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A health paradox exists in modern America. On the one hand, many people who do not need to lose weight are trying to. On the other hand, most who do need to lose weight are not succeeding. The percentage of Americans whose health is jeopardized by too much weight is increasing. Thus, consideration of voluntary weight loss must encompass a continuum from persons of normal or low weight who wish to lose weight for cultural, social, or psychological reasons to severely overweight persons who suffer clear adverse medical consequences.

Fast food can add a lot of calories, fat and sodium to your diet, if you choose carelessly. But now, a growing number of restaurants specialize in what can be called “fast food for adults.”

These restaurants, dubbed “fast casual,” like Schlotzsky’s Deli, Baja Fresh, Panera and Au Bon Pain, offer the convenience of fast food for those who want take-out, as well as a comfortable eat-in section. Originally, these restaurants targeted aging baby boomers with more money and an interest in healthy food. But studies show that almost 40 percent of the customers are aged 18 to 34.

The food offered at these places includes salads, soups and a variety of sandwiches. Since the food isn’t deep-fried, you might assume that any of the menu items are a good choice for losing weight, limiting fat or reducing sodium intake. While it is true that healthier choices are more plentiful at “fast casual” restaurants compared to traditional fast food establishments, calories, fat and sodium can still add up quickly, unless you’re savvy.

If weight loss were a sprint, low-carb dieting would win hands down. It is not completely certain why people lose weight faster on low-carb diets, although one of the most likely explanations is that they are better at suppressing appetite for a time, making it easier to achieve the ultimate goal of all diets, cutting calories. However, results from two studies summarized in the August issue of the Harvard Health Letter show that with regards to weight loss, low carb and low fat diets end up in a statistical tie after a year…

As for the health effects, chief objections to low-carb dieting have been that they can increase levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol. But both year-long studies found that low-carb and low-fat diets had the same effect on LDL levels. And low-carb diets outdid low-fat diets with respect to other blood fats related to heart disease.

With critics on both coasts crowing about the newest releases from Rioja, Ribera del Duero and Priorat, Spanish wine couldn’t be more au courant. But in the middle of summer, who wants a big, oaky red? Imagine instead a glass of cold fino sherry — bracing and crisp like a dip in the pool, yet bone-dry and clean like the breeze that warms you when you get out.

Sadly, sherry has largely been forgotten, having been shelved the last couple of generations as the tipple of fuddy-duddies. That view misses the boat: Sherry is in fact one of the most complex and versatile wines in the world.

Welcome to Your Disease Risk, the source on prevention. If you were looking for Your Cancer Risk, don’t worry. You’re in the right place. We’ve simply expanded. Now, in addition to cancer, you can find out your risk of four other important diseases and, as always, get personalized tips for preventing them.

Your Disease Risk is an educational web site for informational purposes only. It does not take the place of regular medical check-ups.

The French-English audio dictionary contains more than 2,000 entries, each with a French word or expression, sound file, English translation, and links to additional or related information.

When using Javascript for form validation, there is a right way, a wrong way, a very wrong way, and a suicidally wrong way! Unfortunately many sites use one of the wrong ways, including even some which claim to be form-validation tutorials. This page tries to help people in the right direction.

In general, people eat two meals a day:

• Dinner, at midday say 11:00 or 12:00
• Supper, in the evening, about 6:00.

It is better to refer to having dinner instead of lunch or even luncheon. Invite people to dine with you, or ask “Where shall we dine today?”

Conferences are what you make of them. If you’re not sure why you’re going, or what you want to get out of the experience, you’re unlikely to get it. This essay gives one perspective on conferences, and how to make them more valuable and engaging experiences.

You also have bacon, but one of the things I missed was British bacon. Not the fact that it comes from Britain, more the choice. You seem to have one choice — bacon. We have back, throughcut, streaky, smoked, green and dry cured. The one we call “streaky” is the cheapest as there is almost no meat on it. It is the closest to the bacon you have in the US. The most expensive is back, as it is almost all meat. Your bacon is nice and crisps up, but for the country that likes choice, it’s odd that there is none.

The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It’s around the year 2030, and there’s time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There’s a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna the Journalist appears. She isn’t exactly welcome, but she sits down anyway, orders a bottle of German beer from the waiter, and asks the three if they believe in the Singularity. Ah yes, the Singularity. A very real term, although the scene above is taken from a soon-to-be-published novel, Accelerando, by British writer Charles Stross. The idea was conceived by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science-fiction writer who’s now a professor emeritus at San Diego State University. We’re living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment — the Singularity — the world will be as different from today’s world as this one is from the Stone Age.

