The Politics of Food and the Historian's Work: When the Twain Shall Meet, Part 1 (*1)

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Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three  This three-part rumination is prompted by a comment from Tim Beauchamp, who blogs at Open Fermenter and who I follow on Twitter. (He provides excellent Twitter content, by the way. None of this “I’m at the grocery store now” crap from him!) For some reason, today he complimented me in a tweet and ended with:

She may be the Upton Sinclair Jr. of today. (*2)

I was touched by his sweet words in the rest of his tweet (modesty prevents me from including those), but --- I gotta say something about the “Upton Sinclair” business. (Tim, this is NOT an attack on you. No way, no how.) He inadvertently hit a nerve. And proved a point that I’ve been wanting to comment on:

That the current “food fight” has become so heated, so contentious that people assume that because I’m writing about meat, I must have an agenda.

So, Tim, thanks for prompting me to get busy writing a blog series that I’d been putting off. (The next beer’s on me.)

I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing a history of meat in modern America (c. 1870-1990). I spend most of my days digging through primary materials, hunting for information, trying to figure out “what happened” and then writing about what I learn.

But as part of my research, I’m also learning as much as I can about current agricultural issues, our existing food system, government food policies, and the like. That’s been an eye-opener. I had no idea how politicized these topics were.

Sure, I knew there were recurrent debates over, for example, farm subsidies. Over food tariffs and export quotes. Yes, I knew about the conflict unfolding here in the midwest over land use: Should large feedlots be allowed to exist? What kinds of controls ought to regulate their wastes? How can we reconcile the rights of homeowners with farmers?

I was, however, more-or-less oblivious to the other food fight: The one between the nation’s food producers --- farmers and manufacturers --- and the people who want to dismantle the existing food production system and replace it with one that is more “sustainable” (preferably more “organic”). (*3)

Next: My "agenda" __________

*1: No pun intended. Honest.

*2: Upton Sinclair was a committed socialist whose intent with The Jungle was the reveal the misery of factory working conditions. As he himself said (and I'm paraphrasing), he aimed for the nation's heart and accidentally hit its stomach.

*3: More accurately: I wasn't completely oblivious to the issues or the debate, but I sure didn't know how, um, heated it had become.

By the Way: One Guy's Experiment With the Kindle

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On a sort of related topic (related, that is, to the previous post): Astute Reader Dexter sent me a link to this New Yorker magazine article in which the author gives the Kindle a test run. It's a long article, but if you're thinking about buying/using an e-reader, it's worth reading.

Dexter also informs me that I'm ruining his reptutation: I keep referring to him here as this ultra-connected guy lying on a beach in Hawaii. He's not, and he's not: According to him, he owns pretty much zero e-gadgets (no blackberry, etc.) and spends little to no time on the beach itself.

He also says he's not nearly as culturally literate as I keep making him sound, but he attempted to refute my description of himself by referencing seven obscure films, an ancient Paul Simon song, and Norman Mailer. Which, ahem, proves my point.

So What Do I Think E-Readers Are Good For? Right Now, Not Much

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Tony Comstock, one of my Twitter-pals (@tonycomstock) (a truly nice guy who is passionate about personal freedom), asked me (rhetorically) if he'd be able to read the Kama Sutra on the Apple e-reader (or any reader).

Well, I dunno. But I'm guessing that for some time to come, e-readers will only be useful for reading fiction. Mind you, I've never used an e-reader (can't justify that kind of money for something with, at present, marginal utility).

But given my experience reading scholarly journals and monographs online, I  suspect it will be a loooooong time before anyone comes up with an e-reader that can be used to read scholarly stuff. By that I mean books/articles that contain footnotes or endnotes.

'Cause I'm here to tell you that it's mostly a total. pain. in. the. ass. to read that stuff in digital form.

As you probably know, Google and a number of university libraries launched a partnership several years ago to scan the contents of the libraries. Many of those volumes are available at the partner libraries (most notably at the University of Michigan's online library).

I have no idea who designed the software/structure for the project, but mostly it sucks. The project calls for the actual books to be scanned, so the online versions are digital reproductions of the physical books. That's where the problem begins. The software is designed to allow you to "open" only a few e-pages at at time.

But what if the book contains endnotes that were printed at the end of the book? Say you're reading page 24 and it contains five endnotes, and those were printed on page 250?

You guessed it: Close the first set; call up the pages that contain the notes. Total nuisance. Tedious and time-consuming. WAY more complicated than, ya know, just opening the pages of a book and thumbing through them.

And don't EVEN get me started on how fucked up the method is in other databases, ones created by other, different partnerships. Unless you've used them, you canNOT imagine how much those software designers managed to complicate the otherwise simple task of leafing through a journal.

