How quickly is the marine environment exposed to the activities of people living along the edges in cities or urban centers? We frequently hear in the news how this company or that oil slick contributed to the alteration of the natural world, but what about the everyday things we do? Does the natural world notice what you ate for dinner last night?To help answer these questions, we measure a set of fun and benign (non-harmful) compounds that record the daily activities of humans and transport that information into the marine environment. Currently, we are tracking baking spices, coffee and chocolate from the grocery store shelf through your house and your stomach, and then out into Puget Sound.
“What? Spices? That’s stupid.”
But is it really? Every day we seem to hear of the latest chemical that is bad for us or bad for the environment. The news is sobering and maybe even depressing, but what can we do about it? We are just people living our lives, trying to make it day-by-day.
Isn’t it refreshing to hear about something that is NOT bad for the environment, but shows how linked we are to our natural world? That is where our research comes in. Using spices, we can show how rapidly the marine world sees the activities of our daily lives, bringing home the message of a connected world. The bottom line – when we take care of our own health, we also indirectly can take care of the health of the world we live in.
(Disclaimer – we also occasionally measure things that aren’t so good for the environment, but that is a different story).
Who is paying for this work?
Nobody but us – we are volunteering our time, working samples into our regular research as we can. We have received in-kind (no money) support from:
We measure several spices (cinnamon, vanilla, all-spice, thyme, rosemary), caffeine (which is a good marker for coffee, among other things) and theobromide (the ‘feel good’ compound in chocolate).
Each week we visit the West Point sewage treatment plant in Seattle and with the generous help of our colleagues there we take 2 liters of treated sewage (the stuff that is going out into Puget Sound). We sample more frequently around the holidays. We also get samples from Puget Sound when we are out on the University’s research vessel the Thomas G Thompson.
What have we found out so far?
We always see cinnamic acid (what we convert cinnamon into when we eat it) and two forms of vanilla (natural and artificial) in treated sewage and in Puget Sound. The amounts we see are reasonably high, in the parts per million range. This is much higher than is natural, but still much lower than the amounts we might call ‘harmful’. Since cinnamon and vanilla are such common spices added to coffees and baked goods (and medicines and gums and ice creams), it is not surprising to see them passing into the environment.
The amounts of vanilla and cinnamon jumped up during the Thanksgiving-Christmas holiday season of 2006, but fell back down after New Years. We converted the amount of spice added to Puget Sound each day into the same amount of spice that would be found in holiday cookies such as chocolate chip, gingerbread persons and snickerdoodles. The flux of ‘home-baked cookie equivalents’ during the holiday season of 2006 was about 250,000 cookies per day, roughly 2/3 butter or chocolate chip and 1/3 snickerdoodle or similar cinnamon-containing cookies such as gingerbread. If accurate, and taking into account our digestion, this means that the average person in Seattle was eating at least two cookies per day during the holidays. There was a spike in cookie equivalents after about December 13th. We wonder if this is because of the numerous office parties and holiday parties that occur the two weeks before the holiday.
We completed a full year of monitoring in 2007 to learn how closely spices track holiday and eating habits and are now writing up our results
How do we make our measurements?
Once we get the water, we filter it (0.2 micron), acidify it to a pH less than 4, and spices are collected as the water passes through a 10g C-18 column (Varian). The spices stick to the column. They are eluted in 50 ml methanol, stripped of remnant water using NaSO4 and dried under a stream of nitrogen. After a post-extraction cleanup (Montgomery and Goni, 2001), we redissolve the sample in pyridine, derivatize it using BSTFA and analyze it by GC-FID and GC-MSD. This procedure is a modification of Louchouarn et al (2000 Anal. Chem. 72;2780-2787
Teach me more about Cinnamon, Vanilla, Caffeine and Theobromine (opens new page)
Spices are interesting compounds because they enhance flavors so much, but also because of their interesting chemistries. To learn about chemicals in our daily lives, check out the great website ‘Molecule of the day’
Would you like to be involved?
We are looking for volunteers to help in the lab, or to help collect samples in the Puget Sound region. E-mail Rick is you have questions or interests.
We made the news! You can read or listen to news reports about this work at these links:
