Enjoying my veggie side at UBC Farm
At dinnertime, the cook at my college residence always gives me the same puzzled squint. As his hand hovers between two different serving utensils, he strains to categorize me, then asks one of two questions:
“Veg?”
“Meat?”
I remind him of the inconvenient truth: “I don’t eat red meat, but if we have fish or fowl tonight, I’m up for it.”
He never looks pleased.
People like categories, and why not? It’s easier to organize things mentally. But because I straddle both sides of the dinner menu, I confound, annoy, and/or anger both strict vegetarians and unapologetic meat-lovers.
If you must call me something, I guess you can say I’m a semi-vegetarian or flexitarian. (To be honest, I think both terms sound half-arsed, but it’s conversational short-hand.) In this Globe and Mail interview, Jonathan Safran Foer introduced me to the terms “ethical omnivore” and “selective omnivore.”
Whatever the label, it does seems like an open invitation to an ongoing dinner debate. And many people don’t find shades of gray very appetizing.
Still, all the uncertainty reflects the lag in the evolution of language when it comes to reflecting changing and nuanced realities. Many busy but concerned people want to make better choices for themselves and for the planet, but there is a whole lot of confusing and contradictory information out there.
As I enjoyed my view from the fence this week, an interesting development caught my attention.
Lord Nicholas Stern, an acknowledged authority on both climate change and economics, came right out said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
And with that, Pandora’s lunch box flew right open.
All you have to do is google “Lord Stern + vegetarian debate” and you’ll see how riled up people can get about this issue (especially if you read the comments below articles).
Now, as someone who peeves off both parties, let me just put some interesting points out there. If you’ll excuse one more bad pun (they just pour out of me when it comes to cuisine!) here’s some…
read more…
Posted by Fabiola Carletti on Oct 29th, 2009 and filed under Environment at thethunderbird.ca
A sea of umbrellas at UBC
Curtis Ballard rushed to fasten plywood between parking curbs as rain cascaded down Wesbrook Mall. The water runoff streamed toward TRIUMF, the laboratory for particle and nuclear physics at UBC.
“The water outside eventually rose to our knees,” said Ballard, TRIUMF’s operations manager, who worked with personnel from the lab and the physical plant to clear catch basins and set up dewatering pumps.
Although the water from the flash flood seeped into offices and damaged flooring, the group’s work spared a nearby laser lab filled with high precision equipment. They now refer to it as the great flood of 2009.
Such temperamental tales become lore at the University of British Columbia, which sits on the outskirts of rainy Vancouver.
The project team behind Campus and Community Planning know the challenges of managing stormwater, but are also creating policy that may channel it into opportunity.
The planners are entering the final phase of drafting the UBC Vancouver Campus plan, the guiding document for the next 20 years of property development. Taping the copious amount of rainwater, a renewable resource, is finally on the agenda.
In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip. ~Daniel L. Reardon
350 at Clovelly, Sydney, Australia. Uploaded by 350.org under the creative commons.
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I wasn’t at Cambie Bridge yesterday, and I deeply regret it.
Instead of drinking in the energy of about 5,000 other environmentally-conscious Vancouverites, I sat in my room sipping cold coffee.
(Side note: Too often my schooling gets in the way of my education! But maybe I’m just lame because one of my J-school peers made the time to go.)
The bridge was one of thousands of places around the world where concerned citizens gathered to call out for action on climate change. This time, they rallied around the number 350. Why?
Well, climate scientists have said that 350 parts per million is the upper limit for heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the longer we live past this concentration, the worse the global repercussions (like droughts, rising sea levels, famine, etc.) will be.
By the way, we’re currently living at 387 parts per million.
The statue outside of the Thea Koerner Graduate Student Centre
BY FABIOLA CARLETTI
CONTRIBUTOR
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 18TH, 2009
Graduate students are now entitled to take three weeks of vacation per academic year. The decision was made by the UBC Vancouver Senate last Wednesday.
Before this year, UBC was the only major Canadian university without an official policy regulating graduate students’ vacation time. The new policy, effective immediately, creates clear and formal expectations for both students and supervisors, replacing the unofficial and occasionally unfair arrangements of the past.
“It took us a while to get the wording quite right,” said Jim Thompson, the associate dean of graduate policy and program review. Thompson explained that the Academic Policy Committee reviewed the documents of other universities, ultimately crafting original wording that meets national standards without being exceedingly rigid.”
This article is published in The Ubyssey.
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If someone offered me two unidentified glasses of wine and asked me to assess their value, I’d get nervous.
Sure, I’d feign competence and do the swirl, sniff, and sip but, without any information about the products, I’d simply choose the more enjoyable and hope it was also the more “valuable.” Yes, this might mean I’d go with the bargain bin basic over the super-rare vintage from eons ago but, apparently, I’m not alone.
