Friday, February 06, 2004

Cookies, Gift-Giving, and the Internet Hillary Bays and Miranda Mowbray write: This paper arose from a question: why are there so many connections between cookies and the Internet? We describe some of these connections. Cookies appear in contexts that have to do with giving and sharing. We explore the larger social context of cookies as food, as a gift for children, and as a symbol of sharing, and also the relationship between women and giving. There turns out to be a connection between the Internet gift economy, the U.S. tradition of giving cookies as a present, and the future of the Internet. We describe this connection and its implication for Internet strategies. ... Those who built the Internet experienced a gift economy in the academic and scientific community. They also experienced it in kindergarten and with their mothers, grandmothers, and women neighbors of the type who volunteer to help in the local community, and who bake cookies. The Internet builders associated cookies with gift-giving and sharing. So when they set up shareware, or the Web, or shared file systems, they thought of cookies. One of the fastest-growing demographic segments of Internet users is women over the age of 50. Surveys differ as to the exact numbers, but there were probably already over five million U.S. women over 50 on the Internet by mid-1998. They tend to be religious, traditional, and family-oriented - exactly the type of women who bake cookies. They are enthusiastic about the Internet and spend more time online than some younger Internet users. Their principal reason to use the Internet is to communicate with their family and friends. The fact that they feel at home in the Internet gift economy is not a coincidence: it was partly inspired by them.In terms of Internet business strategies, cookie-givers are not motivated by monetary profit; they give their cookies away. Companies who assume that in the future most transactions on the Internet will be in exchange for money will miss this important demographic group. ... The reason that there are so many connections between cookies and the Internet is that in the U.S. cookies are a symbol of giving and sharing. The future Internet is likely to be dominated demographically by people used to operating in gift economies. Companies that understand the gift-giving philosophy are most likely to prosper. (02/06/04) Learning to Farm Sustainably Laura Sayre writes: This photo from the fall of 2002 shows student workers in the fields of the OASIS Farm at New Mexico State University. Andy Giron is majoring in Agricultural Extension Education; Andrea Padilla in Family and Consumer Sciences. In 2002 the student farm cultivated 142 varieties of flowers, herbs, and veggies, and yielded 20,000 lbs of food (photo courtesy of Connie Falk). ... At colleges and universities across the country, students are finding--and founding--opportunities to make sustainable agriculture part of a well-rounded education. Many go on to farm organically in real life. “I think of the farm as an agent of change,” says Scott Stokoe, manager of the Dartmouth College Organic Farm in Hanover, New Hampshire. “A place where students can identify problems and figure out how to fix them.” Ivy-League Dartmouth is hardly known as a seedbed of student radicalism, but on two sandy acres overlooking the Connecticut River, that could be quietly changing. Stokoe confesses that when he was first hired to run the Dartmouth Organic Farm in 1997, he was uncertain whether to understand the project as a new chapter in the history of food politics or as the tail end of an older movement, finally surfacing at a fundamentally conservative institution. Seven seasons later, the farm has come to fill a small but beloved role within the Dartmouth College community, supplying fresh produce to one of the campus dining halls, helping students prepare for study-abroad programs in Africa and Latin America, and serving as a popular activity, especially for sophomores, who at Dartmouth are required to spend their summer quarter on campus. Today the farm has half a dozen paid part-time student workers, another dozen or so regular volunteers, and over 200 people on its email list. Stokoe and the students operate a farmstand on the main quad one day a week in season, grossing about $4000 a year. Meanwhile, as if in answer to Stokoe's question, similar programs have been taking root at colleges and universities across the country. (02/06/04) A New Vision for America Josh Harkinson writes: Judy Wicks founded the White Dog Café on the first floor of her Philadelphia home in 1983. Her food took its cue from the innovative New American cuisine of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in Berkeley: updated regional dishes, rebuilt on a foundation of seasonal local produce. At the White Dog the food was a hit, and diners soon spilled onto the sidewalk, waiting for a chance to taste farm-fresh strawberry pie and the succulent local tomatoes on Betty's Beef Kabobs. As the restaurant grew, so did Wicks's notion that the strength of her business relied upon the quality and sustainability of its locally grown ingredients. Six years ago, after reading about the horrors of industrial hog farms, she stormed into her kitchen, scratched pork off the menu, and went searching for a farmer with a soft spot in his heart for pigs. Her hunt took Wicks beyond the meat wholesalers, who knew not whence their cuts came, to Glen Brendle, a farmer who delivered produce to the White Dog in his compact pickup truck. Brendle knew Amish farmers in nearby Lancaster County who still were raising hogs the old way. But he barely had room in his pickup for vegetables, let alone pork chops, so Wicks gave him a low-interest loan to purchase a refrigerated cargo truck. The loan enabled him to deliver meat to more than fifteen restaurants and caterers, creating an entirely new market in Philadelphia for locally grown, humanely raised, free-range pigs. "Judy is an enabler," Brendle says. "Without her encouragement and financial help I probably wouldn't be doing this." That could have been the end of the story, but Wicks saw something powerful in what she and Brendle had done. She began to envision how strengthening