This book was a horror show. I only read it for book club. I don’t watch horror movies, and I don’t read them by choice, either. If this book were a movie, it would be one of those super-R-rated violent guy movies that I wouldn’t go near with a ten foot pole. SPOILER – the climactic scene with the gunfire ripping through all the bodies at the happy gathering down at Lemondrop Farm on Lollipop Lane was almost a parody. But really, that’s not a spoiler, because if you think for one moment past the first few pages that this tale is going to have a happy ending, you must read some weirder books than I do. ( )
I was really bored through all the early history of the first half. “Self,” I kept saying to myself, “I’m confused. What does this have to do with food?”
I perked up once the Fed came on the scene. 🙂 The Fed was “a horse designed by a committee of committees, a camel of a central bank.” We have 12 districts because the “central” part of “central bank” was too scary for people; and we were almost controlled by private bankers, rather than overseen by a board appointed by the president.
The financial crisis of 2008 is well explained from a different perspective. Learn (again for the first time?) how “money-market funds” came to be and what it meant when the most famous and long-standing one “broke the buck.”
Goldstein has good style. Each chapter is short, heavily sub-chaptered with often funny sub-chapter-titles, and ends with a lesson and/or premonition. His informality does devolve a little bit excessively at times (“It was a dick move”… “You know who knew? Irving damn Fisher”).
He has a great overarching lesson, though. We all known that money is “a made-up thing.” Of course it is – it’s just PAPER at the end of the day, after all. But more importantly, the way we “do money” is a made-up thing. It seems every time we make up a new way to “do money,” very quickly we forget there was ever another way; and that surely this way is the only “real” way, and we’ll all go to hell in a handbasket if we think about doing it some other way.
First go back to gold and silver coins. Why should they be money? They have rarity in their favor, and some utility, but why make them money? Because we said so. But we could say something else: next, consider the gold standard. Why did money have to be pegged to this element called gold? Because we said so. And now… there’s an interesting old-but-new-again theory called Modern Monetary Theory which says that basically, as long as we aren’t at full employment and experiencing inflation, it’s OK for the government to print all the money it wants. It really doesn’t have to be balanced with higher taxes; we don’t have to wonder how we might “pay for” government programs. Why not just MAKE money to pay for them? We make all this money stuff up anyway. Well… why not? ( )
Not what I was expecting, exactly. Little story arc; more of a series of discrete journalistic investigations. Some of them were very difficult to read – the perpetually debt-ridden life of a trucker; the horror story of being an enslaved, maimed captive on a Thai fishing boat; even the ostensibly benign story of the woman furiously driven to make “Slawsa” a success (and climb out of debt) was a little sad.
But Benjamin Lorr’s style is really captivating. He’s just trying to make sense – doesn’t have an ax to grind; doesn’t constantly make himself the center of the story; ultimately doesn’t come out with much in the way of answers. For those who want reform, he wants us to “consider that any solution will come from outside our food system, so far outside that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done.”
As a temporary sidetrack, Lorr mentions a prior book about the world of yoga, where he wondered what it was all FOR, all this yoga – it all seemed to be just be able to do more yoga. I feel that way when I wonder about why we care so much about being healthy. Why lose weight? To be healthy. Why be healthy? To live longer in better health. For what though? What’s all this health ultimately for? Anyway – he finds an eerie analogy in the world of groceries and our god of convenience. What are we making everything so convenient FOR, ultimately?
Anyway I do love those philosophical questions. Like he said – thinking about food itself is just a distraction. ( )
What a contrast with my previous food read, Resetting the Table. I had a feeling I was being swayed too much towards buying this book based on the title. It is not my style at all; it’s just one bad thing listed after another. Everything that has ever happened to our food system since the dawn of history has been bad – did you know that? I don’t care how many facts may be in it; I never find unbalanced works like this to be educational.
I thought that midway through we would finally shift gears towards directing the barbs merely at the junk food industry, but the general negativity towards all modern agriculture never ceased.
I would love to get Bittman and Paarlberg together for a debate. Here are just a few ways they would explicitly part company:
– Normal Borlaug, leader of the “Green Revolution.” To Bittman, he “virtually ignor(ed) what was traditionally grown” in his blind zest for bringing in chemical fertilizers and pesticdes.
– Whether organic farming yields would fall far short of levels that could effectively feed the world’s current population – Bittman calls it “a moronic argument”.
