The amiable looking chap with the generous hooter and the knowing gaze could write a bit.
Bech saved Petrescu for last, and walloped his back, for the man had led him to remember, what he was tempted to forget in America, that reading can be the best part of a man’s life.
John Updike (1932-2009)
If BabbelOn took a backpack, a bag of rice and a survival manual and wandered into the wilderness without telling anyone where he was going, hardened readers would say he was crazy and deserving of everything he received, including possibly a lingering and lonely demise.
If BabbelOn was a 22 year old, good looking, intelligent middle-class American student (and who is to say he isn’t?), progressive readers might say that he was misguided and “looking for himself”.
If his misadventures became the subject of a New York Times Best Seller and a “Sean Penn Film”, soft-boiled readers would have to concede that he was perhaps, albeit posthumously, onto something.
Christopher McCandless went looking for himself in Alaska in 1992, died of starvation three months later and has been immortalised in Into the Wild.
This film was nominated for two Oscars and numerous other awards. (The ABC’s resident hobbit gave it 5 stars). At the time that BabbelOn began scribing this post, the film was ranked the #245 best film of all time (by IMDB.com), putting it just ahead of Harold & Maude and behind Shaun of the Dead. At last count, it had risen to a frankly astonishing #130, ranking it ahead of Die Hard, Annie Hall and Ben Hur and trailing not very far behind Gladiator. (As at 7 April it is now #126 and has gone past Gladiator.)
BabbelOn is rarely moved to review movies but cannot let this one pass.
Into The Wild is something of a departure for Sean Penn. Cineaste readers will be familiar with his earlier films, The Indian Runner (with a young Viggo Mortensen), The Pledge (with an old Jack Nicholson) and even The Crossing Guard (with a not quite as old Jack Nicholson). (Mr Penn enjoys working in “The” movie business apparently.) Those films were violent, psychological fictions. This one is a gently moving true story with a charismatic lead and nice scenery. But pretty actors and Alaskan landscapes do not equal Ben Hur (let alone Die Hard).
The $22 question is - should one care about McCandless’s story?
Before BabbelOn attempts to answer that question, a short detour into the plot is required (BabbelOn begs the indulgence of those readers who have seen the film or have not but are prepared to have it spoiled).
After graduating from university, McCandless gave his college fund to charity, said so long to his family and drove his old Datsun into the desert in search of adventure (he called himself, without irony, ”Alexander Supertramp“).
What was he running away from? His family; in particular his parents. He wasn’t beaten or threatened in any way. In fact the worst thing his parents did to him was to offer to buy him a new car. This was the catalyst for him to take off for good. Admittedly there was parental abuse. William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden yelled at one another and he once held her tightly in the kitchen. But the sin committed by Ma and Pa McCandless was that … they lied to young Chris. It turns out that Pa had been married to someone else at the time he met Ma (gasp) and they weren’t married until some time after Chris and his sister were born which made them, technically, bastards. BabbelOn wryly observes that if every kid whose parents had to get married in the ’60s decided to burn his money and hike into Alaska, Nome would have the population of, say, Los Angeles.
The film’s voice-over is by Chris’s sister who loved him and put up with his aberrant behaviour and in return didn’t get so much as a postcard or a phone call. In the film, McCandless thinks about calling home but then gives his dime (apparently his last one) to an old guy having his own short-changed crisis on the next pay phone.
Our hero does not appear to have been running towards anything special either – despite his protestations about western materialism and his second-hand philosophy about nature and the simple life (he finds room in his backpack for Jack London and Thoreau. Rimbaud must also have been in there somewhere). What he really needed was a stack of books made out of edible paper or Jamie Oliver’s Moose and Wild Grass Salad recipes.
His longing for the far horizon apparently didn’t extend beyond continental USA. His one foray across the border into Mexico ended quickly with him begging to be let back in, having burnt his social security card (presumably he never had a passport) along with his remaining cash and his bridges.
McCandless has some encounters on his road trip, with hippies and drug dealers and an old guy who shows him how to make a leather belt (adding holes to it becomes symbolic of his weight loss in Alaska). The hippies are friendly and philosophical and try to gently guide him (“Don’t go to Alaska in the winter”). But their efforts prove futile against the boy philosopher with the strong will and the chip on his shoulder.
