Just in case you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s Sicko, or perhaps didn’t believe him, this great story is a second chance for you to WAKE UP!

More good news for blueberries and antioxidants in regards to brain health and Alzheimer’s , as the USDA news service reviews some recently published literature here.

The story brings to mind a regular frustration I run into as an anthropologist with interests in food and nutrition. Health and nutrition researchers seem to have an exceptionally well-developed reluctance to draw connections between specific, down scale research data and long-term health outcomes. In other words, they don’t like to ever tell people what to (and hence what not to) eat.

As illustrated by the hundreds, perhaps thousands of often contradictory books on dieting and healthy eating, each of which is often authored by a legitimate MD, there is little to no agreement within the research community about how food and diet relates to health, through nutrition.

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I sent the following email to UAF’s chancellor today, without much hope for making a difference but I felt it necessary nonetheless. To add to its impact I copied our campus newspaper as well, though in hindsight wished I had copied the Fairbanks News-Miner too.

Chancellor,

I just witnessed a remarkable sight on campus. A UAF trash compacting truck is presently backed up to Gruening, and a handfull of UAF workers are loading perfectly good desks into it (the kind where the chair is attached to the desk), one by one. As they are crushed more and more are added. I witnessed at least 20 be destroyed in as many mintues. I wondered, what offense could these desks have committed that they aren’t being reused here, or donated elsewhere, but will instead end up as tangles of metal and particleboard in a landfill? Curious, I checked one out - indeed it was in perfect condition!

It seems to me that universities need to be the institutions that set an example for the rest of our society, if real change is going to happen that averts ecological catastrophe and allows us, as a species, to inhabit this beautiful planet for a while longer. The display outside of Gruening is not an example of this new thinking, but of the thinking of old minds - “Out of sight, out of mind.”

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This month’s slideshow: Classic Alaska

OK, I’ve finally decided that its time to start sharing the site with others. We’re by no means running at 100% yet, there are still glitches with the layout and such, but the content is here. Contributing writers are being added every day so check back often for new contributions! And for those of you with nothing better to do than read my rants and musings, i have also added archives of my old blogs Reboot Activism, Reboot IT, and The Living Maya.