He was right.

Bardacke, a respected labor activist and educator based in Watsonville California, was first mentioned in this blog six years ago in connection with his research on Cesar Chavez. Like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, he dropped out of Harvard after his freshman year and moved west to change the world. Unlike them, he joined the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and has had an abiding interest in radical politics ever since. In the early 70s, I traveled to China with Bardacke to get a first hand look at Mao’s proletarian dictatorship. Frank admired all things proletarian; I feared the dictators. Bardacke often views the world through a different template than I do, but I have learned a lot from him and continue to have enormous respect for his views.

Bardacke became a farmworker – one of a handful of Anglos and surely the only former Harvard student to work the celery fields. He became fluent in Spanish and formed friendships with many of the union staff and farmworkers who appear in his book. He spent more than a decade interviewing every major participant in the drama, reading every known book on the farmworkers and scouring every archive. He received help in managing this massive project from faculty in history and politics at nearby UC Santa Cruz.

The result, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farmworkers, is the most complete account yet of the rise and fall of the UFW. It is also an epic, Shakespearean drama with all of the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster. The pitch meeting would be surreal:

OK, picture this: we have a conservative Catholic who fasts and marches like he’s Ghandi. He courts progressive clerics and hires liberal Jews and alienated Anglos to mobilize immigrant Mexicans and Philipinos to fight Slavic and Italian growers. At first David slays Goliath, but then he morphs into King Lear and destroys his newly built kingdom amidst slaughter and recrimination. We’ve got side plot romances between devotees who work for $5/week and bad food trying to raise farmworker pay. We’ve got violent Teamster, UFW, and grower thugs straight out of the Sopranos. We’ve got a certifiably batshit human potential guru who wreaks havoc getting everyone to criticize everyone else. And under the carpet here somewhere, we may even have communists trying to advance a proletarian revolution without a proletariat. How can we miss?”

Astonishingly, it is a true story and Bardacke delivers it with intelligence and compassion. Unique among labor historians, he grounds his analysis in “the work itself”, with brilliant, memorable descriptions of how different stages of production for different crops in different regions of California all affect the ability and willingness of different crews to self organize. He describes clearly why organizing was often sustained by the tight-knit, highly skilled lechugeuros or the celery cutters, not the garlic or asparagus workers or those in ladder crops. He describes the skill and endurance that the work requires, introduces leaders that arise from various crews, and captures in fine detail how they interact with a union that was built on a very different set of principles from farm work. In a decade spent organizing waiters, housekeepers, nurses, bartenders, machinists, cannery workers, and assembly workers, I observed precisely these differences. The work itself shapes our propensity to organize. Bardacke is the first writer to apply this principle to the fields and he does so with a deep understanding and compassion for the work.

Bringing an existing union into a workplace is an act of industrial combat not for the faint of heart — but starting a new union from scratch is a herculean task that almost always fails.  I started a company that has lasted more than a decade, a public agency that lasted three years, and a union (United Espresso Workers – I was a bit early) that lasted all of three weeks. With the proud exception of the United Farmworkers, I cannot think of a single independent union formed in the United States in the past 50 years that was not sponsored and controlled by an incumbent union (I can think of several that tried and died – but none who made it).

This was not always true — new unions once spawned regularly in the US. There are many reasons for the change, but the lack of competition between unions has positioned them nicely for extinction. Organizations evolve through the mutation, variation, and selection that is always produced by competition. The labor movement stopped growing the instant the AFL joined with the CIO and prohibited unions from competing with each other. When two teachers unions competed, both grew. The instant the Teamsters stopped raiding the UFW, growth stopped. I hated the Teamsters (who were kicked out of the AFL-CIO for corruption and are not subject to the noncompete provisions) and I took a nasty beating from them once, but like sharks or wolves, they have their place in the ecosystem. (I am aware of no union leader who agrees with this view, by the way. Most feel that they have all the competition they can handle from employers).

But for a brief moment following the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a new labor union arose in the United States and in the least likely place. If you had asked in 1960 where in the economy a new union might appear, you would never have selected the farmworkers of California. Organizers prefer workers who are tied to one place and to one employer, not workers who are seasonal and often itinerant. Probably wrongly, organizers prefer workers who are covered by labor laws, which had always exempted farmworkers. Organizers like English-speaking Americans, not Tagalog or Spanish-speaking immigrants or Braceros who are tolerated for a season then ushered back to Mexico. A dozen or so failed efforts by farmworkers to form agricultural unions seemed to validate Marx and Lenin’s belief that workers would organize once they were forced into factories and worked for a single employer.

Bardacke demonstrates that Cesar Chavez succeeded in organizing farmworkers because he was, at heart, a brilliant and hard-working Alinksy-trained community organizer. As a community organizer, Chavez pioneered an enormous innovation that had the potential to transform labor organizing: he mastered the secondary boycott (illegal for most workers under the federal labor law, which thoughtfully excludes farmworkers). Chavez tirelessly organized enormous boycott operations in grapes, lettuce, and against major retailers including Safeway.

Farmworker boycotts were the Occupy movement of the 70s and 80s – a way for college students, community activists, and middle class young people to participate directly in the tough work of social change. And credit Chavez’s brilliant leadership, it worked magnificently: faced with effective boycotts, growers raised wages and improved working conditions and politicians begged the army of grass-roots Chavistas to help register voters and turn them out on election day. The UFW became a powerful force for social change.

But the UFW was only briefly a powerful labor union. Bardacke correctly diagnoses the boycott as creating a formidable tension within the UFW. He frames the tension between labor and boycott organizing as a struggle between the “two souls” of the UFW. The metaphor is fraught. As Bardacke demonstrates, the UFW collapses not because it has two souls, but because none of its activities were organized, financed, or led in a manner that enable them to grow. The problem is not that community organizing is a distraction – most American labor unions lack a community service organization and are much the weaker for it. This is tragic: having discovered and refined one of the few recent innovations in union organizing, Chavez cannot let it grow. Instead, he strangles his own child.

One of the heros of Bardacke’s book is Marshall Ganz, one of America’s most innovative labor organizers. Ganz also dropped out of Harvard, but moved south to organize for civil rights before heading west. After his exile from the UFW, Ganz helped the Silicon Valley Central Labor Council build a powerful neighborhood-based political organization for the 1984 elections. He was terrific at posing fundamental questions – and at directing me and others to writers and thinkers who helped answer them. In 1984 he urged me to read, of all things, a business book, In Search of Excellence. I quickly developed an appetite for business writing. decided to get trained in it, and ended up working with the book’s authors. Marshall returned to Harvard, got his degree after a 28 year hiatus, and now teaches at the Kennedy School. (His version of the UFW story, told in Why David Sometimes Wins, is a fine companion volume. It suffers for being his PhD dissertation and dwells more deeply on theories of organizing and less on the dynamics of local struggles).

So let’s ask a Marshall Ganz-like question: what does it take for an organization to grow successfully? Venture capitalists, a group not deeply concerned with the welfare of those who produce their salads, obsess about this question. There are at least as many answers as there are VCs, but common elements include:

• A big market. If there is not substantial demand for the product or service an organization produces, the organization cannot get very big.

• Positive unit economics. If serving one more person imposes more cost on the organization than it generates in revenue, then growth makes no economic sense and the organization will depend for growth on funding from charity or government. Anyone can sell a dime for a nickel; selling a nickel for a dime means that an organization has to add at least a nickel’s worth of value if it wants to grow.

