In the same vein: course you ought to make your own stock, but if you don’t, or you want some on hand for use in a pinch, I highly recommend Better Than Bouillon.
It’s the same stuff as (good, high-end) stock, but they simply don’t add the water that regular stocks do. (Commercial stocks are made into a concentrate, and then rehydrated before packaging.)
It’s not a powder, it’s a paste. A teaspoon makes a cup of stock, and you can even just add a teaspoon directly to your sauce or whatever to add a salty umami hit without extra water needing to be boiled off. And it lasts forever.
I don’t have any issue with recycling/refilling because the general (filthy) public isn’t the one I have to depend on to ensure food safety. The dairy/business owner/etc… all have a vested interest in their product not making me sick. Random people sticking unwashed body parts into a public serving container not so much…
In my travels in latin american countries, it seems pretty much standard that all soda bottles are recycled many many times.
This has inspired me to try the powdered Gatorade I saw…somewhere. I don’t think it was much cheaper, if at all, than regular Gatorade once you add the water. But packaging-wise Gatorade is up there with soda in terms of wastefulness, and now that China isn’t taking our plastic I need a guilt-free source of that inexplicably awesome pseudo-electrolyte sugar water.
Just hope the powder dissolves well. I think I’ll save a few empty Gatorade bottles to mix it in, to maybe convince myself it’s exactly the same.
What evidence is there that there was such an incident? I’ve never heard such a thing and belt-drive bicycles still exist. Heck, many high-powered motorcycles have belt drives now.
It seems more likely that bicycle frames have to be built differently to use belts and are more expensive as a result. Chains can be easily separated, whereas continuous belts cannot. As a result, the drive-side stay has to be able to separate to install a belt.
Wow! That failure of a chain has only happened to me once in a lifetime of bike riding - literally tens of thousands of miles. The most likely reason for a steel chain failing would have to be lack of maintenance.
I found powdered Gatorade at the 99-cent store once and tried it. I don’t drink Gatorade very often - mostly when I’m sick, actually - so it represented a potential year’s supply for under a buck. Unfortunately, it ran into both of the classic powdered-form problems: caking AND insolubility. I tried everything I could think of: shaker bottles; reconstituting drop-by-drop to paste first; dissolving in hot water first. Nothing worked; I always ended up with a residue of slightly-sweet mineral grit at the bottom.
Your mileage may vary, but I won’t be bothering with it again.
Another option would be electrolyte tablets (they make a slightly worse tasting gatorade-y liquid) that you can get at outdoors stores.
I once experienced a fun incident in the heat, where I was staying well hydrated, but started to have heatstroke like symptoms. Sat in the shadow of a bush and ate some beef jerky, then started to feel immediately better and energized. Figured out that I had sweated out a dangerous amount of salt. Now I carry a tube of these electrolyte tablets in my pack. They’re not as inexpensive as gatorade powder, but they’re convenient, and seem to dissolve well (probably since they’re not designed to all be used at once as soon as the tube seal is popped).
The tablets are supposed to be used in a water pouch, but obvs will work in anything.
Reminds me of a German I know, who once was at a loss searching their vocabulary, suddenly bursting out “How do you call those undried rasins?”
FTR, @timquinn, you nailed it.
Not exactly “instant”, but definitely most impressive.
I wanted to post a nice gif of Craterostigma plantagineum, Chamaegigas intrepidus or Myrothamnus flabellifolius, but I didn’t find a proper one. (Only Selaginella lepidophylla pops up, and in a terrible gif.) So, just a very short account: some plants (mostly occuring on Inselbergs) are able to survive serious dessication to a water level of nearly 2 % of their weight, some for several weeks of even months.
There’s research underway since now several decades to see how the gene regulation works and which proteins make this possible, with the aim of transferring dessication tolerance to crops.
That’s only a tangent to the topic here, but 2 % is really, really impressive.
I don’t doubt that tubes are nasty to try to process(most of them seem to be multi-layer laminates of either mixed plastics or mixed plastics and a metal foil; which is basically a middle finger raised at the prospective recycler); but one virtue that the prospective replacement would have to duplicate is the tendency of tubes to reduce contact between the toothbrush and product that remains in the package(not impossible, the ‘pump’ style dispensers used for soap and lotion and stuff have similar properties).
Toothbrushes get pretty nasty(just look at the biofilm crud that grows on electric toothbrush chargers); and since toothpaste is nonprescription, used continually in humans; and often swallowed or absorbed it is more minty-fresh and abrasive than actually bacteriostatic.
A jar of toothpaste could end up pretty gnarly if a few users, especially ones of less than scrupulous rinsing habits, where dipping toothbrushes into it a couple of times a day then storing to depletion.
Those are good to know about, which I previously didn’t. I had a similar incident at one point; but only had access to oral rehydration therapy mix packets.
Those work; and ORT deserves a few nobels for all the nondead kids it has enabled; but (shockingly enough) drinking something that tastes like warm seawater slightly sweetened is something you do because electrolyte imbalances can kill you unpleasantly, not because it’s a pleasant experience. I’d almost prefer IV fluids; and I hate needles.
I see the rediscovery of this sort of product form as part of a larger trend. The notion of speculative production of large masses of bulky, fragile, rapidly obsolesced goods in distant locations, their wasteful packaging for shelf display, and their transport around the world simply makes no sense anymore, environmentally or economically. The core paradigms of the Industrial Age look increasingly nonsensical. As companies are compelled to address their carbon overhead (direct and indirect), the inefficiency of this model is likely to become increasingly apparent, particularly as the increasing generalization of capability with shrinking scale of production technology become apparent.
I anticipate that Amazon will soon begin experimenting with adding production to its storage facilities, car dealerships beginning to assemble cars on-demand, and in general a progressing localization of production that will see global trade ‘commoditized’, shifting from the exchange of bulky goods to refined materials and commodity components that can be shipped in densely packed forms.
Even in space this shift in paradigm will become necessary. The transport of bulky ‘faberge egg’ payloads of astronomical value by gigantic rockets with outrageous engineered reliability just makes no sense if you can establish a production capability in orbit and leverage that capability on the commodification of payloads, thus applying the ‘tolerable throughput yield’ paradigm of conventional industry to space transport. That’s the real key to CATS. This is why I forsee the eventual obsolescence of rockets --albeit it heresy in space advocacy circles.
