Tbe Lupine Project

I
Tbe Lupine Project
IT IS A long way in time and space from the bathroom
of my Grandmother Mowat's house in Oakville,
Ontario, to the bottom of a wolf den in the Barren
Lands of central Keewatin, and I have no intention
of retracing the entire road which lies between.
Nevertheless, there must be a beginning to any tale;
and the story of my sojourn amongst the wolves begins properly in Granny's bathroom.
When I was five years old I had still not given
any indication-as most gifted children do well before that age-of where my future lay. Perhaps because they were disappointed by my failure to
declare myself, my parents took me to Oakville and
abandoned me to the care of my grandparents while
they went off on a holiday.
The Oakville house-"Greenhedges" it was called
-was a singularly genteel establishment, and I did
not feel at home there. My cousin, who was resident
in Greenhedges and was some years older than myself, had already found his metier, which lay in the
military field, and had amassed a formidable army
of lead soldiers with which he was single-mindedly
preparing himself to become a second Wellington.
My loutish inability to play Napoleon exasperated
him so much that he refused to have anything to do
with me except under the most formal circumstances.
Grandmother, an aristocratic lady of Welsh descent
who had never forgiven her husband for having been
1
.2
Never Cry Wolf
a retail hardware merchant, tolerated me but terrified me too. She terrified most people, including
Grandfather, who had long since sought surcease in
assumed deafness. He used to while away the days
as calm and unrufHed as Buddha, ensconced in a
great leather chair and apparently oblivious to the
storms which swirled through the corridors of Greenhedges. And yet I know for a fact that he could hear
the word ..whiskey" if it was whispered in a room
three stories removed from where he sat.
Because there were no soulmates for me at Greenhedges, I took to roaming about by myself, resolutely
eschewing the expenditure of energy on anything
even remotely useful; and thereby, if anyone had had
the sense to see it, giving a perfectly clear indication
of the pattern of my future.
One hot summer day I was meandering aimlessly
beside a little local creek when I came upon a stagnant pool. In the bottom, and only just covered with
greeen scum, three catfish lay gasping out their
lives. They interested me. I dragged them up on the
bank with a stick and waited expectantly for them to
die; but this they refused to do. Just when I was
convinced that they were quite dead, they would
open their broad ugly jaws and give another gasp.
I was so impressed by their stubborn refusal to accept
their fate that I found a tin can, put them in it
along with some scum, and took them home.
I had begun to like them, in an abstract sort of
way, and wished to know them better. But the
problem of where to keep them while our acquaintanceship ripened was a major one. There were no
washtubs in Greenhedges. There was a bathtub, but
the stopper did not fit and consequently it would not
hold water for more than a few minutes. By bedtime
I had still not resolved the problem and, since I
felt that even these doughty fish could hardly survive an entire night in the tin can, I was driven to
The Lupine Project
3
the admittedly desperate expedient of finding temporary lodgings for them in the bowl of Granny's
old-fashioned toilet.
I was too young at the time to appreciate the
special problems which old age brings in its train. It
was one of these problems which was directly responsible for the dramatic and unexpected encounter
which took place between my grandmother and the
catfish during the small hours of the ensuing night.
It was a traumatic experience for Granny, and
for me, and probably for the catfish too. Throughout
the rest of her life Granny refused to eat fish of any
kind, and always carried a high-powered flashlight
with her during her nocturnal peregrinations. I cannot be as certain about the effect on the catfish, for
my unfeeling cousin-once the hooferaw had died
down a little-callously Hushed the toilet. As for
myself, the effect was to engender in me a lasting
affinity for the lesser beasts of the animal kingdom. In
a word, the affair of the catfish marked the beginning
of my career, first as a naturalist, and later as a
biologist. I had started on my way to the wolf den.
My infatuation with the study of animate nature
grew rapidly into a full-Hedged love affair. I found
that even the human beings with whom the study
brought me into contact could be fascinating too.
My first mentor was a middle-aged Scotsman who
gained his livelihood delivering ice, but who was
in fact an ardent amateur mammalogist. At a tender
age he had developed mange, or leprosy, or some
other such infantile disease, and had lost all his
hair, never to recover it-a tragedy which may have
had a bearing on the fact that, when I knew him,
he had already devoted fifteen years of his life to a
study of the relationship between summer molt and
incipient narcissism in pocket gophers. This man had
become so intimate with gophers that he could charm
them with sibilant whistles until they would emerge
I
UNCLE TUNGSTEN
M
any of my childhood memories are of metals: these
seemed to exert a power on me from the start. They
stood out, conspicuous against the heterogeneousness of
the world, by their shining, gleaming quality, their silveriness,
their smoothness and weight. They seemed cool to the touch, and
they rang when they were struck.
I loved the yellowness, the heaviness, of gold. My mother
would take the wedding ring from her finger and let me handle it
for a while, as she told me of its inviolacy, how it never tarnished.
"Feel how heavy it is," she would add. "It's even heavier than
lead." I knew what lead was, for I had handled the heavy, soft piping the plumber had left one year. Gold was soft, too, my mother
told me, so it was usually combined with another metal co make
it harder.
It was the same with copper-people mixed it with tin to
3
UNCLE TUNGSTEN
Uncle Tungsten
produce bronze. Bronze!-the very word was like a trumpet to
me, for battle was the brave clash of bronze upon bronze, bronze
spears on bronze shields, the great shield of Achilles. Or you
could alloy copper with zinc, my mother said, to produce brass.
All of us-my mother, my brothers, and I-had our own brass
menorahs for Hanukkah. (My father had a silver one.)
I knew copper, the shiny rose color of the great copper cauldron in our kitchen-it was taken down only once a year, when
the quinces and crab apples were ripe in the garden and my
mother would stew them to make jelly.
I knew zinc: the dull, slightly bluish birdbath in the garden
was made of zinc; and tin, from the heavy tinfoil in which sandwiches were wrapped for a picnic. My mother showed me that
when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special "cry." "It's due to
deformation of the crystal structure," she said, forgetting that I
was five, and could not understand her-and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.
There was an enormous cast-iron lawn roller out in the garden-it weighed five hundred pounds, my father said. We, as
children, could hardly budge it, but he was immensely strong
and could lift it off the ground. It was always slightly rusty, and
this bothered me, for the rust flaked off, leaving little cavities and
scabs, and I was afraid the whole roller might corrode and fall
apart one day, reduced to a mass of red dust and flakes. I needed
to think of metals as stable, like gold-able to stave off the losses
and ravages of time.
I would sometimes beg my mother to take out her engagement ring and show me the diamond in it. It flashed like nothing
I had ever seen, almost as if it gave out more light than it took in.
She would show me how easily it scratched glass, and then tell
me to put it to my lips. It was strangely, startlingly cold; metals
felt cool to the touch, but the diamond was icy. That was because
it conducted heat so well, she said-better than any metal-so
it drew the body heat away from one's lips when they touched it.
This was a feeling I was never to forget. Another time, she
showed me how if one touched a diamond to a cube of ice, it
would draw heat from one's hand into the ice and cut straight
through it as if it were butter. My mother told me that diamond
was a special form of carbon, like the coal we used in every room
in winter. I was puzzled by this-how could black, flaky, opaque
coal be the same as the hard, transparent gemstone in her ring?
4
5
I loved light, especially the lighting of the shabbas candles on
Friday nights, when my mother would murmur a prayer as she lit
them. I was not allowed to touch them once they were lit-they
were sacred, I was told, their flames were holy, not to be fiddled
with. I was mesmerized by the little cone of blue flame at the candle's center-why was it blue? Our house had coal fires, and I
would often gaze into the heart of a fire, watching it go from a
dim red glow to orange, to yellow, and then I would blow on it
with the bellows until it glowed almost white-hot. If it got hot
enough, I wondered, would it blaze blue, be blue-hot?
Did the sun and stars burn in the same way? Why did they
never go out? What were they made of? I was reassured when I
learned that the core of the earth consisted of a great ball of
iron-this sounded solid, something one could depend on. And
I was pleased when I was told that we ourselves were made of the
very same elements as composed the sun and stars, that some of
my atoms might once have been in a distant star. But it frightened me too, made me feel that my atoms were only on loan and
might fly apart at any time, fly away like the fine talcum powder
I saw in the bathroom.
