The TV Dinner as Turning Point

In the first chapter of Stuffed: An Insider's Look at Who's [Really] Making America Fat, Hank Cardello identifies the invention of the TV dinner as a key turning point on the road to the current state of the U.S. diet and the health problems that flow from it:

There are many people who trace the beginning of our national obesity epidemic to the start of the fast-food chain, to a man named Kroc and the Golden Arches that he started in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. While I'm the first to admit that fast food and all of its offshoots played a big role in our current situation, for my money, the story of the Swanson TV dinner holds the real key to understanding why we're so fat. The TV dinner marked a lot of firsts: the first time that we embraced en masse convenience over cuisine; the first time that it was better to be easy than to taste good; the first time that a preprepared (frozen) meal was served ready to heat and eat at home.
     But of all these firsts, perhaps the most important, the one that has affected our waistlines and our taste buds the most, is that the Swanson TV dinner marked the first time that a food industry marketing gimmick seduced what might have been our better judgment. After all, the TV dinner was just a way to boost a company's struggling bottom line and cut its losses. On the surface, from a food perspective, there appeared to be little benefit to the consumer. The taste was awful, the food unappealing, and the choices limited. I mean, seriously, who wants to eat frozen Thanksgiving turkey in February?
     And yet, it turned out that was exactly what a lot of people wanted, and they wanted to do it because of how it had been sold to them. They had been sold on the idea that the convenience of this product was their ticket to a happier life. It had nothing to do with the actual food, and everything to do with the image of the food that had been projected.

As you may have gathered from this passage, Cardello, a former food industry executive, sets his sights squarely (though not exclusively) on the food industry in apportioning blame for the alarming rates of obesity in the U.S. today. Having developed a longer view from Harvey Levenstein's histories of food and eating, I don't think Cardello is right about the TV dinner marking the first time a food industry marketing gimmick had such an effect. Nevertheless, after only a couple of chapters, I'm finding Stuffed to be an eye-opening read. No doubt I'll have more to say about it here when I work my way through to the end.

Marion Nestle on Food Marketing, Nutrition, and Personal Choice

Marion Nestle reports on an encounter with a room full of food company executives and, in response, sums up her philosophy on marketing, nutrition and personal choice:

They said: "If you object to the way we market foods, you must be against business." As it happens, I am not against business. But I do have problems with unchecked greed, the use of misleading health claims to sell junk food, and the marketing of foods directly to children—especially when marketing to children undermines parental authority and, therefore, the personal choice of parents. I most definitely do believe in personal choice—when it is informed. To make informed decisions about food choice, you need truth in advertising, the whole truth and nothing but.

From Marion Nestle, What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating (2006).

George Orwell on Losing His Love of Books

In "Bookshop Memories," George Orwell writes of losing his love of books in a concluding paragraph which, it seems to me, fairly brims with a love of books:

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

From George Orwell, Books v. cigarettes (2008; essay first published in 1936).

"...in crime, after all, the backdrop is always one of the lead characters."

Tobias Jones on the pleasures (and the limitations) of crime fiction set in exotic locales:

The appeal of such books is that, as well as a good yarn, they offer the traveller the longed-for "feel" of a country. They serve up digestible slices of culture and history at the same time as giving you the pleasure of an old-fashioned page-turner. The marriage works well because in crime, after all, the backdrop is always one of the lead characters. Ross Macdonald told his readers far more about the underbelly of California than he ever did about Lew Archer. We read Scandinavian crime fiction largely because we're fascinated by countries simultaneously so similar yet different to ours. And people turn to Alexander McCall Smith or Ian Rankin in part for the same reason others sit on an open-top bus: they want to see the sights and sounds of Botswana or Edinburgh. Add to that the fact that we live in an era of cheap air travel and quick continental breaks, and it's hardly surprising that there's a demand for crime set in exotic locations.

For the rest of the article click here.

