Last food for thought round-up for the year, folks! I’ll be taking some time off to relax, clean house and enjoy the holidays.

• Jamie Oliver ends the year (and the decade) not only as the recipient of a TED award, but as an icon of the decade, as detailed by food critic Jay Rayner. He wasn’t always the sharpest knife in the drawer on some of his shows, but he changed the way we watch, cook, talk about and think about food. Rock on, bruvvah!
• Inmates in Illinois have filed a lawsuit against the state, citing too much soy in their prison diets.
• Minority farmers in the US are claiming discrimination from the USDA with regards to farm loans.
• When is a catfish not a catfish? When the government says it isn’t.
• Another report showing that the past decade was a fine time to be a food lover.
• And another list of predictions for 2010 – think childhood nutrition and sustainability.
• The origins of fish and chips.
• Ever been stuck on a plane on an airport tarmac for hours? A new US law will enforce penalties on airlines that do not provide food and water after a 2-hour wait.
• Marion Nestle debunks that stupid “eat your dog to save the world” book. Politely, of course, but with a much higher level of logic than the authors have used.
• And finally, I leave you with…. tasty Santa bento box.

Image by eclecticlibrarian via Flickr

If you haven’t seen Meljean Brook’s latest post at Odd Shots, you must check it out. That is some seriously funny book p0rn. Best of all…her dad left a comment! I might die if that ever happened. Enjoy!

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Bacon, apps, rooftop gardens – the food buzzwords of 2009.
• A bowl filled with hate  – it’s bad enough when your fast food doesn’t look as pretty as it does in the photos, but when it sucks the joy to live right out of you, there’s something to be said for fresh and sustainable.
• It’s fun to live in imaginary worlds online, but are games like Farmville distorting the reality of the work involved in farming?
• Diners eat fewer calories when menus list not only calorie counts but have a reference to a recommended daily caloric intake.
• We know that bottled waters can be expensive – but should they be more expensive that alcohol? In some places in the UK, the push to increase booze sales have led to discounts that make some alcoholic beverages cheaper than water.
• We all want to buy sustainable fish, but with eco-labels on fish so incredibly confusing (and contradictory), people are having a hard time determining what to buy.
• Santa eats what he wants – at his busiest time of year, Santa is getting flak from the media for being too big and jolly.

I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! I hope you are spending it with friends and family. Below are ten things I love about Christmas:

10. Gifites! Who doesn’t love to be given somehting?!

9. Christmas Carols…I adore the old school singers and standards carols. Le sigh.

8. Christmas villages with train tracks.

7. Snow…mostly cause I live in SoCal and I don’t have to deal with it!

6. Santa and his Elves.

5. Christmas lights! Ooooohhhhh! Aaaaahhhhh!

4. Christmas stockings hung on the fireplace with care.

3. Food! Who doesn’t love eating? there is so much good food during the holidays.

2. Giving gifts to those I love.

1. The spirit of Christmas!

What do you love about Christmas?

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Save the tuna – bluefin tuna might make it to the “endangered” list (effectively shutting down trade in the species) in March. Fingers crossed.
• Monsanto is at risk of anti-trust action against them, and a whole pile of reports show that many of their claims (like GM seeds using less pesticide) have turned out to be false.
• It’s a surprise, I know, but it turns out that kids eat less junk food if they can’t get it at school.
• If you’ve got a tattoo of a grilled cheese sandwich (which is right up there with skulls, “Mom” and roses, yes?), you’re entitled to a lifetime 25% discount on that same sandwich at an Ohio restaurant that specializes in said dish.
• 2009 was the year of bloggers getting book deals, and while many of them were utterly undeserved, a few were actually not bad.
• The history of Christmas dinner.
• Food activists talk a lot about weaning people off of cheap food, but in a recession, where cereal sales rise by 50% because people are buying it to eat for dinner, that probably won’t be happening any time soon.
• Enjoy the nativity, but please do not eat Jesus’ head – a nativity scene at a produce farm fashioned out of fruit and vegetables becomes controversial.
• Food trends of the noughties: making cooking/cheffing a desirable career, making room for female chefs in professional kitchens, sustainable food sourcing… yeah, okay, it’s been a pretty decent decade.
• Yes, it’s true… you really can deep fry anything.

This week, we were in the very traditionally European themed sims of Wunderbar to learn how thwy were celbrating Winter and preparing for Christmas. You can now see the show on the web – here, and available in both standard and high quality on the Treet.tv archive website. And you can also download the show from the iTunes store (just search on Designing Worlds) to watch at your leisure. You can even put it on your iPod to carry around with you (or watch at the gym!).

