Melissa's blog

The recent meetup outage made me reflect on all my experience with real life communities that formed or are primarily organized online. I've been participating and organizing such communities since I started college. I've met some great people and some of my friends this way, but I've also had some negative experiences with people who have very poor social skills for whatever reason.

“You should spend less time on food and more time on your career”

A boss actually said this to me once. I was the bad employee who took a full hour for lunch. And didn’t just slurp a bowl of microwaved glop while reading tech listservs like some of my co-workers. I also left at the end of the working day to join friends at dinner or to go home and cook a meal rather than reading documentation until the sun went down. 

I occasionally get comments here with the insinuation that I stopped posting on paleodrama because I "lost" or realized "boys will be boys." I didn't stop posting, though I rarely post there now. For the uninitiated, paleodrama was created to highlight incidents of sexism and other bigotry in the "paleo" community, as well as the most obvious examples of pseudoscience.

It's great to see so many interesting papers exploring the role of wheat in various common digestive issues. The last interesting paper I wrote about explored the role of FODMAPs in wheat in causing digestive problems sometimes called "gluten sensitivity." A new paper, Effect of Triticum turgidum subsp.

I did a stint as a guest writer at Chicagoist and wrote a couple of pieces. Most might be kind of boring if you don't live in Chicago, but there are a couple that are of more general interest. 

It's here. After over a year of procrastinating I finally hit the trigger. Along the way I finally figured out one of the main reasons I procrastinate: perfectionism. I figure if I can't do something perfectly, it's not even worth doing. If I had kept to that path, I wouldn't be writing this. I forced myself to stop while I was working and think about whether or not it was really worth it to do what I was doing. To ask whether it's really truly completely necessary. Much of the time it wasn't. I let good enough be good enough. And I can always add things to the site later.

I had to improvise a Thanksgiving meal today because plans with family members fell through. Unfortunately none of the convenient grocery stores were open, so I had to use things I already had. Luckily I've been cooking a lot lately and I had a decent amount of stuff to work with. Except I had almost no vegetables and no thawed or easily thawable meat except bacon. But our meal, while slightly odd, ended up being pretty tasty.

What’s the deal with gluten sensitivity? Gluten sensitivity as a proposed disease showed up in the scientific literature in the past few years. The key here is proposed, because there was evidence it might exist, but it remained in a scientific grey area because there was not a known mechanism behind it.

But enough people had already decided or wanted to decide gluten was bad that they took the proposed disease and ran with it, producing and selling a large volume of scientifically dubious diet books featuring “gluten sensitivity”.

Note: if you do not plan to read the whole post, please skip to the last section

Kale is one of those vegetables that everyone thinks is so healthy. From kale chips to kale salad, kale has become an extremely trendy vegetable. But people have embraced kale without thinking enough about the chemicals it contains and its effects on the Earth. What you don't know could kale you.