As others smell us...

A colleague of mine is visiting from Bulgaria. He brought me, as a gift, a picture book entitled "25 Beautiful Places in Bulgaria".

He arrived on Sunday, and has already had a little time to explore the area. What had been most amazing, he said, was the smell. "Nobody told me about the smell."

The smell? I wondered if maybe he'd wandered a bit too close to some of the salt evaporation ponds near the Dumbarton bridge or something.

No, no. He meant the beautiful smell of flowers and grass. When you live here, he asked, do you just get used to it?

"I think we must," I said, sniffing the air.

I think this is an underexploited tourism promotion angle: "Come to the San Francisco Bay Area. We smell nice."

In which I attempt to do science on myself

If you do any amount of reading about weightlifting, you'll find people singing the praises of whey protein, usually consumed in the form of protein shakes, for post-workout recovery, muscle growth, and so on. Initially, I was skeptical. First, because I had a hard time believing that I wasn't already getting more than adequate protein from my diet. Second, because whey protein powder is a by-product of cheese manufacturing, and barely qualifies as a food in my eyes.
( How much protein do we need, anyway? )

( I am my own lab rat )

So, then we come to the second question: does this stuff qualify as food? I went to Whole Foods, and bought one each of every brand of whey protein that they made available in a single-serving sample pack. (Plus a vegan protein for comparison.) Because my source was Whole Foods, all of these powders were sweetened with stevia, which unfortunately I found to have a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste. Basically, none of the whey protein powders are things that I would consume merely for pleasure, but a few qualify as almost tasty. Some are frankly disgusting. This is one area where you should definitely try before you invest in a 5 lb. tub of the stuff.

In case anybody's interested, here are the protein powders I tried with my evaluations of them.
( Whey hey hey )