The answer to the above is a resounding YES. If you own a website, your personal information such as address, cell phone number, e-mail address (pretty much everything short of your first-born child’s worst fears) may be publicly available to the web’s unsavory characters.
“So where’s all this info!?” you ask. “And how do I check if I’m exposed?”
After attempting to read some pretty simplistic and unsophisticated books like What Would Google Do and The World is Flat, I finally got around to reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Yes. Thank you, Michael Pollan for being nuanced and thorough and writing like a real investigative journalist. You’ve established trust as an author.
So well written, and detailed. Pollan’s book made me sad, indignant, hopeful. I seriously came almost to tears at some points.
If you want to know where your dinner comes from, please pick up this book. If you don’t care enough about yourself to even try to understand the stuff you’re putting into your own stomach, then you’re only doing yourself a disservice.
Food was always very important in my family. Coming from a Chinese background - back in China, most people put a very high premium on freshness and quality of food. The food industry in China is no where as developed as the one in the US, so there are still many local open-air markets that sell fresh produce and live chickens and fish that local farmers bring to town. Compare this to the ridiculous extent to which Americans have industrialized their food. Microwaveable TV dinners, Easy Mac that cooks in 1 minute, the countless combinations of processed foods all made essentially from corn and soy.
Pollan explains how the US’ way of growing, processing, and distributing food is unsustainable, contributes to obesity, and uproots humans from nature.
Externalities makes capitalism faulty The Problems of Externalities in Capitalism
OD 243 Joel Salatin: “Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water - of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.”
It would be a great rule, that in order to eat meat, people should remind themselves of what it means to the animal. To eat a chicken, you must first experience the act of killing a chicken. We’ve gotten too disconnected from the domestic animals we depend on. We’ve lost touch with other life forms. We need to get reacquainted with Mother Nature.
Make slaughterhouses glass for transparency.
Why look at animals? by John Berger
OD 318: “A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.”
Killing Animals
In the second section of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan writes about his experience on Polyface Farms, an organic, local farm. He includes this quote by farm-owner Joel Salatin:
Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians - we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians every wanted - to keep their teepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn’t care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can’t bear an opt-out option. We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Big Horn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.
Them is fightin’ words.
A better way to farm would be to emulate Mother Nature’s closed-loop biological systems. On Salatin’s farm, the cows are allowed to graze on pastures but rotated to prevent overgrazing. Grazing stimulates grass’ root growth. The cows provide natural manure. Then a mobile henhouse is brought in. The hens pick the cowpats for insects and thus spread out the manure to fertilize the grass and eliminate parasites. Chickens also provide nitrogen for the greass. Their eggs taste better and they’re raised more humanely.
But Whole Foods does not buy from this type of farm. To have a business this large, you are forced to buy from big suppliers because of the high transaction costs of dealing with hundreds of small ones. page 161 OD: “As soon as your business involves stocking the frozen food case or produce section at a national chain, whether it be Wal-Mart or Whole Foods, the sheer quantities of organic produce you need makes it imperative to buy from farms operating on the same industrial scale you are. Everything’s connected. The industrial values of specialization, economies of scale, and mechanization wind up crowding out ecological values such as diversity, complexity, and symbiosis.”
One of my friends doubted wether small-scale farms would be able to save us energy or feed everyone. But we’re not feeding everyone. We’re feeding the majority of Americans well. Some too well as witnessed by rising obesity rates and obesity-related illnesses. But many people in the world suffer from starvation and malnutrition. And according to Pollan (page 161, Omnivore’s Dilemma) small farms are more productive on a per acre basis than large farms.
OD 200: “So feeding ruminants corn came to make a certain economic sense - I say “certain” because that statement depends on the particular method of accounting our economy applies to such questions, one that tends to hide the high cost of cheap food produced from corn. The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost - to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs of which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. If not for this sort of blind-man’s accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does.”
OD 214: “‘Efficiency’ is the term usually invoked to defend large-scale industrial farms, and it usually refers to the economies of scale that can be achieved by the application of technology and standardization. Yet Joel Salatin’s farm makes the case for a very different sort of efficiency - the one found in natural systems, with the coevolutionary relationships and reciprocal loops. For example, in nature there is no such thing as a waste problem, since one creature’s waste becomes another creature’s lunch.”
mimic relationships found in nature instead of working against her. Both animals and humans gain by letting them do what they naturally are disposed to do. It’s not natural to cram hens in cages, snipping their beaks, tail docking pigs, etc.
A follow-up to my post on the great salmonella-tainted-egg recall.
I’ve always been skeptical of organic foods. “What does ‘organic’ really mean?” I asked my friends who went ga-ga for thistle milk at farmers’ markets and bought labels like Kashi Go Lean. “No chemicals or synthetics,” they said. But was that really true?
Here’s the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) definition of “organic” as of 2007. But many companies who want to tap into the lucrative organic market no doubt hire lobbyists and creatively interpret their way around standards to get that “organic” sticker slapped onto their packages.
We’ve all heard the proverb “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” as a way of expressing how a child is similar to his parents. This is a good thing if your parent is Bill Gates, a bad thing if he’s K-fed, and a mixed blessing if he’s Stephen Hawking. For those of you who think you’re nothing like your parents and would be offended at the mere suggestion that we share the same driveway much less the same genetic material, I bring you a suitable response to the above saying. It’s assertive yet tactful.
“If my parent was an apple tree and I an apple, I would be the most delicious-looking fruit on the tree. A hungry mammal, enticed by my colorful and fleshy appearance promising sugars and calories, would immediately eat me. The animal would then travel away from my parental tree while I commuted through its gut landing finally in a faraway place after being excreted into a pile of fresh poop. So this apple fell very far away from the tree.”
12:37 PM on AIM
Friend:so i have a great drunk story for you lol
Me: hi
Friend: hi david lol
Me: yes? do tell
Friend: well i’m pretty sure i broke my foot. lol
Friend: like i’m STILL hobbling in my friends apartment
Me: “pretty sure”?
Read the post that started all the fuss. Read the post that continues it**.
[update] Commenter “Jessica” wrote on the previous post:
As a female employee at Citi, I have one of these on my desk. They were NOT handed out by the HR department, but rather by the Head of Diversity, Patricia David, who is no longer with the firm. (Currently at JP Morgan I believe.) They are handed out at workshops geared towards women, often hosted by “Women’s Councils” that exist in various Citi locations.
When a friend who interviewed at Citibank showed me the card above, we shared it among friends and laughed at its ridiculousness on so many levels. I posted a photo of the card here but didn’t think it would get much of a response. I was right. It languished in my sad, little corner of the Internet garnering a only a few hits. Two days ago, a friend who reads the online business tabloid Dealbreaker, told me to send my post to Dealbreaker editor Bess Levin.
You know that post about the tips to women from Citigroup?? If I may, I think you should send a link of that post over to Bess Levin at Dealbreaker. It is perfect for her and if I remember, she has not uncovered that piece of paper yet. She loves to pick up on women in finance stuff AND she likes to make fun of citigroup. She will definitely link from Dealbreaker to your blog, which will get you viewership.
I shot Ms. Levin an hopeful e-mail, and she responded, “wow…is that real??” I said I’m neither creative enough to come up with ten whole bullet points or motivated enough to print and laminate the card. Coming up with something for a birthday card is hard enough. And if the photo was a hoax, don’t you think I’d catch the “therefore you are not get taken seriously” typo in #7. Come on, Citi. Can’t you spare some i-banking analysts from writing prospectus summaries to spellcheck that card?
Ms. Levin agreed to post the photo and link back to my blog. The blogosphere’s response has been, to put it lightly, somewhat loud:
It started on Dealbreaker where comments ranged from
#11 -Typically give terrible head in the conference room.
to
Yeah, right? I mean wtf? If I were a competent female Citigroup employee I’d be seriously po’d at this. Totally insulting. A woman doesn’t get ahead in this biz by acting like a douchebag guy with no sense of humor. She gets ahead like anyone else– being good at her JOB.
Being well dressed and hot is also a plus, especially if you’re in a client/counterparty facing role.
-a heterosexual WASP who is amazed he’s actually commenting like this but anyway
Jezebel, Gothamist, Business Insider, Big Think, and even the LA Times blog posted the photo. So I got my first viral blog post. My fifteen seconds of fame in the blogosphere brings mixed feelings, however. Hell, this even provoked a comment from a Citi spokesperson, according to the LA Times:
A Citi spokesperson said, “The material in question is not part of Citi’s formal leadership training or human resources communications. It appears to have been taken from a published book by a noted author in the field of executive coaching.”
My rationale and defense for posting the photo rests on the fact that this card is not confidential information and it’s…thought-provoking. Releasing something like this on the web, the wild, wild west of all mediums, however, has the danger of distortion and exaggeration. Just imagine a game of telephone with thousands of people, some don’t listen carefully while others are just mildly retarded. So I clarified some things with my source who passed me the photo.
According to my friend, this card was on some of the desks on a floor he suspects was the human resources department. It is unclear how these cards fit in with official company training material, how widely and to which employees Citibank distributed them, or the financial institution’s broader policy towards women in the workplace. I personally don’t doubt that Citibank takes its treatment of female employees very seriously and that this card was handed out with the best of intentions.
I stood next to Ground Zero’s twin beams of light commemorating the victims of 9/11 a year ago today. Earlier that evening, I had milled around the World Trade Center area with two friends from college. We peeked through construction barricades to look at the reconstruction efforts and listened to bagpipe players playing funeral dirges for fallen firefighters. As my friends and I approached the Tribute in Light installation like moths drawn to a flame, we traced the lights’ origins to Battery Parking Garage at 38 Washington Street.
Worried about the MTA raising their fares? $99 to $104 for a monthly pass that may not even have unlimited rides? Don’t you wish you could hack into your MetroCard and get free rides for life? That’s exactly what four MIT students did in 2008. They found multiple ways to bypass security mechanisms in Boston’s subway passes. For example, one can buy a 5-cent pass, a $150 card reader, and re-encode the card to hold over $600.
I made my first cent from Google Adsense on last Friday. I jumped at the site of that big fat “$0.01″ on my Google Analytics page. I’m so happy. And I only had to wait 3 months before this massive windfall.
This post was submitted by a friend of mine who’s desperate to have his voice heard and his grievance aired. Naturally, this person chose my blog as a platform. Due to the sensitive nature of this issue, I’ve chosen to not to reveal his/her identity. Instead, I’ll just refer to him by the pseudonym ”Jonathan Maimon.“ For Mr. Maimon’s sake, I sincerely hope Mark Bittman will notice just how many lives he’s destroyed. Help Jonny out. Send an e-mail to Bittman at bitten@nytimes.com.
Mark Bittman is really stressing me out. I have his book “How to Cook Everything.” There are so many recipes. I estimate that it has 3,000 recipes. What am I supossed to do with 3,000 recipes? I can’t sit down, look at it, and figure out what to cook because there are 3,000 recipes to sort through. Even if I cooked a new recipe every night, it would take me 8.2 years to finish the book. I might not even need to cook by then. I could be married or homeless. Those are the two most common reasons for someone not to cook.
You know?