the owl and the olive tree

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan

I haven't been bookblogging because I've been putting off blogging these books, and the reason for that is twofold. One: I'm not totally sure what to say about them. Two: They're books that tend to, mm, inspire strong feelings, and I'm not sure I'm up to a rousing debate on the ecology, ethics, and politics of factory farming vs. local farming. Not that it's not a worthy discussion, just that I think of refereeing that discussion right now and I put my head in my hands.

So, with that caveat, I want to blog these anyway so I can move on through my list.

The title of The Omnivore's Dilemma can be unpacked in two different directions. The dilemma of which he speaks is the fact that, the more things you can eat, the more choices you have as to what to eat. If you are a koala, the decision is very simple: if it looks like a eucalyptus leaf and smells like a eucalyptus leaf, it's dinner. If it doesn't, it isn't dinner. But if you're a bear, rat, raven, human or other omnivore, and you're living in something other than subsistence-starvation, suddenly life gets a lot more complicated. Given a finite stomach capacity, and finite hunting/gathering/growing/buying resources, do you eat the wheat, the berries, the potato, the apple, the dead bird? If the answer is 'some of all of the above,' then in what proportion? And hey, look, there's a plant you've never seen before, growing in abundance in this place! ...Can you eat it? Should you eat it? Maybe it's a great source of food, and you'd be stupid to pass it by. Or maybe it'll make you sick, and you'd better stick to your wheat and your apples. How can you know? Pollan's point is that the brain of an omnivore has to support a lot more complicated prioritization and decision-making than the brain of a koala, which just does an 'is eucalyptus y/n?' pattern match and goes on from there. And modern humans aren't exempt from that: a trip to the local megamart is an extreme example of an omnivore's dilemma.

The other part of the title -- A Natural History of Four Meals -- describes the content of the book. Pollan obtains and eats four meals, each an extreme example of one modern food choice paradigm, and then examines its roots (so to speak). There's the first meal, the industrial meal, predicated on corn: corn-laden (in the form of corn protein, corn syrup, corn starch, corn oil, etc) mass-produced bread products, soda, and sweets, plus corn-fed factory farmed meats. There are the second and third meals, two variants on 'pastoral': the 'big organic' organic meal and the small-local-farm meal. And there's the fourth meal, most of the components of which he hunted or gathered himself. The book is largely about environmental impacts, and -- to hugely oversimplify -- those impacts trend better the farther along you get in the book. Industrial farming has some serious issues; 'big organic' avoids some of those -- at least you aren't dousing X-thousand square miles of farmland with pesticides that are literally poisonous -- but is still problematic in other ways; small farming has a smaller footprint; gathering for yourself is fairly defensible, with caveats, as long as what you're gathering isn't, you know, endangered species. That's a massive oversimplification, but there we go.

In Defense of Food is specifically about defending 'actual' food -- that is, food made of definable ingredients, where you know that the quiche has, e.g., wheat and lard and salt in the crust, eggs and salt and cheese and spinach and herbs in the filling, rather than having an ingredient list as long as your arm where you can't pronounce or recognize half of them. Where The Omnivore's Dilemma was mostly about the effects our food choices have ecologically, In Defense of Food is about their effects to health. Essentially, it's got two parts: an attack on 'nutritionism,' where food-as-food is considered vastly less important than food-as-a-collection-of-nutrients, and where nutrients go into and out of fashion (fat is bad! no, carbs are bad! no, it's refined carbs that are bad! and certain kinds of fats! but not others! did I mention antioxidants? coffee is good this week, better drink a lot before we decide next week that it isn't!). The other part of the book ties into this: nutritionism tends to lead to the belief that it doesn't matter what you eat, as long as you're eating the ratio of nutrients that's in fashion at the moment. So, because it's cheap and tastes good, we eat a lot of refined food, particularly refined grains, and a lot of meat -- as long as we can find a company to buy it from who will tinker with it so that it's low in this and high in that and has lots of added that other thing to make us feel as if it's still healthy.

It's hard to know exactly what I want to say about this. There were a lot of parts of the book that I had to agree with, while wincing -- it's difficult to read anything about the way factory meat farming is done and not feel kind of oogy about it, even if (as I am) you're a pretty content carnivore. It's hard to feel too great about a method of plant farming that's eerily reminiscent of strip mining. (And I say this as someone who doesn't have a knee-jerk 'chemicals BAD' reaction, necessarily.) And I'm not exactly a hard sell on buying local-and-in-season -- I mean, I do it myself, and (apart from the times like, uh, now, when I might scream if I see another bunch of kale) I enjoy the process. And I think that my health has improved hugely since I started making most of my food from scratch, even though I cook with an embarrassing lot of butter, because at least I know what the hell it is I'm eating. If I eat mashed potatoes laden with cream, at least I know what I'm doing -- if I eat mashed potatoes laden with hydrolyzed protein and added starch and, oh, by the way, a quarter cup of corn syrup, I don't even know what I'm doing to my body.

So there's that, and that much of it I tend to be pretty agreeable about. But. But there's another angle of it that I have a lot of problems with, and that's this: he seems to be advocating a revolution that's only available to people with a lot of money and a lot of time. Now, I am a person with the luxury of a lot of both, for which I am grateful. I can afford to spend quite a bit on food. More importantly, I have the time to cook from scratch basically every day -- and even more important than that, I like cooking. (You can bet that if the trendy thing was a 'locawear' movement, where you made all your own clothes from scratch, I'd be waaaaaay less favorably inclined to it, just because I don't like sewing that much -- and I recognize that it's a huge advantage that I do enjoy it for cooking.) But I have major problems with promoting something as the ethical solution to a major problem that's only available to people with the privilege of money to spare and time to spare, and both in pretty good quantities. More to the point, I have major problems with the occasional dismissal of the issue by saying that people should just buy fewer pairs of fancy shoes in order to buy the food, because -- because there are plenty of people in America right now who are already not buying fancy shoes, not ordering HBO, not wasting money, and still having trouble making ends meet. Inasmuch as the American food system is a problem to solve, it's only going to be solvable if your solution can reach those people, and not just people like me. (And trying to spread it to those people by lecturing them and making them feel guilty is both pretty darn high-and-mighty and still not very effective -- if the money and time aren't there, they just aren't there.) This isn't just a matter of ethics, it's a matter of pure pragmatism. Your revolution will never spread very far until it can be practiced by the mother working a job and a half while raising three kids, who has maybe twenty minutes a day to put together a meal for them, and who's already squeezing her food bill until it squeaks. I don't care how theoretically rewarding it is, it just won't, because practicality does mean something.

Still, it's an interesting read, and, as I say, already a number of things I put into practice and have found very rewarding. I just would like to see more practical suggestions for making this something other than a luxury movement.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 19
Fiction: 6
Non-Fiction: 13
POC Author: 6

Right now fiction is lagging so much because I got onto a rereading stint of Discworld novels, and I'm not counting rereads.

Clay's Ark, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

This was a hard book to read. It was rewarding, but oh my goodness, it was hard.

As Blake Maslin and his daughters Keira and Rane travel across the desert of California, they're stopped by armed men. This, while horrible, isn't that unusual a possibility in their dystopian future USA (the setting is some time after Mind of My Mind, but before Patternmaster): in between walled safe zones, extreme gang violence runs rampant, and traveling through those areas -- even armed, in a car -- is extremely dangerous. But the people who stopped them aren't a car family, and their goal isn't robbery, kidnapping, or murder. Instead, the kidnappers take the three back to their farmstead, where they discover what this group really is.

The farm is home to a group of people, small but growing, who were infected by an alien organism. The organism changes them -- enhances them in specifically physical ways. They're stronger and faster than normal people; they have better reflexes; they are physically tough to the point of being extraordinarily difficult to hurt; they have enhanced senses, particularly hearing and smell. But the infection also drives them to spread itself, both by infecting others and by breeding. And yet -- despite the infection that has changed their bodies and that fills them with unbearable, undeniable urges -- they're still people. They still have their consciences, and their memories, and the interests and desires they had before. Their personalities are just overlaid by a set of literally alien and very animal urges.

The bulk of the book is about their conflict, between the undeniable impulse to spread 'their' kind and their desire to remain human, and to avoid spreading the infection to the rest of the world. And that's the most terrifying thing about it: the bearers of the disease, the agents of this change (and indeed of the kidnappings that keep it going) are so sympathetic, they're trying so hard to stay themselves. What hurts the most is watching them fight and fight for their humanity, even as it slowly erodes.

