Sunday, October 25, 2009

Weekend Links

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why humans would ever have traded such a healthy and comparatively pleasant way of life for the backbreaking, monotonous work of agriculture. Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren't). Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturalists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 279.


And Now, The Links

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[...S]ince the human desire for sweetness surpases even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
That at least is what we're doing with about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest—turning it into 17.5 billion pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. Considering that the human animal did not taste this particular food until 1980, for HFCS to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable acheivement on the part of the corn-refining industry [...]

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 103.


And Now, The Links

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[....] McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasi-edible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. [.... Including] “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food. According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomitting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pp. 113-114.


And Now, The Links