Category Archives: Viva!

French Law Kicks Packaged Food Out of the Kitchen

Restaurant-goers in France will start seeing a funny little symbol on their menus this week: a skillet with a house on top, indicating your menu choice is made in-house.

It’s part of a new law meant to battle against the surprising amount of factory-made, pre-packaged food in French restaurants, and celebrate the country’s culinary traditions.

However, many in the industry say the law doesn’t go far enough, because it allows dishes made from frozen, pre-peeled or pre-cut products to count as home-made.

via French Law Kicks Packaged Food Out of the Kitchen.

Celebrating cellulite isn’t the route to happiness | Bella Mackie | Commentisfree | The Guardian

This desire to rejoice in our form, whatever its shape, is yet another way for women to see our bodies as the priority. We may refuse to see our cellulite as ugly or unsightly, but we are still being asked to focus on an external part of ourself, to flip the negative into a positive and examine our physical attributes from a different angle. Is this what we see as progress? If you cannot imagine a blog where men happily praise each others’ beer guts then the answer must surely be no.

I have spent the past year running. I’ve got stronger and leaner. I can feel my physical strength increasing. I have learned to appreciate how each part of the body connects, and how wonderful it is to be able to use it fully. But this trend towards body positive language and imagery requires us to do the opposite; it asks us to see our bodies as superficial.

When writing about the history of the suffrage movement, Jeanette Winterson argued that if a woman cannot feel comfortable in her own body then she has no home. In order to feel fully at ease with ourselves, perhaps we should throw off the notion that one’s body, and one’s specific body parts, must be seen as either praiseworthy or wanting. Acceptance, rather than jubilation, is the only way we women might have a real chance of moving away from the constant fixation with our image.

via Celebrating cellulite isn’t the route to happiness | Bella Mackie | Commentisfree | The Guardian.

Polar Vortex Knock-Off Headed Straight Toward Us: Gothamist

Trigger Warning: An unseasonable blast of cold air reminiscent of last winter’s infamous Polar Vortex is headed our way next week. Tropical Storm Neoguri, off the coast of Japan, has initiated a chain reaction in weather patterns which, according to Weather Underground, will cause a ripple effect in the jet stream over western North America, resulting in a phenomenon “similar to the nasty ‘Polar Vortex’ pattern that set up during the winter of 2014.” Guess we’re still not done slurping up winter’s blood from that snowman’s skull. Fine, pass it over.

via Polar Vortex Knock-Off Headed Straight Toward Us: Gothamist.