What I learned this week

A percentage of the world's chocolate is from beans picked by child slaves. From what I've read chocolate beans are purchased in bulk in such a way that you can't be sure that your batch of chocolate is completely slave free. Sadly my response is going to be giving up my good friend chocolate.

I'm also trying to switch over to a vegan diet - this is day four. Meat is easy for me to give up but dairy is much harder. I have quite a fondness for dairy products but not so much just plain milk.

Annoyingly I've now forgotten everything else I was going to say.

I'm going to read Girl at Sea by Maureen Johnson next.

I'm in the middle of two books about food, diet and health by Dr. Neil Barnard that are pretty fascinating in an oh my god, that's awful sort of way. The things these associations get up are appalling. I read an article in WaPo yesterday about the formula dudes and how they pressured the government over a series of encouraging breast feeding ads. And increased their ad spending by 20 million dollars while the go breast feeding campaign was running. I could just puke.

Just finished I Only Have Fangs for You which was sort of blah and predictable but at least readable.

Read Anthem in the middle of that. Cam is going to study it for school this semester. What's funny is how his English teacher encourages parents to read the same books their children are reading and discuss them with the kids but then then when they turn into freshmen at college we're supposed to back off and not talk to them for the first six weeks - advice I heard at the UMBC orientation. Really, how are you supposed to go from being an "involved" parent to an "I don't want to hear about it" parent over the space of one summer? No wonder we're all so confused.