(Surely you wouldn’t expect something conventional from me.) 

***

Lit Review

Scholars agree on one point:

Food crisis.

***

Food systems

Unjust, unsustainable;

Something’s wrong.

***

One billion

Underfed, undernourished;

There’s enough.

***

One billion

Badly fed, badly nourished,

Unhealthy.

***

The verdict:

It’s a broken food system …

Can be fixed?

***

Who’s in charge?

The market, state, third sector?

You and me?

***

Do we have

A right to food, right to health?

Some say so.

***

Can we have

Security, sovereignty,

Food justice?

***

Can we have

Good, clean, fair for everyone,

Everywhere?

***

What’s to come?

Health, goodness, justice (‘peace, love’)?

We can hope.

***

What’s your view?

Your ideas, your visions are

Most welcome.

Tastes like fresh milk

This gem of a food(-like?) product passed my camera, but not my lips, during a recent trip. Were someone to indulge my thoughts, the vitriol would be thick and the sardonicism – a work Etymology Online tells me originates in the Greek plant sardonion, which ‘caused facial convulsions resembling those of sardonic laughter, usually followed by death’, a result perhaps not ultimately unlike those of products like these – unbearable.

Instead, then, I leave the dear reader with the image alone and an invitation to contribute her own – rancorous or otherwise – commentary.

I’ve been intrigued for some time by the so many ways that ‘sustainability’ gets conflated. It doesn’t necessarily surprise me that most people don’t find it easy to engage with such a lofty idea, and usually I just agree with whatever people tell me sustainability ‘is’, smile, have another drink, and invite my interlocutor to keep on talkin’. (‘That’s right! I hear sustainable stapling techniques are all the rage these days in furniture upholstery hobby circles!?’) But of course part of the reason that sustainability often narrows to notions such as ‘local’ or ‘organic’ is that sustainability activists themselves are guilty of a reductionism that’s not only simplistic but also public.

All this is to acknowledge that sustainability advocates don’t necessarily deal well with the tensions inherent to the concept they want to promote. One important area of tension, I think, is that between the worlds of sustainability and technological advancement. Don’t get me wrong: I’m the person you’ll spy in Bute Park tasting wild plants as they grow. But, at the same time, I do think there’s a key place for technology in the sustainable food movement, and I even think things like cocina tecno-emocional are really cool. Of course the highly processed food culture that dominates contemporary landscapes – literally – with its aberrational manipulations such as trans fats and twenty-year Twinkies isn’t good. On the other hand, it’s not the technology itself that’s bad: man has used various technological innovations to manipulate food for thousands of years (think garum, flour, smoked meat and salted fish). Like just about everything else, it’s not the thing that’s good or bad so much as how it gets used.

On that note, I’ll share with you two recent videos that illustrate two very different sides of food technology – and I’ll be most curious to hear your interpretation of what they portray.

The first, from the TedX Harvard Law event (titled ‘Forum on Food Policy’), doesn’t give us a new message: most readers will have picked up on the associations between contemporary processed-food diets and poor health outcomes. But David Ludwig’s lecture does serve as a nice compendium of the research results which link the two – with sources cited, no less – and might serve as well for its good illustration of the bad use of technology.

The second features Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche showing the food tricks they’ve invented at their vanguard Chicago restaurant Moto. What’s interesting is that they’ve used haute deconstructive and reconstructive techniques to ask whether such methods could create a more ‘sustainable’ food system. Among their ‘flavour transformation’ tricks are turning corn, beets and barley (a cow’s food) into ‘beef-without-the-cow-in-between’, watermelon into ‘tuna’, and hay into ‘barbecue sauce’. What they create is all but natural and unprocessed, and yet they claim that these methods could ‘turn food miles into food feet’ and be a solution in the quest for food system sustainability. Cantu and Roche aren’t typical sustainability actors, and their methods are a far cry from popular protest and school gardens. Yet they raise interesting questions and at least suggest the prospect of using food technology for good.

http://www.ted.com/talks/homaro_cantu_ben_roche_cooking_as_alchemy.html

(*sorry, the video uploader isn’t working, so you’ll have to follow the link.)

