been using on their butter packages.

The photo at the beginning of this post is reported to be of the new packaging.

The meme, posted below, makes a joke about the change being typically American - removing the native American, but keeping the land.

It surprised me to learn that Land o Lakes was making this change, but they've actually changed the packaging before. I hadn't realized that the portrait of the native American woman was very different from the one I remembered as a child. The full body image had been removed a number of years ago.

The packaging I remembered from childhood is shown below.

It seems a shame to me that children will no longer be familiar with the little game played with the Land O Lakes package from the 1950's.

Baking With Third Class Flour

I enjoy baking. Biscuits, brownies, cakes.

Baking at home isn't as popular here in Philippines as it is in the U.S. and locating a store that sells wheat flour isn't easy in Dumaguete. I can't recall ever seeing whole wheat flour. Fortunately, there is a grocery store here that usually has white flour in kilo bags.

At Lee Plaza grocery, I can normally find all purpose flour, cake flour and something called third class flour. I prefer to buy the cake flour for all my baking, though I will substitute the all purpose flour if the store is temporarily out of the cake flour. I've stayed away from the third class flour until a few days ago.

Because of the quarantine, I've been unable to buy either the cake flour or the all purpose. As an experiment, I bought 2 kilos of the third class flour. We all wanted biscuits a day or so ago and I used the third class flour for the first time. Actually, I was very surprised. The biscuits were as good - if not better - than the biscuits made with the other two flours.

Pancakes made from the third class flour, however were another matter entirely. I could not manage to make pancakes with this flour. The pancakes were an absolute disaster.

The only explanation that made sense to me was that the heating process involved in making pancakes is very different than baking in an oven.

To test this idea, I decided to bake banana bread (AKA banana cake in Philippines).

As can be seen in these two photos, the banana bread looks wonderful. The texture of the bread was perfection. The only problem was that in my haste, I had neglected to add sugar to the batter. Still, the banana bread tasted very good. It would have been better had I put in the proper amount of sugar, but in my mind the experiment was a success. Next time, I'll pay attention to what I'm going and put in all the ingredients.