They’re the people who took somebody else’s invention and made it commercially viable. The inventors we remember didn’t invent anything. Betty Fussell did a wonderful book about corn. Sidney Mintz wrote a book about sugar called Sweetness and Power. I don’t know who the founder is, but I can tell you about a couple of people who did very nice jobs before me. “Ever think of a book about lettuce?” What I used to get a lot after Salt came out was “pepper” - which shows that they’re not getting it at all.
Paper was an opportunity to talk about technology and society.ĭo people propose commodities to you to write about?Ĭonstantly. The oyster book was about the degradation of an urban environment.
I wondered if he was picking up on a very intended message about oil. Bush read that book, and I’m told from White House correspondents that he used to talk about it a lot. The thing that was fascinating about salt is that it was considered so valuable and people went to such lengths to get it, and then almost overnight everybody said, “Oh, that’s no big deal.” What is the true value of the things that we’re valuing, and will it last? George W. I started writing Cod at a time when people were first beginning to take an interest in the problem of fisheries because the Grand Banks had closed. But these all are for very different reasons. You’ve done several that have taken that form: Cod, Salt, Paper. People think that I sit around thinking up commodities to write about, but actually I’ve had 30 books published, and most of them aren’t this kind of book. And then there are the books where they just absurdly overrate the impact. This isn’t a real one, but an example is if you did a book on oil and said, “The Fossil Fuel That Changed the World.” I mean, no kidding. I don’t think I want to just trash these people! But I have, yes. Have you ever received one that seemed ridiculous? I blurbed a pretty good book about meat called Meathooked. I blurbed a nice book, not at all like my book The Big Oyster, called The Essential Oyster.
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