Category Archives: Uncategorized
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“Daniel L. Spuck of Mercer, Pa., has filed a motion against the NFL to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania for “a temporary emergency injunction” on the basis that the Chargers should not have been in the postseason because of a missed call in the Week 17 game between San Diego and Kansas City. The filing came before the first round of the playoffs.”
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“Forget biker chic or even mixologist chic. For beard purists, Mr. Carney’s adoption of the whiskered look marked an inevitable mainstreaming of a look that defined a subculture. To the Brooklyn set, it’s an echo of that post-’60s moment when longhair migrated from the muddy fields of Woodstock to crew-cut turf like country music and the National Football League. To the culture at large, the whiskered chin suddenly looks as divorced from its rebel origins as the Jolly Roger flag on a Pittsburgh Pirates beer koozie.”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/fashion/the-brooklyn-beard-goes-mainstream.html?ref=todayspaper
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Imagine if the federal government mandated that a portion of all federal gas taxes go directly to the oil industry’s trade association, the American Petroleum Institute. Imagine further that API used this public money to finance ad campaigns encouraging people to drive more and turn up their thermostats, all while lobbying to discredit oil industry critics—from environmentalists to those calling for better safety regulations or alternative energy sources.
That’s a deal not even Exxon could pull off, yet the nation’s largest meat-packers now enjoy something quite like it. Today, when you buy a Big Mac or a T-bone, a portion of the cost is a tax on beef, the proceeds from which the government hands over to a private trade group called the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The NCBA in turn uses this public money to buy ads encouraging you to eat more beef, while also lobbying to derail animal rights and other agricultural reform activists, defeat meat labeling requirements, and defend the ongoing consolidation of the industry.
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– http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january_february_2014/features/big_beef048356.php?page=all
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Natural zero-calorie sweeteners have so far been caught between two imperatives: What they want to say and what they can deliver. It used to be that natural sweeteners weren’t sweet enough; now they have an added problem: They aren’t fully natural.
“‘Natural’ would mean that I picked it from the ground,” said Donna LiVolsi, the director of operations at Cumberland Packing Corporation, which invented Sweet’N Low, the first artificial sweetener sachet, in 1957. I met her near the Navy Yards of Brooklyn, where Cumberland still makes Sweet’N Low, along with value brands of aspartame and sucralose and a couple of natural-sugar substitutes — Stevia in the Raw and Monk Fruit in the Raw. When I asked LiVolsi if she thought these latter two were “natural,” she said she couldn’t answer, because each consumer has a sense of what the word means to them.
It’s a question that has bedeviled beverage-makers, too. In the fall of 2012, a German food company surveyed 4,000 people in eight European countries, to find out how they understood the “natural” claim. Almost three-quarters said they thought that natural products were more healthful and that they’d pay a premium to get them. More than half argued that natural products have a better taste. But the respondents weren’t sure what degree or form of processing would be enough to strip a product of its natural status. Some drew a line between sea salt (natural) and table salt (artificial). Others did the same for dried pasta and powdered milk, though both are made by dehydration.
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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/the-quest-for-a-natural-sugar-substitute.html?pagewanted=all
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This handy infographic from Guard Your Health offers a quick reminder that your butter pat should be no larger than the size of your fingertip, that your protein should be roughly the size of your palm, and that your carbs should only fit the size of your clenched fist.
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No matter your stance on capital punishment, eating and dying are universal and densely symbolic human processes. Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country. If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly). And when this combination of factors is set against America’s already fraught relationship with food, supersized or slow, and with weight and weight loss, it’s almost surprising that Pizza Hut didn’t have a winner on its hands.
The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point. As Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed by the state of Arkansas in 1995, said in regard to his last meal, “It’s just like putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.”
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Liz divides cheeses into six families — fresh, bloomy rind, washed rind, pressed, cooked and blue — each with its own appearance, aroma, flavor and texture. (There is no set number of families, and cheesemongers may define them slightly differently.) Once you absorb the basics of the six families, you can use cheeses from the same family interchangeably in a recipe with good results.
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On Tuesday, the commission charged four companies with deceptively marketing weight-loss products, asserting they made “unfounded promises” that consumers could shed pounds simply by using their food additives, skin creams and other dietary supplements.
The four companies — Sensa Products, L’Occitane, HCG Diet Direct and LeanSpa — will collectively pay $34 million to refund consumers. They neither admitted nor denied fault in the case.
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By paying a wage that was significantly above what the market required, Ford was betraying his fellow business owners and putting the whole of American enterprise in jeopardy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, then, as now, a hotbed of revanchism, sniffed: “To double the minimum wage, without regard to length of service, is to apply Biblical or spiritual principles where they do not belong.” Ford may have been seeking a place in heaven, the Journal warned, but this action would more likely consign him to hell. Ford has “in his social endeavor committed blunders, if not crimes. They may return to plague him and the industry he represents, as well as organized society.”
Of course, Ford was motivated more by self-interest than by altruism. Turnover was huge in the growing auto industry, as workers hopped from factory to factory in search of better wages. The nation was in the midst of a rising wave of labor activism that frequently turned to violence. International networks of communists, socialists, and various other types of radical syndicalists were organized and active in America’s largest cities—and occasionally tossed bombs at business owners. Raising wages proactively was clearly a way to buy some short-term labor peace.
But Ford was playing a deeper, longer game. The Ford Motor Company was in the business of building an expensive durable good. The first cars he had built in number, the 1903 Model N, cost about $3,000, and so were accessible only to that era’s one percent. Henry Ford recognized that the automobile would be more successful as a volume business than as a niche product. “I would build a motorcar for the great multitudes,” he proclaimed. Through relentless innovation, vertical integration, and the obsessive development of an assembly line, Ford had already managed to bring the cost of the Model T, the first democratic car, down to about $500. And the company was moving about 250,000 cars a year. But per capita income was only $354 in 1913. The U.S. didn’t have a developed consumer credit industry. People paid for things with the wages they earned and their savings.
So this was Ford’s theory: Companies had an interest in ensuring that their employees could afford the products they produced. Put another way, employers had a role to play in boosting consumption. While paying higher wages than you absolutely needed to might lower profits temporarily, it would lead to a more sustainable business and economy over time. If the motorcar was going to be a mass-produced product for typical Americans, not a plaything for the rich, Ford would strive to pay his workers enough so they could afford the products they worked on all day.
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– http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/06/henry-ford-understood-that-raising-wages-would-bring-him-more-profit.html#url=/articles/2014/01/06/henry-ford-understood-that-raising-wages-would-bring-him-more-profit.html
shaun james bockert 