Study finds holiday cookies affect Sound

SEATTLE – Researchers at the University of Washington say all the holiday baking and eating we do has an environmental impact – the Puget Sound is being flavored by cinnamon and vanilla.

“Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect,” said Rick Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. “When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness.”

Keil and UW researcher Jaqui Neibauer’s testing of treated sewage headed for the Sound from the West Point Treatment Plant in Magnolia showed that cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla all rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike on the weekly test right after Thanksgiving.

So far, they’ve found no evidence that snickerdoodles are harming sea creatures, but their research does lead to some serious environmental questions.

Fish do rely heavily on their sense of smell to locate food, however, and, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream to spawn.

“All the spices have odors associated with them, so it’s interesting to ask whether they are there in sufficient concentration (for fish) to smell them,” Keil said.

Natural vanilla showed the largest increase, “perhaps indicative of more home baking using natural vanilla,” Keil and Neibauer wrote.

“This conjecture is weakly supported by a verbal communication between Rick Keil and an employee of the Wallingford QFC who felt that natural vanilla peaked during the holiday seasons,” the scientists’ preliminary report says. “This will be investigated more thoroughly.”

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 treatment 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.

Officials at King County’s Wastewater Treatment Division were happy to cooperate with the university researchers because they expected the study to reinforce their message: What goes down the drain has to come out somewhere.

That goes both for pesticides and industrial chemicals and vanilla and cinnamon.

“It’s an ability to look at a whole population’s behavior through one pipe,” said Randy Schuman, a King County science and technical support manager who helped arrange the wastewater testing.

King County did not spend any money on the study, county spokeswoman Annie Kolb-Nelson noted.

Keil’s findings present a light side of what scientists say is potentially a serious situation. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies have documented that antibiotics, contraceptives, perfumes, painkillers, antidepressants and other substances pass through people’s bodies and the sewage system into waterways.

In Seattle, King County researchers several years ago even sought to figure out whether the city’s coffee drinking habits had any effect on the Sound, so they took caffeine measurements.

“It was everywhere,” Schuman said. “There’s an effect (from) humans on the Sound and it’s almost ubiquitous. It’s not just at the end of the (discharge) pipe.”

In those tests, caffeine was found in more than 160 of 216 samples – up to 640 feet deep.