Book Reviews - Sapiens and Fast Food Nation

Although I used to read a lot as a teenager, I grew up a persnickety reader.  I would almost exclusively read only fiction, and I stuck to the typical mystery books symptomatic of my adolescence.  Sure, I read some Wodehouse here and R.K. Narayan there, but my brain essentially binged on the Hardy Boyses and Hercule Piorots.  I am not talking these books down, mind you.  These are some of the greatest novels written.  Even in adulthood, my go to books have all been fiction; Wodehouse, Ayn Rand, Robin Cook, John Grisham etc.  It has taken me a lot of time and effort to branch out to non-fiction.  I have been spending the last few weeks trying to find my niche in the non-fiction macrocosm.  After suffering through some agonizingly dry financial guidance and self help type of books, I finally found two non-fiction books that hit the spot for me - 

The first book, "Sapiens" (ISBN 9780062316097), written in 2011, is an incredible account of the egregiousness of our species, Homo Sapiens, or the member species 'Sapiens' of the genus 'Homo'.  Author Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, strikes a chord right off the bat by impressing upon the reader that various species belonging to the genus 'Homo' (which Harari collectively calls 'Humans' ) have existed for about 2.4 million years and that our current species 'Sapiens' have existed for only 150,000 years, a mere 6% of the total historical timeline of humankind.  The book compartmentalizes this timeline into a series 'Revolutions', namely, the 'Cognitive Revolution' that began 70,000 years ago marking the beginnings of ingenuity of thought we associate with humans today, the 'Agricultural Revolution' that began 11,000 years ago when humans started moving away from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming, the 'Scientific Revolution' that began 500 years ago, the 'Industrial Revolution' that began 250 years ago, the 'Information Revolution' that began 50 years ago, and the current 'Biotechnological Revolution'.  Although Harari sounds a bit presumptuous when he says the current revolution will lead to the annihilation of humans by bioengineered 'post-humans', he does embed a wealth of thought provoking narrative as part of the discussion of each revolution.  For instance, how the 'imagined order' of religion, money, laws, human rights, government etc. invented by sapiens enables us to live in harmony and how the same 'imagined order' acts as the impediment to this very harmony, how this order organizing our lives exists only in our imagination by living only in the material world and is yet inter-subjective and shapes our desires, how agriculture was essentially a 'Faustian bargain between humans and grains' meaning that 'we did not domesticate wheat, it domesticated us', and how the fundamental structure of our emotions and desires has remained the same over billions of years; '...today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah...', leading to the significant proportion of the world's population constantly crave sugar and fat, the sine qua non for today's obesity epidemic.  As part of the timeline, Harari also addresses pivotal aspects like the development of language, the evolution of polytheistic and monotheistic religions (although I felt he could have addressed Hinduism a little better), the evolution of money, the proliferation of empires, the maturation of trade and capitalism, etc.  An arresting read for sure.

The second book "Fast Food Nation" (ISBN 9780060838584), written by American investigative journalist Eric Schlosser is a polemic against the American (and now global) fast food industry.  Extremely compelling and at times disturbing, the book is an attempt at addressing the different pieces of the surprisingly complex puzzle that produces a typical fast food meal.  As I understand it, this book was the first of its kind, so while it is by no means a comprehensive look at the fast food industry, it is a great start.  The book starts off with almost biographical accounts of some of the pioneers of this industry viz. Carl N. Karcher of Carl's Jr, Richard and Maurice McDonald and Ray Kroc of McDonald's.  Schlosser also discusses the complicated relationship between Ray Kroc and Walt Disney, and the role Disney played in developing the ominous marketing strategy of advertising to kids to maximize profits, a method that ultimately became the name of the game in the fast food industry.  Schlosser estimated that Americans would have spent shockingly more than $110 billion in 2000 as against $6 billion in 1970 (I have not researched on what the actual figure was in 2000 or what the figure is in the current year), the economics of which have lead to scarcity of fresh food but an overabundance of chemical-laden unhealthy food.  Schlosser calls this the 'McDonaldization' of the planet.  The book addresses topics like the economics of franchising, meatpacking and manufacturing practices, and the pyramidal structure of the business behind fast food (containing a very interesting account of J. R. Simplot, the potato baron).  Schlosser talks about why a McDonald's fry tastes so good and how chemical components contribute to this.  In a true documentary style, Schlosser chronicles some heart wrenching accounts of the lives of ranchers, workers in the meatpacking industry, and the animals that are slaughtered.  A lot of pages are spent critiquing the meatpacking and slaughtering practices.  A particularly gut wrenching section is where the author describes a visit to a slaughter house.  Beyond all the blood and gore he describes, what really impacted me was the way he portrays how cattle are ushered into the facility in a single file line, each animal wondering where it is being transported to next, only to get zapped by a stunbolt gun prior to getting slaughtered.  Schlosser also addresses the rise of E coli and ties it to the centralization of the meatpacking and slaughtering industry.  Since the book was written back in 2001, and was essentially an enlargement of a Rolling Stone article by Schlosser in 1999, one wouldn't be imprudent to assume that the information contained might be a bit dated.  Surely things aren't so bad anymore, right?  Or have they become worse?