Tag: nonfiction

Endlessly fascinating! I know, it sounds cliché, but it accurately describes this read. Every time I sat down to read it, I was engaged, tuned in, and thinking about my relationship with food (a relationship that is somewhat warped). I think that’s what Pollan is trying to do here, just give you information so you can think about what ties you and your food together. He nails it big time and although I’m not going to make any major changes in my eating habits immediately, I have a feeling that this book will stick in my mind forever and certainly change how I view what I shovel into my gullet.

Warning, this is an aside! Before I launch into my take on this book, I need to mention something about really great nonfiction and really great fiction. I’m never as captivated by really great nonfiction as I am by really great fiction. This book still took me a few weeks to read and it’s one of the best chunks of nonfiction I’ve read in years. Contrast this to a little piece of Scalzi’s sci-fi that I read while I was reading this book; I banged through it in a matter of days. I just get along a little better with fiction, I guess.

Pollan structures this book as a description of four meals that he consumes with family and friends. He uses each meal as a mechanism to describe four different ways that food can get to your plate. He digs deep, and goes way back to the original speck of energy that indirectly caused the origination of that morsel of food you’re going to put in your mouth. In the process, he goes on numerous thoughtful and often humorous diatribes about various social and ethical consequences of eating what we eat. It’s not preaching at all, it’s just discussing. I think he does a good job of looking at things from multiple angles.

The four meals in order are:

1. Industrial (burgers, fries, and McNuggets in the car on a California expressway, with wife and son)
2. Organic Industrial (oven roasted chicken and vegetables, steamed asparagus, organic ice cream and organic blackberries, all purchased from Whole Foods, with wife and son)
3. Grass Fed (grill roasted chicken and sweet corn, chocolate souffle, from Polyface Farm in Virginia, with friends)
4. Perfect Meal (wild California pig, slain by Pollan himself, hand picked greens, Bing cherry cake, with fellow hunters and gatherers and wife and son)

Think of these meals as a continuum – a continuum from most processed (McDonald’s) to least processed (wild pig), from higher on the food chain to lower, and from industrial to private. Do not interpret this order as going from unhealthy to healthy, unsustainable to sustainable, or ethically wrong to ethically virtuous. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if many interpret it this way. Pollan, at times, may come off as self-righteous with an agenda, but I think he tempers it with a grasp of reality. I read it with an open mind and I haven’t checked any of his facts. I assume they are mostly correct because this book hasn’t been met with any noticeable public outcry from, say, the beef industry or McDonald’s. But like any work of nonfiction, or news story, read it with skepticism.

So on to the four meals. The basis for the industrial meal is corn, and Pollan explores it in detail in the first quarter of the book. I knew I was going to like this book when I came across a few interesting gems like the following within the first 30 pages.

On where the term corned beef came from:

… Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt – hence “corned beef”. …

On where the term corn hole came from:

… the shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”)

Eventually Pollan converts to a very serious tone when discussing corn. The “corniness” of his family’s meal from McDonald’s is probably higher than you think.

Some time later I found another way to to calculate just how much corn we had eaten that day. I asked Todd Dawson, a biologist at Berkeley, to run a McDonald’s meal through his mass spectrometer and calculate how much of the carbon in it came originally from a corn plant. … soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (28 percent). …

I never thought of corn this way. Even if you don’t agree or trust his facts (and he recites a ton of data), this book will make you think of corn differently. You will make the link between fossil fuels and corn production, between government subsidies and corn production, between obesity and corn production, and between the environment and corn production. Links that may be debated as to their direct or indirect effect on the well-being of humanity, but thought-provoking and worthy of consideration nonetheless. He sums the corn/industrial section up with:

… America’s corn-fed food chain looks like an unalloyed disaster. I mentioned earlier that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition for the energy captured by plants and stored as carbohydrates, energy we measure in calories. There is a limit to how many of those calories the world’s arable land can produce in a year, and an industrial meal of meat and processed food consumes – and wastes – an unconscionable amount of that energy. To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do), is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90% of its energy is lost – to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken. This is why vegetarians advocate eating “low on the food chain”; every step in the food chain reduces the amount of energy by a factor of ten, which is why in any food system there are only a fraction as many predators as there are prey. But processing food also burns energy. What this means is that the amount of food energy lost in the making of something like a Chicken McNugget could feed a great many more children that just mine. …

The thing is, despite his tone, I don’t expect him to give up McDonald’s, especially since his son likes it. He left me with the impression that he’s open-minded about it all; that if his kid says “hey dad, let’s get a McNugget meal,” Pollan would grab a salad and maybe even a small order of fries, and think nothing of it.

