Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
As most readers of this blog know, I will be joining the Department of Applied Economics at University of Minnesota in a few weeks. Today is the day we drive off to the Upper Midwest. As such — and following Kim’s example — this is as good a time as any for me to take stock of what I’ll miss in what was, for better or for worse, my hometown for the past seven years, and the place where I’ve lived the longest after my hometown of Montreal.
This has been in my “to-blog” file ever since I went on sabbatical in Belgium in 2009-2010 and read In Defense of Food.
Some food for thought from Michael Pollan:
“[I]t’s only natural to search for the causes of one’s misfortune and, perhaps, to link one’s illness to one’s behavior. One of the more pernicious aspects of nutritionism is that it encourages us to blame our health problems on lifestyle choices, implying that the individual bears ultimate responsibility for whatever illnesses befall him. It’s worth keeping in mind that a far more powerful predictor of heart disease than either diet or exercise is social class.”
Adventures in Publishing, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul Edition
An anonymous reviewer opens his or her remarks on an article I had submitted for publication in the following unintentionally hilarious fashion: