Foods and Fools

So it looks as if sustainable food guru Michael Pollan, whose bestselling In Defense of Food picks up where The Omnivore’s Dilemma left off, has ticked off agribusiness yet again—so much, in fact, that they’ve pressured Cal Poly to transform a Pollan talk into a roundtable discussion featuring their own representatives.

Figures. Trying to help people become slim and healthy runs afoul of the multi-billion-dollar industries—not only food production but advertising, dieting, and medicine—that profit from keeping people fat and sick.

In a sane society, Pollan’s book would be entirely uncontroversial. (In fact, truth be told, it’s a bit dull.) In Defense of Food exposes the perils of “nutritionist” thinking—that is, the assumption that what matters to human health is the individual nutrient instead of the whole food. As Pollan shows, this belief that “foods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts” abets the preposterous health claims that scream from the packages of the unhealthiest of food products: claim that Snack Wells or Cocoa Puffs are full of some nutrient or other, and you can convince people they’re eating healthy when they stuff their faces with junk. Hence what Pollan calls “the American paradox: a notably unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.”

Where Pollan’s argument sticks in the craw of the food industry is in his claim that “the chronic diseases that now kill most of us”—coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer—“can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food: the rise of highly processed foods and refined grains; the use of chemicals to raise plants and animals in huge monocultures; the superabundance of cheap calories of sugar and fat produced by modern agriculture; and the narrowing of the biological diversity of the human diet to a tiny handful of staple crops, notably wheat, corn, and soy.” Against this backdrop, the ideology of nutritionism can offer only partial and quick fixes: a little less saturated fat here, a little more Omega-3 fatty acids there. By contrast, Pollan argues that we are “in need of a whole new way of thinking about eating,” a way that emphasizes whole foods over processed food products, that privileges local and organic farming, and that changes our rituals surrounding food consumption from our current “grab and gulp” mentality to a culture of family- and community-oriented dining.

So essentially, what Pollan is saying is that we should grow our own food (or at least know by name those who do); that we should eat lots of fruits and vegetables; and that we should sit around the dinner table with our families and friends when we eat. That such advice could be seen as radical and threatening is simply a measure of how distant we as a culture have become from the reality—and sanity—of our ancestors.

Dove Bomba

This is a follow-up to my recent post about the Obama Peace Prize lunacy. As I mentioned earlier, I do some political cartooning on the side (mostly for the newspaper of The Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh's peace and social justice hub), and I thought you might enjoy this one.

Online Publishing, Part III

I had a new short story published last week--only there was a problem with the hypertext link and when you clicked on my work you got someone else's. Ah, the perils of online publishing! But it's all been put to rights, and now you can read my latest, titled "Princess."

This is a revised version of a story I worked on and then set aside a long time ago, but I think it's still fresh. I'm one of those writers who like to have multiple projects gestating at once, then I'll plunge into a particular piece, finish it, and have the others waiting for me when I'm done. I never wrote scholarship that way (too confusing), but it feels right for fiction: just confusing enough to keep the creative juices flowing.

By the way, you can leave comments on the site, if you're so inclined. I'd love to hear what you think, either through that avenue or through this blog.

War and Peace Prize

Well, I told you it wouldn't take long for Obama's misguided war policies to return to this column. I told you it wouldn't take long for him to do something.

The only difference this time is, he actually did nothing.

But the Nobel Committee, apparently believing that doing nothing is better than nothing, did do something: they awarded him a big fat peace prize.

In interviews after the announcement of the award, Obama confessed to being "surprised" at the committee's decision. And frankly, I'm not surprised he was.

Because when it comes to promoting peace, Obama has not only not done anything, he's done a lot less than nothing.

Let's review. Despite campaign promises, he has maintained the war in Iraq, with no end in sight. (After we pull out, he tells us, tens of thousands of "non-combat troops," not to mention various bases, embassies, contractors, private security forces, and advisors, will remain. So really, we're there for good.) And in keeping with campaign promises, he has escalated the war in Afghanistan, with, let's face it, no end in sight. (If these wars have proved anything, it's that in the modern era, wars are much easier to prolong than to end.) So Obama's signal contribution to peace has been to wage--and no less vigorously than his predecessor--war.

The wars he has waged have achieved none of the objectives on which they were founded. They have not destroyed the Taliban or al Qaida, captured Osama bin Laden, rid the world of WMD, brought democracy to the Middle East, staved off terrorist threats, liberated Muslim women, or any of the rest of it. What they have done is kill thousands of US soldiers and possibly hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, wreck several nations' economies and environments, unleash ancient ethnic rivalries, stoke anti-US sentiment worldwide, spawn new terrorist networks and recruits, install unstable governments, enrich defense contractors, embolden aggressor nations, and generally make the world much less peaceful than it was before they began.

Not exactly what you'd expect of the Nobel Prize winner. But hey, I guess it's something.

More on Online Publishing

I just found out this morning that my essay "Positioning," which I mentioned in a previous post, was nominated for Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2010 anthology. With the rise of online publishing, there's been a corresponding movement to highlight the quality of much of the material that's appearing in the online format; the goal is to chip away at the persistent bias that treats print publishing as the gold standard and online publishing only as its illegitimate offspring. I'd be the last to knock print publishing--I owe my passion for reading and writing, as well as my career as a teacher, to print, and the stories and essays being published in print journals are often astonishing--but I'm thankful for efforts to draw attention to the real accomplishments of those writers who are publishing online as well as, or instead of, in print. And of course, I'm thrilled to see my own work among those being recognized! Thanks to Terrain.org and its publisher, Simmons Buntin, for the nomination--and keep your fingers crossed for me. Final selections for the anthology will be announced in January 2010.

