Green Curry Paste

While I was out of town, staying with my roommate in spirit, she showed me how to make a delicious curry recipe. It's one where you make a curry paste, that lasts a couple weeks in the fridge, for multiple meals. We were using the tasty looking recipe from Rebar: Modern Food Cookbook "Victoria, B.C.’s favorite restaurant and juice bar, featuring fresh, healthy, predominantly vegetarian fare." so says the publisher.

In trying to make the recipe again, I tried to put together the ingredients from memory but also consulted with a few online recipes, such as CanadianLiving.com.

Ingredients:

3 fresh cilantro plants (roots, stems and leaves; wash well)
3 green onions
1 or 2 jalapeño peppers
3 lemongrass stalks (sliced)
3 cloves of garlic
a few centimeters of ginger (peeled and cut in 3)
zest of one lime and juice of 2 limes
1 generous sprinkle of each: cumin, coriander and turmeric

Normally, you throw all of the ingredients into the blender and add a little water, as needed, until it turns into a green pulp. Unfortunately, I do not own a blender, but I do own a "wand" or handheld immersion blender. You learn pretty fast that this thing can paint the walls within seconds, so I found a rather useful narrow plastic container that fits it just perfectly. This has revolutionized our fruit smoothie consumption..

Anyways, I used that, with a little bit of arm power and voila! Homemade Green Curry Paste. Will have to let you know how it is once I have the curry, but it smells delicious!

As for making the curry, you throw in 3 big spoonfuls of the paste in with some broth to cook the veggies. Once cooked, add some coconut milk and let it simmer a little to let everything become nicely integrated. You can also throw in some pepper flakes for spiciness and a spoonful of sugar and/or fish sauce and/or peanut oil to give it that tasty Thai curry flavour.

As for the contents of the curry, I have a feeling it's one of those things were you can throw in all the leftover ingredients from the fridge and it will still be tasty. I'm planning to make it with: potato, zucchini, eggplant, extra firm tofu (toasted with soy sauce), and possibly some chickpeas if it seems it is lacking. Served with rice, sprinkle with fresh cilantro leaves.

Rebar Cookbook photo from publisher Culinate - Big Ideas Publishing

Water

It's HOT out there and we should all be topping up the sun screen, keeping covered and staying in the shade. We should also be drinking a lot of water. Now let's face it, tap water is not exactly tasty unless you've just come off your bike from a half hour ride. But we all know that we need water.

You lose about a litre and half in fluid just in pee alone. That's not including other losses, including transpiration  which is significantly higher in the heat. I think it's difficult to set a daily requirement for water, because it changes so much from day to day, considering body type, location, metabolism and size... but a good indication is certainly the colour of your pee, dark pee means your body is straining to concentrate your urine and keep the fluid circulating. This means, of course, that you're not getting enough fluid.

Let's get a little bit more specific about what kind of fluids. If you haven't noticed already, about a half hour to an hour after drinking coffee, tea or alcoholic beverages, it's as though they pass right through you. They do in fact, and they stimulate your body to get rid of more water (diuretic = diuresis = more urine production = less retained water in the body), so these are not very effective ways of upping your hydration count.

Recently, I was passed on a nice little summary of reasons you should not drink from bottled water from the foodie.fm blog, you can read it here. I think most of us have heard this story before, but I did like the link they made to the blog NancyCreative about making your own flavoured tap water. Here is a list of them:

Citrus Cucumber Water
Cucumber-Herbal Water
Cucumber Melon Water
Honeydew-Lime Water
Herb and Berry Flavoured Water
Lemon Lavender Water
Lemon Mint or Basil Water
Lemon, Lime and Orange Water
Frozen Fruit Water
Orange Mint Water
Watermelon Basil Water
Fruit Water

Mmmm! I bet you are thirsty now! Find them all here

Photo of flavoured water from NancyCreative blog

Ethics of Globalization

Since I posted about Ethically-Made Clothing, I have had many thoughts and unanswered questions on the topic which left me overwhelmed in trying to grasp the issue as only one person.

