Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Flexitarian-Ish but definitely could be better about the flex

Mostly Plants by Tracy Pollan, Dana Pollan, Lori Pollan, Corky Pollan

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Mostly Plants is book by the Pollan family, as in mom and sisters of Michael (Pollan). The forward, byt the food writer himself, explains the general philosophy (which you already know if you’ve read any of his other work) and introduces the family. Sort of. He includes the history of the sisters going veggie, but never directly explains that they’re his sisters. Unless I just missed that bit, but if I did, he could have been clearer. He also claims that most of the meat […]

Plant Mind Control

This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

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Bingo 1: Edibles I think the only other thing I’ve read of Michael Pollan’s was Food Rules, which was as it sounds, a general rules list with brief discussion per rule. They were pretty common sense, and I generally agreed with them. I know he’s actually a bit more controversial than that, but it’s only now I know why. I’ve had This is Your Mind on Plants on my TBR shelf for a while. Now I’ve read it. While the subject isn’t edibles in the […]

How to do it (better than you) (CBR12Bingo2: how to)

Cooking by Michael Pollan

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Man, this is a good contender for the color square too because boy howdy can Michael Pollan’s writing turn to purple prose at times. I love reading about food, much to my coworker’s confusion, and particularly books like this, that view cooking as a whole rather than a collection of recipes. I know that reading about food is like dancing about architecture, to borrow from Frank Zappa, but when Pollan waxes poetic at times I wanna roll my eyes. It doesn’t help that Pollan can […]

Four plants in search of a human

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

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I have the sneaking suspicion that this started out as four books before Pollan decided there wasn’t enough material to sustain each (or, in the case of the Dutch tulip mania, too little undiscovered ground to cover) and smushed them all together into one okay book by deciding the unifying theme with each plant he wanted to write about was that they all evolved to be appreciated by humans for different reasons. Well, yeah. That’s more or less what evolution is – what is of […]

Eat Your Vegetables! Also, Relax!

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

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In the last few years, I slowly gained and somewhat rapidly lost a lot of weight (about 50 pounds). While extra weigh certainly did some damage to me physically, the psychic trauma of worrying about everything I was putting into (or not putting into) my body was the worst part of the whole thing. Food just…wasn’t fun. It became terror. I’m sure you’ve been there. In this book, the author mentions a survey in which the French associated with chocolate cake words like celebration , […]

That wasn’t on the menu

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You guys, my “delicious” bingo square was supposed to be about food. I love reading about food – cooking, restaurants, food culture, the science of taste – it’s all catnip to me.  My coworkers mock me.  This was supposed to be an automatic good review.    It’s written by Michael Pollan.  It’s in the food writing section.  It’s subtitled “a natural history of four meals.” So where’s the food writing? I feel like the reader expecting Moby Dick to be an action tale and getting […]



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