The billion-decade pie recipe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geology, cosmology, astronomy, nucleosynthesis, cooking

This chart was mentioned in How to Make an Apple Pie From Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, From the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang, by Harry Cliff. The book's title, indeed its raison d'être, is a humorous aside by Carl Sagan on an episode of Cosmos: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist and researcher on the Large Hadron Collider, specifically the experiment/detector called LHCb. The "b" means "beauty", for the Beauty Quark, which most physicists now call the Bottom Quark (the "t" and "b" quarks were initially called "truth" and "beauty"). The short answer to "What is 'scratch'?" would be, "Something smaller than a quark." Quarks are what we call the (possibly) indivisible bits that make up protons and neutrons, which with electrons, form atoms.

I think of the book as a microscope that uses higher and higher powers to probe the makeup of the universe. Dr. Cliff actually began his investigation by obtaining an apple pie and pyrolizing a few grams. That gave him a rough estimate of the phases present, gas/vapor, liquid, and solid. The final product of pyrolysis is charcoal, although he found later that he didn't cook it hot enough; his charcoal still had some volatile stuff in it. It matters little: the end product was mainly carbon, the "gateway element" to producing the entire suite of elements from hydrogen and helium. The chart above shows the various "ovens" in which the elements were made.

Much of the book is history, the history of the discovery of the chemical elements during the Enlightenment, then the discovery of subatomic particles a bit more than a century ago. Although I've read the stories again and again (because writers seem compelled to cover it all every time), I find it enjoyable to rehearse the way alchemy became chemistry, and experiments with "cathode rays" and pitchblende came together to discover that atoms (from "a-tomos", "un-cuttable") are actually cuttable, and the "easy" sub-parts are further cuttable.

The book skips over the range of magnification available to a light microscope. There is nothing about the plant cells in the apples, or the microstructure of a perfectly baked crust. We go from some burnt pie right to atoms, which can only be distinguished when the magnification exceeds 10,000,000X, the magnification of this STM image. The best electron microscopes are hard pressed to deliver magnifications greater than 1,000,000X. Thus STM, or Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, has to be used. The white spheres here are atoms of lead, on a silicon surface.

The reason for this omission is soon apparent. The author's quarry is smaller compared to an atom of lead than that atom is to a sports arena.

An ordinary light microscope "maxes out" when viewing items smaller than half a micrometer (or micron, or µ). An E. coli bacterium is about 2µx6µ. The photons of green light, with a wavelength of 0.55µ, have an energy of 2.25 eV. One eV, or one electron volt, is the energy of an electron that has "fallen" across the gap between an anode and a cathode when the voltage is 1V. Photon energies in the range 1.75 eV to 3.1 eV are used by the retinas of our eyes to detect "light". Things smaller than about 0.5µ, or 500 nm (nanometers), can only be studied using "light" of a shorter wavelength. And here is the important principle: shorter wavelength means higher energy per photon (or other particle).

Why is it hard to "see" an atom? It is because they are so much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The lead atoms in the image above are about 0.35 nm across. That's 0.00035µ. The silicon atoms in the surface below them are much smaller, with an interatomic spacing of 0.078nm. An electron microscope with beam voltage of a million volts uses electrons with energy of 1 MeV (million eV), and a wavelength of 0.0012 nm. However, such an electron beam simply blows off most of the electrons from the atoms you want to look at, while a more "modest" beam of about 16,000 volts, and a useful magnification of a million, can produce images without causing total disruption. The STM technique sidesteps this by using atomic forces to get higher-resolution information, with a limit in the range of 10 to 20 million X magnification.

When the biggest constituents of atoms were discovered, electrons, protons, and neutrons, they were soon found to be a whole lot smaller than the atoms. One analogy states that an atom of hydrogen magnified to the size of a stadium (a magnification of two trillion) would be "seen" to be an electron cloud with a speck at its center the size of a small pea, perhaps 6mm diameter: the proton.

