Reading List: June/July 2009

1. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

I seemed to be hearing about this book everywhere and had somewhat thought of it as yet another health/diet/miracle plan/talk show pseudo-phenom. This assumption was completely unfounded and unfair: good job, Meghan! Then I heard the author in a radio interview on CBC and he was saying interesting things, so I bothered to, yanno, at least google the book, because that's how we get Information and the interwebs never makes assumptions like I did. Nevertheless. I discovered he wrote a couple other cool books and the premise of In Defense of Food seemed rather smart, so I put a library recall on that sheeeit, yo.

Sadly someone recalled the book right back cause library patrons are cold like that, so if I say something inaccurate it's because I don't have the book in front of me. I'm even working practically inside a bookstore today but they don't have it either.

Okay. I was excited by this book. It said so many things I really agree with but had never been able to articulate before. He talks about the current time as an "Age of Nutritionism" where the combined forces of nutrition science and food industry marketing have made us all very anxious and obsessed with nutrients and diets and how this obsession is used as a marketing device. Like how we're buying omega-3-fortified chocolate bars and $2.50 bottles of vitamin water.

The history of how nutritionism and the overprocessing of food developed (especially in terms of economics and marketing) is fascinating and depressing; reading about it made me very aware of the intense bombardment of media related to eating and diet and 'health' that I am subjected to every day--which has very little to do with actual food or actual health.

He points out that North American society has a huge obsession with "healthy" eating, and is simultaneously one of the most unhealthy societies in the world (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and so on). He talks about other cultures and how humans can eat a huge range of food and be relatively healthy, as long as they are Real Foods, whole and unprocessed and unrefined and fresh. C.f. our manufactured 'foods' stripped of their true essence and filled with corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and aspartame and random dyes and preservatives etc, a diet that makes us fat and sick.

He touches on the idea of eating as a cultural activity that can be about joy and tradition and social bonding. It seems like so much of our food-related time and energy is spent thinking about weight and body image and guilt and shame and "eating right" like there's some moral imperative directing you to skip the low-cal margarine on the low-gluten-omega-3-fortified-prebiotic-fibre-enhanced bread. Even if we are having meals involving joyful social bonding, how many of us will be thinking about which foods we ate were Bad and which were Good (both probably inaccurately) either during or after that meal? Sigh.

So the answer? Pollan is pretty self-aware about the irony of prescribing any one diet in a book about how prescribed diets are bad for us. He just tells us: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
"That anyone should need to write a book advising people to 'eat food,'" says Pollan, "could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion." And in the latter part of the book he talks about how to track down actual real food and stay away from the manufactured processed stuff.

I agree with so much of this book. Most of what's in our grocery stores is not food, and it's there to make money, not feed us or make us healthy or happy. I want to keep writing about all the points in the entire book because I really do find it intelligent and enlightening and kind of also a huge relief, but I'll restrain myself. It's also written in an engaging and very un-condescending style, self-aware and straightforward but not simplified. The hardest part for me is actually acting on this--convenience, dedication, money, time, taste (because I love me some KD)--but since I read it I have been a lot more conscious of the nature of what I'm eating (is it food? or food product?) and I have been trying to make choices based more on this consciousness and less on what the media/nutrition science industry tells me is right. Recall your library's copy and see what you think. The introduction can be found here.


2. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson

Short stories. I luffed this book. "Go, Fight, Win" was my favorite, I think, though "Birds in the House" was close and the title story is surprisingly satisfying for the topic matter (quarterlife crisis ennui?). "The Shooting Man" just about broke my heart and did something clever with a 'surprise ending' that isn't (in my interpretation) meant to be a surprise at all but rather an apparent inevitability that plays against our hope (and the character's hope) right up to the end that it doesn't have to be inevitable, however irrational that hope. It's neat. This guy's smart, and the stories manage to fit into the contemporary American indie McSweeneys/George Saunders style of fiction while still feeling fresh and exciting. I'll read his next book fo sho. BUY this book, people, right now, from your local independent bookstore.


3. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

You might recognize her name from her comics and books about the Moomins. Another book by Tove Jansson came through the library a while ago and it had an introduction by Ali Smith, who is basically my Favorite, so that's what caught my eye, and I tracked this one down too. It's like nothing I've ever read before and makes me feel quiet and rageful and shivery and relieved all at once.


4. Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

This won the Believer Book Award. It's not quite my preferred style, if that matters, but it's brilliantly written. There's this subversive first-person subjectivity that's pretty great (I'm consciously ignoring the gender issues because writing is an act of willed understanding and it doesn't matter who is what) and it's tense and, as the Believer said, the anti-escapism, and ambiguous. I love ambiguity in books because that's life. It's about, among many other things, never being able to inhabit another person's experience--including, maybe, a subversively subjective first-person narrator's? Mystery and pain and loss and paranoia and insecurity and I almost want to make a DFW comparison, not quite stylistically but emotionally. Most books that aren't quite my taste, I just don't get into no matter how well-done, but this one I did completely, which says a lot.


5. Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block

Mm, it's hard to talk about this book without responding to its content instead of the book itself. But I guess that's the point of this one, I read it to analyze open marriage according to the author and/or society and/or myself, not to read. Like I do with many nonfiction books. Anyhow. She has a blog and it became a book deal, about living in an open marriage. I was bothered by some Sweeping Generalizations made throughout as well as use of euphemisms (if you're going to write about sex, orgasm, masturbation, etc, call them what they are). I don't know. Straight-up nonfiction memoirs entirely about the author's personal life are tough to comment on for me, because I'd be commenting on her life and not much else. Also I think I'm the not the Target Audience, wrong generation or something, a lot of the stuff about "what we all grew up believing about sex and love and marriage" is not what I grew up believing, so. Worth a look if you've never thought about open relationships, I guess, but it's no Ethical Slut.