There are some kinds of food that are real and some that are not. It isn't too hard to tell the difference, but apparently serving real food to large numbers of people is quite a challenge. In fact, it's a challenge with a NAME.

A Boston-based initiative called the Real Food Challenge is encouraging institutions worldwide to sign on to pledge that 20% of the food they serve will be real.

Twenty percent.

Here's the hitch: "Real Food is food which truly nourishes producers, consumers, communities and the earth," according to the Real Food Challenge website. That means factory farmed foods might not qualify. In fact, they have a calculator for institutions to use to figure out what counts as real and what doesn't.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think this is awesome. The fact that we have gotten so far from knowing what real food is that we have to calculate it means that we probably need programs like this one. On the other hand, to me, the whole idea of creating a calculator drives us even farther from our intuition — that basic instinct that tells us what's yum and what's yuck — that took us eons to evolve.

According to the Burlington Free Press, the University of Vermont is the 5th university to sign on.

In other weird stuff that was fiction when I wrote The Blind Pig but is now creepily creeping into reality is Project Glass, eyewear made by Google. Here's a short description from the NY Times:

The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands.

Here is a description of the fictional eyewear from The Blind Pig:

Her eyepiece projected a clock onto her retina and, seeing it was earlier than she'd thought, she decided to wait an hour. The metal arm jutting out from her ear looked like the stem of an old pair of glasses and held a convenient a test-tube sized computer just over her eyebrow.

In the future, I will patent all of my fictional ideas.

Actually, what this tells me is how quickly things change. Apparently, researchers are already working on Project Contact Lens.

What's next?