Comments watermirrors has made

Old Josh Video

Ha, I was reading this and I noticed someone had linked to an old video I had posted when I was a student at a big huge Midwestern university and I went to a Yale food conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKLbGS7yZ-0. I was highly impressed with Josh, but at the same time the whole experience was a little dispiriting. The Yale students I stayed with had wood-paneled rooms with fireplaces and ate wild salmon and organic butternut squash in their dorm cafeteria. Back at my home university I lived in a tiny cramped bare room and shared a beer/vomit encrusted bathroom with 30 other people. Our cafeteria food was nachos and pizza under florescent lights while we sat on beige plastic. I became a little jealous while I was there and thought that maybe if I weren't so dumb and poor I could drink organic fair trade hazelnut coffee too.

I've been thinking quite a lot since then and while I did feel a little alienated, I do agree that aesthetics are important. They have discovered that in urban planning, when they noticed that housing people in isolated concrete barracks does nothing to improve morale and giving people nice places to live gives them something to live up to. Now I go to school in another country and the student housing here manages to enable students to have good food without running cafeterias serving expensive ingredients. It's simple: give students nice kitchens, garden plots, and orchards. Let the students do the work...it's mostly about access.

 I think it might be even better than Yale's solution because Yale's farm was only run by a few select students, whereas here I can rent my own plot for $20 a year and I also get the benefit that I learn how to cook and grow food. Yale students may get served organic local kale, but do they know how to cook it themselves....much less grow it?  And it gives me access to some of the most expensive and delicate foods like wild sea buckthorn for free...I would never be able to afford them otherwise.

But I learned how to harvest the sea buckthorn from the local Slow Food here. That's slow food at its best- when it focuses on improving access rather than selling expensive food. On Slow Food Nation was magnificent in many ways, but overshot its mandate posted 1 year, 2 months ago 17 Responses

WTH

In college it seems to be the exact opposite. Don't like seitan? Say goodbye to those hot vegan boys. If you want the skinny boys in college, vegan is the way to date.

Not that I believe in modifying my diet to get dates. If you pretend to like food you don't actually like, you are attracting men who are attracted to your act, not the real you. On NYT dating advice: Eat more flesh posted 2 years, 3 months ago 24 Responses

I love this trend

Several of my professors use either no textbook or  small readers. I like this because you know that since the reading was put together by the professor, you don't have to wade through anything irrelevant to the course. A lot of my professors use papers from my university's library database as course content. I don't like websites as much (I really resent "web exploration" assignments), but they can be useful.

Besides that, you can avoid the ridiculous textbook costs, where you are often paying for material (bundled CDs etc.) and content you don't use. They are often pretty heavy too...my chemistry textbook weighs more than my computer and has often caused backaches. If you like the feel of paper/out in the woods without a PC, you can print relevant pages off so you don't have to carry everything around. On My year of teaching environmental science without a textbook posted 3 years, 7 months ago 11 Responses