Quick links

I am clearing out my email in-box. I'll spare you the news about academic management controversies and share just the more fun stuff.

Boston University is hosting a conference May 8-9 entitled The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives. My wife and I are going to try to get a babysitter so we can see the lecture and dinner by eco chef and food justice advocate Bryant Terry.

This coming weekend, the Lowell, MA, free film festival has a food and fair trade theme.

Along with a group of other researchers, I enjoyed meeting Michael Pollan and hearing a lecture by him on his recent visit to Tufts. A magazine article and a video are available. A colleague and I moderated our school's weekly seminar the next day, using a debate format for questions from the audience, followed by a sequence of iClicker polls of the gathered community of nutrition experts and graduate students. The debate questions concerned some of Pollan's more provocative points from his talk. Like: "Nutrition science today is about where surgery was in 1650." It was lively.

Friedman School graduate student Emily Morgan's report about fruit and vegetable consumption and waste in Australia is a featured link on VicHealth, the website for the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation. Morgan studied the issue while in Australia on a Fulbright.

The Onion reports today on a new high-level commission report calling for radical food policy reforms.

It is the season for signing up for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares. Some that have fallen into our orbit at one time or another in the inner Boston suburbs include Waltham Fields, PEAS, and Enterprise. If you live in east Arlington, MA, feel free to contact me by email about a pickup site some neighbors are organizing.

Okay, mission accomplished. Time to get the merit badge from BoingBoing.