Flavor be darned--full speed ahead.

Tomatoland: 

How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

by Barry Estabrook

Not recommended if you ever plan to buy a grocery story tomato again.  Actually, no--highly recommended in that case.  Not recommended if you're of limited means and can't afford to buy at farmer's markets. 

I'm not sure that organic is a viable alternative. The ones I've purchased don't taste any better than the regular. Are they also picked green and pinked up with Ethylene gas?

It's so hard to believe that the kind of land and human abuse practiced by Florida tomato growers could be profitable. If they--and we--were forced to pay for cleanup of the harm they do, it couldn't be. Of course if such laws were enacted, they'd probably have about the same effect as the ones about coal strip mining--companies don't necessarily clean up the land when they're done, just to promise to clean it up someday.

Now that I come to think of it, almost all the tomatoes I see in the grocery these days come from South America. I'm not naive enough to think that our government is free of corruption, but I wouldn't even venture to guess about those. How many Mexican farmers pay off the local officials to ignore the labor abuses suffered by their workers? On the other hand, it's a lot harder to overwork, abuse, and underpay people who are actual citizens of the country--they'll just run away.  Why the heck doesn't the US have a decent guest worker program?

Sorry, I'm off topic. The best part of the book is the last two chapters, which describe people who set up free daycare and early childhood education for farm workers; a farmer who decided to do his job the right way; a lawyer who organized farm labor into effective unions. And last, most encouranging but probably least significant, a stubborn man who started growing heirloom tomatoes for their taste, not their appearance.  Once people sunk their teeth into his tomatoes, they never went back to insipid, mealy and acidic.

Old bones be cold bones

Dead Men Do Tell Tales
by William R. Maples, Ph.D.

Deliciously lovely stories of bones and teeth and tiny shards of metal that remain in the ground when the flesh has long gone.  Dr. Maples is a forensic anthropologist with a long and wild habit of turning tiny little things into evidence.  Or into people, as we learn from the time he spent worrying through boxes of Vietnam war remains.

Cremains is the term he uses for cremated remains, and he got an exceptional challenge in the Page-Jennings case, where a fire and explosion mixed four sets of human bones and a dog in the blasted out shack twenty miles north of Gainesville, Florida.  Does everything bad happen in Florida?  It was the setting for The White House Boys crimes and in my most recent reading, Tomatoland, the rape and murder of thousands of acres of animals and plants to grow foul-tasting tomatoes. Not to mention human slavery.

But if you're thinking about reading this book, just flip through the pictures in the middle inset to make up your mind.  You'll see airplane crash sites, Don Francisco Pizarro (executed conqueror of Peru), Tsar Nicholas II and his family, five murdered students, and much more. You'll read it.

Not for everyone, but definitely my cuppa tea

The FitzOsbournes in Exile
by Michelle Cooper

I adored this one, even more than the first!  The usual warning: listening to a lengthy book read by a narrator with a British accent can do horrible things to your speech for a few weeks afterward.

I thought I heard a couple of historical mistakes but since I was driving at the time, I failed to note them down. One reference to 'skittles' caught my ear, but when I looked it up I saw that before skittles was a candy, it was a alternate form of ninepins played in English pubs.  And once I thought she referred to a place name that didn't exist by that name in those days.  I could be wrong about that, too.

The FitzOsbournes are so very, very amusing, and their adventures in pre-World War Two Europe are spot on!  My absolute favorite thing is the family comaraderie among them.  There are a few heroes and a few villains to spice up the story, but you honestly know the family will overcome even the most determined of villains--together.

But will they overcome war?

Life changed. Maybe.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:

The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing 

by Marie Kondō
Spoiler alert!

After reading and enjoying this and not laughing too loud at the occasional outcropping of mysticism, I went out to see what other people had thought.  Immediately I turned up this:

You hold an item, look deep into your heart, and make a decision based on the level of joy it inspires. By that criterion, I’d only keep my wine, my vibrator and my family (and some days, by “family,” I really mean “the family dog.”)  --http://www.foxywinepocket.com/

I recommend this article http://www.scarymommy.com/club-mid/my-marriage-survived-the-konmari-method-of-tidying/ and this one http://www.scarymommy.com/club-mid/5-cons-of-the-konmari-method/ as both accolades for and warnings against the method.  My only argument with the latter article is that it doesn't recognize the inherent contradiction in the KonMari method: the method says that you should apply the 'spark joy' criterion to individual articles, not collections   But that's not possible for all kinds of collections--clothes, sure, but photos? The reviewer's collection of photos brings her great pleasure, both for the memories and for the surprise of rediscovering the forgotten. 

I went through the photo sorting exercise many years ago, placed only the ones I loved in albums, and discarded the rest. Every individual photo may not bring me joy, but the entire collection does.

But I will say this--after reading the book, I headed immediately to my clothes collection and started work. (I had to stop a half-hour later to go buy food, but that's not the point.)

Great reading; great recipes; just wanted more

The Seventh Daughter

My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco

 

by Cecilia Chiang, Lisa Weiss

Yes, it's a recipe book and yes, I knew that when I bought it.  But it's also a beautiful, touching memoir.  Cecilia Chiang speaks of her childhood in Bejing, her harrowing journey to live with her uncle in Chongquing during the Japanese occupation of China.  (Chongquing was the war capital of Chiang Kai-shek's exiled government.)  Then she tells of fleeing to Tokyo during the communist revolution and eventually opening a Chinese restaurant there with a group of other expatriates.  Then, last and first, opening The Mandarin in San Francisco.

If these are the kinds of recipes she served there, I want to eat them!  So imagine my disappointment when I realized, they all have meat in them!  Okay, not all.  Of the first eleven recipes in the book, nine have meat in them. One had shrimp and one is a dessert.

