Tagged: shopping

How to eat your veggies and cut your grocery bill

This week, the USDA released “MyPlate,” the improved successor to the ubiquitous but oft-criticized food pyramid, that visualizes thee proportions of each food group a person should consume at meals. Among the things that this new visualization reveals (but that actually hasn’t changed) is that half of the volume of each meal should be made up of fruits and vegetables. Even though this is not technically a new recommendation, MyPlate makes this more obvious, and some people are treating this information with a certain amount of surprise. In particular, the reactions I’ve seen to this have revolved mainly around “how...

Do you live in a “food desert”?

The USDA defines a “food desert” as a census block or tract where 500 people and/or 33% of the population is more than a mile from a large/full-sized grocery store (10 miles for non-urban areas). This phenomenon is considered by the USDA as a leading cause of malnourishment and obesity among poor and/or rural populations, as the only regularly accessible food is often in the form of preprocessed items from small convenience stores. Earlier this week, the USDA released an online tool that allows people to visualize what parts of the country are considered food deserts. The tool isn’t perfect–some...

The Journey of my beloved backpack

I have had the same red Jansport backpack since I was about 14 years old. It had taken a good two years for me to convince my mom that it was worth it to invest $40 in a backpack, particularly when every other backpack my younger sister or I had ever used lasted for a maximum of two years. From her vantage point, it made sense. If you don’t spend more than $15 or $20 on a backpack, and it lasts two years, it’s more cost-effective than spending $40 on a backpack that lasts two years. However, I had a...

Bad photos on Flickr help with camera shopping

So I’m looking at buying a DSLR, and I’m balancing price/value with capability and quality to come out with the best camera for my needs. I’ve only rarely worked with professional- and expert-grade cameras, usually just tinkering with ones belonging to the photographers that I work with. Pretty much all of the photography that I’ve ever done, either for personal use or for-hire has been shot with a point-and-shoot of some sort. I pretty much converted over from shooting a combination of film and digital to just shooting digital about four years ago, and if there’s one thing I really...