So, what’s a sustainability advocate to think? More to the point, what do you think: where does food technology fit into a sustainable food future?

If you’re the type who likes to bandy about town with patched-elbow tweed jacket, newsboy cap, and a homily of postpositivist metatheory, then you’d best get on gettin’ on, because you won’t find much here. But if you’ve come for a few moments of peripheral vision – and I would argue that, to put an academic twist on an old favourite, too much Environment and Planning A and too little contact with boots on the ground makes Jack a boring scholar, indeed – keep on reading: you’re in the right place.

This is my November collection of some of the internet’s best offerings for the food-interested:

• UC Berkeley, teamed with Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Foundation and The People’s Grocery, is offering a semester-long course called Edible Education: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement. All the biggest names in the U.S. (and, to some extent, global) food movement are here: Pollan, Patel, Petrini, Nestle, Cooper, and more. The course outline is here; the readings are here; and the full videos are here.

• Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institutes is hosting a 2011/2012 lecture series in Food Ethics. The line-up includes stars such as Paul Thompson and Oliver De Schutter, and all videos are archived online. Viewers keen to interact with the presenters can watch the lectures live and submit their questions in real time.

• The New School’s program in Food Studies has hosted dozens of excellent food-related seminars and lectures, all broadcast on the university’s Youtube and Fora channels.

• The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) offers a number of live and archived webinars and conference calls in addition to an excellent archive of research publications (largely on hunger issues).

• If you regularly monitor the web for developments related to a particular area of interest, I suggest letting Google Alerts do the work for you. Tell it what you want, how frequently you want it, and from what types of sources, and it’ll be delivered to your inbox for you to read (or to delete, as it were).

• If you haven’t yet turned to podcasts as a source of brain fodder (and, I’ve found, frequently rather useful ideas and connections), I’d recommend that you at least give it a try. You can download iTunes for free; you do not need an iPod to play the files; and you can transform your running time, cooking time, and busy-work time into moments of mind play. In iTunes, simply go to the sections labelled ‘podcasts’ and ‘iTunes U’ (which features university-produced broadcasts of actual courses). In particular, in iTunes U, check out two offerings from Yale, a 2009/10 ‘Food and Sustainable Agriculture’ course and Rudd Center’s Rudd Report. In the general section, check out the BBC’s Food Programme; the London School of Economics’s public events and lecture series; and NPR’s Food Topics.

That’s my November list. What can you add to it? 

The next time someone tells me that a collaboration or an innovation just isn’t possible, I’m going to refer her to this story of miscreant master chefs.

Though I heartily recommend a watch, I’ll summarize the film in a headline: Prison Imports Slow Food Culture. Well, I suppose it’s a bit more complex than that. As the inmate cooks work alongside a pro chef to prepare a seven-course banquet for 140 ‘outsiders’ who will come ‘inside’ as paying guests, the essential and immutable humanity of everyone involved rises to the fore. We see prisoners shelling prawns, charging up pre-shift with a bit of espresso, enjoying wine and song alongside their guests, and generally waving their hands about and being charming as only Italian restauranteurs can be. We see a pro chef who seems to get a lot from his gig as the behind-bars cooking coach. And we see a voyeuristic public who for the first time relate to the prisoners who are spatially proximate but experientially quite separate from their community.

Ah. And they do these dinners regularly.

There’s plenty to think about here. If food can foster relationships, rehabilitation, and resilience here in this prison, where else can it be used for similar aims? How much is this example context dependent and borne of a very particular food culture: is this something that could happen ‘only in Italy’? To what extent are these dinners meritorious, and to what extent are they voyeuristic aberrations?