Back on board the Field Circus, Donna the Journalist asks the crew members when they think the Singularity took place. “Four years ago,” Pierre suggests. Su Ang votes for 2016. But Boris, the jellyfish drinker, says the entire notion of a Singularity is silly. To him, there’s no such thing. Wait a minute, Su Ang responds. Here we are, traveling in a spaceship the size of a soda can. We’ve left our bodies behind to conserve space and energy so that the laser-sail-powered Field Circus can cruise faster. Our brains have been uploaded and are now running electronically within the tiny spaceship’s nanocomputers. The pub is “here,” along with other virtual environments, so that we don’t go into shock from sensory deprivation. “And you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

Some people and at least one woodchuck take a special pleasure in eating what is wild, but for me the pleasure is in eating what I’ve cultivated myself. It’s a habit I learned from my parents, who grew up on farms where the kitchen garden was as important as the crops in the fields.

Those gardens were simply a matter of common sense, a way of providing for oneself. Like nearly every choice that humans make, they had an implicit political content. But the political content of our garden, and of our pigs and chickens, is overt: to step aside even a little from the vices of industrial agriculture. Our purpose is summed up in the words of an old victory garden poster that was meant to encourage Americans to grow their own food during World War II. It says simply: “Grow Your Own. Be sure!”

The victory garden movement came to an end when canned food no longer needed to be rationed. But in 1943, those gardens — the work of three-fifths of the American population — produced some eight million tons of food. Many people abandoned their vegetable plots when they were no longer a national necessity. Many others realized that fresh food and the pleasure of gardening more than justified the labor. And they were able to pass that realization along to their children. What my dad called gardening, I called weeding. I’ve learned few of the details of how he gardens, especially because he gardens in California. But I learned from him the feeling that something is missing without homegrown vegetables.

What do you get when you cross an egg white with a crabshell? You get a thin film that prevents food from spoiling and can be eaten along with the food that it wraps.

No joke…

Because it is made entirely from food products, the wrap is edible. It’s so thin that it doesn’t interfere with the texture of the food it covers. And it is made from powerful natural antimicrobials, so it keeps fresh food from spoiling.

Vodka has come a long way in its 900-year history.

Like most alcoholic drinks, its origins are obscure, but it seems likely that the stuff was first distilled in northeastern Europe sometime in the 12th century. For centuries it was nothing more than rotgut moonshine, the tipple of Russian and Polish peasants who used it to fortify themselves against the chill of northern European winters and to alleviate the awfulness of their grim lives.

So it’s quite a journey from these inauspicious beginnings to vodka’s exalted status as the world’s number one selling spirit, and the ingredient of choice for today’s trendy cocktails.

Vodka accounts for 25% of the distilled spirits sold in the U.S., and according to the Distilled Spirits Council…

The key to weight control is keeping energy intake (food) and energy output (physical activity) in balance. When you consume only as many calories as your body needs, your weight will usually remain constant. If you take in more calories than your body needs, you will put on excess fat. If you expend more energy than you take in, you will burn excess fat.

Simple, huh? You do the math. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of body fat. When you take in 3,500 more calories than your body uses, you gain a pound of weight. When you burn 3,500 extra calories, you lose a pound. So a balance between the number of calories you eat and the number you burn each day should maintain your weight at a constant level.

If you choose to restrict your calories by 500 a day, you will lose one pound per week. However, you will most likely lose lean body mass in the process and not fat mass. After you stop your diet, you will most likely gain all the weight you lost, plus a few more pounds, and this has a detrimental effect on your body composition. Lack of physical activity causes muscles to get soft, and if food intake is not decreased, added body weight is almost always fat.

Some food historians credit Thomas Jefferson with bringing the waffle iron across the Atlantic in the 1790s, but it’s equally possible that other irons came over with immigrants from the Netherlands and Germany. And waffles weren’t always served for breakfast with whipped cream, strawberries, and chocolate syrup. Edge says that the Pennsylvania Dutch use them as a base for creamed chicken, and another traditional Southern cookbook by Bill Neal includes a recipe for waffles made with leftover grits.

