This week at the library: desire, war, and traditions

Dear readers:

It's been a slow start for February despite the miserable weather that keeps everyone indoors, possibly because I've spent the last week nursing a cold and it's easier to watch movies than to coordinate book-holding, page-turning, and nose-tending all at the same time. I've finished off season one of The Vikings, which I would have never been interested in were it not for Bernard Cornwell waking me up to how fascinating their culture was.  Earlier in the week I did read his The Pagan Lord, the latest book in his series about the wars between the Saxons and Danes for control of Britain; that was another fine adventure. Toward the latter part of the week I became interested in And Then There Were Nuns, which is not an Agathie Christie mystery but a Jane Christmas recollection, the story of a woman who spends a year living in convents and a monastery.  Comments will follow for that this week, but yesterday I read Michael Pollan's Food Rules, which is not so much a book as it is a pamphlet that looks like a book. It essentially distills his argument in In Defense of Food into 60 rules-of-thumb for eating. If you have read Pollan, most of the rules bear out specifically what he's written about previously: he emphasizes eating whole, organic foods in moderation, but also works in advice for building a personal food culture -- eat meals, not snacks; eat at a table, not just anywhere; eat with friends, not alone.  All good advice, it struck me, but $11 is a lot to pay for a collection of rules when many of them don't have extensive explanations because they're similar to one another.

This week I'll be finishing Forgotten Voices of the Great War, which is a collection of first-hand recollections of the conflict,   and then -- who knows? I'll be doing a review for Wendell Berry's The Gift of Good Land ,which is about the virtues of traditional farming and the importance of treating the land arightly,  and yesterday at the university library I found a book entitled dirt: the erosion of civilization which may be similar. That was a book picked up in afterthought, though; the main reason I went to the library was to check out On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, by William Irvine. Some readers may know him as the author of A Guide to the Good Life:  The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. 

I also came home with:

• Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations, Brian Fagan, on the historical impact of sudden climate shifts
• The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, Frans de Waal, and;
• What's Wrong with the World,  G.K. Chesterton. This is one of the books that introduced Chesterton's advocacy of distributism, so I want to tackle it to both read something by the man (given his reputation) and to ponder his response to industrialism as it was happening. This book was published in 1910. The language looks heady, but if I can get through Augustine I can get through anything. 

One book I was sorely tempted to buy was Alain de Botton's The News: A User's Guide, but I'd rather pair it with Neil Postman's How to Watch TV News.  Right now I have entirely too much unread books sitting around, including The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond.

Well, happy Valentine's Day to those who have been Cupid-stricken, and happy reading to the rest!

The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World
© 2001 Michael Pollan
256 pages

     Meander through your garden and ponder the meaning of life; such is the advice of Michael Pollan, who in The Botany of Desire asks what four domesticated plants (apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes)  might tell us about ourselves. Although he describes his subject as human-plant coevolution, the final result is more philosophical than scientific. In truth, it’s a little of both – a surprising read that makes the average garden even more interesting.

            Pollan’s four chosen examples allow him to explore the subjects of sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. The first section on apples is the most ‘scientific’, as he establishes fruits’ sweetness as not some happy accident, but an evolutionary strategy: animals that eat fruits swallow their seeds – and later deposit them in a pile of fertilizer. That sweetness appeals to us because it’s a signal: here lies energy-giving glucose, lots of it. Pollan’s treatment of each subject isn’t a straightforward “The relationship between plants and human evolution is THIS and THAT” --  Pollan strolls,  exploring side roads that somehow connect to one another. The section on apples introduces Johnny Appleseed,  praise for the merits of apple reproduction (each apple contains five radically different seeds: that great variety has allowed apple trees to thrive in different climates), and the introduction of a dichotomy that becomes a running theme: that of Apollian order and Dionysian wildness.

