Abacaxi Mamão

As you may have noticed, I made some changes to my blog recently. The main change is that I'm now using the newer form of Blogger, and can thus have labels (or "tags," if you want to call them that instead). Both deciding which labels to use (rejected a general "Jewish" tag, decided to have separate "parsha" tag, decided to conflate "science/environment/health" into one tag instead of keeping them separate) and going back and tagging old posts were wonderfully self-reflective exercises. Seeing how various topics intersect was also interesting. How often do I write about gender + Torah vs. gender + history or gender + science/environment/health?

I'm sure I missed some tags that belong on old posts, but my list of tags, from most-used to least-used, currently looks like this:

Labels

• life (45)
• gender (41)
• New York (35)
• Torah (broadly defined) (34)
• travel (18)
• links (17)
• childhood (13)
• science/health/environment (13)
• Israel (12)
• books/reading (12)
• words (12)
• meta (11)
• Brazil (9)
• In Memoriam (9)
• mental health (8)
• history (5)
• parsha (5)
• chocolate (2)

Most of them are self-explanatory, I think, but I thought I would take the opportunity to explain a few that might not be.

1. life = mostly self-reflective musings about my life or the nature of life
2. links = posts that mostly consist of links to other blogs, newspaper articles, or websites
3. childhood = about my childhood or about childhood in general (what can I say? it's something in which I am interested)
4. books/reading vs. words. This merits an explanation. Books/reading is about things that I'm reading or have read or about buying books compulsively. Words is about cool words that I've discovered or about linguistics or the nature of a particular word or set of words. This distinction makes complete and utter sense to me, although I can see how it might not to others. There are two distinct things that I love: reading (books) and words.
5. meta = posts about this blog or about blogging in general
6. mental health. I thought that I blogged a lot more about mental health issues than I do. Likewise, I thought I blogged a lot less about New York than I do.
7. chocolate. I can't believe I've only blogged about chocolate twice! That's ridiculous! In my defense, though, there's probably generally less controversy about chocolate than about some of the other things I blog about, and maybe less nuance as well. Of course, you can get into fierce debates about milk vs. dark chocolate (dark, of course), and about what percentage of cacao is acceptable (65-82% is my happiest range). Except for the child/slave labor stuff, though, it's not too controversial.

To remedy this dire chocolate situation, here is some recent news about chocolate:

• It's the single-biggest specialty-food export from New York City, and food manufacturing is "'by far the most stable major manufacturing sector'" in the city, so that's really saying something.
• It can be very, very expensive ($2,000/pound) but people buy it anyway.
• The continuing problem of child labor in the production of chocolate: "Children as young as 9 are taken from their homes to work in the cacao fields, with frequent whippings, no schooling and no family contact."
• There is one fair-trade chocolate company that has been in the news lately. (I feel no need to mention them by name and thus provide free advertising.) I will, however, mention Equal Exchange fair trade chocolate bars, which are both delicious and hechshered. Yum!
  

I realize that this will only get me up to three posts with chocolate tags, but one has to start somewhere, doesn't one?

If there are labels/tags that you would like to see that I don't currently use, feel free to let me know.

Labels: chocolate, meta