Jonathan Schwartz describes a lunch held for Tony Blair and some ‘silicon valley leaders’, at which this interesting snippet came up:
I took a quick poll to prove a point – nearly everyone in the room was a product of public school education (myself included). So the opportunities weren’t isolated to higher education. (Mr. Jobs followed up to make the reality more painful – showing how few of us were sending our children to public school.)
From 2001, a Nat Friedman blog entry which I liked:
Does anyone really want to sit eight hours a day in a windowless walled cubicle under fluorescent lights breathing carpet fibres with unblinking eyes inches from a computer monitor only to spend hours crawling home to a homogeneous subdevelopment through traffic emitting noxious deadly fumes listening to shrinkwrapped pop hits and tear through three layers of non-biodegradable packaging to get to the chemical-impregnated food products that were once blinded bleating veal calves growing into a revenue stream in pens only slightly larger than their bodies while you sit in front of three hundred channels of somnolent mass media crap?
Is this the price of an indiscriminately heightened chance of procreation and a longer lifespan? Please, say that it isn’t. Please, no.
(source.)
Really interesting tidbit from the university of South Australia in light of the government’s recent unhappiness with junk-food in kid-targeted advertising and school lunches:
Professor Tim Olds continues his presentation from last year’s series, delving into data dating back to the 1880s which details the eating habits of a quarter of a million children from 24 countries. What this says defies conventional wisdom: today’s children are actually eating less than their great-grandparents did. What’s more, they eat less fat, less saturated fat and enjoy a greater variety of foods. So why are they more obese? The likely answer you’ll discover in this fascinating history lesson is that they don’t expend as much energy.
(source.)
I’d also like to know a little more about the effect of my long-time-favourite scary synthetic ingredient, trans fats – that’s a big dietary change the West has undergone in roughly the same time-scale as the ‘obesity epidemic’.