… or so it sometimes seems. Some surprising, counter-intuitive thoughts about eating healthy, from a Washington Post blog (via Deborah Blum).

There’s nothing like a gorgeous summer day in Oregon. Just spent part of the weekend at local farmer’s markets, where the people are friendly, the produce is beautiful, and the prices are sky-high (c’mon, folks, $1 per leek?). I  love eating fresh,untainted vegetables and fruits, but wish that somebody would figure out how to keep the cost down.  Still, it was heartening to see the sheer number of farmers at these events — a sign that at least in my part of the country, there is a resurgence in interest in careful, thoughtful, healthy smallholder farming. Sometimes it seems like everybody’s going organic, with “organic” on the labels of ever-more products, not just at the weekend markets, but in our grocery stores as well. Organic is growing fast, it appears. Or is it?

Turns out that the organic movement might be a smaller, less important factor than it appears.  Check out this interesting item over at Sustainablog for the background.

See geneticist Pamela Ronald’s thoughts here. The point is that not all GMO crops are the same, they’re generally safe, and we should judge them on a case-by-case basis instead of painting them all as bad or all as good. Sounds reasonable to me.  Ronald is married to an organic farmer, and together they’ve tried to find productive middle ground between hardcore anti-tech foodies and hardcore pro-tech forces.

I’ve just released my 1995 biography of Linus Pauling, Force of Nature, for the Kindle platform. This book holds a special place in my writer’s heart — it was my first big-time solo book, published by a big publisher (Simon & Schuster), for decent money, and got some terrific reviews — so I’m glad to see it living on in cyberspace.

As a sometimes-publisher, it was an education to see how complicated  it is to create an ebook from hard copy . Turns out to be a lot harder than it should be, but that’s only because I wanted to do everything myself.

Oh, yes — My son Jackson designed the cover. Great job.  You can order the book here.

Well, this is swell. I received an email this morning saying that Raj Shah likes my book, “The Alchemy of Air.”  For those of you who don’t know,  Shah came out of the Dept. Agriculture, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and now heads USAID, the central agency for distributing tens of billions of dollars in US civilian aid to foreign countries.  In other words, he’s kind of a big deal (and take a look at the photo — he’s not even 40 years old yet). Young, talented — and very good taste in literature.

Here’s the email:

Dear Professor Hager,

I am writing from FiveBooks at TheBrowser.com. Each day on FiveBooks, we feature an interview with an expert — a scholar, artist, politician, journalist, or other eminent figure — who recommends and discusses the five best books in his or her field. I thought you might be interested to know that  Dr Rajiv Shah has recommended your book, The Alchemy of Air, as one of five must read books on Breakthroughs in Development. Here is the link:
http://thebrowser.com/interviews/rajiv-shah-on-breakthroughs-development

Oregon Public Broadcasting put together a terrific new one-hour documentary on the life of Linus Pauling. It aired last night, but because we don’t get television signals at our house I didn’t get to watch it until today, when they started streaming it. I think it’s  very well produced and shot, quite complete, plenty of good images and archival video, and provides a good overview of the high points of his life (full disclosure:  I’m interviewed in it). Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know more about one of the great scientific personalities of our time.

A new article in Scientific American makes the case that declining soil quality and increasing dependence on crops bred for size and transportability — rather than nutritional value — makes today’s grocery-store produce significantly less nutritious than the greens (and reds and yellows and purples) your grandparents ate.  Looks like good soil = better crops, both when it comes to quality as well as quantity. Just what you’d expect. But the story as written is a bit too much of a downer. The drops in vitamins and minerals the authors note are disquieting, true. But the unspoken good news is that we can quickly bring the nutrition back if we get down in the dirt and work on  improving soil quality (through proven methods like soil conservation, crop rotation, and improved fertilizers) and work toward breeding more nutritional value into our crops — like this project is doing in Africa.

Nice to see some good news for a change: Since the 1970s, significant improvements in US air quality have been matched by a steady rise in life expectancy.  We all owe thanks to everyone who worked on the Clean Air Act.

I write about science as a mixed bag — in other words, I try to note its limits as well as its successes. Science and a modern sense of the rational have been around for more than three centuries, and by now it seems these ways of thinking would have triumphed, displacing all the old superstitions and bringing Shining Reason to rule over human affairs. But this  has not happened. Despite the takeover of government and academia by number-crunchers, policy wonks, and social scientists, society  remains anything but rational. The reason is simple: Humans are much more than number-crunchers.  Much deeper. More mysterious. Motivated by tangled, sometimes conflicting inner forces. It is time to recognize that fact and integrate it into our public policy-making. This terrific David Brooks op-ed, forwarded to me by my friend Mical Lewis, outlines the issue and points toward the rise of a new kind of humanism.

It’s nice to see medical students getting something out of my work, as in this  Adjacent Possible Medicine blog post