Long post--feel free to read in installments if you wish...


Film: Waitress
This movie was a good way to cool off on a Monday afternoon. As someone whose thoughts and emotions are usually tied up (either allegorically or practically) with food, I, of course, liked the way that the trials and joys of the main characters are inseparable from pies. The middle of the film seems to glorify extramarital affairs, but the story's resolution rose above my initial impressions. Witty and quirky at times, painful and depressing at times, it was much more than a romantic comedy.



Book: Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

I got on a kick a while ago to reread some of the books that were assigned in high school but didn't make much sense to my seventeen year old mind at the time. This is a book that somehow escaped me in my high school assignments, so I got to read it for the first time.. As I perused it in the library, I figured that if nothing else I will be able to clearly understand all of the cultural references and parodies of the story. After a few days of digesting the story which is, well, just weird as you read it, I've found myself liking it more and more. The story was very visceral to me and I could physically feel the chaos as the island descends into disorder. As a parable and a commentary on human morality in the midst of group governing systems I found it pretty


interesting.Book: The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements, by Sandor Ellix Katz

This was a pretty interesting and well-researched book following grass-roots alternatives to the modern industrial-food complex. Diets consisting of roadside weeds and roadkill; the raw foods diet (including raw meat for some); the lifestyles of "freegans" aka "opportunivores" who subsist entirely on discarded food; oh and an entire chapter on legalizing cannibis. Katz is a self-admitted extremist and activist when it comes to food, and the book is not intended to offer widespread solutions to the current food crisis (clearly several hundred million people cannot subsist on roadkill), but does offer some interesting even if unfeasable options with the basic message that it would do us good to become more connected to our food, whether that means growing our own, visiting local farms, or just reading our ingredient labels more closely. I'll list just a few of the interesting things that Katz mentions (I didn't fact check for accuracy, though Katz lists his sources in the back of the book):

**A very eye-opening illustration of how many organic companies (you know, the products with the cute small family farm on the front label) are now owned by major corporations. Click here for the updated info. Buying organic can be a good option if you are concerned about pesticide residuals, the use of genetically modifed organisms, and the use of growth hormones and antibiotics in animals. But buying organic does not mean supporting small farmers. The USDA estimated in 2001-02 that farmers receive only 19 cents of every dollar spent on food.

**Based on research provided by the Pew Initiative, as of 2004, the United States was one of only 5 nations that have proactively embraced growing genetically modified food. The United States cultivates over half the acreage of geneticallly modified food worldwide, whereas most other nations have either banned them outright or used caution in allowing them in their country. Countries such as Zambia have refused U.S. donations of genetically modified corn.

**Although common wisdom tells us that healthy food leads to good health, there seems to be little connection between the food industry and the health industry. In 1960, the average household spent 17.5% of its income on food and 5% on health care. In 2003, the average household spent less than 10% on food and more than 15% on health care. I recognize that this increase is due to multiple factors, but anyone who has ever eaten hospital food can tell you that the health industry does not always practice what it preaches...

**High fructose corn syrup (you know, the stuff that makes dr. pepper so good) consumption has rose more than 1,000 percent from the 1970s to 2000; today the average consumption of high-fructose corn syrup is more than fifty-five pounds per person per year. Katz quotes a doctor studying rats on a high fructose diets. She reports that whereas every cell in the body can metabolize glucose (ie sugar), all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of rats on high-fructose diets looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhosis. (yuck).

**While the US government is jumping on the biofuel bandwagon by endorsing the use of corn to make ethanol, a small group of people are recycling used cooking oil into fuel. This is encouraging in that it does not require redirecting edible food or agricultural resources and provides a way to dispose of the over 3 billion gallons of used fry oil used by American restaurants each year. An interesting alternative.
6/21/07 Update: I heard a story on npr last night about a man who was fined over $3,000 for running his diesel engine entirely on soybean oil ($1000 of this was to pay taxes that he would be charged if he were buying gasoline). Kinda makes you wonder how serious our country is about reducing our dependence on oil...

I wish I could say that I had all the answers to how to feed an entire nation with fresh, healthy food from sustainable farms (and this would mean feeding ALL people, not just the ones who can afford to shop at Whole Foods). But I don't. And lest I spout statistics in an effort to make me look like a food and health elitist, let me say that I enjoy eating things like cheetos and ice cream, and drinking coke with my pizza. But I will say that in the past year Doug and I have had lots of conversations and made a more concerted effort to know where our food comes and to be more conscious of where we spend our money. And it has been the beginning of a very good thing.