Thank You Thursday: Oh. Hell. Yes. 9 June 2011 12:58 am
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,good news,nyc,pictures,school,thank you Thursday , add a comment
Weights are lifted that I did not even know I was carrying, party people.
Big huge thanks and love to everyone who has ever been supportive, including but by no means limited to everybody who sent nice messages on Facebook and/or Twitter when I was being all giddy on said media about graduation-related activities. Steinhardt faculty kickline FTW forever! And so on.
“I act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends/ But I really just have friends.” —Dar Williams, “My Friends”, End Of The Summer.
Flashback: competitive eating at Harvey Mudd College 9 March 2011 3:09 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,eating,events,food as spectator sport,school,silly,writing , add a commentOkay, so if all goes according to plan, soon you will call me Master (hey, I’m writing a self-indulgent flashback to undergraduate days at engineering school; I get to be as geeky as I want). Which is to say that if all continues according to plan this should be my last semester of my Master’s degree in food studies (concentration: food systems and policy, and please feel free to forward that information and my resumé to anyone you know who’s hiring food geeks) at NYU! So. In an effort to finish said Master’s, I’m in a class called Research Applications, in which my fellow last-semester students and I help each other work on big research projects. Which, it turns out, has a way of inspiring me to write blog posts, or at least this one.
One of my classmates (who will remain anonymous at least until she reads this post and tells me if she’s OK with my using her name) is writing about “extreme eating”—Man Versus Food, the Heart Attack Grille, stuff like that. One angle she’s particularly interested in is how college students engage in extreme eating and the gendered dimensions of such activity. Which sent me into a little flashback earlier today, because (perhaps unsurprisingly) something about the male-dominated environment of my undergrad engineering college did in fact lend itself to regular events involving some degree of competitive eating, a few of which I will now describe (and link to my class discussion board in case anybody’s interested in reading more than a summary). (more…)
Liveblogging TEDxManhattan: “Changing the Way We Eat” 12 February 2011 4:19 pm
Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,eating,environment,events,geekery,liveblogging,nyc,school,sustainability,writing , add a commentHey party people, surprise Saturday post!
I am coming to you sort of live from the 4th floor of NYU’s Kimmel Center, site of the NYC FoodEDU Student Food Collaborative TEDxManhattan viewing party (official Meetup site for the event here). For more information about TEDxManhattan, try this link here; we’re currently watching the third session, which kicks off with an old TED video of Dr. William Liu of the Angiogenesis Foundation, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” So far I am very happy to hear him mention quality of life as a consideration in the usefulness of angiogenesis-based cancer treatment.
I’ll be updating this post as the presentations continue to inspire me to comment, stay tuned (or read on, if you’re reading this after the fact).
Well, that’s done. For now. 15 May 2010 6:10 am
Posted by Tracy in : history,random,school,writing , add a commentJust emailed out my paper about how the rise of urban and metropolitan issues in food politics parallels food industrialization in the 20th century (as illustrated by examples from the class readings for my food systems class this term). Well, the first 12 or so pages of it, anyway, and kind of a mess in the middle there where I condensed two sections into a paragraph and a half and a few random references here and there. But I shuffled everything around to end on a strong note, so that’s good, or at least kind of satisfying. Not as satisfying, however, as it will be to sleep. Now. Yay!
Monkey Monday: I made this. 3 May 2010 11:43 pm
Posted by Tracy in : economics,environment,geekery,health,monkeys,pictures,politics,school,sustainability , 2 commentsI surprised myself today by producing not one but two diagrams for my final paper on food policy for urban and metropolitan regions. One of them even helped me organize a whole host of food policy issues according to a definition of sustainability based on health, the environment, and economics, like so:
Sustainable urban-metropolitan food policy, sort of.
The big breakthrough was the realization that sustainability and its environmental, economic, and health aspects are not food policy goals so much as they are common unifying themes shared across many food system goals and the policies and programs designed to pursue them, if that makes any sense. Anyway, that diagram helped me do a pretty decent presentation in class this afternoon, despite my weak chalkboard-fu and the fact that I hadn’t finished the paper yet. The first six pages are really solid, and I’m actually look forward to doing more on that project, even as I put it on hold to do the final for my food processing and industrialization class.
I’ll be fine if I just breathe.
Also, I had a fantastic sea scallop, fava bean, and rhubarb appetizer at Braeburn tonight. Nom.
Bed now! And way less coffee, iced or otherwise, for me tomorrow. G’night!