The One That Started It All

It's been a busy week, with lots of papers to grade, plus my left pinky finger is badly swollen from, of all things, a kickball accident. (My 10-year-old daughter is one tough kickballer!) You never realize how much you need your lefthand pinky until you start trying to type--ouch! Especially that shift key.

Anyway, this is my apology for not posting anything for a while, and my explanation for why today, rather than posting something brand new, I'm going to link you up to an old story of mine. This was the first one I published after returning to fiction, so it holds a special place in my heart. Alas, the online journal in which it appeared folded after a year, but they kept their archives intact, so the link should still work. Online publishing is great in one respect; your work becomes available to a far wider and more diverse audience than with the print journals. But online periodicals, being relatively easy to start, are also relatively apt to fail, and that's just what happened with this one.

So in any case, here's the story, "Keynote." In his acceptance letter, the editor likened this story to the works of Chekhov. (Maybe that's why the journal failed.) But still, it was quite an ego boost for a guy who hadn't written short fiction for nearly two decades to be told his works could be mentioned in the same sentence as one of the acknowledged masters of the form.

Enjoy!

E-pocalypse? Not!

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."--Winston Churchill, 12 November 1936, as quoted in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

This past weekend, during a trip to DC to visit family friends, I watched the children’s film Battle for Terra on our host’s lavish home theater set-up (and on crystalline Blu-Ray, a first for me). For those who haven’t heard of it—and that’s probably most of you, since it bombed at the box office—Terra tells the story of a winsome race of aliens whose planet is invaded by the last human survivors of an Earth our species has laid waste. In a particularly insidious form of colonization, the earthlings plan to oxygenate the aliens’ atmosphere—certain death for the Terrans. But thanks to one human dissenter’s friendship with an especially winsome Terran revolutionary, the evil scheme is averted, its masterminds slain, and a permanent human colony erected on Terra to house the dissenting pilot’s peace-minded followers. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you’ll find much discussion—pro and con—of the film’s ostensibly subversive politics of radical environmentalism, anti-militarism, and civil disobedience. Dissenter that I am, however, I saw the film entirely differently.

Flash back several months. While staying in Prescott, Arizona to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on conservationist Aldo Leopold, I watched the smash Disney/Pixar hit Wall-E, another film lauded (and reviled) for its ostensibly progressive values. In Wall-E, the human race, having literally trashed the planet, departs Earth for a life of interstellar leisure, growing fat and useless on a mammoth cruise-ship space station while winsome robots stay behind to clean up our mess. Eventually, after the chance discovery of a single living plant on the globe’s wasteland surface, humanity returns home, vowing this time to cherish the land, get down in the dirt, and teach the children the virtues of community gardening. The robot probe that discovers the surviving plant is named, fittingly, Eve; the human race, the film suggests, has been given a second chance to act as stewards, not despoilers, of God’s green bounty.

And that, in a nutshell, is my problem with both films: the second chance. In both, viewers receive not only the cautionary message, “Don’t screw up!” but the comforting rejoinder: “But if you do, there’s always a fallback!” In other words: go ahead and trash the planet—you can still escape to another world with plenty of green space, convertible oxygen, and winsome welcoming party (or, in the case of Wall-E, you can leave, come back home, and find the world you’ve trashed every bit as resilient as Terra). In these apocalypse-lite visions, there are no real consequences for our actions; we get to eat our cake and have it too. That’s hardly a subversive message. On the contrary, it’s the same message that got us into this mess in the first place, the same message with which our consumer culture bombards us hundreds of times daily (not least through the medium of the movies): everything is ours for the taking, no sacrifices must ever be made, our needs (and our resources) are limitless, take in and spit out as much as possible and let someone else, somewhere in the far distant future, deal with the fallout.

This message isn’t just for the tots, of course. I’m thinking of a film ostensibly for adults, a film ostensibly a somber fable for our time: The Day after Tomorrow, where our wasty ways lead to instant Ice Age. Leaving aside the film’s patent preposterousness, its failure to imagine a true alternative to the problems it identifies is revealed in its conclusion: after the Big Freeze sets in, the chastened citizens of the developed world are forced to take refuge in the southern hemisphere, which, against all science and logic, is not only completely unaffected by global climate destabilization but spacious and gracious enough to accommodate the entire population of the North. Ah, those winsome Argentines and Bolivians—so welcoming, so wise in the ways of the earth, so, well, winsome! Always another place, another world awaiting us. Whether it’s Mars or Mexico, we can safely trash the planet and move on.

In his pathbreaking essay “The Land Ethic,” published sixty years ago, Leopold writes of our half-assed attempts to conserve the land while preserving the prerogatives of consumer society: “Is not this formula too easy to accomplish anything worth-while? It defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values.” And again: “No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. . . . In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.” Which is another way of saying that, short of a revolution in how we envision and live our lives on Earth, all our imaginative efforts to address the environment’s ills will amount to little more than trash.