– Whether Alice $100-a-plate, I-never-step-foot-in-a-supermarket Waters has anything of value to teach us about food systems
I had to rub my eyes in disbelief when I read this on page 243: “Although it’s immoral and cruel, and overseen by mostly immoral and cruel people – only a few of whom were sadistic masterminds – the [food] system is largely the result of incremental decisions…” What?! People who work in modern food businesses are “mostly immoral and cruel”? “Mostly”! You might think the majority of them misguided. But “immoral” and “cruel” are some really nasty words to depict “most” people overseeing an industry. ( )
Considering the fact that SAPIENS by Yuval Noah Harari was one of the best books I have read, EVER, I expected to love this graphical interpretation at least a little a bit. A problem is that I tend to be annoyed by graphic novels. They feel gimmicky. And this one was high on gimmick factor. It didn’t just illustrate Harari’s ideas… it introduced a young inquisitive niece character, Zoe; and an obese Indian woman scientist who carried a small dog everywhere. I honestly have no idea why. Any of it.
Most of the time I felt the book was at the level of the Zoe character – for children; older, genuinely science-curious children, but still… children. (Notwithstanding lots of nudity.) I kept wondering what I was getting out of it.
But in the end – though it seems I always have to spend a lot of any review being a nattering nabob of negativity – I DID get things out of it. It made me think about us all being animals… evolving from and with animals… animals, our brothers, our OLDER brothers, as I read in another scientific book of a different stripe recently, BRAIDING SWEETGRASS. Here in the graphic SAPIENS, the pictures did add something more than a gimmick, I have to admit: I remember a picture of a doe-eyed doe, and it made me think about being a nearly-evolved sapiens looking that doe in the eye, as an equal.
Another idea still persisting in my mind: “Our brains are still adapted for life as hunter-gatherers. Our eating habits, our conflicts, and our sexuality are all the result of our hunter-gatherer minds grappling with a post-industrial world.” I can’t be blamed for the fact that I simply cannot resist a plate of fries or a pie crust when they are sitting right in front of me. The hunter-gatherer in me would KILL – literally! – for that amount of delicious fat.
Also: One reason we can’t look at modern-day hunter-gatherers as a stand-in for what life was like for our early ancestors is that what’s left of today’s foragers are all living in the most marginal places. “Modern forager societies have mostly survived in regions with difficult climatic conditions, and inhospitable terrain that doesn’t lend itself to agriculture.” I’ve always tended to think of hunting-gathering with a big fat “No, thanx!” Agriculture is my favorite invention. When people talk about eating wild foodstuffs, it’s about as appealing to me as dumpster diving. Yay, a handful of fiddleheads, some mushrooms that hopefully don’t poison us; and maybe, if it is exactly the right time of year, some really seedy blackberries! Sounds WONDERFUL! Please, bring on the agriculture already.
But the hunter-gatherers in pre-agricultural times weren’t all trying to make a living on my 3 acres in Vermont. Think about our most fertile agricultural land, our most abundant seacoasts and forests. They lived in the good places. I’m not saying food was as thick on the ground as it is in your intensively cultivated plot of garden, maybe; but then again, maybe it wasn’t far from it, either.
They lived in the good places, and they lived all over the world. Before agriculture, think about it – we were already everywhere. We had an abundance of lifestyles and cultures, just like today. We just didn’t live in towns, or on farms. We all just lived on the land. Like the animals. Because that’s what we are. ( )
“Every life contains millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. The books are portals to all the lives you could be living.”
Thus the premise of THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY. Nora hovers between life & death, and is given the opportunity to explore the books in the eponymous library, and live bits of some of the other lives she could have lived.
“You do realize there are infinite possibilities here?” says a fellow traveler. “… It’s not about a million or a billion or a trillion universes. It’s about an infinite number of universes. Even with you in them… [T]his is an opportunity and it is rare and we can undo any mistake we made, live any life we want. Any life. Dream big… You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.”
But the real lesson:
“[M]aybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths… And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people & other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good & bad…
There are patterns to life… Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that could immunise you against sadness. & that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness… But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever.” ( )
This is a spiritual nature book. I don’t normally do well with nature books; and when this one devoted an entire chapter to lichen, or the different sizes of drops of water depending on their tannic content, I was glazing over. I read it for the Native American spiritual aspect, which offers some beautiful perspectives.
The best one of all came right in the introduction:
“Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world by standing silent in the sun.” Such a beautiful thought! In snow-covered February in particular.
Here is another: what the earth gives to us is a gift, and consider how differently we often feel about an object when we have received it as a gift. Kimmerer tells of a dream where she walked through a vivid Andean outdoor market, and picked up a fresh bunch of cilantro. When she went to pay, she was gestured away. It turned out everything in the market was being given away as a gift. She found herself being careful not to take too much; and she found herself wondering what presents she might bring to give to the (non-)vendors the next day. We should view the earth that way.
