JANUARY 27, 2012: BITS AND BOBS FROM THE INTERNET

From Bloomerg: A piece about food waste worldwide. It includes this sobering statistic: “The FAO has said global food output must rise 70 percent by 2050 to feed a world population expected to grow to 9 billion from 7 billion.” Food not wasted would go a long way toward achieving this goal. From the New [...]

ON BEING FAT: PART III—WHAT’S UP WITH WILL POWER?

When it comes to weight, there are various types of people. First, there are the people who are naturally slim and have been since they were children. They can eat like truck drivers and never put on a pound. My sister-in-law, Rose, falls into this category, and she is as pretty and as trim now [...]

A BUSY WEEKEND, ENDING WITH A LECTURE BY HABIB DAGHER AT UMA

A very busy weekend, that started with a bang. On Friday evening, our friends Debbie and Dennis Maddi joined Clif and me for soup and homemade bread. I decided to be bold and try to reproduce the soup I had made out of odds and ends in mid-December. (Here is the post where I describe [...]

NEWS ALERT: FROSTY’S IN BRUNSWICK TO REOPEN

News alert from the Bangor Daily News! Scrap the diets and head to Brunswick where Frosty’s Donuts will soon be reopening for—get this!—seven days a week. Frosty’s fans will recall that this shop, which made incredible melt-in-your-mouth honey dip donuts—had what might called flexible hours. Toward the end, they were open so infrequently that I [...]

JANUARY 20, 2012: BITS AND BOBS FROM THE INTERNET

From grist: Tamar Adler’s and Kurt Michael Friese’s gentle but firm appeal for Americans to get back in the kitchen. Tamar Adler is fast becoming one of my heroes, and I will be reading more of Kurt Michael Friese. From Rob Hopkins’s blog Transition Culture: A map of Guildford, England, back in 1793, when food [...]

ON BEING FAT: PART II—A LITTLE MORE PERSONAL HISTORY

In my last post, I gave a brief history of being fat in the United States, and I also included a bit of personal history. I’d like to expand on the personal history before moving on to biology and will power. I went on my first diet when I was 10 years old and was [...]

ON BEING FAT: PART I—A BRIEF HISTORY

A few weeks ago in the New York Times Magazine, Tara Parker-Pope wrote an excellent piece, “The Fat Trap,” which is, of course, about being fat, a problem that plagues many Americans and seems to be spreading to other countries as well. As I have dieted off and on since I was young a girl [...]

OUR LIVES SPEAK

My previous post was about Tom Sturtevant, who died a week ago and is already missed so much. Yesterday, my husband, Clif, and I went to his memorial service at the Winthrop Middle School, and it was packed. We estimated there were probably around 300 people there. Peace banners, some written and created by Tom, [...]

IN MEMORIAM: THOMAS CHARLES STURTEVANT, 1928-2012

In a small town such as Winthrop, there are certain people who are so integral to the community that it is nearly impossible to imagine the town without them. Tom Sturtevant, who died suddenly last Saturday, fit that description. What a loss, not only to friends and family, but also to Winthrop, to central Maine, [...]

DIVE! A FILM BY JEREMY SEIFERT

My father was a dedicated scrounger, and he passed on his love of scrounging to me. He loved to take discarded items or find things on sale that nobody wanted and then make good use of them. Because he was handy, and I am not, he was perhaps a more successful scrounger than I am. [...]