More Non Fiction Quotes

Non-Fiction Supplement

Biology and Science

Whenever I used to think of fresh milk, I imagined rows and rows of chilled cartons of cows’ milk, neatly arranged according to their fat content or their added proteins and vitamins, and sometimes colored with chocolate, or strawberry, or caramel. When I was young, fresh milk was delivered in glass bottles to the front gate. Later it came from the corner store, or the cold food aisle of the supermarket. It listed nutritional contents on the label and the percentage these represented of the recommended daily allowance. It had a use-by date. And
it had to be kept cold. Once I began to breastfeed my children, my idea of fresh milk suddenly changed. Fresh milk is warm, and watery pale. Its packaging walks and talks, and runs, and makes love. It is absent of labeling. It has no fixed quantity, or set loading of nutrients, but ebbs and flows according to the needs of its consumers. It is flavored with garlic, or vanilla, or carrots, and sometimes all these things. It is not confined to fridges and stores, but is everywhere women are.
Fiona Giles, Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts (2010)
Is, today’s forensic science is built on innovations of the past. At the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, detectives did use several cutting-edge techniques, including crime scene photography and criminal profiling. Later, investigators would add to these, creating an arsenal of scientific tools that would help catch dangerous criminals. Techniques now include gathering trace evidence; testing bodies for poison; conducting autopsies; studying decomposed bodies; examining blood evidence; profiling criminals; testing DNA evidence; and analyzing bones, fingerprints, and markings on bullets. Put simply, forensic science is the use of science to solve crimes.
Bridget Heos, Blood, Bullets, and Bones (2016)  

FOOD and Drink

When you eat mussels or blueberries that you have collected yourself, or a vegetable you or a neighbor has grown, you don’t have to guess where your food came from. You are consuming it as close as possible to the point of origin, reducing processing to an absolute minimum. Eat your own vegetables and fruits raw, and you’ve reduced “processing” to washing. Eating wild raspberries from your own yard as you pick them is about as short a link to a food source as you can get—a luscious treat and the absolute polar opposite of modern processed food. My kids don’t ask me where these berries come from—they can see for themselves.

Twinkies’ ingredient list was long enough to include a good variety of additives, including my two top targets, polysorbate 60 and high fructose corn syrup. I also liked the idea of Twinkies because, along the way, I could explore some of the outlandish myths surrounding them. Twinkies are, according to urban legend, so full of chemicals that they will last, even exposed on a roof, for twenty-five years, and take seven years to digest. Some myths claim that they are no longer freshly baked—rather, that they were all baked decades ago—nor do they contain any actual food in them, but are the result of assorted chemical reactions. Or, as a character in a February 14, 2006, Doonesbury comic strip stated, baked only every February. I guessed it would be fun to see if there was any truth to these intriguing scenarios, all the while uncovering just what Twinkies are made of.

Steve Ettlinger, Twinkie, Deconstructed (2007)    

ALMOST EVERYTHING I LEARNED ABOUT THE BANANA was surprising. For all its ubiquity, the banana is truly one of the most intriguing organisms on earth. A banana tree isn’t a tree at all; it’s the world’s largest herb. The fruit itself is actually a giant berry. Most of us eat just a single kind of banana, a variety called the Cavendish, but over one thousand types of banana are found worldwide, including dozens of wild varieties, many no bigger than your pinky and filled with tooth-shattering seeds.
Everywhere bananas have appeared, they’ve changed the cultures that embraced them. In Central America, bananas built and toppled nations: a struggle to control the banana crop led to the overthrow of Guatemala’s first democratically elected government in the 1950s, which in turn gave birth to the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. In the 1960s, banana companies—trying to regain plantations nationalized by Fidel Castro—allowed the CIA to use their freighters as part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

In the Western story of Eden, Adam and Eve are said to react to their nakedness by covering themselves with “fig leaves.” Fig greenery might cover the essentials, barely. Banana leaves are actually used to make clothing (as well as rope, bedding, and umbrellas) in many parts of the world, even today. In this case, the word for the Edenic fruit isn’t mistranslated, just misunderstood: Bananas have been called figs throughout history. Alexander the Great, after sampling the fruit in India, described it as such, as did Spanish explorers in the New World. The clincher comes from ancient Hebrew. In that language, the language of the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, including Genesis), notes Levin, a word for the forbidden fruit translates directly: It is called the “fig of Eve.”

Dan Koeppel, Banana (2007)   

Choney takes the first share of milk. With a wooden pail hung from a rope around her neck, she aims to collect about six gallons of raw, whole milk to fill her churn for butter making this afternoon. Here in Bhutan, yak butter is a virtual currency, the gold of nomadic highland yak herders like Kado and Choney who sell or trade it for rice, tea, barley, and other bare necessities. As the number of these high-altitude herders dwindles in Bhutan, the appearance of yak butter—often bundled in thick green leaves and tied with bits of string—is increasingly rare in the towns and cities. Norbu’s parents can sell theirs for twice the price of cow’s butter made in the valleys. Locals place a premium on handmade yak butter not just because it’s traditional but because it’s considered healthier and better tasting, especially in their su ja (black tea whisked with butter and salt). Having loyal customers in the lowlands, Choney’s butter is often sold even before she’s churned it.

Elaine Khosrova, Butter: A Rich History (2016). 

One great misconception about milk is that people who cannot drink it have something wrong with them. In truth, the aberrant condition is being able to drink milk. Milk drinkers are mostly of European extraction, and as we are living in a Eurocentric world, we tend to think of consuming dairy products as a normal thing to do—something that is forgone in some regions only because of a malady known as lactose intolerance. But lactose intolerance is the natural condition of all mammals. Humans are the only mammals that consume milk past weaning, apparently in defiance of a basic rule of nature. In nature, the babies of most mammals

nurse only until they are ready for food, and then a gene steps in to shut down the ability to digest milk. Lactose, a sugar in milk, is digestible only when lactase, a genetically controlled enzyme, is present in the intestines. Almost everyone is born with lactase. Without it, a baby could not breastfeed. But as most babies get older, a gene cuts off the production of lactase and they can no longer consume milk. But something went wrong with Europeans—as well as Middle Easterners, North Africans, and people from the Indian subcontinent. They lack the gene and so continue to produce lactase and consume milk into adulthood.

Mark Kurlansky, Milk! (2018 )  

And food is not all that the potato will give humanity's planetary explorers. In space a sustainable oxygen supply is also essential, and here the photosynthetic process in which plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen as they grow makes the potato invaluable. The conjunction tion is fortuitous indeed: in the enclosed environment of a spacecraft, a stand of potatoes large enough to provide as much as each person needs per day will also supply all the oxygen they must have and remove all the carbon dioxide they exhale.4

Since then Andean farmers have raised hundreds of edible varieties - in fact, they have given over i,ooo names to the different potatoes they grow regularly, each known for its particular degree of productivity, palatability, temperature tolerance, disease and pest resistance, and storage quality. Many of the names are synonyms, but it is generally agreed that at least 40o distinct varieties of potato are grown in the Andes.

John Reader, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent 

Disabilities and Depression

I have schizoaffective disorder—a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, making it both a thought disorder and a mood disorder.  I reasoned in my mind that I was really the new Christ.  I was 100% positive of this, after I rationalized all the data.  And I was sure that if I denied this identity, that God Himself would strike me dead, and send me to Hell for all of eternity.  So, I chose to believe it, even though it was almost impossible for me or anyone else to comprehend.

My illness was so out of control that my life became haywire.  My delusional fairyland was extremely rough on me and all the people in my life.  I know now that these people only wanted the best for me, but I refused to accept the fact that I indeed was suffering from psychosis.  I thought it was easier to come up with bizarre ideas to explain what was really going on in my life.  But realizing that you are indeed ill is the first step in recovery.  I was not able to admit this to myself.  Of course, as you can see, this made it almost impossible for me to get well and obtain any sort of mental stability.