John Glassco on Absinthe

John Glassco on his first experience of absinthe during a 1928 jaunt to Luxembourg:

     We went back to the Grosplatz, where the heavy men had now switched from beer and buns to aperatifs and anchovies. Many of them were sitting in front of elaborate ice-filled glass tanks with little spigots extending over their glasses. When I learned these were filters for absinthe I at once ordered one and was served an aperitif glass a quarter full of pale green liquid over which was fitted a flanged and perforated spoon holding a large domino of sugar. A tank of ice was then brought and the glass placed under one of the spigots. I had now only to turn a little tap to let the iced water drip slowly over the sugar until the glass was full.
     The clean sharp taste was so far superior to the sickly liquorice flavour of legal French Pernod that I understood the still-rankling fury of the French at having that miserable drink substituted for the real thing in the interest of public morality. The effect also was as gentle and insidious as a drug: in five minutes the world was bathed in a fine emotional haze unlike anything resulting from other forms of alcohol. La sorcière glauque I thought, savouring the ninetyish phrase with real understanding for the first time.

From John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse.

To see photos of the absinthe paraphernalia that Glassco describes, check out the Virtual Absinthe Museum.

Find the Story

Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them ... you could use them, you could change them ...

From Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith (2006).

Oliver Twist and Slumdog Millionaire

In Doug Saunders' column in the Saturday Globe and Mail, he traces the parallels between Oliver Twist and Slumdog Millionaire:

Bethnal Green, meet the Dharavi slum; Oliver Twist, meet Slumdog Millionaire.

What has made this genre so enduringly successful is not the melodramatic account of a young person's rise from squalor and poverty to something more elevated. That story had been doing great box office for centuries – including such hits as Cinderella, Moses, Moll Flanders and Jesus Christ.

What Dickens introduced was a new character – the slum itself. The East London shantytowns of Clerkenwell and Bethnal Green loom so large in Oliver Twist that they serve as the novel's main antagonist, throwing all manner of spectres and challenges at the hapless Oliver. At the end, while Oliver is fixed and catalogued, the slum remains a blank-faced mystery.

Danny Boyle's Mumbai, which at the story's outset has not yet been robbed of its name Bombay, is similarly compelling, similarly menacing, similarly inscrutable. It appears as a vast and gorgeous figure, responsible for most of the film's plot twists.

For the rest, click here.

The Hardest Part of Writing

I can totally relate to this bit of the interview with Alan Bradley (whose The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie I look forward to reading) that appeared in the Saturday Globe and Mail:

"The hardest part of writing," he confides, "is sitting down. Once I'm there, I'm good – I write about 1,000 words a day."

For the rest, click here.

Ian Rankin and Anthony Powell

This is a connection that would not have occurred to me, courtesy of David Geherin:

Rankin lists Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, a multi-novel series which paints a panorama of English society, as his favourite novel. In twelve volumes published over a twenty-five-year period, Powell chronicled the changing fortunes of Britain's upper class from 1914 to the 1960s. Rankin began to see how he could explore not just a single character in depth, but also a place and, like Powell did, an entire society. "Everything I wanted to say about Scotland," he realized, "I could say in a crime novel."

From David Geherin, Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction (2008).

Shifting Away from the Narrative Desire Typical of Crime Fiction

Andrew Nestingen on Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels:

Mankell shifts away from the narrative desire typical of crime fiction--investigation and disclosure--yet maintains crime fiction's tension by substituting a narrative desire focused on the affective state of the protagonist. Readers may be less interested in the crime and its investigation than in how Wallander will respond to the next crisis in the investigation. Can he endure? What does he think? How does he feel? With this method, Mankell uses the police procedural to shift reader investment from anticipating and learning the outcome of the investigation to anticipating and knowing Wallander's responses, which requires engaging the ethical and political arguments about global interconnection these entail.

From Andrew Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social Change (2008).

"It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure..."

Virginia Woolf on the duties and pleasures of reading:

[W]hen the moralists ask us what good we do by running our eyes over these many printed pages, we can reply that we are doing our part as readers to help masterpieces into the world. We are fulfilling our share of the creative task - we are stimulating, encouraging, rejecting, making our approval and disapproval felt; and are thus acting as a check and a spur upon the writer. That is one reason for reading books - we are helping to bring good books into the world and to make bad books impossible. But it is not the true reason. The true reason remains the inscrutable one - we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it.