Wunderbar is a region of eight sims with a decidedly European flavour, thanks to the careful efforts of the two owners, Ha Tenk and Poppet McGimsie. The feel of the environment is nineteenth century but, unlike the more usual regions that reflect the British or American ninteenth century, Wunderbar reflects the excitement and colour of the Austrian and German states – something reflected in the large number of German-speaking residents and in the traditions that have grown up in the community – for example for the or Christmas Market, and the regular waltzes held in the stunningly beautiful castle.

The Ballroom at Wunderbar

Join Saffia and Elrik as they try out the winter sports here, exploring the vast Kronenberg ( a huge mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds), and then the Kirche, the Market and finally the ballroom, modelled after Neuschwanstein, the most famous castle built by Ludwig II of Bavaria, where the residents and friends of Wunderbar gather for regular waltzing balls.

Pink Cosmos (c) 2009 Patty Hankins

A few links this week

Jerry Avenaim has Six Tips To Improve Holiday Photography – Part II

Virtual Photography Studio has a post on Photographers on Twitter: How to Use It

Monoscope has an example of Avedon’s Instructions to his Printer

Blackstar Rising has Take the High Road with Backstabbing Colleagues and  Five Tips for Better Holiday Photos

Bec Thomas has a post on Law Enforcement vs The Photographer

Jim Goldstein has the 2009 Social Media Photography Survey Results

Photofocus has Seven Cold Weather Shooting Tips

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Now if we could just train the dog to open the fridge and retrieve the beer, we’d be all set. A dog collar beer opener.
• A lesson from Copenhagen – your contribution towards reducing greenhouse gases – eat less meat.
• The chyllldrun, who will think of them? How kids are being used as political pawns in the fight against obesity.
• Does it make someone a snob if they want their wine in a glass and not a tumbler?
• While there are lots of articles out there on how to have a healthy Christmas dinner – it doesn’t have to be that way. You could have the 900-calorie per slice Turducken.
• More lessons on climate change – waste less food.
• Price-fixing by lobster dealers in Maine screws over the fishers yet again.
• While we would never think of eating a beloved family pet after its death, in Thailand, it is customary for people to butcher, sell and eat the carcass of an elephant – even if it has been with the family for years.
• China opened its own seed bank last month to protect native plants from extinction.

http://www.colectiva.tv/wordpress/lang/en-us/2009/12/

http://www.paperheart.org/2007/messages/index.htm

A recent article published on CNN discusses the lives of two teens in Palestine raised as girls but transformed by puberty into boys. These teens most likely have a condition called 5-alpha-reductase deficiency (5-ARD), one of several intersex conditions (disorders of sex development) that alters the masculinization of XY fetuses before they are born. Unfortunately, the article uses outdated words and phrases such as “pseudohermaphrodism” and “sex-change operations” that should no longer be used because they are offensive. However it does raise awareness and give face to a group of people who are usually hidden away.

All fetuses have the same internal and external genitalia until about 8 weeks of gestation. Then various hormones act to differentiate the sexes by developing some parts and regressing others. But there are many steps involved and DNA mutations can modify this outcome. I suspect that Caster Semenya, the recently contested 2009 gold medal winner of the 800 meter race at the World Athletics Championships, has androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). If this is so, her XY chromosomes and testes were unable to masculinize her body as it formed; a defective hormone receptor prevents her body from responding appropriately to the male hormones it produces. However, her receptors may be only partially impaired and thus give her, in some people’s view, an unfair advantage over her competitors. The allegations, the subsequent gender verification studies and the fallout therefrom continue to embroil her in international controversy. But what makes a woman a woman? If she isn’t a woman than what is she? She certainly isn’t a man.

The Palestinian teens discussed in the article have a different mutation. Like Caster, they probably have XY chromosomes, testes and appeared just like any other girl when they were born. Yet while their hormone receptors work, they lack the enzyme needed to convert testosterone into its more powerful form, dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Their bodies appeared female before puberty because the amount of testosterone produced was insufficient to make up for the absent DHT. After puberty began their testosterone levels went through the roof just like every other adolescent boy. This brought along the changes the go with it including facial hair, deeping voice and musculoskeletal changes. Their clitorises probably enlarged significantly just as penises do. But do these teens really feel that they are now men or do they still feel that they girls inside of bodies that have betrayed them?

