Articles & Essays – Page 89

Why are foodies turning their backs on Fairtrade?

February 25, 2015 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays, Food

Workshop is one of a number of high-end food companies that says it is committed to fair trade, but doesn’t have the certificate to prove it. With the Fairtrade logo now appearing even on mainstream brands such as Starbucks coffees and four-finger Kit Kats, this absence is becoming more and more conspicuous, especially during Fairtrade fortnight, which starts this week. But for a variety of reasons, many speciality providers, which invariably boast about their impeccable sourcing policies, are choosing not to sign up to the Fairtrade labelling scheme.

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The Age of Entitlement

February 25, 2015 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Every child has a right to a decent education. But does that mean every child has the right to educational success? That might sound absurd, but many teachers are concerned that this is, in effect, precisely what the current cohort of schoolchildren thinks.

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Custard tart fight

February 18, 2015 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays, Food

I’m in Lisbon listening to some live fado, the Portuguese folk music that expresses the sorrows and yearnings of ordinary people. Among these songs of love and loss is a hymn to the joys of Pastéis de Belém, the original version of the most traditional cake in Portugal, the pastel de nata, or custard tart. “Served with cinnamon or just as it is,” sings the lyricist Leonel Moura, “This beautiful delicacy has no equal in the world.”

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Why won’t I read your work?

February 18, 2015 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays, etc.

I have no reason to think that independent scholars are any less talented than ones in universities. You may indeed have valuable contributions to make. I hope, however, you can understand why, even if you do, I am justified in passing by on the opportunity of reading them.

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The Utopia Experiment

February 6, 2015 Julian Baggini Articles & Essays

Imagine living in a community where people stay for anything from between a few weeks to a few months, where each member has a skill that she will teach to others and contributes work, not money. Its founder, the science writer Dylan Evans, describes it in The Utopia Experiment as “a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach”. It ended up more like Lord of the Flies meets I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. Within a year of his arrival in 2006, Evans found himself in a psychiatric hospital, his savings spent and his long-crossed bridges from academia smouldering in the distance. Evans’s account is a gripping, slow-motion car-crash. You can’t take your eyes off it, try as you might to hide them behind your hands.

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