Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

The very idea that one might need to write In Defense of Food borders on inconceivable. Why on earth would food need a defense? Consider the cornucopia of products filling modern supermarkets! Behold, thousands of products carefully designed by nutritionists and fortified with every nutrient science deems essentials! With access to such a diet, Americans must surely be the healthiest people on the planet. Not.

So why aren’t they?

Michael Pollan, who examined the so-called Western Diet in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, returns to ponder just that question. In the extended essay he calls “an eater’s manifesto,” Pollan makes the case that Americans have fallen victim to a diet driven by nutrition instead of by food. His thesis is simple: for decades, science and industry have attempted to reduce food to component parts. The result has been fad-like alternating demonization and exaltation of specific nutrients. Think about a generation of food labels: oat bran, low-carb, low-fat, vitamin-fortified, omega-3, phytonutrients, soy isoflavones…

Pollan decries this scientific reductionism by first explaining its history and rationale. Attempts to link health to specific nutrients are logical in a scientific sense, because individual foods are far too complex to analyze as a complete system. Yet the results of such studies are often vague guidelines that are then issued in a nutritional vacuum. The second variable in the diet equation has been the food industry. Just in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan is “orthodoxly unorthodox”: he takes aim at industrial agriculture and the resulting processed foods as a cause of the dietary woes of a western diet. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve gotta hand it to the likes of Robert Parker and James Patterson, veritable writing machines whose output is so massive it has to be spread across several different series. Whether or not you think the authors are boiling the pot is your call (I haven’t read anything by either of them in several years, so what would I know?) On that same topic, though, representing the distaff side (at least in the world of mysteries) we find Janet Evanovich coming up hard on the inside rail. First, Jan retreaded her signature ditz, bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum, with a blonde dye job and a hankering for NASCAR hunks in the Barny Barnaby series. Then she started pouring it on with a string of Plum novellas. Small wonder that she can now afford to live in both New Hampshire and Florida (I’m betting Patterson has homes on six continents…)

Counting the inaugural Visions of Sugar Plums (a Christmas Plum pudding of a novella), Plum Lucky is the third in the “between the numbers series.” The first two featured a new, innumerate hunky hero; blond and buffed surfer-boy Diesel, who stepped in while Steph’s everyday lust interests Ranger and Morelli were out of town. Plum Lucky sticks to the pattern…

If Stephanie Plum had to pick one person she’d rather hadn’t found a bag of money than her Grandma Mazur, it would be a tough assignment. As luck would have it, that’s exactly who found about three-quarters of a million in a duffel bag one St. Patty’s Day. Grandma being part of the Depends, polyester, and 4:30 dinner buffet set; she immediately decamped for Atlantic City in an RV she bought with a chunk of her find. A single phone call to Mama Plum finds daughter guilted into retrieving her errant Granny from Sin City East.

Problem being that the money was stolen. From a mobster. Who’s chasing the thief, who’s chasing Grandma M, who’s convinced the money is “lucky,” even though she’s already lost a boatload of it in the slots. Good thing Diesel’s coming along on the hunt (unfortunately, so are Lula the erstwhile ho and Steph’s office manager, the voluptuous Connie). With a horse-whispering self-styled Polish leprechaun, a horse, a horny little person, and a thug with a toad complex in the chase, you know it’ll be vintage Plum. And it is, right down to the body count (two cars, no humans or horses).

Like any installment in the Plum catalog, Plum Lucky trades heavily on Stephanie’s jersey-girl persona. She’s a tad trashy, a gum-snapping almost-slut in a too-tight tee shirt that she modestly covers with a gray hoodie decorated by chocolate stains on the sleeve. She remains remarkably faithful to her two beaux in the presence of all that blonde testosterone, perhaps partially because she’s still not certain that Diesel is really a human – he certainly seems to have eldritch powers…

Figure Plum Lucky for exactly what it is, and that’s something that Steph herself would love: a quickie; a little snack between meals; something to wet the whistle while waiting for Lean Mean Fourteen to hit the shelves in a couple of months. It’ll be a quick fix for Plum addicts, enough to keep ‘em glued to their TastyCakes for the nonce. I do have to wonder why a novella that’s only about a third of a regular Plum book costs eighteen bucks… marketing, I guess.

More Plum…

Twelve Sharp
Plum Lovin’