Only buying and convincing others to only buy from fair trade certified producers seemed hardly a viable option, especially considering tight budgets and whatnot. It seems only accessible to a very select group of wealthy individuals and unlikely to lead to significant change in practice. So what next?

Similarly, much as I feel vegetarianism is an inspiring stance, I find it difficult to see the connection to significant changes in farming practices, beyond important personal moral and health gains.

In their book entitled “Human Rights and the Ethics of Globalization” (2010), Daniel E. Lee and Elisabeth E. Lee lay down the ethics in a fairly straightforward way that I appreciated.

They talk about different ethical philosophies and attempt to establish how the concepts and principles gained from them could be applicable to Global Market ethics.

They are also more realistic about market as a place which necessitates profitable outcomes but inject a human element that may get lost in balancing budgets.
Chapter 1: Human Rights

Talking of rights is a challenging way of approaching ethics at all. It is often said that where one’s right begins, another person’s right ends, and defining the gray area in between is virtually impossible and significantly affected by situation.

As the book is written from an American perspective, Lee & Lee reflect on Thomas Jefferson’s U.S. Declaration of Human Rights where in the final version it was stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Lee & Lee consider the word “self-evident,” defined as evident of itself without proof. This has been critiqued many times, for sometimes one can feel so certain of something and yet realize that it was a false belief after the fact. Was it really so self-evident to begin with? Did the men who wrote this wondrous document in fact own slaves?

The point is not to say that Rights are not important, Rights and Human Rights are very important, but sometimes violations may not be so clear until after the fact, and, as Lee & Lee highlight, even for the cruelest offenses, the right to fair trial, such as was seen after the Nazi surrender, remains a crucial element of Global Ethics. The conclusion is that first and foremost is respect for human dignity.

Chapter Conclusions

1 – Right to live (important, this is not to be confused with life) is the most basic human right

2 – Right to live is best understood as a natural right (that each individual has independent of anything that government or any other social institution/individual might or might not do, can be violated but not taken away)

3 – Natural rights are best viewed as negative rights (rights not to do something or to not have something done to you, there are simply a lot more things you can do that what you cannot)

4 – In some cases, conferred rights (some argue that all rights are conferred, that is, that they are contractual agreements or by social institutions of some sort) many of which are positive rights (right to do something) are just as important as natural rights.

5 – Rights claims do not exhaust all there is to say about ethics, it makes more sense simply to talk about moral obligations, rather than attempt to subsume everything under the rubric of rights

More to come on this later.

Fleet Foxes

Helplessness Blues
Released May 3rd, 2011

Lately, I have been enjoying listening to the newest album of the Seattle-based folk band, Fleet Foxes. It lives up to the high expectations of the beautiful first, self-titled, album.

They also have a lovely website, see it here: http://www.fleetfoxes.com/

If you refresh the page, the short loop of landscape footage changes but unfortunately the resolution is not great, at least on my computer.

Album art from Wiki

Going West: West End Cafés

I can't resist a good coffee and when I'm feeling uninspired I pick up all my things and head to work in a cafe.

Green Beanery
565 Bloor St. W

Looking out on the glorious spectacle that is Honest Ed's, this cafe is surprisingly easy to walk by without noticing it is even a cafe. Also, just past their summer take-out corner, the entrance leads into their coffee wares and beans, so it takes a moment to realize that you're inside a café at all.

The quality of your coffee is somewhat dependent on who is on staff that day, but generally is pretty good. They also have a large selection of delectable treats, my favourite is the banana bread.

This is a nice area to work because it is spacious and there's a feeling you could sit there all day, as it fills up with sun and soft jazz.

Holy Oak
1241 Bloor St. W.

This is a cute little café turned community centre, music venue and bar in the evenings. As a café, it's a great place to sit in a chair of their eclectic selection and enjoy an excellent coffee with organic milk from a glass bottle. They also have a lovely selection of looseleaf tea that they serve in little teapots.

For work, the music is highly dependent on the staff and sometime cranked a little too high, but the internet connection is good. It must be a good place to host meetings for spawning businesses because I often overhear groups there for that very reason.

Sometimes, it can fill up and there is certainly a higher risk of being seated beside a gossiping pair or near a speaker with music too loud, so it's probably not always the best selection for a work destination.