• Customer or member acquisition costs that scale. Every organization has a cost of acquiring a customer that must be repaid over the lifetime of that customer or member. Smart organizations exhibit declining COA: the cost of acquiring each incremental customer declines with scale. Very smart organizations (and effective social movements) are viral: COA approaches zero as current participants recruit new ones. See Facebook, Google, or Arab Spring.

• Leadership. Growth is very, very demanding on an organization. Everyone in a fast-growing organization has to grow with it: jobs change radically every few months. Not everyone grows at the same pace, so leaders must recruit furiously, communicate direction and values continually, promote and replace people regularly, and test what works all the time. It is stressful and a lot of fun – ask anyone who has been involved in a fast-growing company, boycott, strike, or organizing campaign.

Back to the fields. Boycotts have completely different economics than labor organizations. Boycotts have huge markets: liberals eager to shop their conscience. Churches and colleges do the recruiting at very low cost to the boycott sponsors. Every convert adds more value (the grapes they don’t buy) than cost (the very low cost of volunteers leafleting).

Unions are different. The market for a membership organization of farmworkers is not small, but it is small enough that the UFW needed to capture almost all of it because, as Bardacke notes, organizing half an industry penalizes the organized growers. A union has a responsibility to organize the remaining growers and will frequently be cheered on quietly by those who have signed. More fundamentally, unions need to grow big enough to achieve minimum economic scale: they cannot fund the fixed cost of their operations if they are too small. Unions with fewer than a half a million members are nearly always too small to operate efficiently across the US (meaning that most unions in the United States waste money because they are too small). The UFW never had 100,000 members — although its field operations were mostly in California. Bardacke would counter that the democratic character of the union matters more than its size, which is true, but creating organizations that are not economically sustainable is a bad idea. Unions do this all the time.

Unions have a second problem, to which Chavez developed a unique but ultimately unworkable solution: the economics of labor organizing are often unattractive. Campaigns, negotiations, and strikes are expensive and uncertain of success. If unions file for elections on half of the campaigns they run, win half of the elections they file on, and negotiate contracts successfully 80 percent of the time, then every successful contract has to finance four unsuccessful campaigns and potentially a strike. If the campaigns and the negotiations are labor intensive and the union bears all of those costs, then the economics of organizing turn heavily on the cost and productivity of staff and on the cost and duration of strikes.

The Chavez solution to this dilemma was simple but utterly unsustainable: pump talented people through the organization. Those of us who worked boycott operations worked 14-16 hour days, often 7 days a week. We were paid $5/week and had to beg for donated food to eat. Once we were burned out, the UFW happily replaced us in a process Chavez once compared with pumping water. At any given time during large boycots, hundreds of young people slaved on the campaigns for months and sometimes years. Staff at headquarters (located in the small misnamed town of La Paz), were likewise furnished with living quarters, food, and a miniscule stipend. Chavez personally approved all expenses. From here, it looks like a cult – although from inside the cult, it looked like La Causa and stands today as some of the best work many of us ever did. Regardless of how it feels or looks however, and regardless of the ethics of exploiting volunteers on behalf of underpaid farmworkers, an organization without a core of talented, motivated leaders simply does not scale. Volunteers are not enough — and finding people like Marshall Ganz and Eliseo Medina to fight year after year for farmworkers without paying them even farmworker wages is simply unrealistic.

Bardacke does not go deeply into union economics in part because there is a much bigger tension restricting growth: a command and control organization. Chavez not only micromanages, but much worse, he prohibits local labor or boycott operations. Centrally led boycott operations could work: boycotts demand a consistent message and negotiations with a single adversary and since allied organizations delivered most of the volunteers with help from a skeletal UFW staff, there were relatively few local issues to resolve. But labor organizations are built in hundreds of unique workplaces. This is in part due to the work itself: the problems of lechugueros are simply not the same as tomato workers or lemon pickers. More important however, is that without elected reps, stewards, and ranch committee members, contract negotiations suffer because strike threats lose credibility. Without a credible strike threat, backed in this case by a credible boycott threat, growers rationally refuse to negotiate. Chavez tried to run the union from the top, like he built and ran the boycott. When George Meany and others derided the UFW as “not a real union”, they were wrong at the level of the fields. But in their description of La Paz, they were right.

Bardacke reveals Cesar Chavez to be a brilliant community organizer who campaigned for farmworkers but did not empower them. Bardacke plots the tragic trajectory of the UFW from an authentic movement led by a charismatic leader to one paralyzed by demoralized staff that could see no way to grow a union beyond the constraints imposed by its increasingly unstable founder. Chavez died afraid of his own organization, which he had shriveled into a family business devoted to nonprofit services, La Raza not La Causa, and promoting the Chavez legacy. The union was all but gone.

Bardacke masters an enormous amount of material to relate these events skillfully. He salts his prose with stories and characters straight out of Steinbeck. He rarely leaves the reader guessing about his point of view: Walter Reuther, the brilliant activist who built the United Auto Workers (and marched with Cesar in Delano) is a worthless hack because he voted against seating the Mississippi Freedom Delegation in 1964 and drove communists from the union. Those who cross the US border illegally are noble immigrants deserving of union embrace; those who cross picket lines legally are scabs deserving of UFW tire-slashing and intimidation (but not of UFW efforts to call La Migra and send the illegals among them home). Teamster and grower goons are thugs; Manual Chavez, designated hitter for his nonviolent cousin and other UFW punks are charming rogues who firebomb field sheds and beat their opponents. Those who seek to impose Synanon’s destructive ideology on the UFW are obviously crazy and should be driven from the union; those who seek to advance various communist or nationalist ideologies within the organization are dedicated activists who should be protected. Trampling Out the Vintage is a beautiful work despite these caricatures; it would be even stronger without them. It is a book that deserves a wider distribution and better copy editing than Verso, a niche left publisher, can provide. It would also be nice had Verso published the book electronically (then again, Frank confesses in the postscript that he composed the early chapters of the book on a typewriter!)

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Journalist Chris McDougall wondered why he was getting hurt when humans have been running for two million years. His best-selling book, Born to Run, is a well-told tale of people who run barefoot without getting hurt and of researchers who discover a paradox: support can make you weaker, not stronger. The more support a running shoe gives you, the more it weakens your foot, ankle, and calf muscles and the more prone you become to injury.

McDougall presents the stories that led to the science and the science that has led to a resurgence of barefoot or minimal shoe running. He visits the Tarahumara, an impoverished clan of long distance runners living in the very remote Copper Canyons of Mexico. McDougall romanticizes their lives, describing men and women of all ages routinely running for dozens of miles in sandals over hot, steep mountains.

Scientists have studied the Tarahumara for years because their isolation makes them good subjects. As roads arrive, the Tarahumara embrace modernity: their diet goes from corn meal and long runs to pickup trucks and Hohos. Epidemiologists have documented the diabetes, cancer, and heart disease that result. McDougall looks past this, focusing instead on the propensity of the canyon-dwelling Tarahumara and some of their more crazed gringo brethren to race ridiculous distances wearing heuraches cut from old tires.

Back home, McDougall consults a Stanford track coach who refuses to let his athletes wear expensive running shoes and discovers data suggesting that both the extent and severity of injuries go up with the price of shoes. He interviews Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard biomechanics professor, who explains precisely how the support a of a running shoe makes most runners over stride and heel strike, which delivers a much sharper blow than a barefoot runner who lands mid foot. A good video of Lieberman explaining his research is below. The peer reviewed work is here in Nature.

Lots of testing and learning is still being done both by individuals and by researchers, but nobody these days takes for granted that running shoes are always helpful. Shoe companies are trying to shift their designs and their message to promote “minimalist” shoes, some of which are now best-sellers.

Is this just a fad? Of course any shoe can become a fad if well marketed. On the other hand, humans have run barefoot for two million years but have worn running shoes for only about 30. I would not bet against barefoot running, given the injury rates that shod runners experience.

Protection turns out to be deceptive. It seems completely normal to me that as a runner, I would prefer a protective shoe. I want lots of cushioning. I want to avoid pronation, which must be awful because it sounds so bad. It would be simple to sell me orthotics — hey, my knees hurt sometimes. Although some people surely do fine in running shoes, for many people, highly protective shoes are like a cast. They reduce your mobility and your foot gets continually weaker as a result.

Economists, of course, know that protection often makes competitors weaker. They believe instinctively that competition strengthens counterparties, be they muscles, individuals, teams, companies, or regions. I have even argued that those who want stronger labor unions need to force unions to compete. Economists left and right can show that trade protection weakens both parties, although this knowledge never stops companies, communities, or workers who are hurt by trade from seeking it. Doubtless some similar principal applies to parenting: too much protection weakens your kids. Fine, now buckle your damned seat belt.

To evaluate social programs or parenting, we need the equivalent of the Tarahumara — a group isolated from extraneous influences that can test whether social protections produce more benefits than costs. Fortunately, an impressive young economist has shown that many of our protective programs are testable. Esther Duflo is an MIT professor, a MacArthur genius grant winner, and the winner of the  2010 John Bates Clark Medal for the best economist under the age of forty. Watch her fascinating TED talk on how she tests programs to fight malaria, educate kids, and immunize children. This is barefoot economics at its best.

Testing of this sort requires an appetite for failure. Politicians, business people, and scientists each approach tests differently, depending on how failure affects them.

• Politicians pay a huge price for failure. This forces them to simplify problems and promise sound bite solutions. If they do not do this, they won’t be elected and they won’t be politicians. Politicians cannot say “wow, this is a tough problem. Let’s try a bunch of things, fail at most of them, and learn what works.” Most politicians suffer from what Tim Hartford calls the “God Complex”. Hartford writes the Undercover Economist column for the Financial Times. He has published a terrific book called Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. You can get a flavor of his thinking at his fantastic TED talk. The God Complex is the equivalent of intelligent design: certainty that complex systems can best be managed centrally and that complex questions can be answered without the painful process of trial and error. Parents, CEOs, physicians, gods, and anyone else who pays a high price for failure are especially vulnerable.

• Business people embrace trial and error mainly because markets force them to. Hartford notes that ten percent of all businesses fail every year.  A market economy can be looked at as a huge, ongoing experiment that evolves, like every complex system, because of variation and selection. The best leaders of complex systems acknowledge that leading edge problems don’t have obvious solutions and encourage a structured process of trial and error. Hartford’s book discusses the value of lots of small, low cost trials that are decoupled so that they don’t spill over and of carefully documenting and interpreting results. An important and highly recommended read.

• Scientists love failure. It’s how they learn. They understand that humans have evolved as complex systems through millions of years of variation and selection. They reason either deductively from data or inductively to ask have we evolved to run? Evolutionary biologists have long noted that the unique way we sweat for thermoregulation, our hairlessness, our odd bipedal design (more energy efficient than any quadruped), our unusual ability to breath multiple times per step, and our highly engineered feet, ankles, and hips all suggest anatomy designed to run.

But until the 1980s, researchers were stymied by one big problem: we are slow. Why on earth would running matter, when every mammal worth eating can outrun us? 

It fell to David Carrier, a graduate student at the University of Utah, to notice something that had escaped other scientists: we are built for endurance, not for speed. The case for humans designed for endurance running is now widely accepted. This is partly because we have discovered a story that backs the data. Hunter-gatherers in the central Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa still practice persistence hunting: they run their prey to death (there is one other group that practices persistence hunting — or at least remembers it. Our pals the Tarahumara). Running down a large mammal takes as little as an hour or as long as 8 hours, but if a human can keep a mammal galloping so that it cannot catch its breath, cool down, or rejoin its herd, it will collapse of exhaustion before the human does. It appears that before we invented spears, humans survived by high-endurance, persistence hunting. Barefoot.

The BBC managed to film a group of men in the Kalahari hunting a kudu this way. Despite the drums and the breathless narration, it is a stunning film. Notice that the runners are shod in cheap shoes that do not let them heel strike. They look a lot like the sneakers we all wore as kids.

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The United States maintains posh embassies around the world to host worthies from events such as these and our current ambassador to Hungary did not disappoint. Obama’s emissary is Eleni Tsakopoulous Kounalakis, Berkeley grad but Stanford donor, daughter of a real estate tycoon and a California-based Democratic activist of the Phil Angelides school of progressive realtors. She raised more than a million bucks for Hillary, which made her ambassador material. Budapest isn’t bad duty (one can imagine her politely passing on an opportunity to serve in Athens, the family homeland).

She was a fine hostess and thoughtfully included entrepreneurs from interesting Hungarian startups including Prezi, UStream, Logmein, and NNG (formerly iGo). But the highlight of the reception and dinner hosted at the embassy came when Koualakis tapped my shoulder to introduce a short, shy, graying fellow “I’d like you to meet Erno Rubik”. I fought back the urge to bow, shook his hand, and realized that he, like many others in the room, would rather be working.

Rubik is, of course, the inventor of the world’s most popular toy — the maddening twistable puzzle instantly understood by any child and rarely solved even by accomplished adults. It has spawned an industry of competitions, including speed-cubing, foot cubing (current world record for solving a Rubik’s cube using only your feet is a bit over a minute), and blindfold cubing (look at the scrambled cube, get blindfolded, and work from memory. Good luck with that.)

We were all challenged to complete a scrambled cube (yeah, I know. There is an app for that. You photograph the cube and it shows you how to solve it. Erno even earns royalties on every download. But for once, I resisted). Personally, I always thought that the real innovation behind the cube was the weird bit of plastic in the middle that can be twisted every which way without breaking. And yes, I have taken a cube apart to see it, although I admit that there was a hammer involved. (If you want to try it, just twist the top 45 degrees and you can pop the thing apart pretty easily. Of course, you can reassemble it solved — that’s how many people do it).

Naturally neither America’s top scientists nor Hungary’s top entrepreneurs, people who solve three dimensional problems in their sleep, could restore a scrambled cube, which got me to wondering: which came first, the mathematics of the cube, or the puzzle itself? Surely a brilliant Hungarian mathematician like Rubik had computed the various solutions to a cube. Perhaps he had even tried to solve the “God number” question: what is the fewest number of moves that will restore any cube? The God number turns out to be 20 for a 3*3 cube, and a lot of mathematics together with 35 years of Google-donated CPU time went into figuring that out. Turns out however, that Rubik is an architect and game designer, not a mathematician.

There are of course, people who make solving Rubik’s cubes look incredibly easy. For example, the world’s record for solving a cube is….you won’t believe it. So watch — but don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

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They also produced a video on how they produced the video. Worth a look.

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But amidst the carnage, a funny thing happened: the music industry grew larger even though it had fewer labels and far fewer retailers. Revenue from CDs was replaced by revenue from live concerts, ring tones, downloaded singles, merchandise, and sponsorships. The new industry has its challenges (many of them traceable to lousy music), but it has hardly collapsed.

This transformation presages the coming destruction of traditional book publishing and retailing, even as their overall publishing industry grows. Here are the seven reasons that bookstores and traditional book publishers are doomed.