Before going into the spoiler cut, I will say: this book is very depressing, and it's also brutal in places. Horrible, violent things happen; the violence is never glorified, but it also isn't glossed over; it was very difficult going. I warn not because I think people shouldn't read this, but because I was glad of having been warned myself. I think I would have found it impossible in places if I hadn't been prepared for it.

( Spoilers below the cut. )

I'd recommend this one, too. But I lined up a comfort reread for after I finished, and I think that might not be a bad idea for others.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 16
Fiction: 5
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 5

Patternmaster, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to the "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

This was the first book of the Seed to Harvest quartet by publication date -- and the last one by internal chronology. I read it first for two reasons. One, unless I get a strong indication otherwise, I tend to read things by publishing order -- partly because I like to see the author develop, but also partly because there's more a guarantee that they make sense in that order, because they were presumably written to make sense to people who were reading them as they came out. (Unless they were very bad books indeed, but I don't expect that from Butler.) Two, because my general inclination was reinforced by other people, who said that they read better in publication order. And having read all four books, I think they were right, and I too would recommend that you read them in publication order rather than internal chronology.

I'm going to try to refer to each one without spoilers for the others, and then I'll post about all four of the books considered as a whole, because they stand along perfectly well but gain a lot of richness and depth when you consider them in context.

So: Patternmaster.

Patternmaster is set in... I can't actually tell how far in the future, because the changes to our world are so dramatic that it could be a hundred years or five hundred. (Indeed, I initially thought that it was set on another planet, the world was so different than the one I know.) Patternmaster is set in a future in which the human species has split into two... I was going to say "factions," but really, they're actually two new, separate species: the clayarks, people mutated by an alien microorganism, who are strong and tough and fast and make and use weapons and other technologies; and the patternists, who are psionicists of varying stripes, who use mental powers (including telepathy, telekinesis, healing/biomanipulation, and the ability to store memories in objects) instead of engineering as we know it. "Normal" humans -- people like you or me -- also exist; they're called "mutes" and are servants of the patternists. (There are no normal humans among the clayarks, because the clayark disease is extremely infectious.)

As you could probably guess from the title, Patternmaster is from the point of view of a patternist, Teray, who falls afoul of the strict rules of his traditional society and the political maneuvering therein, and becomes an "outsider" (essentially, a slave) to Coransee, an extremely powerful (politically and psionically) master of a House. The book is about his struggle to reassert his independence, and it's about the way he allies with an Independent -- a patternist who isn't subject to any House master, Amber. Amber is powerful, intelligent, and tough -- she's a healer, but she subverts the 'woman healer' stereotype by also being an extremely effective killer -- and, indeed, I think she's the strongest character in the book. The developing relationship between Teray and Amber serves as both the heart and the backbone of Patternmaster

Besides Amber, the most interesting thing about this book for me was the worldbuilding and the society, which is dystopian and yet fascinating, even for me (I'm picky about dystopian/post-apocalyptic futures). I find the nature of the 'disaster' really interesting: not one but two radical changes to humanity. (Indeed, I find it particularly cool that Butler put both the clayarks and the patternists in this world -- either idea could have spawned a series, but both together creates a richness and sense of conflict that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. The patternists and the clayarks both are extremely potent, but neither is quite strong enough to get the upper hand over the other -- and yet their very natures makes it impossible for them to stop fighting.) We see only glimpses of clayark society, because the protagonists see (indeed, for their own self-preservation, kind of have to see) the clayarks as inherently inimical, kill-or-be-killed. But patternist society is extremely interesting in its own right. Patternists live in Houses, run by powerful Masters, for their own protection against the clayarks. Within the house, there's a heriarchy: the Master on top, his apprentices beneath him, outsiders (slaves, but with psionic powers) beneath them, and mutes beneath them. (The position of women is more unclear to me: it appears that patternist women, in Houses with male Masters, are wives of varying degree of status -- it's not clear whether there are any female apprentices or outsiders who are not wives. It's also not totally clear what the status of men and women are in Houses run by women, which definitely exist.)