Not "Influences" But "Acquisitions"

Mavis Gallant on influence and style:

There is no such thing as a writer who has escaped being influenced. I have never heard a professional writer of any quality or standing talk about "pure" style, or say he would not read this or that for fear of corrupting or affecting his own; but I have heard it from would-be writers and amateurs. Corruption--if that is the word--sets in from the moment a child learns to speak and hear language used and misused. A young person who does not read, and read widely, will never write anything--at least, nothing of interest. From time to time, in France, a novel is published purporting to come from a shepherd whose only influence has been the baaing of lambs on some God-forsaken slope of the Pyrenees. His artless and untampered-with mode of expression arouses the hope that there will be many more like him, but as a rule he is never heard from again. For "influences" I would be inclined to substitute "acquisitions." What they consist of, and amount to, are affected by taste and environment, preferences and upbringing (even, and sometimes particularly, where the latter has been rejected), and instinctive selection. The beginning writer has to choose, tear to pieces, spit out, chew up, and assimilate as naturally as a young animal--as naturally and ruthlessly. Style cannot be copied, except by the untalented. It is, finally, the distillation of a lifetime of reading and listening, of selection, and rejection. But if it is not a true voice, it is nothing.

From Mavis Gallant, "What is Style?" in The Paris Notebooks (1986).

Lewis Thomas on the Semicolon

Lewis Thomas on the semicolon:

I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.

From Lewis Thomas, "Notes on Punctuation" in The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979).

Dawn Powell to Charlotte Johnson

Dawn Powell to Charlotte Johnson in a letter dated December 6, 1918:

Do you know I've lived about twenty years since Sept. 2—the date of my arrival in New York? Everything whirls around you all the time and you grab what you want and then let it resolve again. It makes me dizzy to think of all the warm friendships and Passionate Affairs I've been through in three months. The funny part of it all is that you have to come to New York to appreciate the virtues of a small town just as you have to go to college to learn how easily you can do without a B.A. And all the men say "I love you" and look at you with long wistful "I-surely-am-hit-now" gaze and you kiss them and say this is the first time I've ever cared like this and then you never see each other again. And on the subway in the mornings you suddenly find yourself talking to a man or girl who is a genuine soul-mate. They get out at Times Square and you see them looking back at you through the windows and both of you know you'll never meet again. Somehow there's nothing tragic in it, though. You recognize and love it all as Life—the World—Humanity—whatever it is.

From Tim Page, ed., Selected Letters of Dawn Powell 1913-1965 (1999).

Karl Marx's Das Kapital

I was pleased to see a book from my own pantheon of greats lauded in this week’s instalment of the Globe and Mail’s “50 Greatest Books” series, and to see it described in terms that very much reflect my own experience of it. Here’s Francis Wheen on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital:

Though many who haven't read it assume that his unfinished masterpiece is an economic treatise, Marx himself regarded it as a work of art, breaking through the narrow conventions of political economy with a radical literary collage that juxtaposes voices and quotations from literature and mythology, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy tales. Das Kapital probably has as many allusions to Shakespeare as to Adam Smith. It mixes satire, melodrama, Gothic horror and reportage to do justice to the irresistible, yet mysterious, force that governs our material motives and interests.

To read Wheen’s case for Das Kapital in full, click here.

The Story's Signature Space of Tethered Ferocity

Clark Blaise on the short story:

By turning away from the need to explain too much, to create, construct and establish, the story opens a space that is not available to the novel. It is the story's signature space of tethered ferocity, the eruption of gesture and repression, the accountant of the unconscious presenting his bill, the Joycean epiphany. It is the reason I call the short story an expansive form, and the novel, contrary to most opinion, contractive. The story says the most that can be said about a restricted moment in time and space. The novel says the least about a great many more.

From Clark Blaise, "The Craft of the Short Story" in Canadian Notes and Queries, issue 72.

Robert Lecker on the Responsibilities of Criticism

Robert Lecker on the responsibilities of criticism:

I began to see that there were responsibilities attached to criticism. If you were going to be really honest, you would have to show how the reading process could throw you off track, take you away from what you were supposed to be focusing on, run you around and around until you saw all the routes you could take that you weren't taking, all the things you should know that you didn't. You could keep all those inadequacies and detours out of the reading, or you could take the risk that maybe a few other people might be interested in the problems posed by reading, and not just the reading itself. For it was the problems that made the process interesting and valid as an aesthetic pursuit.

From Robert Lecker, Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit (2006).

Judy Blume's Forever

Judy Blume on her frequently-suppressed novel Forever:

I ask her whether she was aware when she wrote Forever - at once her most loved and most reviled book - of the effect it would have. She shakes her head. 'No, no, no. Who knows things like that? If you do, then you are not going to meet with success because it's going to be so contrived.' She says she wrote the book for her teenage daughter: 'She asked me for a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die,' recalls Blume. 'She had read several novels about teenagers in love. If they had sex, the girl was always punished - an unplanned pregnancy, a hasty trip to a relative in another state, a grisly abortion, sometimes even death. Lies. Secrets. Girls in these books had no sexual feelings and boys had no feelings other than sexual.'

