Banquet at Delmonico's - Barry Werth

I recently read a book by Barry Werth entitled Banquet at Delmonico's. It purports to explain the big debate in this country about evolution at the end of the 19th century. That debate, after all, was extremely important. Edmund Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest" was used to justify imperial expansion all over the world. Both Spencer and Darwin himself were extremely famous and influential men on both sides of the Atlantic.

Werth attempts to describe the debate as it moved to this side of the Atlantic and increasingly became accepted not as a fantastic theory, but as solid fact. To do that, he follows the lives of several men over a span of more than a decade.

He does a good job explaining their daily movements and personal correspondences, but the book mystifyingly lacks any detailed discussion of the particularities of either Spencer or Darwin's ideas. He sets up an ideological competition between Darwin and Spencer, but the reader is never treated to its nuances. We assume it exists, but we never learn its particularities.

Instead, Werth primarily concerns himself with where the main characters were, who they were debating with, and what books they were writing. He spends chapter after chapter describing in exhaustive detail about the alleged affair between Henry Ward Beecher and one of his female parishioners without explaining why the affair was important to the debate concerning evolution. Was it because the affair had a transformative effect on Beecher himself? Did it discredit him? Did it change his viewpoints concerning evolution? Werth never explains.

It's a well researched, pretty well written book. But Werth's apparent insecurity with discussing the ideological debate - the very subject of his book, no less - is a big flaw. It's interesting to read about the comings and goings of famous men, but in the end that's all the book has to offer.

Voltaire, Candide, and Cultivating your own Garden

When I get frustrated with the way things are going in this country, sometimes I think of the final scene in Voltaire's 'Candide'. It refreshes me, and maybe will do the same to you. I'll paste the ending below.

""Work then without disputing," said Martin; "it is the only way to render life supportable."

The little society, one and all, entered into this laudable design and set themselves to exert their different talents. The little piece of ground yielded them a plentiful crop. Cunegund indeed was very ugly, but she became an excellent hand at pastrywork: Pacquette embroidered; the old woman had the care of the linen. There was none, down to Brother Giroflee, but did some service; he was a very good carpenter, and became an honest man. Pangloss used now and then to say to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts."

"Excellently observed," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden." "

Omnivore's Dilemma

I read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma last week, and thought I’d write down some of the things that were particularly striking to me:

--At least a quarter of the food we eat is based on corn

--Most of the corn that’s grown in this country isn’t really edible in its “natural” form. It has to be heavily processed and broken down before we’ll eat it

--About half of the average corn farmer’s income comes in the form of government subsidies. This is because so much corn is grown that the price has fallen to a point where it’s impossible for farmers to make a profit. However, instead of restricting the amount of acreage dedicated to corn and thereby increasing its price, the government encourages farmers to devote more and more acreage to corn. The low cost of corn benefits the big food processing companies, who take the cheap corn and turn it into a million different things that we consumers buy.

The farmer is the one who loses in this deal. He loses money on the only product that food processing plants will buy. As a result, the government pays the farmer to produce a crop whose price is so low that without the payment, the farmer would go broke.

And who ends up footing the bill that pays farmers to sell corn cheaply to the food processors? The taxpayers. So even though we get cheap food on the shelves, we pay for it by financing the farmers’ subsidies. The only entity in this equation that benefits is the food processing plant.

--One popular argument that Pollan seeks to undermine is the one that goes something like “well, cheap food is in the best interests of everyone!” His counter is that while the up front cost of processed foods is definitely pretty low, there are tons of hidden costs that we’re paying for even if we don’t realize it.

It costs a TON of energy to produce food these days. For every one calorie of beef that we eat, for example, it takes 8 calories of energy (i.e. oil, water, natural gas). That’s just not a sustainable equation in the long run!

And, of course, the processed food that we’re eating is pretty unhealthy. A lot of those ingredients with weird names on the food labels are refined petroleum. We’re eating refined petroleum! The nation’s obesity epidemic began in the 70s, which is just about the time that the government really started funding big agribusiness and subsidizing farmers.

Food is the only major item that most Americans buy simply based on price. We refuse to pay $3.99 for a dozen eggs when we can get it for 99 cents. There are two reasons, Pollan says, that this is not such a good idea. First: we’ll pay $50,000 for a BMW when we can get a Focus for $17,000. The justification for the expensive car is that it’s a better product, and therefore we’re willing to pay more. But we don’t use that type of logic when buying food. We blindly assume that the 99 cent eggs are the exact same as the $3.99 eggs and therefore why would we want to pay four times as much? That would make sense if the eggs were of the same quality. But in study after study, time after time, Pollan demonstrates that processed food is of a decidedly lower grade than natural food. Shouldn’t that make us think twice about instinctively reaching for the cheaper eggs?

