Next up: Two books about food

You are invited to a feast for the senses and the spirit! In The Spirit of Food, 34 adventurous writers open their kitchens, their recipe files, and their hearts to illustrate the many unexpected ways that food draws us closer to God, to community, and to creation. All bring a keen eye and palette to the larger questions of the role of food—both its presence and its absence—in the life of our bodies and spirits. Their essays take us to a Canadian wheat farm, a backyard tomato garden in Cincinnati, an organic farm in Maine; into a kosher kitchen, a line of Hurricane Katrina survivors as they wait to be fed, a church basement for a thirty-hour fast; inside the translucent layers of an onion that transport us to a meditation on heaven, to a church potluck, and to many other places and ways we can experience sacramental eating. In a time of great interest and equal confusion over the place of food in our lives, this rich collection, which includes personal recipes, will delight the senses, feed the spirit, enlarge our understanding, and deepen our ability to "eat and drink to the glory of God." Contributors include Lauren Winner, Luci Shaw, and Wendell Berry. Edited by Leslie Leyland Fields.

Our other selection -- from what is likely to be a completely different perspective -- is Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. The Los Angeles Times' reviewer said: “Gilbert’s journey is full of mystical dreams, visions and uncanny coincidences…Yet for every ounce of self-absorption her classical New-Age journey demands, Gilbert is ready with an equal measure of intelligence, humor and self-deprecation…Gilbert’s wry, unfettered account of her extraordinary journey makes even the most cynical reader dare to dream of someday finding God deep within a meditation cave in India, or perhaps over a transcendent slice of pizza.”

In honor of the subject matter, we intend to meet at a restaurant for our May meeting. What shall it be -- Italian, Indian, or Indonesian?

Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Good book; good discussion. Rebecca Skloot ably presents a story that spans decades, changing values, and a spectrum of emotions. It's a story of scientific discovery intersecting with family tragedy. And while readers somewhat know the end of the story, our understanding unfolds in much the same fashion as the truth about Henrietta's cells dawns on the Lacks family.


Rebecca Skloot's color-coded system for arranging the three narratives.

The author's interest in Henrietta Lacks as the source of the famous HeLa cell line began in high school, and she tracked it for more than a decade. The tale could have been told in an unwieldy and dry consecutive order. Skloot chose to "braid" three narratives: the life of Henrietta and her family, the scientific legacy, and her own involvement in bringing the family and Henrietta's cells together. The chapters are brief, and the story moves back and forth between threads. What's remarkable is how what she leaves us with at the end of one chapter leads to the subject of the next, although the timeframes can be separated by many years.

Skloot explains her writing process -- years of research followed by years of writing and rewriting -- in this YouTube video. In this interview, she also discusses her process and the decision to insert herself into the narrative. (Her rationale turns out to be much more sound and her technique more skillful than that of Mary Roach; here the "intrusion" helps tell the story, while in Stiff  it hinders.) There's another lengthy interview with the author here.

Our discussion revolved around our own impressions and some of the questions provided on the author's website. We were interested in the issue of informed consent, and also on the history of science. We remarked on how uneven and tainted the progress of knowledge has been. Critics like to blame religion for many wrongs, but what they replace it with is hardly pure, as we've also seen in Stiff and The Genius Factory. There's an allusion to another of our past reading subjects, Charles Lindbergh, in his dubious connection with eugenist Alexis Carrel (he of the "immortal" chicken liver).

The science could have gotten heavy, but this nonfiction book reads like a mystery novel. Because I don't want to forget why Henrietta's cells are so remarkable, why they still make news, I'll close with the explanation here:

Scientists knew from studying HeLa that cancer cells could divide indefinitely, and they'd speculated for years about whether cancer was caused by an error in the mechanism that made cells die when they reached their Hayflick Limit [the lifespan of normal cells being preprogrammed]. They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chormosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer time our cells have left to divide before they die.

By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. It was this immortality, and the strength with which Henrietta's cells grew, that made it possible for HeLa to take over so many other cultures -- they simply outlived and outgrew any other cells they encountered.

Another mystery solved: The Lacks Cancer Center at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Rapids, MI, is not named for Henrietta but Richard J. Lacks, a prominent area businessman. In 1999, his family pledged $10 million toward the construction of the new center if the hospital raised addition funds.