TOD
DVDs -
We've got a whole pile of DVDs through which we're working our way. For example, der B watched some of the bonus material that came with The DaVinci Code last night, before we settled in for Ugly Betty.
Myself, I've started running through the sixteenth season boxed set of Doctor Who, the season Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor and Mary Tamm's Romana spent chasing around the galaxy in pursuit of the Key to Time. I enjoyed the first story, The Ribos Operation, much more than I did when I saw it on PBS years ago. I've now started on Douglas Adams' The Pirate Planet. And it's particularly fun to watch the serials chapter by chapter, as they were intended to be watched, rather than as "movies" running everything together the way PBS showed them years ago.
BOOKS -
I've completed the first section of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, a screamingly funny portrait of industrial food. Screamingly, because it's both funny and scary at the same time. Who knew that so much of our processed food came from corn? Even vegetarians aren't exempt, if they're eating anything that's been manufactured. If you get a meal from McDonald's and eat it in your car, you're eating corn. The burger? Corn-fed beef (cows don't naturally eat corn, they eat grass). The McNuggets? Corn-fed chickens, which are then chopped up and processed, held together with corn products to make up the nuggets. The soda you drink to wash it all down? The second ingredient in the soda, after carbonated water, is High Fructose Corn Syrup, sweeter and cheaper than sugar... particularly after the tariffs imposed on the sugar industry by the corn lobby. Opt for a salad? The Newman's Own Salad Dressing contains still more HFCS, along with "corn syrup, corn starch, dextrin, caramel color, and xantham gum," all of which come from processed corn. Even the fries, which you would think are mostly potatoes, get half their calories from corn oil. Even the car you drive in, while eating all this McProcessed food, is run in part on corn, because of the federally mandated inclusion of ethanol - a mandate that was supported by the corn lobby, of course. (And ethanol creates more pollution than ordinary gas, too!)
I can't wait to find out how Pollan tears apart organically grown food. Didn't we just go through a scare about organically grown spinach?
I regularly prop whatever I'm reading next to my cash register at work. The Ominvore's Dilemma has been getting more comments than any other book since I started at Super G a year and a half ago, at the rate of two or three customers asking/commenting per day. I don't think it's just because of it's striking cover, either, because several of the customers have mentioned Pollan's previous tome, The Botany of Desire, as an interesting read.
