Marion Nestle's "Pet Food Politics"

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She is author of the award-winning Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism, and What to Eat, among other books. She serves as nutrition coeditor of The Bark magazine.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (University of California Press, 2008), and reported the following:

A visit to the website of Shandong Flourishing in late April 2007 was a disconcerting experience. Here, for example, in direct quotation, is how Shandong Flourishing explained its management philosophy:

"Our company’s management idea is: The good faith for this, by guaranteed the product quality strives for the survival, by creates the enterprise core competition to make every effort to develop, Persisted the user supreme principle, “thought the user thought, the anxious user is anxious”. Our company seriously pledged to you that, Most superior quality! Most inexpensive price! Most arrives service! ... Shandong luck Switzerland auspicious biotechnology limited company zealous welcome general new and old customers presence instruction, discussion service!"

A description like this one readily explains why American companies would be grateful to be able to buy Chinese ingredients through experienced intermediaries such as ChemNutra and Wilbur-Ellis

Pet Food Politics tells the story of the massive recalls of pet foods that occurred between March and May 2007. The story begins with a few cats getting sick with kidney disease soon after eating foods produced by a Canadian manufacturer, Menu Foods. It continues to this very day with reports of infant formulas making thousands of infants in China sick with kidney disease.

The common ingredient in these incidents is an industrial chemical called melamine, usually used to make plastic dinnerware. Chinese manufacturers fraudulently added melamine to wheat or rice protein ingredients in pet foods or to milk in infant formula to make these foods look higher in protein. Melamine is high in nitrogen. Tests for protein look only at nitrogen and don’t care where it comes from. When asked, Chinese manufacturers said they did this because melamine was cheaper and didn’t matter for pets.

The book investigates the pet food scandal. It asks the usual questions: who knew what and when did they know it? In this case, because this was “just pet food,” nobody took the problem seriously at first. But as the recalls grew to encompass not only pet foods but also pigs, chickens, and fish intended for human food, the scandal became major.

They also produced many striking revelations. Who knew that 100 brands of pet foods were made by one manufacturer? Who knew that surplus pet foods were fed to farm animals—pigs and chickens? Who knew that many of the ingredients in pet and human food were imported from China? Who knew that the FDA only inspected 1% or less of imported foods and ingredients? Who knew that China hardly had any control over the safety of its food supply? Hence: Pet Food Politics.

By page 99, I am tracing the chain of production and distribution of melamine-laced rice protein concentrate through an intermediary, Shandong Flourishing Biotechnology Company. This company then shipped it to another company which, in turn, shipped it to the American distributor, Wilbur-Ellis. No wonder pet food companies had no idea where their ingredients came from! The manufacturer of “wheat gluten” did something even more creative: to avoid inspection it shipped the ingredient via a textile company that exported it under the guise of silk scarves.

The moral: until China gets its food safety act under control, buy local. Hence: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine.

Learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website, Marion Nestle's website, and the What to Eat blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chelsea Cain's "Sweetheart"

Chelsea Cain's first novel featuring Detective Archie Sheridan and killer Gretchen Lowell, Heartsick, was a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of Confessions of a Teenage Sleuth, a parody based on the life of Nancy Drew, several nonfiction titles, and a weekly column in The Oregonian.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new novel, Sweetheart, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Sweetheart, Det. Archie Sheridan’s partner has just told Archie that he is having the serial killer Gretchen Lowell transferred and that Archie will not be allowed to visit her in prison anymore. Archie is the former head of the Beauty Killer Task Force and hunted Gretchen for ten years before she kidnapped him, tortured him, and then let him go and turned herself in. They have – how to say this? – a deeply fucked up relationship, twisted and sexual and obsessive. Archie visits Gretchen every week in prison under the pretense of getting her to tell him where her victims are buried – but he is really just so addicted to her that he can’t stay away. Henry has picked up on this and decided to put an end to it. Archie is distraught. It’s funny reading the page as somehow representational of the book, because it’s not, really, in terms of style. It’s a crucial scene that I think sort of loses its power out of context. The characters actions don’t have the weight they should because we don’t know where they’re coming from – how long this has been coming. Also, the prose style is choppy – lots of sentence fragments (“He hated how he sounded. Desperate. Frantic.”) – my attempt to communicate Archie’s dislocation and escalating panic – and short sentences (“The pills burned. Archie coughed. The TV droned on.”) – also an effort to show Archie’s state-of-mind. He’s high on painkillers and I think that being high on opiates creates this weird rhythm to perceptions, like everything is suddenly echoing your pulse. But it doesn’t really sound like the rest of the book. Plus, and this is petty, I have “Debbie” and “Buddy” both on this page, and I don’t really like how those names look together – the two double “b’s,” followed by the “e” sound. I generally try not to have those kinds of pairings because I think it’s subliminally irritating to the reader. On a positive note, there are way more embarrassing scenes we could have stumbled into. Though I guess that opening the book to page 99 and finding hot cop on serial killer sex might make someone more likely to buy the book. (Oh, you know you like it.)

