I am convinced that Christianity as practiced is an

attenuated form of nature worship.

—Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes,  April 

You’d love a Florida rain-storm. Raindrops huge and pelting. The

sky ripped open by lightning, the heavens rocked by thunder. Then

a sky so blue that there is no word to name its color, and birds

bursting open with song.

—Zora Neale Hurston to a New York City friend, ca. 

The ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts.

—Eugene P. Odum, 

5

  

t

During the s—the decade of jogging and tennis—

Americans began to put on weight. Three decades later,

public health officials declared an epidemic of obesity. The

phenomenon is national. Midwesterners, ever stereotyped

as husky, are now bulky; even Californians have added heft,

but Mississippians are the fattest Americans—yet another

doleful ranking for the Magnolia State. This vast succulence

Americans have layered upon themselves corresponds, of

course, to the suburbanization of the population. Ameri-

cans drive more than ever and walk and climb probably

less than ever. Very few American cities are walking ones.

New York, however, the borough of Manhattan best of all,

is among the premier walking metropolises on earth, and

New Yorkers are among the slimmest and fittest Americans.

Case explained, then.

Yet, must sedentary lifestyles necessarily, and alone, pro-

duce obesity? Could the etiology of the suburban plague be

this simple? Michael Pollan, a gardening and nature writer,

argues no. Obesity is caused by consumption of too many

calories, and recently Pollan has accumulated what seems

an incontrovertible case against corn as source of those

calories—corn: the blessed gift of ancient Mesoamericans