7. Americans have stopped reading books. This is a non-trivial problem (after all, we did not stop listening to music). But the landmark National Endowment for the Arts study “Reading at Risk” confirms what we intuitively know: Americans read less than we used to. 43% of Americans read no books outside of work or school — a number meaningfully lower than Canada or most European countries.

Those who do read books, don’t read many of them. About 24 percent of Americans read eight or more books in 2002, a lower percentage of “strong readers” than two thirds of European countries surveyed. Only 16% of the US population reads a book or more each month. According to Morgan Stanley, 20% of all book buyers purchase a majority of all books. Men read much less than women. NPR reports that among active readers, women typically read nine books in a year, compared with only five for men. Women read more than men in all categories except for history and biography.

When most of us read, we prefer magazines and online articles that are shorter and less demanding than books. Kind of like you are doing right now.

6. Many of the books we read are crap. The largest single book category is still romance novels — a fact so embarrassing to the New York Times and other tastemakers that they exclude the category entirely from best seller lists. These bodice-rippers, together with religion, self-help, fantasy, and thrillers, account for a majority of books sold in the US (Gothic romance, which did not exist before 1972, by itself accounts for a majority of all paperback sales). Nearly all of these sales are to women, but women buy and read a lot more books than men even if you adjust out the Harlequins.

Part of this is, no doubt, that brains exposed to constant media are not well wired for long form reading. We prefer writing that is built around tidy lists…oops. Nice essay to this effect by Alan Jacobs (hey, if you have read this far, you can manage it).

5. We can easily get books for free. Just Google “Torrent” and “Books” along with anything else and you will be directed to many sites that enable you to download books as pdf files easily readable on a tablet or an eReader. The site I checked helps you steal any of several dozen books on religion, most of which presumably counsel the reader against theft.

It is always hard to estimate the economic impact of illicit downloading. I wonder if the net effect isn’t positive, even if authors howl. WordPerfect marketer Pete Peterson had a sensible point when he said that “if someone is going to steal software, I hope they steal ours”. Every illegal download is not a lost sale — but every time a reader finishes a book and raves about it, the marketing leads to new sales. Realizing this, most publishers will let you read the first chapter for free anyway. If we see publishers offering books for free but with advertising, we will know that the torrent sites have struck a nerve.

My current bet is that it won’t happen for the same reason that iTunes curbed illegal music downloading. Customers like the ancillary content and the reliable file quality enough that if the experience is frictionless and the price sensible, we will pay.

4. “Books” are mutating.  Like music and movies, books are becoming a service, not a product. Today Amazon launched its Kindle Lending Library, which turns books into a service like Spotify for music or Netflix for movies. The number of publishers who have embraced this idea? Zero. These guys would rather face the Torrent sites than let Amazon loan their books. But publishers need to monetize their back list. Over time, they will do a deal with Amazon, even if they require Amazon to purchase a new copy after a finite number of rentals. Many publishers require libraries to do that now — and would doubtless oppose libraries as socialist if Ben Franklin hadn’t established libraries before they got organized.

Books have become protean. Sites like Byliner and the Atavist are publishing long form essays by well known authors. This writing is longer than most essays but shorter than a book. Sometimes the pieces are free, sometimes paid, and sometimes, as in the case of a recent piece by author John Krakauer, free for the first 50,000 downloads, then paid. Inkling, a San Francisco startup, takes textbooks and transforms them into socially enabled multimedia iPad apps that end up not looking much like textbooks at all. They have just released The Professional Chef, the bible textbook produced by the Culinary Institute of America. You can buy the book or you can just buy a chapter. It features photos, note sharing between cooks, demonstration videos, etc. Their south of market neighbor,  Blurb, does the opposite: it converts your online blog into a nicely bound book you can give to mom. O’Reilly makes many of its books available by the chapter and lets you join a club to get lifetime book updates and access to community events. EBrary lets academic subscribers read huge online libraries and charges by the page for printing or copying.

3. Robo-books.  I shared a taxi yesterday with a guy who bragged that his wife “cranks out eBooks”. She writes 2-3 books each week the same way some kids write college papers: by stealing content and re-writing enough of it to not get caught. Of course, free market capitalism being the spectacular engine of innovation that it is, some late night huckster even sells Autopilot Kindle Cash that helps “your ten year old kid publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day.”

The impact of the resulting spam “books” has been extraordinary. In 2002, about 250,000 books were published in the US; about 15% of these books were self published. By 2010, the number of books had increase thirty times. 3.1 million books were published in the US — about 8,500 “books” per day and 90% of these books were self-published.  In response, Amazon has been forced to “curate” the user experience, meaning that they must try to filter the output of products like Amazon Kindle Cash. If they are wise, they will start charging “authors” $20 to publish their “books”, and deploy the same software that faculty use to detect even clever plagiarists.

Amazon's best selling Single

2. Economics. Amazon has put the publishing industry on notice by hiring respected industry veteran Larry Kirschbaum. In a sly reference to the music industry, Kirshbaum launched Amazon Singles. A single is what it sounds like — a chapter, not a book. It can be an article or an essay, like this terrific one by Hitchens on Bin Laden. In books as with music, you often want just the single, not the entire album.

By promoting authors whose books sell, Amazon has also created self-published millionaires. John Locke and Amanda Hocking are the superheroes of self-publishing. By making millions, they have helped transform self publishing from an industry backwater inhabited by the untouchables to a place where writers no longer share sales with publishers. Importantly, writers price their books and they have become smart about demand elasticity. Locke discovered that his CIA  novels increased twenty fold when he dropped the price from $1.99 to $.99.

“It wasn’t so long ago that an aspiring author would … don a pair of knee pads and assume a supplicating posture in order to beg agents to beg publishers to read their work. And from way on high, the publishers would bestow favor upon this one or that, and those who failed to get the nod were out of the game. No more.”

This trend will affect all publishers. Famous authors will wonder why they share revenue  with publishers. New authors (like Amanda Hocking) will demand enormous advances once they establish a reputation as a successful self-published writer. Because the profitability of the publishing industry turns on the ability of a few popular authors to subsidize the great majority of unprofitable ones, the defection of popular authors is especially threatening.

Publishers and retailers are being badly disintermediated not only because they add too little value, but because they add unnecessary costs. Traditional book retailing is insanely wasteful: at any given time about a quarter of the books are moving backwards in the supply chain because retailers can return product, usually without penalty, to distributors or publishers. I am not aware of any other industry that permits this. These and other costs make printed books more and more more expensive. Price increases, not unit sales, account for nearly all of the “growth” in the sales of traditional books. Trade book prices have risen twice as fast as inflation for more than a decade. Libraries now pay more than $80 per book, in part because library books require specialized processing.

1. Amazon. The number one reason that bookstores will close and publishers will die in large numbers is that Amazon is continuing to take a page from the Apple playbook and create a user experience that is integrated from content development to ecommerce and the device. They are not identical models: we will not see Amazon stores any time soon, nor Apple publishing, but clearly Amazon has learned a lot from Apple.

Indeed one could argue that they learned too well. Walter Isaacson’s asserts in his recent biography of Steve Jobs that Apple won the battle over agency pricing (they let the publisher set the price and took a cut, whereas Amazon set the price as the retailer and paid publishers a commission). In truth, Amazon won and Isaacson got the story wrong. Customers care enormously about price and convenience, as a quick glance at iBooks reveals: it is a wasteland. By combining a preeminent retail experience, offering books as physical, print on demand, or eBooks, featuring buy-back programs and used books, offering Singles, Publishing, and now Libraries, Amazon controls the reading waterfront. They are quickly taking the oxygen out of traditional book retailing and publishing.