Cool Hand of a Girl

2804 Dundas St. W.

I am a little reluctant to consider this really a café because it is more of a restaurant. They have delicious food, but also good coffee and tasty treats.

This is a little hidden away in a less trodden area of the up-and-coming Dundas West, but is worth a check-out.

Crema Coffee Co.
3079 Dundas St. W.

This place has delicious coffee and treats but can be very busy at times. On hot days it might be nice to sit out on the patio.

It's probably not a great location to work in, especially on busy weekends, but is a nice place to meet for a good chat.

The Good Neighbour

238 Annette St.

This place has very good coffee and a little selection of treats. One thing they offer like none other is the veggie and fruit flavoured water, refreshing!

The layout is also interesting, because there are all kinds of seating arrangement: on a bench in the window, at a large communal table and at regular onesies, twosies and foursies.



photo of green beanery from blogto.com

Will you be there when I'm old?

Karima Velji lectured on "Ethical Considerations Relating to Aging" this afternoon, for the 4th annual Sue MacRae Lecture presented by the U of T: Joint Centre for Bioethics. With considerable detail she described the statistics around the demographic and economic reality of aging. She covered very concisely the issues in long term care in a short hour, and, among the things she spoke of, I enjoyed this talk and found her mentions of mental health and keeping the aged in the community most note-worthy.

Mental Health Care

She talked about how the majority of residents are placed in long term care facilities as a result of cognitive impairment but that the reality was that few facilities had adequate onsite mental health care.

She mentioned the lack of staff or specifically trained staff that is appalling and would be considered intolerable if the same conditions were seen in paediatrics.

Moreover, she highlighted that 1 in 6 residents were being placed on an antipsychotic drug that they were not taking prior to residency in a long term care facility, with inadequate diagnosis and lack of continued follow-up to treatment. Provincially, 32% were prescribed antipsychotics with no diagnosed conditions, largely for sleeping and behaviour control. Essentially, these were restraining measures.

She put forth the question: Are we “protecting” people from their own autonomy?

She suggests we reframe our socialized beliefs about aging and begin a new system of care that enables and enhances mobility (beyond “fall prevention” that tends to lead to restrictive measures) and also build better delirium management programs.

To clarify, delirium and dementia are NOT the same thing. Delirium is a acute (sudden, abrupt) state of confusion, it can be brought on by a whole gamut of things, such as fever, pain, drug toxicity, to name only a few. It is perfectly reversible in almost all cases and requires a careful assessment of cause and rectifying the cause. While, on the other hand, dementia is a progressive and chronic loss of cognitive ability.

Staying in the Community

Perhaps I should start by saying that I do agree that it is best for the aged to stay in their homes and out in the communities for as long as they can, because institutions are hardly homes and are only meant to be a transient set-up for the final months.

That said, I was thrown off when I felt she highlighted in one slide the caregiver burden that is largely felt by women, but did not address this when talking later about tax incentives for the families of elderly (defined as over 65) who are cared for at home.

The problem is that women are the first to take up where public health care slacks, caring for their parents, their spouse’s parents, and so on. And, to add to that, there continue to be significant wage gaps between men and women, and a larger number of women living in poverty. I fear that unless gender inequities and home care incentives are considered interrelated in policy-making, the latter will only further the former. I thought I’d show you some statistics I uncovered in a project for a class in Women’s Health.

It is not unusual for women to take time away from paid work, either to care for their children or their older relatives (Hunter et al., 2002, Sugar, 2007). In a study using the 2002 General Social Survey, Williams (2004) examined the “sandwich” generation, aged 45 to 64, caring for elderly while they still have children at home. It was noted that 3 in 10 Canadians are “sandwiched,” that is 712 000 of the Canadian population, of which 83% who were also employed. Not surprisingly, “sandwiched” women spent twice as many hours caring for elderly than men.

“Reentry women” is the term used to describe women, generally between the ages of 25 to 54, who experience interrupted work patterns (Hunter et al., 2002). Caregiving often requires that women cut back on their work hours, giving up important opportunities for promotions and, with extended interruptions, skills may deteriorate, resulting in lost income (Budig & England, 2001; Fast & Pont, 1997; Hunter et al., 2002; Williams, 2004).

