A Quandary of Cuisine

I was a vegetarian for three years before I jumped ship. Let me clarify: By vegetarian, I do not mean I ate wholesome beans, grains, veggies, and soy, but rather, I ate five chocolate chip cookies and a bag of SunChips® in the cafeteria. Jump to a week in England during my senior year of high school with no “viable” vegetarian food options to choose from – I mean, the Brits like their meat. So I gave in and had a Whopper at Burger King. Go big or go home, right?

Since that time, meat was gradually introduced back into my diet. For almost 10 years it was strictly limited to chicken and turkey. When I met my boyfriend, who never met a steak he didn’t like, I began eating red meat as well (although I still limit it to once-a-week). So when I read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History in Four Meals last week, it forced me to reflect on my eating choices.

DISCLAIMER: I feel the need to tell you that I am not a non-fiction fan. In fact, I may be a downright hater. So the fact that I really enjoyed reading this should carry heavy weight. While parts do get a little too technical for me, Pollan meets a lot of characters on his journey, which makes for quite an entertaining read. Mini-Disclaimer: I also feel like I’ve dragged my heels to read this book (it was published in 2006).

Pollan posits that omnivores have such a wide variety of food choices, it becomes a struggle to decide what we “should” eat. He goes on to detail three different meals that are available to omnivores and follows the food chain that starts from the initial source to what finally ends up on our plates.

The first meal starts out on a corn farm in Iowa and ends with a supersized Big Mac, McNuggets, and a chocolate shake. Let me pause here before I get all “Reading Rainbow” on this post. So this meal totally freaked me out because it opened my eyes to how corn is taking over our world. His entire meal at McDonald’s was some derivative or another of corn. It’s fed to the animals we eat (Even salmon! Creepy!), it’s in our gasoline, and it’s in a lot of the common grocery store items where we wouldn’t think to find it.

For example, during Thanksgiving, I prefer the cranberry sauce that comes right out of the tin can. I want it in the can shape, with the tin can lines indented on its gelatinous body, served to me on a plate. Try and find that beauty without high fructose corn syrup. You can’t. I also like relish on a burger in the summer and searched high and low to find some without HFCS. It took a month and a trip to Whole Foods before I was successful.

This brings me to Pollan’s second meal, which was produced from Joel Salatin’s farm in Virginia. During this section, Pollan exposes the myth of Whole Foods, as most of the produce and meat are not local and come from massive industrial farms across the country. Whole Foods ultimately sells more of an image of the organic, small farm than the actual produce of said farm.

This story hit a cord with me, as I worked on a local family farm while in college. The prices of produce at the farm store were sometimes $1-$2 more than their counterparts at the Stop & Shop down the street. Yet customers were loyal to the farm and family, coming week after week and spending more and more money for local food. Little did they know, in the back room I was taking carrots out of the Dole® bag and placing them in a clear plastic sleeve with the label “Farm Fresh Produce.” Little did they know that, yes, the pies were “baked” daily, but they were made by Sara Lee in Illinois and shipped frozen to the farm.

Oh the guilt.

In the final section, Pollan gets all “Man vs. Wild” and forages for his own food. He grows his own vegetables, hunts boar, seeks mushrooms, and even tries to filter his own salt. It was my favorite part of the whole book and ultimately made me sad that we as a society no longer have this as an option. With the retirement age increasing, social security diminishing, and dire unemployment rates, we have to work. Because of this, we have to make sacrifices, most often choosing convenience and price over what is the most mindful and healthy option.

North Star Career Parachute-ing

All that talk about literary vs. non-literary summer books, and here is what I've actually been reading--nay, re-reading--lately:

What Color is Your Parachute? (I recently picked up the 2010 edition of this book at Half Price. Somewhere I have the 2001 or 2002 edition. It's my go-to just-finished-grad-school-now-what-the-fuck-do-I-do book. I'm hoping ten years brings enormous insight in this area.)

What's Your Type of Career? (Because I'm obsessed with personality types. And maybe, to a lesser extent, myself?)

Finding Your Own North Star (I mean, it's good, guys. This is the book that taught me that being a writer is like being a turtle.)

--HP

Two favorite summer reads so far...

Rather early in the summer, I read Paula McClain's The Paris Wife. I tend to like books where literary figures are actual characters, and I like historical fiction, so this one was a win-win for me. I don't know that I'd say it was supremely well written or anything like that, but it was interesting to learn a bit more about Hemingway, and I did rather love the way it was done in the voice of his first wife. (Though I am sure I could find reasons to think this was problematic if I thought about it too much....so I'm trying not to over-think it here!) Mainly, I loved reading about 1920s Paris and the crazy expatriate writers. It's a really quick read--effective for vacation or poolside.

Then, surprisingly, I was also really smitten with a book I assigned for my summer course. I was only able to read it about a week before the course started (I'm a terrible teacher...), so thank goodness I found it so awesome and fitting. (And my students have liked it, too.) I'm teaching Intro to Disability Studies, and I try to do one literary text that focuses on disability. In the past, I've done a play (The Elephant Man), but I just needed to change it up to keep things interesting. So a friend recommended the novel The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon. It's set in the near future--I'm guessing in 50-70 years, though Moon doesn't specify. It focuses on a man named Lou, who is a high-functioning autistic. The premise of the book is largely that an experimental cure for autism exists, and Lou's company is pressuring him and his autistic colleagues to take this new treatment. The book raises all sorts of issues that are great for discussion and writing in a disability studies class--it debates medical vs. social perspectives on disability; touches heavily on discrimination; deals with accommodations/accessibility; and considers how disability frequently forms an integral part of individuals' identities. Anyway, it's a really interesting read--much more complex and political, I think, than the more well-known book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. In addition to being complex and great for a class like the one I'm teaching, I think it's also just a generally good (even fun?) read for almost anyone, though it might be particularly appealing if you have an interest in disability-related issues.


So those are my summer hits for the moment. Now I've been reading books about how to take care of babies, which seem less compelling to share about. And what I REALLY need to be doing is focusing on my dissertation...more writing and less reading! Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing what other folks share, as I always like to have a "for fun" book going on.

Yay!

We have 20 registered authors so far. That's pretty cool.

Thanks, friends! xo
 HP

Reading Links

Do you have suggestions for reading links? Post 'em here in the comments, please.

--HP

Dan Brown & Summer Reading, as a Writer

Here is the kind of reading predicament I get into in the summer: choosing between the literary masterpiece I have been meaning to read for years, and the entertaining pop thriller I finally got for $2 at Half Price Books. It's Rebecca vs. The Lost Symbol. [More on Rebecca later.]

Partly I am embarrassed to be seen reading Dan Brown. Or embarrassed to read alone in my apartment without even being seen. But why should I be? I read the other books in the series, and I enjoyed them. But for the past three years I've been surrounded by brilliant scholars of high art, and I still have the doubt that they would judge me. Because, let's be honest, this is not high art. I've spent the greater part of my life studying plot, character, language, and meaning in literature. The Lost Symbol is not literature, I feel fairly confident about that. Literature is important. However, I'm also certain there is a place for non-literature on my bookshelf, and whatever we say about him in regards to his writing, Dan Brown is a good storyteller. And summer is the time for stories, right? (I'm picturing Dan Brown beside the campfire now, and thinking about our expectations for the aural art of storytelling, and how those expectations are different, although obviously length would be an issue in this case, and anyways, this would lead me on a tangent about the oral tradition of poetry, which is really not what I intended to get into right now.)