How do you "see" a proton? Since it is about 50,000 times smaller than the atom, you would need 50,000 times the energy. At a minimum, 16,000 eV x 50,000 or 800,000,000 eV, just under a billion eV (GeV). Now, let's think a minute. A million-volt power supply needs a lot of insulation. In radio, the rule of thumb is that in dry air a spark will jump about a centimeter per 10,000V. So a million-volt potential can jump at least a meter. I remember seeing a picture of an early million-volt electron microscope. It was eight feet high. What do you do with a billion volts? Such a voltage can jump a few miles. Indeed, lightning has voltages in the billion-to-ten-billion-volt range.

Here it gets fun. Particle accelerators finesse the situation by using magnets and rhythmic pulses to take a bunch (that's the scientific term) of electrons or other charged particles from an "easy" energy of 10,000 eV to higher and higher energies. It's sort of like swatting a tetherball again and again to make it go around faster and faster, except these "tetherballs" are soon going 99% of the speed of light, or more.

When I worked at Cal Tech (as a machinist), I worked part of the time in a room with a dismantled synchrotron about 30 feet in diameter. Energetic electrons or protons lose energy when you turn them to go around in a circle, so the more energy you want, the bigger the circle has to be. The LHC, where Dr. Cliff works, is about 8.5 miles in diameter. It produces beams of protons with energies that exceed 10 trillion eV. It also runs them in both directions, and steers them into head-on collisions, so you get enormous penetration. All that to "see" the insides of particles a few thousand times smaller than protons, which is what it took to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson (but not see into its insides…if it has any).

Chapters and chapters earlier, the author discussed where the atoms came from. The chart that begins this article shows where. Things we can eat, and we ourselves, are primarily CHON, that is, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Hydrogen makes up 75% of the weight of the matter in the universe. Or, at least, of the matter that is either visible or potentially visible because it can respond to electromagnetic energy ("light"). We need to ignore dark matter and dark energy here, because we still have no idea how to interact with them. Most carbon and nitrogen are made in "dwarf" stars, main sequence stars smaller than 1.25 times the mass of the Sun. The jury is still out on whether the white dwarf stars that result from the demise of a main sequence dwarf star have to be blasted apart to release carbon and nitrogen, or if the red giant phase releases enough to amount for what we see in the sky. Most oxygen, at least most of it that gets into the interstellar medium, is forged during supernova explosions. So at an atomic level, that's where the basic ingredients of the apple pie arise.

The reason for using big atom smashers like LHC to dig into the protons for their smaller bits (quarks and gluons, mainly), and into the quantum fields that modulate (or create) their properties such as mass, is that we aren't really back to "scratch" yet. By the end of the book, if we have understood it all (I am not quite there yet), we have the beginnings of matter traced back to the end of the first one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. 

Does that sound pretty good? Not to a cosmologist! The Big Bang is thought to have begun with everything we might call space and time located within a radius of about the Planck Length, which is about 1.6x10^-35 meters. The initial "Bang" got rolling in Planck Time, or about 5.4x10^-44 seconds. Let's just call it 10^-45 sec., and compare it to a trillionth, or 10^-12 sec. There are about 10³³ Planck Times in a trillionth of a second; a little matter of a billion trillion trillion of them. A lot happened that we will be hard pressed to probe. The author describes the ultimate particle accelerator, wrapped around the center of the galaxy (where it has a chance of being gravitationally stable), with a diameter of several thousand light years. The biggest we have a chance of building might wrap the Earth at the equator. The particle bunches would circle the planet seven times per second, so we have long enough lives to do experiments with it, with energies as high as perhaps 50,000 TeV. That's still a long way from the Planck Energy, but it might be close enough to be "interesting".

Future beings with very long lifetimes—because each experiment takes a million years or more—might probe the Planck Length using the Galactic Collider. But beyond a certain level of energy, the only output of the experiment will be tiny black holes. According to Hawking's principle, such a black hole would soon explode into a shower of energetic particles, but they would carry no information about what was going on inside, so the fancy machine would simply be a huge fireworks generator.

The book ends with a description for beginning from scratch, to the point where matter exists, including a middling size planet with apple trees and wheat fields and such. Then it ends with a pretty good recipe for making an apple pie. There ain't a quark anywhere that can explain the great taste of fresh apple pie.