It is important to also remember that this is not just about wages, this is also about retirement and the problem really goes full circle.

- Budig, M. J., & England, P. (2001). The wage penalty for motherhood. American Sociological Review , 66(2), 204-225.
- Fast, J., & Pont, M. D. (1997). Changes in women's work continuity. Canadian Social Trends, 46(2), 2-7.
- Hunter, S., Sundel, M., & Sundel, S. S. (2002). Work, personal finances, and income security. Chapter 5 in Women at Midlife: Life Experiences and Implications for the Helping Professions (pp. 107-133). Washington: NASW PRESS.
- Sugar, J. A. (2007). Work and retirement: challenges and opportunities for women over 50.
Chapter 9 in V. Muhlbauer, & J. Chrisler (Eds.), Women over 50: Psychological Perspectives (pp. 164-181). New York: Springer.
- Williams, C. (2004). The sandwich generation. Perspectives on Labour and Income , 5(9), 5-12.

Sex. Ed.

I had the pleasure of shadowing the wonderful sexual health educator, Lyba Spring, to a 5th grade French class today for the introductory class of their series of four Sexual Education classes. It was lovely to see the children participate and giggle to a dramatic rendition of the pubescent years to come.

This experience had me thinking of my own few memories of SexEd in 5th grade, which was a free antiperspirant stick (great... so now our glands are so dependent we can hardly do without it) and a disposable sanitary napkin. At the time I had no idea, my mother had given me a book that I'd only perused through and any other information probably came through from my siblings.

Recently, I have been finishing Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography that I have mentioned here before, but I thought this an appropriate time to highlight another passage that I quite liked.

So the ovary isn't pretty. So it is gray and pitted and as lumpy as oatmeal. We would expect nothing less of an organ that works as hard as it does, tending to the disparate but joined needs of the known and possible. The ovary is a seedpod, the domicile of our fixed portion of eggs, and you are supposed to use some of those eggs, inasmuch as life strives to perpetuate itself. The ovary is gray because it alone among residents of the pelvic cavity is not covered with the pinkish peritoneum, the springy membrane that encloses and protects other organs. The ovary cannot be enclosed because it must give up its belongings so often. It gives up eggs, yes, but it gives more than that. It gives up a kind of pudding, a yellowish tapioca of hormones that feed the reproductive cycle and the bodies we own. The ovary operates as a physiological and allegorical bridge between stasis and sexuality, between anatomy and behavior. Through its periodic hormonal emissions, the ovary makes itself known to us.

Book cover from Natalie Angier's website, see it here: http://www.natalieangier.com/

Strawberry Mango Spring Rolls

The strawberries were on sale and I had to think fast about what to make for a potluck on a holiday. I remembered this tasty looking recipe for fruit spring rolls off the recipe blog How Sweet It Is, which has lovely, mouth-watering pictures and an interesting obsession with caramelized bacon... (you can check it out here: http://www.howsweeteats.com/).

I mistakenly didn't pick up any Kiwis for her recipe, but I made do with what I had.

In my family, spring rolls are the gold standard in potluck terms. So you can see how I was excited to change the recipe up a bit and make a sweet dish.


rolls

-1 carton of strawberries (mysteriously missing a handful since last night)
-2 mangoes (the yellow kind)
-handful of fresh mint
-package of rice paper

(be careful not to drop it, it might as well be eggs)


sauce

1/3 cup of honey
1 tsp of vanilla
1/2 lime (original recipe calls for lime zest, but my lime had grown quite old in the fruit bowl so I thought juicing it might yield better results)

So you simply have to cut up the fruit and mint, roll them in rice paper and stir together the sauce.

I say simply because I've been making these since I was a child, but here are some tips on the rice paper rolls if you have difficulty

1. Not all of them are going to look nice, best you face this reality early, set aside the ugly ones and eat them yourself!

No one will ever know. On that note, it's also really hard to make them all the same size, once you've made a dozen, though, the differences are hardly noticeable.