I badgered my parents constantly with questions. Where did
color come from? Why did my mother use the platinum loop
that hung above the stove to cause the gas burner to catch fire?
What happened to the sugar when one stirred it into the tea?
TELLING STORIES
2 FAIRY TALES . PERSUASJVE ESSAil'
ILLUSTRATIONS
URBAN LEGEND
CARTOON
DVD COVER
Fairy Tales and Urban Legends
Catherine Orenstein, Dances with Wolves: Little Red Riding Hood's Long Walk
in the Woods. Catherine Orenstein's writing on culture and mythology has
appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The San Francisco
Examiner, and Ms. Magazine. She has lectured at universities such as Harvard
and Columbia and has appeared on television and on National Public Radio.
In her 2002 book Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the
Evolution of a Fairy Tale (Basic Books), she looks at the story over timefrom the seventeenth century to the present-and considers our changing
ideas about men and women and cultural attitudes toward sex and morality.
The following essay was originally published in Ms. Magazine in 2004.
Catherine Orenstein
DANCES WITH WOLVES:
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD'S
LONG WALK IN THE WOODS
176
• Consider before you read. What tools does Orenstein use to deconstruct the tale of
Uttle Red Riding Hood? Notice how she introduces psychology. political history, and information about the production of books and about their audiences. Are there other methods you
can identifY?
Mae West, 1 who mined the rich symbolic terrain of fairy tales, once famously
quipped, "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."
These days the social and sexual messages of fairy tales are no secret. Feminists
in particular have long recognized that fairy tales socialize boys and especially
girls, presenting them with lessons that must be absorbed to reach adulthood.
But what exactly are those lessons? We tend to think of fairy tales as timeless
and universal, but in fact they express our collective truths even as those truths
shift over time and place.
Take the story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example-a tale we all know
well, though not as well as we think.
Once upon a time, "Little Red Riding Hood" was a seduction tale. An engraving accompanying the first published version of the story, in Paris in 1697, shows
'Mae West (1893-1980) was a celebrated and controversial actress known for her voluptuous figure
and bawdy wit.
Catherine Orenstein, Dances with Wolves
""
TELLING STORIES
-,
Fairy Tales and Urban Legends
a girl in her deshabille, lying in bed beneath a wol£ According to the plot, she has
just stripped out of her clothes, and a moment later the tale will end with her death
in the beast's jaws-no salvation, no redemption. Any reader of the day would
have immediately understood the message: In the French slang, when a girl lost
her virginity it was said that elle avoit vu le loup-she'd seen the wol£
Penned by Charles Perrault for aristocrats at the court of Versailles, "Le petit
chaperon rouge" dramatized a contemporary sexual contradiction. It was the
age of seduction, notorious for its boudoir histories and its royal courtesans,
who rose to power through sexual liaisons and were often celebrated at court;
those who made it to the King's bed might earn the title maftresse-en-titre, official mistress.
Nonetheless, chastity was the feminine ideal,
demanded by the prevailing institution of marriage-not the "fairy tale wedding" of modern fantasy, but the mariage de raison, orchestrated by
parents for social or financial gain and often no more
than a crass exchange of assets.
Hence the age of seduction was also an age of
institutionalized chastity: Girls were raised in convents. By law a man could sequester daughters (or
any female relatives) until marriage. Men and women
alike could be disinherited, banished or even sentenced to death for the crime of rapt--meaning seduction, elopement or rape (among which the law made
scant distinction). And young women were repeatedly warned of the dangers of unscrupulous suitors.
Perrault cloaked his heroine in red, the color of
scandal and blood, suggesting the girl's sin and foreROUGE.
shadowing her fate. Her chaperon, or hood, also took
on the tale's lesson, acquiring the meaning in
English, which it already possessed in French, of one
who guards girls, virtue. For good measure, Perrault
added an explicit rhyming moral admonishing
demoiselle~that is, young ladies of society-to
remain chaste:
PETIT
CHAPERON-
CONTE.
