Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

Random House   2013

480 pages            Non-Fiction

The Shortlist     ebook

My granddaughter aged 20 months, sits in her highchair. Her lunch is some strawberries, some carrots, and a hotdog with cheese in the middle. She pokes a few strawberries in her mouth and drops all the carrots on the floor. Then she eats one slice of the hotdog with cheese. With a smile on her face, she looks at me and says, "Umm, delicious!" In an instant, the hotdog slices are gone. Another child lost to "salt, sugar, and fat."

In his book with the same name,  Salt, Sugar, Fat, Michael Moss has created a highly readable study of the food industry and its drive to create ever more edible concoctions to please the palate and the pocketbook and keep you coming back for more. Food scientists strive to "optimize" their products to maximize our cravings for them. You all remember the slogan, "betcha you can't eat just one," for Lays potato chip. Well, that was a food scientist at work, creating a product with just the right amount of salt and fat to make you want to eat those chips until the bag is empty. And then there is the "bliss point" for the soft-drink industry--the point where you open up the can and go "Ahhh." Combine the right amount of sugar, the right amount of salt and a whopping dose of fat and you have food science in a nutshell (with salt on it of course.) The whole reason for adding things to food is to optimize products to maximize cravings. Moss says: "These are the pillars of processed foods, the three ingredients without which there would be no processed foods. Salt, sugar and fat drive consumption by adding flavor and allure. But surprisingly, they also mask bitter flavors that develop in the manufacturing process. They enable these foods to sit in warehouses or on the grocery shelf for months. And, most critically to the industry's financial success, they are very inexpensive."

The preface of the book is very enlightening. In the late 1990s when the epidemic of obesity was just being recognized, a group of food industry leaders, including CEOs of many of the food giants, gathered together to discuss business strategy. The leader of the meeting was trying to impress upon the businessmen that they were most likely going to need to change their strategies if they were going to weather the coming storm of criticism about their industry regarding obesity. At the end of the meeting, no one was convinced that they wanted to change any strategy, and most went back to their companies and added more salt, sugar and fat to their already laden products. 

Moss's book is very well researched, and he also acts like a journalist doing many interviews. I found the book very helpful as my husband and I continue to rid our lives and our pantries of the junk that has weighted us down all our lives. Our mothers were part of the 1950s when convenience foods were just coming into their own. Mixes, frozen foods, packaged cookies, TV dinners and chicken pot pies. My oh my! The scourge of our generation. After reading Salt, Sugar, Fat, I renewed with vigor my nutritional quest. I am now reading nutritional information on every single item I buy, shopping only the outside aisles of the store, and emptying my cupboards of snacks. If I don't eat one, I will never eat the whole bag. I am proud to say that we are making good progress.

The grocery chain where I shop, Meijers, has a big promotion every couple of months where they offer dozens of items on a 10 for $10 sale with the eleventh item free. Last week for the first time they had nearly as many fresh items on the sale as they did processed items. So for every can of Spaghetti o's, there was an avocado; for every bag of cookies, there was a bag of lettuce. I am proud of the company for making the decision to promote fresh items. My challenge for this year is to try to not buy any processed food items when I go to the grocery. Is it possible? Hope so!

You might also like to read Taste What You're Missing by Barb Stuckey. Stuckey is a food scientist and she tells about how and why salt, sugar, and fat are added to foods from a food science point of view. Her intent is to show us why these elements are necessary in making palatable food. A good companion to Salt, Sugar, Fat.

Following this review, I am going to look at a book I just received from the publicist, Foods that Harm; Foods that Heal. It discusses hundreds of food items and what they do to the body. Look for it.

The New York Times review

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/salt-sugar-fat-by-michael-moss.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Interview with Michael Mossat at Bon Appetit magazine: http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2013/03/salt-sugar-fat-michael-moss.html

The Bracelet

 by Roberta Gately

Gallery Books 2012

318 pages     Fiction

The Bracelet by Roberta Gately is a fictionalized look at the serious problem of human trafficking through the eyes of a UN nurse in Pakistan. Abby needed a big change; a romance that she had depended upon was over. Hurt and angry, the idea of working for the UN for a while seemed like a good idea. Get away. Make a fresh start.

Her first assignment is Peshawar Pakistan where she is to evaluate an immunization clinic for UNICEF. Before she arrived in Pakistan, she spent a period of time in Geneva training for the positing. The time in Geneva, however, was marred by a murder Abby saw committed as she was out running, and the vision of that murder haunts her nightly after she arrives in Peshawar. Her dreams seem to focus on the beautiful bracelet worn by the murder victim.