For the rest of Melissa Whitworth’s interview with Blume, click here.

I’m not sure that I ever read Forever. But I do vividly recall being taunted with sexual terminology from it by one of the popular girls in my sixth grade class along the following lines:

Popular girl: Do you know what _____ means?

Me: Of course I know what _____ means.

Popular girl: Tell me what it means then.

Me: Um...

Because, of course, I had no idea what _____ meant.

However, I had read all of the Blume books that were available in the children’s department of the library (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Deenie; and, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t all stand out in my memory), and my experience with the sixth-grade bully didn’t sour me on those. It just made me determined to find out what _____ meant. All of which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to get a copy of Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, a collection of essays by noted female authors about Blume's enduring influence on their lives and work. Perhaps I should have a go at writing such an essay myself…

Characters in Fiction

James Wood on characters in fiction:

Perhaps because I am not sure what a character is, I find especially moving those postmodern novels, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which we are confronted with characters at once real and unreal. In these novels, the authors ask us to reflect on the fictionality of the heroes and heroines who give the books their titles. And in a fine paradox, it is precisely such reflection that stirs in the reader a desire to make these fictional characters "real", to say, in effect, to the authors: "I know that they are only fictional - you keep on telling me this. But I can only know them by treating them as real." That is how Pnin works, for instance. An unreliable narrator insists that Professor Pnin is "a character" in two senses of the word: a type (clownish, eccentric émigré), and a fictional character, the narrator's fantasy. Yet precisely because we resent the narrator's condescension towards his fond and foolish possession, we insist that behind the "type" there must be a real Pnin, who is worth "knowing" in all his fullness and complexity. And the novel is constructed in such a way as to excite that desire in us for a real Professor Pnin, a "true fiction" with which to oppose the false fictions of the overbearing and sinister narrator.

Click here to read the rest of Wood's very thought-provoking article. It doesn't say so anywhere on the article, but it seems likely that this is an excerpt from Wood's forthcoming book How Fiction Works (to be released next week in Britain but, alas, not until the summer in North America). If so, I'm even keener than I already was to read it.

The photo with which I've headed this post is an entry from my grade six "Language Arts" notebook. I unearthed it in my parents' basement not long ago and thought I ought to hang on to it as it seems to me to represent the beginning of my formal literary education. Of course, the true beginning dates back some years earlier to when I learned to read or earlier still to when my parents began to read to me. In any event, Mr. Wood doesn't think much of E.M. Forster's distinction between flat characters and round characters so perhaps it wasn't the best beginning. But then, where else would you start? Incidentally, is it common practice to offer up insights from Forster's Aspects of the Novel in sixth grade, or was my sixth grade teacher ahead of the pack? I always liked Mrs. Hawkins.

'The Most Fascinating Bookshop in the World'

More from Andrew Lycett's biography of Arthur Conan Doyle:

As far as his reading was concerned, he did not lack for material at home. But he also had access to a city renowned for its booksellers, and this was an opportunity impossible to ignore. Every morning, on his way to lectures, he passed what he called 'the most fascinating bookshop in the world'—undoubtedly James Thin on South Bridge. This caused problems because, at lunchtimes, he usually had thruppence for a sandwich and a glass of beer. But once a week he would forgo his meal and spend his money on something more cerebral from Thin's second-hand tub. He found himself devouring eighteenth century authors such as Addison and Swift. He also picked up a tattered copy of Macaulay's Essays, which became his favourite book, both for its subject matter (a series of vivid studies of historical figures) and for its style, which he would seek to emulate: 'The short, vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they all throw a glamour around the subject and should make the least studious of readers desire to go futher.'

The James Thin on South Bridge is gone now, bought out by another chain a couple of years ago I believe. But I purchased many books there myself on various trips to Edinburgh right through to the end of the 1990s. Is it possible that the store I visited in the 1990s is the very same one that Conan Doyle was so enamoured of more than a century before? I feel a strong sense of kinship with anyone who would forgo lunch in order to buy books (of course I'd rather have lunch and books, but forced to opt for one or the other, the choice is clear!). But to have shopped in the same bookstore as well strikes me as a very cool albeit random connection.