Grocery

Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America
© 2017 Michel Ruhlman
324 pages

Let's go shopping! There's a few errands to take care of first -- an homage to dad, a quick review of the history of grocery stores -- but then, straight to business.  Aisle by aisle, from dried pasta to fresh fish, the way Americans approach food is changing, and Michael Ruhlman's Grocery shows us how, using -- literally -- the neighborhood grocery store, the one just down the block from his childhood home.  Ruhlman has a particular passion for food, one inherited from his father -- a man who genuinely looked forward to his weekly run to the grocery, one who kept journals of the meals he'd entertained company with -- and has turned that into a series of books, including one that took him into chef school.  Here he's spending his time with the twin brothers who run a series of stores that grew out from their father's,  one that has continued to stay on top of modern eating trends.

During Ruhlman's childhood, the grocery store was a place where you bought groceries. Wal-Mart changed that, though, when they invaded the grocery market, and other stores like Target  followed in their wake.  A lot of what a grocery stocks, the stuff in the center aisles, are commodity goods that are the same regardless of where you buy them: a box of Cheerios, say, canned soup, or jar of olives.  The quality doesn't change from store to store, and it's hard for a local grocery to compete with prices against the likes of Wal-Mart, let alone Amazon. Their future will lie in offering high-value goods or culinary experiences that can't be thrown on a truck.   Although Americans cook increasingly less -- Michael Pollan speculates gloomily that the next generation may view food prep as weird and alien to their life as milking a cow or beheading a chicken ---   we're still obsessed with food. Part of this is not a healthy obsession, although "health" is the object:  there is an increasing tendency to view food as medicine, buying it based on its advertised health claims rather than its actual quality.   Neither Ruhlman nor anyone he interviews are impressed with the USDA's track record in declaring foods as "healthy" or unhealthy, having previously damned eggs and butter to the devil's bin.

What most people miss is  that no food is "healthy", Ruhlman writes. Food can be nutritious, but it's only part of a healthy lifestyle. Even if the granola bars people are so increasingly fond of were unequivocally good for them -- and they aren't, really, given the amount of sugars packed in as preservative --  people need varied diets and physical activity to be "healthy".   Still, what the market demands is what it gets: the Heinen brothers visit organic expos and look for genuinely nutritious snacks they can introduce in their stores,  but they're mostly beholden to what people demand...be that Cheerios or free-range lambchops.  Happily, the market in general is shifting to favor organics and local produce, so the absence of spring fruit in winter is no longer a deal breaker for people who visit the store.   Grocery stores are having to go beyond food, too:  the Heinen brothers  have long emphasized  health in the products they stock, and their most recent store (in a renovated Beaux Arts bank) has a restaurant and bar.  This is not not unique to the Heinen brothers, as other chains like Trader Joes have experimented with coffee houses and the like;  from the surviving neighborhood grocers to WalMart,  prepared food is an increasing part of the grocery store's stock in trade. What is unique to the Heinens is that they have a doctor on staff, one who vets the quality of their produce and health departments, and who gives community seminars about food and wellness.

Grocery has a lot of topics thrown in the buggy -- the history of grocery stores,  critiques of our modern diet, insight into the marketing and purchase decisions of grocers --  and some of it may be repetitive if you've been reading an author like Michael Pollan.  The store he chose has a unique character, and I enjoyed learning about the brothers' business and their attempt to contribute to a fresh food culture in their part of Ohio. Also, I have to be a fan of anyone who takes a beautiful but abandoned building and turns it into a community center, at a big risk to themselves.

The Heinen's latest corner grocery, the revived Cleveland Trust building.

Inside the store. The book includes a section on how the brothers had to reconcile its architecture with the unique demands of a grocery store. 

Related:

• In Defense of Food, and The Ominvore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
• Pandora's Lunchbox.  I never reviewed this one, but the chapter on breakfast cereal has stuck with me since  reading it back in July 2015.
• Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

Killer Blondes and Killer Wheat

A few weeks ago I read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, a murder-mystery from the same Pinkerton agent turned author who produced The Maltese Falcon.   I was sold by the opening line:

I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory.

