The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Last week I visited one of the local bush care groups around here. They were an amazing group of people; ordinary people who have taught themselves specialist knowledge so that they can rehabilitate green space. They know what to remove, what to leave, and can tell the difference between native versions of things and very similar looking varieties that are weeds. Once a month they get out of bed in the cold in the early morning and put in a couple of hours of unpaid labour for the benefit of the environment and local wildlife. Some of them work with several groups. And they are cheery and friendly at that hour of the morning, which is well beyond me.

The thing is, when I think about it, there are lots of amazing people around here. . .

Last year I wrote a post on Food and Sociality in which I talked about the social and cultural aspects of food and how these encourage us to eat more than perhaps we should. I also expressed an intention to remain “social” despite of some difficulties with certain foods. Has that ever come back to bite me!

What, at the time, seemed like the ill effects of a couple of days of careless eating was actually the start of a rapid increase in allergy and intolerance severity. Consequently, my diet is now quite restricted. I am perfectly healthy, and indeed have a ream of test result to prove same, but my intentions to remain social in my eating habits and not to create a fuss have gone out the window.

It has been a steep learning curve, with much time spent on the internet learning which foods contain what and trying to find reliable articles from medically qualified people that I can actually understand. Here are a few of the things that I have learnt:

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The new clean, green CEO of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch (you might have heard of him) delivered a global address webcast to News Corp employees today, in which he stated that News Corp would be carbon neutral by 2010: