THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, PART 2

I finally finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read all year. All the provocation is probably why it took me so long to finish; sometimes it’s just harder to enjoy your food when you can’t stop yourself from thinking about it. As food is a personal obsession with me, at times I was resentful of Michael Pollan for coming into my head and messing with it. He was hitting me where I live. Still, for all the uncomfortable truths and dire situations it forced me to acknowledge, it wasn’t a downer book. Not only did I finally learn the etymology of “corned beef” (as well as “cornhole”), but I also enjoyed (and agreed with) his informed, passionate writing. Even though I think I was already a much more conscious eater than most Americans (what with my penchant for farmers’ markets, menu planning, homemade meals, delicious vegetables, etc.), I’m now thinking about food in an entirely new way.

Here are a few paragraphs to chew on:

The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality…A few years ago the English writer John Berger wrote an essay called ‘Why Look at Animals?’ in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals—and specifically the loss of eye contact—has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (?!). Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays it seems we either look away or become vegetarians.

*****

There does seem to be an evolutionary trade-off between big brains and big guts—two very different evolutionary strategies for dealing with the question of food selection. The case of the koala bear, one of nature’s pickiest eaters, exemplifies the small-brain strategy. You don’t need a lot of brain circuitry to figure out what’s for dinner when all you ever eat is eucalyptus leaves. As it happens, the koala’s brain is so small it doesn’t even begin to fill up its skull. Zoologists theorize that the koala bear once ate a more varied and mentally taxing diet than it does now, and that as it evolved toward its present, highly circumscribed concept of lunch, the bear’s underemployed brain actually shrank. (Food faddists take note.)

*****

The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor wheel crushes woodchucks in their burrows and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky; after harvest whatever animals that would eat our crops we exterminate. Killing animals is probably unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. If America were suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn’t at all clear that the total number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensely cultivated row crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished steaks for everyone.

*****

The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places….To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility—in the form of manure—would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can guild a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA

I just started The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, and it’s a cool bath after my feverish reading of Passage. Though so far it’s inspired mainly depression and guilt (the first section deals with our culture’s dependence on the monoculture of corn, and contains a grim history of corn’s role in the death of the American family farm), I have already learned a number of interesting facts:

• “without humans to plant it every spring, corn would disappear from the earth in a matter of years. The novel cob-and-husk arrangement that makes corn such a convenient grain for us renders the plant utterly dependent for its survival on an animal in possession of the opposable thumb needed to remove the husk, separate the seeds, and plant them.” Wow, I had no idea! Pollan continues with an entire section on how corn does reproduce, and I love that he repeatedly uses the phrase “corn sex.”

• “Originally ‘corn’ was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt--hence ‘corned beef.’” I’ve always wondered why it’s called that!

• “The shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term ‘corn hole.’)” Well, I’ve actually never wondered about that...but how interesting. I wonder how far the term goes back—when the pilgrims got mad at each other, did they say, “Prithee, stick it in thy cornhole”?

PASSAGE

Passage was one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I’m on a Connie Willis kick—in 2006 I’ve read everything by her I could get my hands on, starting with To Say Nothing of the Dog and continuing with Doomsday Book, Lincoln’s Dreams, Fire Watch, and now Passage. Sadly, this is the bulk of her ouevre—I’ve got one novella left on my list and then I have to sit around waiting for her to write another book. Though classified as “science fiction,” most of her books (except some stories in Fire Watch) don’t deal with space or aliens or apocalyptic futures. She writes almost obsessively about researchers (historians or scientists) trying doggedly, desperately to figure things out; she builds excruciating suspense as she takes you step by step through the frustration of the research process, as her characters endure confusion and missed connections and unhelpful leads and mistaken theses and dead ends. In her books, history is something alive, a reality that impinges on contemporary life (whether through time travel, dreams, visions, or as a metaphor); it is full of disaster (the Blitz, the Plague, the Civil War, the Titanic) and heroism and death. These are the kind of books I wish I could write, full of allusion and real drama.

BOOK TO FILM: THE GRASS HARP

Last night I watched The Grass Harp. I figured, well, I loved the book (I hadn’t liked other Capote books I’d read, but coworker D pressed The Grass Harp upon me and as promised, it was good—simple and sweet and gorgeously written, so that’ll teach me a lesson for badmouthing Capote’s fiction), plus the cast was stacked: Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Sissy Spacek, Nell Carter, Joe Don Baker, Edward Furlong, Charles Durning, Mary Steenbergen, Sean Patrick Flanery (who I used to adore when I was 14 and he was in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles).

Unfortunately, the movie...sort of sucked. I mean, it was competently made, but it was a poor adaptation, in that they took a tender, subtle, well-written book and made it mawkish and cheesy. They gave the book the worst kind of makeover, changing major details in a way that only served to make the story more cliche—which character gets shot, what illness a major character dies of, and the entire end of the story, in which the narrator grows up and leaves town. In the book he goes to law school to become a judge—the character who’s been a sort of father figure to him in the story is a retired judge—and before he leaves, he and the judge go walking in a meadow. The book ends thus: “A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had told me: that it was a grass harp, gathering, telling, a harp of voices remembering a story. We listened.” In the movie, the character leaves town because he wants to become a writer, and the voiceover goes on ad nauseum about how he wants to tell all the stories that the grass harp has told him, because it’s Dolly’s voice he hears speaking to him, and they’re her stories, blah blah, beating you over the head with the grass harp metaphor, sentimental nonsense that would make Truman Capote gag. (I hate it when movies about children end with the narrator growing up and becoming a writer and telling you this very story.) I was watching the movie alone, but during the last 10 minutes I kept feeling compelled to do the finger-gun-to-the-head gesture in sheer frustration, interspersed with booing. I’m so glad I read the book first, because if I’d seen the movie first I’d never have been interested in reading the book.

THINGS THAT SCARE ME

In honor of Halloween, off the top of my head, here are the scariest things I have read:

1. The Dollhouse Murders, by Betty Ren Wright: A kids’ book in which dollhouse dolls come alive and reenact a murder; I still get goosebumps thinking of it.
2. Behind the Attic Wall, by Sylvia Cassedy: Another kids’ book in which dolls come alive; according to the Amazon reviews, these dolls are friendly and benevolent and help a young girl to find the love and security her family can’t give her, but all I remember is feeling terror at the concept. I mean, even the title is creepy-sounding.
3. “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson: Scariest short story ever.
4. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood: For obvious reasons, competes with 28 Days Later for worst-nightmare dystopia.
5. “All My Darling Daughters,” by Connie Willis: I love Connie Willis, but can’t recommend this highly, highly disturbing feminist short story that manages to include both animal abuse—which I particularly hate to read about—and sexual abuse; all the ickiness has a purpose and it’s well-written and thought-provoking, but I nearly became physically ill while reading it.