The narrator will, in the opening act of the novel, consume a small truckload of spirits, and some fun lines follow. (Paraphrase: "'Practically'. Everybody's telling me 'practically' the truth. What I want is some impractical joker who will shoot straight!")  Alas, I didn't  care whodunit. The solution surprised me, though!

This Saturday, I wrapped up William Davis' Wheat Belly,  which I read more for inspiration than information. As someone who lost 120+ lbs in a half a year after dropping most processed food, I'm solidly in the camp the author was writing to. (I've also read Why We Get Fat, and that work by Taubes is in line with the Weston Price/Atkins/Paleo/Davis family of nutritional thinking.)  According to Davis, modern processed wheat is a frankenfood with no resemblance to natural wheat, and  responsible for obesity, diabetes, celiac disease, and even some mental problems.  As I said, I don't really need convincing that bread, cereal, etc. are bad for the waistline, but I've been unable to break 206  (March 2012) and it is utterly annoying.  I have weaknesses, you see --  like sweet tea and sweet potatoes. In the last couple of weeks I've actually cut out my 'sweet' tea altogether (which was lightly sweetened -- 1/4 cup in a full gallon of tea, but if you drink a pitcher a day it's a lot of sugar), mixing in lemon juice instead.  (I mostly drink water, of course, but one does like to taste something every once and again.)  Essentially I read this to psych myself up for valiantly saying "No" to the various little temptations -- tortilla chips,  blueberry waffles, that sort of thing.  The psychic game is the reason I've been reading the Stoics and WW2 history lately...it's all about trying to adopt that indomitable spirit. I've also resumed daily walks, which less about burning calories and more about mental focus -- I find it's a lot easier to exercise my will against cornbread if I've already exercised said will four miles in the rain.

What's coming up?  I'm chasing a few rabbits at the moment and need to focus on one them, really,  Gobs of history -- WW2, Spanish empire, Arab conquests -- a little historical fiction, and a few miscellaneous bits.

Driving with the Devil

Driving with the Devil:  Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR
© 2006 Neil Thompson
411 pages

Oh Rapid Roy that stock car boy

He's the best driver in the lan'

He say that he learned to race a stock car

By runnin' shine outta Alabam'
(Jim Croce, "Rapid Roy")

Today’s NASCAR is big business on par with the NFL, but it didn’t  start out that respectable.  The inventors of the sport were backwoods rebels, supplying populations with forbidden liquor.   Savvy drivers and genius mechanics combined to outwit the law by night, and each other on the weekend -- but as their sport grew, it attracted big money and men who wanted to turn out the rabble and put it on par with Indy car racing. Driving with the Devil opens with sections on the Scots-Irish, Prohibition, and the rise of car culture before focusing on one man’s campaign to wrangle or impose order on an increasingly popular sport in the postwar years.  Who knew whiskey and racing would make such a good combination?

Early American history is besotted with liquor,  distilled beverages being  the chief source of income for many pioneers and a frequent source of conflict between  the people and the government. In an age of meager transportation options, distilling corn or other grains into potable beverages was the only way to sell produce inland, and attempts to impose taxes on said liquor kicked off more than one rebellion, including the famed Whiskey Rebellion of 1791.  Long before Prohibition barred the production and sale of alcohol, Americans had a history of fighting for their untampered tippling.  During Prohibition, liquor continued to be produced in the mountainous woodlands of the mid-south, and delivered to urban centers through young men desperate to escape rural poverty – desperate enough to risk their life and freedom speeding or sneaking through unlit paths through the hills and woods to places like Atlanta.   Bootleg driving put special demands on cars; not only did they need to be faster than the revenuers, but they needed to handle high speeds on rough roads without destroying the cargo.   Boys and men fascinated by the new machines developed a culture of study and tinkering, learning to master and improve the engines that Ford had wrought. Not content to exhibit their work or drink in the flush of adrenaline by night, drivers and mechanics began pitting their talents against one another in farmfields, racing for bragging rights and money.

Auto racing already existed as an organized sport before these bootleggers’ races;  the American Automobile Association organized races for the same reason Henry Ford did, to popularize automobiles.   The racecars used there, however, were specially and solely designed for racing:  the bootleggers were racing ‘stock’ cars, factory-built for consumers, and then modifying them to their own needs.  Bootleggers weren’t the only ones racing, but their nightly practice gave them a leg up – as did their organizations. Raymond Park, who operated one of the most notorious north-Georgia bootlegging operations, also fielded one of the first racing teams -- which included a wizard with Ford engines named Red Vogt, and two superb drivers,  Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, the latter a man with such a following that he inspired two songs.   Running races wasn't just  backwoods fun, though; Parks and men like Bill France realized money could be made organizing and promoting the races. This was an uphill battle, what with the law watching their drivers and World War 2 suspending automobile production and sending drivers out into the wild blue yonder -- literally, as one driver joined a B-29 crew.  Racing was a dangerous sport, too, to both drivers and spectators: during one race a blowout sent a car into the crowd, with seventeen hospitalized and one buried. Not all deaths happened on the course: after winning a national championship, wheeling idol Lloyd Seay was shot in the woods over moonshine finances.

Slowly but steadily, France's organization drew in the majority of drivers,  attracted by his larger cash rewards, his talent for producing races that were genuine shows, and the opportunity of winning acclaim by racing against the biggest names.  France's forcefulness, that energy that helped make  his races a success, was also directed against drivers who wouldn't play ball, either by cheating on him by racing in other leagues, or cheating in the races with illegal modifications.  Eventually France would succeed in creating an institution, NASCAR, that had cleaned itself up for the big-city newspapers: the bootleg heroes were either playing nice, dead, or had gotten tired of fighting with Big Bill.  Either way, the ranks were filling with drivers outside the cast of whiskey-trippers, as young men around the South and even outside it wanted to try their hand at racing for cash.

Watching billboards race around in circles has never sparked my interest, but Driving with the Devil certainly  held it.  There is immediate attraction in the cast of characters,  poor farmboys making a living by running from the law, delivering liquid refreshment through skill, adrenaline, and more than a little luck. Admirable, too, are the mechanics like Vogt who were introduced to new machines and so devotedly studied them that they created a weapon on wheels  -- and the delightful chaos of '39 Fords tearing circles in red dirt,  careening over cliffs or into lakes, has lot more appeal than modern racing.  This is the story that Neil Thompson delivers, ending as 'modern' NASCAR with its paved oval tracks and truly national appeal is taking off.  As a story, it's superb, but as a book it has few issues under the hood. Thompson chronically repeats himself,  and sometimes to absurd levels. Towards the end, for instance, cited facts occur twice within a single page turn. A little editing would fix that, but somewhat more questionable are the historical allusions Thompson makes, like having Hitler refer to Lindbergh as the leader of American Fascism. This defamation is taken seriously by Thompson, who also believes the KKK supported Prohibition out of racial motives, when it was part of their full complement of social police hypocrisy. When it comes to writing about the whiskey and racing, however, he sticks closer to the facts.

Great fun!

Related:

• "Racing Extinction with Leilia Munter", a recent episode of StarTalk Radio with an..environmental-activist-NASCAR- driver?
   Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of StarTalk Radio: Do you know what NASCAR stands for?
   Eugene Mirman, cohost: National Auto....'moonshine' is in there, isn't it?
• Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition, Daniel Okrent

An Economist Gets Lunch

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
© 2012 Tyler Cowen
293 pages

Imagine going out to eat with someone who really likes to talk about food, and imagine that this person is also an economist. That's An Economist Gets Lunch, three hundred pages of very excited chatter about food culture and markets across the world.  There's no argument to be had, just sheer enthusiasm for the subject at hand, one that I had to be wary about reading because it kept giving me the munchies.   Cowan's concoction is a weird mix of  culinary discussion, economics, world travel, and history.  He doesn't produce a set of rules: there's a principle guideline, followed by many little bits of advice. The key principle is this:  food is a product of supply and demand, so look for options where the supplies are fresh, suppliers are creative, and the customers are demanding. The implications of this are broader than "avoid fast food".   Cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad;  most of Cowan's favorite culinary experiences happen while traveling in less-industrialized areas of Mexico,  Nicaragua, Sicily, Thailand (he's very well traveled, this fellow) and other places. Because food markets are predominately local there, supplies tend to be fresh and the creators specialists in their region's offerings. The price is dirt cheap, compared to the cities.  A high price tag doesn't indicate that the food is exquisite, either: often it carries with it the money sunk into creating a luxurious restaurant environment, complete with superfluous staff like valets, or the high rents.Cowan especially disdains the city centers of touristy areas like Paris and Rome. You want good Italian food, hop on a train and head for the back country, he urges. And French? Try Japan.   