I’ll tell you: this story really struck a chord with me, not only regarding ‘the power of food’ as an instrument and a platform with enormous potential for good, but also regarding the value of cleverness and creativity, of ‘new collaborations’, and of inspiring leadership.

As always, I’ll be curious to hear what you think. (I already know what I think, or think I do.) 

I still haven’t joined Slow Food. Not that I don’t believe in what it stands for. Good, clean, fair food: who could argue with that? The problem is, the Slow Food I’ve come to know in Europe tends to perform extremely well on the first two counts – to swipe language from Patricia Allen, the French and Italian gastronomes do seem to have rather successfully addressed the ‘problem of tastelessness’ – but in my view comes up well short on the third. When Slow Food member dinners cost forty euro a plate and pistacchi di Bronte, forty a kilo, I’m not sure that represents the kind of equitable access to ‘good, clean’ food that might characterise a ‘fair’ food system. As we’ve talked about here a few times, those who ‘live below line‘ or do daily combat with the ‘food stamp challenge‘ must spend considerably less than those sums on their weekly food shop.

But Slow Food might be getting a new member, especially if Josh Viertel and the American foodie legions continue doing their bit. There is a good half – a great half – to the entire Slow Food organization; it’s what I call the ‘Terra Madre‘ faction, and it focuses on a wide range of global food justice issues ranging from matters of (inadequate) urban access to (non-existent) smallholder sovereignty. While that half gets – in my opinion – short shrift on the European Slow Food agenda, Viertel and the Americans have embraced it is as their pièce de résistance.

Gina Villareal called our attention to their latest effort, the $5 Slow Food Challenge, designed to combat precisely the elitist notion of good food that gets me up in arms. Good, clean food should be accessible to everyone, and this challenge was all about proving that – in many ways – it already is. Sure, it takes more attention, effort, and creativity than surrendering to Walmart or McDonald’s the responsibility for tendering your daily bread, but, after all, it is a high-stakes game we’re playing. I accepted the $5 challenge – one of about 30,000 people who did, as it turns out – and last Saturday three friends and I merrily indulged in good company, food, and drink (and, in the case of the last, perhaps a bit excessively).

Since we are living in an era of both audit frenzy and ‘knowledge sharing’, here I give my full report.

Originally, I translated $5 into £5, since I think that the way food and income prices run comparatively in the US and UK justifies such an approach (i.e., if an average can of Coke in the US is $1, in the UK it’s probably about a £1; if an average winter squash at the farmers market is $2 in the US, then maybe it’s £2 in the UK; and so on, at least more or less). But since my competitive juices run strong, I didn’t want to skirt around the ‘rules of the game’, so to speak, and I also ‘checked our performance’ by converting the $5 per person limit into a limit of £3.17 per person – or a total of £12.67 for the four of us. Either way, we ‘made it’ with plenty of room to spare, though, had we opted for the stricter limits, we may have had to cut off our drinking prior to two in the morning.

I did a morning shop at the farmer’s market to see what local, in-season veg was ‘cheap and bulky’ – my vegetable-monger is already so accustomed to my usual ‘provisioning strategy’ that I don’t even bother to disguise my intent any more – and then made a trip up the road to see the butcher and the grain-and-spice man. I also made use of small quantities of other stuff I had in my cupboard – garlic, olive oil, salt, spices, etc – so I’ve added a small sum to cover those; and I took advantage of some going-off tomatoes and bread that I had salvaged a few weeks ago by tossing them in the freezer, so I tried to account for those as well.

The menu:

(4 people)

Cooked whole rye

Vegetarian ‘stew’ of marrow (something between a giant zucchini and a winter squash) and onions

Moroccan ‘stew’ of chicken breast and onions

A nice bar of dark chocolate

Wine ***

The actual ingredients that I bought specifically for the dinner were the rye (£0.75); the marrow (£1.25); the chicken (£2.50); and the dark chocolate (£1.50). I bought a 5kg bag of onions for £1.30, and I used five onions; I also used some garlic, olive oil, and spices from my cupboard, so I’ll add in about £1.00 for all of that.

