Chris Aldrich Blog: BoffoSocko.com

🔖 Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction by Parke Wilde

Bookmarked Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction by Parke Wilde (Routledge, 2013)

This book offers a broad introduction to food policies in the United States. Real-world controversies and debates motivate the book’s attention to economic principles, policy analysis, nutrition science and contemporary data sources. It assumes that the reader's concern is not just the economic interests of farmers, but also includes nutrition, sustainable agriculture, the environment and food security. The book’s goal is to make US food policy more comprehensible to those inside and outside the agri-food sector whose interests and aspirations have been ignored.

The chapters cover US agriculture, food production and the environment, international agricultural trade, food and beverage manufacturing, food retail and restaurants, food safety, dietary guidance, food labeling, advertising and federal food assistance programs for the poor.

The author is an agricultural economist with many years of experience in the non-profit advocacy sector, the US Department of Agriculture and as a professor at Tufts University. The author's well-known blog on US food policy provides a forum for discussion and debate of the issues set out in the book.

Study debunks old concept of how anesthesia works | Phys.Org

Read Study debunks old concept of how anesthesia works (phys.org)

Anesthesia induces unconsciousness by changing the function of proteins that reside on the surface of a thin membrane that forms a barrier around all cells, according to new research from Weill Cornell Medicine scientists. The findings challenge a century-old concept of how anesthetics work and may help guide the development of new agents associated with fewer side effects.

Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” are already being used to gut the working poor | Salon.com

Read Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” are already being used to gut the working poor (Salon)

Conservatives and the media treated Vance's memoir like "Poor People for Dummies." Watch his damaging rhetoric work

A brief analogy of food culture and the internet

tantek [10:07 AM]
I made a minor cassis.js auto_link bug fix that is unlikely to affect folks (involves a parameter to explicitly turn off embeds)
(revealed by my own posting UI, so selfdogfooding FTW)
selfdogfood++

tantek [10:10 AM]
/me realizes his upcoming events on his home page are out of date, again. manual hurts.

Tantek’s thoughts and the reference to selfdogfooding, while I’m thinking about food, makes me think that there’s kind of an analogy between food and people who choose to eat at restaurants versus those who cook at home and websites/content on the internet.

The IndieWeb is made of people who are “cooking” their websites at home. In some sense I hope we’re happier, healthier, and better/smarter communicators as a result, but it also makes me think about people who can’t afford to eat or afford internet access.

Are silos the equivalent of fast food? Are too many people consuming content that isn’t good for them and becoming intellectually obese? Would there be more thought and intention if there were more home chefs making and consuming content in smaller batches? Would it be more nutritious and mentally valuable?

I think there’s some value hiding in extending this comparison.

📖 Read pages 55 – 86 of 776 of Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript with JQUERY, CSS & HTML5 by Robin Nixon

I’ve been promising myself that I would do some brushing up on programming skills this year and this seems like a fairly reasonable text with some simple examples.