Have you ever stopped to ask yourself these questions?  In our modern society we take for granted that we have food of all kinds at our disposal and a wide variety of tools to help us prepare it.  Bee Wilson‘s book, Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, tells the history of food through its tools across different eras and continents to present a fully rounded account of humans’ evolving relationship to kitchen technology.  Among the many fascinating facts presented in this book is the assertion that the tools we have developed for eating have changed the shape of our mouths.  Wilson quotes a researcher who suggests that prior to the 17th century and the advent of the fork, the top and bottom rows of European human teeth lined up edge to edge.  We would clamp the meat we were eating between our teeth and bite or cut a morsel from the larger chunk.  However, once our tools allowed us to cut our meals into bite sizes, we could put a whole morsel in our mouths without having to bite into it.  This greatly reduced the wear on our top teeth, which allowed them to grow.  Needing room to grow, they did so in the classic overbite alignment that virtually every human possesses today.  While this did not develop in Europe until the 17th century, the researcher found that the phenomenon is much older in China where they have been preparing food in bite sizes for over 900 years and eating with chopsticks.  All knife work was done in the kitchen because it was considered barbaric to cut food at the table.  This is just one example of the myriad topics covered in this book; from roasting meat over an open fire to a method called sous vide, which involves vacuum sealing food in plastic and cooking it in hot water at precise temperatures and cooking times.

While the tools of meal preparation continue to evolve, our literacy in the kitchen has declined.  So says Tracie McMillan in her book The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table.  I found the book fascinating, although I found that this book was less about what we are eating – which is what I was expecting – but more about how our food is delivered to us and by whom, and who prepares it and how.  I also liked it because it was reminiscent of Hunter Thompson’s gonzo style of journalism, but without the drugs and guns.  The author was not a mere observer but, over the course of a year, lived the life of a farm worker, a WalMart employee in their produce section, and in an Applebee’s kitchen working as an “expediter”, in order to see first hand the nature of America’s food supply and delivery system.

I discovered Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon Baines Johnson more than twenty years ago.  I bought the first two volumes, The Path to Power,and Means of Ascent (neither in the VPL collection), from a discount table for no better reason than curiosity, and that Johnson had been President of the United States when I was born in the early part of 1964.  Even then (1991), I had formed an opinion of the relative effectiveness of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Kennedy had a great gift for foreign relations, demonstrated in his great skill in bringing the world back from the brink of nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He very likely would have conducted the war in Vietnam far differently than Johnson, and it would not have been the national disaster that it became.
Domestically though, it is a far different story.  Kennedy and the men who surrounded him were passionate about social justice and civil rights.  Yet, despite his eloquence, charm, wit, and personal magnetism, Kennedy was unable to realize his ideals through the required legislative action.  In fact, one of the qualities that drew men to him, his willingness to credit both sides of an argument, was the quality that kept him from having any meaningful domestic successes.  It was left to Johnson; coarse, uncouth, blustering, bullying Lyndon Johnson to put into action what the urbane Kennedy could not.
While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, at least partly, on a wave of emotion following Kennedy’s martyrdom, Lyndon Johnson was no mere caretaker.  He was a true believer.  While Kennedy and his followers may have seen the end of segregation as something greatly to be wished for, they did not understand it viscerally in the way Johnson did.  He had witnessed it, lived it, in a way that the Kennedy people had never known.  So, it was not just a political calculation to continue the Kennedy legacy, but Johnson’s deeply held belief in civil rights, coupled with his intimate knowledge of legislative processes, that propelled the legislation into law.
So far I am not as convinced as the author that, had he lived, Kennedy would have ever been able to achieve meaningful civil rights legislation, never mind all the other landmark domestic legislation passed under Johnson.  Perhaps the author will convince me in his next volume.
After reading this fourth volume, I am more convinced than ever that the mystique and admiration surrounding John Kennedy in life and death had more to do with his personal magnetism, his charisma, than with anything that he had actually achieved as the Chief Executive.  For those who followed him in life, and those who continued to do so after his death, the fascination had little to do with his accomplishments, but was and is, mostly a cult of personality.

We’re all connected in some way, past and future.  So says author David Mitchell, and writer/directors Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski.  If you don’t believe this truism, then all you have to do is slog your way through the nearly 3 hour film adaptation of the novel Cloud Atlas.  In the first 15 minutes, in quick succession the filmmakers introduce to us six different stories spanning over 500 years of Earth’s history; stories that seem totally unconnected to one another.  Over the course of the next 150 minutes, the film tries to make them connect.  Some of the connections are obvious and direct, some connect by a slender, and not very relevant thread, while some connections are overly broad and moralizing.  The filmmakers try to strengthen the connections by having the same group of actors playing different roles in some, or all of the stories.  They failed.  The unintended result is sometimes comical, with Hugo Weaving playing an imposing (female) head nurse/warden in an English retirement home, and sometimes preposterous, with Korean actress Doona Bae, with her ill-disguised accent, donning freckles and a strawberry-blonde hairdo, trying to make us believe she is some kind of pre-Civil War southern belle.

As the movie reaches its end, the jumps from story to story become more rapid, promising some sort of great and profound revelation, and then it fizzles.  It was a colossal disappointment for spending three hours of my time.

By the way, I suggest you turn on English subtitles for this DVD.  In the story set farthest in the future, the characters speak in a patois that is almost unintelligible.  I expect theater-goers found this tremendously frustrating.

This movie is available at VPL on Blu-ray and DVD.