There are perfectly good nutritional reasons for New Brunswick’s decision to ban chocolate milk in schools (as well as all other flavoured milks and juices.) With overweight and obesity rates at 30 per cent in Canadian children between ages 5 and 17, it makes sense for schools and local governments to encourage the consumption of less sugary drinks and foods.

Still, for some, this news will be met with pangs of nostalgia. The memories of having chocolate milk in a school cafeteria – the ritual of putting the straw in the little cardboard box (always tricky to open) and enjoying a special treat with friends – this collective experience of Canadian school children may soon be a thing of the past. Chocolate milk is not just an incidental part of this nostalgia; in fact, I’d argue that chocolate milk has a central cognitive role in these kinds of emotionally rich memories.Read more…

Article by Kate Bratskeir

I hadn’t planned to make my first visit to Paris a comprehensive croissant research trip, it just happened. The catalyst was a croissant from Boulangerie Chevalier, a bakery in St. Germain that I stopped into immediately after checking in at my hotel in the sixth arrondissement — really just because the windows looked charming. Fresh off the plane, I was cloaked in eau de middle seat, yet the first bite was a transformative experience that cut through my same-clothes-different-day fog.

The pastry was simple, clean, crisp and soft, almost motherly in the way it nurtured my mouth. These buttery flakes that dissolved on my tongue gave me a sense of home. But I’d never once eaten a croissant in Paris before.

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Article by Anne Ewbank

IT STARTED AS A JOKE. Tide Pods, the internet agreed, look delicious. After all, the packets of laundry soap come in bright rainbow shades. Their film is shiny, and the pods are round, almost dumpling-like. Despite their unnatural coloring and eerie perfection, they look good enough to eat. In 2015, the Onion wrote a tongue-in-cheek article on their appeal for children, and a video in early 2017 by College Humor emphasized their allure even for adults. But no one was actually supposed to eat them.Read more…

Is your house tidier than it used to be? If it is, then you have probably read Marie Kondo’s international bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011). Kondo’s book is ostensibly a manual for home improvement. She suggests that our home environment should not be a repository for limitless amounts of stuff, but that we should surround ourselves only with what we really need, along with those items that bring us ‘joy’. She provides a guide for culling what we already have, organising what we keep, and limiting the acquisitive tendencies that threaten to fill (or re-fill) our living spaces with more and more things. But as many readers discover, Kondo’s book goes beyond being just a guide for cleaning house: it can also be seen as a blueprint for rebuilding a life. Homes are so intimately connected to how people see themselves that to reorganise a home is to change how one lives.Read more…

The home ownership meme can be very powerful

Most of us are familiar with the concept of the “internet meme.” Someone does something, say “planking” on a fast-food counter, and uploads a video of him- or herself doing this to a public or social media site. Other people see the video, emulate the activity, and post themselves doing this to even more sites. Before you know it, the activity has spread like an epidemic throughout the world. Another internet meme has been born.Read more…

What we eat as children shapes how we think about food as adults

In my book The Omnivorous Mind (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012) and in other writings, I have argued that we humans each have a “theory of food” that guides how, how much, and what we eat. This theory of food is analogous to “theory of mind,” the suite of implicit cognitive skills that people use to negotiate the complex, interactive human social universe. Like language, we have a propensity to acquire a theory of mind, and both develop and become more complex over the course of childhood and adolescence. We have critical periods during childhood for the acquisition of language and theory of mind.Read more…