But who put the waffle side by side with fried chicken? A Harlem restaurant named the Wells Supper Club has trademarked the logo “Wells: Home of Chicken and Waffles Since 1938,” and claims to have started selling the dish to clubgoers in the dusk of the Jazz Age, ostensibly as a late-night snack for folks who couldn’t decide between breakfast and dinner. But Edge thinks the origins of the dish go farther back, brought to New York in the great migration of African Americans from the South. “My guess is that it comes from the days when someone would go out in the morning and wring a chicken’s neck and fry it for breakfast. Preparing a breakfast bread with whatever meat you have on the hoof, so to speak, comes out of the rural tradition.”

…about three-fourths of the way through our meal, when I looked down and noticed that there was a medium-to-large-sized roach lying belly-up on the onions and peppers.

It took my brain a moment to process this new information, so I actually kept chewing for a second, staring at this intruder, this mid-sized vermin, this sedan of roaches, who had obviously been cooked ALONG WITH the onions and peppers, body camouflaged by the brown of the caramelized onions, and while I was chewing my brain kept saying things like, “Surely your eyes are deceiving you. You are enjoying your guacamole and black beans and grilled chicken and Corona with lime, and the nice breeze coming off the water, and conversation with a good friend, and how would a mid-sized cockroach fit into this picture? Clearly, it would not,” while my eyes kept saying things like OH MY GOD IS THAT A THORAX?

The ratatouille was a success. I had been thinking of myself as a person who liked ratatouille in its place but could never love it. I’ve changed my mind. Acceptable ratatouile may be merely acceptable, but — as I’m sure everyone in the world but me already knew — ratatouille made right, from fresh ripe ingredients, is splendid. Our dinner guest last night did not recognize it as ratatouille.

“Oh!” he said. “I love this. Eggplant and tomato and…”

“Yes, I’m glad I decided to make ratatouille,” I said.

“Ratatouille!” he said. He looked at it. “Huh. I guess it is, huh?”

The more we find out about genomes, the more humiliating the news they bring us. The human genome turns out to be profoundly ordinary. We have known for decades that human beings have one fewer chromosome than chimpanzees, which should have been ample warning. We have known for years that grasshoppers have three times as much DNA per cell as we do, deep sea shrimps ten times, salamanders 20 times and African lungfish a staggering 40 times. But we still kidded ourselves until just the last few years that human beings would prove to have more genes, arranged in a more sophisticated way, than most other creatures. How else to explain our exquisite brains?

We have 25,000 genes (or recipes for protein molecules) which is the same as a mouse, just 6,000 more than a microscopic nematode worm and 15,000 fewer than a rice plant. However sophisticated our brains are, it is not reflected in our genes. This has led some to suggest that we have been exaggerating the role of genes in shaping our brains. In fact, it reminds us that recipes are more than lists of ingredients. How those ingredients are cooked is also crucial. And the instructions for cooking up a body are hidden in the genome too — between the genes themselves.

“Ninety percent of everything is crap”. Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.

Make the Time. “People say, ‘How do you find the time to work out?’ I say, ‘There is no such thing as finding time, you make time.’ For 48 years, I never found the time. But I have the same 168 hours in the week that everyone else does. And I have as busy a life… virtually as busy as anyone. So, do I have time to do it? Not if I find it, but I do if I make it.”

The Seven Commandments

1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.

Despite this recognition on the part of the human sciences that happiness is the fundamental goal of life, there has been slow progress in understanding what happiness itself consists of. Perhaps because the heyday of utilitarian philosophy coincided with the start of the enormous forward strides in public health and in the manufacturing and distribution of goods, the majority of those who thought about such things assumed that increases in pleasure and happiness would come from increased affluence, from greater control over the material environment. The great self-confidence of the Western technological nations, and especially of the United States, was in large part because of the belief that materialism — the prolongation of a healthy life, the acquisition of wealth, the ownership of consumer goods — would be the royal road to a happy life.

However, the virtual monopoly of materialism as the dominant ideology has come at the price of a trivialization that has robbed it of much of the truth it once contained. In current use, it amounts to little more than a thoughtless hedonism, a call to do one’s thing regardless of consequences, a belief that whatever feels good at the moment must be worth doing.

One experiment of [Daniel Gilbert, a professor in Harvard’s department of psychology,] had students in a photography class at Harvard choose two favorite pictures from among those they had just taken and then relinquish one to the teacher. Some students were told their choices were permanent; others were told they could exchange their prints after several days. As it turned out, those who had time to change their minds were less pleased with their decisions than those whose choices were irrevocable.