When the dust settles, we will see the same thing we saw in music. Spending on what we read will go up with economic growth or a bit faster. But it will go to very different players for very different products than in the past.

Fine. 

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Gay Freedom does not matter yet to most Americans — but it will, soon enough

One of the great strengths and great weaknesses of humans is that we form tribal attachments. We are drawn to people like ourselves, which allows us to form families,  communities, enterprises, and governments. Tribes enable science, education, commerce, and religion. Tribes probably enable language itself.

The problem, of course, is that the bonds that tie can also enslave. Tribes have boundaries and reject those who cross them. They have to or it isn’t a tribe. Children have a known tendency to wander from their parent’s tribe. Thank God for that — human progress surely depends on the freedom to form and demolish tribes. In general, the more of both the merrier. Tribes matter — we cannot and will not do without them — but they rarely evolve.

Gay freedom is at least in part about the ability of people to re-form or reshape our tribe of birth. Most members of the LGBT tribe were not born into it and most people outside the tribe are nervous about their kids or friends joining it. It’s an unusual tribe because, unlike being female, black, or Asian, being gay or lesbian isn’t visible. Imagine the history of feminism if first, one had to acknowledge the socially unpopular fact of being female.

This is the context for Tales of the City, the exuberant musical now on at San Francisco’s ACT. It is a huge, sprawling, production based on bits from the beloved books by Armistead Maupin. The play, (like The Beginners, featuring George Plummer as a man who comes out at age 75) is saved from a meandering and implausible script by wonderful characters and spectacular acting, just as the music is saved from forgettable melodies by terrific lyrics and enthusiastic performances. I have not enjoyed myself at a musical this much since Avenue Q, (the talented Jeff Whitty wrote the libretto for both).

Even three years ago, following the passage of Prop 8 in California, it was not clear that New York, backed fully by Wall Street and large numbers of business Republicans, would endorse gay marriage. It was very clearly not true in 1976, the setting for Tales of the City. But some small decisions made that year have rippled forward to the present day.

Recall that in 1976, San Francisco mayor George Moscone prevailed in a campaign to legalize homosexuality by repealing California’s sodomy laws.  That same year, San Francisco was gripped by the trial of Patty Hearst for helping an apparently drug-addled group called the Symbian Liberation Army to rob a bank. Patty was the granddaughter of William Randolf Hearst, the American publishing magnate who printed, among other rags, the San Francisco Chronicle. Then, as now, the Chron was not a real newspaper. We bought it to find out when movies were playing and to read Doonesbury. Also Herb Caen, the irreverent cataloger of left coast life and father of three dot journalism…When interest in the SLA trial began to wane, the editors of the Chronicle decided to try something new: a serialized novel.

Printing a novel in daily installments in the local newspaper was an old idea, not a new one. It is how much of Charles Dickens, first came out (US papers would plagiarize each episode without paying Dickens or his publishers a dime. Made him mad as the dickens…). The Chron ran a column by writer nobody had ever heard of. Armistead Maupin, who called his column Tales of the City.

Oh. My. God….the effect was amazing. It was like soap opera – you hated to miss an installment. Pretty soon you actually cared about the friends and neighbors at Barbary Lane — the fictional community invented by Maupin. The plots never made any sense (a cult of cannibals at one point took over St. Mary’s cathedral on Nob Hill), but it was a helluva lot of fun. And not only that, it was outrageous gay fun — which at the time seemed considerably more fun than the sort the rest of us were having. This was the year that George Moscone nominated a respected community leader, Jim Jones of the People’s Temple, to San Francisco’s Housing Authority and banned roller-skating on public streets. It was the year that Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, and Ringo Starr performed “The Last Waltz” with The Band at Winterland, which Martin Scorcese made into a fine movie.

Within two years, Maupin was a successful author and an important voice of a gay community that continued to grow in power. In 1978, the Gay Freedom march drew 250,000 people — double the size of the San Francisco antiwar marches of a few years earlier. Reaction was swift: orange juice commercial queen Anita Bryant launched a Save the Our Children Campaign, a crusade that received national attention and politically galvanized conservative churches. The gay community retaliated, boycotting Florida Orange Juice, costing Bryant her lucrative endorsements, and driving her into bankruptcy. John Briggs, the Orange County Republican, tried to ban gays from teaching positions in California. But the cause of Gay Freedom seemed only to grow, spreading from San Francisco and New York to major cities around the country and the world.

What could stop this sort of delirious progress? It was a dizzying, naive, and stupid time — wonderful and amazing to recall. To preserve the momentum hes saw building, Moscone played hardball: he led San Francisco to district elections. This meant that San Franciscans voted by neighborhood. For the first time, they elected a Chinese-American leader, an African American woman, a single mother, and, most incredibly and for the first time in US history, an openly gay man: Harvey Milk of the Castro.

Those who wondered when the progress would end soon found out. San Francisco was forming new tribes and demolishing old ones at a record pace. Some tribes were crazy like SLA wannabes such as the Red Guerrilla Family and the New World Liberation Front. Or the People’s Temple. Moscone responded by installing metal detectors in City Hall. But in November, Jim Jones, who had left the Housing Authority and taken his followers to Guyana, killed 900 of them in a mass suicide. Nine days later, Dan White, a disgruntled Irish Catholic cop and former supervisor who had lost out in district elections, assassinated both Moscone and Milk. He avoided Moscone’s metal detectors by crawling in through a basement window.

Within three years, gay men were being diagnosed with an illness nobody understood. Doctors knew that it was an immune disorder, but had no idea what triggered it, so they could only call it a syndrome, an acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The disease is now a global pandemic and has killed more than thirty million people. Nearly two million people die from AIDS each year, even though it is now a disease that can be medically managed. I can think of no social movement in human history that has been so disproportionately affected by a contagious illness that targets its members. AIDS slowed the cause of gay rights by at least twenty years.

Which makes this week’s victory all the more powerful. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot happen in a closet and often cannot happen in one’s tribe of birth. Those who care about freedom, and that is a very large group, need to defend the freedom of all people to define, discover, and celebrate their own identity at least as vigorously as we protect our ability to form tribes.

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Of course, along with a heart of oak, the town also has a brain of well mashed potatoes. We celebrate diversity beyond parody and indulge in thousand clown politics “somewhere to the left of whoopee!”. Our schools work with immigrant kids that show up speaking more than two dozen languages (actually, nobody speaks two dozen languages. That’s the problem. Each kid speaks one. A different one). Like our libraries, these schools are collapsing under the weight of dodgy managers, paleolithic unions, and ineffective parents (not necessarily indifferent, just collectively ineffective outside of Crocker Highlands).

My part of town, near Lake Merritt, has been brought together by a weekend farmer’s market and by the perpetual comedy of the Grand Lake Theater billboard (typical offering: “Prosecute Dick Cheney for torture” followed by “Kick Ass II”).

We have a terrific neighborhood association which, like most neighborhood associations, is where liberals go to be conservative. Ours is earnestly opposed to rich corporations. And to poor corporations. But perhaps not to Trader Joe’s, because they are German and cool. Also not to Peets, because he was Dutch, their coffee is cool, and they come from Berkeley. (Starbucks: you are clearly suspect). We like “small local businesses” because they are so small and local. The Gap is a dilemma. It is local, but not small — so like Starbucks, we tolerate but do not embrace. What matters here is not whether you create stable, well-paying jobs with health care benefits or even whether you deliver useful goods or services. What matters most in Oakland is that you are small, local, and (ideally) ethnic. Our motto: we love you. Unless you succeed.

