image, via wikipedia ^[1]

Judging from all the cinnamon and vanilla showing up in the Sound these days, it looks like I’m not the only one eating too many cookies. Researchers are UW have been testing the treated sewage at the Magnolia plant and found that cinnamon, natural vanilla, and artificial vanilla levels went up between November 14 and December 9.

The spike in natural vanilla suggests that people are staying away from the fake stuff in pretty large volume. “Using benchmarks from a published scientific study, they were able to estimate that people in Seattle and a few outlying areas served by the sewage plant scarfed down the daily equivalent of about 160,000 butter- or chocolate-chip-type cookies and about 80,000 cookies containing cinnamon during the Thanksgiving weekend [P-I ^[2]].”

This makes for all sorts of interesting problems. Fish, for example, rely heavily on their sense of smell to eat and navigate. What if salmon don’t like cinnamon? And while vanilla is pretty friendly, antidepressants and antibiotics and pretty much everything else enter the water system the same way. What are those chemicals doing to Puget Sound?

What King County will do with the study is anyone’s guess, since it’s not like the general idea of the findings is anything new. I intend to make some zucchini-apple bread this week, though, so I hope the fish aren’t tired of cinnamon quite yet.