I heard author Michael Pollan on NPR this week, and my reaction was mixed. He was discussing his article in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch.” I respect Mr. Pollan’s views, what I’ve heard of them, so I wasn’t biased against him going into the interview. Then he says Food Network shows like Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals and Sandra Lee’s Semi-Homemade just have “dump and stir” recipes from which no one learns a thing. He says The Food Network claims people do download their recipes, but he asks can you call that cooking?

Come on, now. That’s a bit harsh. Does this look like dump and stir?

Pollan went on to trash event shows like Iron Chef, and though I enjoy that show and learn about food from it, I don’t learn how to cook, so his point remains. Shows like Wedding Cake Challenge are tiresome. But as he went on to dismiss the hassle of making home fries and say that marketers tell him no one cooks anymore, I have to wonder if he and his people live in a culture entirely different from mine.

Houston blogger Katherine Shillcut asks in Pollan’s critique applies to her city where farmers markets are packed and the obesity rate is high. Pollan contends that one can mark the rise in obesity by the decline in cooking at home. I don’t think it’s that simple.

Perhaps, like I said, there’s a cultural blindness in play here (probably on both sides). I can’t see how so many chefs, food bloggers, and recipe makers are sustained by the mere interest in vicarious cooking. As a rebuttal, Frank Wilson points out “The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals” and another article suggesting food critics are about as partisan as politicians.

I’m hearing a lot this afternoon about the death of film director John Hughes. I have no objection to that (although I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen any of his films myself) but I think the really big story should be the passing of novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who gave us the classic “On the Waterfront.”

“On the Waterfront” is such a great movie that even Hollywood, which never really forgave Schulberg for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committee, has to respect it. It’s the kind of movie that couldn’t be made today. A union looks bad. A Christian priest is a hero.

It’s amazing to me to read, on the Wikipedia page, that Schulberg worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a screenplay. He turned that strange experience into a novel.

Naturally affected by the experience of helping to liberate Nazi concentration camps in World War II, he was a Communist for a while, but left the party when it tried to tell him what to put in his movie, “What Makes Sammy Run?” He cooperated with the HUAC, earning him many enemies in the business.

And he did a lot of other big stuff. It was quite a life.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I think I’ve proven him wrong,” Frank McCourt said, reported in The Washington Times. “And all because I refused to settle for a one-act existence, the 30 years I taught English in various New York City high schools.”

Author Frank McCourt, 78, died Sunday of skin cancer.

It was known that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had planned to write a book about language together, but no one ever knew how far the project got, or what happened to any work done. Now a Texas scholar has announced the discovery of a draft of the first pages of the book.

Steven Beebe, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Texas State Department of Communication Studies, discovered the opening pages of the unpublished manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library and has recently documented that the manuscript was the beginning of the previously believed to be unwritten Lewis and Tolkien book.

Although C. S. Lewis started the book, there is no evidence that Tolkien began work on the project.

Thanks to Dale Nelson for the tip. Dale is always on the ball.