Code Fu
— Saturday, January 30, 2010 —
Years ago, I was IMing with a friend who was a devout born-again Christian. He said that he knew God existed because when he had been tutoring some local underprivileged kids, he felt sure that those kids' academic improvements were, at least in some cases, due to God's touch. To him, it was evidence this was a world that had God in it.
I didn't think to ask this at the time, but I wish I had:
How do you tell the difference between a world where God exists, and one where he doesn't? ¶ 23:29 0 Comments
I didn't think to ask this at the time, but I wish I had:
How do you tell the difference between a world where God exists, and one where he doesn't? ¶ 23:29 0 Comments
— Thursday, January 7, 2010 —
"Spim" is a word I made up, that refers to the processed crap that the food industry has inundated us with for the past sixty years. Food is cheap, because giant agribusinesses have spent decades figuring out how to produce stuff that's technically edible and not immediately toxic, at the lowest possible cost, by using preservatives, refrigeration, and bulk production methods.
The side-effect is that this stuff, while technically something you can sustain yourself on, is relatively bereft of actual nutrients, and frequently contains substances whose long-term health effects are not known (or are known to be toxic).
"Spim" was from a joke acronym, Synthetic Processed Indigestible Matter. Its proximity to "SPAM" was actually an unconscious choice, but I like it. I wanted to pick a word that didn't sound anything like "food," so as to avoid the association between spim and real food.
Most food out there is spim. Anything that's really cheap is likely spim; it's really not possible to produce good, nutritious, non-processed, non-preserved food for as cheap as the agribusinesses can spit out their spim. Conversely, though, expensive doesn't mean it's real food, either.
My New Year's resolution this year is to minimize my intake of spim. For health's sake? Not really. Mostly I'm angry at the fact that the giant agribusinesses have profited endlessly at our expense. I don't really want to give them my money any more if I can avoid it... but it's hard. Good luck finding restaurants that don't serve spim, for instance.
Food labeling laws have brought us a long way toward a healthier society; being able to know what's in your food means you can make better decisions about what you eat. But there's still a lot more that should be done. For example, "natural flavor" sounds... well, natural, right? Except a company can call a substance "natural flavor" as long as the substance has been found in nature, even if the actual substance in the product was produced by artificial means in a lab, and not extracted from naturally occurring plants or animals.
There's two ways to make this change happen:
The side-effect is that this stuff, while technically something you can sustain yourself on, is relatively bereft of actual nutrients, and frequently contains substances whose long-term health effects are not known (or are known to be toxic).
"Spim" was from a joke acronym, Synthetic Processed Indigestible Matter. Its proximity to "SPAM" was actually an unconscious choice, but I like it. I wanted to pick a word that didn't sound anything like "food," so as to avoid the association between spim and real food.
Most food out there is spim. Anything that's really cheap is likely spim; it's really not possible to produce good, nutritious, non-processed, non-preserved food for as cheap as the agribusinesses can spit out their spim. Conversely, though, expensive doesn't mean it's real food, either.
My New Year's resolution this year is to minimize my intake of spim. For health's sake? Not really. Mostly I'm angry at the fact that the giant agribusinesses have profited endlessly at our expense. I don't really want to give them my money any more if I can avoid it... but it's hard. Good luck finding restaurants that don't serve spim, for instance.
Food labeling laws have brought us a long way toward a healthier society; being able to know what's in your food means you can make better decisions about what you eat. But there's still a lot more that should be done. For example, "natural flavor" sounds... well, natural, right? Except a company can call a substance "natural flavor" as long as the substance has been found in nature, even if the actual substance in the product was produced by artificial means in a lab, and not extracted from naturally occurring plants or animals.
There's two ways to make this change happen:
- Write my elected officials. From my city councilman all the way up, they need to know that I care about this issue and that I'll vote for politicians who support the health of the population over the profits of giant agribusinesses.
- Spread information to other individuals that helps this cause. What exactly goes into spim; how factory farming methods reduce nutrients and increase toxins and disease; how agribusinesses spend millions lobbying Congress to do things in their interests that are not in our interests. This is best done without sounding shrill or evangelical.