Naturally, there is romance of sorts as he is picked up by a 16 year old in the hippie camp. She looks like a young Brooke Shields and sings like Jonie Mitchell but even she can’t stop his vision quest.
After much dicking around, making enough money doing odd jobs to pay for his adventure, eventually he hikes into Alaska with a fishing rod (which apparently he didn’t know how to use), a knife, a pup-tent, a book on edible plants (apparently not many of which grow in Alaska) and his books. No map, canoe, first aid kit or even water-proof boots. His ego wouldn’t allow him to tell anyone where he was going or to ask for advice from an actual Alaskan.
Incredibly for him, he finds an old bus in the middle of nowhere, which has been fitted out with a stove, bed and basic kitchen. If he hadn’t lucked onto the bus, the film would have been an hour shorter (rather than 2 1/2 hours). As it is, he survives shooting small game, wandering around, communing with nature.
After three months he has worked through most of his issues (with the help of Thoreau and the boys) and decides to leave. Tragically for our hero, the stream he waded across has now swollen with the melting snows (who would have thought it?) So he is trapped. No game around, no edible plants (although he does try some that make him sick). So begins a downward spiral to starvation, hallucination and cult status.
One of his last acts is to write in the margin of one of his books “Happiness is only real when it is shared” (with humans, not grizzlies).
So, back to the $22 question ($10 on Tuesdays) – should one care about McCandless?
BabbelOn always enjoys answering a question with another one. Would this film have been made if the boy had survived (say by hiking up the river to where it wasn’t so deep, or setting off a distress flare, or using a radio, or even learning how to use that fishing rod?) Does a grizzly makes its toilet in the woods?
Was he a hero? Was his death a tragedy? Probably. It certainly seems inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. What did he do with his life? One is forced to conclude – not much. How should he be remembered? Was he an idealistic young artist, starving in his garret? Or a selfish, narcissistic middle-class waster. If nothing else, he is a warning to all would-be Grizzly Adams’s, the poster boy for the National Parks & Wildlife Service.
Why don’t we let some actual Alaskans have the second last word?
Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”
Judith Kleinfeld wrote in the Anchorage Daily News that “many Alaskans react with rage to his stupidity. You’d have to be a complete idiot, they say, to die of starvation in summer 20 miles off the Park’s Highway.”
That’s good enough for BabbelOn. Perhaps the only thing more wasteful than Christopher McCandless’s short young life was making it into a film.
BabbelOn heard a new word the other day and being of a curious mind, decided to do some virtual digging.
The word was “acrylamide”. BabbelOn doesn’t want to frighten you, gentle readers, but here goes anyway:
”Acrylamide: A readily polymerized amide, C3H5NO …
Any chemical with the word NO in its formula can’t be all good.
“… derived from acrylic acid and used in synthetic fibers and sewage treatment. …”
Acid, synthetic fibers (sic) and sewage treatment are three things that all right thinking people should avoid. Distasteful, but nothing to hide under the bed about so far.
“… It is a carcinogen …”
The dreaded C word. This definition, like reality TV, just gets worse the further into it you get. Those readers brave enough to have stuck it out this far, prepare yourselves for the punchline:
“… and is present in some foods, especially starches and cereals that are cooked at high temperatures.”
Starches and cereals that are cooked at high temperatures. Hmmm, that only includes bread, chips, roast potatoes, cereals, pizza and probably many other things consumed in large quantities on a daily basis throughout the western world. All together now … “C3H5NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Time for a deep breath. In fact, why don’t you grab a cup of coffee and a biscuit while I do some more research.
Back and comfortable? OK, here’s what I found while you were in the kitchen. According to a World Health Organisation report in 2005, two of the highest concentrations of acrylamide are found in … coffee and biscuits.
Before we all go off the deep end, as a public service to its intelligent but time-poor public, BabbelOn has read the WHO report. It can be summarised as follows:
For those of a scientific bent, here are some selected extracts:
“Although trace amounts of acrylamide can be formed by boiling, significant formation generally requires a processing temperature of 120 degrees Celsius or higher. Most acrylamide is accumulated during the final stages of baking, grilling or frying processes as the moisture content of the food falls and the surface temperature rises …
The major contributing foods to total exposure for most countries were french fries (16-30%), potato crisps (6-46%), coffee (13-39%), pastry and sweet biscuits (10-20%) and bread and rolls/toasts (10-30%). Other food items contributed less than 10% of the total exposure.