Read an excerpt from Sweetheart, and learn more about the author and her work at Chelsea Cain's website and MySpace page.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Ehrenfeld's "Sustainability by Design"

John R. Ehrenfeld, who before his retirement was affiliated with the MIT Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development and the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering, now serves as executive director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology and is senior research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture, and reported the following:

Since flourishing is etymologically derived from flowering, natural systems seem like a very good place to begin a search for inspiration. Nature, the wellspring of human life, is the source of mystery and enchantment. In discussing the foundations for the definition of sustainability, I noted that flourishing is one of several emergent properties of natural living systems, along with resilience, health, and others. Is there anything about these systems that can explain these properties or cause their appearance?

This passage opens Chapter 9 of my book, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Consumer Culture. Its appearance marks a key place in the development of a set of cultural beliefs and values that must replace those currently driving our unsustainable societal patterns of activities. The central thesis of my book is that unsustainability arises out of the unintended consequences of normal cultural activities: an unavoidable result of living. In the past, these unintended consequences might have been insignificant, but today their impact on the world and all who live in it has grown so large that it threatens the possibility of a future where we can flourish.

Sustainability, as I define, it is just this thought: the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever. Human flourishing goes beyond the biological and includes the attainment of time-proven values such as justice or dignity. Sustainability is definitely not the same as sustainable development, which is little more than a continuation of the cultural patterns of the present albeit perhaps more eco-efficient. But delivering more of the same even with less impact cannot change the fundamental trajectory of the modern world. Sustainable development is a technological and technocratic package of “solutions” that cannot fix the underlying causes of unsustainability. Some symptomatic improvements will certainly result by applying these kinds of solutions but they are only quick fixes.

It will take a complete shift in basic beliefs and values to alter the present cultural trajectory. And to do that people will need new metaphors based on different fundamental stories of how the world works and what makes us human. This chapter offers up a new story for nature, following a previous discussion of what makes us human: caring rather than needing; being instead of having. Nature is seen as a complex system, where the future cannot be predicted as present day science would presume. Organic, holistic, qualitative, bio-centric, and communitarian replace mechanistic, atomistic, quantitative, anthropocentric and individualistic in the nature story. By encoding these and other values and beliefs in the artifacts and societal processes, cultural patterns can slowly shift subversively toward sustainability.

Read an excerpt from Sustainability by Design, and learn more about the book and author at the Yale University Press website and the "Sustainability by Design" blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maria Wyke's "Caesar: A Life in Western Culture"

Maria Wyke has taught classics at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Reading, and she currently holds the chair of Latin at University College London.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Caesar: A Life in Western Culture, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Caesar describes the affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra as it was told in a medieval history of the Romans. In that history, Cleopatra is no better than a prostitute. She seduces Caesar because she is greedy for power. She shows off her beautiful palace and her voluptuous body, and the Roman general falls into her arms thoroughly corrupted. For two shameful years, the medieval history says, Caesar submitted to his base desires, wallowed in adulterous love, gave in to Cleopatra the decorated whore. Only Caesar’s knights understand the moral damage being done to Rome and to medieval chivalric values. They ride after him as he sails up the Nile, and reproach him for his forgetfulness of duty to wife and country. This version of Caesar’s stay with Cleopatra in Egypt is meant to be a history lesson for aristocrats. It teaches them what chivalry means – marriage and valour in war – because Caesar fails the test. The conqueror has been conquered by the folly of love. The story demonstrates to us how important Caesar has been in Western culture as a means to teach lessons about politics, war, or love. The life of Caesar isn’t just an interesting story – it is a warning to avoid or an example to follow. Caesar teaches us what to do. But different teachers offer different lessons. Later in the same chapter, we see Caesar inviting us to spend money, buy goods, enjoy luxury, and stay with our Cleopatra. Or, at least, that’s how the casino-hotel Caesars Palace have put him to use. Every night, actors dressed up as Caesar and Cleopatra tour the hotel inviting guests in a very different direction from the medieval history, away from duty and towards pleasure. Page 99 shows how Caesar has been used to teach lessons, but it doesn’t show up their variety. Lessons in how to be a good and brave soldier, a conqueror or a liberator from conquest, a revolutionary, a dictator or a killer of tyrants, a lover and a libertine. Or even, in the end, a celebrity and a legend.