Corn falls by the wayside, but the term industrial hangs around for the next quarter of the book because Pollan uses it as a modifier for his organic meal. He unearths a fair amount of hypocrisy occurring in our country’s recent obsession with organic and discusses the facts and perceptions around the term. Here is a synopsis:

And yet, and yet…an industrial organic meal such as mine does leave deep footprints on our world. The lot of the workers who harvested the vegetables and gathered up Rosie for slaughter is not appreciably different from that of those on non-organic factory farms. The chickens lived only marginally better lives than their conventional counterparts; in the end a CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] is a CAFO, whether the food served in it is organic or not. As for the cows that produced the milk in our ice cream, they may well have spent time outdoors in an actual pasture…, but the organic label guarantees no such thing. And while the organic farms I visited don’t receive direct government payments, they do receive other subsidies from taxpayers, notably subsidized water and electricity in California. …

But perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart. Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked in Arizona…to the moment I walk it out the doors of my Whole Foods. …

… And so, today, the organic food industry finds itself in a most unexpected, uncomfortable, and, yes unsustainable position: floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.

He spends more time on this topic and weighs the pros and cons of going organic, industrial, or industrial organic. This gets kind of tiresome and circuitous, but makes a lot of sense when he moves on to the next meal; the grass fed meal based on ingredients from Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia.

Pollan had heard about Polyface Farm in his research so he called up Salatin and requested to purchase a steak and have it Fedexed to Pollan’s home. Salatin said no, because Fedexing a steak was explicitly against his code of ethics. Salatin says:

“Just because we can ship organic lettuce from the Salinas Valley, or organic cut flowers from Peru, doesn’t mean we should do it, not if we’re really serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism.

The interesting thing is that Salatin’s Polyface Farm makes no claims about being organic and Salatin actually detests the word.

… Polyface Farm is technically not and organic farm, though by any standard it is more “sustainable” than virtually any organic farm. Its example forces you to think a lot harder about what these words – sustainable, organic, natural – really mean.

Thus we embark upon what I think is the most fascinating part of this book: the stories of Pollan’s time on Polyface Farm. This Salatin guy refers to himself as an “alternative farmer” or as a “grass farmer.” He basically uses the ecosystem on his farm to maximize his use of the land. Here is a passage that I think is important:

It isn’t hard to see why there isn’t much institutional support for the sort of low-capital, thought-intensive farming that Joe Salatin practices: He buys next to nothing. When a livestock farmer is allowed to “practice complexity” – to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to – he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds that he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

One the coolest examples is the way they have the chickens graze on the same area that cattle have after a three or four day lag. Salatin says “…you’ll always find birds following herbivores…that’s a symbiotic relationship we’re trying to imitate.” Pollan elaborates:

… It seems the chickens eschew fresh manure, so he waits three or four days before bringing them in – but not a day longer. That’s because the fly larvae in the manure are on a four-day cycle, he explained. “Three days is ideal. That gives the grubs a chance to fatten up nicely, the way the hens like them, but not quite long enough to hatch into flies.” The result is prodigious amounts of protein for the hens, the insects supplying as much as a third of their total diet – and making their eggs unusually rich and tasty. By means of this simple little management trick, Joel is able to use his cattle’s waste to “grow” large quantities of high-protein chicken feed for free; he says this trims his cost of producing eggs by twenty-five cents per dozen. … The cows further oblige the chickens by shearing the grass; chickens can’t navigate in grass more than about six inches tall.

Incredible isn’t it? I thought this was so cool, but it’s only one of the tasty morsels Pollan serves up in the Polyface Farm section. I’ll let you read it because we have to get to the meal that he hunts and forages for himself.

This hunting and foraging starts out with Pollan talking about our omniverousness, how being omniverous effects our physiology and psychology, and just how messed-up our dietary habits are in America. He then branches off into the ethics of eating meat. All great, thought-provoking stuff. I have so many pages turned over for stuff I want to talk about that it’s overwhelming, so I’m not going to talk about it.

Anyway, it’s all just a build-up for his trip into the woods to hunt and kill the wild pig for dinner. Pollan, who is somewhat of a vegetarian, is surprised by his trip into the forest to hunt the pig. I love this passage describing the start of the hunt.

Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling with the signs of your prey is thrilling. It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true. I am not by nature much of a noticer, yet here, now, my attention to everything around me, and deafness to everything else, is complete. Nothing in my experience (with the possible exception of certain intoxicants) has prepared me for the quality of this attention. I notice how the day’s first breezes comb the needles in the pines, producing a sotto voce whistle and an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow tattooing the tree trunks and the ground. I notice the specific density of the air. But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention; it is a hungry attention, reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, like nerves. My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate, picking their way among the tangled branches, sliding over rocks and around stumps to bring back the slenderest hint of movement. In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes my ears roam at will, retuning with a the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine, or the snuffling of a …wait: What was that? Just a bird. Everything is amplified. Even my skin is alert, so that when the shadow launched by the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture passes overhead I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall. I am the alert man.

Eloquent, intense, and I can completely relate. Not because I hunt, because I don’t. But I play golf, which is stalking a different type of beast. You know what I mean if you’re passionate about golf.

He finally gets his pig. Pollan describes the fourth meal in great detail, the Perfect Meal. It is a great finish to a great book.

This is another suggestion by Nick Hornby (from reading Housekeeping vs. The Dirt). Hornby hasn’t done me wrong yet. In December of 1988, a group of terrorists planted a bomb on Pan Am flight 103 from Heathrow to New York. That plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland shortly after takeoff. None of the passengers survived. On that plane was a gentleman named David Dornstein. He was a 25 year old writer, actor, brother, son, boyfriend, Brown graduate, and all-around tortured soul. He was on his way home to Philadelphia to see his family.

David’s brother, Ken, was 19 years old when this happened. This book is partly Ken’s autobiographical account of how he dealt with David’s early death and partly Ken’s devotional to David, whom Ken loved very much. It’s sad man, really sad. But not sad in a way that you get choked up while reading it. In fact, the sadness of the story really didn’t hit me until I started banging this out.

Ken spent about 15 years going through David’s journals, talking to David’s friends and acquaintences, and visiting the places that David had been. David was a starving artist of epic proportions and he left a vast estate of journals. Ken pieces these journals together to give the story of David’s life and tells his own story along the way.

Ken doesn’t sugar coat anything. There is plenty of pain and suffering. For example, their mother had emotional problems and left before Ken and David were teen-agers. Around this time, David was apparently abused by an adult neighbor, which Ken does not find out about this until he starts reading the journals. There is an especially tense moment when Ken meets the perpetrator, but never brings up the accusations.

Ken also ends up building lasting relationships with two of David’s old girlfriends. In fact, he ends up marrying and starting a family with one of them. Ken loved his brother. And he finds out after his death just how much he loved him and how much that love was returned by David, even after his death. It’s not touching necessarily. I didn’t necessary feel any sympathy. It didn’t strike those chords with me. But I loved this book. It’s a slice of humanity that I just found kind of interesting.

Kerry Temple was a married father of two grown boys when his life unraveled in his “middle years.” By unravel, I mean divorce and estrangement from his sons. So he moved into a secluded cabin in the Northern Indiana countryside and tried to make sense of it all. The subtitle of the book is “A Backpacker’s Journey Into Self and Soul” and it’s a recounting of much of that time in the cabin. It’s also an exploration of how nature and outdoor adventures can be positive, influential forces in one’s life.

Before we dig into this, I’ve said it before, some day I’m going to hike the Appalachian Trail. This is a desire harbored in the deepest recesses of my brain, but I’m comfortable getting it out there; it was a hook for this book. The author is also an ND grad and editor of the ND Magazine, providing another hook. And finally, this book was referenced years ago in Outside magazine, a publication that I usually enjoy reading (even though I don’t subscribe).

The cabin I mentioned brackets the beginning and the end of the book. He talks about his stay at the cabin in the first few chapters, switches gears and devotes the middle chapters to his most memorable trips in the backcountry, and ends with his eviction from the cabin and subsequent building of a golf course on the land (I really want to know which golf course).

He writes in an artistic style with many references to the mysticism of the outdoors. This isn’t exactly what I expected because I thought it would be more about how he resolved his family problems through thoughtful meditation in the solitude of the outdoors. But his divorce and the after effects are not part of this book. This book is about his general relationship with the outdoors. Here is one of his thoughts near the end of the book:

My time here [the cabin] has shown me again what I discovered as a teenager loose on the land but had forgotten in those intervening years – that the landscape does offer spiritual sustenance, a sense of grace, and an avenue to the divine. Perhaps those two – the land and its spirit – are not that different. And the human race, in order to find redemption, to locate itself, to be at rest in the world, must find again the union of the two.