Which pretty much rules out McDonalds. In 2004, the Golden Arches wanted to take over Kwik Way, a burger joint that had been abandoned for years. In 1980, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen memorialized Kwik Way in “Two Triple Cheese” on their Lose it Tonight album. The lyrics suggest that the Commander lived in this part of town, even if he takes liberties with the street names. His ode to saturated fat, salt, and cholesterol now enjoys a place of honor in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Watch it below: it’s pretty good.

Post Cody, the Kwik Way became an abandoned dump and a favorite haunt of sketchy crackheads who sold stuff in plastic tubes and left them lying all over the massive drive-in parking lot. McDonalds offered to renovate the place, hire local kids to run it, and keep it swept up. The arches might have framed the Grand Lake Theater quite nicely, but no way. The ‘hood mobilized against the would be corporate trespassers. Conveniently ignoring the KFC next door, we stopped Big Mac by asserting that the traffic would snarl up the place (we argued, in short, that “we gotta stop this restaurant because it might be so popular”).

Gleeful idiocy of this sort mixed with strong coffee is what keeps Oakland running. Truly if you polled my neighbors, 65% would nod solemnly at the assertion that McDonalds was responsible for Dick Cheney and his Guantanamo torture. (The sordid truth, of course, is that McDonalds has killed more people than Dick Cheney ever dreamed of and quite likely contributed to the Veep’s own lousy ticker. But the Oaklandish among us objected to the crowds that McDonalds would attract, not to the celebrated American tradition of serving cardiotoxins to teenagers.)

Kwik Way crumbled until it was finally sold to a local developer with an appreciation of mauve, ecru, and other soothing colors. He relaunched it as a higher priced burger joint a couple of weeks ago. The place sells food that is arguably more salty, fatty, and sugared than McDonalds, but hey, it is small and local. Here is a video of the opening (a prime specimen of neighborhood values appears at the 1 minute mark).

Comparing the two videos, who wants to argue that we have made real progress?

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With my wife grounded by a nasty ankle injury, we took in three movies and I escaped to a rock band reunion. Oddly, they all confirmed the same lesson: nostalgia is a temptress — fun, but wholly unreliable. 

Owen Wilson is the hero of Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris. He is a Hollywood screenwriter working on a piece about a nostalgia dealer even as he visits Paris and is transported in style back to the Lost Generation of the 1920s and 30s. The film is complete with a hysterical Hemmingway, a brilliant Stein, and appearances by Dali, Picasso, and both Fitzgeralds. It is a romp – the sort of film that Allen made in the good old days before he married his step-daughter.

Allen understands that mature cities are built on memories — perhaps Paris most of all. Memory is impossible in emerging cities (in Beijing today, the drivers frequently get lost because entire neighborhoods are transformed so thoroughly that they seem foreign). Mature cities are often wealthy enough to be politically liberal but most are culturally conservative, even as they attract the great minds of every age. Inevitably, the Golden Age of any great city is thus built by people who idolize an earlier Golden Age. Into this vortex steps Wilson, a Texan version of the traditional Woody Allen romantic, neurotic schlurb. It all works well, with the obvious exception of Carla Bruni, who should stick to her day job as the first lady of France. (Unable to cut her from the film altogether, Allen simply created a new character, wonderfully played by Lea Seadoux, to take over 90% of the role offered to the hopelessly wooden Bruni). 

We also treated ourselves to a pair of movies I passed on when they first came out but have since been told by many constitute the best romance films ever made: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Both films consist almost entirely of conversation between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Once again, there are ties to Paris and nostalgia, and some of the ties are subtle. For example, the second film opens at Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookstore founded by Sylvia Plath and frequented by Hemmingway, Dos Passos, and other characters out of Midnight in Paris. Plath famously published James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes place on a single day, June 16, Dublin. Before Sunrise takes place during a single day in Vienna and ends with our two lovers agreeing to reunite in Paris the following summer on, you guessed it, June 16. The second film opens with viewers wondering whether either had shown up. The movies are wonderfully rendered, brilliantly acted, and an ode to the trap of powerful memory, especially powerful romantic memories. Very highly recommended and available for streaming on Netflix.

On the advice of a friend, I caught the Buffalo Springfield reunion concert down the street at Oakland’s the newly restored Fox Theater. The theater is beautiful, but tells a powerful political tale. It was refurbished by Jerry Brown as mayor using redevelopment money, despite the Paramount, a landmark Art Deco theater one block away. The Paramount was empty the night of the Springfield reunion — and Jerry Brown is now proposing, quite rightly, to eliminate California’s wasteful, zero-sum, redevelopment spending.

The Springfield are nothing these days if not nostalgic. The concert opened with On The Way Home: “When the dream came, I held my breath with my eyes closed”, which pretty much described the graying, cannabis-mellow crowd.  

Buffalo Springfield reminded me of the new atomic elements reported in today’s Times. Like all of the heavy particles, it is highly unstable and blows apart after a split second. The three founders still seem deeply incompatible. Stephen Stills is a classic rocker and always has been. He looked pretty good, he has lost some weight, but he can no longer sing. Furay is a pop singer, good at the girl songs, who should have joined the Eagles. He can sing, but his guitar playing is like a guy leading church camp. Which figures, since Furay has been a Christian minister for the past three decades, but apparently needs another 15 minutes of rock star fame. 

Then there is Neil Young (who Stills once wrongly accused of being “a folk singer who wants to play in a rock band”). Young is just more talented, more committed, and all around more bad ass than Stills or Furay. Young played off to one side, but the stage always tipped his way. In the encore, he broke loose and lit up the place with Keep on Rocking in the Free World, which revealed Stills and Furay to be what they always were: Young’s backup band. The idea that these guys in their 20s and on drugs even practiced together, never mind made albums and toured, is hard to imagine. The reunion produced some memorable music, but ultimately no nostalgia can overcome the core incompatibility of the band’s founders, who stayed together less than two years. 

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I don’t grieve gladly or for long. I have had uncles drop dead and barely paused between emails, except to reflect that the world was an ever so slightly better place for their passing. Why is the sudden loss of a pet so sad?

It surely is not because pets are innocent or selfless. JJ was anything but innocent. He was demanding and entitled. If you sat down, he jumped on you and begged to play. If you threw something, he chased it and pestered you until you threw it again. He was a terrier who thought he was a retriever.

JJ was a designer dog. We chose him carefully and made him part of the family. I was intrigued by Boston Terriers, so in 2004, following our move to Oakland, my wife and I went to watch a pack of 25 or so Bostons play in the mud (they should have charged admission — it was a riot). Two of the dogs seemed especially attractive and we learned that they were cousins from the now defunct Welcome Ranch in Potter Valley. We began a correspondence with Mike Siebert and Lauren Ash, the vet who selectively bred Bostons. They often bred brindle dogs, not traditional black and whites.

Our boys were 6 and 10 and dog-ready, so we arranged to visit Potter Valley, near Ukiah. We discovered a place straight out of Dr. Doolittle. Lauren was a vet who bred Boston Terriers, exotic birds, and Morgan horses. Within minutes, we were rolling on the floor with a dozen dogs. Mike realized that we desperately wanted an animal and that we had planned carefully how we would accomodate one (they screened owners carefully). He disclosed his secret: a pup had just been born, the single offspring of their show dog Justin. He showed us the tiny fur ball, but we could not yet hold him. Six weeks and some correspondence later, we returned to Welcome Ranch to pick up Justin, Jr, known thereafter as J.J.

Families have to make room for a dog, not unlike a new child. You restructure your daily routines to accomodate a new personality. JJ made his needs clear: he wanted to be wherever we were and he wanted to play. Always.

