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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 comment

Hey 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).

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Mixed feelings about Wal*mart’s sustainable agriculture plan 17 October 2010 3:31 pm

Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,consumerism,economics,local food,Marion Nestle,news,sustainability,WFPA , add a comment

Last Thursday, on Twitter:

@jorgeimontalvo Jorge I. Montalvo
Director, Strategic Initiatives, NYS Consumer Protection Board: food policy and consumer protection
Food folks: what do you think?: Wal-Mart Plans Drive to Buy More Locally Grown Produce: http://is.gd/g1Q9v

@tracyfood Tracy
Food geek, one-time-regular blogger
@jorgeimontalvo I have more mixed feelings about Wal*Mart’s “Global Sustainable Agriculture” plan than fit in 140 chars. Must. Blog. Soon.

Here, at last, is my post.

* * * * *

News stories, in roughly the order I saw them:

* * * * *

My first thought was, I’ll admit, a mix of kneejerk snobbery and “Solidarity Forever”: ew, Wal*mart. (more…)

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 comments

I 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:

MUSFModelcrop
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!

Ask TracyFood: should I freak out about genetically modified foods? 10 March 2010 11:05 pm

Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,books,economics,environment,food safety,food snobbery,friends,geekery,GMOs,health,history,Marion Nestle,politics,science,sustainability , 1 comment so far

So I got a message from the splendiferous Ms. Lara earlier today:

Hey, Tracy! Someone on FB is arguing that GM crops are categorically horrible and bad and whatnot. Can you send me some informative links to help educate her (and myself!)? (I seem to recall you linked to an article about the death of an agriculturalist who saved millions of lives with his crops, so of course I thought of you…)

Many thanks to my favorite foodie!!
-L

Well. How could I resist the chance to go all run-on sentence on that? (more…)

Belated Monkey Monday: winter solstice 2009 edition. 22 December 2009 1:48 am

Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,monkeys,politics,random,school,seasonality,sustainability,whoops,writing , 2 comments

So I know tonight is officially the longest of the year, but I’m also subjectively sure that my longest night of 2009 was last Thursday, when I finally came up with a way to organize my sociology paper into a more-or-less coherent whole. That was at 11 PM, and of course it took a few more hours for the writing to really start to gel. Whee. I ran into a spot of technical difficulties at 2:40 PM the next day, when I had settled on a conclusion and all that was left was cleaning up, cutting the big block quotations down to size, and so on… Google Docs sent me the error message that it couldn’t save my changes, and I noticed it hadn’t been able to do so since 2:15 PM. Eeks. I’m still not sure what caused the choke-up, but I managed to work around it by opening the most recently saved version of the paper in a different web browser, and rescuing the last few paragraphs into it by cut and paste, but the confusion did cost me a bunch of editing. So the final mess ended up way longer than intended, and I may yet revise it to satisfy my obsessive-compulsive superpower, but not today. Today is for the policy portfolio, which I had hoped to have turned in by now, but self-imposed deadlines be danged, sleep is more important.

Here’s my one-page summary of the issue, the stakeholders, and my strategy about what I think should be done about it. Can you dig it? (more…)