The UN house in Peshawar is in a nice neighborhood; it is staffed by a young Afghan woman, Najeela, and a housekeeper named Hana. Shortly after Abby arrives at the posting she meets Najeela's unsavory uncle, the staff of the immunization clinic at a refugee camp, and a New York Times reporter named Nick. Nick is in Pakistan ostensibly to interview Abby as a UN relief worker, but his main interest is the rampant human trafficking that is taking place in the country. He introduces Abby to the woman who runs a half-way house for trafficking victims, and Abby gets involved in helping the women at the half-way house. All is not as it seems, however, and Abby and Nick barely escape Pakistan with their lives. 

Roberta Gately is knowledgeable about human trafficking and UN refugees because she worked as a nurse in several war torn countries. It is obvious that she knows a lot about the situations presented in the book, and she writes in an engaging style that keeps you reading. The plot is serviceable, but the plot is not the main reason for the novel. This is a message novel, plain and simple. Gately is trying to get out the message that human trafficking is one of the world's dirty little secrets, and while things are being done to combat it, there is a great deal of money to be made in many of the countries of the world. She indicates that government officials in many countries and even the UN are on the take, turning a blind eye to the trafficking right under their noses. The stories of the victims in the pages of The Bracelet are heart rending, and they are the important part of the novel--not the plot or the romance. The Bracelet should be read with that in mind.

 

Recently there have been efforts in West Michigan to identify human trafficking in our area. Michigan State University is spearheading a task force to work on the problem and alert the citizens to the problem as it appears in Michigan. You can find a link to the task force here.

This is Gately's second novel, the first Lipstick in Afghanistan was published in 2010. She recently wrote an article about how she turned to fiction writing, which you can find here.  

Roberta Gately's website:  http://robertagately.com/

Targets of Revenge

by Jeffrey S. Stephens

Gallery Books    2013

441 pages     Fiction

Jordan Sandor returns for the third time in a skillfully rendered action novel, Targets of Revenge, and revenge is the key to the plot. In almost typical James Bond style, Sandor is out to get a terrorist with the code-name Adina, who apparently had caused a lot of havoc in one of the two previous Target books, Targets of Deception and Targets of Opportunity. The interesting thing about Adina is that he operates out of Venezuela. Who knew Venezuela was a hotbed of terrorism? 

In an attempt to "take out" Adina, Sandor discovers that Adina is manufacturing Anthrax and has plans to deliver a massive Anthrax attack, probably on New York City. Sandor races around the globe following the trail of a huge cocaine shipment in which the Anthrax might be buried. We are taken to Egypt, Russia, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Washington, and chapter headings let us know where we are. Sandor seemingly answers to no one and spends most of his time telling the US government officials what he is going to do next--or not telling the US government officials what he is going to do next. Sandor is not one to take orders.

The reviewer in Suspense Magazine says that Targets of Revenge is like a "big summer action movie." There are last-second escapes in virtually every chapter, and nothing seems to deter Sandor's two-fold mission--to wreak revenge on Adina and to save Manhattan. He outwits Venezuelan terrorists, Mexican drug runners, Russian drug lords in Egypt, and the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. He escapes from a drug lab in the jungle of Venezuela, a barn in Mexico and a basement in Brooklyn. He loses a girlfriend and two co-workers; wherever he goes, murder and mayhem follow. I wish I had kept count of the dead bodies--the score count would have been huge. But even Sandor bemoans the mayhem. "Sandor lived in a world of brutality and deception, but even in the context of that shadowy existence there were still boundaries." Frankly, I didn't see many boundaries.

There are some light moments. Sandor is pretty smart mouthed, and he seems to get by with sarcastic quips to almost everyone, including the higher ups in the government, who seem to shrug their shoulders and pass it off as just another incidence of Sandor being Sandor. One of my favorite bits of writing comes when Sandor arrives at the headquarters of a Russian mobster in Brighton Beach.  "'Private party tonight,' he told them in an accent as thick as a Russian novel." (Loved that!)  

One of the things I found most interesting was the underlying political agenda of the author, which comes out in lecture form. For example, in a chapter where the action takes place in Washington Heights, New York City, the welfare atmosphere of the neighborhood is introduced in this way: "Just as jihadists nurture anti-Western hatred in their impressionable children, anti-American socialists promote the politics of blame as they deride the capitalist ethic of hard work and achievement, preaching the easy life promised to all by entitlement programs." Some of the preaching goes with the Sandor's character, but most of it goes with the character of the author I would guess.

All-in-all, however, the book was fun. I love James Bond movies, especially the Daniel Craig ones, and I just kept visualizing Daniel Craig as Jordan Sandor. I can only imagine that Jeffrey Stephens is envisioning the same thing. 

