Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Inevitability
Michael Adams, head of the polling firm Environics has released his new book. It looks at the changing values of Canadians and Americans, and while it has been said our cultures are converging - or, Canadians are becoming more American, the polls result show the opposite. We're diverging. While Canada is probably on par with the other industrial nations of the world, the US is moving more towards a position of isolation, and in my opinion, paranoia. Case in point: George W. and his many global snafus. He's quite representative of the average American, and it's scary where they're heading as a nation. If all this stuff interests you, you can catch Michael Adams speaking at the UofT Bookstore Series on May 20th.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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