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Sam's Around the Sound Blog
Samantha Murphy is a student who thinks about Puget Sound and writes about it for her school paper
December 28, 2007
Spices in Puget Sound
By Samantha Murphy
It’s the holidays, and you know what that means; it’s time to pull out the cookbooks and start baking. Cookies, cider, turkey, you name it, they’re all holiday favorites, and they all have one thing in common, spices! Almost everything we bake has spices in it; cinnamon, vanilla, ginger, those are just a few of the spices that make what we eat taste all the better. But we’re not the only ones affected by all these spices, Puget Sound is too.
All the spices you consume go through you, on to the sewage treatment plants, and then into the Sound. It seems weird doesn’t it; that the cinnamon you sprinkled over your hot apple cider is now floating around in the Sound. You would think that at least it would be filtered out of the water at the sewage treatment plant. The truth is that a large percent of the spices we eat are unable to be filtered out at sewage treatment plants, the same goes for all the caffeine Seattle consumes. That’s a lot of caffeine! Right now all the fishes in the Sound are swimming in a giant, spicy latte.
Luckily, as far as we know the spices and caffeine in the water don’t greatly affect the animals in the Sound, but it just goes to show that even the smallest things we do, like adding extra vanilla into a cookie recipe, affects the Sound and its inhabitants, in some way. By studying and understanding these impacts, we are once again reminded of how our lives are closely inter-connected to life in Puget Sound.