Okay - I'm reposting an item from 13 January 2007. No need for alarm, right?
The January 2007 issue of U.S. Water News Online reports that University of Washington researchers found significantly higher levels of cinnamon and vanilla (natural and artificial) in Puget Sound during the period November 14 - December 9, with the levels spiking right after Thanksgiving. Natural vanilla showed the highest increase. UW researchers (your tax dollars at work) speculated that over the Thanksgiving weekend, the people served by the West Point treatment plant in Magnolia consumed the daily equivalent of about 160,000
chocolate-chip or butter-type cookies and about 80,000 cookies containing cinnamon (not to mention caffeine, some of which was found as deep as 640 feet). The spices could pose a problem for fish, since they use their sense of smell to find food or, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream for spawning.
I suppose finding spices in our natural waterways is marginally better than the antidepressants, painkillers, birth-control pills, etc., that have turned up in the past few decades. I used to joke about the infamous "nine-eyed carp"; we may be closer to seeing them.
"Water is the true wealth in a dry land." - Wallace Stegner
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