The great Discard Studies just published a series of graphics about food waste that convey some pretty astounding information, like the fact that 40% of all food produced in the United States is wasted. One graphic, which includes information about what we can do to avoid wasting food includes this note: “‘Use-by’ expiration dates contain no information about food safety - most food stays good enough to eat long after that date passes.” It seems that the pumpkin lady was onto something after all!
Related:
My own example is the stash of older computers I have kept in my university office. I have a least four or five and mostly use only one, the latest model. I remain attached to older machines that have been replaced so fast that I could neither learn everything from them, exhaust them as it were, or just trash them as I was advised to do. I have kept them with all their separate memories and data, out of a sense of nostalgic attachment. Today’s technology offers the spectacle of an elephants’ graveyard, of interest only for inhabitants of the third and fourth worlds or quasi-Luddites like me. Machines that are discarded but functional are figures of a stubborn non-death; they are muter than ghosts, those who do not know that they are dead, or vampires, who derive strength and powers from being dead. Obsolete machines are still alive in a sense, but are cold and dusty because left unused. This is why obsolescence takes us beyond the venerable category of the uncanny—its awkward survival is at best funny, or ironical. Devoid of melancholia, it points to the moment when both mourning and death are impossible.
— Jean-Michel Rabaté, “The Death of Freud: What Is to Be Preferred, Death or Obsolescence?”
The ego is like the superimposition of various coats borrowed from what I would call the bric-à-brac of its props department.
— The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 155.
![thisisgrossnyc: Hoarders: NYC Edition. [Manhattan - UES]](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly2dludrDS1r9zmxwo1_400.png)