Take my word for it: The printed page is much easier to deal with. So, for that matter, is microfilm.

Right now, for example, I need to read Good Housekeeping from c. 1890 to 1910. I started reading it online --- and gave up. It takes too damn long. It's easier for me to go to the library and read it on microfilm.

Obviously, none of this would matter if the content is designed specifically to be used on some kind of e-reading device. Eg, turn the notes into hyperlinks and create a reading device that allows the reader to jump back and forth from page to note and back. But it would also help if the program designers actually, ya know, tried USING their own programs.

Life in the digital age: Not all it's cracked up to be.

God, where did this diatribe come from???

We Have Seen the Future --- And It Is Scary

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We are seeing the future, and it is --- scary? The background is the ongoing debate over electronic books and the electronic devices (the actual objects) on which those books can be read.

This is a Very Hot Topic among the elitterati and writers and publishers because, well, we're watching history being made and of course we who are living through the process don't know how things will turn out, so mostly we sit around and talk about the details --- details that some future historian will gloss over because by then this will have all been decided and no one will care about the details and chatter that enveloped the topic at the time.

Okay. My submission for the Longest Sentence of the Day contest.

Anyway --- as I think many people know, Amazon's version of the e-reader is the Kindle and there's been huge, contentious debate over whether or not Amazon will end up controlling the entire market for e-books because of the Kindle. Last week, the debate heated up because Amazon "yanked" (deleted) copies of several books that customers had bought, including George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.

This move was widely criticized and interpreted as still more evidence of Amazon's plot to take over the world (although it's competing for that prize with the Google Guys and it's not clear who will win: Bezos or the Google Guys.)

So to finally get to the point here, Astute Reader Dexter is a devoted blog reader who lives in Hawaii and spends his time lying on a beach surrounded by blackberry, laptop, Iphone, and other gizmos that enable him to keep up with all the stuff I'm interested in so that he can then pass on great info to me. He's sort of my personal Beta Reader (who comes equipped with an astounding range of cultural references.

I think the guy has read every book, seen every movie, and every TV show ever in the history of time.) Yesterday, he sent along a link to this Slate.com article, which offers a chilling, interpretation of Amazon's deletion of the books from the Kindle.

Read it and, uh, ya know, ponder the possible future.

Just Checking In Here . . .

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. . . with myself.

Me: Hey! You here? You've been quiet lately. Myself: Yep, I'm here. Just buried in reading, research, writing for the new book. Me: Whatcha working on right now? Myself: Reading up on Americans' ideas about food and nutrition, and their on-going debate about food, food sources, and food manufacturing in the 1890s. Me: 1890s? Is that The Jungle stuff?

Myself: No, this is earlier than that. The Jungle was the end of a long era of discussion, not the beginning. I think because so many generations of high school students have been forced to read it, its actual role in the history of American food is misunderstood.

Me: Oh. That makes sense. Well, this other stuff you're reading: Is it interesting? Find anything good?

Myself: Sure! Tons of stuff. Too much, in fact.

Me: For example??

Myself: Well, today I was reading about food "fads," for lack of a better word, and came across this hilarious (to me) quote about the rationale for low-calorie diets and fasting. (This was c. 1902-1910.):

Since it . . . appears that the less we eat, the more energy we have . . . it should be our logical conclusion . . . that, were we to eat nothing at all, we should have very much more energy than usual --- since none of it would be used for digestion, and we should be able to use it all for the daily activities. (*1)

Me: Huh? Was this guy nuts?

Myself: Not really. Just, well, fanatical about his pet project. You know: like joggers who think everyone should run five miles a day or people who go ballistic if someone eats hamburgers, or the people who think EVERYONE should drink only craft beer. By the way, not everyone was convinced that fasting and low-calorie diets were a good idea. One man had his assistant try it, and it made the poor guy

Flighty, fidgety, jerky and contumacious . . . weepy, irritable . . . [and] as unreliable as the dope-fiend. (*2)

Me. Um. Interesting. I guess some things never change, huh?

Myself: Yup. That about sums it up. Me: Plus, you sure better not try that kind of diet. You know how cranky you get when you're hungry and your blood sugar drops.

Myself: Heh heh. You got that right. I'd never make it on Survivor.

Me: Well, glad you stopped by. I was beginning to think you fell off a cliff or something.

Myself: Nope. Just working on this new book. Okay, gotta go. See you later!

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*1: Hereward Carrington, Vitality, Fasting and Nutrition (New York, 1908), p. 114; quoted in L. Margaret Barnett, "'Every Man His Own Physician': Dietetic Fads, 1890-1914," in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995): 169.

*2: Elbert Hubbard, "Fasting Fans," in Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard (New York, 1922), 9:315; quoted in ibid.