Three Winters

I am standing in a village on a morning like this one - crisp, with a definite nip in the air and a howling wind to match. I am cold but sweat is streaming down my face. I am watching my classmates perform a play on the value of sending the girl child to law school. Villagers sit around and watch without expression. They yawn a lot and begin to disperse quietly once the play is over. Always alive to the call of duty, I quickly corral one mustachioed gentleman attempting to leave with his cow. You have a daughter, why don't you send her to law school? I say. My daughter is a good girl, my friend notes generously. The comment is a little off-topic, but promising. People can pay for her if she does well, you know, I say with greater enthusiasm. Educating a girl child is educating the family, he says, as though repeating something off a billboard somewhere. So why don't you educate yours? I interject cleverly, with the feeling that I have caught him on a fine point. He sighs deeply and raises large grey eyes to mine - Arre beta, she is the only child… there is no help. A pause, and - you know how it is... he says. I plainly do not, but he does not elaborate.

After an uncomfortable silence of indeterminate length, I hand him a small booklet with a phone number to call if he ever ends up wanting to educate his girl child at a discount. He takes it quite happily from me. I already know that he will feed it to his cow.

We write up a report for our camp - "Visited Chotagaon village in Chotagarh district and performed several plays highlighting the importance of creating diversity in national law schools. Distributed pamphlets highlighting the same." We put this on our blog.

I dedicate a bullet point on my CV to the above statement in its entirety.

I take a sip of elaichi tea and cringe; are all college cafeterias obsessed with sugar? I give the plastic glass to the resident nogoodrascal dog, who stupidly pushes his whole snout into the glass and cannot take it out. He howls in perverse harmony with the wind, while I think about another winter..

I am sitting in front of an Important Person in his office. I sent you an email, I say. I saw it, very regrettable, he says. I am very disappointed. It was plagiarism, I say clearly, and he is a professor. Important Person agrees in soothing tones. Tomorrow I will email him and tell him his article cannot be published, I say, because he is a plagiarist. I’m afraid you cannot do that, says Important Person in the same gentle tones – (I am not prepared for this) - and why is that? I say, stupidly. He raises his old, brown eyes to me and sighs - "He is after all your teacher, is he not? Arre beta you know how it is...

He looks like a wise toad behind his glasses. I feel like a fly who has just been swallowed.

I look down and watch as my breath mists up his glass tabletop. I can't tell how long I sit there, perfectly still. It is our flagship journal, I finally say, without looking up. This one we will not send to Harvard, eh? says Big Man, with a small laugh. Do you want more tea, son?

One month later, I am standing outside a local press, shading my eyes from the sun, watching glossy piles of our new prospectus be brought out to be taken back to campus and posted to the law-school-ward headed masses. I read the front cover. "An institute of national repute in the field of legal education and pedagogy" it says. I open it and smell the paper.

It feels smooth and smells dirty.

It is the last winter in law school, the onset of this very one; I sit on the other side of a table in a beautifully appointed room, all teak and velvet (not unlike, I imagine, a high class bordello). I stuff myself awkwardly into a cushioned chair and face yet another powerful man, who sits in the chair opposite mine. You had shortlisted me for an interview, I say politely. I was wondering why you never took that interview, I say politely.

We liked your CV, but we ended up filling that position unexpectedly early, he says.

Filling it without taking any interviews, I say carefully, without meeting his gaze. It was not a question unless you wanted it to be one; just the gentlest interrogatory inflection - I had planned it so inside my head.

The briefest pause follows, and then - Yes, we found a candidate who was...closer to home, he said.

Closer to home, I see, I say. This time also, I am careful to keep any particular tone out of my voice. He is gentler in his reply - You have a good CV. But in this industry, you know how it is, we take many favours. Sometimes, well, we have many friends we are grateful to…

Cheese mould, a new sanitary sterilizer?

Since the days of the ancient Romans, humankind has relied on mould to craft pungent, tasty blue cheeses like roquefort, gorgonzola and stilton.

