Sometimes, I Wish I Were A Plant #HogsAbroad

Lauren and I in our spiffy lab coats feeling like real scientists.

I don’t know if I’ve already mentioned this, but if not, I’ll say it again. I NEED MORE FREE WATER. In fact, when I buy water at food establishments, I need a real size bottle of water. These good-for-nothing size water bottles that we get at restaurants, when we actually get real water since these crazy people like sparkling water (it tastes terrible, why is this a thing,  you have to ask for “still water”), are the size of large shot glasses. There’s more water in a kid’s size Wendy’s cup, no ice. How do people not get dehydrated by drinking exactly two sips of water with their meal of french fries and beer? Every so often, I wish I were a plant. They could survive on this more limited water intake; maybe I could transform into a cactus.

Also, I am so stinking glad that there is fruit and juice and coffee and WATER in the classroom during our lectures. I could not think of a better idea to make the class experience better than that. Maybe if I could stand up every 20 minutes or so. I have strong desires to walk around; sitting still really isn’t my thing. Maybe I wouldn’t make a great cactus.

BUT HOLD UP SPEAKING OF EDIBLE THINGS, Lauren (my roommate and one of my best friends who came with me) and I were shopping in a grocery store a block away from the hostel, and we saw a bag of Doritos on the shelf. Maybe it wasn’t authentically Belgian, but oh well. We bought the bag and brought it back to the hostel to try because, um yes snacking? PSA guys, apparently the Flemish like their nacho flavored Doritos sad because their was about 30% as much seasoning on their Doritos as ours back home. It would take me 3 bags to have enough orange dust on my fingers to get a satisfying lick. And to top it off, their version of Cool Ranch flavored Doritos is just…well see for yourself.

Apparently, this bag of chips is just super suave and patriotic. Way to go Belgium.

But now to backtrack back to Wednesday’s lectures and excursion, it was all about the plants. Our two lectures were about sustainable plant production and genetically modified plants, and our excursion was to VIB, the Flemish Institute of Biology. Sustainable plant production and agriculture are approached in two different ways in Belgium: intensification and agro-ecology. Intensification implies narrowing agricultural focus to perfect a few crops to do “more with less” through eco-efficiency. Agro-ecology is maximizing on diversity of crops and the practice of “intercropping” where several different crops are planted together in the same field to benefit each other. It does not result in certain outputs, but it is stable where it will never be the highest but also never the lowest. An interesting note is that even though plant breeding is resulting in higher yields, increasingly restrictive regulations by the EU results in effectively no net gains in net yield from crop production. Also, did you know that Belgium is the world’s biggest producer of processed potato products? And its stinking tiny! Pretty impressive.

The GMO lecture was particularly intriguing to me since it can be a heated debate topic, so I really wanted to learn about the science behind them from someone who works with them directly, not a news station or botched website whose main goal is to get an emotional reaction from its audience and neglecting factual information. The European Union has an interesting approach to its use of GMO’s. They do not allow the cultivation of GMO crops in EU countries except insect resistant corn but do allow its use in foods and feeds with required labeling. They actually import incredibly large amounts of GMO products, especially soybean, which is appalling to me since some European countries were making very good money and employing their citizens by harvesting the same GMO crops they now import. I feel like I could write all of my notes here, but that’s not why I blog, so I’ll keep it short. Essentially, some genetic modifications using a process called cisgenesis could theoretically be achieved by breeding, but breeding could never be as fast, precise, or cheap. The EU’s distrust with GMO’s stems largely from their distrust of the government’s and study’s endorsements of food safety since dioxin and mad cow disease crises. I could go on for a while, but I want to get to the rad pictures I took at VIB.

VIB was a very cool facility, and our guide was working on biomass research. His work was focused on getting the most energy from various plant breeds without compromising the well-being of the plant. It was quite technical and a bit over my head since I had chemistry two years ago and biology ever longer ago. Also, he was a new professor. No lie, I got lost. However, the greenhouses and labs were quite interesting and honestly really well decorated. He would start his research on smaller plants, specifically Arabidopsis, because he can do many tests at once in a given space. Some parts of the research were done in greenhouses while others were done in little rooms with growing lights. Moving on from the small Arabidopsis plants, he moves to the poplar plant for a larger test subject. I could try to describe this more, but the pictures are much more interesting.

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Read more from Kaylee at https://letsghentlost.wordpress.com/blog/

To find out more about the U of A Faculty-Led: European Agriculture-Food Chain Sustainability program at http://studyabroad.uark.edu/SUSTEurozone/