a chemical stress

In a culture that hails mobile phones and plasma-screen televisions as the great innovations of our time, Smith is gloriously out of step. She designs medical devices and labor-saving machines for people who live at the far end of dirt roads in Africa. Her inventions cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few pennies. ”You can’t understand how important a grain mill is,” she says, ”until you’ve spent three hours pounding grain and gotten a cup and a half of flour.” It is this kind of understanding — of tedium, of tired muscles, of hunger pangs — that Smith brings to her work.

In the course of the campaign, Clinton has tried out at least a dozen lines of attack against Obama, from ridiculing his message of hope—“The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing”—to questioning his preparedness. “One of us is ready to be Commander-in-Chief,” she told a crowd in New York. “Let’s get real.” The attacks in themselves have not been especially effective and, as is so often the case, they have had a damaging effect on their instigator; according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, the proportion of Americans who view Clinton negatively has risen to a record high of fifty-four per cent.

Hemingway liked Cuban rum in general and frozen daiquiris—which provoked him into a small rhapsody—in particular. “This frozen daiquiri,” he wrote in Islands in the Stream, “so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”

The daiquiri as we know it is a sort of alcoholic sherbet, often extruded from vast, Dairy Queen—like dispensers. It is associated with sundresses and strawberries, linked more to ice-cream headaches than hangovers. One wonders: How did the manliest of bare-fisted fighting men fall in with such a beverage?

Seeking the answer to a simple question can give a pilgrim great stamina. So it was with my quest.

Hash-browns are dismissed as “ghastly manifestations of American imperialism” (damned uppity colonials), and Sir Winston Churchill himself might as well be playing Elgar in his Union Jack underpants as we read that: “A good English breakfast never lets you down.” No, it kills you. That’s what an English breakfast does. The current £7.25 “Olympic” breakfast at Little Chef comprises: “two rashers of crisp backbacon, British outdoor-reared pork sausage, two griddled eggs, whole-cup mushrooms, crispy sauté potatoes, fresh griddled tomato, Heinz baked beans and toasted or fried extra-thick bloomer bread”. Olympic? What the hell event do they have in mind, the 3,000m casualty dash? The Triple Barf (also called the hop, skip and vomit)? The Synchronised Massive Coronary? Ye Gods, if that’s what our young athletes are going to be packing down daily in advance of 2012 then we’ll win even fewer gold medals than the, er, none, which I believe is currently predicted for this whey-faced generation of feckless British fatties.

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

The libertarian aspect of the approach lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like. They should be permitted to opt out of arrangements they dislike, and even make a mess of their lives if they want to. The paternalistic aspect acknowledges that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people’s behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.

In its company literature, Monsanto now refers to itself disingenuously as a “relatively new company” whose primary goal is helping “farmers around the world in their mission to feed, clothe, and fuel” a growing planet. In its list of corporate milestones, all but a handful are from the recent era. As for the company’s early history, the decades when it grew into an industrial powerhouse now held potentially responsible for more than 50 Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites—none of that is mentioned. It’s as though the original Monsanto, the company that long had the word “chemical” as part of its name, never existed.