Then there is the chapter “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”. Her ancestral language, Potawatomi, uses “he/she” pronouns for almost everything, certainly all plant and animal life; the “it” pronoun is reserved for things that truly and beyond a doubt have no life, like a piece of plastic. How might we feel differently if we called the trees “he” or “she” instead of “it”? She asked how one would feel if someone referred to her grandmother as “it”. “It is making soup. It has gray hair.” It would be kind of funny, and definitely disrespectful. It certainly makes me feel funny just to think about it. It’s wrong. She feels it is just as wrong to call a tree an “it”! Try thinking about it next time you wander and ponder outdoors. How might we be treating the earth differently if our language called the trees and plants and all growing things “he” or “she”?
The Potawatomi language is also very heavy on verbs. There’s a verb for “to be red.” “To be a hill.” And her favorite, “To be a bay.” Very frustrating to learn! But notice how it animates everything.
It may seem off topic, but things are converging to bring me closer and closer to a vegetarian lifestyle. I ponder her sentence, “I wish I could photosynthesize… doing the work of the world.” Plants do the work of the world. What parasites on them the rest of us are – without plants, we are doomed! What a gift to have so many plants to eat. To eat any higher on the food chain, to eat not the plants but the things that eat the plants… seems very, I don’t know, out of tune and needlessly complicated and far removed from the “work of the world.”
I find myself taking this to heart, the ‘gift economy’ that is the bounty of the earth, the animation of all things, and I find myself nightly thinking back over the day and, silly as it sounds, saying thank you, oats and banana… thank you, apple and grapes… And with 32 days till spring equinox, I long to see the plants return and do the work of the world; I’m sure I will see them with new eyes.
This really inspired me to be more vegetable-forward.
Written in the form of Q&A, where the Q comes from a rhetorical person asking leading questions (like, “Huh?”), and the A from co-authors Mark Bittman, of cookbook fame, and David Katz MD. But they all read like they come from the MD.
The theme is sensible advice about what to eat. Sometimes it got too bogged down in nutritional science for me. And my big quibble… there’s always a big quibble, here it comes:
They make the mistake of lionizing ‘traditional’ ways of eating without addressing the whole grains issue. Traditionally speaking, for as long as humanity has been raising grain crops, we’ve been trying to come up with ways to get the yucky outer hulls off, in order to make flour with just the beautiful creamy white middle of the grain. In Asia they’ve been polishing their rice for hundreds, thousands of years? And I’ve been to Italy three times, to three different regions. I never once saw whole wheat pasta. I can imagine what the natives would say to that (namely, “Fa schifo!” – disgusting).
So yes, encourage consumption of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Just don’t call it Mediterranean and don’t worship the ‘traditional’. The authors are constantly reminding us, after all, that we evolved to like calorie-dense foods; and they give the obvious reasons why (a few too many times). I wish the rhetorical questioner would have asked why we evolved to prefer refined grains, because we obviously did.
And what about tofu, after all? They say there “seems” to be something good about it, and call it “minimally processed.” Seems like a highly processed foodstuff to me. Tofu has such a reputation for being good and healthy, and I have no reason to think it’s not; but it seems to be a big fat exception to the rule of not eating “processed” foods.
Still and all it WAS an inspiring book. I really hope to start eating meals that are more plant-focused, and yes, more whole-grain-focused as well. I am glad to hear them encourage the eating of ‘carbs’ (albeit whole grain ones). Starches have indeed been the Staff of Life since agriculture began! ( )
Very difficult to describe Allie Brosh if you’ve never seen her work. Take a look at the cover… that’s her, the star of the show.
I’ll open up to a random-to-me page, the exact middle of the book. It’s a series of panels depicting her and her little sister during memorable childhood moments. No text. Allie’s sister ended up dying by violent suicide, so it’s heavy. That, plus some serious health problems or her own, plus a divorce leaving her living a very reclusive life, plus her basic sad nihilism, form the basis of the (lack of) story.
I feel I’m not doing a very good job of talking it up. It’s an amazing piece of work. ( )
Eleanor Oliphant, misfit with a scarred face and hands, 30 years old living alone in Glasgow. Very alone – her only companions being vodka, and weekly calls from “Mummy” – a total bastard of a woman who torments Eleanor with put-downs and reminders of a horrible past tragedy.
As happens in novels, a Series of Events unfolds to slowly change things. There’s an odd friendship with an IT guy at work; an old man’s heart attack in the street that he and Eleanor witness together; and a crush Eleanor develops on a local singer. Together they form the whirlwind that finally sends Eleanor first to rock-bottom before lifting her towards becoming possibly, finally, maybe not completely, fine.
She’s a real pip. And Raymond, the IT guy, is a doll. ( )
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Tytania 