The bag of bags

Yesterday, I ran out of non-fiction reading material and was stuck reading more fiction than I cared to read. After reading the following in the Bellow biography,

Bellow, too, was mindful of those who had fallen by the wayside—especially dear, dead Isaac Rosenfeld. Back in 1948, when the young Truman Capote had been featured in the pages of Life magazine as a rising star, Rosenfeld comforted a jealous Bellow. "Don't worry," he'd said: "One of use is going to win the Nobel Prize." Now, when Dave Peltz called to offer congratulations, Bellow said, "It should have been Isaac."

I was inspired to have MIT dig up Passage from Home from the library repository. And although Rosenfeld’s novel is interesting, it appears that I’ve developed a sort of impatience for most fiction. I can’t read hundreds of pages of it at time like I used to (one or two IBS short stories a week is enough). However, it's probably better that I read fiction than books like Fast Food Nation, granted that I’m practically vegan as it is, and the things unveiled by Schlosser make meat seem all the more unappealing (although assumingly kosher meat is at least somewhat cleaner). Some excerpts:

In the USDA study 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.

The slaughterhouse tasks most likely to contaminate meat are the removal of animal’s hide and the removal of its digestive system…At the IBP slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska, the hourly spillage rate at the gut table has run as high as 20%, with stomach contents splattering one out of five carcasses.

A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist a the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, “You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell into your toilet than one that fell into your sink.”

In May of 2000, three teenage employees at a Burger King in Scottsville, New York, were arrested for putting spit, urine, and cleaning products such as Easy-Off Oven Cleaner and Comet with Bleach into the food. They had allegedly tampered with the Burger King food for eight months, and it was served to thousands of customers, until a fellow employee informed the management.

…several employees at the same McDonald’s restaurant in Colorado Springs independently provided details about a cockroach infestation in the milk-shake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night.

“This is no fairy story and no joke,” Upton Sinclair wrote in 1906; “the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

Basically, I am in desperately in need of new reading material and this is my call for suggestions…

Given the the new rate at which I am devouring books; how I need to make an exerted effort to contain my sudden and overwhelming desire to spend way too much time learning javascript and css to facilitate the revamping of my website; the fact that I can’t wait to set up my new pretty laptop(!); the discovery that I’ve begun to actually enjoy the company of MIT folk; and finally that I am taking the above listed developments as reason to rejoice, leads me to suspect that I might be returning to quintessential nerd mode.