Cis Miss

Cis Miss
I see the correlations of all the traits used to determine southerners from northerners, but it appears to me that the map would never be able to create a line between the two. For example along rivers and other natural barriers, cultural practices and traits would expand in either direction. My point is that a river that was the main access to the lands of the west and trading posts would displace people as well as their culture and customs further then just the south. It would seem to me that southern style traits as determined in "Where the South Begins" would creep north across this determined line. The idea of determining the South and creating a boundary line could be better represented by the speech patterns of the local people.
The map of Linguistics by Hans Kurath was in my opinion wrong for not taking into consideration the way people pronunciate and accent words. Because to me a person's accent is a person's identity and should be able to determine a boundary where the accents change.


Obsessed With Nutrition? That's an Eating Disorder

I completely agree with Michael Pollan who states "the financed branch of nutrition is remarkably reliable in its ability to find a benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study." This means that just because experts say that red wine is good for your heart make sure and check who funded the study. It isn't too difficult to see the glaring coincidence between a study paid for by the wine industry that states wine is good for your heart. I believe it was Charles Darwin who stated that any false information can be only detrimental and crippling to science, and when lobbies and big business fund their own studies they are essentially paying for a falsified and glorified outcome of results. people seem to be taking the word of their grocers or the company that supplies them instead of doing their own research on the produce the foods that are sold at the local grocery.
It seems to me that healthy living and eating organic has almost become a fad. People love to eat healthy foods labeled as organic because they believe it is better. The only problem I have is that the only reason we are going back to organics is because we got so far away from them in the first place. Every food on earth that is natural and reoccurring was at one time an organic compound, but through genetic tampering and supplements man has developed a new brand of food. These foods are known as GM foods and should be outlawed. People have no idea what eating this food could do to our own bodies. A genetically modified tomato for example is a tomato that has had its genes sliced in the laboratory and then a gene from another plant or even an animal is spliced into the gene to complete the code. This makes for certain characteristics in the tomato to be more pronounced. But studies have also shown that the nutritional value in the foods that we eat are slowly deteriorating in terms of how much nutrients we receive per serving.
The food that we are eating now is less healthy then the same food 50 years ago. And now people are so concerned with eating healthy after our forefathers have destroyed and contaminated our food supply for so long, makes you wonder if third world countries without the technology and chemistry that Americans have would be better off without all the poisons and chemicals that were introduced so prudently. People need to study the evolution of foods and realize that to manipulate something as perfect and all natural as a crisp organic apple just to increase shelf life isn't worth the hidden effects and long term results which aren't well known.