Library Video of the Week, March 11, 2013.

Forks over Knives, a documentary written and directed by Lee Fulkerson.

Library Call Number: RA645.N87F67 2011

Synopsis excerpts from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB):
            What has happened to us? Despite the most advanced medical technology in the world, we are sicker than ever by nearly every measure. Cases of diabetes are exploding…half of us are taking at least one prescription drug and major medical operations have become routine. Heart disease, cancer and stroke are the country's three leading causes of death...Millions suffer from…degenerative diseases. Could it be there's a…solution so comprehensive…that it's mind-boggling that more of us haven't taken it seriously?  
          FORKS OVER KNIVES examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the so-called "diseases of affluence" that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods. …The film traces the personal journeys [of two eminent researchers]…Inspired by remarkable discoveries in their young careers... Their research separately and independently led them to the same startling conclusion: degenerative diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even several forms of cancer, could almost always be prevented-and in many cases reversed-by adopting a whole foods, plant-based diet. Despite the profound implications of their findings, their work has remained relatively unknown to the public. Written by Brian L. Wendel

June 2012 Browsing Books---Finding the Feasts

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid by Melanie Rehak

Library Call Number: TX633.R45 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor) 

Author Rehak begins a year-long search as a thoughtful eater and new mother into the food choices of today’s world, trying to understand how to choose the right foods, do the right thing, eat the best meals possible and “make peace with our food,” even if it means her child will occasionally hit the Burger King later on.

American Terroir: Savoring the Pleasures of our Woods, Waters and Fields by Rowan Jacobson.

Library Call Number: TX631.J335 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)

 

Terroir means “taste of place,” the local soil, air and water that gives many of our foods, from apples to maple syrup, chocolate to oysters, a distinct and local flavor. Like a Michigan apple grower who can bite into a local apple and tell you whose orchard it came from, Jacobson’s book explores the “flavor landscapes of America…where our great foods live.”  With recipes.

Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs 

Library Call Number: TX633.B393 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)

Adapted from the dust jacket:  In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. Desperately sick of European hotel cooking, his menu included some 80 regional specialties, a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi.  Beahrs’ book sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables. The menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years

Browsing Area book of the Week, September 26, 2011.

 Sugar: a Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott. Library Call Number: TX560.S9A23 2009.

          A comprehensive social history of the taste most craved. Abbott’s book takes the reader from the origins of cultivated sugar cane—likely in Indonesia or Polynesia—to the huge agribusiness of beet and cane production today. Supplanting honey in the sweetening of tea, sugar began as a treat for the wealthy and exploded in popularity; in a few hundred years, it went from luxury to unfortunate staple.  Abbott gives the reader a look at the huge enterprises that sprang up in the Caribbean in the 1700’s, plantations that required hundreds of thousands of slaves to do the work and made a handful of Europeans rich beyond dreams and how candy and chocolate became necessities. She describes the American plantations, the sugar beet fields of the north central and western plains and how the historical commodity sugar was once as precious as petroleum today.  During its rise, sugar cultivation caused the near-extinction of native Caribs, resulted in untold ecological devastation and is now responsible for problems that threaten to overwhelm world’s health care systems.