6 posts tagged “omnivore's dilemma”
If you want someone besides Michael Pollan to talk about real food, how about Mark Bittman, NYT food writer, blogger, and author of cookbooks such as How to Cook Everything, from the 2007 Entertainment Gathering conference?
I decided yesterday that there was a missing blog that I would write if I had time. Mostly because I'd like to read it. Let me know if you know any blog or blogs like this so I can pretend.
It would be called Best Endtimes Ever and contain news about several interrelated topics I'd like to follow:
- Space exploration. I don't know and haven't historically followed space, other than a boy's typical space shuttle paraphernalia and more recently agreeing that SpaceShipOne was hella cute. The video of Burt Rutan at TED made me more interested in the topic than anything before or since.
- New human computer interfaces. I'm not that hot on cyborgization and augmented reality, but epaper, multitouch interfaces, and ubiquitous mobile computing are the leading edge in user experience.
- Industrial food. I loved Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, and know there are other books on the topic now, but more importantly there's actual news in the form of Whole Foods' business practices, Chinese product safety, and the disappearing bees. All of it is about our precarious, interdependent, global food system.
- Lastly, a topic I'll call epidemic neoteny. I find compelling the idea that media, public corporations, government, and the people are in a vicious downward spiral of devolutionary, idiocratic infantilism. I can't claim to know to what extent this actually happens (I should at least read Everything Bad Is Good For You), but it seems like plenty.
I said these topics are interrelated. I suppose they are somehow; I sure can't say. But I'd still read the blog.
I'm waiting until I finish The Omnivore's Dilemma to read these topical links:
To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself—the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built—is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
And us?
I'm listening through the Science Friday podcasts of the last couple months with interesting titles, and tried "Michael Pollan" only to find it's the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. OMG, must read.
