Stomach Share

What would you think if someone told you that they were fighting for a “share” of your stomach?  Bring to mind organ harvesting? alien invasion? theft? But this is in fact what the food industry is doing, and has been for some time.  I first heard this term last week when I took part in [...]

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Slow Food and Less Food

Slow foods & local foods are fabulous, and we should be grateful to those who have made them part of the landscape.   Thanks to advocates in recent years, many of us can now purchase a tomato from the store and know where it came from or have a conversation with a grower while getting apples [...]

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Food Stamp Soda Ban Means More Coke Zero

Mayor Bloomberg would like to prevent New Yorkers on food stamps from trading “stamps” for soda.  Under his newly proposed plan, food stamps won’t be an acceptable form of payment for beverages (other than milk and some fruit juices) that contain more than 10 calories per 8 oz serving.   By cutting down on soda consumption, [...]

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A Few Reasons not to Listen to 1001 Albums

So, a friend approached me a few weeks ago and asked if I would accompany him on a project. He is listening his way through this book called 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. He asked me to blog the project with him. But I can’t do it. There are three main problems [...]

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Sell Music, Buy Shoes

The conversation about “selling out” in popular music has been dead for some time. And I’m not interested in reviving that conversation now. The last time it really flared up was around 1989, when Nike featured the Beatles’ “Revolution” in a commercial. Since then, it’s basically been a done deal. So, today’s New York Times‘ [...]

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The Trouble with Choice: Web 2.0 Edition

I don’t have a T.V. but I do have access to TV programming, thanks to my Netflix subscription and various other online sources of traditional broadcast entertainment. As a result, I found myself watching HULU the other night, and as after I selected the sitcom I wanted to watch, the screen went dark and I [...]

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Appetite and the MRI

Today’s NPR story on the relationship between weight loss, emotions, and hormones called leptin revealed how far we have come in our understanding of food and our bodies–and how far we still have to go.  In “Rational or Emotional? Your Brain on Food,” Columbia University Medical Center researchers reveal that weight loss can cause both [...]

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Why does “relevant” mean “make me money?”

To wit: This week’s “Education Life” Section of the NY Times, where the cover article is called: “Making College ‘Relevant‘” I appreciate the quotation marks in the title, but the article seems to focus primarily on how to translate a BA into a J-O-B. This is a question that those of us in the humanities [...]

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The Sustainable Pen

The UCD Sustainable Pen There’s something troubling about this artifact.  What appears at first to be another of the hundreds of variations on “spirit pens,” this UC Davis implement is something else entirely.  It is actually a plastic pen–perhaps of the bic variety?–wrapped with a thin layer of cardboard onto which the UCD logo is [...]

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Born to Buy, but Not Born Yesterday

One of the laments we often hear about the state of childhood in America today is that childhood has become commercialized.  Our news media and bookstore bookshelves regularly feature stories about how American children are barraged by advertising and marketing: the average child views 40,000 television commercials a year, children as young as three can [...]

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