Books

Some of you may know that my library card is a fairly recent occurrence. Well, let me rephrase that... My most recent library card is a fairly recent occurrence. I had a library card when we first moved here. I have been known to joke that if my fines had been made all at once as a donation, they would have a wing, or at least a reading room, named after me. Only it isn't really a joke... I wasn't responsible enough for a library card. I got rid of all library cards.

Then, encouraged by my library-going friends who were always reading the latest books, I made a pledge to be good and got a card. I relapsed once and have had one fine (less than $5) during the time I have had this new card.

You may have noticed from the list at right that my choices lately have been themed. Food and Michael Connelly. The Michael Connelly's are the Harry Bosch series about a an L.A. detective named Hieronymous Bosch. I stumbled on one in the middle and then started at the beginning on audiobook last summer while knitting D's birthday blanket. There is something nice about reading a long series start to finish.

Of the books in the food theme, the two most recent are really good! The first, In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan was so good that on just about every page I was thinking, "Oh, I need to remember this for the blog." Finally, I realized that would be a good example of plagiarism, so I will just summarize and HIGHLY RECOMMEND it.

His premise is that most of what is in the grocery store is so processed that it really doesn't count as food--he calls it "food-like substances." He then goes on to talk about the wholeness of what he considers real food and how our society came instead to think of food as a set of discrete nutrients. The only problem with that is the hubris of science in thinking that we understood what the nutrients were. It turns out there were more of them than they first thought. Ok, so NOW we have the complete picture. Ooops! No, there are other important nutrients. NOW we have them all. Wait, no. This one doesn't work the same without that one. And maybe there is another something, that has to be there, too... Better, he says to follow this rule. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Pollan talks about the reasons for our culture's desire to find the elements of food that are important and isolate them, recreate them, exalt them and demonize them. It's a similar story to the cautions in Laurel's Kitchen about how ridiculous to create foods that have been highly processed, taking out the nutrients, and then fortify them to put the nutrients back in. But Pollan looks at the history behind doing this and the cultural beliefs and economic pressures that led to it.

I'll talk about the other book, Farm City: The education of an urban farmer, in a future post.