A serendipitous friendship

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, friendships, food, cooking

Isabel Vincent was nearing the end of a toxic marriage. Her friend Valerie had just lost her mother and was worried about her father Edward, a 90-year-old. She asked Isabel to "look in on him". Over the next few years, a friendship blossomed, and Ms Vincent's book Dinner With Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship, is an intimate peek into it.

Just a touch of a spoiler: Though at the end of the book Edward is still living, at age 94 he is getting frail and has just hosted what he calls "the last supper". The eighteen chapters of the book focus on eighteen meals, most of which Edward cooked for Isabel or for her and a few others. Edward is an extraordinary man. Like many self-taught polymaths, he had a few careers, not just the usual one or two. Along the way he learned to cook very, very well.

Isabel and Edward each had a huge need. He was suddenly adrift, having been widowed after 68 years with an extraordinary woman. She was "going under for the third time" as her marriage dissolved around her. She needed his perspective, along with the comfort of a warm and exceptionally delicious meal, about weekly. He needed a focus outside himself, a way to divert his grief into caring for another.

In the end, each felt the other had rescued them. Need I say this was not a romance? Except in the way that every deep friendship forges a bond nearly as strong as a happy romance. Most folks know the Bible verse, "It is better to give than to receive." Both Isabel and Edward felt they were receiving something precious. Neither could fathom the value of what they were giving. That is the best kind of gift, the best kind of friendship.

Would YOU eat there?

kw: cooking, hygiene

I have heard a number of times, and heard again this morning, someone say on the radio, "If you see what's going on in a restaurant kitchen, you'll never eat there." It is a bit like the statement, "Politics is like sausage: You don't want to watch it being made." It also reminds me of the summer I worked in a meat packing plant. It made it hard for me to eat meat until after I left. But I have a stronger stomach now.

The fact is, if you really watch what goes on in your own kitchen, would you be willing to eat the food? Most of us are careful enough, but there are plenty of things we do that are riskier than the standards require of restaurant kitchen workers. Do you wear latex or nitrile gloves to prepare food? Do you wash things as frequently as they do? Do you have a 5-second rule for things dropped on the floor (the restaurant doesn't: into the trash it goes!)?

We've all been told, "Don't leave food out for more than two hours at room temperature." Every church potluck lunch I've been to, the people bring hot food at 9:30-10:00 AM, let it sit on the counter until Noon or 12:30, (some of it is re-heated on a steam table or in a microwave), and it has all been sitting there for two-and-a-half to three hours before any of it is served. Nobody gets sick, though.

Then there's Thanksgiving. Most Thanksgiving dinners I've been to, or hosted, the meal is served pretty promptly after cooking, but then people hang around and "graze" for four to six hours. Sometimes more.

I don't know about you, but I have to have a bit of confidence that my immune system is up to the task, considering that it evolved during the 100,000 years when there was no refrigeration, and some foods were "left out" for days. I know what goes on in a Chinese kitchen—a great many of my close friends are Chinese—but that doesn't keep me from greatly enjoying the occasional pig-out at the Chinese buffet place, or eating at the church's potluck.

Pie night

kw: cooking, recipes

I made an apple pie this afternoon, part of getting ready for a potluck lunch tomorrow. Our apple tree is bearing heavily this year, and its apples are just tart enough to make great pies. Second to good apples, the key to a great pie is the crust.

I learned how to make pies from the old (1967) Betty Crocker's Good-n-Easy Cookbook. Here is the recipe for a two-crust apple pie, as I make it.

(1) The filling

• About six apples of a sweet-tart variety such as Jonathan, McIntosh, or Winesap. Enough that when cut up they measure 5-6 cups, loosely piled. If you use Delicious or another sweet-only variety, add a tsp of lemon juice when you mix the sugar with the apples below.
  
• 3/4 cup sugar
  
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2-3 Tbsp cornstarch

Peel, core and cut the apples into pieces not more than 1/2 inch thick (1.3 cm). Pile in a bowl. Mix the sugar, spice and starch well and pour over the apples. Set aside.

(2) The crusts

• 1-3/4 cups flour
• Half cup vegetable oil
• 3 Tbsp cold water
• 4 sheets wax paper, longer than the width
• A ceramic, glass or metal pie dish that measures ten inches across the rim
  

Stir the oil into the flour with a fork until well mixed. Let it stand a minute or two then sprinkle the cold water over the mixture and stir again until well mixed. It should be easy to form into a ball. Split the ball into two.

