Founded in New York in 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was among the first formally established fellowships solely dedicated to attaining – and maintaining – sobriety. Today, the organization and its tenets have famously come to represent a tried-and-true model for recovery from alcoholism. Popularly depicted in television shows and movies as often-somber church-basement gatherings, AA group meetings have become iconic of support-group subculture, and of what the road to sobriety might look like.

I’m almost loath to jump on the Samantha Brick opinion-piece bandwagon, but in light of all of the backlash and the backlash to the backlash (and given that this is, kind of, a food column) I can’t well pass up the opportunity. Published by the Daily Mail on Tuesday, Brick’s article has drawn venom and vitriol from all corners of the world via the Twitterverse (duh) and every other form of communication or public commentary you can think of. Given the shelf life of controversy these days (see KONY 2012), it’s not expected that the outrage will last. Thus, before the ‘Brick’ can fully sink, I’ll stick in my two c(em)ents. Here I go (commence jumping):

By now the entire virtual world has – or should have – heard of Trayvon Martin. On February 26, Martin, a seventeen-year old black kid from Sanford, Florida was shot to death for no good reason, no passable reason -- really, it seems, no reason at all. Other than the questionable conduct and unquestionable racism of the self-appointed neighbourhood watchman, who ambushed the teen because he looked “suspicious” by simple virtue of the fact that he was a black kid walking home from the 7-11 through his gated community after dark.

This morning, I woke up and did my usual pre-column-writing world events and social media news sweep. To my chagrin, the thing that 34 of my friends (and surely counting) had posted and re-posted was not about robo-calls, Super Tuesday or the potential attack on Iran by Israel. Instead what I found splattered all over my newsfeed, and then neatly collected into a running tally (thanks, Mark Zucker-robot!) was the KONY 2012 film and campaign by U.S. organization, Invisible Children, released into cyberspace not even 48 hours ago.

This leap year, Wednesday February 29 marked the fifth annual Pink Shirt Day – Bullying Stops Here! anti-bullying campaign. Not to be confused with Valentine’s Day, the fight to end breast cancer, or the Pride Parade, the day was originally started by a couple of guys at a Nova Scotia high school in reaction to a bullying incident over a colourful clothing choice. Their antidote to bullying? The school-wide distribution of pink tank tops, which is how the campaign got its colour scheme and its name. Cute, right?

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”
- Judge Stephen Reinhardt

The tendency towards colour-blindness when it comes to crime data reporting by the Canadian police force has come under fire in a recent study by University of Toronto Criminology PhD student, Akwasi Owusu-Bempah.

Talia Gordon makes sweet-potato, roasted beet, macintosh apple, red onion winter mash

For many, a visit to the emergency room can be a frightening and stressful experience. Patients arriving at the hospital emergency department (ED) with injury or illness are often physically exhausted or emotionally distraught. In addition, research has shown that the discharge process also presents potential health risks.

Talia Gordon dishes on Rob Ford and prepares Lentil Soup.