In “Life Lessons from an Ad Man,” the recently posted TED talk embedded above, Rory Sutherland explains how advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception of a product instead of changing the actual product itself. I know this notion may seem obvious, especially when directly discussed, but Sutherland’s examples highlight how persuasion has worked as a powerful marketing tool.
In terms of wine, Sutherland quotes the American Institute of Wine Economics [sic]*: “Except for among 5% or 10% of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine—except when you tell people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the most expensive stuff more.”
The line up in front of the Granville Theatre for the premiere of Toad's Oil at the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival. As you can see, people just love line-ups on cloudy days.
We’ve all heard that journalism can be a strenuous pursuit.
That’s true, no doubt about it… but sometimes we gadflies do get some truly sweet gigs. I thought about that as I flashed my media pass and received free tickets to some of the best new movies from around the world. Thanks to Schema Magazine, I was able to watch, enjoy, and review four films at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF).
If you’re interested in any of the titles, click the link to see what this rookie reviewer had to say. Shout outs to Schema for taking a chance on an unknown kid.
What if we chose to see the homeless as more than just statistics?
Last Friday I sat down with Monte Paulsen, the investigative editor of the web-based magazine The Tyee.
For three years, Paulsen has been writing solution-oriented journalism on homelessness in BC, talking to everyone from politicians and outreach workers to people living beneath the Science World docks. We spoke before his free public talk, “Ending Homelessness: What Works,” an event that was co-sponsored by The Tyee and the Museum of Vancouver, and timed to coincide with the region’s fourth annual Homelessness Action Week.
Paulsen wants to prove, beyond an optimistic sentiment, that the province can end homelessness for the same amount it currently spends to maintain it.
To read my article on Paulsen’s ideas, click here. (There’s also a link to hear audio)
“When I first heard my dad had a mental illness, I thought ‘how could someone so weird get any weirder?’” - Ten-year-old Jonathan Granirer
Click here to see the original story in the Ubyssey
BY FABIOLA CARLETTI
CONTRIBUTOR
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8TH, 2009
Nearly 500 people attended the two Stand Up for Mental Health comedy shows on Monday at Frederick Wood Theatre and the Totem Park Ballroom. The campus comedy day coincided with National Mental Illness Awareness Week, a campaign that aims to break down the stigma surrounding mental illness.
Karine St-Jean stood before the microphone clutching her cue cards. Most of the audience wasn’t much older than her, and many without seats sat close by and cross-legged on the floor. The 16-year-old comic wore heart-shaped earrings, which framed her cherub cheeks, and a bright yellow shirt.
“I took this anger management class and they told us to do the square–breathing technique when we get angry,” she said. “That really pissed me off.”
The crowd erupted in laughter, showing support for St-Jean and the other comedians that highlighted the humour in a diverse list of mental illnesses.
Crack open your creamy companion and savour the satire:
Now, there’s no way that I can keep you as entertained as Sarah Haskins can, but if we get serious for a moment, this probiotic party line may actually be full of it.
In a recent article for the guardian, Felicity Lawrence points out that we may need to take slurp on a little reality. Sure, we can snicker at 19th century cereal slogans that promise to make our blood redder and cure malaria—‘cause we know those are silly sales pitches—but then maybe we should ask ourselves if we’re buying in to “the ludicrously exaggerated” modern day equivalents.
While gliding through the grocery aisles, I’m sure many of us stop at the functional health foods that promise to move us and improve us, but as the industry winks with approval, more objective bodies–like the European Food Safety Authority–are not impressed.
My cat, Grisito, waiting to be let out. Photo credit: Beatrice Carletti
Back in high school, I read a poem called “The Prize Cat” by E.J. Pratt. As a cat owner and lover, I delighted in Pratt’s descriptions of a pure blood domestic tabby cat with a soft-mannered, musical purr. “The ribbon had declared the breed, Gentility was in the fur.” Essentially, Pratt muses about the tamed majesty of the now-domesticated feline. And then, a flash of instinct:
I saw the generations pass
Along the reflex of a spring,
A bird had rustled in the grass,
The tab had caught it on the wing:Behind the leap so furtive-wild
Was such ignition in the gleam,
I thought an Abyssinian child
Had cried out in the whitethroat’s scream.
I think that was the first time I considered the predatory instincts of my beloved pet and, though it was unsettling, I didn’t think about what outdoor cats might be doing to bird populations on a wide scale.
In her recent article for the New York Times, Natalie Angier offers a bird’s eye view. Although Angier definitely editorializes—describing cats as bored, carnivorous tourists and recreational, subsidized hunters—she raises some interesting points.
