Book report 6

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

This book provided the escape into fiction that I’ve been seeking.  It’s the story of a family who finds their life performing gator wrestling shows on their remote swamp island obviated by the death of the mother, their star performer, and the opening of a modern amusement part on the mainland.  Most of the story is told from the perspective of the pre-pubescent daughter who dreads leaving the island for suburban life and sets out on an adventure to the underworld to save her family.  There’s just enough of the surreal to make the book fun without verging into the realm of being a ridiculous ghost story.  Good fun, and sufficiently compelling that I barely put it down until I finished it.

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The title refers to the challenge we as humans face deciding what from the variety of foods available to us is good to eat.  While some animals, like koalas or whales, have specialised diets, we are more like rats, nibbling a bit of this and that to see what kills us.  Somewhere in the world, just about every plant and animal has been classified as food, even when requiring elaborate preparations to nullify toxins or to make them digestible.  To illustrate a few common decisions made daily by Americans about what to eat, Pollan attempts to trace the origins of three meals: a family feed at Mc Donald’s, a home-cooked meal from Whole Foods ingredients, and a painstaking hunter-gatherer feast. 

Discussion of the Mc Donald’s meal leads to a description of what the author calls the industrial food chain.  Prior to the 1970s, farm aid primarily took the form of government loans to help farmers survive years of bad crops.  However, in the mid-1970s, a few years of good weather saw crop prices drop, which lead farmers to withhold some production.  The resulting increase in the retail price of groceries lead to demonstrations by angry shoppers that got the attention of the government.  Nixon’s secretary for agriculture solved the problem in the short term by changing the structure of farm aid to setting a floor on crop prices, with the government paying farmers the gap between that floor and actual market price.  This encouraged farmers to produce regardless of market conditions and to consolidate into ever-larger farms focusing on single crops, primarily corn.

Most of this section of the book talks about how prevalent corn is in American diets, even though we don’t see it.  The surplus of cheap corn lead food producers to develop new ways to use it, such as in preservatives, as animal feed, in ethanol, and in artificial sweeteners.  Corn as animal feed enabled factory farming as farmers were no longer limited by the amount of feed their own land could produce through pastures.  None of this is inherently bad; it’s more the secondary effects of overly sweetened, preserved foods on our national health, particularly on those in lower income brackets who consume a disproportionate amount of these inexpensive foods with negligible nutritional value, and the waste and cruelty associated with factory farming that should give us pause.

The second part of the book leads Pollan to explore a few of the brands he picks up in his local Whole Foods, whose labels suggest they are produced in agrarian paradises.  What he finds is that the “organic” label has evolved to mean something quite different from what the original small farmers who were trying to create a new way of looking at food and community intended.  Most organic fruits and vegetables are now produced by one of only a few large corporations, and organic meat is produced on factory farms that look very much like other factory farms.  The only real difference is the pesticides and antibiotics employed, which depending on a consumer’s concerns may still be very meaningful.

At this point, a handful of farmers view their practices as “beyond organic”, and the author spends a week working with one of them.  His animals are pasture-fed, and he raises a variety of plants and animals that are inextricably linked in an efficient chain of production.  If food, particularly meat, was produced this way, it would be more expensive but infinitely more sustainable.  Steak or even chicken with dinner would be a treat again, the way it was 30 years ago before factory farming artificially drove down the cost of meat.  The price of food would once again take into account hidden costs like environmental degradation through single-crop farming and animal waste disposal.

Strangely, he uses the existence of these “beyond organic” farms to argue against being vegetarian or vegan, even though most of us don’t even have access to this kind of meat and dairy, and he admits that even the farmer with whom he worked had to employ an industrial slaughterhouse with questionable practices for his beef and pork.  Given the first two-thirds of the book, I was genuinely shocked at his conclusions and almost antagonistic tone, which probably contributed to my being defensive and shutting off a bit for the remainder of the book.

It might also be that the last third of the book was just boring.   There were a hundred pages about hunting for mushrooms in the forest, and the rest was a florid discussion of the thrills of hunting.  If you’re going to eat meat, killing and butchering it yourself is probably the most honest way to go about it, but it’s still not something I’m likely to ever try.

Although I disagreed with some of the conclusions he drew, I learned some interesting facts about food along the way, and it’s made me think more about what I eat.  For example, did you know that the only fuel your brain can consume is sugar, which is why we continue to crave sweet foods even after we’re too full to eat other things?  That’s why dessert is at the end of the meal; we’ll almost always “make room” in a way we wouldn’t for an extra helping of bread, meat, or veggies.  In conjunction with the inexpensive supply of artificial corn-based sweeteners, this is why food manufacturers are constantly looking for new sweet products which we will be biologically compelled to over-consume. 

Breakfast is often sugary enough on its own, but I almost never finish lunch or dinner without having at least a small piece of dark chocolate (and more often a few).  As such, I decided to try cutting out sweets for a bit.  I’m not so mental as to try to eliminate sugar entirely, since that would mean giving up things like bread and PBJ; I’m just forgoing that sweet little taste after meals.  In these first few days, it’s been more difficult behaviourally than biologically, showing that I eat dessert out of habit rather than from need, but it will be interesting to observe the effects over the coming days.  All bets are off, though, when we get to Carnavon, famous for chocolate dipped bananas, mango smoothies, and black sapote ice cream!

Charles Kingsford Smith and Others by Peter FitzSimons

I’ve been wanting to read this book for several years and was happy to finally get the chance to figure out why the Sydney airport was named after this guy.  Although the book asserts that his fame was equal to that of Lindbergh, I’d never heard of him until coming to Australia.  His feats, like being the first pilot to circumnavigate Australia and cross the Pacific, were impressive, but I think the fact that he flew with a crew instead of alone and made stops along the way kept him from capturing the public imagination in the same way that Lindbergh did.  The support of the PR machine that is the US media probably didn’t hurt Lindbergh either.

FitzSimons does an excellent job of communicating the risks taken by pilots in the era following World War I when flying records were set one month and exceeded the next as technology and pilot skill increased exponentially.  It really took guts to be a pioneer like Kingsford Smith and set out on these adventures over the bones and wreckage of fallen colleagues.  Unfortunately, this constant psychological strain, combined his experiences during the war, lead to Kingsford Smith’s demise after two decades in the air, but it’s a hell of a story along the way.  Given the number of people who died flying in the early days, it's amazing how many were willing to be pioneers in this area.  Without them, we never would have gone from the first powered flight to a man on the moon in just 66 years.  And we think technology moves quickly now!