where are your gloves and your helmet?

Will continue reading The Most Important Fish In The Sea, but god, it's depressing to see "$EnvironmentalProblem is happening? It is TOTALLY part of a natural cycle and has NOTHING to do with human overexploitation of resources! Totally natural cycle!" in arguments from the late 1800s. I think this book is best dealt with one chapter at a time, interspersed with other things for maintaining balance, something like how I read Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth back in college and immediately had to turn around and read Calvin and Hobbes for a while to put my brain back on track.

on that note I have started Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, largely because I have a vague recollection of a Tumblr post saying that Kipling may have been the spiritual godfather of all English imperialist literature but the book in question contained a wider array of ethnicities among the characters than many modern day novels bother to put together. (Or something to that effect. I know the post took the form of "What would you say about a novel that had the following characters" and that at least one of the characters in question was a Viking. It's been years since I tumblrd for any reason other than trying to find my Blood And SAN Points For My Lord Yog-Sothoth tags.)

Finished Call Me Chef, Dammit!. Started on The Most Important Fish In The Sea, by Howard Bruce Franklin (nonfiction; it's about menhaden). Also got back into reading The Secret History Of Food by Matt Siegel and was reminded rather sharply of why I was willing to walk away from it after finishing the chapter about cereal and starting on the chapter about corn (maize).

The whole thing is written with an attitude of 'the author is clever, and can deliver important facts and history as informally as website commentary; more importantly, the author is both more clever and more righteous in his choices than you'. It's one thing to be reminded of the dangers of massively monocropping and another to be reminded of it in a 'don't you feel stupid for not knowing that corn is so literally in everything that even if you never eat anything with corn in it, you're still using things with corn in them?' way. The abrupt 'oh, by the way, animal farming is incredibly cruel and includes these specific inhumane practices that you weren't planning on thinking about today' moments I can sort of excuse, as they're mentioned as part of the list of unnatural things humans do with their agriculture (alongside feeding corn as a primary animal feed), but the repeated sense of 'this is an important thing you didn't know about an important food and you are either morally wrong or stupid, now laugh with me because I said this in a clever way' is off-putting. And there is something eye-rolling about sentences like 'if the ingredients label says X, Y, Z, A, B, or C, it includes or depended on corn! (but really, turn to page 186 for Why Food Labels Are Bullshit)'. Seriously, the author actually had that as a parenthetical aside in the middle of the chapter.

I also have to admit there was a word choice that pissed me off. In discussing the development of maize from teosinte, the author kept referring to 'our ancestors'. Pal, your name is Matt Siegel. Unless a Mr. Siegel of times past married a Native American woman, the people who bred maize from teosinte are not the hell your ancestors, and they are very definitely not the hell mine. Credit where credit is due. My ancestors had nothing to do with the development of one of humanity's most important crops, kthx.

I will probably be putting the book in the first Little Free Library I come across.

Anyway, I read a little bit of the corn chapter and then put the book aside. I have since started on Secrets Of Eskimo Skin-Sewing by Edna Wilder instead. Mrs. Wilder gets to use the term, she's the daughter of an English father and an Inupiaq mother and wrote the book as a textbook for the Art of Skin Sewing class she taught at the University of Alaska in the 1970s. That covered both my 'read actual books' and 'do something sewing related' goals for the day yesterday. when I finish the book it'll be back to The Most Important Fish In The Sea. Probably going to be reading Eating To Extinction soon, too, or possibly finishing Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee by Thomas Craughwell first, as I was several chapters into that one already last year.