A lot of the book covers similar ground to “Does IT Matter?”, though it has been brought bang up to date (witness references to the iPhone, for example), and has a different perspective, looking at the constructive effects of the commoditisation of IT, rather than the more pessimistic view of the earlier book.

It’s hard to argue with the basic premise: corporate IT is becoming a commodity, and it is a trend that is starting to accelerate. Virtualisation has been embraced enthusiastically by the industry (just look at the way all of the big enterprise vendors have piled into this space).

Right now, people are focused on virtualising familiar and comfortable things: operating systems, storage, networks. This will bring great cost savings, both through consolidation and simplification, but also through an increasing trend to move less essential systems out of the corporate data centre, and into shared (commodity) hosting environments.

All very much Good, Right, and True, but Carr also points to the next wave beyond this very physical virtualisation: virtualisation of business services.To me, this is where we start seeing real transformation, rather than just optimisation. The service cloud, as opposed to the compute cloud (or storage cloud, or whatever). Virtualisation of the physical aspects of computing is a wonderful thing, and an essential step on the road towards making IT a utility. However, I believe that the real benefit will come when we move up the food chain, and start thinking in terms of what our business clients need, and not just in terms of what would make the data centre cheaper or simpler.

As in the earlier book, Carr does a good job in highlighting analogies with the early days of electrification, as that industry moved from being a proprietary advantage for a few, to being a commodity that became an essential part of life for both corporations and individuals. One thing I found interesting was his account of how society changed as a result of ubiquitous electric power: over time, electricity did not just replace steam and hydro power, but enabled a wholesale transformation of how business worked, which in turn gave rise to the modern office, white collar workers, domestic consumerism, etc., etc. We’re already starting to see major changes with the commoditisation of IT, especially with the globalisation of significant parts of the IT job market. The question of “where next?” is an important one that isn’t being asked often enough today, and Carr is to be commended for raising it.

I found the end of the book (“iGod”), to be a little disappointing, as the tone suddenly jumps into tabloid-style speculation about Google as “big brother”, neural implants, etc. I wonder if his publishers made him put it in, sort of like the obligatory sex scene in blockbuster novels?Overall, the book is thought-provoking and well worth the read. Even if you have read his previous book,  I think that this advances the argument nicely, and it is a subject that urgently needs more discussion.

The core message of the article was summarised in the tagline

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.                 

This basically boiled down to an argument in favour of eating whole foods where possible, avoiding processed foods, especially when they have a plethora of added ‘healthy’ nutrients, eating an appropriate amount for one’s lifestyle, and reducing the amount of animal products in one’s diet. Not really much to argue with there, you might think. This is exactly what a US Congressional committee thought too, when they tried to make this into official US policy back in the 1970s. The food industry rebelled, and the result was a political compromise: a focus on nutrients rather than food. Instead of looking at food, the result is a focus on levels of individual nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, as though these can somehow be separated from the foods in which they naturally occur. Well, of course, they can be separated, if you eat processed foods, which suits the processed food industry just fine. Why waste time in the produce section of your supermarket, when you can browse the aisles for conveniently packaged foods with detailed labelling of healthy, nutritious additives, flavourings, sugar substitutes, omega oils, and the like?

Pollan has expanded this article into a book, In Defense of Food (An Eater’s Manifesto). While it covers much the same ground as the NY Times essay, it uses the extra space well, highlighting the oversimplifications, generalisations, and suspensions of disbelief inherent in the nutritionists’ thinking, and making a pretty compelling argument against the industrialisation of food, and in favour of eating real, whole foods where possible.

As if by magic, I opened today’s NY Times to find not one, but two articles supporting Pollan’s arguments:

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler is a sharp reminder of what is involved in the meat industry. It’s difficult to think hard about what is involved in the meat processing industry and still want to eat farmed meat. For most of human history, eating meat has been something of a luxury. But today it has become something that we can eat at every meal, at least in the West (and increasingly elsewhere, as the meat industry globalises).

What’s Cholesterol Got to Do With It? echoes Pollan’s argument that by just focusing on one or two micro-nutrients or chemical processes (in this case the impact of cholesterol on heart disease), we are ignoring the extremely complex interactions between the vast array of  macro- and micro-nutrients in real foods, and their impact on the (still poorly understood) metabolic processes in our bodies. So instead of telling people to eat less processed food, to eat less in general, to eat more plant-based foods, to take more exercise, we embrace weak science with religious fervour, and put our faith in supplements, additives, and drugs (such as statins) that focus on just one aspect of our internal chemistry.

Food is not just fuel. Eating is a central part of what we are, and enriches us through culture, community, and pleasure. We need to reclaim food from the scientists and industrialists and make it our own again.

The history is weak, the writing is simplistic, and the author relies too much on dramatised accounts of meetings between the protagonists in the story, and too little on first-hand accounts of what actually happened. At one point, the writing seemed so unidiomatic that I found myself checking whether the book had, in fact, been translated from Italian into English, but no, it appears to have been written in English.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on a book that is, after all, a popular history. But the coverage of the architectural and artistic details is so simplistic as to be practically worthless, and the historical backdrop of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation is simplified to the point of irrelevance (one one hand the author seems to assume too much background knowledge for readers of a popular history, and on the other provides far too little meat for the more serious reader). On the plus side, Scotti does an adequate job of bringing some of the larger-than-life personalities to life, and reading the book has made me want to visit Rome again soon!