We took him to obedience school, which was an elaborate joke. He barked obnoxiously at his classmates, then retreated fearfully when they turned on him. Like an insecure, bratty kid, JJ was forever asserting his superiority then turning tail when challenged. He flunked every test, but gladly took the treats. 

JJ grew up to be an extremely attractive dog. His markings and personality literally stopped people on the street — a chick magnet that single men could only envy. He hated other dogs, but was fine with small children petting him.

Some of our best memories of JJ are of seeing him try to swim in Lake Merritt, where he traumatized the Canadian Geese (the only creatures more obnoxious than he was). We loved seeing him run full bore on a beach, chasing strands of kelp until his smiling, drooling mouth was covered with sand. Small crowds would gather to see him chase a ball up a hill with a determination and speed not at all typical of terriers. He slept with us, ate with us, played endless tug of war with us, and took long walks with us. He begged incessantly, tipped over every wastebasket not covered or weighted down, and treated even polite dogs as a personal threat. He was a large personality and in a household that welcomes large personalities.

He survived being hit by a car and had a titanium right hip. Most days, you barely noticed it. He survived the usual dog injuries and infections and was the picture of health until Wednesday night, when he appeared tired. He was holding his head low but not coughing or vomiting. His heart and respiration were normal. He evidenced no pain when poked and he slept well Wednesday night. But yesterday morning he was clearly weak. He may have developed acute AIHA: autoimmune hemolytic anemia. If so, his body was tacking antibodies onto his red blood cells, which tricked his spleen into removing them faster than he could make new ones. In dogs, death from acute AIHA is quick — vets cannot usually get animals stable enough for blood transfusions and the huge doses of corticosteroids that serve as immunosuppressants. I rushed JJ to the vet, who put him on oxygen but he died within an hour. We do not know what causes AIHA, but it is not especially rare in dogs — and in any case, it is just a theory that fits a lot of facts, not a clinical diagnosis.

In the previous post, written with JJ snoring loudly next to me, I quoted Steven Hawking that “Heaven is for people who are afraid of the dark”. Losing a loved one, even a pet, gives you a different perspective. Heaven is our way of remembering. Hawking should restate his theorem: heaven is for people who are afraid of forgetting. 

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Suppose that you had an al Qaeda-like urge to cripple the world’s strongest economy. Instead of flying planes into towers and killing a few thousand however, you aspire to sicken hundreds of millions of us. You want to poison Americans gradually but in huge numbers. Your goal is to shorten our lives, weaken our children, and cripple our economy with extraordinary health care costs, knowing that  as people become sick and discouraged, they often sacrifice their young and rarely develop memorable literature, arts, technology, or civilizations.  

Your poison of choice might be an addictive, debilitating drug. England demonstrated this approach in the 19th century when they spread opium throughout urban China. The Chinese became so weak that England ruled them for a century. When they tried to revolt, the Brits grabbed Hong Kong for 166 years. The problem with this approach is that it’s too 19th century. Americans recently chased Big Tobacco overseas — we are naturally suspicious of narcotics.

If drugs are out, what about food that is addictive and toxic in excess? This would be ideal, since even Americans who hate tobacco smoke will defend their God-given right to eat unlimited quantities of tasty food.

THE KILLER DIET

In a moment of dazzling insight, you realize that at least three essential foods are both delicious and highly toxic if over-consumed. We are all, in varying degrees, wired to love sugar, salt, and fat — probably because they are both essential and historically scarce. Most of us can overcome a preference for salt and fat in a few weeks. But a strong preference for sweets is evident in newborns and can be an especially tough habit to kick.

To carry out this plot at scale, you would need powerful allies in government, corporations, and the media. Food companies and restaurant chains will rally to your cause. Pepsico, America’s largest food company, would become your closest ally. During the course of a generation, they have made calorically dense, dry, salty, oily, and sweet foods available at very low prices. They offer these foods in gas stations, movie theatres, hotel rooms, airlines, workplaces, and schools. Allied companies make meat so cheap that consumption has risen from less than a pound a week to nearly a pound a day. These companies ensure that taxpayers subsidize cheese, butter, and sugar so that per capital consumption of these ingredients has tripled or quadrupled within a few generations. Drug companies and most doctors will also join your cause because they make billions treating the illnesses you are determined to promote.

Disinformation … er, advertising, is essential to your campaign. Pepsico, the world’s largest vendor of sugared, salted, oily snacks calls itself “a health food company” and spends billions advertising images of fresh fruit and vegetables alongside its products. They wisely hired a smart, attractive vegetarian woman as CEO. She has hired respected nutritionists from government and universities and coaxed credulous puff pieces from NPR and the New Yorker. Fortune has twice declared her the most powerful businesswoman in the world. 

You need flacks and lobbyists, so your allies would fund the Salt Institute and the Sugar Association, to promote salt and sugar as a healthy and part of a “balanced, natural lifestyle”. Modeled after their late sibling, the now defunct Tobacco Institute, the Sugar Institute declares itself “Sweet by Nature” and promises “to promote the consumption of sugar through sound scientific principles” and to describe “the benefits that sugar contributes to the quality of wholesome foods and beverages”.

A wonderful feature of your plan is that it can go viral. As people consume ever more more sugar and refined carbs, diabetes will become epidemic, which sharply increases heart and kidney disease. Once Americans have the world’s saltiest diet, high blood pressure will inevitably follow and make diabetes and kidney disease much worse, while leading directly to heart disease. Obesity will not only lead to diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, but it leads to more obesity because getting fat slows your metabolism – making you even fatter. Meanwhile, your plan promotes a nice variety of cancers and, in an amazing stroke of luck, it hits the most vulnerable people first: blacks, Latinos, and poor people get sick even faster on these diets than affluent whites do. The viral growth of Google or Facebook has nothing on your plot. 

Physicist Steven Hawking asserted this week that “heaven is for people who are afraid of the dark” (of course some people do science because they are afraid of the dark, but that’s another post). But suppose for a moment that our great grandparents were watching this conspiracy unfold. They would shout to high heaven. Listen carefully and you might hear their voices:

“YOUR KIDS ARE GETTING FAT”

They would be alarmed that children are no longer skinny. In the 50’s, my nickname was “Slim” because you could easily count my ribs — and this was true of most kids. Since then, childhood obesity has tripled. Today we no longer call Type II “adult onset” diabetes since overweight kids now get this serious, life-altering disease all the time.

Our ancestors would hardly recognize our diets. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization notes that Americans consume more calories than any other country – an average of 3,770 per person per day. Since men burn on average about 2,700 calories/day and women about 2,000, we eat a lot of food that we don’t need. It adds up: airlines have to carry more fuel per passenger than a generation ago because a planeload of people weighs a lot more than it used to (to offset the increased fuel costs, they serve snacks instead of food, which doesn’t exactly help).  

“CUT THE CRAP”

Our great grandparents would be alarmed at how much of our food comes from boxes and bags and how little of it comes from a home kitchen. The USDA: “Americans eat 31 percent more packaged food than fresh food, and they consume more packaged food per person than their counterparts in nearly all other countries. A sizable part of the American diet is ready-to-eat meals, like frozen pizzas and microwave dinners, and sweet or salty snack foods.”  

We eat more fat than any other nation and the USDA reports that Americans eat 156 pounds of added sugar each year — a five-pound bag every 12 days. Most of it is not traditional sugar, or sucrose, but another word that ends in “ose” (dextrose, maltose, high fructose corn syrup) or honey, molasses, etc. The largest source of “added sugar” is soft drinks from companies like Pepsico. We drink an average of 50 gallons of soda each year, accounting for a third of all added sugar we consume. A quarter of our added sugar comes from prepared foods like yogurt, ketchup, canned vegetables and fruits, and peanut butter (most ketchup, for example, has more sugar per ounce than chocolate ice cream). 