I think Temple’s intention throughout the book is to expand on two points from the quote above. First, think about what was special – what you valued – when you were younger and if you’re not living those ideals, figure out why not. Second, the science and technology of the modern world may hinder your pursuit of living a happy and satisfied life, but contemplative time in the woods can offset the destructive aspects of our “technoindustrial” society.

The beauty is that Temple never tells you these things or beats you over the head with these themes. It’s not a self-help book, it’s not an environmentalist rant, it’s a philosophical look at his own life and how his meanderings in both the modern world and the backcountry have affected him. He poses thoughts and retells experiences with wonderment and introspection. I got used to the tone within a few chapters and really enjoyed it.

It inspires me to live smaller, to minimize my impact on the globe, to find beauty in nature even if I don’t live in the woods. I’m sitting in my living room right now with the lights off just watching the snow fall with the city lights as a backdrop. It really is beautiful. In fact, I turned off the golf (Phoenix), in HD, believe it or not.

Ah, the short-awaited follow up to the aptly titled prequel Persepolis. I bought both in a two book set earlier this year and, as you’ve read, I really liked the first one a lot.

Young Marjane is now grown-up Marjane. She has certainly lost all of the innocence of youth. The book starts with Marjane attending high school in Austria, where she was sent at the end of the first book. She has a rocky time fitting in. She has bad luck with men, parties a lot, does a lot of drugs, and continues her rebellious ways. She reaches a low point at age 18 and spends two months on the streets of Vienna, basically homeless. It’s at this point that she decides that she needs to go back to her family in Iran.

Then the fun begins. She moves back to Tehran and upon arriving from Vienna, she notes:

After four years living in Vienna, here I am back in Tehran. From the moment I arrived at Mehrabad Airport and caught sight of the first customs agent, I immediately felt the repressive air of my country.

She struggles with her identity…she’s an Iranian living in the west…a westerner in Iran. She didn’t know who the hell she was so she swallowed a bottle of anti-depressants and really hit rock bottom. But she doesn’t die, and eventually cleans up her life. She starts working out and goes back to school. She comes to terms with the country and ends up spending 10 years there. She gets married and she gets divorced. The book ends with her departing for France, where she ends up living and still resides.

So I guess she really never came to terms with the life in Iran. I’m generally confused about how women living in a Muslim state feel about it. Are they angry, sad, happy, content? I think it’s a combination of all of those emotions. I don’t have any idea. Amongst the absurdity of everyday life, Marjane has a love for her country and her family so she gets along. She relates a lot of funny stories that are downright bizarre. For instance, from the book (illustrated in comics so you don’t get the full effect):

These absurd situations were quite frequent. One day, for example, I was supposed to go see my dentist, but classes finished later than expected.Suddenly I heard a voice over the loudspeaker,

“The lady in the blue coat, don’t run!”

“The lady in the blue coat, stop running!”

??

“Hey blue coat, stop running!”

Me?

“Madam, why were you running?”

I’m very late, I was running to catch my bus.

“Yes…but…when you run, your behind makes movements that are…how do you say…obscene!”

“WELL, THEN DON’T LOOK AT MY ASS!”

I yelled so loudly that they didn’t ever arrest me.

Wow, that is bizarre. She lives in France now and I’m interested to get an update. In the book, despite her occasional disagreements with Iran and the people, she never denounces Iran and clearly loves her home country. Here is her Wikipedia link with a few interesting interviews in the external links section.

Chock one up for the “stranger than fiction” genre. In June of 1962, Anna Slesers was found raped and strangled in her Boston home. Over the next 18 months, another eleven (or twelve) Boston area women were victims of roughly the same heinous crime. Most of these crimes were eventually attributed to a person known as the Boston Strangler, who kept Boston and the surrounding suburbs in a constant state of fear for years.

About nine months into this reign of terror, in March of 1963, Bessie Goldberg of Belmont, MA was raped and murdered, also in her own home. This had many ingredients of a Boston Strangler slaying and was particularly surprising because until then, Belmont had been a quiet, quaint, murder-free town. Upon hearing of the murder, Ellen Junger, a young mother living not far from Bessie Goldberg in Belmont, came home with one-year old Sebastian in tow and described the horrific crime to a carpenter named Al DeSalvo. DeSalvo was around Junger’s house often because he was assisting on construction of an addition to Junger’s home.

DeSalvo and the Jungers play important parts in this story. Al DeSalvo would eventually confess to eleven of the Boston Strangler murders. Sebastian Junger would eventually become a world-famous author and write a bestseller about the strange circumstances surrounding his mother, his home, the Boston Strangler, Al DeSalvo, and a man named Roy Smith.