Much of Gilbert’s research is in this vein. Another recent study asked whether transit riders in Boston who narrowly missed their trains experienced the self-blame that people tend to predict they’ll feel in this situation. (They did not.) And a paper waiting to be published, “The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad,” examines why we expect that bigger problems will always dwarf minor annoyances. “When really bad things happen to us, we defend against them,” Gilbert explains. “People, of course, predict the exact opposite. If you ask, ‘What would you rather have, a broken leg or a trick knee?’ they’d probably say, ‘Trick knee.’ And yet, if your goal is to accumulate maximum happiness over your lifetime, you just made the wrong choice. A trick knee is a bad thing to have.”

All of these studies establish the links between prediction, decision making and well-being. The photography experiment challenges our common assumption that we would be happier with the option to change our minds when in fact we’re happier with closure. The transit experiment demonstrates that we tend to err in estimating our regret over missed opportunities. The “things not so bad” work shows our failure to imagine how grievously irritations compromise our satisfaction. Our emotional defenses snap into action when it comes to a divorce or a disease but not for lesser problems. We fix the leaky roof on our house, but over the long haul, the broken screen door we never mend adds up to more frustration…

Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950’s to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: “Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we’re designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.” In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: “We don’t realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.”

For quite some time now I’ve been observing the weird and not-so-fascinating eating and drinking habits of the indigenous populations of this island I found myself stranded on.

I’ve finally decided to report them for the benefit and the amusement of the populations of the civilized world.

It seems very appropriate to begin with tea.

The relationship between the natives and tea is fascinating indeed. Whatever the circumstances you can be assured that you can tame any member of the indigenous population by pronouncing these simple words:

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

Whatever the occasion, the day, the hour, the season the native will answer in the following fashion:

1. His/hers eyes will brighten up
2. He/she will say the words “Mmmhhh… I would *love* one”
3. He/she will look at you with loving anticipation as if they are puppets and you the master.

(You must be then ready to serve the cup of tea. the consequences of not fulfilling your promise are too horrible to be mentioned in this blog).

Read. Chew. Discuss.

Create and sell your own books using print-on-demand technology!

• No setup fees or minimum quantities.
• Black and white books with full color covers.
• Choose from Saddle Stitch, Wire-O or Perfect Bound binding options.
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Now if only consumers could distinguish between grains that are refined and grains that are whole. Just because bread is brown and has specks of something in it, does not mean it is whole grain.

Whole grains (and foods made from them) consist of the entire grain seed, usually referred to as the kernel. The kernel is made of three components: the bran, the germ and the endosperm.

Refined grains have neither the bran nor the germ, which means that most of the B vitamins, certain minerals and the fiber have been stripped from them. In enriched products, some of the B vitamins are added back.

All grains are chiefly carbohydrates, but generally whole-grain cereals have three to seven times more fiber to a serving than refined cereals.

When the grain has been refined, destroying much of the fiber, the carbohydrates turn to glucose quickly and enter the bloodstream. In whole grains, with their fiber intact, carbohydrates are not absorbed quickly. This helps to regulate blood sugar, increase satiety and delay the return of hunger…

Being satiated is the point. Because, no matter the source, calories count: the only way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories than you burn up.

Recipe: Fried Brown Rice

Time: About 45 minutes plus 2 hours’ soaking

• 1 cup long grain brown rice
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 4 eggs, beaten
• ¼ cup small peeled shrimp, slit in half lengthwise and cut in ¼ inch pieces
• ½ cup diced cooked chicken breast
• ½ cup diced cooked roast pork (leftover Chinese roast pork is good)
• ¼ cup frozen peas
• 2 scallions, chopped
• Salt to taste
• 1 cup baby salad greens or baby spinach.

1. Place rice in a bowl, and cover with water. Cover with plastic wrap, and allow to rest on countertop for 2 hours or overnight. When ready to cook, drain rice, then place in a pan with 2 cups water. Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover and and simmer until tender and water has been absorbed, 17 to 20 minutes. Makes about 3 cups. Refrigerate until ready to use.
2. In a skillet, heat one tablespoon oil over medium heat. Add eggs, and cook as for an omelet, pushing cooked eggs back, and allowing raw eggs to fill in and cook. Remove eggs from pan, and shred.
3. Clean pan, and add remaining oil. Add shrimp, and cook over medium-high heat until just pink. Remove. Add chicken, pork and peas, and cook just long enough to heat peas. Add shrimp, and stir for 1 minute.
4. Add 3 cups cooked rice, scallions, salt and eggs, and stir well to heat all ingredients. Stir in greens, and mix for about 30 seconds. Serve.

Yield: 2 servings as main dish.