I shouldn't have been surprised. For one thing, many of them are restaurant dishes. And for another, she grew up in a very wealthy family. Her mother observed the rules for certain days (holy days?) to eat only vegetables, but she didn't impose them on her husband or children.  Before the war, I imagine that they ate meat and fish every day. The quantities of it were small compared to the SAD (standard American diet) of today.

Now that I have sources for free-range meat, I should be able to cook a few of them. But I'm not sure about the "good country ham from Smithfield, Virginia" that she says you can substitute for Yunnan ham.

Back to the book--it's a keeper and a re-reader. Often.

Real pirates don't get

Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

by Stephen R. Bown

Fascinating book about a very grim topic.  His detailed descriptions about what scurvy does to the body turned my stomach--I had to start skimming them.  But the saddest thing was that we discovered the cure before we understood the cause.  Even though the cure was discovered and re-discovered over the years, it was always lost again. Experts--often without any practical experience in the conditions of seafaring life--insisted in making up bogus cures based on wrong guesses about the cause.

Humanity's insistence on "ancestor worship" confounds and confuses me to this day. (e.g., the Supreme Court and the Constitution--have we not learned anything in 200 years?  I say we have--a lot.)  But in the case of 17th and 18th century medicine, apparently not much.  They were still blindly obedient to Hippocrates' theories of humoral imbalance.  Blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile had to be in balance to achieve health.  An imbalance could be corrected by draining to overage or by consumption of cold and dry or hot and wet medicines.  None of which, incidentally, contained vitamin C. 

Mankind also has an incurable propensity for confusing symptoms with causes.  I wonder if the whole theory that high cholesterol in the blood was "caused" by high cholesterol in the diet was simply the result of backward reasoning?  Thus,

1. By the eighteenth century, the theorists had succeeded in obfuscating with a bewildering fog of shifting hypotheses a problem that should have been, and indeed was at one time, solved by basic observation and common sense.

To argue from observable facts was thus revolutionary, when it finally occurred:

1. This attitude placed the horse firmly before the cart, the facts before the conclusions--something that had been the reverse for centuries.

Pictures would have made this perfect

The Earth Moved

On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

 

by Amy Stewart 

Charming little book by a gardener who developed an interest in earthworms.  She even had a worm mini-farm on her back porch; the way she described it made me want one.  It consisted of three or four stacked boxes, with probably a latticework on the bottom of each so the worms could travel freely from box to box.  She fed them kitchen scraps.  When it was time to harvest the compost that the earthworms
so obligingly created, she'd rotate the boxes and wait until the worms had vacated the topmost one, then dump out the contents and start afresh. I may have gotten this description a bit off-kilter--to get it told right, read her book.

I never knew that Darwin's last book was The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms.  Reading her description of it has made me want to read it for myself.  I'm holding back until I see how long it is.

Amy Stewart mixes personal anecdotes with serious research here, and does it quite beautifully.  Great work!

Didn't work for me

Tracks

A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback

by Robyn Davidson

I'm not qualified to rate this book because I didn't finish it. I'm sure it was honest, and true, and deserved to be written.  But it was too gritty for me--too unpleasant--too real.  The author is impulsive--she admits so herself--and plunges herself into her dream to lead a caravan of three camels across half of the continent of Australia. She had no experience doing anything, so far as I can tell, so she learned everything the hard way--how to handle camels, make gear, live on her own, and finance the journey. But her particular version of the "hard way" seemed to involve repeated, disastrous failures; dead, lost or abused camels; ugly encounters with ugly people; and so on. I couldn't take it anymore.

I kept expecting things to get better when she got out in the bush--over halfway through the book!--and interacted with the Aborigines.  Possibly it did, but after deciding to give up I flipped through the last half and saw nothing but unhappy interactions with rude, noisy, bigoted tourists.

I'll give her a bit of a break.  I believe the actual journey took place in the late 1970's, when people probably were as bad as she portrays.  And she herself seemed to suffer major bouts of depression during the time.  I sympathize with her issues--I applaud her persistence--but I'm giving up.

foodery foolery

There will be no fancy foods to boast about this week.  I couldn't afford to go to the farmer's market (know that sounds weird, but it's true) and am taking a week off cooking.

But last week I made some chickpeas that I thought tasted annoyingly bland--until I topped them with some coconut milk sauce and sweet potato chips that I baked in the oven. They became decidedly un-bland and deliciously filling.

Not expecting a recipe book, darn

Heart of the Artichoke
And Other Kitchen Journeys
by David Tanis

I won't give this a rating because I expected more anecdotes and less recipes but that's not the book's fault.  I copied out a couple of the recipes but they're generally not my cup of tea.  Again, not the fault of the recipes, just a mismatch between what I like to eat and how he likes to cook.  They could be perfectly good recipes.

Some interesting stuff all the same.  When he remakes an old favorite, like "Shrimp Cocktail In a Glass", I bet his version is a lot better tasting than anything I've ever had in a restaurant.  Some of the simpler ones look right up my alley, like the "Platter of Jicama, Avocado, Radishes, and Oranges."  It's basically a salad of fruits and vegetables seasoned with lime juice, salt and ground chili. However, since I've never tasted it and don't know what it's supposed to taste like, how am I supposed to mix the spices "to taste"?  The instructions are a little weird, too, saying to "dip the lime half in the chile mix and rub on the spices."  What spices?  The spice(s) are the chile mix--chile powder plus salt.

His recipe for a slow rise bread is going to inspire my next attempt to make bread.   (Which will turn out flat, burnt, and dry, but that's just me.)