In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan, 2008. Penguin Press, $21.95 hardcover.
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester R. Brown, 2008. W.W. Norton & Co., & Earth Policy Institute, $16.95 paperback. Available for free downloading at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm
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Introduction
History, her robes woefully out of fashion, has been left behind by the "core academic subjects" now central to American education. Thus we not only doom ourselves to repeat her mistakes but also deprive ourselves of her wisdom, in particular the hard-won knowledge of how to prevent or at least survive the disasters we recklessly re-create for ourselves. The knowledge survives, however, in such unlikely places as cookbooks and children's literature.
Thanks to the vivid tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), the menus of two families, half a continent apart in the dawning Age of Fossil Fuels, illuminate the themes of new books by Michael Pollan and Lester R. Brown.
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
by Michael Pollan, 2008. Penguin Press, $21.95 hardcover.
by Carol Van Strum
"As soon as Mother finished straining the milk, they all sat down and Father asked the blessing for breakfast."
"There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar. There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat cakes, as many as Almanzo wanted to eat, with sausages and gravy or with butter and maple syrup. There were preserves and jams and jellies and doughnuts. But best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice and its crumbly crust. He ate two big wedges of the pie."
"Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie."
From Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Thus did a nine-year-old boy eat breakfast and dinner in 1866. In between these prodigious meals, there was also the lunch-pail, carried through 40-below-zero weather to school: "It held bread-and-butter and sausage, doughnuts and apples, and four delicious apple-turnovers, their plump crusts filled with melting slices of apple and spicy brown juice."
By today's standards, Almanzo's childhood diet should have hustled him into an early grave, yet despite a bout of diphtheria in adulthood that left him permanently crippled, Almanzo lived into his 90s, active to the last. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, explores this dietary paradox in his sequel, In Defense of Food. Like Farmer Boy, it is hard to read without pangs of hunger and nostalgia.
Almanzo certainly ate with gusto, but never need fear obesity: every calorie he consumed fueled dawn-to-dark activity – hauling and splitting wood; cutting and storing ice; planting, harvesting and storing food for a large family and their wealth of livestock, as well as attending school and exercising a lively predilection for mischief. What's also worth noting is that every scrap of food on his family's well-stocked table was produced on their own land, by their own labor. Even the wool of their winter clothing and the leather shoes on their feet came from their own sheep and their own cattle.
Michael Pollan sensibly does not advocate a return to such strenuous, non-stop exertion. Instead, he points to the growing local foods and organic agriculture movements as a healthy reconnection between urban and rural lifestyles. Most importantly and eloquently, he condemns the twentieth century replacement of food with food-like products and isolated nutriments relentlessly hyped in what he calls "The Age of Nutritionism."
"As eaters we find ourselves increasingly in the grip of a Nutritional Industrial Complex – comprised of well-meaning, if error-prone, scientists and food marketers only too eager to exploit every shift in the nutritional consensus." Thus has arisen an ideology of nutritionism, vigorously proclaiming that the only function of eating food is to obtain whatever individual nutrients are currently in vogue. The industrialized Western diet of refined, processed food products, constantly modified by the latest nutrient, was recognized more than a century ago to be the chief cause of what were called "Western diseases": obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
Instead of questioning the basic value of our Western diet, however, 20th century food producers kept tinkering with additives and fortifications in a never-ending stream of diet and food fads – high protein, low protein, good fat, bad fat, good sugar, bad sugar, high carb, low carb. The result, Pollan notes, is that "no people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than we Americans do – and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating."
The remedy for this obsession, he suggests, is food – real food, that is, unprocessed and untainted – as far as possible – by industrialized agriculture. Avoiding specific strictures or guidelines, he recommends simply: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." This means taking a little time to prepare and cook our own meals, but as Pollan says, we've managed to squeeze time from our oh-so-busy lives to surf the Internet, watch television, and yack endlessly on cell phones; certainly we can manage a few minutes to chop onions. Equally important, he emphasizes, is taking the time to enjoy our food.
What a concept! Imagine any of us recalling in fifty or eighty years – as did Almanzo Wilder in delectable detail – the meal we ate yesterday or this morning. Michael Pollan reminds us of what we've lost, and how much we have to gain with a return to real food, in all its varied glory.
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Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
by Lester R. Brown, 2008. W.W. Norton & Co., & Earth Policy Institute, $16.95 paperback. Available for free downloading at http://www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm
by Carol Van Strum
"For supper there were hot boiled potatoes and a slice of bread apiece, with salt. That was the last baking of bread….While they were eating, the lamp began to flicker. With all its might the flame pulled itself up, drawing the last drop of kerosene up the wick. Then it fainted down and desperately tried again. Ma leaned over and blew it out….Christmas day was over."
"'Everything has changed too fast' (Pa said). 'Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves - they're good things to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.'"
From The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
During the 1870s, the Transcontinental Railroad encouraged development of far-flung settlements with regular deliveries of coal, kerosene, food, fashions, and other trappings of civilization. Stranded with other settlers on the Dakota prairie when blizzards halted supply trains from October to April, Laura's family slowly starved, desperately burning their livestock's hay to keep from freezing to death. As fossil fuel supplies dry up 130 years later, the corn once raised for our livestock is now processed into fuel, creating food shortages. This, we are told, is progress.
Two years ago, we reviewed Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet in Distress and a Civilization in Trouble, Lester Brown's second edition of this book1, asking, "would world leaders forget their quarrels and unite against a common threat? Could global industries be retooled and mobilized in time? Would people alter wasteful lifestyles to save the planet? Tune in for the next exciting episode."
Plan B 3.0 is the next exciting episode, and it's a real cliff-hanger. As Brown remarks, "Perhaps the most revealing difference between [the two books] is the change of the subtitle from 'Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble' to simply 'Mobilizing to Save Civilization.' The new subtitle better reflects both the scale of the challenge we face and the wartime speed of the response it calls for."
There is no question about the wartime speed needed to mobilize. In the two years since the earlier edition, melting of glaciers and polar ice caps has increased dramatically; the number of failing states has increased year by year, as has runaway population growth, even as peak oil becomes manifest and fuel prices soar, water tables drop, grain production declines world-wide, forests succumb to fire and chainsaw, soils erode and deserts expand, and the global economy teeters on the edge of collapse. In a frighteningly real sense, we are little better off than the Dakota settlers 130 years ago: lamps dimming, food supplies dwindling, and no hope of a supply train full of fuel on the horizon.
Continuing with business as usual, Brown says, is no longer a viable option. "It is time for Plan B." The current version has four overriding goals: "stabilizing climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the earth's ecosystems." Every one of these critical goals, Brown emphasizes with detailed, inspiring examples, is not only feasible but is already being accomplished in one or more nations or regions. The big question is whether we can inspire the political will and leadership to effect these goals on a global scale in time to avert climatic and economic disaster. Herein lies the urgency of Plan B 3.0.
"We have the technologies to restructure the world energy economy and stabilize climate," Brown urges. "The challenge now is to build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play."
In this spirit, Brown and publishers have made Plan B 3.0 available in free download from the Earth Policy Institute web site, as well as in an affordable, handsome paperback suitable for donation to schools, libraries, and all other public institutions: the more the merrier, for as Brown says, "there is not anything sacred about Plan B….If anyone can come up with a better plan, we will welcome it. The world needs the best plan possible."
1 http://www.deptplanetearth.com/book_BrownLovins.html
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