I’m sure no one will be surprised to learn that my major decorating theme around here is piles of books. I have bookshelves, and even a wee library in my basement office, but the books, they still seem to pile up. So here are a few things I’ve been reading lately: This terrific article about how the David Foster Wallace archives found a home at the Ransom Center in Texas. We had our first glimpse into Wallace’s creative process in 2005 with our acquisition of the papers of Don DeLillo. Unexpectedly, the archive included a small cache of letters between…
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The cover of Preservation Magazine proclaims this month that “Old is the New Green.” It’s an interesting concept on a lot of fronts, especially in the way it undercuts the idea floating around out there that we can shop our way to sustainability. Sustainability, and being green, aren’t about buying clothing made from bamboo (which is really just rayon, the manufacturing of which brings a host of problems) or changing the lightbulbs, or well, buying different stuff instead of the stuff we’ve been buying all along. We’ve got to start thinking about ways to NOT buy stuff. To buy less…
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Over at Alternet, Kate Pickett, and Richard Wilkinson have a fascinating introduction to their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. It’s no surprise to anyone who has been reading this site that I think we all need to re-evaluate ideas like “standard of living” and “economic growth” — here at LivingSmall, I follow Ed Abbey, who said in all the way back in 1977, in The Journey Home that: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Picking up on this idea, Pickett and Wilkinson have done a demographic study…
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Here’s a link to the USDA News Release about the Child Nutrition Act and what’s been added to it. The list looks promising. It includes: Improve nutrition standards. Establishing improved nutrition standards for school meals based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and taking additional steps to ensure compliance with these standards; Increase access to meal programs. Providing tools to increase participation in the school nutrition programs, streamline applications, and eliminate gap periods; Increase education about healthy eating. Providing parents and students better information about school nutrition and meal quality; Establish standards for competitive foods sold in schools. Creating national…
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Hi folks — working on a really exciting redesign, so expect to see the maintenance mode page again over the next week or so. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot about school food. The Billings Gazette had a piece about an elementary school that was about to start offering breakfast to all students. Which sounds like a great idea, except that I read about it right on the heels of Ed Bruske’s series, Tales from a DC School Kitchen in which he spent a week in his daughter’s school, and discovered fun facts like the breakfast offered contained…
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There’s been a lot of noise on the foodie twitter/blogosphere about the EPA’s reluctance to ban Atrazine. As someone who grew up in the midwest, and who has relatives who grow corn and soybeans, let me tell you, that stuff is everywhere. I’ve also long wondered whether the sharp increase in agricultural chemicals was in some way responsible for the cancer cluster in which I grew up (the Zion Nuclear Power Plant didn’t help either). But we all got our water out of Lake Michigan, and all those chemicals were running into the lake. Here’s a piece from the Atlantic…
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Residents in parish of Martin join forces to feed themselves | Society | The Guardian. Nick Snelgar, who earns a living from growing herbs and shrubs near his home in Martin, thought it was crazy that he could not eat local produce. “It would be fresher, tastier and more nutritious than anything from the supermarket and I thought it could be cheaper too if we organised to cut out the middlemen,” he says. “Farmers’ markets tend to be expensive niche providers for the few. I wanted a system to provide local food for the many.” He organised a meeting in…
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Steve Sando and I had some good emails back and forth back in the day when we were both grumpy with Slow Food and Alice Waters. He grows the most DELICIOUS beans in the world. I can unabashedly plug them. Even if you think they’re too expensive and that buying beans by mail (as one must if you don’t live near by) — you’re wrong. His beans are wonderful. And you can plant them in your own back yard! I can personally vouch that the runner cannellini beans grow beautifully, make pretty red flowers, and produce lots and lots of…
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Ill-conceived from the start, and as usual, a program with paperwork burdens that were prohibitive for small farmers, looks like the USDA has come to its senses and killed NAIS. U.S.D.A. Will Drop Program to Trace Livestock – NYTimes.com.
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A seven minute recording of Virginia Woolf (with thanks to Paul Lisicky for the re-tweet). Paul says she doesn’t sound like the Woolf in his head, but I’m afraid she sort of does sound like the Woolf in my head. Or some combo of this and Vanessa Redgrave’s Mrs. Dalloway. It took me a long time to come to love Woolf’s work. If you’re not a fan, I recommend the letters — she’s scathingly funny and an unrepentant gossip. MOBYLIVES » “Words, words, words” as Hamlet lamented…..