As I said, I also made use of some ‘salvaged’ materials. Last week I passed by a Polish shop just to poke around, and when I saw the ‘knedliky’, I wanted to give it a try. In the Czech tradition, there are two types of knedliky (dumplings), one potato-based and one bread-based; I love the potatoey one and hate the bready one. I couldn’t quite ascertain which one this was – the man in the shop spoke only Polish – but at £0.50, I figured it was worth an experiment. Turns out it was the bready kind: basically a loaf of white bread, and not at all good; so I sliced it up, toasted the slices, and ‘filed it away’ in my cupboard for an opportune moment to ‘dispose of’ in a culinary creation. I had also frozen the remainder of a huge batch of fresh tomatoes that had started to go off. This seem like the perfect opportunity to resurrect these two ‘salvaged items’ into a simple garlicky bruschetta or pan amb tomaquet (along with some fresh basil from the plant growing in my apartment window), and I’ll add another £0.50 or so to cover what we used of those items.

That comes to about £7.50 for our food feast – and in my opinion it was a feast indeed, though perhaps we should check the comments section for refuting testimony – or £1.88 per person.

Of course, we also wanted to drink wine, and that’s something that’s difficult for me to account for. Wine is quite expensive in the UK – and, sadly, I must say, that only reproduces its elitist status and encourages the type of excessive, cheap beer-glugging behaviour that turns downtown Cardiff into a cultural, social, and olfactory aberration on weekends and evenings. In any case, on my last trip to the Netherlands, I brought with me two pairs of pants, two shirts, and a mostly empty hard-backed roller suitcase which returned to the British isles full of cheap continental wine. That is the wine we consumed, and at 2 euro per bottle, I cannot claim that its quality matched that of a nice Rioja or Ribera del Duero, but it did the trick and fell within budget. Our guests also brought a nice rosé, and I don’t know how much it cost, so it may technically have pushed us out of the more limited budget; but, as its consumption also continued until two in the morning, it may also technically have fallen outside the parameters of the five-dollar dinner challenge.

Regardless, all said and done, we certainly didn’t spend more than £20 including the three bottles of wine, while excluding wine we fell (at £7.50) well below both the £20 and the $20 limits. Including, say, one bottle of wine – perhaps a more reasonable quantity for a ‘dinner’ – would have made us come in at a total cost of somewhere around £9 ($14) total, or £2.25 ($3.50) per person, including dinner, dessert, and a bit more than a glass of wine each.

If we’re looking to draw ‘lessons learned’ and shareable, perhaps these are the ones most immediately salient, at least to me:

1. Go to farmers markets and local shops, but don’t make a habit of buying $3 yogurts in decorative pots. Rather, get to know your ‘suppliers’, and get to know ‘the season’; don’t be afraid to go for stuff that’s ‘bulky and cheap’ (like leafy greens, squash, onions, and so on – or, if you’re lucky enough to live in, say, the Mediterranean, things like oranges and tomatoes), and don’t be ashamed to ask producers to guide you to those types of products. You’ll be profiting from in-season glut, good prices, and maximum freshness.

2. Buy in quantity, but don’t be a waster. When the tomatoes start to go off, chop them up and freeze them. When the bread goes stale – or just doesn’t turn out to be very good – turn it into breadcrumbs, croutons, or tostadas.

3. Have a cupboard stocked with the basics. Olive oil, spices, and garlic are musts for me.

4. Use meat, if you want, but don’t use it in the quantities that most people do. Let it accent the meal rather than constitute the meal.

5. Make food fun. It’s not about the food, it’s about the meal.

Reporting from that challenge done, I’ve got a new challenge for everyone – two, in fact. Challenge Number One: how about making every day – or nearly every day – into a $5 challenge? To be honest, I think that, if anything, setting a limit as high as $5 as a ‘challenge’ only underlines the exclusivity of the good-food community: that’s five times the limit many people find themselves obligated to impose at every every meal. Which brings us to Challenge Number Two: how about making one day each week into a $1 meal challenge … and donating the excess to people who struggle with food access in a much, much more serious way (such as, for example, those affected by the East African famine that Lani Trenouth referenced in her article).

