I've begun building a section of speeches I've given to my Toastmasters club on this blog, because ... well, I should be honest, it's at least partly because I'm a showoff. (Too much of one? You decide.)

But also, I am a professional speaker, and I want to highlight both my ideas and my speaking style for buyers and event planners who can't help but benefit from hiring me.

If you haven't seen this, then you should. And then, you should share.

It continues to fascinate me, how Big Food tries to justify its products in the face of the broad ill health that they are bringing to the world.

The new example is a story on foodnavigator-usa.com, reporting the remarks of a General Foods nutritionist, Susan Crockett, at the Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo in Philadelphia this week. Here’s a synopsis:

1) Processed food isn’t the enemy.

It's just coincidence, but I'm published twice today by the Boston Globe, which for 14 years was my employer.

Maybe now I’m piling on, but I’ve got one more thread to pick out of the confrontation between Wisconsin fitness scold Kenneth Krause and news anchorwoman Jennifer Livingston. See my first two comments here and here.

In a previous post, I waded into the lives of Wisconsin news reader Jennifer Livingston and the unkind words addressed to her by a viewer, Kenneth Krause. As I said then, my inclination was to skip by it because I am constitutionally averse to the predictable, and my impression was that this was that.

But the more I considered, I realized that Livingston’s on-air retort, and the groundswell of support for her, were obscuring issues that are better off aired.

I was thinking of skipping over the kerfuffle about the obese Wisconsin news anchor’s response to the comments by the critical, personal-injury-lawyer fitness freak, but I haven’t blogged all week, and that’s what’s up right now.

My reactions — at least the ones I want to share — are not the typical ones. But if they were, that’d only be greater reason to take a pass.

I was the guest of Deborah and Karen of the Book Goodies podcast last night, and though I'm still looking for the audio, here's a brief print interview we did together.

The first time I saw this, I just sent a tweet, pointing out that Zagat blog — which one would think would understand about food — was ignorant on a major point, that “guilty pleasure” and “fast-food ‘addiction’” are not the same thing. But now I see, via my Google Alert for “food addiction,” that it’s a series, and they’ve got to stop.

Heretofore, the criticism I'd heard about BMI was that it overstated the problem of obesity, which wasn't very believable. Forget statistics and just look around: Only a liar or a fool in denial could go to a mall, or an airport, or a stadium and not see lots of people who are overweight.