After a large portion of a few peoples' evening being spent on creating a name, one might be curious as to why this one was picked. On the surface, it seems as though one is just picking from whatever cliches from popular culture that would seem to fit into some gist of this blog. Or possibly it came from some segment of nightly TV, in which people give funny anecdotes to a formulaic comedian. In some sense, it is both: we are to give some anecdotes and we wish that our dietary lifestyle would go into the popular psyche, at least I do. However. the name carries something more meaningful.
Sometime last year, around this time, my German professor talked about "cultural starches". He noticed that there were many ethnicities in our class and asked what were our cultural food staples. At first, it sounded as though we were naming lists of stereotypes, as if FOX news was doing a documentary on the American "melting pot", and doing so at a Hometown Buffet. Our professor then argued that cultural staples were starches: Latin Americans have beans, corn and potatoes, whereas Asians in the East have rice, and the Middle East has grains, and so on and so forth. The crux of all our diets is starch based. A few months before, I read Dr. McDougall's Starch Solution and knew that, but my professor had this knowledge by mere linguistic observation. He is a historical linguist and knew that there is a connection between food and language, or rather humans, society and food. Humans need these things to survive. Sometime after, we learned how to say good day, "Guten Tag", reflecting another element of human society, politeness. Because "Tag" is "day", this blog's name is "The Hash Tag", and it is hoped that it will become a part of our daily consumption.
-Steven C.
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