‘Every day they serve a vegetarian dish and non-vegetarian option.’

That line, penned by a semi-anonymous Indian in his comments to an online news feature about school food around the world, turned out to be far more interesting than the story itself (something I’m sure the journalist author of the feature would be chagrinned to hear.)  With his vegetarian dish and  non-vegetarian option, the writer clearly knew which dish served – as it were – as the norm, and which, the alternative. And his classification of things inverted mine: it was an alternative alternative.

Here in the UK (and indeed everywhere else I’ve lived), vegetarian dishes – vegetarian options – often come with some graphic artist’s cleverly designed version of a green vee (this one disarming with a cartoonish smile, that one reassuring with a checkmark-here-for-healthy form). That is, they’re singled out, and they’re singled out precisely because they differ from the norm.

Even though I’m an often-vegetarian myself, I know that when I choose to not eat meat, I’m choosing to be not normal in the context of my culture and society; I know that I’m the alternative one.  But in India – of course! – the norm is inverted:  most people are vegetarian, and meat-eating represents the exception rather than the rule.

All this got me thinking about norms, and the cultural distance we sometimes need to see them. Dropping casually into other realities didn’t seem like much of a practicable option for the weekend, so I decided to drop into a question-everything mindset instead and try to imagine a world of ‘alternative alternatives’. What if, I asked, mainstream industrialized society were completely re-normed with regard to its food system?

• What if vegetarian meals were the norm … and meat meals, the exception?
• What if fair terms of trade were the norm … and exploitation, the aberration?
• What if organic production were the norm … and GMO seeds, disease-causing pesticides and hormone-injected livestock seemed – one might say – rather ‘unnatural’?
• What if rock stars advertised apples, broccoli sponsored NASCAR, and stadiums had names like ‘Whole-Grain Spelt Park’ … and Coke and Fritos were relegated to a tiny metre-wide supermarket shelf called ‘Industrial Food’?

And what if, what if, the current food paradigm didn’t make all these questions seem so radically absurd?

What are your what-ifs? Can you relate to the experience of inverted norms?

We are delighted to confirm that Registration is now open for the AESOP (Cardiff) 3rd Sustainable Food Planning Thematic Group Meeting, 28-29 October, 2011, Cardiff.

Ticket prices are £180 with a discounted price of £90 for PhD students.

(There are 30 PhD tickets available and these will be provided on a first come, first served basis).

The cost includes, buffet lunch for both days and an evening meal on Friday 28th at the National Museum for Wales.

Registration is vital and can be completed by simply selecting the blue text below and providing the basic information requested.

REGISTER your place at the AESOP (Cardiff) 3rd Sustainable Food Planning Thematic Group Meeting

Once you have registered you will then be contacted with directions, payment methods and details of hotel accommodation for you to book in the area.

If you wish to attend, the deadline for registration is the 10th October 2011.

The meeting has attracted approximately 40 cutting edge papers and 4 plenaries and will take place over two days at Cardiff University’s Glamorgan Building.

Working at a range of scales and with a variety of practical and theoretical models, we will review and elaborate definitions of sustainable food systems, and begin to define ways of achieving them. To this end 4 different themes have been defined as entry-points into the discussion of ‘sustainable food planning’. These are (1) Urban Agriculture, (2) Urban-Rural Linkages, (3) Community Food Systems and (4) Urban Food Strategies.

