BiblioAddict

Let’s begin with the good news: I’ve been accepted to the master’s in publishing program at Pace University in New York!!!!!!!!! *insert ecstatic jumping and insane screaming here* This means that beginning in the fall I will be learning the ins and outs of the industry which brings us the books we all know and love. I. Can’t. Wait! I’m finding it impossible to believe that I’ll be a part of the book-making process. How cool is that?! This is truly the first step in a dream come true. Waaaaaa-hoooo!!!!! *insert balloons and confetti falling from the sky here*

Okay, okay – back to our regularly scheduled programing…

I’ve been reading Barbara Kingslover’s book ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE and we got off to a rough start in the beginning. Kingslover’s writing style is incredibly readable and engaging so it is not the source of my minor quibbles. No – those come when Kingslover draws some rather shaky conclusions, in my opinion, on the problems affecting the American diet. For instance, on page 15, Kingslover writes,

All industrialized countries have experienced some commodification of agriculture and increased consumption of processed foods. But nowhere else on earth has it become normal to layer on the love handles as we do. (Nude beaches are still popular in Europe.)

Now, I may not have quibbled with the first sentence, although I might have wondered what was so wrong with love handles. The last time I checked, having love handles didn’t necessarily mean you were overweight. It simply meant that you – as my mother would say – had a little meat on your bones, which I don’t think is a bad thing. In fact, I’m of the opinion that it’s healthy to have a little meat on your bones.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have quibbled if she had left it there. But that parenthesized sentence – “Nude beaches are still popular in Europe.” – bothered me. What, I wondered, does one point – love handles are normal in America – have to do with the other – nude beaches are popular in Europe? I see the point that Kingslover is trying that make, but it’s a very weak one, considering that it does not take into account the differences in culture and the way that Americans versus Europeans tend to view the public display of the naked body.

This cultural difference has very little to do with the relatively recent development of American tendency toward love handles, and more to do, I think, with our inherited Puritan belief that the naked body is something that should only be revealed within the privacy of our own bedrooms. I’m not saying that that’s the proper way to view the naked body, but I am saying that it is nevertheless a part of our national psychology inherited from our Puritan ancestors.

And Kingslover says, “Nude beaches are still popular in Europe” as if they were ever popular in America. Was this ever so? Perhaps I am too young to remember the time when Americans frolicked on nude beaches flaunting their fashionably thin bodies.

I also thought Kingslover was being unfairly dismissive of people who claim they simply can’t afford organic foods i.e. the farmer friendly and healthier foods offered in grocery stores. She writes,

And we complain about the high price of organic meats and vegetables that might send back more than three nickels per buck to the farmers: those actual humans putting seeds in the ground, harvesting, attending livestock births, standing in the fields at dawn casting their shadows upon our sustenance. There seems to be some reason why we don’t want to compensate or think about these hard-working people.

I wrote in the sidelines, “But if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.” When a single mother of six is faced with saving a few pennies by buying the commercially farmed food over the more expensive organic kind, nine times out of a ten, she’s going to choose the cheaper of the two, no matter how much she might sympathize with the plight of the American farmer. Hey, I’ve been in Whole Foods before, I know how expensive that stuff is. Everybody simply can not afford it. Or rather, the ordering of their priorities won’t allow them to afford it, and I don’t think Kingslover, or anyone else, is in a position to judge someone else’s priorities. Judge not until you’ve walked in my shoes.

So there’s an example of what I didn’t like about the book. What I do like is that, despite my quibbles, it is making me more conscious about all the blasted soy and corn product in my food. Once you start looking the labels, you find that it’s on everything. Why, I wondered this morning, is there soy and corn product in my pancake mix? And I’ve begun to appreciate in a way I never have before the virtues of fresh, unprocessed food. Earlier last week, I baked an animal (Cornish hen), I bought fresh vegetables (carrots and potatoes), and now Barbara Kingslover may have cured me of my addiction to Dr. Pepper (corn syrup heavy), which is surely a miracle.

In other bookish news: because I have problem and can’t be stopped, I’ve bought two books within the past two days. The first is THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL by Elif Shafak and the second is LADY MACBETH by Susan Fraser King. I really need to stop buying these books. All my recent purchases deserve to be read as soon as possible but, really, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it before: my “currently reading” list is ridiculous.