Another Twitter Tuesday! 8 November 2011 11:24 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,diet stress is a health hazard,events,fangirl,fast food,food safety,food snobbery,health at every size,media,meta,news,Twitter Tuesday , add a commentHey, so like I confessed yesterday, I really didn’t know what to blog about today, only then suddenly, to my surprise and delight, the Twitters, which I kinda sorta really hadn’t been watching since last Tuesday, came through for me in a big way. Check these out! First and foremost, my former classmate Shanti with news that makes me want to make horrible puns about sticky messes:
Shanti Elise Prasad (@shantielise)
If you eat honey, this may blow your mind. Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey… foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-…
I’m having a little trouble wrapping my head around this story, personally, because as far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “honey” being argued about here is whether or not (for example) the sweet golden goo in the plastic bear has pollen in it. But the article’s scandal-monger-y lede:
More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn’t exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.
really rubs me the wrong way. Because with the possible exception of some wild-caught fish, pretty much no animal product sold in U.S. grocery stores is exactly what the animals in question produce. It’s all processed one way or another. (more…)
Monkey Monday: real monkeys and more! 19 April 2010 11:07 am
Posted by Tracy in : events,fun,funny,health at every size,media,meta,monkeys,news,random,video , 2 commentsFirst things first, I know this doesn’t really have anything to do with food but it makes me incredibly happy so I’m posting it wherever I can:
If you like that, you will also like this (it’s really quick, I promise!)
And now, for something less completely different. (more…)
Thank You Thursday: Tara Parker-Pope 4 March 2010 8:15 am
Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,eating,good news,health,health at every size,media,news,nutrition,thank you Thursday , 2 commentsSeriously, youse guys, I haven’t been following Tara Parker-Pope’s Well blog for the New York Times super-closely or anything, but on several occasions now it’s been hard for me to ignore the fact that her reporting keeps taking a remarkably reasonable view of health and weight, most recently in a post that’s, well, downright critical of the all-too-popular misconception that weight changes are a simple function of calories consumed and burned—especially for a mainstream publication like the Times (albeit only on one of the paper’s blogs, not in its printed pages, but still). Here’s my favorite part, with boldface emphasis from me on the ideas that were SO EXCITING to see:
“I’m not saying throw up your hands and forget about it,” Dr. Friedman [Jeffrey Friedman, head of Rockefeller University’s molecular genetics lab] said. “Instead of focusing on weight or appearance, focus on people’s health. There are things people can do to improve their health significantly that don’t require normalizing your weight.”
What, you mean there might be more to health than body weight? (more…)
Yet another (very) belated Monkey Monday post 20 January 2010 3:47 pm
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,eating,fangirl,food snobbery,geekery,Marion Nestle,media,monkeys,news,nyc,politics,random,reading,school,writing , 1 comment so farAll right, it’s my first day of spring term, so I’d better close some browser tabs and make ready to go back to school. I think I’m getting into the right headspace: for instance, when I saw the Salon Food feature about whether Indian food will finally get trendy this year, my first thought was, “I wonder if (NYU food studies professor) Krishnendu Ray has seen this.” Only then of course it turned out that he was the very expert interviewed for the article. Go figure?
Likewise, I thought of Marion Nestle when I spotted the above-the fold front-page story about the FDA taking another look at bisphenol-A (BPA) in Saturday’s New York Times. Of course, she’s all over this story and the BPA issue in general. Personally, I’m just relieved to see coverage of this story beyond “here’s what you, personally, should do if you only care about the health of you and your family, forget the rest of the world.” (more…)
Thank you Thursday: geeking out on government data 19 November 2009 2:13 pm
Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,fun,geekery,health,health at every size,media,meta,random,reading,silly,work,writing , add a commentSo today I ran across a survey on the CDC website while I was doing some research for my food policy final project (on how maybe health at every size is a better goal than weight loss, or obesity prevention, weight control, “healthy eating” or any other euphemism for making ourselves miserable about being irresponsible, fat, unhealthy failures at life, despite the fact that life, y’know, is not always easy, and there’s plenty of reasons we might be unwell besides the stuff we can try to control if we have the means, which not everybody does). I had a surprising amount of fun with that survey, and I copied some of the questions and my answers to prove it (there were questions about whether I might blog about what I was finding on the websites, and then I knew for sure I would have to go all meta). But before I get to that, today’s Thank You:
Dear CDC and USDA Economic Research Service and other awesome organizations doing public policy research and putting it online where I can geek out over it,
Thank you. Keep up the good work, and please give me a job someday.
Love,
-Tracy
And now, on to the survey silliness. (more…)