Little girls, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way,
Never trust a stranger-friend;
No one knows how it will end.
As you're pretty so be wise;
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be, and kind.
Gay, and charming-nevermind!
Now, as then, 'tis simple truthSweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!
L efroit une fois
une petite fille de
Vilage , la plus
jolie qu'on cut f~u. voir.;
Perrault's original illustration ( 1697).
(Bibliotheque Nationale de France,
Reserve des Livres Rares)
-
,
·~
GOLEMS I HAVE KNOWN,
OR, WHY MY ELDER SON'S
MIDDLE NAME IS NAPOLEON
A Trickster's Memoir
I
golem in 1968, in Flushing, New York,
shortly before my fifth birthday. It lay·on a workbench in
the basement of my uncle Jack's house, a few blocks away
from the duplex-we called it a "two-family house"-that my
parents and I shared with a Greek couple, who lived upstairs.
My uncle Jack owned a candy store in Harlem, in a neighborhood where there had once been only Jews but now there were
only black people, though my uncle Jack did not call them that.
He called them "the coloreds." N~~ertheless he always hired local
Harlem people to work in his store, and he extended credit to
many families in the neighborhood. I suppose he had complicated feelings about his customers, and they about him, both as a
creditor and as a cranky and ill-humored man. Owning a candy
store was not my uncle Jack's choice of employment; he had
failed at several other trades before finally arriving, with the last
of his and my aunt's savings, at the threshold of Mount Morris
Candy and News. Though I was not told and did not understand
SAW MY FIRST
181
Sherman Alexie
The Joy of Reading and Writing:
Superman and Me
Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian who grew up
on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He was born hydrocephalic and underwent a brain operation at the age of six months, which he
was not expected to survive. As a youth, Alexie left the reservation for a public
high school where he excelled in academics and became a star player on the basketball team. He attended Gonzaga University in Spokane on a scholarship and
then transferred to Washington State University, where his experience in a poetry
workshop encouraged him to become a writer. Soon after graduation he received
the Washington State Arts Commission Poetry Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. His first collection of short stories, The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), received a PEN/Hemingway
Award for Best First Book of Fiction. He was subsequently named one of
Granta's Best of Young American Novelists and published a novel titled Reservation Blues (1995), followed the next year by Indian Killer (1996). Since 1997
Alexie has written for the screen; his screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals,
based on his short story "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" (page
909), received the Christopher Award in 1999. He has published eighteen books
of fiction and poetry, including Ten Little Indians (2003), short stories; Dangerous Astronomy (2005), poetry; Flight (2007), a novel; and The Absolutely True
Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), his first book aimed at young adults, which
won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Alexie has commented on his own work, "I'm a good writer who may be a
great writer one day. I'm harder on myself than anybody."
I
I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor
can I remember which· villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember
the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can
remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his
family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state.
13
14
l'~
Alexic I The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed
to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class
by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a
combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus
food.
My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school
on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries,
gangster epics, basketball player biographies, and anything else he could
find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch's Pawn Shop, Goodwill,
Salvation Army, and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought
new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores, and hospital gift shops.
Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the
bathroom, bedrooms, and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired
creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them
with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination,
Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the entire 23-book series of the Apache
westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an
aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.
I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read.
The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact
moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a
paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a
paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me.
I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation
was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a
paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north,
the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our
house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had
genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can
see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father,
older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and our
adopted little brother.
At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked
up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue, and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel,
Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue, and yellow. The
brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the
picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman
is breaking down the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say,
"Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, also float out
of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he
says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the
words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door." In this way, I
learned to read.
Alexic I The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
15
This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches
himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads "Grapes of
Wrath" in kindergarten when other children are struggling through "Dick
and Jane." If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on
the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often
speaks of his childhood in the third person, as if it will somehow dull the
pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.
A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by
Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily
basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked
for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were
expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the
classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic
reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow
songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but
could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They ~ubmis­
sively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but
would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian
children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who
failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately
pitied by non-Indians.
