Smile!!!

The photograph at the top of this post shows a cross section of the leaf of marram grass Ammophila arenaria, a species of dune grass that’s primarily responsible for trapping wind-blown sand and building the dune systems around our coast. Marram grass survives by rolling up its leaves during long periods of drought, minimizing water loss. This cross section of a partially rolled leaf has been stained with fluorescent dyes to light up different cell types within the leaf, with the outside surface of the leaf at the bottom of the picture (smooth, curved surface) and the inner convoluted surface at the top.  (To learn more about the other structures in the image, visit BeyondtheHumanEye)

The distinctive features that look like ‘smiley faces’ with a pair of large ‘eyes’ with a blue open ‘mouth’ – are the leaf veins that conduct water and sugars along the leaf . So, if you were a cow eating this grass, every bite would contain a ‘smiley face’ :)

Of course, we don’t graze beef cattle on sand dunes, and not every grass species has quite such distinctively shapes structures. There is more and more evidence to suggest, however, that quite literally “we are what we eat.” So this just seems like one more reason to eat grass fed beef.  If there grass with smiles built into its structure, and cows evolved to eat grass, then eating an animal that eats smiley faces (or even less interesting grass) seems a like a lot better idea than eating one that eats antibiotics to compensate for eating a diet of corn that it hasn’t evolved to digest.  (I’m just saying!)

Smile! Marsya ~