Feeding the future

There's been a lot of interest over the last little while in food security - knowing we all have enough to eat and that what we do have is safe to eat. The slow food and local food movements are growing worldwide, and questions about altered food (genetically or chemically) are getting louder and more frequent.

For many of us, it's hard to know who to believe when we hear food safety and food supply discussions. Some of those discussions are quite heated and few of us have the training necessary to follow all the arguments. At times we're not even sure we know what all the questions are, let alone who's got the (believable/reliable/responsible/realistic) answers.

Feeding the future is a collection of expert opinions on a variety of food security issues including tainted beef, over-fishing, genetically modified foods, the obesity epidemic, and worldwide food distribution. Each author gets one chapter and the various authors don't necessarily agree with one another, but that makes the book more useful for the reader. Footnotes provide references to continue research on subjects that catch your interest or verify points you find hard to accept.

Editors Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon have done a good job of pulling such disparate voices together into a cohesive whole. They begin each chapter with a brief author/subject introduction that I found tremendously useful. They are also responsible for additional content added as sidebars to the main text.

Although the subtitle of this book (from fat to famine, how to solve the world's food crises) promises solutions, I would liken this book to a survey course. Solutions are certainly proposed but if resolving the issues were that simple, we would already be there. Instead, I would call this an excellent starting point for a self-directed study, or, at the very least, enough information to get you through a number of earnest conversations.

Feeding the future : from fat to famine, how to solve the world's food crises edited by Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon. Published in 2004 by Anansi. ISBN: 978-0-88784-744-8

Boomtown

Most of the reviews in this blog will be positive. After all, I don't see much point in writing about a book I didn't enjoy when I could spend that same time reading one I like a whole lot better. Every once in a while, though, there are books that must be reviewed for one reason or another and this is one of them. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy it.

Boomtown by Nowen N. Particular (a.k.a. Marty Longe) is aimed at 8-12 year old boys and looks very promising. It's full of inventions, explosions, silly stuff, and bumbling adults who are rescued by children. Silliness is a core virtue in our household and I grew up with a brother who was forever inventing things and blowing things up so I was all set for a fun read but was disappointed.

For starters, the narrator/main character, Arthur Button, is an adult who doesn't have a clue to what's going on in his family or his new town. Since everything is observed and recorded through his eyes, the reader doesn't have a clue either. Two of the Button children are full of mischief and adventure and are the right age for readers to identify with but we only get to see what their father knows about their various escapades and thus end up missing out on a lot of the fun. We get bits and pieces of adventures and story lines but no real sense of involvement.

There's also not much in the way of plot development. Lots of things happen in the story and we're told about lots of wonderful inventions (like hen grenades and inflatable sky campers), but most of the bits and pieces feel jammed in there. It's as if the author has all these fun bits he wants to get into his story and isn't willing to sacrifice any of them for the sake of telling the story well. If this were a movie, it would be filled with special effects and explosions, very low on character development, and almost without plot - not my kind of film.

The illustrations were promising. I like the air of authenticity the faked photos and newspaper clippings give to the text. There are, however, some gaffs, the worst being a supposedly authentic ancient Chinese note with the text running in rows from left to right, and punctuated as if it were English. Many of Nowen N. Particular's readers will know that Chinese writing goes in columns from top to bottom, organized right to left.

If I were part of the editorial group for this book, I would suggest that the author cut out at least half of the escapades, string what's left into a proper story line, and tell it from the point of view of one of the children. Use the leftover bits in the next book. Be careful with the language, too. Over the course of just two pages, we had a sequestered jury and a venerable lawyer who liked to pontificate and decry. Rather challenging vocabulary for 8-14 year olds.

Boomtown, by Nowen N. Particular was published by Thomas Nelson in 2008. ISBN is 978-1-4003-1345-7.