Clean the tabletop. Wet with a nearly dripping wet dishrag and set a piece of wax paper, shiny side up, on the wet surface. Put one half the ball of dough on the paper and flatten a little with your hand. Top with a second piece of wax paper and roll it between them until it is a circle that just matches the width of the paper. Carefully strip off the upper wax paper. Lift the crust using the lower piece of wax paper and invert over the pie dish. Position the crust and peel the paper from the crust. Fit it into the dish so it overlaps all around. Fold up and raise the edge a little.

Now mix the apple-sugar-spice and pile into the crust in the pie dish. Set aside. I find it wise to put aluminum foil in the bottom of the oven to catch drips from the pie. Apple pies always drip. You can see three areas of overflow in the picture. Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Re-wet the table top. Roll out the second ball of dough like the first, strip off one paper, invert using the other piece of wax paper and position over the apples in the pie dish. Carefully strip off the wax paper. Seal all around the edge, either folding the top crust under the edge of the lower crust, or just smooshing them together. Flute if you like. Cut a few slits into the top crust for steam to escape. Otherwise the crust will balloon and burst. The apples will settle as they cook, so the crust needs to lower onto them.

(3) Cook and serve

Cook at 400 F on the middle rack for an hour. I check it at 50 minutes to see if the edge is getting too brown. The pie above is just exactly cooked right. A browner edge will have a burnt taste. The cook book specifies 425 F and using a curved strip of foil around the edge of the pie so it doesn't overcook. I've found a lower temperature and a full hour of cooking works best.

When you take out the pie, put it on a wooden board or pie rack to cool. It can be eaten in half an hour to an hour, once it is cooled enough not to burn the tongue. Hot, sugary apple juice is quite a bit hotter than boiling water!

Pie crust made with liquid oil is much tastier and flakier than crust made with lard or butter. Try it!

A new standard for olive oil?

kw: observations, food, cooking

I was taken aback by seeing a new Crisco advertisement that promotes three kinds of olive oil for three purposes. The three Crisco grades are Extra Virgin, Pure, and Light. E-V is touted for salads and other "cold" uses, Pure for sauteing, and Light for highest temperature use.

Let me say at the outset that I've used only extra virgin olive oil for decades, for all purposes, with no problems. I suspect this is a marketing scheme to get us to have three bottles of product where one will do.

According to Pacific Sun, extra virgin olive oil has these characteristics:

"In scientific terms Extra Virgin olive oil is oil that has a free fatty acid percentage of less than 1%.

"In order to be Extra Virgin olive oil must be extracted only from olives, the fruit of the olive tree, and can not undergo any treatment other than washing, decanting, centrifuging and filtering. It excludes oils obtained by the use of solvent extraction or re-esterification methods, and those mixed with oils from other sources."

Their web site describes all the accepted grades of olive oil. "Pure" and "Light" are not among them, although "Lite" is, as a designation of certain mixed oils.

Will Crisco succeed in their attempt to set up a new naming standard? They may, but I hope not.

Life in the food lane

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, cooking

Moira Hodgson is presently a food critic. I tend to think of critics as professional complainers. However, at least in her book It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food, Ms Hodgson appreciates more than she condemns. Having grown up all around the world—her father was in the British Diplomatic Corps—and having learned to enjoy a range of food most folks would find astonishing, she has the taste buds to fairly evaluate just about any cuisine.

When one's earliest memories include being served fine food aboard a cruise ship upon which the family must spend a few weeks traveling half across the globe, one's standards get set quite high, quite early. Growing up multilingual tunes the ear to words as the food trains the palate. Thus, the author's primary vocation has been writing, and much of that writing has been about food, from cookbooks to a recipe column to restaurant reviews.

Growing up as she did, just a few years older than the leading edge of the baby boom, she experienced the forefront of the various revolutions we tend to lump together as "the 60's", societal, sexual, political. She seems as ill-attuned as I am to politics, but social upheaval seemed like home country to her: she'd already lived in Beirut, Saigon and divided Berlin (a few among many), so when Western society seemed to flip upside-down, the skills one applied to moving between countries applied equally well to one's country becoming a very "other" place.

