Saturday morning roundup

A history of hacktivism.

On Cecilia Muñoz and immigration reform.

We're all bad listeners, but men are measurably worse listeners than women.

This whole review was over my head--I'm so far from high-end restaurants that pervade the foodie culture described in the book is lost on me--but I have to take issue with this:

The food movement ran into trouble when it began insisting that good taste was also capital-G good: Food that is good for the environment, for animals, for workers, for community-building, and for health will also taste the best. The argument is seductive but specious—what tastes good to one person won’t taste good to another—and dangerous. In the final section of her book, Pearlman notes that food-focused publications have increasingly covered issues related to environmentalism, labor, and politics over the last decade—but only “as problems to be solved not by collective political action but by individual shopping choices—in other words, consumption.” If consumption is virtuous, only those with the economic means to consume discriminately can have virtue. Which is how restaurant menus became infected with the elite farm brand-names and modernist amuse-bouches that proclaim how much less accessible they are than the food of the masses. The less accessible, the better.

What food movement is this? My food movement (which does insist on those things) is different from the celebrity restaurant food culture. My food movement emphasizes cooking and using basic ingredients (see Michael Pollan's and Mark Bittman's most recent books). My food movement emphasizes sustainability and fairness.

That said, I absolutely agree that conscious consumption will only get you so far, especially when so much public policy and subsidy drives our food system. I guess my issue with the paragraph is the confounding of the two issues and the slam on the people who are actually trying to do something about the food system. I ranted the other day on the flaw in the argument regarding "only those with the economic means to consume discriminately can have virtue." It doesn't mean that people who do have the economic means shouldn't consume discriminately, first of all, but it also presumes that sustainable food is more expensive (please compare the prices of my chickpeas against a very subsidized burger... the chickpeas will still win). But can't you also make the argument that the same people who are too busy wondering where their next meal is coming from--and so cannot "consume discriminately"--are also too busy to engage in collective political action? You think those people are more likely to agitate for food system reform?

Look, I was raised by people who grew up poor and survived a famine. Just, logically, do you think I care about food because of that or in spite of that? I fundamentally reject the idea that you have to be wealthy to care about food or want to do something about the food system. And just because having choices about what you eat is a privilege, doesn't mean exercising those choices for the betterment of your neighbors is an act of depraved elitism.

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Now that we got that out of the way... blood facials are bull$hit.

Sand is not going to save my clay-laden soil, and it looks like nothing else would, either.