Monkey Monday: odds, ends, and closing browser tabs 6 April 2009 4:06 pm
Posted by Tracy in : chocolate,geekery,monkeys,random,reading , trackbackI don’t want to complain. I’m sure all this rain is awesome for the garden we planted last week. Still, it sure does an Oregon winter on my brain, so I am cuddled up to a nice big mug of hot chocolate and reading a lot. I needed the chocolate comfort after Michael Ruhlman’s advice to aspiring food writers. Encouraging, it was not.
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On a much more optimistic note, Growing Power is awesome, and here’s a Yes magazine article to remind us all why.
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Are people more likely to order unhealthy food from menus that offer healthier options? Maybe, according to this New York Times report about an article due to appear in the Journal of Consumer Research. I’m not entirely clear about the conclusion of the piece, which to me reads like study participants who scored highest on a test designed to measure self-control were the most likely to order the unhealthiest item when faced with a menu with healthier offerings. So many questions: it looks like participants rated items according to how healthy they thought they were, and french fries were widely perceived as the unhealthiest option, but did the researchers (who also included chicken nuggets on their menus) agree, and why? I want to know if the researchers asked whether the more self-controlled subjects were more or less likely to be on diets or otherwise trying to lose weight — in fact, I’d like to know what, if any, relationship can be found between dieting and measurable self-control (a fun concept in and of itself). So here’s hoping I can get ahold of the actual study when it’s published.
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Finally, I liked this article about tip-sharing and recession economics. Lately I’ve been trying to add an extra dollar to all the tips I leave. If I want to pinch pennies, I’ll stay home and eat something I make myself with rice and (dried) beans (cans would be splurging).
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cj
