Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss is an excellent addition to a bookshelf that includes works by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Marian Nestle and others who write about the health of our food and the un-health of the industrial food system. Moss lifts the curtain on the giant corporations that engineer and market convenience foods and processed foods. What he reveals is largely invisible to us on a daily basis, yet affects our society significantly - and catastrophically.

Moss is a seasoned investigative reporter - he was the first to expose trans fats, and more recently "pink slime" - and this book is a tour de force of research. Moss takes you to the laboratory and the board room, where chemical engineers and marketing executives contrive to get North Americans eating more and more of everything unhealthy. (The book is written in a US context, but it is equally relevant to Canada.)

Salt Sugar Fat is full of wonderful mini-histories of corporations like Kellogg's and Kraft, and eye-popping demographic data about what North Americans eat. You'll learn how our food has become increasingly sweeter, increasing both our tolerance and desire for ever-sweeter food. How we eat three times as much cheese as we did 40 years ago, now that cheese - or more accurately, a processed substance distantly related to real cheese - is used as an additive in countless foods. And especially, the myriad ways that the holy trinity of salt-sugar-fat is used by food engineers to encourage overconsumption.

Here's an example of a little gem I gleaned from this book. I've always scoffed at fruit drinks that are cynically marketed as containing "10% real juice," meaning, of course, that they are 90% water and sugar. For people accustomed to drinking soda (pop), 10% real juice may seem like a healthy improvement. But Moss describes the how the "juice" in those drinks is created.

At is extreme, the process results in what is known within the industry as "stripped juice," which is basically pure sugar, almost entirely devoid of the fiber, flavors, aromas, and any of the other attributes we associate with real fruit. In other words, the concentrate is reduced to just another form of sugar, with no nutritional benefit over table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. Rather, its value lies in the healthy image of the fruit that it retains. ... A company like General Foods can use this stuff and still put the comforting words contains real fruit on the box.

Much of Salt Sugar Fat is about economics. Moss quotes a parade of food executives - whistleblowers and industry faithfuls alike - who are all caught in the same trap: reduce the amount of salt, sugar, or fat, and the product's taste will suffer drastically. Therefore consumers will buy less. Therefore consumers will buy the competitor product without the reduced additives. And therefore the company cannot reduce the additives.

When reductions are possible, they are immediately offset. It is a principle of the processed food industry - the first commandment, the sacrosanct law - that a reduction in one of the trinity must be countered with an increase in another. Is the product lower fat? Then it is higher in salt. Is it slightly lower in salt? Then it is higher in sugar. Without copious amounts of these three ingredients in various engineered forms, processed food would be completely inedible.

One such tale from within Kraft Foods said it all. A group of high-level insiders was very concerned about the health implications of the company's products. There was no getting around it anymore: these processed foods are contributing to skyrocketing rates of hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes. (Moss refers to this as "the obesity epidemic," but it is actually about health, not weight.) These Kraft insiders fought against a deeply entrenched corporate culture, risking their livelihoods, to force their colleagues to face these facts. They worked very hard, and succeeded in reducing some of the salt-sugar-fat in the company's products by a tiny bit. Only a tiny bit, one might say, but a start.

Then the sales figures came in. These concerned insiders were immediately slapped down by the board of directors, speaking for the shareholders. Wall Street reminded the company that they are not in the business of caring about what consumers eat. They are in the business of making money. The executive behind the internal movement was demoted, her career significantly curtailed.

Are companies trying to do better? Moss crunches the numbers.

"In Capri Sun alone we took out 120 billion calories," [Kraft executive] Firestone said. ... "We've looked at the amount of sodium we've taken out. Last year was six million pounds, and we're going to add nine billion servings of whole grain between now and 2013..."

If those numbers sound impressive consider what Michelle Obama manged to wrestle out of the entire processed food industry in 2010, after asking for their help in fighting obesity. "I am thrilled to say that they have pledged to cut a total of one trillion calories from the food they sell annually by the year year 2012, and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015," she announced. ...

The math on all this, however, is less compelling. If everyone in America consumed the standard 2,000 calories a day, or 730,000 a year, the 1.5 trillion in saved calories would reduce our collective eating by not quite 1 percent. Its actually bleaker than that, according to some health policy experts. In reality, many of us consume far more than 2,000 calories, and processed foods make up a large part, but not all, or our diets. So the real drop in consumption from those 1.5 trillion calories is likely much less than that 1 percent. Still, it's a start.

Is it? Salt Sugar Fat leads one to question a system that would rely on these industries to safeguard consumer health. And what about the government agencies tasked with keeping the industries in check? They are a significant part of the problem.

With the American people facing an epidemic of obesity and hardened arteries, the "People's Department" doesn't regulate fat as much as it grants the industry's every wish. Indeed, when it comes to the greatest sources of fat - meat and cheese - the Department of Agriculture has joined industry as a full partner in the most urgent mission of all: cajoling the people to eat more.

Moss frequently notes the connections between the processed food industry and the tobacco industry. Kraft and General Foods - the two mega-giants of processed food - were for a long time owned by the Philip Morris corporation. Kraft and General Foods, now one company, are no longer owned by Big Tobacco, but the marketing and engineering principles of that industry informed the companies' cultures and decision-making. The language of addiction and the view of salt-sugar-fat as narcotics run through this book.

When reading Salt Sugar Fat, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is, at bottom, an economic problem. Moss touches on these issues; for example, he mentions more than once the class divide between the food industry executives, who never eat their own products, and their customers. But I wish he went further. For example, Moss writes about the convenience stores overloaded with processed foods, selling no fresh foods at all, and the insidious (and invisible) industry practices that cause this. But he mentions only once, in passing, that these same neighbourhoods are usually food deserts, making processed food laden with salt-sugar-fat the only option for many low-income families.

Another economic factor Moss alludes to, but doesn't examine, is something we hear about all the time in a non-economic context: families are so busy now, both parents work (usually portrayed as "more women are in the workforce"), families don't have time to cook proper meals. That's worth examining, too. Why are families so much busier now, why do both parents work? One principal reason: for most people, it's impossible to raise a family on one income, because the cost of living, especially housing costs, has far outstripped wages.

For anyone writing about the food industry and overconsumption, economic factors are an intrinsic part of the picture. Moss understands that. I just wish he went further.

It's not only an economic issue, of course. It's also an education issue. In my workplace yesterday, a colleague left some "healthy" cereal out to share. Its packaging was full of claims like "no preservatives" and "all natural". Everything about it, down to the colours and fonts used on the packaging said "healthy" and "alternative". The first four ingredients, in order, were: sugar, wheat, corn syrup, and honey. That is, three of the four top ingredients are sugar. And the wheat is not even whole grain, so the human body processes it largely as sugar.

In the end, Moss concludes that we have a choice. We control what we buy. We control what we eat. We can choose to not eat processed food and convenience food.

That is technically true. But it is also incomplete, reductionist, and disingenuous, as Moss himself has shown in more than 400 pages of excellent writing and impeccable research. The individual consumer must be extremely motivated, and blessed with a mighty will, to withstand the economic, social, cultural, and biological forces stacked up against her. The stuff is engineered to make us over-consume, our bodies are biologically programmed to like the stuff and want more ofi t, and many of us cannot afford to do otherwise.

Despite these critiques, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us is page-turning, eye-opening, thought-provoking book that I highly recommend. (This review was originally published on wmtc.)

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's online catalogue.

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947

400 years, more or less. That is how long Prussia existed as an independent political unit. Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 explores the history, so full of incident and drama, of this north German state.

So what is Prussia?  The dates featured in the title are somewhat arbitrary. The Duchy of Prussia existed since 1525 morphing in the proceeding centuries into a modern state that was essentially shattered after World War I though it took until 1947 (post World War II) for the official abolition. I mentioned it is located in northern Germany but to be specific it was the lands in and around Berlin (historically called the March of Brandenburg—a Roman thing) which united with the Duchy of Prussia. Why did Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia unite? For an explanation I need to introduce another name, the House of Hohenzollern. The Hohenzollern was a royal dynasty first mentioned in the record books in 1061. The Hohenzollerns eventually went on to become the hereditary kings of Prussia and later Emperors of the united German lands (with Austria as a notable exception).   Prussia didn’t have much going for it in the early days. Impoverished of natural resources and with lots of sandy soil in and around Berlin making farming a challenge, Prussia had the deck stacked against it. To add to its national anxiety Prussia also had lots of potentially dangerous neighbours like Pomerania (another interesting and little known, once upon a time, country that hugged the Baltic Sea), an aggressive and sometimes expansionist Sweden, a haughty France and Austria both of whom looked upon the checkerboard patch of German lands as their military playground and the always massive Russia to the east.

Part of what makes any country, and Prussia is no exception, fascinating are the individuals who lead it and the funny quirks of history that shaped it. Prussia’s history is rich in both famous people and in the auspicious, almost fated, twists and turns in its national narrative. I will mention just two events—perhaps national ideas would be a better term—that shaped the north centre of Europe: the idea of union and the idea of a powerful military.

The idea of a united Germany was in the air since at least the Napoleonic age. The major stumbling block was the question of who would lead the union. Bavaria, Saxony and others mistrusted Prussia. A lot of Prussia’s history can be told with an eye on this idea of influencing and ultimately binding all the various small German states under its guiding hand.

Prussia’s keen desire to create a sophisticated and modern military was a result of its location on the map of Europe. It is this martial tradition that has bequeathed to the world the stereotypical idea of the Prussians as a warrior society, something like a modern day Sparta. The enthusiasm for the art of war would be its downfall. At least this is the common narrative. What I enjoyed about Clark’s Iron Kingdom is that it goes some ways in correcting this overly simplistic chronicle. Prussia was not the whole of Germany, though it was one of its principle voices. Perhaps one of its great gifts to Germany was its military prowess, but it would be a mistake to think that this tradition necessarily lead to Germany’s subsequent involvement as a major protagonist in the two world wars. As Otto Von Bismarck (one of Prussia’s great statesmen) argued, diplomacy and the ability to formulate alliances so as not to go to war is the best policy;  that is, keep the peace by keeping a healthy balance of aligned states that can check each other’s aggrandizing desires. When he died his shrewd advice seemed to die with him. The terrible events that followed only proved to underscore his very sage advice.

Why read the Iron Kingdom? It is first and foremost a dramatic story. Here you have the birth, life and death of an entire country in 688 pages. There are big names in this story that someone who prides him or herself on knowing a thing or two about world history should recognize, names such as Frederick William ‘the Great Elector,’ Frederick II ‘the Great’ and Otto Von Bismarck to name a few of the more notable figures. In many ways countries, nations, states are like people full of hopes and dreams, they strive to face challenges, succeed sometimes and fail at other times and because they are big their impact can be big. Prussia had an immense impact on the history of Europe (and the world) completely out of measure given its smallish size and humble beginnings. Its legacy like a colossal black eagle—an icon featured prominently on all of its flags—looms large across the heart of that continent. To this day whenever there is a reorganization of the electoral boundaries in north eastern Germany, or when a new building or street needs an appellation Germans debate whether to resurrect the term Prussia. The debates are heated. This book goes a ways towards explaining why there is still so much oomph behind that name.

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Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator

I'd never have thought that I would find a book about elevators so interesting. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator by Andreas Bernard, translated by David Dollenmayer, made the technical aspects of elevators as well as their cultural importance a page-turner. I must commend the translator Dollenmayer, as the text flowed as naturally as if the original text was English. It was a beautiful read. The key to the book's success was its specific reference to the cultural history of elevators. For sure, Bernard talked about how elevators worked and the evolution of lift mechanics. But the focus was the impact of the elevator in culture, especially urban culture, from city planning, the reconstitution of building floor plans, to elevator references in literature and popular culture. Bernard asks early on:

"What effect did the technical apparatus have on the conceivability and expressability of what happens inside the buildings, about the distribution of spaces and people?"

From the late nineteenth century on, the elevator had a profound effect on building construction. Suddenly a central shaft was designed as the centerpiece of all new buildings, and the interiors radiated from this vertical passageway:

"The stairway as means of access to the various levels had to now compete with a vertical shaft cutting a breach through the center of the building: this in turn had far-reaching consequences for the floor plans of new buildings since, as Robinson insisted, the linearity of the transport channel was to be applied to the entire organization of interior space. In office buildings equipped with elevators, the old winding corridors and labyrinthine stairwells replete with blind corners and dead-ends were replaced by a clear distribution of space comprehensible at a glance."

Flowing Scarlett O'Hara staircases, the eye-catching feature in stunning foyers designed to impress the visitor were now architecturally superfluous, primitive even. Suddenly, their central focus as one entered a building disappeared:

"How strongly floor plan configuration was focused on the elevator's conduit from the 1870s on was particularly apparent in the changing status of the stairwell in American buildings. In the course of only one or two decades, this traditional means of vertical access was pushed into the background, downgraded from a grandiose structural element occupying the center of a floor to a mere escape route."

The elevator was regarded with fear at first, at least in the United States. The first elevators were nothing more than platforms enclosed by ornate metallic meshwork. They likely instilled fear in those who stepped into them and slid the doors shut. In the beginning elevators had an on-board operator, whom passengers got to know and trust. With the introduction of push buttons (and the unfortunate en masse unemployment of all elevator operators) passengers were afraid to use the first buttons. But after the period of timid toes and fingers had passed, people learned to like the elevator, and it grew to have a sense of exclusivity. Companies which occupied single buildings relocated their head offices to the top floor (instead of the second floor in the age before elevators). Company executives worked among the clouds, and soon after this, people wanted to live there too. Needing to use an elevator developed into a matter of personal importance, and the higher you lived, the more you needed an elevator to get there. Thus after only a couple decades the top floors of apartments--which were, before elevators, limited to only six storeys with only stairs as the means to ascend to the top--went through a transformation in the organization of living space. No longer were the top storeys reserved for the servants. With so many stairs to climb, the wealthy let the hired help climb them. Now with the elevator, building height could reach skyward, and the rich wanted to be as far away as possible from the ground. Thus was born the exclusive penthouse suite.

The Dakota apartments in New York, perhaps best known as the residence of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, took the elevator to an extra degree of exclusivity. In any other apartment building up until the Dakota was built, the rich had to ride in the same elevators with everybody else. The claustrophobic space of an elevator car kept the passengers standing closely together, too closely together for some. The Dakota offered a solution for its exclusive clientele:

"The Dakota initiated the history of the private elevator, the installation of a vertical passage that made movement in a multistory residential building completely independent of public spaces. This transportation option was so essential to the development of the image of New York because it prepared the way for the final phase of the transformation of Manhattan in the first two decades of the twentieth century: the willingness of the most wealthy class to sell their remaining mansions on Fifth Avenue, together with their building lots, and move into the apartment houses rising in the same location."

Thus many rich families, notably the Vanderbilts and Huttons, were persuaded to sell their downtown mansions provided their new apartments in the luxury buildings going up on their former properties gave them exclusive use of an elevator.

The most interesting part of Lifted was the section on elevators in books and film. In the chapter section entitled "The Moment of Truth: The Stalled Cab as Secular Confessional", I realized that what Bernard wrote was so true:

"In novels, films, and commercials, elevators get stuck with a frequency that bears no relation to official statistics. As Nabokov's Mary and Fechter's Der Ruck im Fahrstuhlshow, elevators tend to appear in big-city stories precisely, and only, at the moment they stop working. Although malfunctions have been infrequent exceptions since the development of safety mechanisms in the early twentieth century, they seem to be the rule in fictional narratives. The reason for this statistically indefensible preference is undoubtedly that, while one can (with difficulty) ignore uncomfortable physical proximity for the length of a normal ride, it becomes oppressively unavoidable in the case of a malfunction."

Isn't it? He elaborates:

"The 'unease' that Lethen says arises 'when the traffic flow is suddenly interrupted or backed up for a long time' is intensified in the elevator, where fiction and film can portray it more sharply than in any other means of transportation. The crises that unfold in the cab are one sign among many that the elevator is a paradigmatic site of modernity."

I can recall many TV episodes I have seen--even commercials--which have taken place in elevators. At the sign of a crisis--like a stuck elevator--the passengers who wouldn't dare glance your way five minutes ago are now confessing their innermost secrets. A stuck elevator is eerily threatening. To be stuck in a box without an escape route can lead to a panic, or a feeling of impending doom:

"If we seek to understand why the elevator is still such a popular location in novels, films, TV series, and advertisements with urban settings, we need to keep in mind the latent threat embodied in this unobservable intersection of individual lives."

Bernard wrote about many feature films with chilling elevator scenes, including a German film which takes place entirely within the claustrophobic confines of the metal box, "Abwärts". I am going to order a copy on-line.

 Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission

Jo Piazza’s If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission is a profile of ten American Nuns, (though as Piazza states in her introduction, they are technically Sisters), who are changing the world through charity, activism and political protest.  At the same time these women are challenging the restrictive and generally negative stereotype of what it means to be a Catholic Sister.  The Sisters that Piazza profiles in this book are not disapproving schoolmarms or uptight nurses, they are working to abolish slavery, have gays and lesbians recognised in the Church, to eliminate nuclear weapons and many other causes.  Despite the good these Sisters are doing they are, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, radical feminists who are challenging key doctrines. According to the Sisters they are working in the spirit of the bible in order to make the world a better place for people on the margins of society, these viewpoints lead to clashes between the established male church hierarchy and the Sisters about what it means to be a good Catholic. What started out as a Master’s thesis on how nuns use social media by Piazza, transformed into a book profiling the lives of ten inspiring and forward thinking women who use their religion to make the world a better place.

The book itself is divided into ten chapters, each profiling and interviewing a different Sister.  These interviews detail the Sister’s specific cause or concern, their history and how they came to join the ministry. Many of the chapters also contain information on how Piazza came to meet them and on their interactions over the course of the interviews. Some are conventional interviews over tea; others are less expected, like a six hour road trip with a Sister who may be incarcerated for political protest, or a movie screening of Eden with a Sister who runs a home from women escaping slavery in New York. Piazza’s history as an entertainment reporter can be seen in her interview style, Piazza says in her introduction that “I want to tell the stories of these nuns as if they were rock stars or Hollywood royalty.”  To a large extent she succeeds, the profiles feel very natural and flow well and like stories of rock stars of Hollywood royalty I longed to know more about each of the Sisters. Every section seemed too brief, even if the book had been twice as long I probably would have wanted to know more about them.  One interesting criticism I read about the book in another review is that Piazza usually describes what each of the Sister’s looks like and what she is wearing. The reviewer found this to be distracting and negative; I however enjoyed this as it further removes Sisters and Nuns from their habits which have not been required uniform since the 1960’s.

Potential readers may be turned off of the book by the religious subject matter, afraid the book is full of Catholic doctrine or written in such a way as to convert people to Catholicism. As a (very) lapsed Roman Catholic I had many of the same reservations. While the book does talk about the spiritual lives of these women and their faith and relationship to the Christian God it does not make any pitches to convert readers or to tout Christianity as any kind of ‘true religion.’ When Piazza, also a non-religious though raised Catholic, does mention faith she is mainly interested in what drew these women into life in a religious order, a life she notes is devoid of “many of the things Americans think of as the trappings of a good and “normal” life: marriage, kids, a sex life.” She is interested in how they use faith to drive their actions. With so many negative portrayals of faith in the world, especially of the Roman Catholic Church it is relieving to a positive example of religion inspiring people to help others.

While the profiles on the Sisters are all fascinating, the reactions from other Catholics as well as the Church Hierarchy are also interesting, though not in the same uplifting and positive sense. Sister Simone Campbell who toured America in 2012 to protest the Republican “Path to Prosperity” budget with the ‘Nun’s on a Bus’ was called a feminazi by Rush Limbaugh and was protested by people calling her a ‘fake nun.’ Others like Sister Jeannie Gramick, who is fighting for a more LGBT friendly church has been threatened with excommunication from the Church itself.  Piazza notes that it is interesting and troublesome that a Church that has been so plagued with scandal in recent years has had a fixation with correcting the behaviour of Nuns, even going so far as to launch a formal investigation into the behaviour of American Nuns in 2008 without any prior allegations of wrongdoing. The male hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church does not come across as particularly accepting in this book and stands in stark contrast to the more progressive nuns. This is not particularly surprising, though it is upsetting to hear a Sister who tried to speak with a Bishop about allowing women to be ordained was literally laughed at. This section hit me particularly hard since my much more devout eight year old self wanted to be a Catholic Priest and received a similar condescending reaction from a Deacon.

I hadn't intended to read or even review this book, but the title jumped out to me while going through new books and I am glad I picked it up. Positive stories about faith are not front and center in the modern world, neither are stories about people doing good deeds. This book covers both of these as well as profiling ten amazing women that are helping to change what the Catholic Church means in a modern context and helping people who need it the most. To paraphrase Piazza in her introduction she says that she may not believe in God, but she does believe in nuns. After reading about these incredible women, I feel much the same way.

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The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth

Pope Joan is alleged to have reigned for two years during the ninth century. She kept her identity hidden until the truth of her sex was revealed when she gave birth in the middle of the street. Her story is told by Peter Stanford in The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth. I had long been interested in this cross-dressing pope and was hoping for a story that would leave me spellbound. One does not need tabloid journalism to tell a story as sensational as this. Unfortunately I found Stanford's story quite boring, and this slim book of only 200 pages took me twelve days to finish. Stanford travelled to Rome to conduct his research and accessed mediaeval documents in libraries and museums. He discovered quite soon how difficult it was to research a pope from over a millennium ago. Often the only surviving sources were from a time four hundred years after Joan's alleged reign, leaving much room for the original writers' reinterpretations or worse--time to excise Joan from the public record. Stanford did not rely solely on the most well-known texts, and strove to find their sources--some of which were not lost after all.

The main theory for the promotion of Pope Joan's existence was that she was created by the Protestant church in order to cast the Catholic church in a disparaging light. A certain way to turn followers away from Catholicism would be to promote the idea that they elected an unchaste woman as pope and were all too blind to notice. The story becomes sensational when she is said to have given birth--on the street no less. It smacks of a mediaeval urban myth, according to Stanford. However Joan does have her defenders:

"The fall-back of harder-hearted, less fanciful defenders of Joan has been to dwell on the fact that this was the Dark Ages, a period of political turmoil, illness, famine and marauding armies across Europe, when for many life hung by a thread. There was little time for scholarship or keeping records for posterity. Moreover, the argument goes, if the lack of a contemporaneous written record is taken as sufficient in itself to damn any story or character, Jesus himself is in trouble."

Stanford raises the issue of the scant information about many mysterious popes throughout history, such as Lando, about whom hardly anything is known. The names at least of male popes are recorded for all history, yet prominent women figures have been ignored. Could Pope Joan have been ignored merely because she was a woman, or could her biographies have been excised from all church records once the truth about her sex was revealed? Could the Catholic church have rewritten its own history?

The church did not always bar women from high office. There were women bishops prior to the Reformation. There was thus already a precedent, and in the ninth century a woman could have risen within the Catholic hierarchy. But to the position of pope? The pope back then had not yet assumed the powerful and influential worldly title of an international head of state. There were many pretenders to the throne--the antipopes--and popes were deposed by being either imprisoned or murdered. The papal seat was a highly volatile position and it does seem possible that Joan could have existed and risen to the throne.

Stanford covers the theory that Pope Joan was a fantastic manifestation of the sexless and celibate priesthood. Priests, years after having taken the vows of celibacy, might have fantasized about women being under the priestly robes. Joan could have been an all-encompassing priestly sexual fantasy.

The jury is still out about Pope Joan. I am led to believe that Stanford considers her to be a real figure who was in fact pope. Stanford concludes the book with the following questions:

"Did she, or didn't she? Could a German woman of English parentage pull off one of the greatest deceptions of all time and rise, disguised as a man, to the pinnacle of the Catholic church in the ninth century? If so, did the Catholic church then achieve a remarkable triumph by putting this embarrassing skeleton back in the cupboard in the post-Reformation period? Or is Pope Joan an empty and malicious legend promoted by generation after generation of anti-Catholics and anti-clerics? Perhaps, though, the truth is less clear-cut. Could Pope Joan be a significant myth or an allegory for some other historical happening? Or a bit of both?"

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The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning

Is there a limit to what we can know? This is one of the great questions that have occupied the creative minds of some of the world’s most illustrious luminaries. All of them have been stumped and no definitive answer has been provided. The advance of science (or perhaps more specifically, the advance of technology) is changing the epistemological landscape and the old unanswerable questions about limits to human understanding are being brought to sharp focus.

Enter Marcelo Gleiser and his latest work The Island of Knowledge. The book is a broad treatment of the topic. Gleiser begins at the beginning with a discussion of the earliest philosophers of ancient Greece and highlights their ruminations on the nature of the world and the limits of what we can know about it. The narrative speeds along through history to the quantum age. This isn’t a history book. You won’t find here an exhaustive account of all the philosophers and scientists who have produced some answer to the mystery of knowledge limitations. He spends some time on the history of science and epistemology to ground the book and to show the perennial befuddlement of all attempts to grapple with the topic. Most of the book is spent discussing modern science and the breathtaking weirdness of what physicists and astronomers have uncovered. It is here, in our day, where we see most clearly the answer to the above question. Everywhere you turn, in every intellectual discipline of science, the same answer resounds: Yes, there are limits to what we can know about the world and ourselves.

Gleiser enumerates the findings of various disciplines, particularly physics, astronomy and mathematics, highlighting technological limitations to our ability to observe the universe both at the macro (big bang and expanding universe) and at the micro levels (the quantum world).  The implications of quantum physics are especially disconcerting to individuals who want the certainty that comes with absolute knowledge.  Gleiser spends most of his analytical-descriptive work on the quantum age.

There will be some readers who will say, when they are told there is a limit to what we can know, “Well duh!” But for many scientists whose lives are informed by an ethic of the search for ultimate answers, a search that will eventually be rewarded, this conclusion will come as a shock—kind of like cold water splashed on the brain. We exist on an island. This fact must be faced boldly and digested for all the import it will have on what one might call the “meaning of intellectual life.”

The final chapter acts as an epitaph to the absolutist’s dream. I will quote one passage at some length as a finale to this review.

It is too simplistic a hope to aspire to complete knowledge. Science needs to fail in order to move forward. We may crave certainty but must embrace uncertainty in order to grow. We are surrounded by horizons, by incompleteness. All we see are shadows on cave walls. Yet it is also too simplistic to consider such limits as insurmountable obstacles. Limits are triggers: they teach us something about ourselves while taunting us to keep edging forward, in search of answers. We push the limits and keep on pushing so that we can better know who we are. The same ongoing growth process that we see in science—forward, backward, but always charging ahead—we should see in each of us, in our individual pursuits. The day we become too afraid to step into the unknown is the day we stop growing.  (p.280).

It is a grand statement and adds a bit of poetic musing to the final chapter of the book. Allow me two observations. First notice the allusion to Plato and “shadows on cave walls.” Plato, a very keen observer of human nature, prodded his fellow Athenians to reach for the permanent unchanging Forms as the only true hope for knowledge. This world view is passé these days—that there may be some eternal, unchanging realm beyond the mundane—but wouldn’t it be nice. Secondly, it may be the way I read the book and this passage in particular, but I can’t help but think that Gleiser bristles and chomps at the bit as one who cannot quite commit to his own conclusions. The limits to knowledge are chaffing. He vacillates, at one moment saying we are surrounded by incompleteness and at the next suggests it is too simplistic to think these limits insurmountable obstacles.  Here then is the human condition, we live on an island of knowledge looking out to horizons we just can’t reach. Odd. Frustrating.  And yet the mystery (it seems to me a mystery) enchants the world.

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Frost On My Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer

Frost On My Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer is Tim Moore's a hilarious laugh-on-every-page account of his Arctic adventures. His trip from England to Iceland, then to the Faroes, Norway, Jan Mayen (almost) and concluding in the Svalbard archipelago was not a voyage chosen at random. Moore decided to mirror the exploits of Lord Dufferin, who is known to Canadians as our third Governor-General. Lord Dufferin explored the north Atlantic in 1856 and published his own amusing travel tale, Letters from High Latitudes. Frost On My Moustache can be looked at as a modern-day Letters. Moore kept me laughing, and since I had been to many of the same places, I felt a degree of familiarity that only made me laugh more.

Moore spent most of his nine-week adventure in Iceland. I am planning a two-week trip to Iceland this summer, although I did spend an entire day in Reykjavík in the summer of 2013, so the references to the capital city were still fresh. What I found most interesting though was Moore's cycle trek across the country. Roads suddenly disappeared and he was left bouncing his tires over rough lava, worrying about getting a flat. His observations about the perils of the outdoors sounded both serious as well as downright hilarious:

"What heightened the senses was the complete absence of warning signs, fences or barriers. In Iceland, a healthy respect for the nation's geological and climactic [1] extremes is taken for granted. If they went around trying to signpost every danger the nation would be bankrupted. 'Warning--enormous hidden hole in ground', 'Danger--no shops or petrol or any living thing for miles and miles--oh yeah, and you just fell into a geyser'. That's what Iceland is about--confronting the elements, and man's puniness beside them. Don't look where you're going in the English countryside and you tread in a cowpat; here you disappear into a glacial crevasse. Get lost in the English countryside and you miss last orders: here you freeze to death up an unknown mountain and have the trolls pick at your bleached bones for a millennium until an earthquake affords you a proper burial."

British-born and well familiar with imbibing a good pint at a pub, Moore nonetheless was taken aback by the degree of drunkenness he saw throughout the entire length of his travels:

"In my nine weeks away I saw more deeply drunk people--people with no control of their necks, people arguing with seagulls, people so dangerously wayward that everyone weaved out of the way and stared back with horrified intrigue in the expectation that they'd imminently fall off a quay or steal a tram--than I think I've seen in the previous ten years in London."

Although married to an Icelander, Moore still has difficulty wrapping his tongue around the Icelandic language. He can never pronounce the name of the town Höfn correctly, despite numerous attempts. After failing to make himself understood in Icelandic, Moore drew the following conclusion:

"Scandinavians are so good at English that they even have two names for their own towns--one as pronounced by the natives, the other by idiot tourists. They are not programmed to deal with the possibility of an idiot tourist attempting the native pronunciation. I was rather taken aback, for instance, to hear that the correct Norwegian pronunciation of Oslo is actually the reasonably hilarious 'Oooshloo'. but, on the single occasion I tried that out, the woman at the ferry terminal in Bergen gave me a leaflet about Newcastle."

His olfactory perceptions of Höfn left much to be desired:

"Icelanders often tell you that their fish doesn't smell. Only fish that is rotting smells, as it were, of fish, and theirs is all too fresh. Unfortunately with regard to this maxim, the whole of Höfn stinks like a smouldering, month-old whale carcass."

I discovered Frost on My Moustache while researching the north Atlantic Norwegian island of Jan Mayen. There is not much written in English about this small island. I would love to visit this isolated volcanic drop in the ocean yet the only way to get there is by military plane. Norway does not permit independent travel to Jan Mayen and tourists, who have extremely limited opportunities to do much on Jan Mayen as it is, must receive official government approval. Even if you have jumped through all the required hoops, Mother Nature can thwart all travel by her tumultuous seas or rough winds. Unfortunately Moore's plane had to return to Bodø, Norway on account of bad winds, although he did manage to see the volcanic peak through the clouds. By coincidence Lord Dufferin could not land at Jan Mayen either, so Moore was truly following in the lord's footsteps.

That both attempted visits to Jan Mayen were thwarted was fitting, for throughout Frost Moore tries to out-Dufferin Lord Dufferin, yet never really feels he succeeds in outranking the big guy. The abruptly cancelled landing on Jan Mayen showed that he could never surpass his predecessor in feats of bravery or fortitude. Moore was plagued by seasickness and could only wonder if the lord suffered as much as he did. The nausea cast a doom of always being second best:

"They called lunch, and I was forced to concede that though I'd paid for the food, turning it down was probably preferable to throwing it up."

Moore's travels end in the Svalbard archipelago, the main island of which is Spitsbergen. While I was in northern Norway in the summer of 2013 I bought a large travel book on Svalbard as well as an enormous map. One day too I would like to explore the eightieth parallel. During his time on these islands Moore always had to be on alert for polar bears and often lagged behind his much fitter exploration team. Frost painted some gorgeous images of the north, and the picture I liked best was Moore's description of icebergs scattered across the fjord:

"Anyway, everyone got their polar bears in the end, the captain having got into the what-the-hell spirit of Spitzbergen by nosing the Nordstjernen right up to the foot of the Prince Albert glacier through a lethal fleet of car-sized bergs which boomed against our flaking, dented hull with disturbing regularity. The whole fjord was sprinkled with smaller shards floating motionlessly on glassy water, twinkling in the garish 11.45 p.m. sun. It looked like someone had dropped a chandelier out of an airship."

I like a laugh-out-loud travel tale that I can't put down. I burst out laughing many times while reading this on the bus. Frost appealed to me even more because I could compare notes with Moore since we took similar trips. Perhaps I will make it to Jan Mayen and out-Dufferin them all.

[1] shouldn't it be climatic extremes?

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