What do Philip Roth’s polio novel Nemesis and Justin Cronin’s vampire novel The Passage, both published in 2010, have in common? Quite a bit, actually. Roth’s novel renders the atmosphere of fear surrounding a polio outbreak in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944. The protagonist is a young playground director futilely trying to [...]
Archive for the ‘health’ Category
Literature and the Culture of Viral Panic
Posted in books, childhood, health, popular culture, tagged Justin Cronin, Nemesis, Philip Roth, The Passage on October 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Stomach Share
Posted in business, consumer culture, food, health, technology on October 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Slow Food and Less Food
Posted in business, consumer culture, food, health, uncategorized on October 22, 2010 | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Food Stamp Soda Ban Means More Coke Zero
Posted in business, consumer culture, food, health on October 15, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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, [...]
Appetite and the MRI
Posted in consumer culture, food, health, technology, the university on February 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
No Time for the Flu
Posted in childhood, health, parenting, technology on November 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
When I was a kid and I got the flu it meant days home in bed. I’ll try not to glamorize this, but I do recall some fairly blissful mornings with a pile of Kleenex, cough drops (remember Ludens—they used to taste just like candy!), and the TV all to myself. I’m sure this wasn’t [...]
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