Urban Agriculture (convenor Andre Viljoen)
Urban-Rural Linkages (convenors Terry Marsden and Arthur Getz)
Community Food Systems Food (convenors Roberta Sonnino and Alex Franklin)
Urban Food Strategies (convenors Kevin Morgan and Tom Andrews)

Twenty pence bought me a treasure at the second-hand bookshop: a pocket-sized paperback packed with a few dozen trusty Walt Whitman poems. Though I can’t support Whitman’s sometime advocacy for Prohibition, he is both a Brooklyn boy and a voice against slavery, and, as my brother would phrase it, he wrote some ‘pretty nice stuff’, too; I suppose he’s won me over. I think you’ll like one I stumbled upon in my 20p book, This Compost. Its sensuous language and potent imagery testify to the miraculously – and mysteriously – regenerative power of Nature, cleansing, restoring, and ultimately resurrecting the stuff of death into the stuff of life.

Or at least it did when Whitman wrote it in 1891. I think when Whitman spoke of the earth

Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?

I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d.

it was a rhetorical question that he posed. Were he to reconsider the question today, however, he might conclude that he was indeed deceiv’d.

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,

That all is clean forever and ever

Now he’d probably think twice about letting the soil of pesticide-riddled tomato fields – such as the ones where migrant workers pick up illness along with tomatoes and bear children with horrific birth defects – ‘lick his naked body’. Likewise, he might feel considerably more ‘endangered’ by ‘fevers’ from polluted factory farm runoff and meatpacking byproducts. And, if he were to take a look at the emasculated soils of the super-intensified and hyper-fertilized agriculture that is today the norm – or, for that matter, the politics that make it all possible – he might think twice before concluding that ‘all is clean forever and ever’.

Whitman’s words offers a vision of a Nature that – perhaps – once was; by and large it no longer is, and I’ve left you a collection of linked photos that illustrate a world altogether different from Whitman’s. The question is: Can Whitman’s world reign again?

This Compost

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,

I withdraw from the still woods I loved,

I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,

I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

How can you be alive you growths of spring?

How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?

Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?

Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?

Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?

I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,

I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through

the sod and turn it up underneath,

I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person–yet behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,

The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,

The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,

The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,

The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on

their nests,

The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,

The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the

colt from the mare,

Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in

the dooryards,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata

of sour dead.

What chemistry!

That the winds are really not infectious,

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which

is so amorous after me,

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited

themselves in it,

That all is clean forever and forever,

That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,

That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,

That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that

melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,

That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,

Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once

catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless

successions of diseas’d corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. 

The standard critique goes like this: subsidies make bad food cheap; the relative cheapness of bad food encourages people to eat lots of it; eating lots of bad food makes people obese and more generally unhealthy. Ergo, the current subsidy system causes, at least in part, the current obesity epidemic. Who can forget the scene in Food, Inc., when the poor, all-obese family tackles the challenge of buying lunch for a dollar? Mulling choices in the supermarket aisles, one daughter wants pears; but at two for a dollar, they’re the same price as two McDonald’s hamburgers or a giant bag of chips, and mom tells her no: two pears do not a lunch make. Michael Pollan has tried to quantify the imbalance and claims that a dollar will buy 1200 calories in the form of cookies or chips but only 250 calories worth of broccoli or carrots.

But some people say it’s not true, that subsidies don’t make bad food cheap at all. Julian Alston, for instance, maintains that it’s precisely the opposite. He claims that the U.S. federal mandate diverting about 40% of corn to ethanol production, tariffs on imported sugar, and payments to farmers to let land lie fallow all increase rather than decrease the price of food – and, in doing so, discourage obesity. Even Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, usually a dependable player for supportive, consumer-friendly material, says that there is an obesogenic environment, but it’s not caused by farm policy as much as by the suggestive power of food processors and marketers.

Still, I’m not convinced. But I want to know what you think about these assertions: rubbish or reasoned?

Listen to (or read) the NPR story here; and here is another short brief by Alston http://giannini.ucop.edu/media/are-update/files/articles/v11n2_1.pdf

(Don’t miss the NPR article commentary, either. It’s telling: I thought NPR listeners were smarter than that.)