Cowan makes for an interesting dinner companion, going from this to that topic. He starts off with a discussion of why American fine dining is largely inferior to Europe's, blaming it on Prohibition, television, and parents who cater to their kids' bland palates.  Later on he devotes an entire chapter to the majestic enterprise that is barbeque, and defends agribusiness. Don't blame agribusiness networks because they produces crappy fast food, says Cowan, any more than you would blame the printing press for producing pulp fiction.  Curiously for someone who is generally aware of the impact politics have on markets, he assumes the entire reason people rally against GMOs is because they're scary. It's not a question of the products being proven safe, but of power and corruption: the companies producing these things are the ones with commanding market shares and accompanying political influence, supposedly regulated by their former coworkers. No sooner has he written on this, however, has he returned to an apparently favorite topic: the ins and outs of good Chinese food. 

This is a book of interest, but it goes back and forth so much I have no idea who the target audience is. There's definitely more information about food than economics, for what it's worth. 

Related:

• EconTalk interview with Cowen on the book. You can scroll down for a transcript of the conversation and get a lengthier feel for the author's many food interests.

Last Call

Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition 
© 2010 Daniel Okrent
480 pages

"Law and order should not ruin the lives of law-abidin' people! Like that stupid law of Prohibition they had in the old days. Gangsters had to go out there and open up speakeasies, so's  decent people could raise a glass." - Archie Bunker

Prohibition ranks as one of the strangest and most romanticized periods in American history, a period of over a decade in which Americans earnestly sought to deny themselves a pleasure enjoyed by mankind since the first hints of agriculture: alcohol.  In Last  Call, author Daniel Okrent takes the reader back into time to find out how it happened, what it was like, and how it mercifully ended.  A history of Prohibition could easily descend into mythologizing about the Mafia, but this is an account with considerable more body than that. Indeed, Okrent  connects the rise  and execution of Prohibition to deeper political forces that make the general politics of the time more comprehensible. 

How on Earth did the American nation come to deny itself the pleasures of the bottle?  Excess didn’t help: prior to widespread sanitation systems, beer,  wine, and other kindred spirits were the safest source of water, and because they were also fun to drink, they were easily abused, and especially after distillation made chronic inebriation cheap. Various groups within the nation – worried wives, Progressive moralists, guardians of the family – all advocated for temperance, but attempts to convey this into political action were undermined by the fact that their associations tended to pick up other political causes as well, atrophying by distraction. When Prohibition passed as a Constitutional amendment, ratified by the majority of state congresses, it triumphed because of its skillful management at the hands of the Anti-Saloon League.  The ASL, hereafter referred to as the League, combined various groups into one coalition, focusing them all on one common goal and steadfastly ignoring any other social issue.

 Other social issues were at play, however.  The coalition included nativist groups like the KKK, for instance, which saw the increasing population of Jewish and Catholic immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe as a threat to both Protestant religion and the American way of life. The League, as its full name indicates, had an especial grievance against saloons, which were not merely watering holes but the nucleus of immigrant communities. 70% of saloons were owned by first-generation Americans, and their halls were host to political organizations that gave new citizens a stronger voice in the public arena.   Prohibition’s rise is even more interesting, however, connected as it was with both the women’s suffrage movement and a landmark step in the growth of the Federal government, the income tax-establishing 16^th amendment.  The amount of female leadership within temperance and prohibition movements gave many suffragists their first experience in political organization and agitation, and the income tax amendment was a necessary first step for the war against booze. Without taxes on potable beverages, even the relatively small national government of the belle époque couldn’t fund its services. Soaking the rich, which politicized mobs liked the idea of, would provide enough revenue to only compensate for the decline in liquor taxation, but allow the government to reduce its tariffs to boot -- a boon for the working man. Prohibition was thus a cocktail of political causes. 