Her relationships with men were as various and fraught as her culinary gyrations. Though she has now settled down with a husband and son, there seemed little likelihood of domestic tranquillity in the first thirty-plus years of her life. Serial monogamy (without benefit of clergy), spiced with side affairs was as much her style as her men's.

Her extraordinary life story is wrapped around food, however, and this is her life's love and life's work. The book includes 28 recipes, the most eclectic collection I've seen, from Steak Tartare or Chilled Lemon Soufflé to Lamb Tajine with Green Olives or Wonton Soup (of a sort quite different than you'd make from the recipe on the Wonton skin wrapper). The earlier privations of postwar England are reflected in recipes for Wartime Sponge Cake (which contains dried egg) and Wartime Cream (which contains no cream).

When I'm asked where I grew up, I usually reply, "All over the place," though the "place" I mean is the United States. Ms Hodgson really did grow up all over the place, that place being the Northern Hemisphere. She has some statement about being south of the Equator in Saigon, but that city is firmly North, by almost eleven degrees. Singapore, a port of call if not a residence, is quite a bit closer, being one degree North. Such quibbles aside, it is an extraordinary and enjoyable read about an uncommon life.

Do you dare eat mindfully?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, food, farming, hunting, gathering, cooking, industrial agriculture, organic agriculture, polemics

When I can't easily categorize a book, I know I am on to something good. The library classification is (DD) 394.12: Culture:Food:History, which goes to show how much they know.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" by Michael Pollan is chronicle, psychological journal, history, exposé, and thanksgiving paean all in one.

What is the omnivore's dilemma? In two parts: "What shall I eat (given I can eat almost anything)?" and "What must I avoid eating?" A large chunk of our overlarge brains is devoted to the latter question: a powerful recognition and memory organ. Once that question is answered, the first is easy: "Whatever yields the most nutrition for the least effort."

In a sense, you could make a decision tree: Fruits first (fast calories), then fat (dense calories), then starch (calories to store plus protein), finally meat (protein plus fat). Why fruit before fat? Fat has twice the calories per gram. However, fat is slower and usually a small proportion of a food, whether you're eating it from plant, fish, fowl, or mammal.

The dilemma today is, in the West and America in particular, there's so much food the farmers are going broke because we can't eat it all, so prices are low, lower than the cost of farming. Thus, Pollan pursues the matter in three stages: the Industrial Agriculture establishment, the "beyond organic" end of the "organic foods" spectrum, and the hunter-gatherer opportunities that still exist on the margins of Western society.

Most foods eaten by most Americans are produced from corn grown on mega-farms. Much of this (2/3 or more) is fed to cattle—which don't do well on a corn diet, thus the need for humongous amounts of antibiotics and supplements. Of the rest, a little actually is found in the produce section of your local grocery, or in cans in the canned foods section. Most is "refined" and "processed" to make corn syrup, "high fructose" corn syrup (HFCS, that gets into almost everything in some amount), and tens of thousands of "additives" such as xanthan gum (a thickener) and the wax that makes apples shiny. A small amount is made into ethanol, for fuel or for tippling, or as a chemical feedstock. Chapter 1 tells the story: "Corn's Conquest".

The author's growing disgust with this phenomenon is clear in the seven chapters devoted to it. I recalled the summer I worked at a slaughterhouse. I was a night worker, one who gathered scraps and bones for the hasher. The "hash" was rendered into a food supplement to be fed back to cattle in the corn-driven feedlots. This is the source of Mad Cow Disease, though nobody knew that thirty years ago.

One night, I got there early, and wandered over to the killing floor. Things have changed since, and the modern process is well described in Pollan's book. What I saw was this: animal after animal brought into the squeezer through a door that dropped behind him or her. A Killer (that's the title) with an air-powered stunner (8" rod, 3/4" diameter) "stuns" each animal, right between the eyes. It drops, a Hooker loops a metal chain about a rear ankle, and the animal is hoisted overhead. A Slitter takes a long knife and cuts the top of the aorta, releasing the blood, which sluices into a floor drain. The blood empties in seconds, and the overhead conveyor swings the animal to be skinned, and so on through the process. In ten minutes, two new "sides" are in the cooler, any desired bits of offal (mainly heart and tongue) are packaged for their particular use, and the rest goes into a hash hopper: head, guts, tail, hooves, and extra fat.