            Tulips inspire a discussion of beauty, with a history of tulip mania in Holland thrown in; Holland is also the stage for much of the discussion of marijuana. In that section, readers are treated to the comic tale of Pollan growing marijuana in his home garden in pot-friendlier times, then acting like a panicked sitcom character when his firewood delivery man, who doubled as a police chief, stopped by the homestead. This section is the most philosophical, since Pollan uses it to muse on consciousness. The final chapter, on potatoes and control, will be familiar ground to those who know Pollan’s usual subject. Here he revisits a topic introduced with the apples, the problems endemic to monocultures, and examines both the Irish Potato Famine and GMOs.  Each account is a mixture of history, science, philosophy, and personal anecdotes, and in this final section Pollan records his attempt to grow a potato that was engineered by Monsanto to produce its own insecticide, the “New Leaf”.  That astonished me: both that an author who despised GMOs and nutritional science for taking over food  would allow such things in his garden, and that Monsanto would allow the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and a contributor to Food, Inc to play journalist with their magic potatoes. But Botany of Desire was written in 2001, possibly before Pollan had established his reputation as being critical of industrialized agriculture.

            Botany of Desire is fun reading for a foodie: it doesn’t have the teeth that Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food had,  but it’s also happily missing the anti-science tint that marred both of those. As usual, he provides plenty of food for thought.

Related:
Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
© 2009 Michael Pollan
256 pages

Michael Pollan's seminal work, The Omnivore's Dilemma, established that there's no such thing as a free, or even a cheap, lunch.  The low-cost processed foods that the American diet takes for granted exact their price in other ways. The abundance of food in the developed world has coincided, not accidentally, with a decline in its quality - - and so, curiously, while most of us can take the availability of food for granted, we can no longer take for granted that it is in fact food. Food has lost its meaning in the American mind, Pollan asserts here, and science and technology are to blame.

Pollan sees food as having fallen to the twofold assault of industrial agricultural and and ideological which he calls "nutritionism", which reduces food to nothing more than a carrier of nutrients. In his view, this misses the forest for a few twigs on a tree and ignores relationships between different food in traditional diets and the interplay of nutrients and body chemistry. Further, he believes that industrial agriculture  creates not food, but products resembling food -- and that nutritionism aids and abets this, creating a situation in which people are "overfed and undernourished".

In Defense of Food presents a problem for me. On the one hand, there are significant ideas worthy of consideration in here -- people do overly fixate on the value of one nutrient or another, industrial agriculture does sacrifice quality for quantity, and yes, the constant pattern of nutritional fixation does dovetail perfectly with relentless advertising-driven consumerism. Pollan's "food rules" make sense, like "Don't eat anything that doesn't look like food".  That is, if you want cheese, eat cheese -- not puffs of god-knows-what covered in orange powder.

The great problem for me is the anti-scientific attitude that develops from his attack on "nutritionism", an ideology which Pollan sees as being the spawn of scientists, journalists, and advertisers.  While scientists are just as human and potentially self-serving as anyone else, they attract the bulk of Pollan's ire. He mocks the fact that a half-century of nutritional advice has seen Americans grow not healthier, but fatter -- as if obesity and nutritional disorders were caused not by the popularity of fast food or a society dominated by cars, but by the fact that people followed the advice of a government study and got themselves fat by trying to stick to low-fat diets. A spirit of petty resentment pervades the book, as if Pollan is insulted that scientists would dare get their grubby lab gloves over his food. Those of us who are interested in science know all too well that the media does a horrible job at attempting scientific journalism, being irresponsible and ignorant of the subject --  leaving no room for nuance and pitching stories in such a way as to grab headlines. (PhD Comics did a GREAT comic on this.)  Pollan mentions the hype over resveratol, for instance, a compound found in many foods of the French diet which has been linked to health and longevity. While Pollan uses this as an example of nutritional fixation, I recently read an interview with the scientist whose work prompted the media frenzy (in Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Future), and he was dismayed by the way the media failed to understand that the variable he was studying was only one factor of many.  Here it is Pollan, not the scientist, who is overemphasizing the work.

In Defense of Food may be worth considering if you are just starting to become conscious or mindful about the foods you eat, but given Pollan's bias I can't earnestly recommend it to you. Given the importance of food, I'm sure there are superior books out there on the subject.

The Omnivore's Dilemma
© 2007 Michael Pollan
450 pages

What to eat, what to eat? Between our robust physiologies and intelligent, creative minds, there's little on Earth that we human beings cannot eat or somehow convert into food. The entire planet is one big smörgåsbord  for H. sapiens, but such a plethora of choices overwhelms our hunter-gatherer instincts. We are no longer creatures of the plains, but of the cities: a relative few grow food for the masses, and they can do so only by being highly efficient. Such efficiency allows for cheap food, but in Michael Pollan's eyes there's no such thing as a free lunch. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan digs into four possible meals of the modern era to find out what it means -- and costs -- to eat in the 21st century. On the menu: fast food from McDonalds, an organic supper from WholeFoods,  a hearty banquet at a local farm, and a meal foraged from the wild.

