Amy Lynne Grzybinski

Photograph: Flickr

Just days after the House passed a 939-page Farm Bill, the Senate yesterday approved the Bill in a 68-32 vote. Now the $956 billion Bill heads to President Obama for approval. He will sign the Bill on Friday, ending months of tension surrounding the most contentious Farm Bill in history.

The Senate vote comes after nearly two years of delays due to political disagreements regarding the direction of farm and food policy in the coming years. The main hurdle for the Bill's passage was cuts to the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps. In the final Bill, the SNAP program will lose $8 billion in funding over ten years, a compromise between House Republicans' initial proposal of $40 billion in cuts and Senate Democrats' counter of $4 billion. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the changes will reduce benefits for about 850,000 houses nationwide. The Bill did expand a pilot program that allows food stamp recipients to get discounts when they shop at farmer's markets, though it doesn't address the issue of food access.

Additionally, direct payments are eliminated from this Farm Bill. Those payments were a type of crop subsidy awarded to farmers whether they grew crops or not; in exchange for the cuts, the government is making crop insurance cheaper for farmers. Eliminating that program will cut $5 billion in funding over ten years.

There are a few components of the Bill that might impact how you shop and eat. For example, Country of Origin Labeling regulations require that many animal products now contain information about where the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered. This Bill also expanded subsidy incentives to include sushi rice (in addition to wheat, soy, and corn), so we may see more of that product on the market in the future.

This has been one of the most bitterly political Farm Bill passages in the history of the piece of legislation. Historically, the Farm Bill has been considered rather dry and uninteresting, and usually receives little media coverage. But the prolonged political debates surrounding this Bill —and the substantial cuts to SNAP that House Republicans pushed early on— made headlines for months. As with any compromise in the legislative process, plenty of agricultural interests on both sides are disappointed with the final Bill. But we can now move forward in food policy with conservation programs fully funded, progress in some areas of food safety and labeling regulation, and the hope that future Bills will pass before they're two years overdue.

About the Author: Leah Douglas loves learning about, talking about, reading about, and consuming food. Her other work can be found at her website, and you can follow her on Twitter @leahjdouglas.

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(via madmarriage)

In a room lit only by the dim blue glow of his laptop screen, a man who regularly turns down rides to post-work happy hours and invitations to see old friends in order to get into his pajamas as quickly as possible and watch TV shows he’s already seen alone in bed was suddenly overcome by the horrifying certainty that he is not truly known or understood by another single living human being.

This man — who makes a habit of giving the shortest, least informative possible answers to questions like “How are you doing?” and “What did you do this weekend?” — found himself mentally racing through a list of everyone he has ever met, wondering why it is that they seem perfectly content to let him slip from the surface of their lives, even though he has never given them any reason to trust in or rely on him in any meaningful way. The habits of yesterday (going home early from almost every event, making it clear in conversation that he would not welcome either vulnerability or honesty, concocting flimsy excuses to get out of doing even the smallest of favors) were now etched in stone; his life looked almost exactly like the life of a robot to an outside observer.

Why do I feel so goddamn alone, he asked himself, dimly aware that in any given moment he chooses creature comforts and mindless solitude over genuine human connection and even the slightest hint of social effort, the cumulative effects of which have turned him into a lonely man in a bleak room without even the muscle memory of friendship to sustain him. Why doesn’t anyone call me, he thinks, despite the fact that the only numbers that he has called in the last three weeks are his mother (he didn’t leave a message), his office (he thought he was going to be late for a meeting but then wasn’t), and a hospital billing service. His anguish, while genuine, led to exactly zero effective self-criticism; he failed to understand that a human being who chooses isolation at every turn will eventually become a person who is alone.

He could not come up with a satisfactory explanation for his loneliness, because one of the most horrifying hallmarks of social inadequacy is the inability to recognize itself for what it really is. He clicked “Watch the next episode” and waited for the vague sense of injustice to subside, which it eventually did.

Read more Man Who Chooses Netflix Over Parties And Regularly Bails On Friends Wonders Why He’s So Lonely at The Toast.

'Vegan Dog' is an oxymoron. 

Buy the White Whine book today for a chance to laugh on the toilet!

CURLING (Into A Ball)

Ten points if you do it for an hour.

A thousand points if you don't leave bed all weekend.

Gold medal for you if you quit your job, sell that gold medal, invest in the bond market, gain wealth, thereby proliferating more gold. This will translate to happiness. Mail your teenage nephew red Beats by Dre headphones for his "domepiece." This is a successful game of curling (into a ball).

