No, instead of french fires I'll have a side of Pizza

I thought I would channel the environmental anthropologist in me for a brief post on the Pizza is a Vegetable Controversy. This issue is, of course, getting a lot of exposure on both the right and the left, and both sides are misrepresenting fundamental aspects of what is going on. Congress did not declare pizza as a vegetable. Rather, the issue surrounds how much schools can "check off" their vegetable counter for serving tomato puree or tomato paste, which happen to be elements of pizza (but also of other meals that cafeterias serve). Essentially, the Obama administration wants tomato paste to count less than it does now. Congress rejected this proposal, and tomato paste's nutritional status will remain unchanged. But this is a bad thing nonetheless. Even if, as a recent Washington Post article claims, tomato paste has a similar vitamin content as other vegetables (which is probably crap), what else is in tomato paste? I imagine most school district's don't dine on organic products. How many preservatives?  Even better, how much corn syrup??? So, before outraged folks begin boycotting Papa Johns Pizza, we should perhaps look at more insidious interests at play. Ever hear of ConAgra? This exposes another misrepresentation: that Congressional rejection of this proposal protects consumers' right to choose. If anything, encouraging schools to cut corners on their nutritional responsibility to students reduces parents' abilities to make informed decisions, ostensibly a cornerstone of the seemingly free market......

U.S. Cuts UNESCO Funds

The United States is a major contributor to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. They have cut their funding, in response to admitting and recognizing Palestine as a UNESCO member. The United States is a major contributor/


http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/unesco-votes-to-admit-palestine-over-us-objections/2011/10/31/gIQAMleYZM_story.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15518173

In case you don't know what UNESCO is:

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/

Archaeology and Sustainability?

In a recent issue of Anthropology News, Stephen Nash (2011) expresses doubt that archaeology can be used to solve contemporary environmental issues. Nash argues that never before has the world witnessed the effects of global industrial capitalism, and archaeology simply lacks qualitatively and quantitatively valid analogues to understand these processes comparatively: “Compared to human societies of the past, human society today is simply unrecognizable and, I would argue, not comparable” (Nash 2011:34). Nash’s perspective echoes many other contemporary criticisms (McAnany and Yoffee 2010) of past environmental degradation, particularly of those that appropriate the past to create a morality play of contemporary excess (e.g., Diamond 2005). Nash’s challenge questions not just archaeology’s limited role in the contemporary world but also archaeology’s integration within anthropology— a discipline that has an undeniable role to play in understanding, critiquing, and resolving contemporary problems. 

Admittedly, past political economies were structured differently than global industrial capitalism (Wolf 1982), which has led to resource depletion, poverty, and economic alienation on a scale never witnessed before in the history of humanity. But many of these criticisms are responses to simplified reconstructions of the past that center on single (or paired) variables, particularly demographic or climatological ones. In this respect, Nash is correct on empirical grounds. No contemporary sociocultural anthropologist would reduce complex human lives and historical configurations of people, places, and power to single variables even amid conditions of global warming and population growth. Why should archaeologists?

Diamond, J.

2005    Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed. Penguin.

McAnany, P. and N. Yoffee

2010    Questioning Collapse. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Nash, S.

2011    Archaeology and Sustainability: Improbably Bedfellows. Anthropology News 52:34.

Wolf, E.

1982    Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press, Berkeley.