I've been reading Michael Pollan's fantastic book on food and agriculture, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Almost all of the information is completely brand new to me and I'm finding it all extremely fascinating and definitely world-view changing (or should that be country-view changing, in this case?).
It helps that the book design is easy on the eye, as are the jackets of most of his other titles. The more recent ones have obviously been designed to fit together, and I think they look fantastic. The titles and subtitles are variably set in Rudolf Ruzicka's lovely 1939 Fairfield and something resembling Engravers' Gothic or Trade Gothic Extended, both of which are just fine by me.
Update, 12/20: The book was designed by MarySarah Quinn, who apparently has been the art director at a few different publishing houses. She also had a hand in this cute cover for Elements of the Table and this edition of The Stand which apparently fetches $4,000.00. Yow!
The first thing I read by Pollan was "You Are What You Grow" which ran in the New York Times in April. He references an experiment by a researcher named Adam Drewnowski:
Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods--dairy, meat, fish and produce--line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.
Besides being horrible, its the perfect kind of data to put into a chart or graph, which is something I've wanted to do for quite some time. While trying to think of small pixel art projects to ease me through the Mission Pie project (which, coincidentally, was where I learned about Pollan), this immediately came to mind as a great opportunity. I finished the drink comparison (below) and plan on doing the food comparison next. A little underwhelming after all that back story, perhaps, but the back story is more important, anyway.