I don't believe in the idea that to be a good writer (or reader, or student, or person, or whatever) you have to read only "good" books. I think any reading at all is useful--and I am nothing if not a utilitarian--in that it entertains, or informs, or makes you think, or distracts you from whatever it is you want to be distracted from. I'm pretty sure the reason I read and wrote as a child was to escape my own life. Mary Yukari Waters visited a creative writing class I was teaching several years ago to talk about her book of short stories The Laws of Evening (which I highly recommend), and admitted she reads everything, from classic novels and stories to gothic romance novels. One of the thing she said that stood out to me was that she doesn't allow herself to feel guilty for skipping over parts of books or skimming through (which we all do at times, right?), because she does so actively, as a writer. Which is to say, she doesn't just skim parts and move on--she pays attention to why she skimmed. She questions what about the writing was boring or uninteresting or irrelevant to her as a reader, and makes note of it. This is, of course, part of what we mean when we say "reading like a writer." This may not be useful advice to people who don't consider themselves writers (I mean, everyone writes, but only some of us invite the daily struggle of making words work for love or money). And if you're not a "writer," or an academic, it's much easier to go along with a story without questioning what's on the page, or just to toss the book across the room if it sucks. Because a story that's not working, just isn't working. It doesn't take a PhD scholar to determine that. Maybe it takes some training to question the why part (why isn't this capturing my attention? why don't I buy what's happening?), and a little more to come up with the how part (how could it be better? what would make it work?), but it's probably true that only a certain kind of person even cares about the answers. Even when she doesn't want to care about the answers. Like in summer, by the pool, with the $2 hardback in her lap. This is ultimately what being a writer is to me: never being able to turn off my analytic brain. I may want to escape into the world of international intrigue and historical conspiracies or whatever Dan Brown and whoever else is selling me, and it may be a successful sell or not, but either way, I'm never going to truly be able to escape into that world because my writer brain is always asking "why isn't this working?" or "why is this working?" I'm always going to find myself talking aloud to the page at some point, whether it be in disbelief, disgust, amusement, or wonderment.

I remember the first time I had the conscious realization that I was really "reading as a writer," and that I would never again be able to not read this way. I was reading the story "Snow" in Charles Baxter's collection A Relative Stranger. The characters--a young boy narrator, his older brother, and the brother's girlfriend, are out on a frozen lake looking at a car trapped under the ice. There's a moment in reading the story when I became very nervous that the ice would break, and characters were going to fall in. I saw it coming, and I resisted this turn even as I read. But just at this point, the narrative jumps forward to the future, to a time when all of them are older and the brother and girlfriend are no longer together, when the boy would run into the brother's high school girlfriend at the store where she worked (or something like that, I don't remember exactly). But anyway, the jump forward is just enough to assure the reader that yes, everything will be okay. Sort of. Not magical, not perfect, not as anyone might have expected in their younger days. But it will be fine. And that is what the story is really about--not the danger of falling through the ice, or the fear of it, on their parts or ours, but about being in that moment, in that time and place, and having a particular experience with particular people that will never be captured again. It was such a strangely wonderful move to make the jump in time at that moment in the story, and it's all I could think about as I was reading, and after I finished reading, and every time I go back and read that story again. Granted, I've been in school, taking or teaching writing workshops for the past fifteen years, which constantly reinforces this kind of attention. And I feel a little like I lose the magic of stories like this by focusing so closely on "what's under the hood." But it also means I have a great appreciation for, and admiration of, a well-crafted story, which makes me enjoy the reading even more. Even if I can't totally get lost in the world on the page the same way I used to be able to.

--HP

Bel Canto by Ann Patchet

My friend Erin recommended me this book -Bel Canto by Ann Patchett - and when I got a book gift card for graduation I decided to buy it. Lately it has been hard for me to find books with original storylines, so it came as a great surprise to find a well written, thrilling and original book. The multiple characters in Bel Canto have depth and you feel that you are getting to know them as if they were people you actually met. In addition, it brings such disparate topics together like politics and opera, language and social barriers. Telling you what the book is about would take away a little of the originality of the book, so I hope you are curious enough to read it!