...the taste of hot is lost from a lot of people’s palates in the U.S., I think. Hot and sour and fermented are all sort of erased from the average American diet, so we basically just have sweet, salty, and fatty.

DM: Absolutely. There is hot, but it’s very combined with sweet. Hot is not actually an instinctual taste that we seek out, like sweet, salty, and fatty; hot is a learned healing taste. So [the food industry has] harnessed the idea that hot is somehow good, but matched it with loads of high fructose corn syrup so that it becomes palatable.

But fermented is probably one of the greatest losses, I’m figuring out. I swear, if we could get everybody in this country to eat one serving a day of a really good-quality yogurt that was relatively unsweetened, and truly made through a fermentation process, I think that in itself would be a major step forward in terms of public health. That, or some other fermented food. But most people have nothing that’s truly fermented in their diet. Even the pickles and sauerkraut and things that you can buy in some supermarkets across America aren’t made through a true fermentation process anymore. So they lack all the health benefits. But recently the medical literature has been showing that genetic information is actually put into our gut through eating fermented foods. It’s becoming really obvious that this plays a key role in everything from food allergies to possible cancer prevention...

CH: And so it’s really telling to look at cultures where Western diseases just don’t exist.

DM: Right. And the proof positive is that we’re exporting this disease now. So effectively. Okinawa was just amazing: You have this culture that is so remarkable for longevity and low rates of cancer, and within one generation, our food corporations have achieved near-magical results in terms of transforming Okinawans into a group of obese diabetics with metabolic syndrome. You have these grandmothers who are 100 watching their great-grandchildren waddle around and suffer from obesity.

Obama Feared Bill Ayers Would Step on Flag Lapel Pin

(2008-05-05) — Sen. Barack Obama admitted today that he stopped wearing an American flag lapel pin out of fear that friend and domestic terror group founder William Ayers would “step on my chest.”

Some students at Centennial High School* have shaved vertical lines into their eyebrows in a trend recently made popular by hip-hop star Soulja Boy. School officials say the mark looks like a gang symbol.

Centennial administrators are telling students with the lines that they can't return to school until they shave their eyebrows off. Assistant Principal Mark Porterfield said the students are not suspended, but they are not allowed in school until they cooperate.

The Woodstock-based events producer Chris Wangro is not a very religious person, but he has always believed that something magical happens when a big crowd gets together. (This is what led him, after stints as a clown and an agitprop street performer, to begin staging concerts in Central Park—Earth Day, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, David Byrne.) So, Wangro said last week, he felt at ease when the Office of the Papal Visit hired him to plan a youth rally at St. Joseph’s Seminary, in Yonkers, to welcome Pope Benedict XVI. “It’s all very similar,” he said. “Ultimately, it comes down to creating a community through the show.”

It was four days to showtime. The Pope was arriving in Washington, and Wangro, wearing a leather jacket and Lennon-style sunglasses, was zipping around the seminary in a golf cart, attending to logistics. The audience—twenty-five thousand young people, selected by lottery from around the country—would be bused in on Saturday morning, and Wangro had planned a music festival to entertain them while they waited for the Pope. The lineup: Kelly Clarkson and groups called Saint Michael’s Warriors, the Messengers of Christ, A Fragile Tomorrow, and Jammin’ with Jesus & Friends. Wangro pointed to the stage. “This is purely a rock-and-roll rig,” he said. It was left over from a Rolling Stones show, but Wangro had installed new features, including secret exits, extra floor space, and, on the stage, a thirty-foot-high backdrop depicting a rising Christ surrounded by purple and gold sun rays. Backstage, he was setting up a papal greenroom that would impress even the most demanding diva: fresh flowers, mirrors, Oriental carpets, a decorative cross selected by the fathers at the seminary, a couch-filled seating area, a “very fancy mobile toilet unit.”