The execution of Prohibition itself, of course, is a legendary failure.  Had the brewers and distillers realized that the League was a serious threat, they may have rallied to stop it. But what massive business could be seriously threatened by some locals running around in bedsheets, or a crowd of campaigning women?  Despite its passage, Prohibition trimmed off at most a third of the overall consumption of alcohol. Individuals were subverting the law from the moment it went on the books., moving alcohol into the states from outside by plane, train, automobile, and a flotilla of rum-running speedboats.  Consumer markets quickly created products that would allow people to produce homemade alcoholic beverages --  a kind of grape concentrate, for instance, that if were supplemented with yeast, sugar, and a few weeks of peaceful darkness, would turn into wine.  Beer kits were also available, and completely legal within the law.  The amendment depended on enforcement by the states, but making a law isn’t quite as easy as enforcing it.  The fact that so many people were willing to blow raspberries at the law made widespread investigation and arrests prohibitively expensive, and some states never bothered.  Those which did  were undermined by networks of corruption that kept police wallets and the speakeasies full. Even when corruption wasn’t a problem,  the amount of people being hauled into court was.  Rather than wasting an enormous amount of time plodding through a trial, judges simply levied fines – and the bootleggers absorbed them, just as they would a tax had alcohol been legal. They even managed to buy their cars and speedboats back if they had been seized by the state.  None of the presidents at the time were strict enforcers – Harding was wishy-washy, Coolidge had no interest in meddling in other people’s business, and Hoover was slow to spend money. By the time the Federal government did begin intervening, the new sanctions proved to be too much, too late.  Tipplers were outraged by the fact that the government had abruptly decided to take the issue seriously, and as the Great Depression loomed, popular support saw the wisdom in creating more jobs and generating more revenue by uncorking alcohol once again.

The Last Call finishes as a superb history of the period; the author’s emphasis on political and social movements provides insight into the period in general, understanding that would have been missed had he simply dwelt gratuitously on the Mafia.  There’s a great deal to learn here, not only about the era but about the absurdity of the government attempting to manage people’s lives, including their spending habits.  Say what you will about the human race, we're an adaptable species that knows the truth of "where there's a will, there's a way".  

Related:

• Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, Iain Gately
• Drink: A Social History of America, Andrew Carr.

Drink

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
© 2008 Ian Gately
546 pages

"We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them." 

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

A substance that a third of the world institutionalizes as a religious sacrament and another third expressly forbids  on religious grounds is one to be reckoned with. Since time immemorial, humans have been getting themselves sloshed in one way or another, putting their ingenious minds to work creating alcoholic beverages from whatever plants were available.  Drink is a sweeping history of the potent brew in its many forms, created and consumed by every culture and on nearly every continent.  It's a social history of a sociable subject -- for when people drink, they rarely do so alone. 

Alcohol's roots extend to the beginnings of civilization itself;  where there were grains, there was booze. Wheat rendered beer and rice, sake, and both beverages were the staple of many civilizations' diets. This owes not only to the human race's fondness for getting itself knackered,  but to the fact that bacteria-killing alcoholic content made beer a safer source of water than water itself.  Processing wheat products into potable beverages extended their lives, and sometimes gave people an edge, especially as distillation created drinks with long shelf lives. 

Beyond economic contributions, the communal consumption of alcohol created social ties as well. Not only was wine considered a doorway to inspiration from the muses -- a place later assumed by absinthe -- but drinking it together at feasts loosened tongues and allowed for more honest conversation. Not for nothing did the Romans say "in wine, there is truth.”   Not that true and alcohol were steady partners; mead-drinking also went hand and hand with vigorous boasting about deeds in battle. 

Abuse of alcohol has existed since  its cultivation,  something it lends itself to in affording an escape. Early industrial mill workers steeled themselves with ale to ensure the day, and the Romans were absolutely riotous. While the prevailing  view expressed by people throughout the book is that alcohol is an exquisite complement to life, in moderation,  in view of its power some have attempted to ban it altogether. Islam, for instance, forbids it, and has for centuries. Far less successful was the west's own attempt at prohibition, which led to the rise of organized crime and contempt for government.  

