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The tasty Japanese seaweed nori is ubiquitous today, but that wasn't always true. Nori was once called "lucky grass" because every year's harvest was entirely dependent on luck. Then, during World War II, luck ran out. No nori would grow off the coast of Japan, and farmers were distraught. But a major scientific discovery on the other side of the planet revealed something unexpected about the humble plant and turned an unpredictable crop into a steady and plentiful food source.
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Fortunately, on an island at the other end of Eurasia, Kathleen Drew-Baker had recently gotten fired. She had been a lecturer in botany at the University of Manchester where she studied algae that reproduced using spores rather than flowers. But the university did not employ married women. So when she got married to fellow academic Henry Wright-Baker she was kicked off the faculty and relegated to a job as an unpaid research fellow.Drew-Baker focused on a type of nori unfamiliar to nearly everyone: Porphyra umbilicalis. It's a leafy seaweed that grows off the coast of Wales. Locals harvest it, grind it up, and use it to make bread or soup. Known colloquially as laver, it's still eaten in Britain but has not attained the international standing of nori.
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Thanks to Drew-Baker's work, Segawa was able to invent the industrial process that lead to the stable, predictable production of nori, for which everyone with a taste for sushi should be grateful.
If not for her work, sushi rolls would probably not be eaten today.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @10:26PM (5 children)
Yeah so you could devote your time to the family, and not be forced by "economic" reasons into the labor pool. Economic reasons like over abundance of labor driving down the wage. My wife would love to stay home and watch our daughter (possibly more off-springs to come) full time, but thanks to feminism she makes almost double what I do, which is fortunate for us since it takes 3 wages now a day to afford a middle-class lifestyle (thank you feminism), but unfortunate for us because she can't be more involved in raising our kids. Now stop trying to make this story about what it is not about.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Grishnakh on Monday November 20 2017, @10:46PM (2 children)
Wow, that's dumb. It isn't "feminism" which is "forcing" you to have dual incomes, it's 1) your own greed, because you can't be happy with 1 car and a small house like those that middle-class people used to live in decades ago (have you seen what a typical 1940s or 1950s middle-class house looks like? They're pretty small by today's McMansion standards), and 2) competition from the rest of the world, now that WWII is long since over, and many other countries are highly industrialized and competing with the US.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by lentilla on Tuesday November 21 2017, @12:29AM (1 child)
It is far easier to be content with one car and a small house if your peers have only one car and a small house, and if society is configured to expect this as a baseline.
I think it unnecessarily pejorative to call it greed. It's simply human nature.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 21 2017, @10:14AM
And it is not unique to "western" civilisations.. but we may have perfected it.
I'm sure some subsitence-farming iron-age people may have been more content, with practically nothing, but few in western society are content, even the billionaires want "more".
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tizan on Monday November 20 2017, @10:46PM
May be you stay home and spend quality time with the kids as you are obviously the least capable to bring in money for the family.
Rather than force the government to be backwards and force the woman out of a job to look after the kids even thought she is more
capable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @03:56AM
What kind of wasteful lifestyle do you live where that is necessary? More likely, you're just awful at managing your money, like most people. Congratulations.