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Somehow I don’t think this is right:

Customers Also Bought... Really? I don't think so.

So, are people who are about to travel to Scotland all really into FOX News and right-wing politics? Somehow I don’t think this is right. Either there is some interesting book buying activity that I’m now aware of, the B&N algorithm has gone haywire, or something fishy is going on.

This wasn’t a fluke. I’d snapped this screen shot last week but I went back just now and the results are the same. Looking at another Scotland travel book I see results more like I would expect.

I report, you decide.

To all the people in the world who were disappointed by Arcade Fire winning the Grammy for Album Of The Year purely because they had never heard of Arcade Fire before:

At least the award for Best New Artist has some loose criteria. Apparently the nominees have to have been heard of by a fair amount of people. For example, the winner of that Grammy, Esperanza Spalding, is hardly a new artist. She has released three albums under her own name, the first of which came out in 2006. That’s 5 years ago! A nominee, Drake, has released music as early as 2006. Florence & The Machine released singles in 2008. (Granted, it was in the UK, so how can we be expected to know about that?) Mumford & Sons toured the UK in early 2008.

Some are relatively new. But ask their fans and you might get a different answer.

It’s possibly strange that, even though I haven’t (yet) read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, or Food Rules, I have taken a deep interest in what I know of the overarching concepts within them. I have heard Michael Pollan on the radio and have also recently read a couple of posts on the New York Times website by Mark Bittman. There is something in their messages that really strikes a chord with me, and that’s summed up in what Bittman would like to be our food acronym, ERF: Eat Real Food. This is also nicely put by Pollan when he suggests that we eat only what our great-grandparents would recognize as food. These foods can be found along the outer edges of a typical grocery store: fruits, vegetables, meats. Real food or whole foods. Another guide for eating is a simple three sentence suggestion by Pollan that is the other acronym in the title of this post: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The key there, and implicit in the first part of that suggestion, is that a lot of what we find on the shelves of our grocery store is not really food. I mean, yeah, we eat it, but it’s not real food. Another thing that I am thinking about whenever I am deciding what to eat is to avoid “processed” food. But what that means, I don’t fully have a handle on yet. One thing I try to go by is something I can remember comedians joking about even 20 years ago. Don’t eat something that has ingredients that you can’t pronounce. But are noodles “processed?” Or is butter “processed?” I guess they are somewhat processed since you don’t harvest noodles from the field and butter doesn’t come out of a cow’s udder but there is a limit. How much processing is too much processing? That’s where I’m trying to get to eventually.

We will be glad that the food scientists of the 50′s and 60′s developed the preservatives we use these days and we will be glad to have non-perishables and canned food when there are emergencies like a nuclear attack or a blizzard that closes the grocery stores for a week, but until then, I’m going to try to stick to real food.

Sunrise on the L.I.E., originally uploaded by Dan Hewins.

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