Buying indie, eating locally

I was just reading the beginning of Bill Bryson's nostalgic new biography, and he reminisces about "the glory of living in a world still free of global chains. Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else." I hope Bryson got to walk around the city a bit when he was here last month to give a talk (his voice, fyi, is suprisingly high), because a bit of that glory remains.

Today I had wonderful food, and I didn't have to enter a single chain store. Nor did I have to go out of my way. I picked up a chunk of pecorino fresca and a loaf of ciabatta at the market a few blocks away, fresh tomatoes a block from there, and went home to make a sandwich. On my way to campus I grabbed a chai latte at an indepedent coffee shop/art gallery. Then, for dinner, I ate at White Dog Cafe, a restaurant that specializes in locally produced goods, with a group of alums from my high school.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, Slow Food is a big deal lately, and Philly is a great place for it. There's a group here that helps people find locally-grown food, plus a website with a similar purpose called Farm to Philly. There also seem to be farmer's markets all the time, including one on campus.

I've also found it pretty easy to find independent places (more likely to have local products, and better for the community to begin with) here; they predominate in my neighborhood. It's not the 1950s, but hey, I'm quite happy to have a Trader Joe's near by, too.

The political past

The New York Times and the liberal blogosphere have spent a fair amount of time lately discussing the legacy of Ronald Reagan--specifically, about a campaign speech he gave in 1979 that seems to have expressed solidarity with southern racists. Paul Krugman writes, "Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong." David Brooks, on the other hand, believes that "the truth is more complicated."

What struck me here is the contrast between how columnists like these analyse a historical event versus how historians would go about this. For people like Krugman and Brooks, it's an approach that my classmates note with disdain: a teleological one. This means, roughly, that they're starting with the end point and putting together evidence that leads up to that end. That end point is usually a political point for columnists, whereas historians are more likely to let readers infer the contemporary political connections on their own. Historians are concerned with how things might have turned out differently--in our terms, contingency.

Why is one stump speech Reagan made using coded political language for racism suddenly the topic of a flurry of debate? It probably has a lot to do with this year's campaign and republican invocations of Reagan, and very little to do with that speech's historical importance. To me, it's eerily familiar of what a superb Washington Post piece recently described as a debate about race in America that is "stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes." Columnists fixating on this speech in 1979 are doing just what historians try so hard to avoid: getting mired in the detail without figuring out the meaning and implications.

And so, for the final word on Reagan and race--and an example of what the historical method can bring to debates about the past's role in the present--I'll defer to another historian's take.

Working out...ideas about body image

One of the positive life changes I've made since moving to Philly has been starting a good work-out regimen. There's a gym around the corner from me, so it's easy to get there and come home to shower. I've been doing yoga class one night a week there, then cardio and weight-lifting as many days a week as I can fit in. Given that my father has always promoted going to the gym as the panacea for all that is bad in life, I had high expectations for my new habit.

I feel great when I leave the gym, but since I started working out, I've noticed an unhealthy preoccupation that I've never dealt with before: my weight. I had such a fast metabolism growing up that people used to ask whether I was anorexic. I could never understand why 1) girls would starve themselves to look like models and actresses or 2) why even models and actresses would want to be that thin--I knew that it was uncomfortable.

And now, for the first time, I am feeling what those girls must have felt. I expected to lose weight working out, although I didn't feel I needed to, but discovered after a month that I had actually gained a few pounds (possibly muscle, but this didn't console me) and weighed more than I ever had before. Suddenly I was noticing that all of my pants were tight. I began to scrutinize my body every time I looked in the mirror for where the fat was residing. Finally, I realized I needed to step back. I checked my body mass index online, and discovered that I was at the low end of normal weight for my size.

Given my awareness of how the media feeds girls' unhealthy body image, I have to admit that I was a bit surprised that I had bought into it. In high school, I boycotted stores whose ads I found distasteful in this way--this Bebe ad was one of the all-time worst. Things haven't improved since then. Magazines and blogs today treat cellulite, which one blog notes "effects 90% of women," as if it were a disease, and this recent blog post is an utterly tasteless example of that.

Where does this all leave me? I can't wipe out all of the negative associations I have with fat, but I can keep in mind where they're coming from. As an academic, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how culture shapes people's ideas, so maybe it's time I think about that in relation to myself.

Want to learn more about media and body image? Check out www.about-face.org.