2. Use a shallow pan that is just larger than the rice papers, I like to use a pie pan but something even larger might be easier.

3. Fill a whole kettle and boil it. I have a pretty high tolerance for hot water and rice

paper cooks very quick (like in and out in a split second) in hotter water. You can start by putting boiling water and cooling it down with a bit of warm water.

4. As your going, top up with a little hot water from the kettle and when you feel like the water has become so salty that the rice papers are not softening, dump it and start again.

5. Make only one at a time and don't leave any floating while you're rolling another, the longer they stay in the water, the softer they get and the more they'll break.

6. As you roll them, sortof like a miniature burrito, they're pretty flimsy but as they dry a little they'll firm up, making them much easier to eat.

7. Finally, try not to stack them, the paper once softened is really sticky and they'll probably fall apart as you're trying to pick them up.

Good luck!

These are a tasty treat!


Diagram from Foodie Calls blog, see it here

Neti Pot

This is my neti pot:

I think it is beautiful.

It's the size of miniature teapot with a straight spout and an opening the size of a nostril. Yes, indeed, that's where this shenanigan is going.

Neti is apparently Sanskrit for "nasal cleansing," which is appropriate for this nasal irrigation device.


One puts salt in it (just enough to layer the bottom) and tepid-warm water. I like to get a little picky that the salt didn't come from a salt shaker because who knows where that's been or the last time it was really cleaned, so I bring the salt box into the bathroom.

Wash your hands, of course, and give that water and salt a stir with your finger until you're sure you cannot feel any more salt crystals floating about, they would probably cause some major irritation to your nasal passages.

Then, simply, lean over the sink, tilt your head and allow the saline to flow through one nostril and out the other. I remember some of the first times it felt a little nasty, because you swallow a little solution... But watch with satisfaction as your snot falls into the sink.

Some doctors have even started recommending this for sinus infections, because it helps you clear snot without popping your ears or blowing your nose to the point that the skin becomes raw and pealing.

Unfortunately, they recommend the plastic, disposable kind - what gives? - and an expensive saline solution "pre-mixed." Now the only thing that this solution has over plain table salt and water is probably that it contains no iodine, but I'm sure you can pick up some Kosher salt for half the price and iodine-free.

Now, if you're the measuring cup type, to be more precise, it takes 1 cup of water to 1/8th to 1/4 teaspoon of non-iodized salt.

This is also an excellent device for the prevention of colds, if you feel one coming on and want to give your nose a gentle rinse. Don't, however, try to experiment using other irrigation fluids, as I read on a few blogs: the use of peroxide. I have heard far too many times the use of peroxide on wounds and this horrifies me as it is an extremely abrasive chemical and there are far gentler solutions out there that will do the trick.

Drawing of unknown source

MSF Photo Blog

MSF - Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders - do a lot of great field work in offering health care services, setting up infrastructures/facilities and training staff.

They also take beautiful pictures on these journeys. Here is the most recent from their photo blog.

Central African Republic Hospital

by Sarah Elliott

Check it out here: http://msf.ca/blogs/photos/

Cheesecake (near) Disaster

Now, what's a birthday without a birthday cake? And what if said birthday boy has a sweet spot for cheesecake? And what if said boy's girlfriend has never made one before?

Looks tasty enough but, well... Let's just say, in all the commotion of baking the crust and hand beating the four bars of cream cheese, one might have forgotten one very important ingredient: sugar. Damage done, a discovery was made! It is quite nice to pour a little maple syrup on a slice of sugarless cheesecake.

Now, I won't subject you to my mistakes, but below is a fairly easy recipe for cheesecake from Dorie Greenspan's Baking My Home to Yours, via A Tender Crumb, a recipe blog for sweet teeth (see it here).

Tall and Creamy Cheesecake: A Basic (makes 16 servings)

Ingredients:

Crust
2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
4 tablespoons sugar
Pinch of salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Cheesecake:
2 pounds (four 8-ounce boxes) cream cheese, at room temperature
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2/3 cups sour cream
2/3 cups heavy cream
1/2 cups fresh raspberries, plus addt'l for garnishing


To make the crust:

1. Butter a 9-inch springform pan—choose one that has sides that are 2 3/4 inches high (if the sides are lower, you will have cheesecake batter leftover)—and wrap the bottom of the pan in a double layer of aluminum foil; put the pan on a baking sheet.

