In addition to the many great answers here: consider putting on performances, whether you organize them or perform. Make art, and leave it in unexpected places. Sell some homemade food outside your house once in a while. Add a little surprise and delight into people's lives. It's contagious. And everyone needs joy, entertainment, and even some good-weirdness in their lives; it's not just for those with disposable income and spare time.
Random anonymous acts of kindness (like paying for coffee for the person after you) can uplift a whole community. And it spreads faster these days with digital community groups (people saying thank you to strangers). In fact those messages could even be positive propaganda
Very cool that you are generating fictional cultures! This resource only structures Western food cultures (probably because a lot of ancient Eastern & African histories relied on oral traditions rather than written, which has been harder to capture and structure pre-voice tech.) As a result, the patterns you detect and stories you generate will be limited to those Western sources; maybe that could be interesting, but I imagine combining those with other traditions around the world would lead to far more novel fictions.
Have you been able to find good structured data about Asian/African food? If not, it would be cool to figure out a way to start building that sort of database so that your stories draw from a fuller set of information and traditions! I think voice tech and the improvement in transcriptions + gpt3-like tools will help us start capturing and structuring oral histories much more effectively and quickly than ever before.
This resource is great, but only focuses on US and European ingredients/techniques -- probably because oral traditions were much more common back in the day in Asia/Africa.
The fact that these western recipes/techniques are more well-documented than eastern techniques is one factor in why western cuisine has historically received a lot more attention in restaurants/cooking schools as well as popular media (we'll set aside colonial biases, etc for now.)
As we use structured data to draw inferences and then guide actions more and more (ML -> AI...) the fact that databases like this skew entirely western will lead to distorted suggestions in applications that, say, aim to generate cooking curricula programmatically to teach cooking (I'm sure y'all can think of better examples than that.)
I wonder if voice technology can help capture oral histories, oral traditions, and allow those to be structured in a way that only written traditions have been in the recent past. There is hope! We'll all be better for it, too, when we can access the histories and traditions (many of which have been lost, or almost lost, at this point) of the whole world, not just a small section of it.
The bulk of the Schlesinger collection was donated by Julia Child from her personal library, and yes, English-language cookbooks covering Asian and and especially African cuisine were scarce before 1940. And Child was definitely a Francophile when it came to food, so her collection was skewed that way.
Seems like a good time to revisit this blog post by the late-Aaron Schwartz about removing news from your information diet: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Removing news is a solution that screams privilege though, isn't it?
If I'm a DREAMer, or a woman who works for a private company, or a person recently laid off due to COVID, I kind of need to follow along to help me understand how I'm going to make it the next 30 days.
Yeah I've definitely thought about this and share the concern. I think there is a distinction between news that addresses immediate issues, like the ones you mentioned, vs unfocused news consumption, which amounts to a distracting form of entertainment that masquerades as productivity or civic responsibility.
The former is largely necessary, but probably far less frequent than we think on average. The latter is what we ought to reconsider; it's the addictive version of news that we should probably swap for slower/deeper versions of information.
I know Schwartz argues for a hardline "no news" position. I think that any amount of reflection and discipline to minimize mindless news consumption under the guise of "staying informed" and replacing that with deeper thought is a net benefit, and one that people from any walk of life are capable of.
I guess the question of how to filter out the noise and only pay attention to salient issues is the real challenge. When I've experimented with this, I've often still heard about issues important to my various identity/interest groups through group chats with friends, in-person conversations, even just passing by newstands and seeing headlines. This doesn't seem like a satisfyingly reliable solution, but like Schwartz mentions, it's kinda surprising how much current info we absorb even when not explicitly reading the news.
"criminality" is not an inherent trait in any race, including black Americans. The increased crime rates are a function of a number of inputs, many of which stem all the way back to slavery-- which has never fully been addressed/redressed in our public policy. To fail to recognize this and treat "black criminality" as some initial condition is to fail to critically think about our collective history and the resulting consequences.
