Fire and Knowledge

Today, nine thousand people will die of HIV/AIDS. And almost all of them will be poor…. Today, fourteen thousand new people will be infected with the disease, most of them in poor countries. Forty-two million already have it, twenty-two million have already died…. The world has never seen a public health crisis like this.

–Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (2005), p. 287

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1990s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold … have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, for lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18-19

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 18

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia (one of the best in America, as far as I know), wrote an interesting diatribe about how everything he wants to do is illegal. He can’t slaughter his own animals, collaborate marketing with neighbors, charge for farm tours, or build the house he wanted without government interference. If you don’t know much about how government makes life hard for small, environmentally-conscious farmers, you should definitely read this.

I learned about Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was really taken with his permacultural methods of farming. Someday my wife and I hope to visit his farm and attend one of his seminars.

This article made it on the homepage of del.icio.us, which is very encouraging. In fact, I have been very encouraged over the past year about how environmentally / agriculturally-aware our culture is becoming. It is still a very small segment to be sure, but it is starting to catch on. Thank God.

My hope is that someday feedlots, industrial agriculture, pollution, and destructive mining and foresting practices will be as reprehensible to us as racism.

There are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of “unhealthy” foods, and lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are. We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 3

Do you want to die at home with your people “in blessed peace around you,” which is the death Tiresias foresaw for Odysseus and the one Homer seems to recommend?

Or do you want to die in the hands of the best medical professionals wherever they are?

Such questions seem irrelevant until you realize that they define two very different lives.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 146

An idea of health that does not generously and gracefully accommodate the fact of death is obviously incomplete. The crudest manifestation of modern medicine is its routine, stubborn, and finally cruel resistance to death. This comes of the refusal to accept it not only as part of health, which it demonstrably is, but also as a great mystery both in itself and as a part of the mystery that surrounds us all our lives.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 146

The anti-smoking movement has never been louder or more prominent. Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti-smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped from 22.3% to 28.5%. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of high school students who smoke jumped 32%. Since 1988, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the United States has risen an extraordinary 73%. There are few public health programs in recent years that have fallen as short of their mission as the war on smoking.

–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000), p. 221