Drink, like those who have imbibed a bit too much, is outstandingly ambitious in trying to render a comprehensive history of alcohol and culture. While he's most thorough covering  the western world,   recurring chapters also address alcohol in China,  Japan, the middle east, and South America.  A 'cultural' history verges on the literal, as Gately examines alcohol's depiction and relationship with art, literature, and the movies.  Yet for all the ground to be covered, Gately does rather well;   the book's bar is well-stocked with stories, and if one doesn't suit your taste another setting and different subject are right behind it.

Related:

A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage.  A history of the world as told over wine, beer,  coffee, tea, rum, and Coca-Cola.. 

An Edible History of Humanity

An Edible History of Humanity
© 2010 Tom Standage
288 pages

Tom Standage offers a course in human history set at the dinner table, beginning with agriculture and moving swiftly to the green revolution.  His A History of the World in Six Glasses  used given beverages to exemplify a historical epoch; beer covered agriculture,  wine the classical era, and so on through to consumerism’s Coca-Cola.  An Edible History of Humanity isn’t quite as tidy, but whereas most of his beverages were recreational drinks,  food is serious business.  Beginning with civilization and agriculture, Standage explores various theories as to why man settled down and began domesticating so many species. From there he moves to exploring how the European obsession with spices led to the discovery of the new world, and the nigh-subjugation of the old.  The bounty of the new world allowed for substantial population growth, even before the scientific and industrial revolutions; in fact, Standage contends, industrialism was a consequence of the boom allowed for by the increasingly diverse range of foodstuffs available to people throughout the world.  Man's search for food security is the Edible History's main point, and it's a hard point to oversell  Although not quite as cohesive as Six Glasses,  I thoroughly enjoyed both the author's usual lively writing and the way it informed my understanding of topics like the Napoleonic wars.

Related:

Against the Grain,  Richard Manning

Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky
A Splendid Exchange: A History of World Trade, 

The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday
© 2012 Jared Diamond
481 pages

            Earth has been the province of mankind for hundreds of thousands of years, and for most of the time he has transversed it in small tribal groups, hunting and foraging, living a life on a knife-edge of danger. Several thousand years ago, however, cities and farms appeared, civilization flourished, and the human race filled the globe, teeming into the billions.  Despite that vast difference in accomplishment, however, Jared Diamond holds that traditional societies, for all their tribalism and perilous lives, have much to teach modern man. For despite centuries of technological and social evolution, our bodies are as they were eons ago, and the great horde of wisdom contained within old tradition has not lost use.  In The World Until Yesterday,  Diamond surveys the practices of traditional people throughout the globe, predominantly in Africa and southeast Asia, for what they may yet teach us.

             Elements of Until Yesterday have been given consideration by others; witness the primal movement and the more widespread paleo diet, which hold that since our bodies evolved for the small-village, hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, our minds will feel more at home, and function at their best, recreating that behavior. It's easy to agree to a point;  few would dispute that apples are better for you than AppleJacks, or that daily exercise is more healthy than spending all day in chairs or couches. Diamond's own approach is more nuanced and pragmatic rather than idealistic. Modern approaches are still new, very much wet-behind-the-ears. Traditional approaches are more seasoned, more mature, and their experience  can be used to temper our novel approaches, combing old wisdom with modern power.  One example of this Diamond uses is that of the legal structure;   western law has its place,  but something is lost from the old ways in which criminals were confronted by the victims in a court of those who knew them, and forced to make personal restitution -- instead of being tried, defended, and judged by strangers,   then thrown into a prison where their crimes lose all significance, lost in a sea of others.  The victim, meanwhile, is expected to be detached, surrendering their pain and lust for justice to the impersonal apparatus of the state. But the law cannot feel, it cannot bleed, it cannot flush with anger, and it cannot substitute impersonal punishment for personal crimes. 

