The Mall of America broke my brain!
Mar. 30th, 2007 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronA brief rant:
Argh! I have just spent a very frustrating half hour in the alt.polycon consuite trying to figure out why my damn phone wouldn't connect to WiFi and kept attempting to dial up Orange GPRS instead. It transpires that I can only use my hotel WiFi username and password in my room. Argh!
The Mall of America is a scary, scary place. I'm not sure I can sum up succinctly why. The fact it contains a wedding chapel where you can get legally married (providing you are an opposite-sex couple and neither of you is already married) may have something to do with it. Also the food courts were absolutely terrifying. The only things I saw that did not contain more fat in just one meal than I usually eat in an entire day were the fruit juices and water. The level of artificial colourants was also fearsome. In the UK we have recognised that these things are bad for you and taken steps to limit their use: not so here where cookies contain alarming levels of bright red, blue and green.
I hit the Hot Topic, both Gamestops, and a shop selling Minnesota souvenirs. Then I headed back to the hotel for the alt.polycon introductions panel.
Argh! I have just spent a very frustrating half hour in the alt.polycon consuite trying to figure out why my damn phone wouldn't connect to WiFi and kept attempting to dial up Orange GPRS instead. It transpires that I can only use my hotel WiFi username and password in my room. Argh!
The Mall of America is a scary, scary place. I'm not sure I can sum up succinctly why. The fact it contains a wedding chapel where you can get legally married (providing you are an opposite-sex couple and neither of you is already married) may have something to do with it. Also the food courts were absolutely terrifying. The only things I saw that did not contain more fat in just one meal than I usually eat in an entire day were the fruit juices and water. The level of artificial colourants was also fearsome. In the UK we have recognised that these things are bad for you and taken steps to limit their use: not so here where cookies contain alarming levels of bright red, blue and green.
I hit the Hot Topic, both Gamestops, and a shop selling Minnesota souvenirs. Then I headed back to the hotel for the alt.polycon introductions panel.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 04:21 pm (UTC)I asked the friends I was staying with (from Chicago and the Bay Area) about your assertion, and they disagreed. They did point out that Rhode Island is small and doesn't have much farmland, so has to import a lot of its food from other states. I didn't have time to check the grocery prices in Minneapolis, but I got into NY last night and went into two supermarkets here. Both locally owned, not big chains. Bananas were 39c for 1 lb, grapes were 89c for 1 lb, sugar snap peas were 79c for 1 lb... As for Chinese greens (cabbages, pak choi, choi sum etc), they were around 99c for 2 lbs. The most expensive fruits were avocados, at $1.49 each, and cantaloupe melons at $3. All of these fruits and veggies were of a quality that I would buy and eat. There were some others even cheaper, but they were visibly a bit limp or tired.
As for the business about the food being "comprised almost entirely of GMOs" and GMOs "producing pesticides inside the food itself", man, you believe some crap. Most genetically-modified organisms contain one or two transgenes from other species. A few contain maybe up to 10. Yes, there has been cross-pollination of normal crops with genetically-modified pollen, but even then we're talking about one or two transgenes. Genes are made of DNA, and as a scientist, I do not fear DNA. There is no way for genes from food to become detached from the food cells' nucleus and somehow migrate into our human genome - if there was a way to do this, then genetic therapy for diseases such as cystic fibrosis would be much easier, and they wouldn't need to use retroviruses and modified cancer cells to do it.