Are "Vices" Good For Us?

I use Twitter fairly extensively, for a variety of different purposes, one of which is to keep my ear to the ground, so to speak, or if you like a different analogy, to see what might come across my virtual desk. Spam or self-promotion aside, most of it is pretty good stuff.  At times, the articles linked to might be rather idiosyncratically, even misleadingly headlined, but in general, they provide a decent picture about what knowledgeable people in a variety of fields, professions, and communities are talking about. Given my own predilection for matters of morality, discussions of virtues and vices, it's no surprise that an article caught my attention: 10 'Vices' That Are Actually Good For You.  I suppose I ought to have known or at least suspected as soon as I saw the MSN Health logo coming up that it would be fairly ill-conceived, poorly-informed, disappointing the hopes the intriguing title raised -- despite what people tend to think, its tough to write well and competently on moral matters without a strong intellectual background and some practical experience in the field of Ethics.

Junk Food is Not Really Cheaper, But Habits Cost You

A piece in the NYT Sunday Review, Is Junk Food Really Cheaper, provoked some interesting discussion among my culinary friends, many of whom are almost evangelistically committed to food awareness and to reduction of obesity and other food-related illnesses in America.

It’s often taken for granted that junk food is in fact cheaper than healthy home-cooked food.  Those who are content with eating it — or with others feeding on the wide array of readily available but admittedly unhealthy foodstuffs — can point towards the comparative costs and shrug their shoulders and reach for another bite.  Those who are against that situation get ready villains for verbal effigy-conflagrations, usually pretty emotionally satisfying: either the government for providing the tangled net of subsidies, or the big food corporations for lobbying for and benefiting from them — or both.