Margins of exposure (MOEs) have been calculated at intakes of 0.001 mg acrylamide/kg body weight/day, to represent the average intake of the general population based on national estimates. Comparison of these intakes with the no-observed-effect level (NOEL) of 0.2 mg/kg bw/day for morphological changes in nerves detected in rats would provide MOEs of 200 and 50, respectively.
When the value of 0.001 mg acrylamide/kg body weight/day taken to represent the average intake of the general population was compared with the benchmark dose of 0.30 mg/kg bw/day for induction of mammary tumors in rats, the MOE is 300. The Committee considered these MOEs to be low for a compound that is genotoxic and carcinogenic and that they may indicate a human health concern. Therefore, appropriate efforts to reduce acrylamide concentrations in foodstuffs should continue.”
Your correspondent is almost sorry he started this post. But stick with it, loyal readers, there is some light at the end of this tract (if not your intestinal one).
Let’s pause for a moment to spare a thought for the lab rats exposed to our new friends MOE and NOEL. A diet of chips and pastries probably sounded liked a pretty good gig as far as these things go. But it was obviously no picnic. One of the effects of the massive acrylamide doses fed to the rats was “atrophy of testes, reduced fertility and adverse effects on sperm count.” Why is it always the reproductive organs that cop it? Why can’t it be some less sensitive part of the anatomy, say the foot? Glad you asked, replies the WHO report. Another effect was something called “hindlimb foot splay”. Great. Shrunken testes and a limp.
At this point, lucky readers residing in western democracies will be thinking – “This whole acrylawhatever thing can’t be that serious or our government would have done something about it. At least they would have warned us, wouldn’t they? That’s what governments are for, isn’t it?”
Actually, that’s what the WHO is for. Governments only like to warn us about a problem when they know what the answer is and can reassure us that everything is under control. The only time a government will deliberately scare us is when it thinks there are votes in protecting us. If they don’t know what the answer is, they would rather we didn’t know about the problem and if we find out they will blame someone else. The best kind of threat is therefore one that no-one but the government knows about. Occasionally the truth gets out and all hell breaks loose (see Indian doctors who lend their SIM cards to relatives).
To be fair, the Californian government did do something about the WHO report; in 2005 it sued all the fast food companies.
The Californian Attorney General said at the time:
“In taking this action, I am not telling people to stop eating potato chips or french fries.”
He’s no fool.
“I know from personal experience that, while these snacks may not be a necessary part of a healthy diet, they sure taste good. But I, and all consumers, should have the information we need to make informed decisions about the food we eat.”
California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment then produced a list of acrylamide levels for 40 foods and estimated that:
“consumers of french fries receive up to 125 times the amount of acrylamide that requires a warning under current regulations, while consumers of potato chips receive as much as 75 times the level requiring a warning.”
And, being California, they also produced a diet guide. An acrylamide intake of .001 mg/day would be exceeded if one consumed the following foods on average once every . . .
Wheatena(TM) 30 days
French-fried potatoes 26 days
Canned sweet potatoes 26 days
Prune juice 16 days
Postum(TM) 14 days
Potato chips 14 days
Corn/tortilla chips 9 days
Cookies 7 days
Toast 7 days
Popcorn 4 days
Black olives, canned 4 days
Ready-to-eat cereal 4 days
Crackers 3 days
Pie 3 days
Pizza 3 days
Coffee 3 days
Peanut butter 2 days
Biscuits 2 days
Breads 1 to 2 days
Imagine trying to follow this Californian diet. Coffee no more than once every three days? Toast once a week? It’s tougher than the Israeli army diet and that was just apples and cheese.
To reach the WHO NOEL 0.3 mg/kg/day threshhold would require eating everything on the list every day. Now that might sound excessive (particulary the prune juice) but I would wager that there would be some people out there who could do it standing on their hindlimbs (eg. those recovering from the Israeli army diet).
Having led a somewhat antipodean life, BabbelOn was unfamiliar with Wheatena and Postum. Through the magic of the internet, here they are. Postum is apparently favoured by those who consider caffeine unhealthy (boy are they in for a shock) or who avoid caffeinated products for religious reasons, such as our old friends the Mormons.
