Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Experiments with n=1 (or n=4)

Jen from the weblog Life begins @ 30 has been posting a captivating account of everything she eats, now up to day five. Conscientious and interesting. And how cool of her father to bring wild salmon by plane straight from his home in Anchorage.

The examined daily bread, as a stepping stone toward the examined life, is an honorable tradition. The new weblog cheap veggie gourmet led me to Kitchen Parade's "veggie venture" and to a four-year-old weblog that we might euphemistically describe as ....corporategroceries.net, who seeks to buy food only from independently owned sources. An earlier post in these pages also mentioned Half Changed World and Henry Thoreau. From Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, the delightfully literate economics weblog, I heard some time ago about the astonishing Seth Roberts, a Berkeley psychologist whose experiments on himself have included drinking five liters of water daily to test a theory of weight loss.

I am tempted to try my own exercise, suited to the peculiar interests of this forum, which include the political, nutritional, and home economics implications of personal food choices. Does anybody want to propose a goal or challenge for this exercise? Appropriate for a busy family of four, with 2 adults and 2 young children, all big on fruits and vegetables? Say, one month in length?

1 comment:

Alanna Kellogg said...

Hi Parke ~ Just found a link to this page in my bookmarks, you might well have been the first blogger to find A Veggie Venture, way way back when. Anyway, it made me laugh and so I thought I'd let you know. I'm a faithful reader ... likely first-time commenter.