I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books
late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at
recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I had finished
my classroom assignments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the
bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read
the books mY father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand.
I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal
boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of
the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I
read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had
words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I
loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was
trying to save my life.
Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I
was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories,
and poems. I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all
my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to
write poetry, short stories, or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the
reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they?
Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit the schools as often as possible.
5
356
Eighner I On Dumpster Diving
On what is required to find success as a writer, Eighner has said, "I was not
making enough money to support myself as a housed person, but I was writing
well before I became homeless . ... A writer needs talent, luck, and persistence.
You can make do with two out of three, and the more you have of one, the less
you need of the others. "
Long before I began Dumpster diving I was impressed with Dumpsters, enough so that I wrote the Merriam-Webster research service to discover what I could about the word "Dumpster." I learned from them that
"Dumpster" is a proprietary word belonging to the Dempster Dumpster
company.
Since then I have dutifully capitalized the word although it was lowercased in almost all of the citations Merriam-Webster photocopied for me.
Dempster's word is too apt. I have never heard these things called anything but Dumpsters. I do not know anyone who knows the generic name
for these objects. From time to time, however, I hear a wino or hobo give
some corrupted credit to the original and call them Dipsy Dumpsters.
I began Dumpster diving about a year before I became homeless.
I prefer the term "scavenging" and use the word "scrounging" when
I mean to be obscure. I have heard people, evidently meaning to be polite,
using the word "foraging," but I prefer to reserve that word for gathering
nuts and berries and such which I do also according to the season and the
opportunity. "Dumpster diving" seems to me to be a little too cute and,
in my case, inaccurate because I lack the athletic ability to lower myself
into the Dumpsters as the true divers do, much to their increased profit.
I like the frankness of the word "scavenging," which I can hardly
think of without picturing a big black snail on an aquarium wall. I live
from the refuse of others. I am a scavenger. I think it a sound and honorable niche, although if I could I would naturally prefer to live the comfortable consumer life, perhaps-and only perhaps-as a slightly less
wasteful consumer owing to what I have learned as a scavenger.
While my dog Lizbeth and I were still living in the house on Avenue B
in Austin, as my savings ran out, I put almost all my sporadic income
into rent. The necessities of daily life I began to extract from Dumpsters.
Yes, we ate from Dumpsters. Except for jeans, all my clothes came from
Dumpsters. Boom boxes, candles, bedding, toilet paper, medicine, books,
a typewriter, a virgin male love doll, change sometimes amounting to
many dollars: I acquired many things from the Dumpsters.
I have learned much as a scavenger. I mean to put some of what I
have learned down here, beginning with the practical art of Dumpster
diving and proceeding to the abstract.
What is safe to eat?
After all, the finding of objects is becoming something of an urban
art. Even respectable employed people will sometimes find something
tempting sticking out of a Dumpster or standing beside one. Quite a num"
ber of people, not all of them of the bohemian type, are willing to brag
Eighner I On Dumpster Diving
.
357
.Gvne..c-,1t- rJh·· Uus, :..vp M-. tw't"
that they found this or that piece in the trash. But eating from Dumpsters
is the thing that separates the dilettanti from the professionals.
Eating safely from the Dumpsters involves three principles: using the
10
senses and common sense to evaluate the condition of the found materials, knowing the Dumpsters of a given area and checking them regularly,
and seeking always to answer the question "Why was this discarded?"
Perhaps everyone who has a kitchen and a regular supply of groceries
has, at one time or another, made a sandwich and eaten half of it before
discovering mold on the bread or got a mouthful of milk before realizing
the milk had turned. Nothing of the sort is likely to happen to a Dumpster diver because he is constantly reminded that most food is discarded
for a reason. Yet a lot of perfectly good food can be found in Dumpsters.
Canned goods, for example, turn up fairly often in the Dumpsters I
frequent. All except the most phobic people would be willing to eat from
a can even if it came from a Dumpster. Canned goods are among the
safest of foods to be found in Dumpsters, but are not utterly foolproof.
