Week 2 readings

 Adelie penguin, Cape Adare, Antarctica

Having just polished off a Big Mac for breakfast, I suppose Obsessed With Nutrition? is a good place to start commenting on the readings. Bread bolstered with the Omega-3 fatty acids? I think a tuna sandwich would work just as well. Our diet is a two edged sword. The availability, variety, and freshness mean that I’m likely to eat more than I need, simply because it tastes good. That same availability, variety, and freshness also means that I can be sure that I have any needed vitamins, minerals and nutrients. And Obsessed With Nutrition? doesn’t address organic food. Thanks, but I’ll pass. Those preservatives keep the food edible longer. And besides, at my age all the preservatives I’ve eaten are likely the only thing that keeps me from crumbling to dust like Christopher Lee at the end of a vampire movie. Our collective lifespan suggest that our collective diet is fine and orthorexia is silliness.

There are numerous ways to define “region”. But I don’t believe that any single method alone can give an accurate definition. Some have used dialect or accent, others have used the ratio of mules to horse and Zelinsky used as part of his definition, the type of building materials. The influence of radio and television and the way speakers with a Southern accent are viewed have contributed to a decline in that particular accent. Since horses and mules are little used in farming anymore, that ratio would indicate that the South no longer exists. I think that building materials are more a matter of availability rather than a cultural preference. Adobe is used in the Southwest. Trees are more plentiful in the South. The Northeast has clay suitable for bricks. The Great Plains, lacking trees or suitable clay, used sod for buildings until better materials could be imported. I always thought I was in the South when I started seeing headstones in the yards. In the urban (and cooler) North, the dead were transported to the local churchyard for burial. In the rural South, the distances and the heat often precluded transporting bodies to a church for burial so they were just buried in the front yard. Times have changed but it isn’t unusual to see several moss covered tombstones in the yard of a house on a Southern country road.

Some of the readings, I’ll confess, I just don’t understand the point even after multiple readings. I just don’t get the point of Regions on the mind does not equal regions of the mind. Some I am reluctant to address because disagreeing or simply questioning certain orthodoxies can be risky. The comment “Watersheds…are seen as delimiting local natural communities” in the essay ON “BIOREGIONALISM” AND “WATERSHED CONSCIOUSNESS makes me wonder what exactly constitutes an unnatural community?