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Hiddenmi lernas esperanton sed mi ankoraux ne parolas gxin bone. parolu al mi en esperanto!
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QOTD 10/10/2026
In 1854, cholera was killing hundreds of people in the Soho neighborhood of London. More than 500 people died in ten days. A physician named John Snow mapped the cases and traced them to a single contaminated water pump on Broad Street - the founding act of modern epidemiology.
What is less often remembered is that the pump served a working-class neighborhood. The wealthy had private wells. The workers at the brewery on Broad Street were spared - not because of any intervention, but because they drank beer instead of water.
Cholera, as physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer later wrote, was a disease that followed “the contours of social inequality.” Tuberculosis followed the same contours. In the late nineteenth century, the wealthy who contracted TB retreated to sanitaria in the mountains - Davos, Saranac Lake - where they rested in clean air and were attended by private physicians.
The poor died in tenements.
The disease was romanticized among the literary classes - Keats, the Brontës, “consumption” as a mark of artistic sensitivity - while it killed industrial workers by the thousands. TB was, and remains, what the medical literature calls “the disease of poverty.”
The pattern is old enough to be a law: Infectious disease follows power. The wealthy buy their way out - through sanitation, through space, through access to treatment.
The poor bear the burden.
Sanjay Basu, “The Double Standard of Evidence” (October 2026)
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nautilusbut that's not surprising because his entire schtick is about blaming individuals for not making extremely impractical food choices based on romantic settler colonial fantasies instead of advocating for a sustainable change in systems
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QOTD 10/9/2026
Last fall I taught a segment on a recent TikTok scandal where a white nutritionist went on a rant about how salsa is not a serving of vegetables. She equated salsa with ketchup and berated people for counting salsa as part of their daily servings of fruits and vegetables.
I also showed several nutritionists, many identifying as Latina, who pushed back because the salsas eaten in many Latino homes were made from fresh tomatoes, chiles, onions, herbs, and spices. If salsa was not a serving of vegetables, they asked, then what was it?
My students picked up on the racialized differences in the ways that nutritionists understood what salsa was. One student pointed out that the white nutritionist may have considered salsa from a jar, which might have preservatives and other stuff in it. However, she may not realize that some families make salsa and other sauces from scratch.
This example identifies how what is considered nutrition science can provide contradictory advice based on a lack of general understanding of cultural practices of food preparation and consumption; this shifting or competing advice can create public mistrust.
Hanna Garth, “What the New Food Pyramid Tells Us About Science and Culture” (October 2026)
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