Although very rare with modern canning methods, botulism is a possibility. Most other forms of food poisoning seldom do lasting harm to a
healthy person. But botulism is almost certainly fatal and often the first
symptom is death. Except for carbonated beverages, all canned goods
should contain a slight vacuum and suck air when first punctured. Bulging,
rusty, dented cans and cans that spew when punctured should be avoided,
especially when the contents are not very acidic or syrupy.
Heat can break down the botulin, but this requires much more cooking than most people do to canned goods. To the extent that botulism occurs at all, of course, it can occur in cans on pantry shelves as well as in
cans from Dumpsters. Need I say that home-canned goods found in
Dumpsters are simply too risky to be recommended.
From time to time one of my companions, aware of the source of my
15
provisions, will ask, "Do you think these crackers are really safe to eat?"
For some reason it is most often the crackers they ask about.
This question always makes me angry. Of course I would not offer
my companion anything I had doubts about. But more than that I wonder
why he cannot evaluate the condition of the crackers for himself. I have
no special knowledge and I have been wrong before. Since he knows
where the food comes from, it seems to me he ought to assume some of
the responsibility for deciding what he will put in his mouth.
For myself I have few qualms about dry foods such as crackers, cook"' ies, cereal, chips, and pasta if they are free of visible contaminants and still
dry and crisp. Most often such things are found in the original packaging,
which is not so much a positive sign as it is the absence of a negative one.
Raw fruits and vegetables with intact skins seem perfectly safe to me,
excluding of course the obviously rotten. Many are discarded for minor
imperfections which can be pared away. Leafy vegetables, grapes, cauliflower, broccoli, and similar things may be contaminated by liquids and
be impractical to wash.
I
528
Schlosser I Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good
discuss a similar issue? After reading "The Word Police," discuss
whether the terms "global warming" or "climate change" can be
considered "politically correct." In your opinion, which term
would be considered the more "politically correct," and why?
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Eric Schlosser
Why McDonald,s Fries
Taste So Good
Investigative reporter and author Eric Schlosser was born in New York City
in 1960. A co"espondent for the Atlantic, and contributor to Rolling Stone and
the New Yorker, he has won numerous journalistic honors and awards. His twopart Atlantic Monthly series, "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law,"
won the National Magazine Award in 1994 and became the basis for his bestselling collection of essays, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the
American Black Market (2003), an expose of America's underground economy.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001), Schlosser's controversial and influential first book, prompted a reexamination of practices in the
meat-processing industry. A best-seller, the book was adapted and released as a
motion picture in 2006, followed by a companion book for young people, Chew
on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food (2006).
Of writing Fast Food Nation, Schlosser said, "I care about the literary aspects
of the book. I tried to make it as clear as possible, and make it an interesting thing
to read, but I sacrificed some of that, ultimately, in order to get this out to people
and let them know what's going on."
The french fry was "almost sacrosanct for me," Ray Kroc, one of the
founders of McDonald's, wrote in his autobiography, "its preparation a
ritual to be followed religiously." During the chain's early years french
fries were made from scratch every day. Russet Burbank potatoes were
peeled, cut into shoestrings, and fried in McDonald's kitchens. As the
chain expanded nationwide, in the mid-1960s, it sought to cut labor costs,
reduce the number of suppliers, and ensure that its fries tasted the same
at every restaurant. McDonald's began switching to frozen french fries
in 1966- and few customers noticed the difference. Nevertheless, the
change had a profound effect on the nation's agriculture and diet. A familiar food had been transformed into a highly processed industrial commod-
Schlosser I Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good
529
ity. McDonald's fries now come from huge manufacturing plants that can
peel, slice, cook, and freeze two million pounds of potatoes a day. The
rapid expansion of McDonald's and the popularity of its low-cost, massproduced fries changed the way Americans eat. In 1960 Americans consumed an average of about eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and four
pounds of frozen french fries. In 2000 they consumed an average of about
fifty pounds of fresh potatoes and thirty pounds of frozen fries. Today
McDonald's is the largest buyer of potatoes in the United States.
