The endless search for info misses The Point Of It All

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
October 26, 2007

Did you know that grumpiness is caused by an overactive bit of your brain? Yes, they’ve mapped it! Imagine that. Using magnetic resonance imaging, scientists have tracked bad moods to the source, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Isn’t that amazing? Here, we’ll show you a picture. See, that chunk that lights up at a Jim Flaherty press conference?

Here’s how I respond to the relentless brain stories: Wouldn’t it be more surprising if humans did or thought something and it wasn’t in any way related to the brain? The brain regulates everything we do. Imagine if the human response to David Frum was governed by stray dendrite in a metatarsal or a small oily gland clinging to the pancreas. Then you’d have yourself a news story.

As it is, I am simultaneously bored and bewildered by the news that scientists have "discovered" the brain chunk linked to food cravings/arithmetic/empathy/forgetting/terrorist thoughts/religious surges in nuns/autism/schadenfreude. Racism sits in the amygdala, apparently. How unusual. I always thought it lived in the Martin Amis section of the lower bowel, the bit that thinks Muslims should be strip-searched until they learn how to be British. Fine, I stand corrected.

We see in this endless brain "news" the journalistic result (wire service filler) of large amorphous things like feelings (fiction filler) being tracked to their corporeal source (seat filler). And whose needs does it serve? Not mine. It makes geeks happy though, a certain type of geek, and their misdirected need for pointless information has taken over the news waves.

Men vs. women, Mars vs. Venus, news vs. info

I yield to no one in my fondness for men. Fine people, most of them. Men are praise-worthy creatures, admirably simple in their needs, direct in their responses. Women are a wilderness of monkeys by comparison, frantic, scary, complicated creatures flashing their red bottoms at you and then biting your ear off when you get close.

On the other hand, a woman sees a chocolate bar and says "That’s a chocolate bar. I shall eat it." A man, especially if he’s the editor and writer Bill Buford, sees a chocolate bar and says, "I shall travel up the Amazon and track the cacao pod back to the Olmec peoples around 1300 B.C. in one of those tedious treks that are so unaccountably popular in the New Yorker." I like the studied-yet-casual use of "around." Even the Olmecs are an anthropological construct. Are you saying another male choco-nut is going to claim that the Olmecs didn’t break open a kakawa until 1303 B.C.?

Yes, he is, actually, and he’d be right.

Men verging on the Aspergic have worn us out in recent years. A woman named Dava Sobel is apparently to blame for writing a small book in 1995 about the first person to measure longitude. I interviewed her once. She’s a nice woman, but she has a lot to answer for. Since then, publishers have hired hundreds of writers, mostly male, to put the commonplace under the microscope, writing immensely detailed books on the small: cod, salt, New York oyster beds, the paper clip, ironing, chloroform, quick decision, eels etc. The wave reached its nadir when the New Yorker published a massive piece on the history of the American ice cube machine industry.

Deeply in depth

Publishers are not creative; they track random waves and swallow them to the last drop. In the 80s, it was hardship travel, in the 90s memoirs and ChickLit, and in the 00s it’s Iraq and death by detail.

I loved Mark Kurlasnky’s Cod. And I loved Bill Buford for having dissected football hooliganism in his wonderful Among the Thugs. But that was before he wrote Heat, a memoir that took a mincer to Italian food. Buford quit his job to become a line cook in a Mario Batali restaurant, moved to Italy to study under a renowned psychotic village butcher (that butchery is a means to fame is a sign of the foodie times), then hauled a freshly slaughtered pig into his New York apartment to practise his new-found art.

Naturally, his latest epic in the New Yorker, a magazine I love for Adam Gopnik and Seymour M. Hersh and nothing else, is titled Extreme Chocolate. We learn about agricultural wars, the demise of Brazilian cacao from witches’ broom blight in the 90s, the theobromine high, the sophistication of the Europeans’ favoured mouthfeel, and the catastrophic home life of the purist California boutique chocolatiers. He strips naked and prances in a chocolate pod fermentation vat. Nine bean rows does he plant.

Well fed… up

Well, I’ve had it, Bill — it’s just chocolate. At least when you studied hooligans, you got sick of being punched in the face and you gave up. But moving from hog scientist to chocolate archaelogist isn’t a transition, it’s a trending down in mental health.

I’m fed up with the need — it does seem to be largely confined to the male mind — to kill pleasure by injecting it with tortuous analysis. And people I admire agree with me. The brilliant critic Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, has just taken a hacksaw to Heston Blumenthal, one of those chefs famous for egg-and-bacon ice cream and snail porridge. You know, like Ferran Adrià, the chef at El Bulli who serves pork with candy floss.

When Blumenthal wants to fry a burger, he begins by studying the molecular structure of meat, Brooker says, spluttering, and then he nails him. Blumenthal’s TV show is called In Search of Perfection. Brooker calls it Mister Impossible’s Smartarse Kitchen. And I call the genre Food Search & Destroy. Its mission is to make us sauce our food with minutiae, thereby turning it to ashes on the tongue.

I can draw a larger conclusion from this, mainly because I want to defy Buford by not drawing 48 tiny, perfect conclusions.

Our attention is being drawn to arcana just as it should be focused on massive, cartoonish disasters in the wider world that is not on our plates. The Middle East is imploding (better than exploding, but still), the planet is frying itself and while all this goes on, where are we? Face down in our dinners. I rest my case.