World Flavor

So McDonald’s is closing all its locations in Iceland (all three of them). Iceland, as you may know, is very small. It’s very small and also very far from everything else. Therefore it was costing them too much to import ingredients to the Iceland stores. And now Iceland is McDonald’s free! Just another reason to go there: escape the ubiquitous fast-food mega-chain. The owners are replacing the locations with restaurants with similar but local products. Good for them, I say!

I wanted to throw this book in a lake (unfortunately, it’s a library book). At times it was funny, sure, and it was kind of interesting. But I couldn’t get over its shortcomings and so I didn’t finish it (maybe you think that makes me unqualified to form an opinion of it, but I don’t). First off, a real gripe I have with this these pop science (I use science loosely here, because I couldn’t think of another way to describe the genre) books is that they never seem to have a bibliography, or always cite their sources. I mean, the author is no researcher, but still he quotes a whole lot of other works, which it would be nice if he had collected them at the back (and not, dare I say, too hard). In addition, he showed moments of extreme cultural insensitivity. Clearly, the question “are you happy” is not always an appropriate one to ask. Take when he was in Qatar. He even knew it was an inappropriate question, but asked it anyway.

Weiner is also ridiculously ethnocentric. When he talks about culture, he is referring to the American definition of ‘high culture’, not the definition that you should be using when doing cross-cultural research. The claim that Qatar has no culture is absurd! There is no place without a culture. Sure, it might not have its own arts, literature, music, etc., but those things are not equivalent to culture. He criticizes, ridicules even, parts of some of the cultures he visits. For instance, he sees the Bhutanese use of phalluses as an apotropaic symbol (they ward off evil spirits) and makes fun of it. This would be uncalled for and really offensive even if it was a uniquely Bhutanese custom. But no, he doesn’t seem to realize that the use of the phallus to ward off evil is fairly common, and dates back at least as far as the ancient Romans.

Finally, Weiner expects to know all there is to know about a culture’s view of happiness by going for a week or two and talking to a few people. This is completely outrageous and presumptious. You can’t come to such broad conclusions after a week as a tourist. Basically, thanks to my being an anthropology major, I could not take anymore of this. So, I urge you to be suspicious while reading this book. If you can enjoy it, by all means, do. But don’t believe that it’s necessarily very true.

So, I missed Blog Action Day slightly (because I was writing a Flat Hat article instead, which I’ll put up tomorrow). Oops. The topic was climate change. I agree that climate change is a pertinent, important issue. Through polluting our environment we are making a negative impact on our earth, and it is really up to us to stop that. Seas are rising; soon there will be less beautiful places to travel to (and by that I’m implying everywhere is beautiful, not that being close to sea level makes a place beautiful). The place I’m from is not very high off sea level, and I worry that might be affected. I try to reduce my negative impact on the environment by recycling and making eco-friendly choices when possible. But even if I could eliminate my impact entirely, one person’s efforts are not nearly enough. Individuals, though certainly they can help, cannot effect the kind of change necessary to repair the nature we’ve harmed. We need to get governments to pass laws which will stop manufacturers from polluting, and will cause automobile designers to make greener cars, among so many other things. Perhaps this is nothing new, and isn’t saying much. But it is just a plea to care about climate change, and start taking steps in your own life to be a better friend to the environment. Also, check out other blogs that participated here.

Basically copying my Yelp review for the Ren Fest: