Clockwise from top left: A Uighur woman protests before paramilitary police in Urumqi on Tuesday (AP); Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in an interview on Tuesday (MSNBC.com); President Obama speaks about climate change during the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy (AP); Janet Jackson (l) and LaToya Jackson (r) stand behind Michael Jackson’s daughter, Paris Jackson, during the late star’s memorial service in Los Angeles on Tuesday (AP).

The president in Moscow and Rome. Street battles in China. Fireworks in Washington over health care and jobs. Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.

Guests:

Kathleen Parker, syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writer’s Group.

Clarence Page, columnist for The Chicago Tribune.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

TOM ASHBROOK: We are very glad to have with us right now from Washington Christina Romer. She is chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, [and] a leading scholar on the economics of the Great Depression, unfortunately relevant here. Christina Romer, thank you very much for joining us.

CHRISTINA ROMER: It’s great to be here.

TOM ASHBROOK: There’s a lot of talk about another round of stimulus, Stimulus II or Stimulus III, if you count George W. Bush’s initial one. Where are you coming down on this, and why?

CHRISTINA ROMER: Where we’re coming down is we currently have $787 billion of stimulus that’s been passed. We’re certainly focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that’s absolutely the right strategy. That’s certainly going to be the money that can get out the door the quickest and we are already doing that, so I think it makes sense to concentrate on that.

TOM ASHBROOK: The vice president saying there was a miscalculation here over the weekend. Nobody expected unemployment to be where it is right now. If there’s a miscalculation, is that a justification to at least consider more stimulus money?

CHRISTINA ROMER: It’s important to realize that none of us has a crystal ball. So the way I described what happened back in December and January and February was we got a tremendous amount of new information. And certainly, if you watch a lot of the private forecast, everybody was staging their forecasts very quickly, precisely because we were finding out things, like the rest of the world was going down with us.

So the important thing, again, is to concentrate on where we are now, and where we are now is with a lot of fiscal stimulus there already approved. And an important thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we always knew it would take some time, even with the shovel-ready projects, to actually get the money there and employing people, and an important fact is that it is ramping up substantially over the next couple of quarters. And so, we certainly want to give time for that medicine to start hitting the economy.

…

TOM ASHBROOK: Mark in Amherst, Massachusetts, you’re on the air with President Obama’s big advisor.

MARK: First, concern about the deficit right now is preposterous. Second, FDR tried several public works programs, but the only thing that got us out was a public works program otherwise known as World War II which was a massively greater stimulus….

TOM ASHBROOK: So you say more stimulus Mark?

MARK: Yes.

TOM ASHBROOK: Christina Romer, ridiculous to think about the deficit? Mark says the only thing that bailed FDR out was the war.

CHRISTINA ROMER: I think Mark makes a sensible point about in the short run, given the terrible situation that we inherited, the large budget deficit we inherited, the fact that we needed to do things to get the economy going again, it is unfortunately right and appropriate that the deficit got bigger. That was just inevitable. I think where I differ a little bit, we absolutely have to think about the deficit looking down the road. And certainly that’s something the president has said that we need to, as the economy recovers, have a plan in place for getting it down.

This is one of things I’ve been pushing so hard is, this is why healthcare reform is so important. If you look at the studies coming out of the Congressional Budget Office, the number one thing that’s going to blow a hole in the deficit as we go forward 20, 30 years is government spending on healthcare. So doing those reforms now that genuinely slow the growth rate of cost, that’s the thing that we can do right now to make us healthier, you know, after we get through this crisis and bring those budget deficits down in the long run.

TOM ASHBROOK: The vice president said over the weekend, you know, that the administration undershot its expectations of unemployment. It’s already higher than was expected. So might that mean that you undershot on the size of the stimulus needed as well?

CHRISTINA ROMER: As I was saying earlier, we certainly got a lot of information, all forecasters did, that things were changing quickly, and we certainly have seen the unemployment rate go up more than anyone, I think, anticipated. You know, I think the important thing is to concentrate — we have done a tremendous amount to try to turn this economy around. It’s not just the fiscal stimulus. Think of all the work we’ve been doing on the housing program to try to mitigate foreclosures, to try to allow people to refinance at lower rates. Those are things that are designed to actually help consumers do better, start spending again — the financial rescue. So, all of them are part of a comprehensive package.

TOM ASHBROOK: What would it take for you to say, “You know what, we tried, but it wasn’t enough, it’s time to pull the trigger”? 10.5 percent unemployment? 11 percent unemployment? What would it take for you to advise that?

CHRISTINA ROMER: I think the crucial thing is: What’s the direction that we’re moving in, right? So one of the things that, you know, I think people have forgotten is just what the economy — I’m sure they haven’t forgotten — what the economy was like in December and January. We were truly an economy in freefall. And I think one of the things we’ve been seeing is moderating conditions. We’ve started to see some of those leading indicators, like building permits, orders for durable goods — those kind of things that tend to turn around before the actual economy turns around. You know, what I’m going to be looking at is, Are we on the right path? And certainly we do have to give the stimulus the time to have an effect. Simply because we do know we’re getting a lot more money out the door in the next several months, and we’ll be getting a read on, Is that doing what we think it should be doing?

TOM ASHBROOK: Are we on the right path right now? You saw the unemployment numbers for June that just came out last week.

CHRISTINA ROMER: Of course we all were disappointed at those unemployment numbers. Every person that is unemployed is a tragedy, and the numbers we saw clearly were bad. I think the important thing is to not read too much into any one point of data. For example, right today we just got some information that initial claims for unemployment insurance have dropped a lot. So I think we do have to realize that there’s a fair amount of noise in our indicators.

I’m going to be looking at all of the indicators, and are we seeing them — we’ve got to be moderating the downturn before we actually turn the corner. And I want to make sure we’re still on that path. But of course we are concerned. That’s why we are focusing so much on taking the stimulus we have and using it as quickly and effectively as we can.

Listen to the full hour here, in which Romer was followed by William Gale of Brookings and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

From iRobot.com

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In 1973, the now nearly-sainted Michael Jackson first popularized the dance “The Robot” with the Jackson Five’s hit “Dancing Machine.” In 1984, the first Terminator movie hit theaters, with humans pitted against robots from the future.

In 2009 — right now — robots are, in fact, moving into more and more facets of life, from cleaning gutters to making war.

My guest today, iRobot CEO Colin Angle, says robots won’t take over the world, but they will merge with us. In fact, he says, they already are.

This hour, On Point: iRobot’s co-founder, and the future of the robotic world.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

We’re joined in our studio by Colin Angle, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of iRobot. iRobot produces – among other products – the popular floor-vacuuming “Roomba” robot, and the military “PackBot” robot, in wide use by the U.S. Armed Forces. Colin is one of the world’s leading experts on mobile robots, and formerly worked at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

More:

You can watch a number of videos of iRobot products on the company’s YouTube channel. Here are a couple we liked: a prototype of the iRobot Warrior and a “flying” iRobot PackBot.

Two women pray during an unemployed support group meeting in Beverly, Mass., in June. (AP)

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Americans are optimistic people. We wanted to see “green shoots” of recovery in the economy. We really did. Still do.

There’s a welcome decline reported today in the number of newly laid-off workers filing initial claims for jobless benefits. But the overall trend in unemployment? Painfully up, despite the huge stimulus bill passed in February.

The talk in Washington and beyond is that the economy may need another huge round of fiscal stimulus. More billions. Republicans say that’s crazy. The White House is non-committal. Congressional Democrats are holding their fire. But the heat is on.

This hour, On Point: Top Obama economic adviser Christina Romer, and the debate over Stimulus II.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Gerald Seib, executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal, where he writes the Capital Journal column. He’s co-author with John Harwood of “Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power.”

Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

William Gale, director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and co-author, with Alan Auerbach, of the Brookings publication “An Update on the Economic and Fiscal Crises: 2009 and Beyond.”

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.”

We have the full transcript of Christina Romer’s interview up online. Her take on whether the White House should immediately push another stimulus package?  Here she is:

Where we’re coming down is we currently have $787 billion of stimulus that’s been passed. We’re certainly focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that’s absolutely the right strategy. That’s certainly going to be the money that can get out the door the quickest and we are already doing that, so I think it makes sense to concentrate on that… (Read the rest.)

An American nun crosses her hands in front of her Rosary Beads as she attends the 2008 World Youth Day celebrations in Australia. (AP)

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In recent decades, the number of Catholic nuns in the United States has fallen dramatically, but their perspectives on spirituality, calling, and the Roman Catholic Church have broadened dramatically.

Many have left convent and habit — and some, Church teaching — far behind, to live more deeply in the world.

Now, the Vatican is investigating whether American nuns have strayed too far — whether they are “living in fidelity” to the religious life as prescribed by Rome. Some sisters are pushing back, charging inquisition.

This hour, On Point: What’s going on with America’s Catholic nuns.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Laurie Goodstein, national religion correspondent for The New York Times. She’s covered American Catholic life for more than a decade. Her recent article, “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny,” has stirred up some debate.

From Berkeley, Calif., we’re joined by Sister Sandra Schneiders, professor emerita of New Testament studies and spirituality at The Jesuit Theology School at Berkeley. She is a member of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an order in Monroe, Michigan. She has expressed concern publicly over the Vatican’s inquiry into American nuns, but makes clear that she’s speaking for herself, not her order or theology school.

From Pittsburgh, we’re joined by Sister Mary Traupman, a practicing attorney a member of Sisters of Divine Providence, an order in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. In her legal work she helps senior citizens with issues from guardianship to social security. She has also worked as a teacher and as a health care administrator.

And from Gallup, New Mexico, we’re joined by Mother Mary Quentin Sheridan, Superior General of The Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Michigan. She is also a founder and current president of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, which supports more traditional roles for women in Catholic religious orders.

Supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya cheer as his airplane flies overhead at the international airport in Tegucigalpa, Sunday, July 5, 2009. (AP)

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Before he was tossed out of Honduras in his pajamas by the Honduran military, President Manuel Zelaya was a proud populist buddy of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who — like Chavez — was looking to rewrite his country’s constitution to allow himself to stay in office.

For the poor, he said.

Now, Honduras has had a 21st century coup d’etat. And Zelaya has turned to Washington — which he and Chavez demonize — for help in getting back into power.

It’s quite a picture. And Hondurans are still poor.

This hour, On Point: coup, and the hard backstory, in Honduras.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

From Atlanta, Georgia, we’re joined by Jennifer McCoy, professor of political science at Georgia State University and director of the Americas program at The Carter Center in Atlanta. She’s an expert on democracy in Latin America and is editor of the book “The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela.”

And from Washington we’re joined by Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute’s Center on Global Prosperity. His opinion piece “Honduras’s Coup Is President Zelaya’s Fault” appeared in The Washington Post on July 1. His op-ed for The New York Times on June 30 was headlined “The Winner in Honduras: Chávez.” He’s  the author of “The Che Guevara Myth” and “Liberty for Latin America,” among other books. 

And from Guatemala City, we’re joined by Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University and author of “Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.”  His piece “Democracy Derailed in Honduras” appeared recently in The Nation. 

I think what’s going on is, in effect, a kind of an adjustment, particularly on the part of Russia, but also on the part of America, to new international realities. We have learned, rather painfully, in the course of the last eight years especially, that even if we are the only global superpower, we are not capable of unilateral action, of sustaining that. We simply don’t have enough power to dictate to the world. And the Russians are learning that the days of their empire are over.

Here’s the full interview with Brzezinski:

In the second half of the show, Stephen F. Cohen, professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, offered quite a different perspective.  It’s worth a listen.

A worker in Houston, Texas. (Photo by billjacobus1/flickr.com; click above for full image.)

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It’s been a rough recession for everyone, but especially rough for men.

Tally up the job losses since November, and 80 percent have fallen on American males. Factory jobs, gone. Hard hat construction jobs, gone. The very male cowboy culture of Wall Street, stumbled and humbled.

Reihan Salam looks at the fall and sees not just numbers. He sees the end of an era of macho jobs, macho risk-taking, the end of an age of macho culture ruling the economy.

It may be a quiet end, he says. And it may not.

This hour, On Point: Reihan Salam on the grind of the Great Recession, and “the death of macho.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Reihan Salam joins us from New York. He’s a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of an article in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine titled “The Death of Macho.”  He’s the co-author, with Ross Douthat, of “Grand New Party: How Conservatives Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

Joining us from Olympia, Wash., is Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families.  Her most recent book is “Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage.”

More links:

UMass-Amherst economist Nancy Folbre puts Reihan Salam’s piece in context on the NYTimes.com Economix blog. One of the articles she points to is this one, from Forbes, called “Cleaning Crew: The women who are fixing the financial mess.”

And in Foreign Policy, BYU political economist Valerie Hudson writes “Good Riddance: Why macho had to go.”

President Barack Obama and Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev sign a preliminary agreement to reduce the world's two largest nuclear stockpiles by as much as a third, to the lowest levels of any U.S.-Russia accord, before a joint news conference at the Kremlin in Moscow on Monday, July 6, 2009. (AP)

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Last summer, it was all but proxy war between the United States and Russia. Russian troops in neighboring Georgia. Washington’s rhetoric on fire.

This summer, it’s Barack Obama in Moscow, talking about a new beginning in U.S.-Russia ties. He talked with Medvedev. Talked with Putin. He got the start of a nuclear arms deal. He got over-flight rights for the U.S. military to Afghanistan.

But as for a real restart, a reset — not so clear. There are tough issues here with a defiant, oil-rich Russia.

This hour, On Point: Zbigniew Brzezinski, and more, on Obama in Moscow and the push for a reset with Russia.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

From Moscow we’re joined by Karen Travers, White House reporter for ABC News. She’s been traveling with President Obama in Russia and covered his speech today and the arms agreement signed yesterday.

From Washington, we’re joined by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor under President Jimmy Carter, from 1977 to 1981, and now a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

And joining us from New York is Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and a contributing editor to The Nation.  His most recent book is “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives.”

A plastic 55 gallon barrel is seen among piles of driftwood and mud along the Potomac River in Cropley, Md., Feb. 8, 2006. (AP)

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For years now, the stories have been piling up. Frogs and salamanders with extra legs. “Intersex fish,” neither male or female. Eighty percent of male smallmouth bass in the Potomac producing eggs.

And the apparent culprit: chemicals in the water — endocrine disruptors — that are also in our water and everyday household items.

Now scientists are tracking large increases in genital deformities in newborn boys, early-onset puberty in girls, obesity and diabetes in animals and humans, and warning that these, too, could have a chemical cause.

This hour, On Point: Danger in the water — endocrine disruptors, and their long reach.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Amherst, Mass., is R. Thomas Zoeller, professor and chair of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is one of the authors a 50-page scientific statement by the Endocrine Society, “Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals,” which was cited by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in his column for Sunday, June 28. (Also see Kristof’s followup blog post on the topic.)

Joining us from Washington is Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and epidemiologist. She is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 1993 she was appointed by President Clinton to serve as Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, where she served for five years.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announces that she is stepping down, in a speech in Wasilla, Alaska, on Friday, July 3, 2009. The former Republican vice presidential candidate said she would step down on July 26, but didn't announce her subsequent plans. (AP)

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There she was. Sarah Palin, in her backyard in Wasilla, on the shores of Lake Lucille, bailing out of the governorship of Alaska.

By the end of this month, she’s gone — eighteen months shy of the end of her first term.

It was a shocker. It’s being interpreted every possible way. Erratic. Ingenious. The end of a flash career. The beginning of a serious Palin drive for the White House. She has been, by her own lights, a candidate like no other.

This hour, On Point: Citizen Palin, and what’s next for the outgoing Alaska governor and the GOP.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Anchorage, Alaska, is Michael Carey, columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and host of Anchorage Edition on Alaska Public Broadcasting.

Joining us from New York is Mark Halperin, editor-at-large and senior political analyst at Time magazine. He writes The Page at Time.com.

Joining us from Washington is David Winston. A Republican pollster and strategist, he’s president and founder of The Winston Group. He served as director of planning for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and was chief information officer for the Republican National Committee from 1989-1993.

Aoife O'Donovan and Gregory Liszt of "Crooked Still" in our studio

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Originally broadcast Aug. 12, 2008

When Crooked Still formed in 2001, it was a band of twenty-somethings from the Boston conservatory scene playing a genre-bending blend of bluegrass and folk. Critics raved about the sound of young Americans reinterpreting old Appalachian tunes.

Now, seven years later, with world tours under their belt and a recent overhaul of their lineup, they’re a little older, a little wiser — and every bit as innovative. Bluegrass and folk, pop and blues, maybe even jazz. They play mountain music from an old-time era, polished with percussive banjo-beats and an ethereal voice.

With us today we’ve got Crooked Still’s banjo player, their fiddler, and their singer-guitarist to put their sound in our ears.

This hour, On Point: breakout bluegrass innovators, Crooked Still.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Aoife O’Donovan, lead singer and founding member of Crooked Still.

Gregory Liszt, banjo player and founding member of Crooked Still. In 2006, he toured with Bruce Springsteen as a member of the Seeger Sessions Band.

Brittany Haas, fiddler for Crooked Still.

More:

Crooked Still’s official website tells the band’s story and has all the information you could want on tour dates and recordings.

Double-bass player Corey DiMario’s blog, “Play the Bass, Drive the Bus,” has a big selection of videos from Crooked Still’s performances.

This is Crooked Still performing “Captain, Captain” (also heard in today’s show) from a recent show at the Basement in Nashville:

]]> http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/07/crooked-still-2/feed 6 http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/07/week-in-the-news-31 http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/07/week-in-the-news-31#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:00:23 +0000 John Wihbey http://www.onpointradio.org/?p=14653

Clockwise from top left: U.S. Marines move into Afghanistan's Helmand province on Thursday; Senator-elect Al Franken on Tuesday, shortly after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in his favor; South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, in an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday; people wait in line at a job fair in Seattle earlier this month. (AP)

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Jobs, jobs, jobs. And war. As Americans mark another Independence Day, the news at the end of the week reminds us where the nation stands.

In Washington, the White House responds to new unemployment numbers — now at 9.5 percent — and to critics of its stimulus plan.

In Afghanistan, 4,000 Marines move into Taliban territory. While in Iraq, U.S. troops move out of the cities — as bombings increase.

In Minnesota, the Democrats gain a 60th U.S. senator. In South Carolina, Republicans look to get rid of a governor.

This hour, On Point: Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Steve Chapman, columnist and editorial writer for The Chicago Tribune.

Gebe Martinez, political columnist and contributor to Politico.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Author Rick Bass at his home in Montana. (Photo by Nicole Blaisdell)

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Rick Bass, award-winning author and environmental activist, has lived in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana for over 20 years.

Well known as a chronicler of the western wilderness, the Yaak Valley in particular, his newest book is something of a modern-day “Walden.” Like Thoreau, Bass records in lush detail the passage of seasons and the natural world.

But while Thoreau went into the woods alone, Bass is a family man — and he reflects on raising young children immersed in the wild.

This hour, On Point: Rick Bass and a year in the Montana wilderness.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Rick Bass joins us from Spokane, Wash.  An award-winning chronicler of the American western wilderness and an environmental activist, his new book is “The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana.” Among his many other works of fiction and nonfiction are “The Book of Yaak,” “The Ninemile Wolves,” “The Hermit’s Story,” “The Lives of Rocks,” and “Why I Came West.”

Read an excerpt from “The Wild Marsh.”

(Photo: Flickr/robertpaulyoung; click for full image)

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Remember David Kessler back in the 1990s, when he was head of the FDA? The guy who took on Big Tobacco?

He’s on a new crusade now, and it’s not about smoking, it’s about eating — about our national culture of food. He points to a huge and profitable food industry and its legion of well-paid scientists who work hard to make their products literally irresistible, to make us eat almost non-stop.

He says we’ve got to understand our own appetites, and to change how America looks at food.

This hour, On Point: David Kessler on controlling the American appetite.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guest:

Dr. David Kessler joins us from San Francisco. He was Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 1990-1997, under the first President Bush and President Clinton. During his time at the FDA, he led the campaign to regulate tobacco and the landmark lawsuit FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. He is a pediatrician and lawyer. His new book is “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.”

Read an excerpt from the book, in which Kessler goes “inside the unregulated, wild world of food processing.”

“Higher sugar, fat, and salt make you want to eat more,” a high-level food industry executive told me. I had already read this in the scientific literature and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. Now an insider was saying the same thing.

My source was a leading food consultant, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food who had agreed to part the curtain for me, at least a bit, to reveal how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified.

But he was remarkably candid, explaining that the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the “three points of the compass.” Sugar, fat, and salt make a food compelling, said the consultant. They make it indulgent. They make it high in hedonic value, which gives us pleasure.

“Do you design food specifically to be highly hedonic?” I asked.

“Oh, absolutely,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “We try to bring as much of that into the equation as possible.”

* * *

During the past two decades there has been an explosion in our ability to access and afford highly palatable foods. Restaurants—where Americans spend 50 percent of today’s food dollar—sit at the epicenter of this explosion.

Countless new foods have been introduced in restaurants, and most of them hit the three points of the compass. Sugar, fat, and salt are either loaded onto a core ingredient (such as meat, vegetable, potato, or bread), layered on top of it, or both. Deep-fried tortilla chips are an example of loading—the fat is contained in the chip itself. When a potato is smothered in cheese, sour cream, and sauce, that’s layering.

I asked the food consultant to describe the ingredients in some foods commonly found in popular restaurants today.

Potato skins, for example: Typically the potato is hollowed out and the skin is fried, which provides a substantial surface area for what he calls “fat pickup.” Then some combination of bacon bits, sour cream, and cheese is added. The result is fat on fat on fat on fat, much of it loaded with salt.

Cheese fries “take a high-fat food and put more fat on top of it,” he said. The potato base is a simple carbohydrate, which quickly breaks down to sugar in the body. Once it’s fried and layered with cheese, we’re eating salt on fat on fat on sugar.

Buffalo wings start with the fatty parts of a chicken, which get deep-fried. Then they’re served with creamy or sweet dipping sauce that’s heavily salted. Usually they’re par-fried at a production plant, then fried again at the restaurant, which essentially doubles the fat. That gives us sugar on salt on fat on fat on fat.

“Spinach dip” is a misnomer. The spinach provides little more than color and a bit of appeal; a high-fat, high-salt dairy product is the main ingredient. It’s a tasty dish of salt on fat.

Chicken tenders are so loaded with batter and fat that my source jokes that they’re a UFO—an unidentified fried object. Salt and sugar are loaded into the fat.

The White Chocolate Mocha Frappuccino served at Starbucks is coffee diluted with a mix of sugar, fat, and salt. The whipped cream is optional.

Bloomin’ Onions—the trademark Outback Steakhouse dish—are very popular, and they too provide plenty of surface area to absorb fat. Fried in batter and topped with sauce, their flavor comes from salt on sugar on fat.

Salads contain vegetables, of course, but in today’s restaurants they’re more than likely to be smothered in a cream-based ranch dressing and flavored with cheese chunks, bacon bits, and oily croutons. The food consultant calls this “fat with a little lettuce,” although there’s salt in the salad as well. Even lettuce has become a vehicle for fat.

I began reading the Cheesecake Factory menu to my industry source. He called the chain, known for its vast spaces and equally vast portions, “an icon of indulgence.”

We started with the appetizers.

“Tex Mex Eggrolls: Spicy chicken, corn, black beans, peppers, onions, and melted cheese. Served with avocado cream and salsa,” I read. The food consultant said the avocado alone is about 15 to 20 percent fat, and that’s before any mayonnaise or heavy cream is loaded in. A fried outer layer wraps fat and salt around more fat.

“Roadside Sliders: Bite-sized burgers on mini-buns served with grilled onions, pickles, and ketchup.” The words suggest a cute little hamburger, but he said there’s salt and fat in the meat, and sugar and salt in the caramelized onions and the ketchup. In reality, this dish is fat surrounded by layers of sugar on salt on sugar on salt, making it another grand slam.

“Chicken Pot Stickers: Oriental dumplings pan-fried in the classic tradition. Served with our soy dipping sauce.” Frying the pot stickers replaces the water in the wrapper with fat. The layer of meat inside is loaded with salt, while the outside layer of sauce is rich with sugar and salt. “That’s hitting all the points,” my source said, sounding almost rueful.

“Buffalo Blasts: Chicken breast, cheese, and our spicy buffalo sauce, all stuffed in a spiced wrapper and fried until crisp. Served with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing.”

For a moment the food consultant just laughed. “What can I say? That’s fat, sugar, and salt.” Chicken breast allows us to suspend our guilt because it suggests a low-fat dish, and the celery sticks also hint at something healthy. But the cheese layer is at least 50 percent fat and carries a load of salt, and the buffalo sauce adds a layer of sugar on salt. That dough wrapper—a simple carbohydrate—is fried and so absorbent that he called it “a fat bomb.”

Just as chicken becomes the carrier for fat in the Buffalo Blasts, pizza crust can be a carrier for sugar and fat. Caesar salads are built as an excuse to carry fat and salt. We double-fry french fries, first at the manufacturing plant and then in the restaurant. Our hamburgers are layered with bacon and cheese. We add cheese to spinach, batter our fish before frying it, and slather our Mexican food with cheese. As we do, each one of these foods “becomes more compelling, more hedonic,” said the consultant.

As our conversation wound down, he walked me to the door of his office and paused, as if choosing his words carefully. Then, with the certainty of an insider, he observed that the food industry is “the manipulator of the consumers’ minds and desires.

Animals, humans included, seem to have a built-in preference for features larger than those that occur naturally. Ethologists, scientists who study animal behavior, have tried to understand the attraction of “supernormal stimuli.”

Consider the oystercatcher, a shorebird with black-and-white plumage, a red bill, and brightly colored legs. Back in the 1950s, Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen conducted now-classic studies of the bird’s incubation behavior and discovered something astonishing: When presented with a choice between brooding its own small egg and the giant egg of a much larger bird, the oystercatcher invariably chose to sit on the giant one.

Research with the herring gull and the greylag goose uncovered much the same thing. Both of these birds prefer an egg that is biologically impossible for them to have laid.

We also see this with butterflies. When a male is courting, he’ll be drawn to the female by the rate at which she flickers her wings. But when a butterfly is presented with some kind of artificial stimuli that flickers even faster, that’s what he’ll prefer.

Most of the relevant research about supernormal stimuli was conducted decades ago, although some contemporary writers and scientists have taken on the topic as it relates to food in recent years as well. I wanted to talk to one of the original researchers in the field. John Staddon, now a professor of biology and neurobiology at Duke University, seemed startled to be tracked down as an expert on the subject. “I wrote some stuff on this years and years ago,” he told me, surprised that I had uncovered his work.

His early findings seemed to deserve new scrutiny as I considered the possible analogies to food.

Staddon and I talked about the concept of “asymmetrical selection pressure.” From the standpoint of evolution, a bird’s preference for a larger egg over a smaller one makes sense. Smaller eggs are more likely to be nonviable, so birds that consistently choose them would not have been likely to survive as a species. Their preference for a giant egg is a logical extension of a preference for the egg that seems most likely to be viable.

I asked Staddon about the kind of food we eat today. “Now I’m eating very energy-dense sugar and fat,” I said. “And I’ve artificially created it. It didn’t exist in the wild. Is it a supernormal stimulus?”

It would be, said Staddon. “It is not only exaggerated, it also has never been seen in nature.” Those features define the term.

“Why do I prefer an exaggerated stimulus?” I asked.

“Your ancestors were punished for preferring a smaller-than-normal stimulus but not punished for preferring a larger-than-normal stimulus,” explained Staddon, harkening back to asymmetrical selection pressure. He talked about the “gradient of preference” established by evolution—whether it’s a gigantic egg or a hyperpalatable food, a lot seems to be more desirable than a little. An entertainment spectacle, such as Disneyland or Las Vegas, attracts us in much the same way.

Today’s choices only push us further along that gradient. “In the selection pressures acting on the species, more sugar was always better than less,” said Staddon. The amount of sugar in food today goes beyond the level we could have experienced naturally—and that just means we desire it all the more.

*  *  *

Our diet today is mostly made up of “easy calories.” According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.

In part this is because fat, which has become ubiquitous, is a lubricant. We don’t eat as much lean meat, which requires more saliva to ready it for swallowing. “We want something that’s higher in fat, marbled, and so when you eat it, it melts in your mouth,” said Civille. Food is easier to eat when it breaks down more quickly in the mouth. “If I have fat in there, I just chew it up and whoosh! Away it goes.”

John Haywood, a prominent restaurant concept designer, agreed. Processing, he said, creates a sort of “adult baby food.” By “processing” he means removing the elements in whole food—like fiber and gristle—that are harder to chew and swallow. What results is food that doesn’t require much effort to eat. “It goes down very easy; you don’t even think much about eating it,” said Haywood.

The food consultant who told me about his industry’s secrets had much the same perspective. “We’ve gone through some kind of a metamorphosis over the years. We’ve made food very easy to get calories from.” He talked about the greater degree to which we refine foods now; an example is how we mill away the bran from brown rice and whole wheat flour. As a result the food is “light, it’s white, it’s very easy to swallow. It doesn’t obstruct you in any way. It’s easy to get a lot of calories without a lot of chewing.”

Because this kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body’s signals that should tell us “I’m full.” He offered coleslaw as an example. When its ingredients are chopped roughly, it requires time and energy to chew. But when cabbage and carrots are softened in a high-fat dressing, coleslaw ceases to be “something with a lot of innate ability to satisfy.”

Contrast apples with applesauce and we can see the same phenomenon. When the peel is removed, much of the fiber is lost. “Then we add sugar to it; we make it so you can practically drink the thing. It doesn’t ever provide the satiation of a fresh apple that you have to chew on.”

This isn’t to say that the food industry wants us to stop chewing altogether. It knows we want to eat a doughnut, not drink it. “What are you going to do with the sugar, put it on your tongue?” asked the food consultant. “I want to chew. I want to feel it in my mouth. The key for the food industry is to create foods with just enough chew—but not too much.”

Foods that go “whoosh” don’t leave us with a sense of being well fed. By stripping food of fiber, we also strip it of its capacity to satisfy. In making food disappear so swiftly, fat and sugar only leave us wanting more.

Instead of paying attention to what goes into our mouths, we’re engaged in a “shoveling process,” said Nancy Rodriguez. An expert on the sensory properties of food and head of the product development firm Food Marketing Support Services, Rodriguez asserts, “We eat to be belly filled.”

*  *  *

There’s a contradiction in all of this. At the same time manufacturers are making so much stimulating, high-fat, high-sugar food so readily available, they’re also responding to consumer concerns about health. Indeed, this is a substantial area of activity and profit for the industry.

Many food producers and restaurants now provide nutrition calculators on their Web sites, allowing consumers to add up the calories in their foods and find out how much fat, sodium, carbohydrates, and sugar they’re eating. And some surprising alliances have been formed in the name of health. T.G.I. Friday’s partnered with Atkins Nutritionals to create a menu that appeals to people on the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet. Wendy’s is working with the American Dietetic Association to offer consumers educational tools about nutrition.

That kind of paradox reflects broader industry trends, according to Datamonitor, a leading supplier of “business intelligence.” In one of its consumer-trends reports, the company declares that “the desire for health and indulgence represents a trend clash.” Consumers looking to satisfy seemingly contradictory desires represent an important market opening, according to the report, which proclaims: “Healthy indulgence is a vast opportunity that is underdeveloped by the food and drinks industry.”

Increasingly, the industry is supplementing its products with chemicals to persuade consumers that the food is good for them. It’s all about grabbing “the consumer’s attention” by making “compelling” claims that sometimes “seem to be an exercise in creative writing,” admit industry experts.

Apparently, it’s working. What used to be the domain of small, specialty health-food stores has attracted national competitors. Kellogg’s, for example, introduced candy bars containing the chemical DHA (a fatty acid), labeled them “Live Bright brain health bars,” and made bold claims about their value in sustaining brain health. Whatever the merits and potential health benefits of DHA, if any, the other ingredients are no surprise—mostly sugar and fat.

Most restaurants don’t make those kinds of claims for their meals, but those who sell the most indulgent sugar-on-fat-on-salt combinations often market low-fat meals as well. Hardee’s, home of the Monster Thickburger, proudly announces that its health-conscious customers need not “leave taste behind,” and offers up a charbroiled BBQ chicken sandwich, with 340 calories and 4 grams of fat. Chili’s includes Guiltless Grill listings on its menu, with “more choices for your healthy lifestyle.” McDonald’s is marketing its fruit-and-walnut salad aggressively, with photos of the new dish prominently displayed in drive-through lanes and near in-store order counters.

But are those products selling? One food industry executive shrugged off the question. “Who cares?” he asked. “You’re going to build your image.”

———————————–

Excerpted from “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” by David Kessler.

Return to “Controlling the American Appetite”

Late in July, we like to try to get into some of those patches just before the legions of rabbits do, and pick a little basket of berries. The girls have a tiny doll’s basket (the berries are no larger than the nub of a pencil eraser, but contain more sweetness within them, concentrated, than an entire bushel of the supermarket mega-irradiated jumbo giants), and because I’m red-green colorblind, I can’t find the tiny strawberries and have to rely on the girls to do the harvest.

They’re delighted by my weakness, and by their sharp-eyed superiority, and delighted also, as junior hunter-gatherers, to be providing for me. We all three have little baskets — in the dimming blue light of dusk, I absolutely can’t find a single one — and from time to time the girls take pity, and come over to where I’m searching, down on my hands and knees, and drop a few into my basket.

And as is their habit, they eat far more than they pick, not even really hunter-gatherers but more like wild animals, feasting in the moment, letting their bodies do the hoarding rather than jars or cabinets — the girls more a part of the forest, in that manner, in that moment — and by the time it is too dark to see well and we walk back toward our truck, our baskets have barely enough strawberries to drop into our pancake batter the next morning. But they will be memorable pancakes, and it will be enough.

Excerpted from by THE WILD MARSH by Rick Bass, copyright © 2009. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Back to “Rick Bass and the Montana Wild“

I think the most important question with this initial foray is not so much what it leads to next for the United States but whether or not this has an effect of helping the United States to play a leadership role in international negotiations to put in place a post-Kyoto Protocol climate regime…

Two countries in particular will hold huge sway in those negotiations: India and China. In India, the Environment Minister’s office issued a statement in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. bill’s passage that seemed less than promising for future negotiations: “India cannot and will not take emission reduction targets because poverty eradication and social and economic development are first and over-riding priorities.”

In China, which now leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions, news of the U.S. climate effort got a mixed review. The government-backed China Daily ran with the headline, “China Unhappy With U.S. Climate Bill.” A government minister, though, gave a more equivocal response:

We think that we should give a positive evaluation to this bill…. But in the area of tackling climate change, especially on the issue of cutting emissions, if they could take some more positive, effective measures it would give a bigger impetus to the year-end talks.

As Prof. Stavins said today during our hour, little matters if China and India don’t get involved. The math is simple: if China and India fail to take action, it will be impossible to avert reaching the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that many scientists now believe would create dangerous warming.

And just to complicate matters, another of our guests today, John Broder of The New York Times, has written that some tariff provisions in the House bill — which would penalize countries that don’t accept a carbon cap — are generating controversy. Indeed, those provisions could alienate the very allies the U.S. needs in Copenhagen.

Ever since the notion of Original Sin, there has been a tug of war over the essential goodness of humankind.

But whether or not you believe that we’re innately given to be good, you might wonder how likely we are to do good — to practice, as our guest Adam Phillips puts it, acts of true kindness.

In an America with feuding, greedy housewives in prime time, and a business culture driven by reckless self-dealing, kindness hardly looks like a priority — much less an essential ingredient of human happiness, Phillips says, as it was once believed to be. He argues that we’ve grown afraid of kindness, wary of it — that it’s become dangerous to practice.

This hour, On Point: kindness, how we lost it, and the case for bringing it back.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Adam Phillips, co-author, with historian Barbara Taylor, of “On Kindness.” He is a psychoanalyst in London and the author of twelve books, including “On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored,” “Going Sane,” and “Side Effects.”

And with us in our studio is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Sunflower Electric Cooperative's coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, Kansas, seen in 2007. (AP)

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President Obama came to Washington promising to break the gridlock on climate change. He claimed an historic victory last week, when the first bill ever to cap carbon emissions passed the House on Friday.

But the celebrations were short lived. Critics, left and right, say the bill is a mess: that it will weigh down a struggling economy. That it’s so riddled with giveaways that it does little to address global warming.

So what exactly is in the bill? Will it stand up in the Senate? And what does it mean for a warming planet?

This hour, On Point: unpacking the climate bill.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is John Broder, a reporter for The New York Times. He’s been covering the climate bill in Congress, and his piece in today’s paper takes a close look at the horse trading behind the House bill’s passage.

From New York we’re joined by Elizabeth Kolbert. She’s a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she reports extensively on climate change.  Her most recent piece, “The Catastrophist,” profiles climate scientist and activist James Hansen.

And with us in our studio is Robert Stavins. A top environmental economist, he’s a professor of business and government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and director of its Environmental Economics Program. He also co-chairs the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. His forthcoming book is “Post-Kyoto International Climate Policy.”

More links:

Climate blogger Joseph Romm says passing the House bill involved some real twisting of arms. The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blog explains how the bill helps green building efforts. And the environmental news site Grist reports that efficiency efforts were weakened as the bill was hashed out.