2. Stir the crumbs, sugar and salt together in a medium bowl. Pour over the melted butter and stir until all of the dry ingredients are uniformly moist. (I do this with my fingers.) Turn the ingredients into the buttered springform pan and use your fingers to pat an even layer of crumbs along the bottom of the pan and about halfway up the sides. Don't worry if the sides are not perfectly even or if the crumbs reach above or below the midway mark on the sides—this doesn't have to be a precision job. Put the pan in the freezer while you preheat the oven.

3. Center a rack in the oven, preheat the oven to 350°F and place the springform on a baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes. Set the crust aside to cool on a rack while you make the cheesecake.

4. Reduce the oven temperature to 325°F.


To make the cheesecake:

1. Put a kettle of water on to boil.

2. Working in a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the cream cheese at medium speed until it is soft and lives up to the creamy part of its name, about 4 minutes. With the mixer running, add the sugar and salt and continue to beat another 4 minutes or so, until the cream cheese is light. Beat in the vanilla. Add the eggs one by one, beating for a full minute after each addition—you want a well-aerated batter. Reduce the mixer speed to low and stir in the sour cream and heavy cream.

3. Put the foil-wrapped springform pan in the roaster pan.

4. Give the batter a few stirs with a rubber spatula, just to make sure that nothing has been left unmixed at the bottom of the bowl, and scrape 1/2 the batter into the springform pan. Dot the filling with the raspberries, then pour the remaining filling on top. The batter will reach the brim of the pan. (If you have a pan with lower sides and have leftover batter, you can bake the batter in a buttered ramekin or small soufflé mold.) Put the roasting pan in the oven and pour enough boiling water into the roaster to come halfway up the sides of the springform pan.

5. Bake the cheesecake for 1 hour and 30 minutes, at which point the top will be browned (and perhaps cracked) and may have risen just a little above the rim of the pan. Turn off the oven's heat and prop the oven door open with a wooden spoon. Allow the cheesecake to luxuriate in its water bath for another hour.

6. After 1 hour, carefully pull the setup out of the oven, lift the springform pan out of the roaster—be careful, there may be some hot water in the aluminum foil—remove the foil. Let the cheesecake come to room temperature on a cooling rack.

7. When the cake is cool, cover the top lightly and chill the cake for at least 4 hours, although overnight would be better.

Serving: Remove the sides of the springform pan—I use a hairdryer to do this (use the dryer to warm the sides of the pan and ever so slightly melt the edges of the cake)—and set the cake, still on the pan's base, on a serving platter. The easiest way to cut cheesecake is to use a long, thin knife that has been run under hot water and lightly wiped. Keep warming the knife as you cut slices of the cake.

Storing: Wrapped well, the cake will keep for up to 1 week in the refrigerator or for up to 2 months in the freezer. It's best to defrost the still-wrapped cheesecake overnight in the refrigerator.

Cookbook photo from Barns&Noble.com

Abortion, the Facts

Found an informative and really well-presented video by the Guttmacher Institute (find them here) via the Our Bodies Ourselves blog (really worth keeping an eye on at http://www.ourbodiesourblog.org/).

Stop Slow-Motion

Sometimes it's hard not to appreciate the art in advertising. This is a video from Bruton Stroube Studios advertising firm (see them here: http://brutonstroube.com/). A beautiful, delectable scene, quickly turned frenzy.


BSS | Breakfast Interrupted from Bruton Stroube Studios on Vimeo
I've long since wanted to try something like this, as slow motion shots are quite spectacular, especially involving liquids as they glide through the air!

They also have some good photos of the how it was made, as seen above, see more of it on their blog here.

Justice and Social Justice

The common way of assessing ethics in health care is to use principles, the common ones being autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. In their paper, entitled “Feminist Intersectionality: Bringing Social Justice to Health Disparities Research,” Jamie Rogers and Ursula A Kelly consider how justice is poorly represented, more specifically social justice.

