“These things can enlarge the soul: Laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: Fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.”

This is a book–by Michael Pollan–that makes me want to be a better writer than I am. The book is about the convoluted system of corporate food manufacture and factory farming that makes corn an ingredient in most of the food we eat, what effect it has on our society and our health (and the animals involved) and what the alternatives might be.
Like Mary Roach’s “Stiff” (about the uses of cadavers), it’s a well-written book about an interesting topic and it just makes me itch to write something that big and challenging.
Only what? Right now I’ve no idea.And would it be a book? An article for The Log? A freelance magazine piece? Again, no clue.
Books like this make me want to challenge myself, but I’m not sure how.
Then again, both Pollan and Roach sort of stumbled into their topics, so maybe I will too, eventually.