Wait a second, who was Roy Smith? Well, Roy Smith was convicted for the murder of Bessie Goldberg.

What?

Yeah, the Goldberg rape and slaying would never be attributed to the Boston Strangler because there appeared to be overwhelming evidence that a petty criminal named Roy Smith was the perpetrator. Smith had admittedly been at the Goldberg home that day on a cleaning assignment and was seen by many exiting the Goldberg’s home shortly after the murder would have taken place. It appeared to be an open-and-shut case and Smith was eventually found guilty, but authorities couldn’t pin any of the other Strangler crimes on him.

The Strangler crimes continued and eventually DeSalvo confessed to the murders, except for Bessie Goldberg’s, after being indicted on several rape charges. Smith was already locked up at this time. The Roy Smith trial and the Al DeSalvo confession are the central parts of the book. Did Roy Smith kill Bessie Goldberg? Was Al DeSalvo really the Boston Strangler or a just a sick, serial rapist who read about the Strangler in the papers?

Junger delves into all of this stuff with a zeal of someone who was actually there but still can’t believe it happened. Here’s how he sums it up:

The story about Bessie Goldberg that I heard from my parents was that a nice old lady had been killed down the street and an innocent black man went to prison for the crime. Meanwhile – unknown to anyone – a violent psychopath named Al was working alone at our house all day and probably committed the murder.

He goes on to say:

As I did my research I came to understand that not only was this story far messier than the one I’d grown up with, but that I would never know for sure what had actually happened in the Goldberg house that day. Without DNA evidence Smith’s guilt or innocence would always be a matter of conjecture. By extension DeSalvo’s possible role in the murder would also be a matter of conjecture, and I would never know for sure how close I had come to losing my mother.

Both Al DeSalvo and Roy Smith are dead. DeSalvo was killed in prison in November 1973 after being stabbed in the chest 16 times. He was a bad man and remained a bad man in prison. Smith, however, was a model prisoner. He never got in to any trouble, supervised the prison kitchen, and completed a college degree. His sentence was commuted in August 1976, but he wasn’t able to enjoy his freedom long because he died from cancer a few days after he left prison.

Riveting stuff. Junger digs deep into all aspects of this tragedy. He’s a curious guy and goes off on interesting tangents. He brings to light the racial situation at the time. He tries to capture the effect of the Kennedy assassination (it occurred during the Roy Smith trial). He describes in detail the legal differences between homicide, murder, manslaughter and all the permutations thereof. He digs into the American prison system, the death sentence, and the insanity defense. He throws in some interesting history on Boston, Belmont, and Oxford, Mississippi. It’s just an endless stream of well-researched, important information that I wish I could retain more of. It’s a lot to pack in to 266 pages. Reading it is well worth the time.

This is the story of Jeff and Beth Alt, a young couple who hiked the John Muir trail (JMT) in California to increase depression awareness after Beth’s brother committed suicide. They did it back in 2003 and you could follow along via the website, but it looks like they’ve since taken it down and replaced it with marketing content. Jeff, the narrator, takes you through every step of the 211 mile journey with a good mix of seriousness and humor.

This book has been on my list of books to read for a long time but I don’t have any idea how it got there. Beth is from Chicago and the local Chicago papers gave it some pub, so I may have heard about it that way. They both live in Cincinnati and Jeff has family in Toledo, so I may have seen or heard about when I was home visiting (my hometown is Findlay, Ohio). Or I could have stumbled upon it in the the book reviews of Outside Magazine, which I grab occasionally when wandering through airports.

I harbor a near-secret desire to hike the Appalachian Trail someday, so I was drawn to this book (Jeff did the AT prior to this book and wrote about it). I’ve been on a few backpacking trips and have the pictures to prove it, but backpacking never took hold with Gail. I eventually sold all of my backpacking gear.

The John Muir trail is a big undertaking because of the altitude. You regularly hike above the tree line (around 10,000 feet) and instances of altitude sickness are common even among the very fit. There are plenty of tree-less mountain passes that are especially rigorous and dangerous. By comparison, I think the Appalachian trail maxes out at maybe 6,000 feet above sea level. But with the difficulty of the JMT comes the reward of some of the most remote and beautiful wilderness in the US. I’ve never been there, but my dad has preached of Yosemite’s beauty and Jeff the narrator certainly describes it with awe.

This is a cool book. It’s self-published (I think) so there are typos (at least in my version). It’s a very folksy look at a serious adventure for a good cause. It was a lot of fun for me. At some point I will do an extended backpacking trip, mark my words.