Word: contentions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EATING IS BAD for your health, to judge by the public controversy and fear which food has stirred up recently. The Saccharin Question has replaced the Cyclamate Debate, but the same anxieties over cholesterol count, caloric content and carcinogenic tendencies are being expressed. Widespread concern about our food and the need for that concern is evident in past and continuing controversies over mercury in fish, bug spray on tomatoes, too much sugar in baby food, bacterial contamination in canned and frozen foods, red dye in anything. The big swing towards "health foods" is an indicator of this consumer anxiety--every...
When edibles cause controversy, it is usually over their chemical content or price. And that, say Karen and John Hess in The Taste of America, is symptomatic of a deeper problem. As we worry about the additives we are ingesting, we have forgotten about what the chemicals were originally added to preserve. We have been weaned on Instant Breakfast, raised on Tastycakes and Big Macs, and disciplined by the threat of "no dimes for a Dairy Queen." Our "gourmet" restaurants serve prepackaged, precooked Lobster Thermidor. Our cookbooks are compendiums of corporate-test-kitchen press releases. And the average sugar consumption...
...same cloth, a take-off on Watergate that uses a religious framework should have great potential. But Michael Lindsay-Hogg's film Nasty Habits relies too much on an ornamental frame--the format of transplanting the Watergate scenario to a Philadelphia convent--and leaves only a blank canvas for content...
...latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives...
...capture the degeneration of his love affair, and focusing finally and most persistently on his moments of existential angst. Jed's own formlessness is thrown into relief by his encounters with a cluster of well-drawn minor figures, from the cheerfully mundane Cudworths, whose very name suggests the unquestioning content of cattle, to the impeccable Mrs. Jones-Talbot, for whom the study of Dante is a ritual of appreciation for a lost Italian lover...