Can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic?
Michael Pollan, talking about the way we talk about food, specifically, the bullshitting/storytelling endemic to Southern barbecue culture (which is part of its charm, right?).
Tag: michaelpollan
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (review: 2.5/5)
By now you’ve probably heard Michael Pollan‘s seven words of advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the book he spends 150 pages talking about nutritionism, reductionist food science, and the negative health effects of the Western diet. In the last 50 pages he finally gets around to expanding just a little bit on those opening words.
If I may do my broken record routine, there are some books that are/would be much better as a long article. This is one—Pollan wrote it a year and a half ago in his New York Times Magazine article Unhappy Meals. Or you can get the gist from Pollan’s entertaining talk at Google. In making an excellent 12-page article 20 times longer, he retreads a lot of the same ground.
One prime example is this bit of repetition, within the space of 2 pages, when he’s writing about farmer’s markets and locally grown produce: “What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of their taste and nutritional quality.” And one paragraph later: “When you eat from a farmer’s market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious.” And in the very next paragraph: “Local produce is typically picked ripe and is fresher than supermarket produce, and for those reasons it should be tastier and more nutritious.”
It kills me.
Not to say he’s a bad writer. He isn’t. (I did enjoy The Botany of Desire.) This one comes up a bit thin and repetitive. Maybe he wrote it to turn a buck. Maybe just because he’s fascinated and loves to write about it. Maybe he did it to have good ideas spread even wider and with a longer lifespan (and these are good ideas). But it’s frustrating to read.
On the upside, I like his mention of parking lot science:
“…for a long time cholesterol was the only factor linked to heart disease that we had to the tools to measure. (This is sometimes called parking-lot science, after the legendary fellow who loses his keys in a parking lot and goes looking for them under the streetlight—not because that’s where he lost them but because that’s where it’s easiest to see.)”
And I really liked his suggestion that Wonder Bread “scarcely waits to be chewed before transforming itself into glucose”.
The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5)
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing it would’ve made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase “literary nonfictioni” for work like this, but I’m a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it’s for losers. It’s pretentious, for one thing, and it’s a bore. Which is to say, it’s exactly the opposite of the writing it’s trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing “literary nonfiction” is like daring you to read it.
Not only is it a pretty good collection, but almost all of them are available online, in their entirety. Someone is listening to my prayers. My comments on each, roughly listed from Must Read to Don’t Bother…
“Losing the War” is easily my favorite work in the book (made obvious by the dog-ears). And I tend to have severe World War II nausea, so I was surprised to like it so much. Lee Sandlin explores the “collective anxiety attack” of the war, the impressions of the war that Americans got through the weak, cheerful reporting from the frontlines, and how we remember and how we forget. Highly recommended.
In one of the better tales in the book, Michael Lewis wrote about “Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.” Lebed, at 15 years old, was called out by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock market manipulation and doesn’t seem very much phased by it. Fun story.
Jack Hitt‘s “Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit” is another good one that covers ballooning litigation over the Stringfellow Acid Pit, a local dumping ground made to spur business. Naturally, with a name like that, you’re going to end up with a lawsuit. This one has 4,000 plaintiffs and doesn’t look to end anytime soon. Recommended.
Susan Orlean profiles a ten-year-old in “The American Man, Age Ten.” Interesting voice in this one.
Michael Pollan bought a cow and writes about its journey from birth to beef in “Power Steer.” And he touches on how our food chain all interconnects and the twin scourges of oil and cheap corn.
Though I’m not much for card games, I did like James McManus‘ story in “Fortune’s Smile.” McManus learns the ins and outs of no-limit hold’em and enters the World Series of Poker, and walks out with $250,000. A lot of the lingo flew over my head, but the spirit is right and the story is good.
“Tales of the Tyrant” is Mark Bowden‘s profile of Saddam Hussein. The scale of the vanity and self-delusion are incredible. It makes the guy a lot more human and a lot more disgusting. Pretty good read.
“Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” is Chuck Klosterman‘s profile of Val Kilmer. I’d recommend it, keeping in mind what Ira Glass says about Klosterman in the introduction: When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out.”
“Shapinsky’s Karma” [excerpt] by Lawrence Weschler follows an improbably cheerful, persistent Indian man who has found his calling in promoting the artwork of Harold Shapinksy, an undiscovered peer of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, who is in his 80s at the time.
Bill Buford reports on hanging out with a bunch of rowdy Manchester United loyalists in “Among the Thugs.” It takes a while to warm up, but the later bits about group psychology and inevitable soccer mob violence are good (and downright scary).
“Host,” by David Foster Wallace, is the longest in the book (surprise!). It’s a profile of a conservative radio personality in California. I couldn’t get much into it, but I do like this bit from one of the many sidebars:
It’s hard to understand Fox News tags like “Fair and Balanced,” “No-Spin Zone,” and “We Report, You Decide” as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel’s conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seems dim, humorless, and stodgy.
Dan Savage‘s “My Republican Journey” is about being homosexual and infiltrating a local Republican group. Eh.
“Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” is Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of one woman’s social network. Not recommended.
“The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot” by Coco Henson Scales is okay, but feels out of place here and doesn’t measure up to the other writing in the book.
Michael Pollan talked with Google last month about his latest book, In Defense of Food. He’s funnier than I expected. My doodles:
Michael Pollan has condensed his writing into a little manifesto on eatin’ right.
The Botany of Desire (review: 3.5/5)
This Sunday I read Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire. The book is a natural history of man and four plants: the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. Now that I think of it, this might be the only life-science book I’ve ever for recreation, but there are certainly worse places to begin.
Michael Pollan is not only a writer, but a gardener. Throughout the four sections he draws on history, biography, genetics, economics, biotechnology, and culture at large in a delightfully consilient manner. The high botanical drama of man’s Apollonian quest for order versus his yielding to Dionysian revelry is interwoven with Pollan’s own personal experience.
While it is not a dedicated study of eco-issues, the work is nicely book-ended with thoughts on the man-environment interaction–the plants we domesticate, and the ways we are subtly domesticated in turn. I particularly like the discussion of “wildness” and “wilderness,” and some provoking thoughts on intoxication. I thought the apple section was the most interesting, but Pollan reaches his most filligreed and gushing moments in the chapter on the tulip. The potato section was a bit bland, but perhaps that is to be expected. Overall, the book is an interesting romp.
Mark Larson 