We have understood this problem since at least the early 1950′s, when the US military became alarmed at the results of autopsies on US Korean War casualties. Every US soldier had atherosclerosis — fat in their coronary arteries. But Korean soldiers did not — unless they were Korean-American. The discovery that the US diet was sickening young, fit soldiers was a closely guarded secret for many years.   

Our ancestors would yell at us to join the resistance by avoiding oil and refined carbs. Even “healthy” oils are not helpful. That extra virgin imported stuff not only has the same 4,000 calories per pound as any other oil, but it tastes great, so you eat more of it. A good guideline is to not buy or eat anything with more than 20% of its calories from fat and to avoid any package that lists a sugar in its top five ingredients. 

But don’t some people lose weight on kenotic (high fat, Atkins-style) diets? Many do, if they cut out more calories of refined carbs than they add back in fat. But they mortgage their health, as Atkins himself would have discovered had he attended his own autopsy. The pathologist discovered that Atkins had suffered a heart attack and had both congestive heart failure and hypertension (he did not die of these things — he fell and whacked his head). Some flashy journalists notwithstanding, not a single peer-reviewed study supports kenotic diets for weight loss or for health — but more than 113 peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that very low fat, low salt, near vegetarian diets combined with exercise can make an enormous and sustained difference.

“SAVE CHICKEN FOR SUNDAY”

In good times, our forebears ate “a chicken every Sunday”, and it often fed a family of 8-10. Today we routinely order 24 oz steaks and serve each person a half chicken. The American Meat Institute is thrilled: they brag that Americans consumed 234 pounds of meat and poultry per person in 2006. Since 10% of population claims to be vegetarian and another 10% are under ten years of age, the average adult carnivore is eating 300 lbs of meat and poultry each year (and only about 12-15 pounds of fish). Fish are better because unlike the fat from animals with feet, fish oil is unsaturated and often contains Omega 3s that retard arterial inflamation. 

Saturated fat and trans fats (margarine and other oils that are solid at room temperature) are the leading cause of the atherosclerosis — the first sign of heart disease that is now the leading killer of Americans. People who eat no more than 3-4 oz of skinless fish or white chicken 2-3 times a week do a lot better. This is a serving about the size and thickness of a deck of cards. Plenty of people, especially educated young people, have simply cut out meat altogether. Not only is this dramatically healthier for humans, but it is much better for the planet. Now that large populations in developing countries have enough grain to raise livestock rather than subsist on it directly, we need to treat meat as a condiment to be used sparingly, just as the rest of the world does.  

“PASS ON THE SALT”

Our ancestors would gag on the quantity of salt we eat. The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences and the USDA both recommend that healthy adults consume no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day, 1,300 for people over 50, and 1,200 for people with hypertension or who are over 70. (Recommended Daily Allowances on food labels are still based on the old standard of 2,400 mg.) Data from the 1988-91 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimates that we consume 3,400 mg of sodium per day before we add salt in cooking or at the table. Altogether, we eat almost 4,000 mg of sodium daily. People who frequently eat in restaurants consume even more.

What’s wrong with sodium? It causes hypertension — i.e., high blood pressure. Hypertension is the #1 destroyer of kidneys, the #1 risk factor for stroke (which is the #1 reason people enter nursing homes), the #1 cause of heart failure, and a major risk factor for senility. Two thirds of Americans have high blood pressure, including far too many children and teens.

We have known for decades that every population that adds salt to food suffers from hypertension and that no population that refrains from adding salt suffers from this problem (see the chart below for examples. Note that it shows dietary salt, not sodium. Salt is 40% sodium by weight). As the National Heart and Lung Institute notes:

“the experimental data with animals have consistently shown that diets high in salt raise blood pressure in a linear dose-response relationship. The findings include data from a study of chimpanzees, the animal species genetically closest to humans. Cross-population studies also have confirmed the salt-blood pressure relationship.”

Result? 90% of Americans over 70 have high blood pressure and most who don’t have it will get it. Most people who have hypertension are not being treated for it and most of those who are being treated do not have their blood pressure under control. Since cardiovascular disease is the primary cause of death in the United States and hypertension is both a leading cause of heart disease and the number one reason that patients visit doctors, cutting out salt is common sense. According to a recent University of California at Berkeley study reducing salt intake by 1,200 mg/day (or by less than 1/3) would save as many lives over the next 10 years as if all American smokers quit tomorrow for good. 

Where does all of this salt come from? Mostly we get it second-hand, courtesy of packaged food. Bread, soup, pasta sauce, canned veggies, canned beans, nuts, and cereals are nearly all salt toxic — even if the other ingredients are perfectly healthy. Salt in our diet is championed by the maker of Fritos, Tostitos, Doritos and dozens of other salty, oily snacks. That would be Pepsico – by far the world’s largest maker of salted snacks.

Resistance fighters have a real challenge here. If you eat a 2,000 calorie diet each day, you will get about half of your 1,500 mg of sodium naturally from food. That’s all you need. To stay within medical guidelines, nothing you buy in a store should have more mg of sodium than calories. (If a serving of pasta sauce has 150 calories, it should not have more than 150 mg of sodium. It will often have 600 mg). Read the labels and you will become astonished and enraged at how much salt is quietly added to packaged food. Corn Flakes, for example, have more salt in them than corn chips. Restaurants are even tougher — you have to consult with the chef. I have been minimizing added salt, fat, and sugar for about a month. It takes a bit of planning, because food manufactures and restaurant cooks make these second-hand toxins pervasive. Indeed, sugar, fat, and salt are the only flavors that many food manufacturers seem to know. 

“GET OFF YOUR ASS”

Our forefathers and mothers did tough physical work. Most of us, obviously and thankfully, do not. The National Health Interview Survey by the Center for Disease Control determined that 40% of us never engage in any exercise, sports, or active hobbies. The older we are, the less educated we are, and the darker we are, the less likely we are to ever break a sweat.  

People who are sedentary are at significantly greater risk factor of getting coronary heart disease, hypertension, colon cancer, diabetes, obesity, and much else. Medicine has few very simple answers, but along with paying attention to what we eat, exercise is the closest thing medicine can offer to a magic bullet. Maybe this is why people in Pepsi ads are so fond of it. 

“DIET, PEPSI”

The current issue of the New Yorker contains a wonderful article on Pepsi by John Seabrook. He explores with Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi the paradox of a company devoted to sugar, salt, and fat suddenly declaring itself a health food company. Even though Seabrook knows better, he finds himself being seduced by Pepsi’s apparent commitment to sustainability, workplace fairness, and healthy foods. He is fascinated by Nooyi and her doublespeak (“Performance with Purpose” is the corporate tattoo), by the potato chip factory, and even by the forthcoming “15 micron salt”. He needs to be honest: Nooyi runs a company that directly kills more Americans than tobacco executives could ever dream of. Where is Seal Team 6 when we really need them?

The article is a horrible muddle, but it contains one shining moment of clarity. Seabrook encounters an expert who understands that the main difference between Pepsico and al Qaeda is their respectability and their timeline for killing Americans. When asked to comment about Pepsico’s aspiration to play a leading role in the battle against obesity-related public health issues, the unfortunately named Marion Nestle, a professor of food studies at NYU, had the guts to blurt out the obvious truth: “the best thing Pepsi could do for worldwide obesity would be to go out of business.”

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