"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never even become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?"

• C. S. Lewis

I got this passage on a Catholic spiritual daily email (don't ask why and how I signed on for it!) today, and since it is a perfectly beautiful fall day here, and since I was feeling quite grumpy (because of longing - damn you abstract intellect, and you selective memory!), this Lewis-ism made me pause in my self-hatery, and look at the blue sky, and the chickadees attacking the bird feeder outside. And because of this I have decided to work outside, under my huggy oaks, for the rest of the afternoon. How much total reality my circular thinkery blocks indeed!

One of the major trends that one would guess is sweeping how folks eat in United States is "healthy" - a slogan and a category that all consumer goods companies seem to have adopted in order to succeed. One needs only to track the phrases such as "high fibre", "vitamin rich" etc in the ad claims to see how pervasive this shift has been.

Given this, this NYT article on a grocery chain's own nutrition ration system indicates that most of these claims are, to borrow a turn of speech from it, "puffery" if not flat out misleading. The article uses claims for V8 juice as an example of how to give the impression of being healthy, while not being really that healthy; V8 juice is "like drinking a vitamin with a lot of salt on it". And this can't be helped, for as a food industry insider tartly quipped in that article,

"They have to keep the taste. Look at all those super-duper healthy products that are in those healthy food stores. They don’t taste good. Nothing is healthy if you get right down to it, except mother’s milk, and that’s probably got too much fat."

In essence, what the American customer wants is a veneer of health without the loss of anything that made processsed food taste great, and unhealthy in the first place. Who wants to eat lettuce and carrots? Not me. I need my "baked" Doritos* and Diet Coke any day. Jokes aside, in light of this it is bracing to read (or re-read) this Wendell Berry's essay The Pleasures of Eating.

* I have denied myself Doritos for months now, not because they will put a hole in my heart but because they do put a hole in the wallet. Freakin' four dollars (@ retail price) for a bag of chips is highway robbery! Ms. Nooyi, you ain't getting no love from this brutha.