You might also enjoy The Intercept by Dick Wolf which also takes place in New York. I read and reviewed it last month.

 Here is the Kirkus review of the book in which they said, " As skillfully rendered as the book is, readers will not necessarily look forward to the next installment in the series."

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jeffrey-s-stephens/targets-of-revenge/

The Submission

 by Amy Waldman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011

320 pages            Fiction

The Submission is an alternate history novel about the development of a memorial to the World Trade Center by journalist, Amy Waldman. Our city, Kalamazoo, Michigan, is reading the book for our community read this month, and my book club is discussing it this evening. It is an excellent choice for a community read because it delves into all the emotional and explosive issues surrounding September 11, 2001.

We all know where we were and how we felt when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. More than a year after the attacks, I visited my son in New York. He had a dinner party to introduce me to all his friends. At dinner, it was very important to my new acquaintances that they explain to me their experiences on that day. In part, it was how they introduced themselves to me; it was their new definition of themselves.

In The Submission, it is just three years later, and feelings are still very raw. A committee comprised of artists, historians, civic and political leaders along with a representative of the families have gathered to choose the winning design in a blind contest. One of the two finalist designs is a beautiful walled garden with the names of the deceased etched in the walls. After a great deal of debate, the garden design is chosen; then the group discovers that the winner of the contest is an American Muslim named Mohammad Khan. This information is leaked to the media and mayhem ensues. As one reviewer says, "The debate moves from the design's attributes to its attribution." A surprisingly intense review in Entertainment Weekly says that The Submission is  "a scathing, dazzlingly crafted indictment of the messes people make when they mistake ideology for morality and bigotry for patriotism."

The many characters in the novel are involved in vigorous debate, much of it recorded by the author. Some of the characters are exactly what you would expect--the Rush Limbaugh character, the blogger, the racists, the politicians, and the haters. There is also the dignified and wealthy woman representing her deceased stock broker husband and the other families on the committee; there is the itinerant younger brother of one of the dead firefighters seeking justice for his brother and his grieving parents; and there is young Bangladeshi widow of one of the World Trade Center's custodians who ultimately provides the moral compass for the novel. My favorite character is the de facto leader of the Bangladeshi community. He is a strong, resilient, loving man who exhibits that which is best in a city of divided loyalties. He remains true to his community and to the young widow he takes under his wing.

I frankly don't know when I have read a novel so compelling in its moral intensity. We are exposed to all sides of the controversy, and quite frankly, we are pulled in every direction. The only direction in which we are not pulled is in the direction of the architect, who comes off as a shallow, rather incomplete person whose motives seem opportunistic rather than altruistic. It is not until the end of the book that we get some real insight into Mohammad Khan's character.

This is not a plot driven novel, but you keep reading the dialogue and keep trying to figure out what should be the appropriate decision. And like almost all such political decisions, the compromise is unenlightened and superficial. Then there is the question about why we need symbolism and why we need to create memorials. I am sure, for instance, that there will be a memorial built to commemorate the children of the Sandy Hook shooting. I kept asking myself if a memorial to the World Trade Center, no matter what is chosen, can possibly solve the issue of terrorism in the same way that a memorial to the Sandy Hook children cannot possibly solve the issue of gun violence. In The Submission, the compromised memorial solves none of the problems nor does it serve as comforter. It is not until the epilogue that we learn what the whole experience has meant to the key players, and in one small heartfelt gesture, the humanity of all the players is brought to a moment of heart stopping clarity. It is the most fitting memorial.

This is Amy Waldman's first novel. She will be speaking in Kalamazoo next Tuesday evening. I will be there and if given a chance, I am going to ask her, "What was your motivation for needing to tie up the loose ends in the epilogue? " In the case of the World Trade Center, it is likely that the loose ends will never be tied up.

Chris Cleve's review in the Washington Post. Chris Cleve is the author of Little Bee which I reviewed a couple of years ago: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-08-15/entertainment/35272087_1_architect-michael-arad-design

The review in EW: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20515098,00.html

An interview with Amy Waldman on NPR: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/09/conversation-amy-waldman-author-of-the-submission.html

On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines--And Future

 by Karen Elliott House
Alfred A. Knopf, 2012
308 pages     Nonfiction

Over the past thirty years, Karen Elliott House has reported about Saudi Arabia through her work with the Wall Street Journal. Her book, On Saudi Arabia, was published last fall, and my husband and I read it aloud as part of our breakfast reading.