       Until Yesterday quickly drives home the point made by other anthropologists that “humans have found many ways to be human”.  A tremendous variety of practices exists between traditional societies, even between those living close by as in on the island of New Guinean.  A grisly example is that of elder ‘care’; while some societies ritually kill the old, others simply abandon them. Yet in most, the aged are revered, not only because the stories and functional knowledge of the tribe are contained within their heads, but because their long practice makes them master craftsmen, and even when their physical bodies deteriorate they can still care for children, leaving adult parents to hunt and forage.  The book’s scope covers justice, war, childrearing,  gender roles,  the elderly, health. and more, but each category bears witness to the glorious diversity of mankind.  Some lessons are familiar, as with health. Some were forgotten by most, but live on in others, like educational approaches;   which is more productive, Diamond acts, sitting in chairs all day memorizing facts, or experiencing the world directly? Opponents of conventional schooling, especially the unschoolers, know how important tactile and immediately-relevant lessons learned are. Traditional children learn to make the tools they will need to live by, and study the animals and rhythms of nature that sill sustain them;  they absorb the stories of the past that inform them of the dangers to come.  Their tests are not academic exercises.  Still other lessons have been lost to us entirely;  in the developed world, living amid plenty in environments divested of all predators and woes, we have become so blind to the thought of a dangerous world that we cross streets with eyes locked on phones, texting and assuming traffic will stop around us. For traditional peoples, however, the world is alive with danger, from animals who can easily  eat your young, or tribal enemies who will do the same if you trespass.

      The World Until Yesterday has much to offer, even with Diamond's thesis aside. It is if nothing else a survey of over a dozen distinct tribal cultures, all providing a wealth of fascinating, living in climates as disparate as the frozen Arctic sea  and the equatorial jungles.  They display how utterly different the human experience can be from the global sameness of modern living; each tribe faces different challenges,  hunts different prey, makes different adaptations.   Diamond's idea does hold, however, that there are lessons to be learned here, that the way we do things presently is not necessarily the most productive or satisfying way. There's much about traditional living no sane person would invite back -- the constant threat of famine, the utter lack of medicine -- but these people are wily and strong, firmly connected one another and committed to their families in ways few moderns can rival.  At any rate, the book offers insight without prescription,  not preaching but demonstrating and leaving it to the reader to consider.



       

Human Scale

Human Scale
© 1980 Kirkpatrick Sale
500 pages      

      Human Scale is an ambitious assault on big business, big government -- the very concept of Bigness. Opening with biology, Kirkpatrick Sale first establishes his basic operating principle:  for everything, there is a limit to its size beyond which it cannot grow without being compromised. In its opening third, Human Scale addresses the problems inherent in large, complex systems, then follows that with sections on how society, economy, and politics might function more effectively if scaled down.  On the hefty side itself, Human Scale impresses with its thoroughness; a kindred spirit to E.F. Schumacher's small is beautiful,  the book has largely stood the test of time in putting forth a case for decentralized politics, appropriate technology,  organic locally grown agriculture, and cities and buildings built to the human scale.  Sale creates a synthesis from topics as varying as demographics and aesthetics.. It is at times dated, at least in its optimistic projections for solar energy efficiency.  On the whole, however, it offers insight into government dysfunction and widespread social problems, along with ways people can work to effect change themselves. It is almost an anarchist how-to, a review of ways people can reclaim their lives against the power of centralization, and its enduring relevance is proven in the multitude of authors still advancing its ideas, a number that includes Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry.

The Simple Living Guide

The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living
© 1997 Janet Luhrs
444 pages

Life distracts easily and passes by without being noticed. The Simple Living Guide is written as an antidote, one which both prompts people to think more deeply about their lives -- how the ordinary can take on meaning --  and which provides resources for living an engaged life. After an initial section on inner simplicity, separate sections concern personal finance, food,  health and exercise,  homes, travel, gardening, entertainment,  and so on, with a special section near the end devoted to clearing out clutter. Though distinct, the chapters link together. Each section is laced with real-life examples and book summaries drawn far and wide, and ends with a larger testimonial and list of resources.  The only fly in the ointment, and it is a truly minuscule fly, is the book's datedness: written in 1997, it reminds readers that cell phones are useful, but unnecessary given the widespread availability of phone booths. Ah, but time marches on. The majority of her advice rings as true today as it would been back in those halcyon days, but  a work written this century would have included the revolutionary impact of ubiquitous wireless connections and 'smart' electronics;  her multitude of pages on cheap car-renting strategies is practically moot considering car-sharing services. Luhrs' sections on inner simplicity and personal finance are exceptional, however.

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!

