Seattle Sewage Has More Vanilla & Cinnamon In It During The Holidays [View All]

[matcom]

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Yule never believe what scientists are finding in Seattle's sewage: a spike in vanilla and cinnamon when the holiday season hits.

It's remarkable enough that the University of Washington's Rick Keil and Jaqui Neibauer, using sophisticated laboratory equipment, were able to track the uptick.

But consider that they also were able to estimate the number of "home-baked cookie equivalents" the people of Seattle gobbled down over the Thanksgiving weekend -- all in the name of figuring out how to protect Puget Sound.

The message?

"Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness."

Don't worry about gobbling that snickerdoodle, though. There's no evidence that cinnamon or vanilla harms sea creatures, and, in fact, the choice of those spices was something of a lark.

But the research does raise serious questions, particularly as fish rely heavily on their sense of smell to locate food and, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream to spawn.

"All the spices have odors associated with them, so it's interesting to ask whether they are there in sufficient concentration (for fish) to smell them," Keil said.

The UW testing of treated sewage headed for the Sound from the West Point Treatment Plant in Magnolia showed that cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla all rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike on the weekly test right after Thanksgiving.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/297137_vanilla25.html