Foodie 101

scleaver — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:57:30 -0400

No longer just for agriculture departments, food studies is entering mainstream academia. As The Washington Post reported, Yale, Boston University, and New York University all offer food studies programs, and others, including the University of New Hampshire and the University of California at Davis are starting them. At Yale, the number of food-related courses has increased almost 50 percent over the last five years.

Among the courses you can take in departments from English to economics are “Cultural Foods: Geography of Food and Wine,” “Cooking Up a Storm: Exploring Food in American Culture,” and Yale’s “Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food.” And you’ll find more than papers and final exams on the syllabus, students observe in restaurants, learn how to make their own dishes, and analyze everything from competitive eating to food memoirs.

Driving the trend is the expanding awareness of food and the environmental implications, the absolute boom in popular food literature (Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are among the oft-cited), and an acceptance of food as something to be studied and young professors who want to study it. All this makes me want to go back to school—which food course would you most like to take?

Photo from Flickr.

Rent a Textbook, Save a Tree

Julia — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:00:00 -0500

Second semester is just getting started, and you know what that means: it’s time to invest your entire previous semester’s savings on textbooks! I bear good news, however. I have found alternatives.

Ever heard of renting your textbooks? Well, at Chegg.com you can, and quite easily at that. You rent your books at nearly half the cost you would have originally paid. I received brand new textbooks in the mail within days, and when I’m finished with them I just send them on back. Oh yeah, and they pay for the return shipping, too.

You don’t have to wait in those long lines at the school bookstore, and they have over 2 million book titles, so you are bound to find most, if not all, of the books you need. Most importantly, they plant a tree for every book you rent. Basically, you can’t go wrong!

Another option is accessing your books online. You download the textbook to your computer and then you have it to reference whenever you need it. It’s convenient, and it ends up saving hundreds of thousands of pages. . Not to mention the physical trauma you’ll avoid from not having to lug around those enormous hard covers all the time.

People are always complaining about the cost of books, but they rarely talk about the wastefulness of it. College students purchase about a tree per year in textbooks. According to the Green Press Initiative, over the past three years the U.S. book publishing industry has consumed an average of 20 million trees per year to print books sold in just the U.S alone. Publishing companies have become a top contributor to the destruction of forests world-wide. Educational textbooks are especially difficult to reuse because textbook companies tend to put out new editions almost ever year.

The Green Press Initiative estimates that nearly 40% of the materials found in landfills are paper products. As this paper degrades, it produces methane—a greenhouse gas with 21 times the heat trapping power of carbon dioxide that eats away at our atmosphere.

This is a crucial issue, and with numbers this big, every student counts. I encourage everyone to seek out these alternative options. Happy studying.