Books from Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze

Here is a list of books mentioned by Greenhouse in The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, in case you want to learn more:

• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream by Jacob S. Hacker
• Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit by Nelson Lichtenstein
• The Other America: Poverty in the United States by Michael Harrington
• The Organization Man by William H. Whyte
• In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters & Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
• Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great by Al Dunlap
• Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution by Michael Hammer and James Champy
• Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy by Bill Gates
• The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce by Peter Cappelli
• Lean and Mean: Why Large Corporations Will Continue to Dominate the Global Economy by Bennett Harrison
• The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head
• White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Reward in Corporate America by Jill Andresky Fraser
• The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uctitelle
• War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back by Lou Dobbs
• Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andy Grove
• Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel Pink
• Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price by Greg Spotts
• Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard
• The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman (click here to read my posts about this book)
• Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz
• The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez by Jimmy Breslin
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (click here to read my posts about this book)
• Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, NoBenefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back by Anya Kamenetz
• Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead by Tamara Draut
• Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation by William Strauss

Not sure if I will actually read any of these.

I feel quite certain that labor relations must change if the United States is to remain competitive and the envy of the world, but reading about how poorly fellow Americans are treated just makes me sad.

Not sure how that change will be created but I do feel like the companies in Bo Burlingham's Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big (one of my favorite books) are good examples of how companies should be run -- for best profitability, happiness (click here to read a bit about this book) and likelihood for creating the "City on the Hill in which prosperity and fairness reigned" (as Greenhouse said on page 78).

Boss Hog

The gorging that is Thanksgiving that made me think of this...

When I last wrote about Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I neglected to mention Jeff Tietz's horrifying article about modern pork production, "Boss Hog" posted December 2006 on Rolling Stone online.

I won't go into details but trust me when I say that after reading this article I could not eat pork for weeks.

Okay I'll post just the first paragraph:

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

That's just the start. It gets much worse. Very eye-opening.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

As promised, here's a bit more on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto (click here to view all my posts about this book).

Most of the contents of this book can be found from other sources by Michael Pollan -- his articles in the New York Times, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan on C-SPAN, and Pollan on NPR several times.

What's new is mostly his lists to help us decide what to eat (and even this can be learned from Pollan's talk on C-SPAN):

Eat Food

• Don't eat anything your great grand-mother wouldn't recognize as food: Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims.
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible: Shake the hand that feeds you.

Mostly Plants

• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves: did you know that the average American eats 200 pound of meat per year?
• You are what what you eat eats too.
• If you have the space, buy a freezer.
• Eat like an omnivore.
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils: "it stands to reason that a chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants."
• Eat wild foods when you can: lamb's quarters and purslane, wild game meat, salmon, mackerel, sardines, and anchovies are good bets.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
• Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks.
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism.
• Don't look for the magic bullet int he traditional diet.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner.

Not Too Much

• Pay more, eat less: Okinawan's say hara hachi bu, eat until you are eighty percent full.
• Eat meals: didn't there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between meal snack?
• Do all your eating at a table: your desk is not a table.
• Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone.
• Consult your gut.
• Eat slowly.
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden.

Well, that's it. Pretty simple huh? We should all be slimmer and healthier in no time.

There are a couple of other things I found interesting from this book.



First, since Pollan makes several references to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I'm glad that I finally read it. And like Devra Davis in The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Pollan also posits that the health industry (as a business) has had much to gain from the unhealthiness of Americans -- Pollan mentions fast food companies while Davis mentions large industrial companies. It's always interesting to see how books by different authors seem to converge.

And did you know that the average American today spends less than 10% of their income on food and less than thirty minutes each day preparing meals, and about an hour each day enjoying them; in 1965 the average American spent 44 minutes prepping meals and 21 minutes cleaning up. This lack of cooking, Pollan postulates, has something to do with our unhealthiness.

And check out these calories per day contributions to America's per capita food supply:

• Corn: 554
• Soy 257
• Wheat 768
• Rice 91

That totals 1,670 and these four crops acccount for two thirds of the calories we eat. It makes me sick just thinking about it. According to Pollan, "humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and three thousand of those have been in widespread use." And now we eat mostly just four species, just because they are among the most efficient transformers of sunlight and chemical energy into carbohydrate energy??!

And if that wasn't enough:

• Half of all broccoli grown commercially in the US is the Marathon variety, known for its high yield.
• Most of the chickens raised for meat in America are Cornish cross hybrid.
• More than 99% of the turkeys raised for meat in Americaare Broad-Breasted Whites.

A typical Iowa farm in the early 1900s would have "raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chicken, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears" and now that same farm would produce just corn and soybeans.

All of this lack of complexity has resulted in a substantial decline in the nutritional quality of produce in this country -- and that's as determined by the USDA.

And here's an interesting quote for you:

The increases in world [omega-6] consumption over the past century may be considered a very large uncontrolled experiment that may have contributed to increased societal burdens of aggression, depression, and cardiovascular mortality.

Hmm, maybe Baltimore would be less violent if it's drug-dealing residents ate a lot more omega-3 fatty acids?!

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

A few days ago, I finished reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Even though it was well written and the plot was captivating, I had a hard time reading The Jungle. You just felt so sad for all the characters; Jurgis & Ona Rudkus; Marija Berczynskas & Tamoszius Kuszleika; Teta Elzbieta; Dede Antanas; and all the little children.

The graphic descriptions of the inhumane working conditions, of the disgusting meatpacking industry, of the problems of non-English speaking immigrants, it just made me want to stop reading.

I can see how this book outraged the public when it was published in 1906 and led to the passage of pure food laws.

Even with the pure food laws, it is clear from reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we still don't know what goes into our food. We think "free-range" is a clear enough term but most of us don't what it really means. We can read the ingredients of a product, but how many of us know that citric acid, lactic acid, glucose, fructose, malodextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, manitol, xanthan gum, dextrins, and monosodium glutamate (among many other common ingredients) are corn-processed additives!

Even though it did not succeed in converting Americans to socialism, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle continues to ring true today. Can you imagine the public outrage and the call for change that would happen if we all knew the truth of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO)?

I am eager to read Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (a non-fiction book about the problems facing American workers -- click here to view all my posts about this book), to learn about the problems facing the modern poor and the middle class alike.

More Library Books

I went to the library yesterday to return a few books, and I could not resist borrowing a few.

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich

You've probably heard of the first two and the third was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year (click here to read David Quammen's review titled "Bird Brains" and published August 1, 1999). Heinrich, who I am not familiar with, is a well known science writer who focuses on animals.

Lately, I've been feeling like it would be good to re-read some of the classics so expect to see me read books like Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe this summer.