The Belmont Report describes justice as pertaining to the just distribution of the benefits and burdens of research based on individual need, individual effort, individual societal contribution and individual merit. [...] It is time to move beyond thinking about ‘doing no harm’ in health research to identifying and addressing adverse social influences on the health of underprivileged groups, and the implications of their consequent poor health.

Feminist Intersectionality

Rogers and Kelly turn to the concept of Feminist Intersectionality to shed light on research in health.

An intersectionality approach explains the multiple, complex dimensions of inequality and power structures that create roles of domination and subordination under the rubric of race, class, gender and sexuality.

They argue that inequities experienced in society can and do translate to health research, furthering these experienced inequities. Historically, they remind of us of who held the power over funding and funds for research. Researchers themselves have also been for a long time mostly white men, until more recently. And, even in selecting a more "diverse" crowd of participants, Rogers and Kelly highlight:

The incremental inclusion of populations based on unidimensional differences (e.g. ethnicity, gender, race, and class) does not equate with an inclusion of the interests, perspectives and experiences of populations that are considered diverse.

What is striking is when you consider the selection of what is researched and what is not. Health problems are ranked on a social scale of socially acceptable to socially inacceptable behaviours, removed from their greater context.

There is a great sense of blame, in selecting research studies in health, in that unhealthy behaviours that are deemed the person's biological or behavioural fault are placed low on the priority list.

We’re all complicit in this when we’re talking about "health promotion" and we neglect to consider contextual factors and focus in on the individual: when we tell our clients to change their diet to lose weight and when we neglect to give an alcoholic a liver transplant. The inherent judgment that behaviour A leads directly to health outcome B is not so simple and also neglects the factors that contribute to behaviour A in the first place. We cannot just say not to do something but need to understand why it happened in the first place, certainly only then we can ensure more lasting changes.

Furthermore, Rogers and Kelly say, "health problems that have been stigmatized and stereotyped as largely affecting marginalized populations (e.g. substance abuse and mental illness) typically receive less research funding until the problem is recognized as directly or indirectly affecting the dominant group."

‘Crack Babies’

Lately, there has been some talk after an article was written in the New York Times that placed judgement on cocaine addicted pregnant women, blaming them for the effects on their children and communities (see it here). As a reaction, Lynn Paltrow wrote an interesting commentary on the issue (full commentary here), she finishes with :

Perhaps then the real ethical quandary that should be addressed is why stories like these suggest that the greatest threat to children is their mothers – rather than the lack of universal health care, the economic policies undermining our communities, and the unethical doctors who turn away pregnant women seeking medical help.

Rogers and Kelly also emphasized that "In the 1980s, the influence of cocaine exposure on a fetus was widely exaggerated in reports of scientific evidence, mostly because confounding variables such as poverty, violence, and prejudices in prenatal care were not considered in initial research studies."

Thus, when we’re considering categorized ‘vulnerable populations’ it is important to consider that people fall under many categories in different ways and at different times in their lives. Within and between populations and individuals there is also an exponential number of intersections and differences and it is important to consider this when we define our research population. Research in health may not be able to correct inequities but it is quite essential for ethical practice and can make a larger effort not to further said disparities.


Feminist Intersectionality: Bringing Social Justice to Health Disparities Research (2011) by Jamie Rogers and Ursula A Kelly, Nursing Ethics, 18(3) 397–407

Poster Art

Recently I've had this next poster by Tim Doyle of a bicyclist in Vietnam (see his art here) on my desktop background and it has had me thinking of how I love poster art. Though Toronto has fallen behind due to strict city laws, Montreal reins strong with beautiful posters, especially for music shows. The following are a few of my favourites.

Jack Dylan is also a fairly well known poster artist who also does editorial illustrations all over the place but lives in Montreal (see his art here). Appropriately, I found this next poster on the Pop Montreal website (check them out here).

And, of course, the Polaris Music Prize (see them here) has come to have a reputation for beautiful posters for its short list of nominees. Here are some of my favourites, over the years.