“Only my appearance, my haircut and clothing, makes me look like a boy,” Ahmed says, gesturing with his hands across his face. “Inside, I am like a female. I am a girl.”

Why do we care if Caster and these teens are men or women, one or the other? Is it right for society to force them to change to uphold the myth of binary gender? When you really think about it, no one fits the stereotype completely; no one is or every was the ideal man or the ideal woman. They are only fantasies. Instead we are all composites, not one of us pure in form. We exist somewhere in the middle leaning this way and that in varying degrees depending on which attribute we consider. Gender is so much more than the 2 little checkboxes “male” and “female.” Maybe someday we will learn to allow each other the space to simply be who we are. A world without labels and boxes, without simplification and alteration. We will finally see the world as it already is.

According to a recent article the New York Times you may want to think twice about drinking water from the tap.

“Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States… hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water.”

Some of them are arsenic, chromium (movie: Erin Brockovich), perc and uranium. To see if you live in a higher risk area click here.

So what to do? Don’t contribute to landfills by buying bottled water every day. Instead, buy filtered water from the grocery in refillable containers for all of your potable needs.

Q.bel was recently featured in Professional Candy Buyer. Click the link to read their review!

Chocolate lovers, rejoice! We’re now on Twitter! Follow us here.

You can also become our Fan on Facebook by clicking here.

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Another voice in the “food miles are bunk” argument, this time from Oxfam, with a reminder that communities in the majority world depend on the export of produce to survive.
• Ganja Gourmet – a restaurant in Denver (legally) serves up food made with pot.
• Quel surprise – general physicians actually know very little about treating food allergies.
• And surprise #2 – websites geared to kids have a higher rate of ads for junk food.
• It’s so liberating to be a feminist, free from the household chores and drudgery of the kitchen – unless your hubby is a “kitchen bitch”, in which case you might be happy to trade in his smug harping over how to cut a carrot for your own frilly apron, just so you have some peace and quiet.
• All those deadbeats who used to hang out in coffeehouses using the free wifi can now start hanging out at McDonald’s. Free wifi is coming… because they’re a cafe with fancy coffee now, don’tcha know.
• Did you cook along with Gordon Ramsay on Tuesday night? Was it as much of a train wreck as the folks from Serious Eats think?
• Sometimes, when you just want the sweet, sweet canday, all that info on the chocolate bar wrapper can just be too much.

Here’s some food for thought for today…

• Anthony Bourdain is writing a follow-up to Kitchen Confidential. Which means that editors everywhere will have to retrain every young male wanna-be food writer to stop trying to write like freakin’ Anthony Bourdain! Again.
• There’s been a lot of talk about the New York City anti-soda ads. And yes, they really are that gross. But I wonder what lobbyist got to them and strong-armed them into including milk in the recommended beverages. Come ON.
• Hanukkah cupcake menorah. I got nothing… just go look at it and admit it’s pretty cool.
• “Comes in a stylish jute carrier bag too – just the thing to show off your squid to its best advantage down the pub on Boxing Day.” 12 gifts no food lover ever wants to see.
• But if you find yourself the recipient of a bottle of rancid chili-spiked oil or a box of chocolate liqueurs, at least appreciate that the giver was making an effort to appeal to your foodie self.
• Cutting carbon emissions through farming means switching to local, sustainable foods – and convincing the other 98% of the population not into local, sustainable food that it’s actually worth it.
• Our love affair with the drive-through – might it soon be over?
• Psst! Buddy… wanna buy some chips? A student at a UK school with a “healthy food policy” gets busted for selling bags of crisps to fellow students.
• Got insomnia? All the things to eat (or not) before bed for sweet dreams.
• Serving omnivores and vegetarians at the same meal – 8 adaptable dishes.

I’m not exactly sure about the “skyrocketing to fame” part, but I was sure flattered to seek a link on Dog Art Today this morning. Dog Art Today, and it’s companion site, the Obama Dog Blog, were kind enough to post my portrait of Bo Obama earlier this year. I subscribe to the daily feed which always offers unique art and reviews. Today they posted my paintings of Heather (dooce.com) Armstrong’s Chuck and Coco; Martha Stewart’s dogs Sharkey and Francesca; The Bloggess’s Barnaby Jones and others.

I am offering readers of Dog Art Today a $50 discount on pet portraits ordered by January 1, and what the heck, that offer goes for anyone. Happy New Year, a little early.

If you like dogs, and you like art, this blog's for you.