I think I speak for most, if not all, Canadians when I mutter “damn it” and sigh heavily.
The reason Canadians of all political leanings paused at your announcement yesterday is because cancer has an eerie but largely unspoken grasp on everyone. Few among us are untouched by the disease, and this latest news of yours is a reminder that life has a way of shaking even the sturdiest of foundations, especially, it seems, when we could really use the stability. A person can’t swing a CT scanner in this country without hitting someone who either has or has had, or knows some who has or has had, cancer. Very little shock lingers after an announcement like yours because disbelief is quickly ousted by a familiar sense of disappointment — not again.
Any oncologist will tell you that cancer is not a single disease; it’s a blanket term for a type of disease that takes on many different forms and implications. Today, while some observers dig around to figure out what particular kind of cancer you’re battling now, others among us know it really doesn’t matter. Any cancer survivor will tell you that cancer is cancer. Regardless of who you are, how old you are, where you are, and what the sickness interrupts: it’s cancer. (more…)
Alex Hutchinson ponders the effect of GPS technology on human sense of direction in this video, which accompanies his article, “Global Impositioning Systems,” in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus.
Michael Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, has an air of summation about it, drawing on years of research to make an argument that is both profoundly radical and embarrassingly simple. In Pollan’s estimation, many of the epidemics facing our corner of Western society have little to do with, say, the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat in our diet. Instead, the problem is the nature of our diet as a whole, and the fact that we eat way too much of it: too much red meat, too many refined carbohydrates and sugars (usually including an array of chemical enhancements) and too little of everything else.
Partly to blame for this is the rise of nutritionism, a particular branch of food science that has spent decades casting about in an attempt to blame some evil or other for the reality that many of us are overweight. Pollan’s book is as much a defense of food as it is an indictment of the mindset that has seen us reduce food from being nutritious to being comprised of particular nutrients. This tendency, Pollan argues, lies behind our societal fetishization of the latest black-balled ingredient, a focus that allows us to ignore actual nutrition, which would just tell us to eat more vegetables and fruit, and less food overall.
In Defense of Food is a small book in size, but its scope is massive: a comprehensive study of the ways in which, over the last fifty years or so, scientists and journalists have manipulated what and how we eat. Pollan also looks forward in its call to common sense. “Eat food,” Pollan advises. “Not too much. Mostly plants.” Simple advice, and geared less to a diet fad than a new lifestyle. The book’s overwhelming success indicates its message is being well received. And let’s hope so, for as Pollan suggested in our interview, as more and more of us “vote with our forks,” casting the ballot will become easier, and more delicious.
I spoke with Michael Pollan last week, by phone from his office in Berkeley, California. (more…)
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