The taste of McDonald's french fries played a crucial role in the chain's
success-fries are much more profitable than hamburgers-and was long
praised by customers, competitors, and even food critics. James Beard
loved McDonald's fries. Their distinctive taste does not stem from the kind
of potatoes that McDonald's buys, the technology that processes them, or
the restaurant equipment that fries them: other chains use Russet Burbanks, buy their french fries from the same large processing companies,
and have similar fryers in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a french
fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades McDonald's
cooked its french fries in a mixture of about seven percent cottonseed oil
and 93 percent beef tallow. The mixture gave the fries their unique flavorand more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger.
In 1990, amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in
its fries, McDonald's switched to pure vegetable oil. This presented the
company with a challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef
without cooking them in beef tallow. A look at the ingredients in McDonald's french fries suggests how the problem was solved. Toward the end of
the list is a seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious phrase: "natural flavor." That ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good
but also why most fast food-indeed, most of the food Americans eat
today-tastes the way it does.
Open your refrigerator, your freezer, your kitchen cupboards, and
look at the labels on your food. You'll find "natural flavor" or "artificial
flavor" in just about every list of ingredients. The similarities between
these two broad categories are far more significant than the differences.
Both are man-made additives that give most processed food most of its
taste. People usually buy a food item the first time because of its packaging or appearance. Taste usually determines whether they buy it again.
About 90 percent of the money that Americans now spend on food goes
to buy processed food. The canning, freezing, and dehydrating techniques
used in processing destroy most of food's flavor-and so a vast industry
has arisen in the United States to make processed food palatable. Without
this flavor industry today's fast food would not exist. The names of the
leading American fast-food chains and their best-selling menu items have
become embedded in our popular culture and famous worldwide. But few
people can name the companies that manufacture fast food's taste.
The flavor industry is highly secretive. Its leading companies will not
divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of clients.
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The television hums and flickers with fast motions, bright colors, and loud tones that
reach out from a surreal world to the direct world of the family room. The flash of over thirty
different images in forty-five seconds is associated with the growing rate of children with
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) I feel that as a writer I have all the symptoms of
a person with ADHD, because my style is here there and everywhere, yet nowhere, and it is so
difficult to control. The purpose of my writing parallels the purpose of the media and advertising
in the act of grabbing the audience's attention and maintaining it. I have found that the media
does a fairly good job of reeling us in and keeping us locked in the jaws of persuasion.
Fascinated by the "sway" ability on the audience of the media in advertising, as a youth I
began to form my own style of writing to mimic the stylistic forms of advertising. I do not recall
much formal education in writing, nor has writing ever been a strength that I have possessed, but
it is fair to say that just as advertising has one main goal- sell, sell, sell!-I too want to
persuade anyone who reads my writings to "buy" into my way of philosophizing. My writing is
like advertising in that some things work and some things just don't. For instance, who in their
right mind is going to purchase a polar bear and two penguins that rock out to Christmas music
for $14.95 after purchasing three over priced cards, then, use it for entertainment in the airport of
all places. I question, is this good advertising? One may wonder, "What kind of mind thinks up
crap like that?" The answer: my mind. I think up "crap" like that or at least I did. I refer to the
crude term "crap" because all of my life I have felt like I have used some of the most ridiculous
anecdotes that have made no sense in my writing. Just as changes in advertising-better
technology, better graphics, better products-do not guarantee that it is better advertising, the
changes that have occurred with my writing over the years does not guarantee that my writing
has improved.
So what is my style of writing? How do I know my style of writing if I do not remember
anything from my formal training? I suppose that due to the "amnesia" of ever receiving formal
training in composition, the analogy of advertising and the media agree best with what I do
whenever I write, whether it be a persuasive essay or a research report. I'm always trying to
relate what I know and have experienced in life to the subject at hand.
