Book #71: American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom

I picked this book up at the library after reading The Kitchen Counter Cooking School because it was one of the books in the "Recommended Reading" section. In KCCS, one of the chapters (and one of the lessons for the students) was about how to use up your leftovers and not waste/throw out tons of food you paid good money for. I liked their ideas so much that I've been thinking a lot about using up ALL of the food we get, not just finishing half of the red onion we bought for a salad and then letting it rot until we throw it away. If you think about it, if you used the other half of the red onion that you weren't planning on using, it's like you got it for free. And I can definitely get behind that idea.

American Wasteland is like that whole concept, but on steroids. Bloom is a waste-obsessed blogger-turned-journalist/writer who goes around looking to see how much food is wasted in the U.S. (and according to some statistics, it's around 50% of the food produced) and what we can do to make that number smaller. Food is wasted at all points in the food distribution process--from food not harvested and left to rot in the fields, to food thrown out because it got to warm during transportation, to food thrown out from supermarkets because it's reached its sell-by date (even though it's still totally edible), to food wasted at restaurants, to food that we buy and ends up going bad. It's pretty impressive when you think about it, and Bloom shares some interesting anecdotes and experiences of massive amounts of food waste. He also provides a lot of great tips on how we can reduce our food waste at the end of the book as well. My only complaints about this book was that it got a bit repetitive (every chapter could have been titled: Food Is Being Wasted Unnecessarily--Do Something About It!) and his tone was a bit over the top. I mean, yes, I do think that food waste is not a great thing and that we should definitely do what we can to reduce it. He even provides some convincing arguments for why it is so bad. But he made it sound equivalent to real, serious human issues like human trafficking in the way he talked about it, which bugged me. But that's his THING, so I can see why he writes so seriously about it.

Bonus: He lives in Durham, North Carolina, so most of his research and most of the places he writes about are in the Triangle area! That was pretty neat to read about some local food waste efforts (and some of the not-so-great locations of really bad food waste).

Book #70: The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan

Back in the 50s, companies ran contests for people to enter their own lyrics or jingles as part of advertisements for their products. A lot of the time, the company would provide a prompt ("I use Dial soap because:") and then ask people to provide an answer in "25 words or less," with prizes for the best responses. The prizes varied from wristwatches to cars, wall clocks to trips to Europe. And Evelyn Ryan, mother of the author, made a part-time career out of her skills at writing answers for these contests, winning prizes for nearly one out of every four entries she sent in (and many times beating out tens of thousands of other responses). Their family was extremely poor, and the father was an alcoholic, leaving Evelyn Ryan to use her wits to help the family to survive. But the amazing part of the story is how the prizes always came in at the crucial moment: thousands of dollars used to buy a house right when they were about to be evicted, and several years later thousands of dollars more used to pay for the second mortgage on their new house three days before it was due, and a year's worth of prizes used as Christmas presents for all the kids in a year when they didn't have enough money to buy any outright. It was really amazing reading about how determined and intelligent she was, and how able she was at providing for her family when it was needed--in such an unconventional way. Bonus: A few days ago, we saw on cnn.com that Romney was campaigning in Defiance, Ohio!

Book #69: One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus

The title of this book sounds totally racist, right? Haha that's what Tommy said when he saw what I was reading. It actually refers to a fictionalized version of a historical event--or at least a "what if?" scenario for a historical event. Apparently, in the 1800s, a Cheyenne tribe sent messengers to the U.S. government during a peace conference, and made the proposition that they would make peace if they were given 1000 white women for their men to marry (and in exchange they'd give the U.S. 1000 horses). You can imagine the government's response: Protect white womanhood! Send the savages away! An insult to our fair maidens! And all that jazz.

But in this novel, Fergus explores the idea of what it would have been like if they had sent those white women to marry the Indians, through the journals of one of those women: May Dodd. And that's where my real problem came with this book--I just could not believe that May was a real nineteenth-century woman. She sounded far too modern--she wasn't racist, she wasn't interested in "conventional" marriage, she was independent, etc. Not to say that there weren't women back then who were like that, but May just wasn't very convincing as a character. She was ALWAYS the one who happened to be the first one to do anything ("I started singing, and everyone else joined in"), and said a BILLION times that she was a woman with "strong passions" and used that to justify her actions. It just didn't feel very realistic to me. I ended up skimming the last fifty pages or so just to finish it--I just wasn't that into the story.

Book #68: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn

My mom's going to be so proud of me for reading this. She read it over the summer and kept telling me about it, and I kept meaning to read it but never got around to it, until I FINALLY remembered to request it from the library. I picked it up yesterday and was so into it that I plowed through it and just finished it--and then ordered a copy of it for myself on Amazon. I NEED to own it so that I can remember everything in here!

