Pig Hunting Corn Haters

After about six months of off and on reading, I finally finished The Omnivore's Dilemma. In it, UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan traces the origins and processes behind several different food chains: industrial, industrial/big organic, local, and self-obtained. It becomes obvious pretty early on that he has serious reservations about the ludicrous ways American industrial agriculture sets about dealing with the annual surplus of corn, but how practical is it really to expect us all to hunt pigs in the Northern California foothills or gather our own mushrooms in the streets of Berkeley?

Pollan raises more questions than he answers in this peek behind the curtain and, unintentionally or otherwise, it starts to feel like a ploy to get us to buy his latest book, an unofficial sequel titled In Defense of Food. I haven't gotten around to reading this one yet, at least in part because I think its tag line sums up his answer pretty well: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Are pesticides bad for you? Of course. Is fast food healthy? Certainly not in the quantities a lot of people eat it. A lot of it just comes down to common sense, though. If you eat a lot of fatty, processed foods, you're not going to be healthy. If all you eat is spinach, you're not going to be healthy. Moderation and logic will take you a long way...

So, did The Omnivore's Dilemma change my life? I suppose. I'm more cognizant of what goes into some of the processed foods I love (although it's nothing I didn't already know from reading Fast Food Nation or watching Super Size Me). I value local food more than I did before (although like the New Yorker article I linked to a while ago, if the local food isn't season it's probably just as bad if not worse than food that's been trucked across the country).

Oh, and apparently since I live east of Columbus, I'm environmentally better off drinking wine from France than from the Northern California vineyards I grew up near. So there you have it.

Bill James Gets Around

Apparently, running the Boston Red Sox isn't enough of a challenge for Bill James (there's some baseless invective straight out of my mother's Albuquerque basement for you). Here in Slate, he's figured out when a basketball game is actually over. Since, you know, I guess it's not over when the clock says 00:00. Or something.

The formula:

Number of points team is ahead
- 3
+ .5 points if leading team has the ball or - .5 if trailing team has the ball (negative numbers become zero)
Square the result

If the resulting number is greater than the number of seconds left in the game, the lead is safe.

Ah, screw it - there's a widget embedded in the Slate article.

Don't mind me - I'm having a hard time caring about basketball after Cal's sorry excuse for a season (funny, I feel like I said something very similar during the bowl games). Besides, this will come in handy when I start placing my foolish, under-informed wagers on the games. And not to mention my brackets. Oh, Lord, my brackets.

Thanks, Mom & Dad

Just when I was about ready to take responsibility for my own misery, Edinburgh University researchers have determined that happiness is in our genes. Take it away, Dr Alexander Weiss:

Although happiness is subject to a wide range of external influences, we have found that there is a heritable component of happiness.

So not only can we not determine the legitimacy of other people's brain states, apparently now we're only somewhat responsible for our own general dispositions. Studying 1000 sets of twins, the researchers were able to determine that basic happiness is about fifty percent genetic, with the rest being accounted for by external factors such as health, wealth, and relationships (and, presumably, big-screen HDTVs).

Then again, what do the Scots know? They deep fry pizza:




(Link to the study found on the always interesting Freakonomics blog.)

PS. Just kidding, mom & dad. Y'all are the best.

Sacksophilia

I finally finished Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, and *yawn*, thank god for that. It's not a bad book, don't get me wrong, but there is no steak to go with the four hundred pages of sizzle. Sacks has a lot of great anecdotes, and a Bostoner (Bostonite?) would probably say he was 'wicked awesome' to talk to at a party:

(My video embedding skill are failing me again.)

Still, I can't honestly say I'm a better or even more informed person for having read this book. You could easily skip around from chapter to chapter as stories grab your interest. And I'm sure plenty of people will enjoy it. I was hoping for more content, though.

For another take on the book, check this previous post.