New Testingstan

i'd rather just use facebook where i'm not gimped to 140 characters

i worry that i will never use or remember anything from my philosophy of language course after it is finished

i mean philosophy in general is fairly abstract

but i honestly don't see in what circumstances my knowing a solid theory of definite descriptions will come up

Who know, maybe one day it could save your life ?

I tweet about Murder She Wrote.

nua i don't remember most of that stuff, and it is pretty much okay with me

other philosophy allows me to argue with people on the internet and if that's not useful i don't know what is

Oxymoron wrote:What the fuck do people use Twitter for, anyway ?

Well personally i use it so that i can be the first person in the world the Dalai Lama follows on Twitter.

twitter is a trap for politicians to reveal their true opinions

or so it seems

i love food, but i wish i could have an easy way to filter the news articles and opinions i read about it. they appear in my regular news sources, and sometimes people send stuff to me

things i give a shit about

• recipes with cheap, accessible ingredients
• actual science
• the psychology of eating, like how to train yourself to eat better without feeling unsatisfied
• congress doing hilarious shit like declaring pizza a vegetable

things i do not give a shit about

• some pretentious fuck in california who forages for lichen and seaweed and has 2 michelin stars for it
• some pretentious fucks in new york who go on buddhist retreats for "mindfulness eating"
• angry vegans
• angry omnivores
• organic _________

WTF is organic food anyways, it seems like its just code for locally grown. I can do that in my back yard, well if the local cats would stop shitting in it.

all i know is that organic food is more expensive while looking and tasting more or less the same

Aaron wrote:WTF is organic food anyways, it seems like its just code for locally grown. I can do that in my back yard, well if the local cats would stop shitting in it.

Supposedly it means "no pesticides or growth hormones" and a bunch of other rubbish hippies claim they don't like.

Organic food actually can have pesticides as long as they are derived from plants. It's really food that doesn't have artificial pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, or genetic modification. In the States, the USDA has an official stamp of approval for organic beef, poultry, fruit and veggies, and the laws are a little bit arcane. There isn't anything for organic seafood, so anyone can say they're selling organic seafood, I guess.

Organic food is often locally grown, but not always. That's partly because it can't be processed (so can't always survive long shipping trips) and partly because... well, there's a big morass of food and health activist causes that tend to overlap and appeal to similar audiences. There's vegetarians, vegans, locavores, organic food fans, people who only eat free-range and cruelty-free meat/eggs/dairy, and occasionally the real crazies like raw foodies and fruitarians (I've never met either of those though). People who are into this stuff tend to use a certain language: "organic," "fresh," "natural," "local," and "sustainable" are high praise for food and agriculture, and "processed," "artificial," "chemical," and "toxins" are slurs. Many think that anything natural is good for you, and anything artificial is bad for you.

Obviously not all of them are like this, but the farther you go, the weirder it gets. Vegetarians tend to be pretty normal (my dad is a vegetarian, physiology professor, and all-around reasonable dude), but fruitarians are cuckoo for minimally processed chocolate breakfast cereal.

Fruititarian?

Someone who eats only fruit? I pity the toilet.

Well, the idea (I think) is that you don't eat anything unless it can be removed from a plant without harming or killing it. So, fruit, nuts, and seeds are in, root vegetables and anything you have to cut down is out. It's not quite as restrictive as only eating fruit.

There really is going to be a market once we'll have debugged all the potential problems with vat-grown food.

I'm just expecting the nutters to be all "wah-wah industrial genetically engineered chemical blah blah bleh" once it reach the market...

Oxymoron wrote:There really is going to be a market once we'll have debugged all the potential problems with vat-grown food.

I'm just expecting the nutters to be all "wah-wah industrial genetically engineered chemical blah blah bleh" once it reach the market...

let me know when it tastes like the real thing

until then i'm not interested

The only real problem I have currently is with antibiotic use because it is rapidly making infections resistant to treatment. Other than that, steroid them up, genetically modify them, make 200lb tomatoes, do whatever.

Zod wrote:let me know when it tastes like the real thing

until then i'm not interested

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e2Q8Op7XEIE

Oxymoron wrote:

Zod wrote:let me know when it tastes like the real thing

until then i'm not interested

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e2Q8Op7XEIE

i do not speak frenchie

Frog. The term is frog.

@ Zod : More or less what you said in a visual form (90's idea of the "food of the future", with the associated "awh hell no !").

@ Flagg :

Metatwaddle wrote:Organic food is often locally grown, but not always.

Organic produce exports are a pretty big deal for Tasmania, because we obviously can't compete on scale. An agsci guy I met recently was telling me though that operating in the organic niche is reasonably profitable though.

Around here, people who grow things "organically" ("agriculture biologique", personally I prefer to call it "responsible agriculture" - I suspect there's a difference in definition on the stuff between the two side of the Atlantic...) have generally better profit margin over classically grown stuff because :

1 - They have less expenses coming from the "need" to use chemical Monsanto-branded pesticides & fertilizer.
2 - They tend to prefer selling their stuff to distribution circuit with almost no intermediary between them and the final consumer : one intermediary, two at most ; compared to the three, four, five (or more sometimes...) intermediaries of the classical distribution scheme, each one taking their own profit margin, pushing down the selling price of the producer and up the buying price of the final consumer.

Because of the point N°2, "organically" grown food around here tend to be cheaper than classically grown stuff. It also tend to be tastier...


Short distribution circuit + responsible agricultural practices = rox

Marketing inflates prices world in peril

Truly, it always bring me a special kind of joy to see these guys selling stuff of greater quality at a lower price, and doing better profit margins than the concurrence.

Now, mind you, I really don't know if these practices generalized could be able to meet the demand of more than half a billion Europeans, but who the fuck cares, eh ?