Pollan begins with the most typical American cuisine: fast food from McDonalds, which despite being advertised as beef and potatoes, contains an awful lot of corn. Corn allows cattle companies to raise their beef to market quickly and efficiently, and it's also processed into virtually every food staple sold in American market. Efficiency is the watchword for industrial agriculture, which feeds its corn to cattle and pigs on vast feedlots, which are a far cry from bucolic images of cattle lowing out on the plains. Efficiency's allure has not been lost on organic business, which -- while decrying pesticides and other 'necessary evils' of big agriculture -- is forced to pursue the same basic business model, as Pollan finds out when he follows the ingredients of his WholeFoods-purchased meal from the farm to his plate.  His organic chicken ("Rosie") may be a free-range animal, but her living conditions are roughly the same as KFC's birdies.  From here, Pollans goes off the grid and into a family farm, one which takes an entirely different approach to producing food.  Polyface Farm, in fact, does not produce food: it grows it. It cultivates it. Instead of using fossil fuels to process food, Polyface's owner simply manages nature,  putting ecology to work for him. Why fill animals with antibiotics when you can have chickens peck through cow manure and eat the bugs which would cause sickness later on? Finally, Pollan leaves the farm for the wild, gathering mushrooms and hunting for boar to create an authentically human meal, with every ingredient on the plate made by his own hands.

The great theme of Omnivore's Dilemma is awareness -- food mindfulness, if you will. We can buy cheap food and enjoy foods out of season, but at cost:  beef is so cheap because it's raised on heavily-subsidized corn, and has been since the 1970s when Nixon decided to take food off the political-issues menu. But that same subsidization encourages farmers to drive themselves into financial ruin by planting more and more corn (and seeing increasingly marginal returns for their investment). It's not a sustainable system, but taxpayers cover the gap.  Although Pollans never mentions it, there's a similarity between the birth of agriculture thousands of years ago and the growth of corn-based agriculture only a few decades ago: both allow us to feed many more people cheaply, but at the expense of quality. Uncivilized hunter-gatherers enjoyed a diet far more varied and healthy than that of the medieval peasant and possibly even ourselves.  The quantity-quality dichotomy divides the book's four chapters into two portions:  the first two meals use society's industrial infrastructure, while the latter focus on on the quality of food rather than increasing profit. At one point the owner of Polyface farm notes that while he could add more cattle to his farm, it would throw off the ecological balance he cultivates.   He thus spurns economic growth for sustainability, a philosophy I wish more businesses, people, and governments shared. Growth without sustainability is nothing more than a market bubble waiting to be popped. Pollan's last story (the boar-hunt) takes a completely different tack, focusing on the morality of eating animals and the meaning that can be found in gathering one's own food, and thus in interacting with the world in which we live instead of passively consuming foodstuffs.

Dilemma will raise difficult questions for virtually everyone who reads it, unless they live on a farm like Polyface,  and the issues are varied. Yes, we can dine cheaply -- but only if we do not take into account the nutritional, moral, political, and societal costs. Those who try to buy to satisfy their conscience and palate both by moving to organic don't get off as easily as they might think. Judging from the book,  the ideal foodsource is local, natural, and sustainable -- but  the majority of us do not have the luxury of being able to buy or eat responsibly-produced food from places like Polyface farms, either out of location or finances. As much as I would like to see feedlots give way to the Polyface approach, I think this is as realistic as hoping for the return of Mom and Pop general stores on Main Street in a world dominated by big boxes. As hideous and artificial as those box stores are, they're simply more economically competitive and will continue to increasingly dominate our society without the appropriate legislation. The solitary reader need not despair, however:  while society at large may continue to go its processed-food way, those who read this or a similar book can be provoked to change our lives and our culinary habits -- and just as I have decided to avoid Wal-Mart and buy from local businesses, I can decide to avoid processed food in favor of items from the farmer's market whenever possible.

Given the questions Dilemma raises, I highly recommend it -- though I would prefer more substantial evidence (like raw data on what percentage of cattle are raised on feedlots) to back up his anecdotal conclusions.