Read an excerpt from Caesar, and learn more about the book at the University of Chicago Press website.

Learn more about Maria Wyke's research and publications at her faculty website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lilith Saintcrow's "Night Shift"

Lilith Saintcrow's books include The Dante Valentine Series, which was featured last year at My Book, The Movie.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Night Shift, the first book in The Jill Kismet Series, and reported the following:

So I opened up Night Shift to page 99, and found a page that encapsulates the protagonist Jill Kismet's relationship with her Mephistopheles, Perry the hellbreed. I think it's a fair representation of the quality of the book, because on one page we have Perry and Jill's relationship boiled down to essentials--he wants her to turn a little, just a very little, so he can own her. We get to see Jill's upbringing, and a little of what makes her who she is. The whole utility/hate relationship these two have really stands out starkly for me--it's definitely utility/hate, not love/hate.

What fascinates me about Perry and Jill is not a love/hate relationship, because we've all seen that before. What I'm interested in is two characters who hate each other almost as much as they need each other--Jill needs the strength Perry's mark grants to her in her fight against evil; and who knows what Perry wants from her yet? I want to ask the question, "How far can you go down the garden path without losing your soul and becoming like the things you fight?"

Read an excerpt from Night Shift, and learn more about the author and her work at Lilith Saintcrow's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Stoll's "The Great Delusion"

Steven Stoll is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University, where he teaches environmental history. He has written for Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the New Haven Review.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth, and reported the following:

“Everyone seemed to be rethinking the nature and purpose of work. Stollmeyer tried to cut through the question (and grab some attention) by challenging the ‘erroneous notion … that the people want work; that man ought to work … The people do not want work. Work is not the end ... The end is provisions, happiness, the satisfaction of all our rational desires.’”

--The Great Delusion, Page 99

Conrad Stollmeyer had one thing right. The people want happiness though the satisfaction of all their desires--rational or otherwise. Stollmeyer (not a familial relation of mine) was among the first people to express progress as material accumulation, as ever greater provisions without a thought about the origin of the materials themselves. Stollmeyer confronted English socialists of the 1840s, attempting to persuade his working-class audience to turn away from politics and protest and embrace a technological utopia, a scheme that would liberate them from wage slavery without conflict. On page 99 of The Great Delusion, Stollmeyer has just arrived in London from New York to publicize the vision of his business partner and philosophical leader, a brooding and inscrutable German engineer named John Adolphus Etzler. Imagine one trillion people enjoying endless food and endless energy delivered to them by an all encompassing machine that would perform all their work. Etzler called this mysterious machine The Satellite. The partners gather adherents and make their plans for a colony in the tropics. It’s all part of the biography at the core of The Great Delusion. But the book is also a history of what became of Etzler’s thinking: the seemingly reasonable pursuit of economic growth. Think about it for a moment. Growth is the notion that a society can--even that it must--increase in wealth and population without end. No matter what evidence the tired and picked-over planet provides to supporters of growth, they continue to wave them away. In other words, Etzler and Stollmeyer might seem crazy, but they were no crazier than the most sober-thinking political economists of their time and of ours. Our presidential candidates might not use words like “infinite abundance,” but when they talk about prosperity without regard to planetary limits, when they promote growth as the cure for income inequality, they participate in the very same delusion.

The Great Delusion is Steven Stoll's fourth book. Learn more about his research and publications at his faculty webapge.

Read more about The Great Delusion at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Kimmel's "Guyland"

Michael Kimmel is the author or editor of more than twenty volumes, including Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (1987), Men Confront Pornography (1990), Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), The Gender of Desire (2005), and The History of Men (2005).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, and reported the following:

Ford Madox Ford might have been a good novelist, but he would have made a crummy social scientist. For us, you see, context matters. One can no more take a single page out of context from a complex argument than one can understand a work of fiction by reading only biographies of the author and histories of the writer's era.

That said, here is p. 99 of my new book, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (HarperCollins, 2008). The chapter is one of several that describes the various elements of what I call Guyland -- the new developmental stage between adolescence and adulthood, and arena of social relationships that guys develop. These are moments in Guyland, episodic and including binge drinking, fraternity initiation, sports, video games, pornography, hooking up, and sexual assault. This particular page is the beginning of the discussion of initiation and hazing, and sets up the discussion by describing the function of initiations in religion and in Freud's theories.

