food

How does the food we eat affect us as people? Michael Pollan’s books—The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Cooked, In Defense of Food, and others—consider the history and science behind the way we eat, and how our eating habits have changed over time. His books often lead us on a sort of journey: in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he spends a few weeks farming with Joel Salatin, then goes on to learn how to forage for mushrooms and hunt wild boar. His journeys are usually structured around a question about food and our relationship to it: why do we farm this way?

A Republican member of the New York State Senate wants to introduce a bill to prevent people on food stamps purchasing luxury food items and stop them getting fat. The Independent reports: Republican State Senator Patty Ritchie wants to prevent folks from buying high-end items such as steaks and lobsters. She also wants to limit the purchases of non-nutritional items like decorated cakes and energy drinks.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been working on some “measures.”

“Now that the economic emergency decree has validity, in the next few days I will activate a series of measures I had been working on,” he said Thursday, in a televised statement meant to address a “food emergency” declared by Congress.

The “validity” Maduro references comes from a high court ruling that gives the President expanded powers to tackle a deepening economic crisis that’s left hospitals without medicine and grocery stores bereft of food.

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

I approach the subject of the physics of energy and the economy with some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? There are not many people who understand dissipative systems, and very few who understand how an economy operates. The combination leads to an awfully lot of false beliefs about the energy needs of an economy.

"It’s a wonderful life for the 1% and a Xanax existence for the 99," Bill Gross says, bemoaning the pacification of the masses that the (former) bond king likens to "a day at the Coliseum" for Plebian citizens and "cake" for the French Bourgeoisie.