Food: The Way We Eat

Food: The Way We Eat
A New Lease on Lunch
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

At a certain point in my 16th year of motherhood, my two sons hurtling out the door to school bearing their 2,400th turkey and ham sandwiches, I began to wonder if history had ever recorded a death from maternal culinary despair.

Like many moms, I started parenthood with noble ambitions, buying a little white grinder to make my own baby food from organic fruits and vegetables so my children would begin life nutritionally pure. I think back on this whenever Jacob and Gabe, who are now 16 and 13, pop a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn with fake butter into the microwave.

I am a gastronomic fallen woman. My descent was gradual and insidious, spurred on by chronic disorganization, too many to-do lists, work demands and the glorious but maddening differences between my two kids. Jacob lives for “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” on NPR; Gabe, for “Halo 3.” Jacob, a picky but basically healthful eater, loves a good steak. Gabe, an adventurous eater and future Top Chef, is a budding vegetarian whose bar mitzvah speech compared animal sacrifice in the Book of Leviticus to the “gross and disgusting” meat industry of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.”

Gazing at the carnage in my kitchen — Freon-infused fish sticks in the freezer and a three-of-everything pantry (My pantry, myself, I thought grimly) — I realized that desperate measures were needed. I yearned to infuse imagination into my humdrum culinary routine and to cultivate a state of mindfulness about the contents of our refrigerator, all while taking advantage of the prodigious bounty of my adopted California home. I began to fantasize about redemption, about midlife second chances. About Alice. Alice Waters. More

Online Storage?

Take Your Storage Online

Sean Kerner

October 17, 2007 09:04
Introduction

It's important to backup your data. We've all had that basic lesson drilled into us for years. It's also important to make sure that your backed up data is located somewhere other than where your primary data is - that way one disaster won't take out both sets. With cheap storage and pervasive broadband, the promise of offsite storage is one that is easily fulfilled. There are many online services that consumers can now use for online storage. Perhaps, too many.

The basic promise of online storage is the security and peace of mind of having an offsite copy of your data. Offsite online storage can also make your data more accessible if you want to share it. But how do you choose which service to go with? It all depends on what you want out of your online storage service. In this review, we'll take a look at six popular online storage services: Xdrive, MediaMax, IDrive-E, Omnidrive, Box.net, Carbonite and Mozy. Each of these services offers a free trial that does not require a credit card for signup - so after you read this article, you can go and try them out for yourself. We'll evaluate what works and point out the stuff that doesn't work as it should. In our features chart, we'll lay bare the costs and capabilities of the evaluated services. Finally, at the end, we'll identify the winners and losers. More