The story of Saudi Arabia for the last half century has really been the story of one family, the Al Saud. The first Al Saud king, Abdul Aziz unified a bunch of disparate tribes to form the present country of Saudi Arabia. The family currently is huge--there are more than 2000 princes. One of the main problem is that the crown has been passed from son to son of Abdul Aziz; the current king is in his late 80s and the youngest son is in his 60s. At some point, if tradition is to be updated for the Al Saud family, the crown is going to have to be passed to the next generation. Who? And which line of succession will continue the rule? The princes are everywhere in the country, and they have their hands in every pie.

The country is so conservative and so traditional because the Al Saud family has control of everything. In the 1980s they chose to impose Wahabi Islam on the people, and religion controls everything. House compares Saudi Arabia to the last days of the Soviet Union only with more money. And the money is spread everywhere. But she also emphasizes that the money is finite. The oil revenue from Saudi wells may be at their peak and on the way down. Sixty percent of Saudis are under the age of 20, and there is great fear that the money will run out and the government largess will have to be controlled.

The high walls that have contained Saudis in their homes with their restrictive religion are crumbling fast primarily because the Internet has opened up so much to young people. There is no cinema in Saudi Arabia; women cannot drive or leave their homes without male escort; there are no nightclubs, but there are thousands of restless youth. In one chapter, House talks about how some young men turn to jihad as a way to find meaning in their lives, and how the government is trying to rehabilitate them with jobs, wives, and money. Yet, there are many, many young men without jobs, and most young Saudi men will not take the kinds of jobs that may be available--those are outsourced to willing workers from Egypt, India, and the Philippines. 

The aspect of Saudi society that I have pondered  again and again is the government policy of exporting students throughout the world to study. Does the king want to totally reform the country and thinks that this is the way? We have had three Saudi students in the small apartment in our home over the past two years. They have been part of the English language program at Western Michigan University where currently there are 500 Saudi students. I have also tutored about 15 of them, men and women, because word has spread that I tutor and edit papers. Each has their own story to tell about why they came to Kalamazoo, about what they are studying, and what they plan to do with their lives. As we have read On Saudi Arabia, I have probed a bit more about their lives, their wives, their children, and their futures.

The first thing I have noticed is that few of them are creative thinkers. Their education system is so force-fed that they have never had to do any intuitive work nor have they had to do any teamwork. So, when asked to form an opinion about something they have read, they have no resources. I have tutored several students who are getting Master's Degrees in education. One young woman is getting a PhD in Special Education, and I asked her about Special Education in Saudi Arabia. She said that she will be one of the first trained PhDs, and that is why she is hurrying so fast to get her PhD. Another man is so taken with the concepts of educational leadership, he can't wait to get home to reform the science education--for which he is a national consultant. What will they find when they return? Will the government let them put into effect the reforms that they are now trained to do?

My favorite story about creative thinking is about Dhafer, who is getting his Masters in Computer Engineering. He had to take a creative writing course in this first semester of his degree. He has found that he has a knack for poetry and fiction writing. He had to write a short story--never having read one in his life. So, we chose an incident that happened when he first arrived in the US and he turned it into a short story about a fictional him. Now, the teacher wants to publish it in a national journal for ESL teachers. He never knew he had it in him.

I have met few wives. I invited one family for Thanksgiving so their two-year-old could play with my granddaughter, but they declined to come; Anood, the wife, would be too uncomfortable because she would have to be covered. Several of the wives, however, just wear hijab, and some even drive the family car and take the children back and forth to school. Most of them want to have a baby while they are in the US so that they will have a US citizen in their family.

On Saudi Arabia gave my husband and me more ways to identify with our Saudi friends. When we have asked them something about what we learned from the book, they questioned where we got the information, but then mostly they begrudgingly agreed. One young man who is studying human resources said that his father is trying to buy a trucking company. (There are not many independent businesses in the country, according to House.) When I asked him about how that was going, he told me that the Prince who has control of the region is willing to help finance the purchase, but then he wants such a big cut of the business that the family doesn't think they will make enough money to support themselves after they pay the Prince.

Well--the stories I could tell. I am grateful that On Saudi Arabia came out while we were in the midst of this experience so that we can understand the country better. We have found our Saudis to be charming, responsible, caring, delightful young men. We are honored to have them in our home. We worry about them when they get home. Will they get jobs? What will happen to their country when the King dies? One man told me that he thinks they are only two years away from revolution. Another told me that he hopes a parliamentary system with a figurehead king (like Great Britain) will be the result. He is afraid for his country.

On Saudi Arabia has been very well received and very well reviewed. Karen House knows what she is talking about. There are extensive notes and references as well as her own observations. Journalism at its best. Here are two excellent reviews.

The review in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578002273053554386.html

The review in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/review/on-saudi-arabia-by-karen-elliott-house.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0