Nonfiction
Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century
by Paul Milo, $14.99, paperback
Imagine what the world would be like today if only a fraction of the wacky predictions over the centuries had come true. We’d be dodging each other in flying cars. We’d be eating plankton as our main food source. And a bunch of us would be living on the moon (anybody you’d like to nominate?). We’d be furiously dashing off new predictions to fix all the problems caused by the earlier ones.
Didn’t quite work out that way — and maybe for the better. You get that sense after ripping through “Your Flying Car Awaits,” Paul Milo’s wonderful treasury of faulty forecasts. And you come to a better understanding of how hope and imagination more often than not triumph over reality.
Sometimes, however, it would be nice if we got it right. How about no more war? Andrew Carnegie promised as much in 1901. Before the 20th century ends, he said, “the earth will be purged of its foulest shame, the killing of men in battle under the name of war.”
Milo does give us glimpses of astounding prescience, too. One example: The Marquis de Condorcet predicted in the 1790s that in 100 years women would gain legal equality with men. What could he have been thinking? His loopy forecast came at a time, Milo writes, “when women had virtually no rights, where a wife was, under the law, virtually the possession of her husband.”
Nonfiction
Free for All: Fixing School Food in America
by Janet Poppendieck, $27.50
By Sarah Halzack
Washington Post Writers Group
School lunches don’t exactly have a great reputation. The daily smorgasbord of pizza, Tater Tots, soda and other fattening fare has come under fire as obesity continues to be a national health crisis. In “Free for All,” sociology professor Janet Poppen- dieck explains how nutrition-deficient meals came to dominate America’s school cafeterias and outlines a slew of problems in the national school lunch and breakfast programs.
Poppendieck identifies shortcomings at virtually every layer of the system, from inefficient government- mandated paperwork to school kitchens ill-equipped to do anything beyond defrost frozen meals.
Outside the bureaucracy, there are other obstacles to healthy eating: Kids gravitate toward seductive but unhealthy items such as cookies or chips even when more nutritious items are available.
Poppendieck is particularly critical of the programs’ pricing system, which allows some students to get free or reduced-price meals based on their parents’ low incomes, but singles them out in the process. “The biggest problem is the stigma that comes from being different,” she writes, “from being marked as poor, from being unable to pay in a culture that places excessive value on being able to pay and a school food subculture that increasingly views children as ‘customers.’ “
To that end, she argues convincingly that lunches should be free for all students, a measure that would remove shame from the equation for those who need the program while cutting costs associated with determining who qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.
By illuminating how Congress, big agriculture, local school boards and even parents affect what shows up in the cafeteria, this well-researched book makes a strong case for retooling school lunch menus nationwide.
