Rather than sharing two links on Twitter with very little commenting or curating, I thought I’d post them in a blog post. That gives me more space to comment on why I found them worthwhile. I hope your brain enjoys these munchies.
Did you know that fast-food products can contain a little extra for you? Read how Fast food increases exposure to a ‘forever chemical’ called PFAS. It’s not in the food. It’s in the packaging. But it gets into the food. Yuck. Who likes food wrapped in soggy papir or soggy cardboard, but do we really need to add a forever chemical to the packaging materials to avoid the soggy mess. Denmark is the first country to ban the use of PFAS in packaging.
Maps are one way indigenous people are becoming more visible. I liked reading How mapmakers help indigenous people defend their lands. A quote at the beginning of the article says it all (in my opinion): “As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism”. This quote is attributed to the geographer J.B. Harley. The link for this quote in the article is broken, so I did a Google search to learn more about it. That search lead me to another interesting bit of information about the imperialism of maps. I found something rather interesting that relates to the first mapping article. Cornell University Library has an “Imperial Federation Map of the World“. The collector’s notes mention this quote, stating that Harley was “the intellectual leader of cartographic ‘deconstruction'”, and that Harley “used this map to illustrate the point!”. It also turns out that the map illustrator, Walter Crane, has a lot of hidden messages in his illustrations of this world map. Something that suited his socialist heart, but could well have shaken the heart of any imperialist who found the hidden messages! I will keep this article in mind when I finally get around to reading my copy of “On The Map” by Simon Garfield.