Lost In The Supermarket

Michael Pollan On How The Food Industry Has Changed The Way We Eat

Families used to control what their members ate and pass along learned wisdom in the form of a food culture. Now that’s gone. Most people don’t eat as families. We eat individually, going one-on-one with the food supply, which is how the food industry likes it.

Seventy-Two Labors

Even though the butcher section was in the back, I could smell animal flesh when I came through the doors, the faint stench that leaked through the plastic wrap and rose above the ammonia smell of the floors.

Ways To Show Affection

The heat isn’t working in the clinic waiting room. A bronze bust of Margaret Sanger, patron saint of birth control, scrutinizes me from a plaster podium, and a slide show, Ways to Show Affection without Intercourse, is projected half on a pull-down screen and half on the cottage-cheese ceiling.

Stupid Design

Fundamentalist Christians are leading a movement to teach “intelligent design” in our public schools, as an alternative to evolution. 

The Anxiety Of Eating

An Excerpt From The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Historically, national cuisines have been remarkably stable and resistant to change, which is why the immigrant’s refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation.

Mercy

The children’s puppy was run over at the end of May. Not on the main road, which Pam might have expected, but on the dirt track that formed the western boundary of the farm.

Newsphoto: Basra, Collateral Damage

Celestial Craving

Jerusalem Artichoke