And secondly, the costs of the “cheaper” food are hidden, back end costs. Those costs include the energy requirements necessary to sustain our current food chain; the large costs to the environment; the costs to our own health, not to mention the questionable ethics of mass-produced and slaughtered animals. All of these things aren’t easily quantifiable, so they’re easier to ignore. But don’t they have real value nonetheless?

--Pollan describes certain types of farms that erase all of the back end costs. These types of farms are a combination of old fashioned and cutting edge farming techniques. They’re really cool to read about. The food is more expensive, $3.99 for a dozen eggs instead of $.99, but at least we pay everything up front. The animals are treated ethically, the environment isn’t harmed, and we’re eating better food. And there are lots of them around!

Anyway, the point is, read the book. If it doesn’t totally change your mind about our current processed food chain, it’ll at least make you think differently about what you put in your stomach.

Review of "Path to Power" by Robert Caro

I remember reading part of one of Caro’s books about Lyndon Johnson several years ago and being so disgusted with Johnson that I couldn’t finish the book, and had no inclination to pick up another. Yet over the past month or two I’ve developed a taste for biography, so the first book in the series The Years of Lyndon Johnson, called Path to Power, seemed like a good bet.

I admit that it’s difficult to walk away from the first volume without really disliking Johnson as a person and as a politician. Caro himself, in the introduction, says that all of Johnson’s campaigns were “amoral” and that throughout his life, wherever he was, Johnson was always disliked by nearly everyone – except by those who could help him. What a way for a biographer to introduce his subject.

A couple of scenes that Caro describes of Johnson’s youth stick out in my head: Johnson as a young boy, unable to be the leader of the local sandlot baseball game, takes his baseball and walks home; Johnson as a college man provoking someone to attack him and then running away and falling backwards onto a bed, kicking his feet in the air, saying “Enough! Enough!”; Johnson screaming to high heaven when he’s lightly spanked for doing something wrong.

Of course a reader of Caro’s book is also struck by how talented Johnson was at playing politics. He was incredibly successful at a really young age. Luck had something to do with it; being from oil-rich Texas had something to do with it; having no morals had something to do with it. But there were a lot of amoral, lucky young Texans who didn’t become president.

I’m surprised at how involved Roosevelt was in the political game. I had always thought he had won and kept his power based on his moral superiority. But he couldn’t have been elected to 4 terms without being a master at the same game Johnson played: getting people to do things for him. Though Caro only deals with Roosevelt indirectly, I get the idea that Roosevelt combined ruthless politics with fatherly leadership qualities.

Path to Power ends at the start of WWII, immediately after Johnson failed to steal the 1941 special Senate election in Texas. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, which will detail Johnson’s 1948 election to the Senate – which Caro has already hinted that Johnson stole – and who knows what other shenanigans.

I still detest Johnson this time around, but it’s difficult not to be fascinated by the path his career takes. It reads like a Clancy novel: filled with shady backroom characters and powerful politicians throwing money around to influencing political outcomes. All that’s missing are the terrorist plots and the guns, though I think those will probably show up in the as yet unfinished volume describing Johson's presidency in the the 60s, with the escalation of the Vietnam war.

Dumas Malone's "Jefferson the Virginian"

I’ve finished the first volume of Dumas Malone’s biography of Jefferson, Jefferson the Virginian, that my Dad sent me the other week, and therefore I feel like I’m an expert and will share my opinions of both the book and the man.

My first impression of the book was that it was much more difficult to read than was Edmund Morris’s biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Malone runs into real problems of scarcity of source material, whereas Morris never really lacked for that, especially considering how skillfully Roosevelt manipulated public opinion. And he wrote this volume 60 years ago, so even Malone’s words sound more foreign to me than do Morris’s. Forgiving him that, I’d say that the first volume was well done, but seemed to rush through the more interesting parts (the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, for one) in favor of the less interesting parts (an entire chapter on the writing of Notes on the State of Virginia?).

Jefferson’s abilities, so far as I can tell at this point, definitely lay in the power of his thoughts and ideas. He wasn’t the most capable administrator or even the most nimble legislator, but time after time his ideas were proved correct. He must have felt satisfied by that, but he never held it against anyone.

What’s also impressive is Jefferson’s insistence on expanding suffrage and giving more power to ordinary people, even though as a member of the Southern aristocracy he had much to lose from such an arrangement. For many of Jefferson’s aristocratic peers, Britain’s primary transgression was in not allowing them to govern themselves the way they wanted to. For Jefferson the problem was on a much higher level, having to do with the nature of government and human relations. That Jefferson was so willing to sacrifice his class’s position in society by creating a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy is very admirable.