When, the topic of bamboo was suggested to me by my friend and neighbor, aka Rock Stalker, I thought this would be the easiest and shortest essay ever written. It would simply be this: “There ain’t none.” But no self-serving witch would be worth the wart on her nose if she did not accept a challenge. So a little google research at http://www.reference.com/science was performed and armed with that knowledge, as well as some invasive commentary, the following emerged from the earth.
Bamboo is well known for its remarkable rate of growth and also its high tensile strength, close to that of steel in some species. Because of these features, it is used in a variety of human applications including everything from food and drink to construction as reinforcement for concrete. My friends probably consider me to be the pickiest eater that anyone ever met. I have a list of things I don’t eat and things that I will never try and this list continues to grow. I think of wine and olives as fruit, French fries and dill pickles as vegetables and firmly believed that ice cream can provide a daily supply of calcium. The perfect meal to me is a chilidog with pizza being a close second. I often have cookies for lunch and I drink large amounts of coffee throughout the day; healthy choices are not an option. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve never eaten anything that can be used to reinforce concrete.
Woody bamboo, Bambuseae poaceae, falls within the family of grasses and represents the tallest variety, with some species typically reaching more than 100 feet in height in just three months. Well, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was not able to define pornography but he knew it when he saw it. Same here with bamboo, I never would have defined bamboo as a grass but I have seen it grow. It only takes one bottle of wine for an emerging shoot to reach 12 to 24 inches height. If it’s a 1.5L bottle of wine, don’t sit still while you are drinking because the bamboo could reach 10 or 15 feet in height, multiply in numbers and you would be “bamboozled,” never to be seen again.
Pandas have evolved in order to eat bamboo because they are unskilled hunters and prefer bamboo, which is readily available year-round. Through rain, sleet, and snow this grass keeps giving food for these cute little pandas. The pandas must consume large amounts of shoots in order to digest enough nutrients to keep their fat little bodies satisfied. All because they were lazy and didn’t want to hunt for food. But bamboo is steady growing and never in “short” supply and happily thrives in draughts, floods, and Class 4 tornadoes. Munching pandas can just reach over a pull a shoot to sate their appetites and grow in cuteness.
There are some nutritional facts available on-line about bamboo along with directions on how to cook the shoots, so maybe Rock Stalker should set up a vegetable stand and sell this stuff. The shoots have a low caloric content, low sugar content, negligible fat content and are full of vitamins and minerals and fiber. They ease cholesterol out of your arteries, fight cancer, strengthen the immune system, fight respiratory problems, lower blood pressure and can be made into pickles. They even have a little cyanide in them, which I suppose could be a useful fact in bamboo pickle making.
I think the growth patterns of bamboo could be depicted in a late night horror show entitled ‘Bambooing Your Way Through the Apocalypse.’ Imagine one hundred feet tall bamboo stalks tethered to the earth by root-bound rhizomes, struggling to break free to invade the plumbing system of every house in their path, slinking through pipes and drains, and then rising up out of toilets everywhere. As far as determining the benefits of bamboo, I reluctantly had to come up with my own due to the emotional distress caused by the possibility of bamboo growing in toilets. So in that spirit, my top ten benefits are as follows.
- Bamboo is good for raising cane.
- The entertainment value provided by Rock Stalker banging on a turkey pan to drive the birds away from roosting in the bamboo is priceless.
- The joy in chopping down shoots and digging up rhizomes can occupy an entire Saturday morning.
- It aggravates Rock Stalker to talk negatively about bamboo.
- A federally funded study on the viability of bamboo as ammunition in long-ranged missiles may be a step forward for mankind and world peace.
- Bamboo can be used to make shelves to hold garden pots.
- A good stand of bamboo can hid the yard, provide privacy, and make pornography harder to see.
- Bamboo may be used to cover up Russian conspiracy theories.
- What happens in the bamboo stays in the bamboo.
- There is always the chance that a panda bear lives in there and they are so cute. Who knows, with enough wine, I might even see one.
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