Now, researchers have harnessed that edible fungus, Penicillium roqueforti, to create a self-cleaning foil that contains an embedded mould that eats away at food spilled on it.

The product is still rudimentary – it took the mould two weeks to digest half a teaspoon of sugary broth.

But it is one of the first times scientists have combined living organisms and a material component. The researchers foresee complex future applications such as weaving toxin-producing mould into fabric to create a self-sterilizing surface.

The research team, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has published its findings in the Jan. 3 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The project’s inspiration was the French cheese camembert, said one of the researchers, Lukas Gerber.

A soft-ripened cheese, camembert has a white, downy rind – or as the research paper calls it, “a living, functional biomaterial.” The rind, which is inoculated with the Penicillium camemberti mould, acts both as a ripening agent and a protective surface against other micro-organisms.

“Now, we want to take such a function from a living body and incorporate it into an artificial material,” Mr. Gerber said in a telephone interview. “It’s the first time have designed a flat surface combining these two domains, the plastic and the micro-organisms.”

The foil they created was like a three-layered sandwich, with two polymer films encasing a thin coating of gelatinous culture holding the fungi.

The layer at the bottom was made with polyvinyl chloride, the material used in plumbing pipes and fake leather. The fungi, suspended in an agar mixture, were spread on that layer, then covered by a porous polycarbonate plastic membrane.

The researchers analyzed two sizes of the self-cleaning material, one about the width of a dollar coin and the other as large as a sheet of letter paper. A sugary broth made from potatoes was dropped on the samples. Within 14 days, the fungi consumed the spill until the sugar dropped “below detection limit,” Mr. Gerber said.

“That was cool; that was what we expected.”

Once the food was consumed, the fungi switched to a dormant state until another spill activated them.

As long as the material was kept from severely drying, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology mould remained active, even after the foil was rubbed with alcohol hand disinfectant or scrubbed with dishwashing soap.

This showed that the material had a shelf life and might survive standard hospital washing routines.

The research opens the door to future applications that combine the benefits of micro-organisms with flat surface materials, Mr. Gerber said. For example, penicillin-producing fungi could be used to create antibacterial fabric that would generate antibiotics only in the presence of germs. Or large surfaces such as skyscraper facades could be coated with algae, which transform carbon dioxide to oxygen, to improve air quality.

“We wanted to show how easy it is to combine micro-organisms and polymer science,” Mr. Gerber said.

Around the world in a dozen plates

OTTAWA — The Ottawa Travel & Vacation Show took a decided culinary flair in the first weekend of April as no fewer than five guest chefs appeared on stage to showcase everything from Nova Scotia lobster to Mexican tostadas — and a traditional fried-rice Indonesian breakfast.

"Over the years we've deliberately and thoughtfully placed more emphasis on culinary travel," says organizer Halina Player of Player Expositions.

"This year I wanted to attract not only Canadian chefs, but chefs from other countries. And I got a very good response — I was actually offered two chefs from Ecuador and Argentina, but I couldn't accommodate them because I simply ran out of time slots on the demonstration schedule."

Scroll down for recipes. But first, here is a list of the chefs on stage:

Michael Howell, cookbook author and proprietor of the critically acclaimed Tempest Restaurant in Wolfville, N.S., who has twice cooked at the prestigious James Beard House in New York City. He made lobster rolls and then his award-winning grilled cheese panine Toscano;

Affable chef Steve Watson from Newfoundland and Labrador returned for a second year with pan-seared steelhead trout, as well as his ice-carving techniques using a chain saw;

Representing Mexico, chef José Hadad from Frida Restaurant in Toronto demonstrated authentic Mexican cuisine;

French-trained chef Eric Masson, owner of The Brentwood Bistro & Wine Bar in Little River, S.C., prepared South Carolina coastal cuisine with a French twist;

Indonesian embassy chef Ifmal Darmin demonstrated traditional breakfast with fried rice with myriad accompaniments.