The Cook’s Thesaurus is a cooking encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools. Entries include pictures, descriptions, synonyms, pronunciations, and suggested substitutions.

There is nothing like homemade granola. It can be used dry as a snack, in a bowl with milk for cereal or baked to make bars.

• 2 cups Regular Rolled Oats
• ½ cup Coconut
• ½ cup Coarsely Chopped, Slivered, or Sliced Almonds, or Chopped Peanuts
• ½ cup Sunflower Nuts
• ¼ cup Sesame Seeds
• ½ cup Honey or Maple-flavored Syrup*
• ⅓ cup Vegetable Oil

Preheat oven to 300°F. Grease jellyroll (15 x 10 x 1) pan. Stir together rolled oats, coconut, nuts and seeds. In separate bowl, combine honey or syrup and oil; stir into oat mixture. Spread mixture evenly into prepared pan. Bake for 20 minutes then stir. Bake for another 10 to 15 minutes or until lightly browned.

After baking immediately turn mixture out onto a large piece of foil. Allow to cool and then break into chunks. Store at room temperature in tightly sealed containers or bags for up to 2 weeks. May also be stored longer in the freezer.

Makes about 6 cups.

* Don’t substitute low sugar or light syrup in this recipe. The natural sugar in syrup and honey acts as a much needed preservative.

Cooking pasta is easy, but does require care to achieve the best results.

Here’s How:

1. Fill a pot with one quart of water per serving of pasta (¼ pound, 100 g) you plan to make, and set it to boil.
2. When it comes to a boil, add 1 tablespoon of coarse salt (a little less if it’s fine) per quart of water.
3. Check the pasta package for cooking time. No time? See below.
4. When the water comes back to a rolling boil, add the pasta and give it a good stir to separate the pieces.
5. Stir occasionally to keep the pasta pieces from sticking to each other or the pot.
6. A minute before the cooking time is up, fish out a piece of pasta and check for doneness.
7. Fresh pasta (fettuccine, tagliatelle, lasagna) cooks quickly, 3-5 minutes.
8. Thin dry pasta (spaghettini, shells, rotini) cooks in 6-9 minutes.
9. Thick walled pasta (penne, ziti, spaghetti, tortiglioni, etc.) cooks in 12-15 minutes.
10. You want an al dente, or chewy texture — not flab. Taste, or break open a piece of pasta to test for doneness.
11. If you see a thin white line or white dot(s) in the middle of the broken piece, it’s not done yet.
12. Test again, and as soon as the broken piece is a uniform translucent yellow, drain the pasta.
13. Sauce the pasta per the recipe and serve it.

Tips:

1. To better wed the pasta to the sauce, put the sauce in a broad skillet and heat it while the pasta cooks.
2. Drain the pasta when it’s just shy of done and stir it into the skillet before the colander stops dripping completely.
3. Toss the pasta and sauce over high heat for a minute or two, until the pasta is done.

Food information to prepare your kitchen for a hurricane, tornado, power outage or other disaster.

The Observer newspaper said Sunday that a report by the government’s environment watchdog found Prozac was building up in river systems and groundwater used for drinking supplies.

The exact quantity of Prozac in the drinking water was unknown, but the Environment Agency’s report concluded Prozac could be potentially toxic in the water table.

Although it may seem daunting to give up all animal products, Barnard said that one easy way is to just try it for a few weeks, and see how you feel. Before beginning, ask family and friends to join in, and make a list of the foods you plan to eat at each meal.

After around three weeks of only vegan foods, he said, many people’s tastes adapt, and they don’t want to return to their old habits. “Once you make the change, you just wish you had done it earlier,” he said.

• 6 cups All-Purpose Flour
• 1½ teaspoons Baking Soda (check expiration date first)
• 3 teaspoons Baking Powder
• 1 tablespoon Kosher Salt
• 2 tablespoons Sugar

Combine all of the ingredients in a lidded container. Shake to mix.

Use the mix within 3 months.

“Instant” Pancakes:

• 2 Eggs, separated
• 2 cups Buttermilk
• 4 tablespoons Melted Butter
• 2 cups “Instant” Pancake Mix, recipe above
• 1 stick Butter, for greasing the pan
• 2 cups Fresh Fruit such as Blueberries, if desired

Heat an electric griddle or frying pan to 350°F. Heat oven to 200°F.

Whisk together the egg whites and the buttermilk in a small bowl. In another bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the melted butter.

