33/67 Halfway and spinning

That was some of the most fun in 33 days- Tarquin's spin class with trainer Nic on bike 46 next to me, casting sideways glances to check I wasn't forgetting to turn up the resistance...
Old hands at spinning know how lekker it is to not think, pump your legs in time to music, and just pretend you are climbing a hill up to somewhere...to find there is a little more hill and then a little more. And then knowing the music will drop...waiting for it to drop. And then coming down, when you know there are only two more minutes. I think I will definitely be back again.

I've been reading two really interesting food blogs. Or rather, blogs that explore the politics of food. One is local, Tangerine and Cinnamon, written by an historian, which has some links which take you to various global and local food, food security and environmental links. In the context of the threat to expand the Cape Town urban edge and sell off some of the Phillipi farmland for middle class housing development, there are arguments that the soil is so polluted that farming is failing on parts of the farmland anyway. So there are those who justify the expansion of the urban edge as " you can't farm there anymore anyway". Isn't the  issue also precisely that the soil has become so polluted due to the polluting of the aquifer? Why aren't we also talking about that degradation? This blog has a sub-blog, the very funny Foodie Pseudery- that is a collection of pretentious food writing. Critics, recipe writers, cookbooks, packaging all gets taken to task. Some of Woolworths' copy on its packaging deserves a special mention.

Then there is the wonderful  A Girl called Jack . Apart from the background of her story of real struggle, bringing up a child as a single parent and no job in the English recession, I particularly like the recipes section- feeding a family (in Jack's case, her young son) on almost nothing, with a very tight budget. Costed down to the last British p. A friend on Facebook recently lamented that what she really wants from the web is somewhere you can enter the food you have in your fridge, and up pop recipes that you can make with very little, before it goes off. As one who frequently consults the web for recipes, and struggles with the idea of throwing food away, and with the temptation of convenience while knowing it is not ethical eating, I could learn to love this idea.