Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
We're Living on Corn!
By Tim Flannery
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Penguin, 450 pp., $26.95
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
by Bill McKibben
Times Books, 261 pp., $25.00
Michael Pollan believes that America has a national eating disorder, and in The Om-nivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, he shows that it goes back a long way—at least to the early 1900s, when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg attracted crowds to his sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan. There the inmates endured all-grape diets and almost hourly enemas, yet despite the discomfort (or perhaps because of it) his quackery flourished and Kellogg soon found himself with competitors. Among them was Horace Fletcher, otherwise known as 'the Great Masticator.' Fletcher recommended chewing each mouthful of food one hundred times. I still remember my mother instructing me in 1950s Australia to chew my food one hundred times on each side. Just how this doubling of the great masticator's dictum occurred is unclear to me, but I can tell you that after the twentieth chew or thereabouts, most kinds of food were reduced to a bilious sludge.
Review, 4077 words
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