Combine the buttermilk mixture with the egg yolk mixture in a large mixing bowl and whisk together until thoroughly combined. Pour the liquid ingredients on top of the pancake mix. Using a whisk, mix the batter just enough to bring it together. Don’t try to work all the lumps out.

Check to see that the griddle is hot by placing a few drops of water onto to the griddle. The griddle is ready if the water dances across the surface.

Lightly butter the griddle. Wipe off thoroughly with a paper towel. (No butter should be visible.)

Gently ladle the pancake batter onto the griddle and sprinkle on fruit if desired. When bubbles begin to set around the edges of the pancake and the griddle-side of the cake is golden, gently flip the pancakes. Continue to cook 2 to 3 minutes or until the pancake is set.

Serve immediately or remove to a towel-lined baking sheet and cover with a towel. Hold in a warm place for 20 to 30 minutes.

Yield: 12 pancakes

Are you prepared for a disaster? From tornadoes in the summer to earthquakes anytime to hurricanes in the fall, Mother Nature can take us by surprise. Take some time and think about your own emergency preparedness. There are foods you can store, recipes to collect, and things to do that will help keep you and your family safe even in the worst emergency.

Corinne Maier, the author of “Bonjour Paresse,” a sort of slacker manifesto whose title translates as “Hello Laziness,” has become a countercultural heroine almost overnight by encouraging the country’s workers to adopt her strategy of “active disengagement” — calculated loafing — to escape the horrors of disinterested endeavor.

“Imitate me, midlevel executives, white-collar workers, neo-slaves, the damned of the tertiary sector,” Ms. Maier calls in her slim volume, which is quickly becoming a national best seller. She argues that France’s ossified corporate culture no longer offers rank-and-file employees the prospect of success, so, “Why not spread gangrene through the system from inside?” …

Her solution? Rather than keep up what she sees as an exhausting charade, people who dislike what they do should, as she puts it, discreetly disengage. If done correctly — and her book gives a few tips, such as looking busy by always carrying a stack of files — few co-workers will notice, and those who do will be too worried about rocking the boat to complain. Given the difficulty of firing employees, she says, frustrated superiors are more likely to move such subversive workers up than out.

Before the invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny by the weaver and carpenter James Hargreaves, and of the steam engine in the same year by James Watt, weavers were generally self-employed and worked as and when they chose. The young Friedrich Engels noted that they had control over their own time: “So it was that the weaver was usually in a position to lay by something, and rent a little piece of land, that he cultivated in his leisure hours, of which he had as many as he chose to take, since he could weave whenever and as long as he pleased,” he wrote in his 1845 study The Condition Of The Working Class In England. “They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed.”

Thompson writes: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness.” A weaver, for example, might weave eight or nine yards on a rainy day. On other days, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did “sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening.” Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down trees or go to watch a public hanging. Thompson adds as an aside: “The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] — today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”

England, then, before the invention of the dark satanic mills, was a nation of idlers. But in time the new Protestant work ethic was successful. The Industrial Revolution, above all, was a battle between hard work and laziness, and hard work won.

The World Water Week in Stockholm will be told the growth in demand for meat and dairy products is unsustainable.

Animals need much more water than grain to produce the same amount of food, and ending malnutrition and feeding even more mouths will take still more water.

Scientists say the world will have to change its consumption patterns to have any realistic hope of feeding itself.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Please answer this question: How many colors are there in a rainbow?

• One
• Three
• Five
• Seven

The correct answer is that the question is meaningless, because a rainbow is a continuum of colors beyond counting, including invisible “colors” called infrared and ultraviolet beyond the red and violet ends of the band. Nevertheless, questions like this are part of the present school curriculum, and a question like this one is included in the science category of the Trivial Pursuit game cards, a game supposedly designed for adults.

But even meaningful questions of this kind carry a hidden false message — education means knowing the right answers. If we have answers for all questions, we believe we are educated. We fail to realize that correct answers are only symbols that represent knowledge, they are not themselves knowledge.

• 2 tablespoons Olive Oil
• 1½ cups Diced Onions
• ¼ teaspoon Kosher Salt
• 1½ cups Sour Cream
• ¾ cup Mayonnaise
• ¼ teaspoon Garlic Powder
• ¼ teaspoon Ground White Pepper
• ½ teaspoon Kosher Salt

In a saute pan over medium heat add oil, heat and add onions and salt. Cook the onions until they are caramelized, about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside to cool. Mix the rest of the ingredients, and then add the cooled onions. Refrigerate and stir again before serving.

