Well, that’s done. For now. 15 May 2010 6:10 am
Posted by Tracy in : history,random,school,writing , View CommentsJust 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!
The U.S. Childhood Obesity Task Force: a comment 26 March 2010 2:28 pm
Posted by Tracy in : diet stress is a health hazard,geekery,health,health at every size,nutrition,politics,writing , View CommentsSo on February 9 of this year, President Barack Obama signed a Presidential Memo establishing a joint task force between the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Education, directing those agencies to come up with a plan to address the “problem” of childhood obesity. The task force is part of a larger effort, led by First Lady Michelle Obama, with the uncontroversial but catchy name Let’s Move! and I have extremely mixed feelings about this project because I support almost everything about it except the fact that good things like improved school lunches and increased access to healthier food in underserved neighborhoods are being pursued in the name of ending obesity. Those mixed feelings are part of why I haven’t posted about Let’s Move until now—but also, I ran into a deadline. The Joint Task Force’s official Request for Information is accepting public responses until 11:59 tonight (and yes, that link will take you to much more information about the Task Force and a way to submit comments of your own). Here is what I wrote: (more…)
I may have created monsters last night, readers. 9 February 2010 11:49 am
Posted by Tracy in : cooking,eating,fun,geekery,history,photos,pictures,potatoes,random,reading,school,silly,writing , View CommentsOne is the paper due in my industrial food class tomorrow, which is currently in very drafty form, full of rambles like:
…Hotchkiss comes in, pretending that change is this magical uniform unstoppable force kind of thing, but fortunately we also have the MIT book reminding us that there was no shortage of immovable objects — and sometimes those immovable objects were people, even if sometimes those people were embodying social forces (*cough* PATRIARCHY *cough* I am looking at you, Professor Sedgwick, you jerkface you. *cough cough cough*)
Yeah, I’ve got some revising to do. But anything written is better than nothing, and editing things to make them suck less is way easier than writing, so hey, I’ll take what I got.
Last night’s other little monster, I am happy to report, was of the edible persuasion, and I got pictures.
I’m posting both because the real color is somewhere in between too dark without flash, and weirdly over-lit with. Also, because more fries!
Homemade French fries, from (more…)
Yet another (very) belated Monkey Monday post 20 January 2010 3:47 pm
Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle,consumerism,eating,fangirl,food snobbery,geekery,media,monkeys,news,nyc,politics,random,reading,school,writing , View CommentsAll 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…)
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 , View CommentsSo 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…)
