other than that I read one right after the other...
The Importance of Being Kennedy, by Laurie Graham. This just struck me as being one of 'those' books, that might be entertaining. Its based on the facts of the Kennedy children and lives, but just lightly fictionalized as seen through the eyes of the nanny who raised them. It was fascinating to see the older children, and the children who were not talked about, and the things that were unspoken. The author did a good job of putting in little 'future nudges' (aka foreshadowing), where you read it and you knew what it was referring to. It was a light book that hung together well. It had a point of view and a direction, and you learned something from reading it.
Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo. I wanted to really like this book. I liked the premise, and I liked elements of it, but I felt that the author took the easy way out in some ways. She almost just flipped slavery on its head, so to speak, without working in more socio-economic factors somehow. It was almost to see if she could do it... and it almost worked, but not quite, because I kept feeling like the heroine was a black slave instead of a white one. I wish she had done something more creative with the geography as well... instead of just flipping the map a little. She just didn't go far enough with the concept, somehow. Because she had some wonderful elements in it, and some wonderful characterizations with the blacks being the masters and the whites being subordinate... I liked it, but I felt it could have been better, deeper, more powerful.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Cooked and the Raw.
So the latest buzz in the cooking blogs of the world (apart from the movie Julie and Julia, which just oogs me out a little, somehow...a fictionalized account of an interesting book, but fictionalized, taking liberties with people's LIVES) was about Richard Wrangtham's Catching Fire.
This book isn't scholarly, per se, but it isn't run-of-the-mill either. It does have an interesting premise, which makes a certain amount of sense, that we evolved from apelike creatures to humans because of cooking our food. That cooking foods neutralized toxins, and released more energy. And the author makes some compelling arguments towards that, backed up by physical facts and the fossil record. But then he diminishes his arguments by having other agendas. He has a chapter in which he demolishes the Raw Foodists, and he ends with making a claim that the current obesity crisis is due to, basically, overprocessed food. I did find the book interesting, don't get me wrong, but I also found that it was skewed and slanted towards the author's argument... Personally, I feel it could have definitely been a strong factor, but that our evolution was triggered by many things. I kept thinking, during one chapter, "You know, there's a way we could prove this, if anyone wanted to try it". Try feeding modern apes a diet of cooked food. Have a control group that is fed the same things, uncooked...
I just think its a little too simplistic to say that cooked food, and cooked food alone, resulted in Homo Erectus. We feed our pets cooked foods, and we don't have our dogs walking on their hind legs...(in fact, dogs do better on a raw food diet, by all accounts)...if any vets are reading this, does anyone know if dogs/cats have developed larger brains or differences in their digestive tracts in the past 50/100 years? The dogs/cats do uphold the hidden agenda, that modern eating habits are making us fat...since we have a lot of tubby pets eating canned food.
Anyway, I just feel that this book could have used a more critical reader and a stronger editor. I kept stopping and muttering to myself while reading this...and my college anthropology was 18 years ago! (eeek!)
It was interesting to compare and contrast this to reading Nina Planck's "Real Food", in which she espouses things like drinking raw milk, red meat, as well as fruits and veggies and butter... this book does make some interesting points, and she also uses some of the same anthropological examples to prove some of her points as does Wrangtham. I suppose this proves that nutritional data can be made to say anything you want...
But her point is, essentially, that "Industrial Food" has caused our obesity/current societal ill-health. She makes some very good points, interspersed with her own experiences, about the nutritional value of 'real food'. She does not actually endorse eating everything raw, that was just my pun in the title, but she does drink raw milk. She drinks milk from pastured cows, and gives a history of milk drinking, that also explains the history of why milk became pasteurized in this country. She also tells you what to look for if you want to drink raw milk, and how to do it safely.
She backs up her claims with a lot of research, of tables, of facts. She gives good, better, best options in terms of food, and goes into detail on why a diet more similar to what your grandparents ate is a good thing.
This book isn't scholarly, per se, but it isn't run-of-the-mill either. It does have an interesting premise, which makes a certain amount of sense, that we evolved from apelike creatures to humans because of cooking our food. That cooking foods neutralized toxins, and released more energy. And the author makes some compelling arguments towards that, backed up by physical facts and the fossil record. But then he diminishes his arguments by having other agendas. He has a chapter in which he demolishes the Raw Foodists, and he ends with making a claim that the current obesity crisis is due to, basically, overprocessed food. I did find the book interesting, don't get me wrong, but I also found that it was skewed and slanted towards the author's argument... Personally, I feel it could have definitely been a strong factor, but that our evolution was triggered by many things. I kept thinking, during one chapter, "You know, there's a way we could prove this, if anyone wanted to try it". Try feeding modern apes a diet of cooked food. Have a control group that is fed the same things, uncooked...
I just think its a little too simplistic to say that cooked food, and cooked food alone, resulted in Homo Erectus. We feed our pets cooked foods, and we don't have our dogs walking on their hind legs...(in fact, dogs do better on a raw food diet, by all accounts)...if any vets are reading this, does anyone know if dogs/cats have developed larger brains or differences in their digestive tracts in the past 50/100 years? The dogs/cats do uphold the hidden agenda, that modern eating habits are making us fat...since we have a lot of tubby pets eating canned food.
Anyway, I just feel that this book could have used a more critical reader and a stronger editor. I kept stopping and muttering to myself while reading this...and my college anthropology was 18 years ago! (eeek!)
It was interesting to compare and contrast this to reading Nina Planck's "Real Food", in which she espouses things like drinking raw milk, red meat, as well as fruits and veggies and butter... this book does make some interesting points, and she also uses some of the same anthropological examples to prove some of her points as does Wrangtham. I suppose this proves that nutritional data can be made to say anything you want...
But her point is, essentially, that "Industrial Food" has caused our obesity/current societal ill-health. She makes some very good points, interspersed with her own experiences, about the nutritional value of 'real food'. She does not actually endorse eating everything raw, that was just my pun in the title, but she does drink raw milk. She drinks milk from pastured cows, and gives a history of milk drinking, that also explains the history of why milk became pasteurized in this country. She also tells you what to look for if you want to drink raw milk, and how to do it safely.
She backs up her claims with a lot of research, of tables, of facts. She gives good, better, best options in terms of food, and goes into detail on why a diet more similar to what your grandparents ate is a good thing.
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