It must be possible to import these products by mail order, even from the antipodes. Assuming that they could clear customs (perhaps by marking them “Acrylamide”) this could open up a lucrative new product line for Philip Nitschke; The Acrylamide Last Supper (TM). Begin with olives and crackers, hash browns and chips with a glass of prune juice, followed by coffee, whilst wearing nylon pyjamas. If that doesn’t finish you off, eat handfuls of Wheatena and Postum and jump into the nearest sewage treatment works.
So why aren’t our favourite TV shows interrupted with public health ads and our letterboxes stuffed with fridge magnets warning of the dangers of acrylamide?
A thorough search of the Australian government websites reveals this. A very informative notice on the Food Standards Australia & New Zealand web-site.
“FSANZ has kept a watching brief on international developments regarding acrylamide and has undertaken a limited assessment of the dietary exposure of Australian consumers to acrylamide. FSANZ will continue to work with other national governments to better understand the potential health risk from exposure to acrylamide in the diet.
FSANZ continues to recommend that consumers should eat a balanced diet containing a range of healthy foods (including a broad range of fruit and vegetables), and to limit high fat and fried foods, as much as possible.”
Great. Reading that in 2005 would certainly have caused one to immediately stop with the chips and the pizza and the toast and the coffee. To say nothing of the other foods (it says nothing of the other foods).
That acrylamine is found in food (and not just synthetics and sewage treatment), was first discovered by Swedish scientists in 2002. That the Swedes are involved should not be a surprise. This is what happens when high taxing, small “l” liberal governments spend their tax dollars funding research. Scientists who should be designing the latest mobile phones and plasma TVs instead come up with new ways to scare the acrylamide out of the rest of us. No wonder the Swedes are the heaviest drinkers in the world. Can you imagine what the TV news is like in Stockholm:
NEWSREADER
(Blonde, handsome, slightly depressed looking)
“Researchers at the Ingmar Bergman Institute for Premature Aging announced today that watching TV causes cancer. A three hour documentary follows.”
BabbelOn promised diligent and patient readers some good news. Here it is: According to the WHO report, alcoholic beverages, raw vegetables and meat are low in acrylamides. So is chocolate and milk.
One solution is therefore to have a stiff drink, a medium rare steak and a salad, or a family-size block of chocolate and a glass of warm milk. Perhaps while you are relaxing, you could listen to some Joe Jackson. After all … “there’s no cure, there’s no answer…”
In the end, it turns out that there is hope. The same scientists that frighten us sometimes also come up with a solution. In this case, it comes from just down the road from Sweden. A Danish company, Novozymes, recently announced that it has developed an enzyme (the poetically named “Acrylaway”), that food manufacturers can add to the cooking process to limit the production of acrylamide.
A recent Harvard study also appears to have cleared acrylamide of causing breast cancer (at least in humans).
Some perspective is also found in this report in 2005:
Even if no one today can answer the question of whether dietary acrylamide is hazardous to humans, it is not inconceivable to us that acrylamide can contribute approximately 1% of the lifetime cancer risk, considering that a large fraction of all cancers has been attributed to dietary factors. However, because the individual’s estimated cancer risk due to dietary acrylamide is quite small, there seems to be no reason to change nutritional guidelines, because the high consumption of foods such as potato chips or french fries should be avoided for other and more prominent health-related reasons, such as cardiovascular disease. However, the situation for vulnerable groups, e.g., pregnant women and children, should always be carefully considered.
In other words, the saturated fats will probably finish you off well before the acrylamide gets you.
Perhaps the Australian government is right after all that: “consumers should eat a balanced diet containing a range of healthy foods (including a broad range of fruit and vegetables), and to limit high fat and fried foods, as much as possible.”
Boring but sensible.
In conclusion, BabbelOn raises a glass of warm milk and toasts a future full of toast.
Here’s a final thought on risk management.
“There is no consensus definition of the precautionary principle, but one oft-mentioned statement [from the Wingspread conference in Racine, WI, in 1998] sums it up: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”
This is an interesting point for the climate change debate. But that’s a whole other post for a whole other day.
After an exhaustive (and exhausting) search picking the eyes out of the acrylamide debate, BabbelOn emerges from his paranoid funk just long enough to go to sleep, dreaming of prune juice and sweet, sweet potatoes.
