Adventures in Reading

Just read this week’s NYTimes.com Book Update and found way too many more books that I’d like to read (relevant NYTimes Book Reviews in parentheses)!

• Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan (”Born Again” by Jonathan Spence)
• Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (”Call of the Wild” by Pankaj Mishra)
• The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai by Wang Anyi (”Miss Shanghai” by Francine Prose)
• Serve the People! by Yan Lianke (”Kissing the Cook” by Liesl Schillinger)
• Turtle Feet: The Making and Unmaking of a Buddhist Monk by Nikolai Grozni (”Dharma Bum” by Amy Finnerty)

Born in Bulgaria, Nikolai Grozni studied jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston before moving to Dharamsala, India where he practiced Buddhism and is his memoir of his turning to and then away from Buddhism.

All the others are novels written by Chinese authors in Mandarin and translated to English. I’ve enjoyed many Chinese novels in English translation, such as A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong, and Waiting: A Novel and The Bridegroom by Ha Jin.

Normally I’d write a bit about each of the novels and tell you why I want to read them, but today’s different.

Now, I’ve always kept a running private list of books that I’ve come across and want to read. And I’ve known for a long time now that the list is getting to be quite absurd. It has just about 300 books on it. I own about 400 books, some of which I have not read and are therefore also on my list of books to read.

But it wasn’t until today, writing this entry and reading through some of my previous entries of books I want to read that I’ve realized how ridiculous this list is. For me to read all these books that I want to read in one year, I would have to quit adding additional books and read full time!

If I want to take my time, well I still have to read at a faster pace than I add books and that just simply is not the case.

So . . . the moral of the story . . . be choosier about what books I read.

Keep my list, but realize that even within my list of books I want to read that I won’t get to read them all.

And consider publishing my list of books I’d like to read (with the ones that I own that I haven’t read removed from the list) to help me realize the absurdity of it all.

Since last week (April 28 - May 2) was Baltimore Green Week, I’ve been reading:

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
• Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Click here to read my post about my intention to read these books.

I plan to write a bit about all three of these books, but today I’ll start with The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was initially more excited to read Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I actually heard about The Omnivore’s Dilemma only after I had heard about In Defense of Food.

Still, despite my initial wariness to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma first, I am enjoying it!

It has made me even more excited to read Pollan’s In Defense of Food and Gary Paul Nabhan’s Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods!

So far, I’ve only read Part I (Industrial Corn) which teaches us about how corn is absolutely the # 1 source of American’s calories. Very creepy.

I’ve tried my best to avoid products containing corn syrup for years, but I had no idea that citric acid, lactic acid, glucose, fructose, malodextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, manitol, xanthan gum, dextrins, and monosodium glutamate (among many other common ingredients) are corn-processed additives!

And people have made such a big deal lately of American consumption of gas, while focusing on gasoline used by cars. Well imagine my surprise to learn that one-fifth (20%) of America’s petroleum consumption goes towards producing and transporting our food! As I understand it, about 40% of our petroleum consumption goes into cars.

The grossest part of the book so far was learning that they feed cattle (herbivores by nature) feather meal, chicken litter (bedding, feces, leftover food), beef tallow and other cattle parts, and chicken, fish, and pig meal in addition to corn. Yes our cattle eat cattle. And sadly so much of a cattle’s diet comes from corn these days (too much starch and not enough fiber) that the poor animals get sick from the build-up of gas and foamy slime in their stomachs and from the unnatural acidic stomach (cow’s stomachs are usually pH netural or pH 7 , the pH of an acid is below 7, above 7 is basic) also due to a high corn diet. Not to mention that cattle live in “feedlot dust” which is cattle feces. No wonder they need high does of antibiotics to stay alive until slaughter!

There’s much more to be said about just Part I (Industrial Corn) of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. For example, Pollan provides us with the number of gallons of oil it takes to grow one acre of corn (that’s 50+ gallons), why we use so much fertilizer (produced by retrofitted World War II plants no longer producing explosives but using the same basic material - ammonium nitrate), the cost difference between growing corn and selling corn (in 2005 it cost over $1 more per bushel to grow corn than you would get selling it), the big businesses’ hands in corn (Cargill and ADM — Archer Daniels Midland — buy one-third of American corn), why processed food companies love corn (it’s cheap and as on food executive supposedly once said, “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it”), and much more.

Not surprisingly, the meal derived from the industrial / factory farm / Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) food chain that Pollan chooses to eat is one from McDonald’s. One third of American children eat fast food every day and 19% of American meals are eaten in the car! And eye-opening for me — a self-described Chicken McNuggets fanatic — thirteen out of the thirty eight ingredients that comprise a McNugget are derived from corn. And two of them are known toxins in large quantities — dimethylpolysiloxene is a mutagen (possibly cancer causing) and tertiary butyl hydroquinone. Ick!

I highly recommend this book and look forward to finishing Part II (Pastoral Grass) and Part III (Personal: The Forest).