And then there's the Pattern, a really fascinating look at the way a telepathic society would exit. All patternists are linked together by the Pattern, although for the most part, only fellow House members are closely aware of one another. People who are sympatico, who are compatible in personality and metal attitude, are said to be close together in the Pattern, something that they can feel immediately and instinctively. It's a world in which you can tell immediately whether you're likely to get along with someone -- and that immediate awareness is acknowledged, and used.

( Spoilery stuff behind the cut. )

As far as recommendations go: Patternmaster is exceptional science fiction. It's not as good as the books in the series that would follow it, which in my opinion get better and better, but it's a good entry point to the series. (And I do recommend that you use it as the entry point: working in internal-chronology order rather than publication order would, in my opinion, be a mistake.)

Running Tally:

Total Books: 14
Fiction: 3
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 3

The Pluto Files, by Neil deGrasse Tyson

I got this book because I saw Tyson on The Daily Show, talking about it, and the whole interview made me grin ear to ear, like a loon. (You can watch it here, if you like.) It's relatively rare that I watch an interview on a show like that and actually want to go get the book, but I did -- immediately. And I'm really glad I did.

The Pluto Files is about 'the rise and fall of America's favorite planet' -- it charts the history of Pluto's discovery, and its special status to Americans. (Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American, and, of course, there's the cartoon dog, named shortly after the planet's discovery.) And then, of course, the complicating factor of the discovery of other Pluto-like icy bodies, which threw into question: was Pluto really a planet at all?

At the heart of the book is a question: what makes a planet a planet? Apparently this question didn't have an actual answer for a surprisingly long time -- effectively, a planet was the set of things we called planets. This was more or less fine when the state of astronomy and astrophysics was such that we weren't aware of the other things out there... but that changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, what with the Hubble Space Telescope and the various unmanned probes.

Much of the book is about this debate: what makes a planet a planet? When the other icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune were discovered (the Kuiper belt objects), the question became: if we find another icy body as big as Pluto -- or bigger -- do we call it a planet, too? What if we find a bunch of them? Will we cheerfully up the number of planets to ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty? (Indeed, at least one Kuiper belt object was found that was bigger than Pluto; if Pluto was a planet, then Eris definitely was a planet, too.) Or does the presence of a wide variety of Kuiper belt objects, much more similar to one another than to the rest of the planets, mean that Pluto isn't really a planet at all? Indeed, the famous 2006 vote to de-planetize Pluto wasn't actually about Pluto at all, something I hadn't been aware of: the vote was to ratify the first formal definition of a planet, and that definition didn't include Pluto.

But the other key topic of the book was the intersection between culture and science. Several people, scientists among them, argued for a cultural definition of 'planet' that could keep Pluto under sort of a historical grandfather clause. In other words, the argument was that Pluto is a planet because 'planet' has more to do with public opinion and historical tradition than scientific definition. And this part of the book included all kinds of fascinating things: songs about Pluto, letters from elementary school students (in the interview, Stewart says, "You got some hate mail about this decision, didn't you?" and Tyson laughs and clarifies: "Hate mail from third graders."), explorations of the effect that nearly eighty years of the Disney dog had on perceptions of Pluto's status, descriptions of the various 'funerals' for Pluto.

One of the things that I really liked about it, too, is that Tyson doesn't pretend neutrality. He's clear from the beginning that his opinion was that Pluto wasn't a planet, and the book is partly an argument for that opinion. I liked that it was straightforward in its biases, and that's part of what made it so entertaining and so... not-textbook-like.

This book was, as far as I'm concerned, a rare find: a pop science book, accessible to practically anyone, but still written by an expert in the field; a book that is informative and funny and opinionated and absolutely delightful. Highly recommended -- and I'm going to track down more of Tyson's books soon.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 11
Fiction: 1
Non-Fiction: 10
POC Author: 1

His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik

And finally, some fiction!

I admit: it took me so long to read this book in part because I'd had it recommended from all sides, and I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the hype. So I let the hype die down a little before I cracked it open -- and I'm glad I did finally read it, because this is a fun, fun book. Very enjoyable indeed.

His Majesty's Dragon begins when Napoleonic-era naval captain William Laurence captures a French ship carrying a dragon egg -- a dragon egg close to hatching. As dragons are valuable in the Aerial Corps (a kind of air force made up of dragons and their handlers) and the country is currently at war, it would be a gross waste to allow the dragon to go feral. (If a dragon doesn't accept the harness from a human hand shortly after he or she is hatched, that dragon will never voluntarily ally with humans thereafter.) The men of his ship must therefore attempt to harness the dragon, and, unfortunately for him, Laurence is the one the dragon wants. Laurence names the dragon Temeraire -- and then is snatched away from his position, the Navy, and his family, to join the mysterious Aerial Corps and fly, rather than sail, to war on behalf of England.

Because the book was billed to me as 'Napoleonic War with dragons,' I expected that the setting would make or break it for me, but that wasn't the case -- though the setting is interesting enough, it's the characters that made the book for me. Hands-down my favorite thing was the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire. It's clear from the book that, while the dragon is inclined to imprint on a particular person at hatching (much like, say, a baby duck), the imprinting isn't any kind of magical soulbond, as with other bonded-companion-animal stories. It's a friendship: a friendship predisposed to being very strong, but still, a friendship. (It has parental overtones when the dragon is new-hatched, but that fades away with time.) It takes work on the parts of both parties and yet, because of that, it is far more rewarding to me than if it had been instalove complete with rainbows and sparkles and Never Being Alone Again. (Indeed, the dragons and humans don't have any kind of telepathy or empathic bond at all, that I can see -- the dragons speak out loud, in human language, and they and their human companions bond by spending time together. And if the humans and dragons don't spend time together, their relationship gets strained and dysfunctional.) It's a really genuine, solid connection, and I love to read about strong friendships, so this just made me grin foolishly all through.

Mostly, though, I loved the book because I loved Temeraire himself. He's got a personality of his own -- smart, curious, thoughtful, sweet-tempered, a little bit elegant. He gives the impression of being very smart and dignified but also being young. He likes to read (or, well, be read to, because of the scale problem) and is fascinated by history, science, mathematics. He's just -- I love Temeraire. Really, I love that the dragon characters are characters in their own rights. The dragons Celeritas, Lily and Maximus all had distinct personalities, and while they didn't get all that much 'screen time' (all of the other characters are very much secondary to Laurence and Temeraire, who are the heart of the book), they're pretty much as well-developed as comparable human characters.

I could certainly nitpick things. It seems a bit, uh, implausible to me that the world is full of dragons, the Americas host a thriving Incan empire, and so on -- and yet those major changes haven't altered the track of history in England/France at all, such that not only is there still a Napoleonic war but all the major players seem to be the same -- and in a lot of ways Laurence is sort of too good, although he's genuinely likable enough, to me, to escape being irritating about it. But here's the thing: the book hit me in a very reading-for-fun-and-pleasure place, and though I can see the flaws, I don't want to nitpick them. I want to just spend a few hours with Laurence and Temeraire and grin at the image of Regency London with dragons flying overhead.

( Spoilers below the cut )

But yeah, this was a really good time, not deep but a quick and entertaining read. If you like fantasy, are entertained by the idea of 'Napoleonic War with dragons,' or like stories with likable characters and strong friendships, I'd recommend it. And now I have to go read the sequels!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver (Nonfiction)

I really enjoyed this book, and yet I'm not sure how to recommend it.

I think the first thing to say is: the author is a particular kind of liberal (class-conscious, ecology-conscious, tending to skepticism and mistrust of big business, invested in social change). If you are at least moderately sympathetic to this kind of liberalism, the book is probably fine for you -- but if you aren't, the book doesn't spend a lot of time trying to convince you. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about convincing people who lean liberal to care about agriculture, not convincing people who don't lean liberal to do so. If you don't sympathize with those viewpoints to start with, you'll probably want to throw the book at the wall, and so probably shouldn't bother.

That said. If you are, at least, sympathetic to that strain of liberalism, I'd recommend the book.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a diary of Kingsolver's family's attempt to eat entirely local food for a year. They have a few starting exemptions: the whole family will continue to use wheat flour, even though wheat doesn't grow in their Virginia home, and each family member has one personal exemption (coffee, spices, and dried fruit are among the exemptions), but apart from those limited exceptions, if they didn't buy it in season (or grow it themselves -- they have a deeply impressive, envy-worthy vegetable garden), they don't eat it.

( As someone who has been eating local produce for the past year, this book was absolutely fascinating to me. )