My cursor came across two revealing graphical representations of how we eat. The first one is from the food service warehouse (a restaurant-equipment supplier) and compares the top 20 and bottom 20 in two categories: calories consumed and income spent on food. 

Of course, Americans consume more calories per day, on average, than anyone on the planet. But comically/perversely, we spend the least per person, on average!

Restricting sugary foods could lead to overeating, according to a new rat study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Many people try to lose weight by going on a diet. But this new research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, suggests that restricting certain foods for a set time period in the manner of dieting could cause withdrawal symptoms similar to those associated with drug abuse and increase cravings for those foods. This could lead periodic dieters to gorge on forbidden foods when they have the opportunity, the researchers suggest.

Oy frickin' vey.

The implication of this seems to be, don't ever stop eating this stuff, because it'll go bad for you when you come back, and you will.

Practically every human on the planet throws stuff away every day without giving much thought to where "away" is and how the stuff gets there. This morning in Seattle, a team of MIT researchers outlined their scheme to do just that. 

The so-called Trash Track project has electronically tagged more than 500 items of refuse, culled from several source categories, and is tracking their movements in hopes of learning more about what Professor Carlo Ratti [at microphones, in photo], team leader and director of the SENSEable Cities Lab, calls "the removal chain," which he contrasted to the much better known business supply chain.

Under the influence of Michael Pollan and others, I've written previously about how we've lost the connection between the food we eat and the world that produces it.

I don't know which should strike you as more absurd, that such a disconnect could occur, or that I could be the one mentioning it, again — I'm suburban all the way, a middling house-plant grower at best, and until recently, didn't even understand what other people meant by having a connection to the land.

Photo by Seth Itzkan

And yet, here I am again, brought along this time by Jim Laurie, whom I heard speak Tuesday night at Redbones BBQ in Somerville, which I take pain to mention because they've been strong community supporters as long as they've been around. On Tuesday, they hosted the Mass. Climate Action Network, serving grass-fed beef donated by Chestnut Farms of Hardwick.

During the presidential campaign, I noted a graphic series of handouts available at Starbucks that explored the most contentious issues.

It was produced by Good magazine, and so was this.

This was already on Andrew Sullivan's blog, and e-mailed to someone who then e-mailed it to me (thanks, Adine!), but it's just too amazing not to join in the parade.

I'm not above using Wikipedia as a source, but I've never written, or rewritten, an entry, and always try to remember that though it is an awesome compilation of information, it can be manipulated, at least in the short term, and should never be trusted as a sole resource.

It is from that perspective that I pass along word, via ecogeek, of green.wikia.com, introduced yesterday by Jimmy Wales, the guy behind Wikipedia and many other little wikis.

So would you spend $55 million without expectation of return? You know, if you made billions in profit and could afford it?

When the new site goes live, it will have a blog made up of all the green content from here. Where here, green has been one category among many, it will be divided it into green subcategories. One of them is going to be infoporn, a term that I think arose at Fast Company, or Wired; it is a perfect description of one of my itches. And, it's about the most I can say about the rest of this post...

This all comes from an LA Times story yesterday:

In Colorado, it's illegal to harvest rainwater, because someone downstream owns the rights to that which falls from the sky.

In California, almost 20 percent of electricity goes to the treatment and delivery of water.

Nationally, public water systems use 50 Billion killowatt-hours of electricity to operate.