DOWNHILL

A brash alarm begins its unforgiving beep. It's the morning; dawn peeks through your window.

"It's all downhill from here," you say.

Bronze medal.

HOCKEY

Punch someone! Reflect on how weak you are! Try to break their teeth! Really try!

TIME OUT. PENALTY.

Slip on a patch of ice at the corner of your block while trying to reach the deli for more Nilla Wafers. The glint in the sidewalk is tinged like silver as you lie moaning, bruised, probably with a shattered ribcage. This is your award. 

SNOWBOARDING

Dim the lights in your room. Scroll through pictures on Facebook of your ex-boyfriend snowboarding in Vermont or whatever with his blonde girlfriend, Erica or whatever. Have the unhinged gall to "like" each photo and comment "Powder looks fresh, guys! Keep shredding that gnar!!" For every comment you post, one silver medal. Make a batch of hot mulled wine in the tub, bump yourself up to gold.

BOBSLED

Have sex with Bob, seems like a good idea.

No medals awarded, that shit got ugly.

ICE DANCING

GET REAL. YOU DON'T DANCE.

Previously: The Definitive Guide to Attending This Summer's Music Festivals

Photo via matins/flickr.

Dayna Evans is a writer. Find her on Twitter here.

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It's every bit as dangerous as it sounds.

The above moment comes at 1:40 and is really, really great. This installment of Anita Sarkeezian's "Tropes vs. Women" series is on the "Ms. Male Character,"  who pops up in Pac-Man first but shows up everywhere: Sonic, Mortal Kombat, Super Mario, Kirby, Crazy Taxi, Donkey Kong, Angry Birds. The video's from last November, but I started watching it this morning via Sociological Images and couldn't stop after listening to the Pac-Man creator explain that his game was intended to play to the "things women like" ("fashion, or fortune-telling, or food, or dating boyfriends"): "I decided to theme the game around eating," he said. "After eating dinner, women like to have dessert."

Sidenote: Lily Tomlin married her partner on NYE! You go, Lily Tomlin.

Menswear Dog Goes Into The Wild

Featured Items:

Buffalo Plaid Jacket: Woolrich

Fisherman’s Sweater: Original Penguin

Chambray Shirt: Land’s End

Hudson Bay Axe: Best Made Company

Brown Button Down & Henley: Club Monaco

interweber:

latenightjimmy:

Mariah Carey, ladies and gentlemen.

[scorpiant]

queen

Bostonians and tourists will soon be able to get drunk while shivering even in the summer at Frost Ice Bar, a bar that is literally made of ice (except for the floor and ceiling). The chilly attraction, which is kept at a brisk 21 degrees Fahrenheit, has pushed its opening back a few times but is now aiming for the last week of August, exact date to be determined, a rep tells Eater.

Admission into the frigid bar requires a ticket ($12 for children; 6-12, $17 for students, military, and seniors; $19 for adults) and gets you 45 minutes inside; gloves and a parka are provided, and you can rent boots for an additional $6. Children are allowed in during the day, but after 5 PM the venue becomes 21+, and the rotating cocktail selection will set you back $11 for each drink.

This is Boston's first frozen bar, but the concept has done well in a number of other cities around the globe. Las Vegas has a Minus5 Ice Bar, for example, with an obvious temperature of -5 degrees (Celsius) — or 23 degrees Fahrenheit, just a little warmer than Frost Ice Bar. Meanwhile in Amsterdam, XtraCold Icebar is in fact "XtraCold" at 14 degrees Fahrenheit, and visitors get to see a 3D movie of "a journey over icebergs and along steep cliffs in a fantasy ice landscape."
· All coverage of Frost Ice Bar on Eater [~EBOS~]

What a catchy paean to the art of self-control and delayed gratification: Me get this feeling when me see a cookie on a plate/ Me have to grab it have to eat it, oh me no can wait/ But now me know that self-control is something me must know/ Me want to grab it want to eat it / BUT ME WAIT / ME WANT IT / BUT ME WAIT. 

From Scientific American:

New research by two Yale University psychologists details how the sight of something cute brings out our aggressive side. Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon investigated “cute aggression” by showing study participants slide shows of either cute, funny or normal animal photographs. As they watched, the participants held bubble wrap. The researchers, attempting to mimic the common desire to squeeze cute things, told subjects to pop as many or as few bubbles as they wished. People watching the cute slide show popped significantly more bubbles than those viewing the funny or control pictures, according to results presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in New Orleans. “Some things are so cute that we just can't stand it,” Dyer concludes.

Every study should reach this conclusion.

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