Page 99:

reborn into the community of the Church. And though baptism is not gender-specific, as both males and females are baptized, it is nonetheless a meditation about gender. (After all, the original baptisms were for men only.) The old "feminized self," born of a woman, is destroyed, and the priest, always a man, brings the new self to life. In a sense, then, the male priest has given birth to the new man. The mother may have given birth, but the child does not become a member of the community until the priest confers that status. Women are pushed aside, and men appropriate their reproductive power.

Freud made such a moment the centerpiece of his theory of child development. Before the Oedipal crisis, Freud argued, the child, male or female, identifies with mother, the source of love, food, and nurturing. To become a man, a boy must leave his mother behind, and come over to his father's side. The successful resolution of the Oedipal complex is identification with the masculine and "dis-identification" with the feminine. Whether or not one subscribes to Freudian theory, all theories of initiation pivot on uncertainty, anxiety, indeterminancy. It is an unstable moment, what anthropologist Victor Turner called a "liminal" stage--a stage of in-between-ness, "neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned an arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony."

Initiations in Guyland are about the passage from boyhood to manhood. Boyhood is the world of women--Mama's boys, wimps, wusses, and losers--or the world of men who are considered women--gays, fags, homos, queers. Or babies. One guy told me of the "Baby Dinner" at his fraternity house at a large public university in the Northeast. Pledges dressed in diapers, with little white bonnets on their heads, The pledge-master would put gross previously chewed food on their heads, simulating pabulum, and the pledges would scoop it off with their fingers and eat it. Many fraternities have equally infantilizing rituals. If initiation is going to validate your manhood, first you have to regress to babyhood.

Initiations, then, are all about masculinity--testing it and proving it. It's not that women don't initiate girls into womanhood. But rarely does becoming a woman involve danger, or threats, or testing. A girl might be inducted into womanhood when her mother explains menstruation

Learn more about the book and the author at the official Guyland website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Cleeves' "White Nights"

Ann Cleeves' Raven Black, the first volume in the Shetland Island Quartet, received crime fiction’s highest monetary honor, the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new novel, White Nights, the sequel to Raven Black, and reported the following:

White Nights takes place in Shetland in mid-summer, when it never quite gets dark. It’s about shifting perceptions, pretence, performance, the glitter of celebrity. In one sense page 99 represents the theme. It introduces an Englishman, Peter Wilding, who has rented a house in Biddista, the small community where a stranger has been found hanged. Wilding is a writer of fantasy fiction, something of a celebrity himself.

He was tall, rather good-looking, Perez saw now. He was wearing a striped collarless cotton shirt and jeans, canvas shoes. The writer smiled. He didn’t speak, but waited for his visitor to explain himself. Perez found the silence disconcerting.

Perez supposed he should show his warrant card but couldn’t remember what he’d done with it and introduced himself instead. ‘I wonder if I could ask you a few questions?’

‘Oh, please do. Any excuse to stop staring at a blank laptop screen.’ It was a rich voice, as if he was constantly amused by a private joke. Perez had imagined a writer with a deadline to meet as brooding, self-absorbed, but now there was no hint of that. The man stood aside. ‘I noticed that there’s been some activity on the jetty. Is it about that, I wonder?’ Perez remained silent. ‘Oh well,’ Wilding went on. ‘No doubt you’ll tell me when you’re ready.’ His eyes were so blue that Perez wondered if he was wearing coloured contact lenses. It pleased him to think of Wilding as vain.

Perez has seen Wilding on a previous occasion. The writer was present at the party to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of Fran Hunter’s paintings. The party is disrupted when a stranger, dressed in black, falls to his knees and begins to weep. The man claims not to know who he is or where he’s from. We meet him next as the murder victim, with a mask covering his face.

Fran appeared in the first of the Shetland novels, Raven Black, and we know that the detective, Perez, is attracted to her. At the gallery party Wilding and Fran seem to enjoy each other’s company. That’s why it pleases Perez to think of Wilding as vain. The jealousy hinted at here becomes more relevant later in the book; it clouds Perez’s judgement. He wants Wilding to be the murderer.

It would be convenient for everyone in Biddista if Wilding turned out to be the killer. He’s an incomer, who’s intruded into the small community unsettling the residents. While the theme of what it takes to belong is more important in Raven Black, it’s still there in White Nights. The last paragraph of page 99 emphasises the difference between Wilding the newcomer and the previous occupant:

Willy Jamieson had been born in this house and lived in it until he’d moved into sheltered housing. He’d scratched a living from fishing and, when he was younger, from odd bits of work from the council.

