I’m interested in outsiders, people who you don’t immediately relate to. I just find it really interesting to use food as a common denominator, and you can relate to people who are usually unrelatable. I guess this is the third in a series: I’ve done prisoners’ last meals on death row, musicians’ backstage requests and then the doomsday preppers as the third in a trilogy. All of them are people who are kind of unrelatable, but suddenly through the very humane interaction with food, you get drawn into who they are. It’s almost like a modern portrait; I’m doing a portrait of these people but they’re not in it. Because the viewer understands the food, they understand the people.
I guess I became more aware of doomsday preppers after that National Geographic TV show. To me, the whole idea of doomsday and eating after the apocalypse is such a surreal thing. I’m like, do you even want to live in a world where you’re having to fight for scraps of canned food and things? To me, the pleasure of living is all about being able to enjoy your food, so I was just curious as to what they were seeing happen after the apocalypse. It drew me into this whole little subculture. I wanted to use the food to show different personalities and outcomes and theories and things like that.
Did you have any expectations of what you would find? The founding director of the Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project, Juan Enriquez, posed a question at a TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, in April 2012. Enriquez’s question was one that he had been enthralling audiences with a lot. He spoke about the history of life, tracing it from the Big Bang, to the birth of the stars, to the perimeter of the galaxy, to parts played by the sun, earth, and man, a history that spanned 14 billion years, involved trillions of stars, and then he asked the audience one question: What was the purpose of all this? He moved on to the next PowerPoint slide to provide the answer: A photo of Pamela Anderson and then Michael Jackson—the point being that man is the almighty purpose, the be all and end all of life, after which, he claimed, evolution flatlines to the end. His next question was “Wouldn’t that be slightly arrogant? There has been something like twenty-five human species; why couldn’t there be another?”
Indeed, why couldn’t there, particularly if we were entering a mass extinction? Many scientists believe that natural selection operates mainly on the frontiers of change.
In the space of a minute the reasonable-looking businessman opposite me had undergone a startling transformation into someone who made the hair on my arms bristle.
He went on. “Look, this country is falling apart.” So much for foreplay, I thought. “We have a president who is an admitted militant Muslim whose objective is to destroy America. Just read his books. China owns us, lawlessness is rampant, the cops are useless and just look at unemployment.”
When I suggested the latest unemployment number was six percent, the retort was instant.
“Lies,” he spat. “Look, they talk about slavery and the historic condition of blacks in this country. What they don’t say is that the middle men for the slave trade were the black brokers in Africa and elsewhere who sold their countrymen to the white traders. Can’t blame the whites for wanting to make money, too, now can you?”
He continued. “My family was indentured for the first three generations that we were in this country, but by initiative and hard work we got out and prospered.”
He delivered his “enlightened” history to me with the confidence of a tenured sociology professor. I was appalled, but captivated. Such erudition on so suspect a topic.
This guy was not speaking in mindless bumper sticker aphorisms. He wanted to tie it together, to build an elegant theory, to move out of brainless wing-nut territory and offer some robust alternate history. And he was articulate, too. This, I thought, was a dangerous man.
I turned the subject back to firearms. “You know Zack, that piece” — I tossed in the noun preferred by the cognoscenti — “that piece that Tom Hanks carried in ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ I hear that’s worth a pretty penny.”
“Yeah, the Thompson, wanna see one?”
He took me to a locked room at the back of the store with one wall lined with huge six feet tall and sturdy safes. He pulled out Thompson in perfect condition. “Here” he said, “shoulder it.”
It was heavy. About 12 and a half pounds. “How much would someone have to pay you for this?” I asked.
The researchers estimated that 10 of 11 adulterated breast-milk samples contained at least 10 percent cow’s milk. At long, long long last, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking on neonicatinoids, the class of pesticides implicated in the mass die-offs of bees.
The agency announced Thursday that it will be restricting the future manufacture and use of products containing the pesticides; in letters sent to companies that apply those products outdoors, it warned that it likely won’t be approving new permits for their use until it can determine that they won’t cause “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment.”
The letters, the EPA said, “reiterate that the EPA has required new bee safety studies for its ongoing registration review process for the neonicotinoid pesticides, and that the Agency must complete its new pollinator risk assessments, which are based, in part, on the new data, before it will likely be able to make regulatory decisions…that would expand the current uses of these pesticides.”
Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is a major problem in the U.S., which depends on the insects to pollinate its cropland. The U.S. lost an estimated 10 million hives in a six period ending in 2013 to these mysterious die-offs, a loss equivalent to $30 billion in crops.