Blinded Me With Science II

The morning after I finally am able to finish my post about Robin Brande and Fat Cat -- which had made me think of the song, I hear about Thomas Dolby on NPR.  He had spent 20 years after the fame of that song, "She Blinded Me with Science" doing science. His tech consulting company developed the synthesizer software which enables all sorts of interesting and less than interesting ring tones for mobile telephones.  And now, he's produced an online game that follows three EPSs (extended play songs) he created into Floating City  -- "collaborative fiction," he calls online gaming.

Blinded Me with Science

When I picked up Robin Brande's Fat Cat to read, I had forgotten that she had written another Young Adult book which I had liked and had previously recommended somewhere, Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature, a well-done commentary on the unforgiving interpretation of What Is Right.  The story unwinds tensely around Mena and the reader can feel the almost palpable heat of innocent hatred of the "Christian" kids for all things Wrong -- homosexuality, evolution and anyone defending such abominations or simply standing up to the righteous.  Mena and her family are basically shunned by the community they had always thought were an extended family.  She begins to learn about the world outside fundamental Christianity and even a little bit about the world inside.  She even has enough curiosity and courage to ask her teacher how one can believe in God and the theory of evolution at the same time --  a question with which Charles Darwin himself struggled when scientifically developing the theory.  That makes Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature a much more serious or perhaps "heavier" in weight of social issue than Fat Cat. 

Fat Cat addresses the issue of obesity and popularity, except they're not issues in this book. Catherine is a little fat, but not obese and while she's obviously not in the most exclusive clique, she is neither yearning to be popular nor is she being taunted for being fat.  Nor does it appear she or any Honors classmates are being taunted for being geeks.  This story is an evolution of a different sort.  In a Science Fair experiment which first begins as what happens when Cat chooses to eat and live like early hominids -- no cars or cellphones unless in an emergency, no processed foods (like chocolate!) or even dairy (there were no domesticated animals that long ago and so, no milk), and no hair product, Cat is motivated to win first place primarily in order to beat a former friend Matt McKinney, whom she has had a rivalry for as long as she could remember.  It used to be a friendly rivalry, which turned bitter -- at least on her side when they were thirteen, some 3-1/2 years ago.  As the narrative is told in Cat's viewpoint, the reader is just as clueless as Matt as to why they are no longer friends.  Did he throw the Science Fair competition and let her win?  Did she overhear him telling lewd jokes about her?  Eating healthy and walking to school and work have the added benefit of Cat's losing weight and gaining toned muscles.  She goes from "Fat Cat" to "Hot Cat" and attracts way more male attention than she ever dreamed of or even wants.  The experiment morphs into how would a Homo Erectus choose a mate, and is that any different today than it would have been then?  Along the way, Cat learns as much about the self she becomes as she does her pre-historic model.  And in the end, when the judges ask, "Do you think this project has changed you?  Beyond the obvious physical changes?," she can smile and say, "You have no idea how much." 

It's great that Brande is able to depict science in such an accessible way.  While I never knew any such intelligent and creative high schoolers so into science (no Science Fairs in West Babylon and I was in the honors program!), I can see how they would exist and how they're really just like ordinary teens with the usual teen angst.  Brande is an observant recorder of young adult nature, a trait which itself is a pre-requisite to a good scientist.  I'd like to think that the 21st Century Teen would enjoy Brande's writing as much as a middle-aged bookseller, but maybe I'm just blinded by the science.

Food Glorious Food

I have discovered that today is Blog Action Day on which bloggers throughout the world write about a topic of global concern.  This year's topic is "Food."  Well, that narrows the range.  Or does it?

Along with air to breathe and some temperature control to keep a human body from freezing or melting down, food is a vital part of our existence.  It also has a wide-ranging definition.  Yesterday, I was eating brunch with an especially intelligent and sophisticated group of people -- Vassarites, and we discussed restaurants, good meals, and at one point, molecular gastronomy.  A trained cook among us gave an example of molecular gastronomy at work -- the breakdown of an apple to its core (pun intended?) elements -- fiber and flavour.  So, can we take those elements and present them to the diner differently, like as a piece of paper made of apply fiber which tastes (one expects) like apple?  This might come in the form of an edible menu.  The objection one person made which is the objection most of us have is, why not enjoy the fruits (another pun?) of Nature's labor and eat an apple in its pure form?  Another person articulated the objection more forcefully:  it is akin to playing with our food; with all the starving people in the world, we are expending exorbitant amounts of resources to play with food.

There may be an argument that molecular gastronomy makes eating out more of an experience, an adventure, and not merely in the 21st century to socialize.  This would then be like the adoption of cooking meat 1.5 million years ago which enabled hominids not simply to stay alive, but to thrive (as demonstrated in Robin Brande's Fat Cat, a young adult story which uses the question, "What would happen if we eat like hominids did?" as the beginning basis for a science fair project).

This would be the antithesis of what a farmer once called, "Better living through chemicals."  High yields of grains and other crops through use of fertilizers, weedkillers and insecticides, refrigeration, preservatives and don't forget, refined fuels for the production, transport and cooking of food are all progress and have undeniably made life better for a significant amount of people in the world.

Because we in the Western World can take food for granted, we can take it further.  We can have a reaction to the inefficient packaging of regularly fried potato chips by creating pre-formed, orderly stacked chips made from potatoes (we could have had that for fish, too, if we listened to Professor Mazzocchi of Hoboken), and we can have a counter-reaction to that over-processing by eating only organic potatoes freshly fried in fresh pressed peanut oil.  We can have an evolved sub-species of humans called "foodies," who are basically food snobs, continuously looking for the next trend.  The foodies are eating locally grown organic purple potatoes freshly fried in duck fat, unless they are enthusiasts of molecular gastronomy, admiring and inhaling the essence of the slice of potato frozen with liquid nitrogen and then, transformed into vapor.  One wonders what kind of science fair project can come studying the eating habits 21st Century Homo Sapiens Americanus.