Calories as Currency

When the world went on a single currency, they'd tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration books, so they'd made the new currency K's, kilocalories, because that's the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding "ration factor," so complicated that nobody could understand ...

 The Paleo Meat-Eater Myth

So, myth one is that humans are evolved to eat meat and that Palaeolithic peoples consumed large quantities of meat. Humans have no known anatomical, physiological, or genetic adaptations to meat consumption. Quite the opposite, we have many adaptations to plant consumption. Take, for example, vitamin C. Carnivores can make their own vitamin C, because vitamin C is found in plants. If you don’t eat plants, you need to make it yourself. We can’t make it, we have to consume it from plants....

 The Nominal Fallacy

The nominal fallacy is the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. An instance of the nominal fallacy is most easily seen when the meaning or importance of a term or concept shrinks with knowledge. One example of this would be the word “instinct.” “Instinct” refers to a set of behaviors whose actual cause we don’t know, or simply don’t understand or have access to, and therefore we call them instinctual, inborn, innate. Often this is the end of the expl...

 Ted Turner's Bison

Corporate America is also evolving as it adjusjsts busineiess practices to embrace conservation. Many American banks, for example, have committed to the World Wildlife Fund's Equator Principles, limiting investment only to companies and projects committed to environmental protection. WalVlart now only sells fish it has bought from sources t that practice sustainable harvesting methods, as certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. Increasingly, business leaders regard our forests and wetlan...