As I mentioned before, the way I have written would be considered an "advertiser's
stance". Booth says that in writing, the advertiser's stance focuses less on content and more on
"effect: how to win friends and influence people" (75). In the past and the present I have sought
to entertain my audience with little thought to content. Booth explains that this advertiser's
stance is a "perversion" or a threat to society. Content is as every bit as important as gaining and
keeping the audience's attention. Booth also explains another perversion, perhaps the more
threatening of the two perversions as that of the "pedantic stance". This pedantic stance bores the
audience with grueling subject matter and discussion not easily understood and without purpose
(Booth 175). We must find a happy medium between the pedantic and advertiser's stances: the
"rhetorician's stance". In order to fulfill this rhetorical balance in my own writing, I must do as
Booth suggests and instead of wondering "How", I should ask, "Why is this sentence put
together in this way" (Booth 177)? By focusing my efforts on the audience and the content I will
be able to distinguish the fine line between "effective communication and mere wasted effort"
(Booth 173).
So who is my audience? When I write I have always striven to make myself laugh and be
entertained by my own writing. So long as I enjoyed what I had written, it was a "good paper".
Professors past and present have never criticized my writing too much, but I have never received
much praise either. Never did my professors desire to keep my work to show as an example for
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Imagine getting into a new car that did not have brakes, a steering wheel, or a fuel gauge.
If the salesperson was trying to sell this as a complete car you would think he or she insane.
Writing is just like this-it comes without brakes, a steering wheel, or a fuel gauge. These are
all accessories that we must personally add to our writing in order to increase its usefulness. If
we do not learn how to steer and stop, and monitor our papers fuel consumption the quality of
our work will suffer.
However, having the necessary accessories does not guarantee the success of a particular
piece of prose. Often poor writing is the result of untutored, lethargic would-be writers going on
about their business--cars running amok if you will. You don't have to look very far for the
evidence either. Perhaps you saw it this morning while reading through an essay someone sent
you to revise, or in a newspaper article about spousal abuse, or a short story you read in which
every sentence began with the word "So".
Poor writing does not necessarily mean that the writer lacks ability, but rather that the
writer may have not found the balance necessary to render an effective argument. To further
abuse the car analogy, effective writing is often like learning how to drive a car with a clutch. It
takes time to learn how to release the clutch and simultaneously press on the gas enough to
produce motion. Sometimes in writing all we are doing is revving our engines without getting
anywhere, and other times we pop the clutch, jerk forward, and only gain inches. In Booth's
essay "The Rhetorical Stance", he also recognizes the need to delicately approach any piece of
writing: " ... he could not write a decent sentence, paragraph, or paper until his rhetorical problem
was solved-until, that is, he had found a definition of his audience, his argument, and his own
proper tone of voice" ( 170).
Writing can be scary. That first blank page can be as fearsome a creature as Moby-Dick.
The hands at the keyboard may be Ahab's. And that blinking, somewhat pleading, cursor can
either be the coffin that saves Ishmael or the line that drags the Pequod under. Writing has
become my life preserver.
My writing career began with noise. My grandpa had decided that I graduate from pen
and paper and move on to a typewriter. He, however, did not want me to use his because "a
typewriter is a sacred thing." Later that week, a retirement community held its annual rummage
sale. The donors of said rummage? Tenants who were recently deceased and whose next of kin
felt no real obligation to preserve the memory of their detritus. Thus it was possible to get
collectible plates for a dime and bathroom scales for a quarter. But I knew what I was looking
for, and my grandpa found it first and led me to it, proud of his discovery.
There it sat: a Smith-Corona Sterling in black crinkle-paint with art-deco black racing
stripes and black tombstone keys. It looked quite heavy, and casually trying to pick it up, I
discovered I was exactly right. I had no idea how much a machine of such intricacy and heft
would cost, but since I knew this place always had great deals, I figured fifteen or twenty bucks.
The round, white dot of a sticker was on the lower left comer, and inscribed in the gracefully
unsteady hand of an old woman: $1.
I immediately heaved it up and cradled it awkwardly in my arms as I lugged it through
the ridiculously long line (nothing speaks more of America than white suburbanites on a
weekend trying to find a good steal on the junk of other white suburbanites, now dead) and out to
the trunk of my grandpa's car, strangely pleased with how the rear bumper now rode just a little
closer to the ground.
When we got home, we took out my machine along with my grandpa's, and tried them
out. We wrote ridiculous formal letters to each other, and when we typed at the same time it
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