Reading on the Weinstraße

Non-fiction has really started to allure me of late. Two recent discoveries have been "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan.

The Omnivore's Dilemma is an engrossing, thoughtful, and even suspenseful account of one journalist's adventures exploring the modern food chain. Pollan's intriguing premise is that our ancestors, as omnivores, were faced with special challenges not experienced by animals with a more self-evident dinner menu. Unlike, say, koala bears, an animal that can eat almost anything must constantly make decisions: Are those red berries nutritious or dangerous? Are these mushrooms tasty or toxic? Should this be combined with that?

How we resolved this dilemma in the past was through culture. Instead of new experimentation every generation, accumulated wisdom was passed down through the community via an established local cuisine. If grandmother made it, then that's what I'll make, too.

This approach to nourishing ourselves worked pretty well for a good many thousand years. But in the last couple of generations, our guide for navigating the bulging supermarket shelves has become everyone but grandma: nutritionists, journalists, scientists, politicians, and advertisers have all elbowed her out, each with a different motive and none with a clue. Eat less fat! Wait, eat more fat! But only these kinds! Eggs are good. Eggs are bad! Eggs are okay, but this omega-3-added variety is even better. Try this milk with "new! active cultures" and this one with "now more calcium". In attempting to industrialize our food production, we've gone from eating the stuff to analyzing, manipulating, and processing (to say nothing of marketing) it. The result is that we've re-introduced the omnivore's dilemma, and sentenced an entire population to bewilderment and malnutrition.

A fascinating read. Here are a couple excerpts:

On the modern omnivore's dilemma: "This situation suits the food industry just fine, of course. The more anxious we are about eating, the more vulnerable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert's advice."

On industrial agriculture: "When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine... when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine."

On a sustainable-agriculture movement in Italy called Slow Food: "It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."

On a meal with friends: "In his chapter Brillat-Savarin draws a sharp distinction between the pleasures of eating -- 'the actual and direct sensation of a need being satisfied,' a sensation we share with the animals -- and the uniquely human 'pleasures of the table.' These consist of 'considered sensations born of the various circumstances of fact, things, and persons accompanying the meal' and comprise for him one of the brightest fruits of civilization. Every meal we share at a table recapitulates this evolution from nature to culture, as we pass from satisfying our animal appetites in semisilence to the lofting of conversational balloons. The pleasures of the table begin with eating (and specifically with eating meat, in Brillat-Savarin's view, since it was the need to cook and apportion meat that first brought us together to eat), but they can end up anywhere human talk cares to go. In the same way that the raw becomes cooked, eating becomes dining."

Cosmos has been another delightful discovery (thanks, Shauna, for leaving your copy at our place!). Carl Sagan was one of the greatest astronomers of the twentieth century, even more so because of his belief that the miracles of science should be made available to the general public. An avowed atheist, he is nonetheless surprisingly spiritual. I can't think of a better word to describe his book than "wonder" -- wonder at the universe, at creation, at humans and our minds, at mathematics, at chemistry, at existence. Here was a guy whose boylike enthusiasm for the cosmos only grew the more he found out. He made it his life's work to shake people and point at the sky and go, "wake up! Look around you! Isn't it incredible?"

I think a review on the back of the book says it all: "Cosmos is like the college course in science you always wanted to take but never knew a professor could teach. It's magnificent. Sagan writes beautifully... With a lyrical literary style, and a range that touches almost all aspects of human knowledge, Cosmos often seems too good to be true."

Well, I'm sure enjoying it. The book is not just about the universe itself -- what it's made of, what we know about how it works, theories as to what it looks like and where it came from -- it also documents how these discoveries themselves were made. Which is funny, how we sort of take that part for granted. Sure, everyone has to read in school about Galileo and his telescope and Isaac Newton watching an apple fall to the ground. Yawn.

But take those stories out of school for a minute. These were real guys. Everything we know about anything had to be stumbled upon and observed and proven by humans like us -- often despite intimidating obstacles, like the scowling Inquisition or the Thirty Years War. As a kid, it's kind of natural to think of science as magic; even though you're intellectually aware that there are rational, often astonishingly clever, inventions behind the things you take for granted, you're so busy learning everything -- from how to walk to how to find your way to the bus stop to how your parents knew it was you who hid your unfinished lunch in the kitchen drawer -- that everything is new, and you're less occupied with how they came about than how to simply navigate their use. Being told that Pythagorus came up with this or that theorum is just another thing to have to learn.

I guess I never noticed that where some things are concerned, like science, this tendency has remained with me into adulthood (at least to some extent). What Carl Sagan does is show you behind the curtain -- make you realize that taking pictures of the surface of Mars is the incredible culmination of thousands of years of struggle and drama and discovery. I found myself reading passages on equations -- equations, for God's sake! -- and nodding in page-turning captivation. Wow. There's a writer.

The book begins with a chapter called The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean:

"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

"The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia, we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky."