What I'm Reading: The Omnivore's Dilemma

I thoroughly enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. He's been one of my favorite writers, ever since I read A Place of My Own, some years ago. And I stumble across stories by him in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, often quite by accident, and then look at the byline to see who this talented writer is, and there's Pollan again.

The book has the distinct danger of making you annoying to your spouse/partner/children, because you'll be reading along and feel compelled to share a fact about how industrial corn production has wormed its way into nearly every aspect of the American diet. I know my 12-year-old daughter cringes when we go the store, and I inspect the ingredients, calling out, "Yep, there's corn in this, too."

Pollan is an immensely fun writer, because he enjoys learning about this stuff, and he's skilled at taking the reader along on the journey, not just through the facts, but through feedlots, and chicken slaughtering, and mushroom hunting. He takes a close look at the industrialization of food production (which depends heavily and crazily on corn), large scale organic farming, and then at a sustainable farming operation, and then around a meal that he assembles using his hunting and gathering skills (relying heavily on the skills of others).

For our family, this book seems perfectly timed, since we've been making huge dietary changes around here since Halloween, cutting out animal products and most refined and processed foods. We were doing it for health reasons, but this books adds an entirely new level of justification. Not that Pollan is saying you should become a vegan. Not at all. He's saying that we owe it to ourselves to become more conscious about what we actually put in our mouths, and the effects that its creation is having on us, our culture, and our planet.

My only disappointment is that in the final wrap-up, he focuses on the extreme distance between the industrialized food he and his family consumes and the meal that he makes through hunting and gathering, without mentioning enough of the sustainable farm that he'd visited. (That section made me want to go out and buy some land and start farming. Tomorrow.) We spent so much time with Pollan through this book, I wanted a stronger sense of whether all this had actually managed to change his day-to-day buying and eating habits. But those are really minor points.

(Also, don't miss a terrific essay Pollan wrote for the NY Times in January, Unhappy Meals, about what we really should eat. Really, it's the answer to what was bugging me about the end of his book. It should be included as an addendum to every copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

What I'm Watching: Sankofa

Part of my plan with this blog is not just to write about writing, but also about the films, plays, and novels that I'm taking in.

Last night I went to a film series in the town where I live. I can't remember the actual title of the series, films about the African diaspora, or something like that. I'd thought that I was going to watch Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, but I was a week off, and so instead we watched Sankofa, written and directed by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima (released in 1993).

I've been troubled by the film all day today, for various reasons. The movie is nominally about a black fashion model who is mysteriously transported (in a dream, or spiritually?) from the ruins of a Ghanaian slave fortress in the modern day, to a life/persona of her ancestor, where she is a slave on a plantation in the West Indies.

The plot is complex, and sometimes a little disjointed, but overall the film shows the cruelty of slave life on a sugar plantation in many horrific aspects, and almost entirely focused on the black slaves, with a little time spent on a Spanish priest. The white slave owners are present, but not really characters. (Which is fine by me.)

Sankofa powerfully examines the struggle of a community of slaves to preserve their own dignity while still attempting to survive, and even more than survive, actively rebel. It also looks into the relationship between current descendants of slaves and the bondage, rape, and murder that dwells permeates their history.

Unfortunately, I found myself unable to completely latch onto this film. Though the acting, especially by the lead actress, was often fiercely raw, it also was uneven, with many of the smaller roles clearly filled by non-actors. Sometimes the dialogue felt trite, even as it dealt with intensely interesting, complex social and racial situations. And, as a viewer used to slick Hollywood films, and also as a sometime filmmaker myself, the visual elements of the film were often jarring in their lack of skill. Shots might inexplicably linger on a landscape element, or we'd see a microphone boom at the edge of the frame. The camera might pan or track at odd moments. The entire piece felt like it needed re-editing. And the story fluttered about between several different sub-plots, some of which were engaging, and others that made me keep looking at the clock.

I haven't decided if the technical elements kept me at a distance from the film just because they were bad, or if because the material is so difficult and painful that I subconsciously latched onto these distractions to keep some sense of emotional composure. Probably a combination.

Making a film about slavery in the Americas is a tough act. You want to make a movie that really gets to the heart of what it was like, the violence and despair. And at the same time, it needs to be watchable. I don't know that I've seen the film about slavery that really makes me say, "Oh, I get how this worked." Most tend to show the triumph of the spirit of the slave over the degradation of his bondage. But I'm also interested in what it did to the slave owners--how did it affect and corrupt their own humanity? And for the slaves, I don't feel I've yet gotten a sense of the continuous despair that must have been part of life.

I got a hint of it last night, when one of the slaves talked briefly about not being able to continue as a head slave for the rest of his life, that the stress of the brutality that he was required to inflict up on his own people was too great. The tough thing to remember about the enslavement of African-Americans is that it didn't just go on for a few years. When we look at a Holocaust film, it seems like the Jews were in concentration camps forever. But the first camp opened in 1933 (Dachau) and then it was all over by 1945. Slavery in the Americas lasted from 1503 to 1865. More than 350 years! I find it tough to get my head around the implications.

So, I guess Sankofa (and the task of writing about it) definitely got me thinking about all of these issues (I've been at work on an historical piece about a slave during the Civil War, so I've been in this territory before) . That seems like a decent accomplishment