Flinn is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, and she works as a food writer (or something like that) since she graduated. But one day in the grocery store she saw a woman with a cart full of what she called "antinourishment" or non-food--only processed food like boxes of Hamburger Helper and canned soup. So she followed her around and started telling her how to make real food and replace all those boxes in her cart--and that encounter opened up a whole new project for Flinn. She recruited nine women who were terrified of cooking and taught them a (free) weekly cooking class to give them the fundamentals and build their confidence in themselves as cooks. She visited each of their kitchens before beginning to see where they each were in their skills, and many of them were in horrible food situations (only eating fast food and frozen meals, for example). But by the end of the class series, many of them were roasting chickens and making their own stock and making soups from scratch! I'm pretty jealous because I want to take a class like that--but Flinn's book is basically set up to BE a class like that for you to read. She narrates each chapter as though she's just telling you what happened in each class, but she's really passing on the information to you as much as to the nine students in her class. The classes covered things like knife skills, roasting a whole chicken, making vinaigrettes, different ways to prepare vegetables, meat, and fish, easy bread recipes, and how to use the leftovers you have in your fridge. So, you can see why I would want a copy of my own--I want to remember all the different skills she taught.

This book is just one more motivation for me to continue our recent push towards eating more whole foods. We have been SO good lately at eating lots of fruits and vegetables (a lot of it for me is because I'm breastfeeding--and trying to lose the baby weight in a healthy way) but there are plenty more ways to do things in the kitchen and make things (like vegetables) more interesting. I'm excited to try!

Book #67: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

This book kind of reminded me of John Green's Looking for Alaska which I read last week. The narrator, an introverted, quiet kid, goes to a new school where he becomes friends with some really outgoing kids who introduce him to all the new life experiences that come with being a teenager (especially the smoking, drinking, and sex). It's a coming-of-age novel in the best sense of the term. Looking for Alaska deals with some really serious philosophical issues, like death and figuring out the meaning of life, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower dealt with other serious issues that many teenagers face in growing up, like sexual abuse and being made fun of for being gay. After reading these two books, I'm convinced that either my high school experience was abnormally sheltered (I'm sure this is true) or these writers overgeneralize the teenager stereotypes of smoking and drinking, etc. I never personally experienced most of the things he has Charlie go through--not even close. And I don't know if Charlie really convinced me that he was a real teenager--he didn't seem self-conscious enough to go along with his shyness and introverted nature.

Book #66: How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

Remember when your childhood understanding of the solar system was shattered when all of a sudden Pluto was not a planet any more? When suddenly there are only EIGHT planets and My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas doesn't work as a mnemonic device for the names of the planets any more? That's all thanks to the work of astronomer Mike Brown, a Caltech professor who discovered several other orbiting objects out near Pluto that were similar to it in size and other characteristics and therefore proved that Pluto was just one of many floating objects out past Neptune, making it not something as special as a planet. I know that I was disappointed when I heard that news--but I'd never really thought about how or why they'd made that decision (or who the "they" who made that decision were). Brown's book serves kind of as a memoir/astronomy textbook describing the whole process and how he discovered the other non-planets. He writes very well and understands his audience very clearly, giving really great non-scientific explanations for everything and a lot of background that's really fascinating for a non-scientist and non-astronomer. He also writes about his personal life along with the discoveries he made, such as his getting married and having a daughter and all that jazz. It was almost poetic in how well-written it was, which is surprising based on the stereotype of scientific writing, haha. I really liked this book!

Book #65: The Vaccine Book by Robert W. Sears

The picture on this cover should probably be a giant scary syringe or something instead of the cute, curious-looking child that's on there. I picked this book up at the library on the recommendation of a nurse that we talked to, and after hearing about vaccinations from several different people. Although I am totally pro-vaccines, we'd heard enough about the controversies surrounding immunizations that I thought it would be a good idea to at least find out what people were so concerned about. I did some Internet research for a while, but that wasn't really that helpful because most websites just kept saying that people are concerned about the links between vaccines and autism, but there hasn't been anything proven through research, etc. However, this book had a totally different format: Sears went through each individual disease and vaccine and explained what the disease was, how severe it is, how the vaccine is made, when it's given, and why people choose (not) to get it for their child. That individual look at each vaccine (while repetitive--I definitely skimmed huge parts of each chapter) was really helpful and gave me a good idea of what to be worried about and what NOT to be worried about.

Sears also provides a sample alternative vaccine schedule if you don't want to keep your kid on the normal AAP-recommended schedule because of concerns about giving too many vaccines at one time, etc. I was pretty interested in reading that and seeing the differences between the two schedules, although I don't really know if we'll be using a different schedule for Dane (although we'll eventually have to figure this out). Who knew that I would care about this kind of thing? It's not the most interesting thing in the world, but it's good (for me) to feel informed before we go into giving Dane four or five shots at a time at his next doctor's appointment. I do like the idea of postponing certain vaccines that have scary potential side effects, like the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine, but that's one that he won't be getting for a while, so we don't need to decide that yet.