Ananas comosus is the botanical name of the fruit we know as the pineapple. Native to South America, it was named for its resemblance to a pine cone, the pine cone reference first appearing in print in 1398. The term pineapple (or pinappel in Middle English) did not appear in print until nearly three centuries later in 1664. Christopher Columbus is credited with discovering the pineapple on the island of Guadeloupe in 1493, although the fruit had long been grown in South America. He called it piña de Indes meaning “pine of the Indians.” South American Guarani Indians cultivated pineapples for food. They called it naná, meaning “excellent fruit.” Another explorer, Magellan, is credited with finding pineapples in Brazil in 1519, and by 1555, the luscious fruit was being exported with gusto to England. It soon spread to India, Asia, and the West Indies. When George Washington tasted pineapple in 1751 in Barbados, he declared it his favorite tropical fruit. Although the pineapple thrived in Florida, it was still a rarity for most Americans.

Captain James Cook later introduced the pineapple to Hawaii in 1790. However, commercial cultivation did not begin until the 1880s when steamships made transporting the perishable fruit viable. In 1903, James Drummond Dole began canning pineapple, making it easily accessible worldwide. Production stepped up dramatically when a new machine automated the skinning and coring of the fruit. The Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company was a booming business by 1921, making pineapple Hawaii’s largest crop and industry. Today, Hawaii produces only ten percent of the world’s pineapple crops. Other countries contributing to the pineapple industry include Mexico, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Philippines, Thailand, Costa Rica, China, and Asia. It is the third most canned fruit behind applesauce and peaches.

When used for drawing a readers eye to an important passage, it can be argued that they are a presentational effect, so it would be nice to have a method to create a pull quote without having to add any extra content. Sadly though, CSS, usually great for presentation, can’t help us with this today, so Javascript seems like the next natural solution. Great.

• ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons packed light-brown sugar
• ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ¼ cup (½ stick) unsalted butter
• 3 cups low-fat granola mix (not cereal)
• ½ cup sweetened flake coconut
• ½ cup golden raisins
• ¾ cup mini semisweet chocolate chips
• ½ cup slivered almonds

Combine brown sugar, honey, vanilla and butter in a medium-size saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Lower heat; simmer 2 minutes or until sugar is dissolved. Cool.

Meanwhile, combine granola, coconut, raisins, ½ cup chocolate chips and almonds in a large bowl.

Stir brown sugar mixture into granola mixture. Spread in a 13 by 9 by 2-inch baking pan. Press remaining chocolate chips into top. Refrigerate 2 hours or until completely cooled. Cut into bars.

This index comprises about 8500 names for far more than 100 spices and herbs. English and German names will be found for every spice, as well as the Latin terms used by Botanists and (if of medical use) in pharmaceutical science. For the more common spices, I have given French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch and Swedish names more or less throughout; other European tongues (Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Finnish) have been included whenever possible.

According to two fish-cutters at the New Square Fish Market, the carp was about to be slaughtered and made into gefilte fish for Sabbath dinner when it suddenly began shouting apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew.

Many believe the carp was channelling the troubled soul of a revered community elder who recently died; others say it was God. The only witnesses to the mystical show were Zalmen Rosen, a 57-year-old Hasid with 11 children, and his co-worker, Luis Nivelo. They say that on 28 January at 4pm they were about to club the carp on the head when it began yelling.

Your complete how-to guide to canning and preserving food, including proper use of canners, ball jars and preparation, food acidity and safe processing methods.

It pays to eat Chinese. Three Virginians who had fortune cookies for dessert at Chinese restaurants they visited used the numbers they received to win $175,000 each in the July 27 Mega Millions drawing.

Sandra Howell of Moneta, Kiry Enn of Richmond and Raymond Sawyer of Chesapeake held three of seven tickets that were good for the second-place prize. The tickets matched the first five Mega Millions numbers, missing only the Mega Ball number.

The purpose of this site is to provide a way to learn Japanese by yourself. I would like to introduce you Japanese, and I will be glad if you are interested in it. I focus on the similarities and differences between Japanese and English.

Expert nutritionists, food industry representatives and everyday Americans largely agreed Thursday at an Agriculture Department public hearing in Washington, D.C., that the basic food groups hierarchy of the pyramid should remain as is.

The real problem, they said according to wire service reports, is that the Pyramid’s healthy-diet message is being ignored now more than ever.