One animal didn't drop right away. The Killer had missed. A backup Killer shot the animal with a .30-cal rifle, but only after a third backup fellow had hit it a couple times with an electric prod to shock it to momentary stillness. I didn't eat beef again until a few weeks after I left that job.

Since it began thirty years ago or so, the "organic" movement has become industrialized also. A few farms have resisted becoming quasi-"inorganic", and are showing the way one may build a farm economy on grass rather than corn. Few people realize that mixed grazing grasses yield quite a bit more calories per acre for animal feed than corn does. But you need to manage it differently. One place that is doing so, in the East at least is Polyface Farm in virginia.

The author really throws himself into his subject. In the first section, he bought a calf and paid for it to be fed, first on a grass farm, then in a feedlot in Kansas. He visited it in the feedlot, and did his best to track the various branches of the river of corn that the beef, pork, and chicken industries rely on. Company secrecy prevented that.

For the second part, he worked a week at Polyface Farm, and learned what he could in that time of their ways. The grass there is part of a rotation that feeds cattle, fowl, and swine, so that each animal plays its part in both eating, feeding (with its manure), and cleaning up the pastures (by eating pests, for example). Sure, a Polyface chicken, egg, or steak costs more, but the author finds it is worth it.

It made me wonder: do we have farm-loving manpower enough to run a large portion of our agriculture that way? I feel lucky to live near a "farmer's market" that contains many booths with Amish providers and workers. I can visit an Amish farm and see how the animals and crops are grown.

For each section, he prepared—and served to himself and others—a meal based on that "industry". For the first, the "preparation" consisted of hitting a McDonald's with his family. For the second, he cooked "industrial-organic" foods for one meal, and grass-fed Polyface chicken, eggs, and beef for another. They were, he relates, both superior to even good restaurant food from the Corn-based agricultural industry.

For the third section, Pollan had to learn to shoot and hunt. He was determined to prepare a meal that contained (nearly) nothing he'd bought. In monetary terms, this probably cost him the most. Not a penny to a Wal-Mart, Safeway, or even a farmer's market. But guns aren't cheap, and neither is the 16-week course you must take to obtain a hunting license in California. Neither is the travel to this mountain range to hunt morels on a "burn", nor to another to hunt boar. And, he reports, the emotional costs to this formerly non-hunter, almost anti-gun fellow.

In his "hunter-gatherer" persona, he reminded me a bit of Blanche duBois, who reported she "benefited from the kindness of strangers." He was much blessed to garner the expertise of several infinitely patient mentors in the art of usufruct, of taking what the land freely offers, including a cherry tree overhanging a relative's fence.

I remember fondly the days my wife and I could wander the Black Hills, gathering fruit: chokecherries, "sarvis"berries, and wild plums for jelly or jam; and dolgo crab or feral Jonathan apples for pies and cobblers. To this day, there's nothing like chokecherry jelly. And I am happy to have a pippin apple tree (grown from a root sucker that overtook a "name" variety), source of pies and apple butter aplenty. The local supermarket planted serviceberry bushes in their parking lot one year. With their permission, I gathered fruit and made jelly. Inferior: too much pollution, I suppose. Now the fruit does little more than stain the parking lot and make wasps drunk.

In the early part of the third section, the author relates how the arguments to be found in some pro-Animal books temporarily converted him to vegetarianism. But he came to his senses. The entire argument founders on one salient fact: rights were invented by people, for people. "Animal rights" is an oxymoron.

To be moral, we must be as civil as we can to the animals we kill to eat. Industrial agriculture is founded on the cruelty of indifference...if you think you have become "just a number," consider yourself lucky to be at least accorded some small measure of freedom, particularly to choose some of what you eat, and where to walk. "Beyond organic" methods are based on growing crops and stock according to their nature—and remember, the modern Cow or Pig or Chicken is no more a "natural" creature than you are; they would not exist without many centuries of human breeding and culture. They are as much an artifact as is a brick. As brick to stone, so Pig to Boar...and so forth.

There is much to think of in this book.