Taft 2012

Taft 2012
© 2012 Jason Heller
246 pages

In another world, William Howard Taft vanished from history after his presidential term. Rather than going on to become a Supreme Court Justice, he simply -- disappeared. He became the world's most famous missing man, at least until 99 years, whereupon he sprang up from the muddy  ground of the White House lawn, interrupting a press conference given by President Obama before being dutifully shot down by the Secret Service. Fortunately, when you weigh close to 400 pounds, you carry your own kind of bullet-slowing protection. Thus begins Taft 2012, a lightening-quick work of political satire which sees a stodgy lawyer from another era become an objection of obsession to a nation distressed by its disunity and eager to believe in anyone who can rise above the fray. Taft's contempt for partisan or dirty politics makes him a man of the hour, a man whose broad shoulders bear the weight of a nation's hopes and fears -- from liberals who want someone who will really take it to Big Business, to conservatives who want someone who knows how to balance a budget. Taft 2012 combines the easy entertainment of temporal displacement (see Taft stare at biracial couples in astonishment, scarf down a Twinkie, be seduced by Wii Golf, complain about modern music, etc) with more serious cultural observations (television is alienating) and a political campaign centered on food and education. The author mixes a conventional narrative with excerpts from the world he's created -- news articles and twitter conversations about Taft, press releases from the Draft Taft element of the Taft Party -- and the like. There are also pieces from an in-universe history of the Taft presidency, which draw allusions from history to the actions in the story. Within a matter of months, the Rip Van Winkle-like Taft goes from a national curiosity to a serious write-in candidate for the presidency. This is aided by the fact that a great-granddaughter of his, one Ms. Rachel Taft, is a popular independent legislator in her own right -- but there's more sinister workings afoot, and Taft truly comes into his own by novel's end rather than being the man everyone pins their hopes on. This is fast, funny, and sometimes pointed. Most Americans will enjoy it

Home Economics

Home Economics
© 1987 Wendell Berry
192 pages

The term economics originally referred to household management, and to Wendell Berry, that's what it should remain still. Home Economics collects essays on the meaning and relation of economy to human life. In it, he deplores the cancerous growth of massive, unwieldy structures like agribusiness, globalization, and the state which destroy culture, communities, and the land, reducing the human experience to economic inputs. He ruminates thoughtfully on the value of more traditional ways of life, and advocates for an approach which is much more finely-grained For Berry, the humane society is one built to a small scale, built on local economies wherein people, not institutions, are the primary actors, and where the relationships between people and the land are respectfully maintained.

Berry is a fascinating author. At first glance, he's manifestly romantic and old fashioned, advocating for the same kind of agrarian  Republic of citizen-farmers that Thomas Jefferson yearned for. Though he's grounded in the past, quoting freely from classical poets and the Bible life, he's not mired by it: he does not despise cities as Jefferson and other agrarians did, and writes that if we wish to preserve the wilderness and farms, we must preserve our cities, too.  Though he doesn't outline his reasoning, it may be similar to that of David Owen's, who sees energy-efficient cities as the best hope for combating climate change. It's certainly a better  hope than car-dependent suburbia, which Berry despises (however much a gentle and aging scholar-farmer can despise something).   Berry urges readers to consider a return to localism not just because it's better for the environment (his veneration for which is religiously inspired), and not just because the new institutions are oppressive and destructive but because Nature has a way of correcting the unsustainable. That which cannot sustain itself will not: eventually it will fail. We will not persist living as we do now forever: our choice is in how and when we change.  In the hereafter, Berry writes, we may ask forgiveness for the crimes Nature has judged us for, but God has never shown any inclination to overturn her just sentences.

At times a warning, the vision of Home Economics is not dire.  In elaborating on the weaknesses of industrialized and globalized modernity,  he affirms that the ongoing desecration of human life and the planet will not long endure -- and in articulating what was lost, he makes clear to modern readers what it is they miss without being able to describe; the bonds of family and community life, attachment to place, and the sense of a life of meaning and purpose. His holistic vision offers to restore those powers laid waste in getting and spending.

Related:
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin. Salatin advocates some of the same ideas, at least in terms of farm ecology. He's more cheerfully manic and provocative, though.
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey (on the virtues of the wilderness)