“We have to find some really clever people who are good at communicating that message, so that people can understand it and act on it. We have to find a way to reach the masses, because right now the masses are listening to McDonald’s commercials,” hearing attendee Katharine Tallmadge, a registered dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said in an interview.

What An Olympian Might Eat In A Day

• Breakfast: 65g cereal with a pint of milk, 4 slices of bread and 4 teaspoons of jam, 400ml of orange juice
• Post training 1: scone with jam and a yoghurt, medium piece of fruit, 500ml isotonic sports drink
• Lunch: Six slices of bread or one baked potato with 200g baked beans, large banana and 250ml of flavoured milk
• Post training 2: Bagel with honey, large banana or 50g raisins, 500ml isotonic sports drink
• Evening meal: 300g cooked pasta, broccoli and tomato based pasta sauce, apple, tin of rice pudding (low fat) 500ml squash or diluted juice
• Supper: 90g cereal with 400ml of milk

(This dietary plan would apply to a 90kg power athlete training two to four hours a day, needing 630-1080g of carbohydrate a day — not someone taking an ordinary amount of exercise.)

Apples cooked in Wine

It’s hard to think of anything quicker, or more satisfying, on a crisp winter night. This recipe is drawn from Ada Boni’s Talismano della Felicità, and will serve 6. She doesn’t suggest a particular wine, likely because the wine used will vary somewhat, depending upon what’s best in a given area. I’d probably go with a red, because that’s what’s best in Tuscany.

• 2¼ pounds (1 k) renette apples (sweet, grainy apples with slightly lemony overtones and wrinkled yellow skins)
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 cup wine
• A chunk of butter the size of a small walnut
• The juice of a half a lemon

Add the lemon juice to a bowl of cool water. Peel, core, and slice the apples, slipping the pieces into the acidulated water to keep them from discoloring. When you are done transfer them to a pot and cook them with the wine, sugar, and butter. Cook them over a brisk flame, stirring them occasionally, until they are tender. If your pot is pretty, use it as a serving dish. Otherwise, transfer them to a heated serving platter, arranging the slices so they don’t appear jumbled, pour the cooking liquid over them, and serve.

This is one of the easiest marmalades to make, because the pectin content of the fruit insures that it will gel.

You’ll need about 2¼ (1 k) pounds of flavorful apples; the preferred variety in Italy is renettes, which are slightly grainy, wrinkled, and tasty. In short, perfect for cooking but not so pretty at the table. Core the apples and cook them in a little water, skins and all. When they are done (a skewer will penetrate easily) pat them dry and put them through a food mill. Weigh the apple butter thus obtained and add to it ⅘ of its weight in sugar (0.8 pounds sugar per pound apples). Put the mixture in a pot, bring it to a boil, and cook, stirring constantly, for about 5 minutes. Then transfer the marmalade to sterile glass jars. When the jars have cooled cover the marmalade with a thin layer of wax, screw the tops onto the jars, and store them in a cool dark place.

These are a classic, loved by all ages; they are an excellent snack if sugared, and will also work nicely with a roast in a very traditional meal. The recipe is drawn from Ada Boni’s Talismano della Felicità; she notes that they are very popular with children, and suggests that you omit the cognac if they happen to be your audience.

To serve 6:

• 6 renette apples (sweet, grainy apples with slightly lemony overtones and wrinkled yellow skins)
• 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
• ⅓ cup cognac or rum
• Grated lemon zest
• A light batter made from flour and water
• Oil for frying

Peel and core the apples, then cut them into ¼-inch rings crosswise, so as to obtain a great number of doughnuts. Put the rings in a bowl and sprinkle them with the sugar, cognac, and zest. Turn them carefully to avoid breaking them and let them sit for an hour, turning them once or twice more.

Shortly before you plan to go to the table, drain the apples, dip them in the batter, and fry them in abundant oil or rendered lard until they’re golden. If you want them to be sweet, dust them lightly with confectioner’s sugar.

Remember, the vast majority of your “taste” is really your sense of smell. Your tongue can only taste bitter, salty, sweet and sour. Everything else — the gentle strawberry, the grassiness, the butter — is coming from your nose.

So how your nose connects with those wine aromas is the most critical part of drinking a wine. Take that $8.99 Chardonnay you grabbed at the local wine shop. If you glug it from a straight water glass, you might think “Mmmmm. Yellow.” You might not get any flavors at all. But if you toss the exact same wine into say a Riedel Chardonnay glass, you suddenly will smell the melon, the butter, the vanilla, the crisp nuttiness. All those flavors you lost before will now be revealed.