Paradoxical

Walking back from the health centre to find out what we need to do to get the medicals to swap our driving licenses to Portuguese ones, met cheeky madam and her parents - haven't seen them in ages, lovely to chat. Milene has been so worried about the effects of the virus, and all the folk who are going into debt as a result of the restrictions - she thinks the end result will be war...

Gratefuls:
- the wonderful time we had with Zé Maria last night, and all the folk we met there and chatted with, including the owner of the bar, Marcelo, who offered to give us a lift home and said if we ever needed anything, we should knock on his door, even if it was 2:30 in the morning! (We walked home, it was lovely under the stars.)
- a hilarious incident with Boris, C&E's dog, who had escaped, recognized me and pushed past me into the health centre, straight down the internal corridor and into a consulting room - much to everyone's consternation/amusement
- crispy sweet potato oven chips I made for lunch

The Body, ch 14 - Food, Glorious Food, 282-3
I have long had huge interest in this subject, and the quote illustrates why our ancient, deep-rooted olive trees, and the oil from them, is so much better for you than that from trees grown like hedges, with shallow roots, relying on irrigation, pesticides and artificial fertilisers...
Many of our fruits and vegetables are nutritionally less good for us than they were even in the fairly recent past. Donald Davis, a biochemist at the University of Texas, in 2011 compared the nutritive values of various foods in 1950 with those of our own era, and found substantial drops in almost every type. Modern fruits, for instance, are almost 50 per cent poorer in iron than they were in the early 1950s, and about 12 per cent down in calcium and 15 per cent in vitamin A. Modern agricultural practices, it turns out, focus on high yields and rapid growth at the expense of quality.
The United States is left in the bizarre and paradoxical situation that its citizens are essentially the world's most overfed people, but also among the most nutritionally deficient ones.