relationships between independent, community-rooted enterprises could inspire broad and profound cultural change. In 2001, she and cofounder Laury Hammel unveiled the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), the first national network of small, sustainable companies dedicated to buying and selling products locally. The organization supports merchants who are deeply committed to their communities and who define success more holistically than the managers of investor-owned corporations. (02/06/04) Understanding a Killer BBC Health -- Scientists have worked out how the virus which caused the world's worst ever flu epidemic infected man. They believe the virus, which claimed the lives of 50m people around the world, jumped from birds to humans. The breakthrough, published in Science, should help doctors identify which future bird viruses pose a threat to man at an earlier stage. But the National Institute for Medical Research team warns viruses cannot be stopped from crossing between species. They also say their work is unlikely to aid the current fight against avian flu in the Far East as knowing the structure of a virus is not enough to block its progress. The key first stage of infection is for the flu virus to attach itself to the cells in which it will breed. It does this by using spike-like molecules called Hemagglutinins (HA) that bind to particular receptors on the surface of cells in the body. Human and bird virus HAs interact with different cell receptors and therefore bird viruses do not usually infect humans. However, the NIMR team has studied the HA of the 1918 virus in close detail, and found that only minor changes in its structure were required for it to start to bind with human cells as well as bird cells. This gave it the ability to pass from birds to humans, and then between humans - with devastating results. ... The 1918 "Spanish" flu pandemic is estimated to have infected up to one billion people - half the world's population at the time. The virus killed more people than any other single outbreak of disease, surpassing even the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Although it probably originated in the Far East, it was dubbed "Spanish" flu because the press in Spain - not being involved in the Great War - were the first to report extensively on its impact. The virus caused three waves of disease. The second of these, between September and December 1918, resulting in the heaviest loss of life. It is thought that the virus may have played a role in ending the Great War as soldiers were too sick to fight, and by that stage more men on both sides died of flu than were killed by weapons. (02/06/04) Law of the Land David W. Orr writes: Each of us Americans, on average, has 190 potentially toxic organochlorine compounds in our fatty tissue and body fluids, and several hundred other chemicals that may be harmful to our health. Although the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects "the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," the privacy of the body has been violated without our knowledge or permission, and with little accountability by those responsible. The ubiquity of pollution makes it difficult to assign responsibility. Still more difficult to determine is which of hundreds or thousands of chemicals, mixing in ways beyond our comprehension, caused exactly what pathology in our bodies. Our knowledge of such things is inescapably general. We know that some of these substances, singly or in combination, undermine health, reproductive potential, intelligence, ability to concentrate, and emotional stability -- hence the capacity to pursue and experience life, liberty, and happiness. In some cases the effects will manifest far into the future, placing perpetrators beyond the reach of the law and leaving their victims without remedy. What, then, is the meaning of the constitutional guarantees in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments that we cannot "be deprived of life, liberty, or property," including property of the body, without "due process of law"? The framers of the Constitution could not have known about carcinogenic, mutagenic, endocrine-disrupting, or radioactive substances, but we do. For many toxic substances we know that there is no safe threshold of exposure. Chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system do their work in parts per billion, wreaking havoc on the development and immune systems of children. Had they known what we now know about the pervasiveness of chemicals and their effects, would the framers have extended the protections of due process to include the fundamental right of bodily integrity? And should such protections be extended more broadly to include deprivation of other ecological necessities of life and liberty? The philosophy and logic of liberty as the framers understood it leaves little doubt that the answer is affirmative. What else would they have protected us against, had they known the kind of world we would inherit? For the framers, the conquest of nature by science and technology was an unmixed blessing. In our time, we can see the limits of nature, some say its end. We know what they could not have known: that nature is an intricate web of causes and effects often widely separated in space and time, and that small changes can have very large implications. We know, too, that what we mean by nature is complicated by our being bound up in it in ways that are hard to fathom. And we know, or ought to know, that we could bring it and ourselves crashing down, gradually or quickly. Of the founders, Thomas Jefferson is notable for his concerns about the intergenerational effects of debt, but he could not have imagined intergenerational ecological debt such as the extinction of species and toxic pollution. "We the People" meant we the present generation, with the caveat that the framers intended to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." To do so meant getting the legal framework in place to balance interests, avoid the tyranny of either minority or majority, provide democratic representation, create national institutions, and establish a credit-worthy government. (02/06/04) 6:06:50 AM

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