Willy belongs; Wilding is distrusted, an outsider.

Learn more about White Nights at Cleeves's website and read her online diary.

The Page 99 Test: Raven Black.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jonathan B. Imber's "Trusting Doctors"

Jonathan B. Imber is the Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics and professor of sociology at Wellesley College. He is the author of Abortion and the Private Practice of Medicine.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine, and reported the following:

On p. 99 of my book, Trusting Doctors, I come to the end of the first part of the book, entitled "Religious Foundations of Trust in Medicine." A few short pages later, the second part of the book opens, entitled "Beyond the Golden Age of Trust in Medicine." My argument on p. 99 ends a long discussion about how Protestant ideas about vocation influenced the public perception of the physician as trustworthy and beneficent. On the same page, I point out that at a meeting of the American Medical Association in 1964, Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel was asked to speak on "The Patient as a Person." His talk, more a jeremiad, was not at all well received by the assembled group of doctors. He criticized them for all those faults that would become much more widely pointed out over the next several decades. Listen to Heschel (in 1964): "It is terribly embarrassing to know that some individual doctors seem to think that it is highly improper for a patient to get sick during weekends ... The patient is haunted with fear, but some doctors are in a hurry, and above all impatient. They have something in common with God; they cannot be easily reached, not even at the golf course."

My aim in Trusting Doctors is to describe not the immorality of doctors, but the decline in their moral authority, that is the decline of their presence in our lives as people we trust with our whole lives. I do not argue this decline is by any means all negative, but it is not all positive either. And this is my hope for readers: to be more aware and more acknowledging of what is at stake in trusting others, not only when we should not, but when we should.

Read an excerpt from Trusting Doctors, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Learn more about Jonathan B. Imber's work at his faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Declan Burke's "The Big O"

Declan Burke is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003) and The Big O, newly released in the US.

Earlier this year he applied the "Page 99 Test" to the Irish edition of The Big O; now he has applied the test to the American edition and reported the following:

When I was writing The Big O I wanted it to be a fun read, one that played around with the conventions of the crime novel a little. I think that that’s there on page 99, where we have the two main characters, Karen and Ray, chatting over lunch. Ray’s telling Karen how as a kid he developed a tolerance for pain courtesy of a school bully. She’s a stick-up artist, and Ray’s into kidnap, but I wanted to undermine the stereotypes of the tough guy operator and the manipulative femme fatale …

Karen couldn’t help but feel disappointed, expecting a big finale, Ray finally getting around to stomping the bully. Not liking the way Ray deflected her expectations, sending them off on new tangents. Making Karen rethink, a couple of times already, like Sundance, who is this guy?

‘You could have at least fought back,’ she said.

‘I did. Caught him some good ones, too, nearly broke my fucking arm for him. You ever punch marble?’

‘And that’s it? That’s the story?’

‘What do I look like, Rocky? I’m knocking the guy down in the last round?’

Karen lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Ray. I’m not saying it’s not an interesting story. But I’m wondering, you take a girl out somewhere flash, then tell her you’re this six-stone weakling, how you let some bastard break your arm three years in a row …’ She exhaled to one side, keeping her eyes on his. ‘I think you’re missing the point here.’

What Ray doesn’t know is that Karen has come to lunch with the intention of cooling him off in the romance stakes, because she’s got too much on her plate planning a stick-up. Instead, by the end of the page, with Ray confessing a strength-through-weakness, Karen changes her mind. But that’s very much a feature of the story – while I wanted The Big O to be a hybrid of hardboiled noir and comedy crime caper, I also wanted the characters to be realistic, just ordinary folk struggling to make the most of their ever-changing circumstances. There are no real heroes in The Big O, just as there are no real villains – as in real life, everyone’s capable of doing the wrong thing if that’s what it takes to get by. And the characters aren’t particularly clever or ruthless – as often as not, they benefit from happy accidents, or because the person they’re dealing with has an agenda that chimes with their own. Ray, without ever knowing how close he came to being blown out by Karen, just gets lucky …

‘Put it this way. If you can blot out pain, you can blot out pleasure.’ He winked. ‘It’s why I can go all night. Just switching it off.’

‘And you’re not using this technique on me – why?’

‘Maybe I don’t want to wear you out right away.’

‘Take a chance. I mean, if I’m hating it, I’ll let you know.’

Ray shrugged. ‘It’s your funeral.’

‘I’ve always liked the idea,’ Karen said, ‘of dying happy.’

Read an excerpt from The Big O and learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website and Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays blog.

The Page 99 Test:: The Big O (Irish edition).

--Marshal Zeringue