Stephanie Anne Allen, My Mental Madness Memoir: The provocative TRUE journey through my struggles with mental illness . (2017) 

The pain of depression and despair can build enough heat to melt the lead walls surrounding you. The darkness of charcoal, under pressure, can turn into a diamond. We need to realize blessings come in many strange shapes and sizes, and if we are willing to learn from our pain, then suicide is not on the list of options.

When you realize that those who admit they are suicidal really get our attention, you begin to see it is their way of filling the space devoid of love. The opposite of love is not hate but indifference. So keep on loving until the person you are loving feels that he or she is worth loving thanks to your persistent love and attention.

Susan Rose Blauner, How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me (2009)  

Our family has had its share of problems, as all families do. But when I came along, everyday difficulties and disagreements skidded to the sidelines, while I and my problems dwelt unwillingly in the limelight; because I suffocated at birth, I have cerebral palsy, which makes walking in a calm, straight line impossible. My gait swings me from side to side. It is only with the helpful arm of a friend or an elbow crutch that my walking appears at all normal out of doors. Even then, I resemble an intransigent triangle, taking up more room than I should. In ultra-modern sneakers, I wobble like a drunkard, though other shoes are too uncomfortable to wear outside. As long as I have something to lean on, my wobblers help to straighten my back and take the strain off my knees and feet. They help me with the effort of walking.

Fran Macilvey, Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy (2014)

Growing up is tough for anyone. But when you’ve been diagnosed with autism, it’s an extra challenge. You have to deal with the negative perceptions and misunderstandings other people have about you, all at an age when you probably can’t even spell “autism” yet. This means you need to figure out your own strengths and weaknesses and how you’re going to use them. That part took me a bit of trial and error to get right. Our saga begins with an insufferable, catchphrase-spouting toddler straight out of a network sitcom and continues into the evolution of a hardened, vengeful preteen straight out of a gritty cable drama. (There’s a happy ending, I promise.) You’ll also meet my family—itself a microcosm of the variety of thought patterns and behaviors that characterize the autism spectrum. But first, one of the most formative experiences in a young autistic person’s life: getting a diagnosis.

Michael McCreary, Funny, You Don't Look Autistic (2019)  

Life

Garbage is the text in which abundance is overwritten by decay and filth: natural substances rot next to art images on discarded plastic packaging; objects of superb design—the spent lightbulb or battery—lie among sanitary napkins and rancid meat scraps. Rubbish is also a border separating the clean and useful from the unclean and dangerous. And trash is the visible interface between everyday life and the deep, often abstract horrors of ecological crisis. Through waste we can read the logic of industrial society’s relationship to nature and human labor. Here it is, all at once, all mixed together: work, nature, land, production, consumption, the past and the future. And in garbage we find material proof that there is no plan for stewarding the earth, that resources are not being conserved, that waste and destruction are the necessary analogues of consumer society.

Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (2013)  

People

“There’s that old saying about the people you meet in life. You can’t take everyone with you. You’re probably discovering that now, if it wasn’t clear before. Time gets away from us. It rips some of our friends away. People come together, they fall apart. But what I’ve realized, and what I hope you understand too, is this doesn’t mean the memories go anywhere or are any less essential. They are more essential than ever, maybe, because you’ll never build new ones with that particular group of people.
― Craig Davidson, Precious Cargo: My Year of Driving the Kids on School Bus 3077
How could any abortionist, much less one affiliated with one of the most prestigious hospitals in the region, have made such a mistake? What doctor or nurse would believe that a woman more than seven months pregnant was less than five months along? Like other babies born prematurely, I had a host of serious medical problems including low birth weight (I weighed 2 pounds 14.5 ounces), jaundice, and respiratory distress. But my troubles were complicated by the aftereffects of the poisonous saline solution I had endured in my mother’s womb. No one knew the long-term consequences of surviving an abortion. Developmental delays are routine for preterm babies, but I also had seizures; and the list of potential complications grew to include mental retardation, blindness, and chronic poor health.
Three weeks after my birth I was transferred three hundred miles east, to the university hospital in Iowa City. The nurses who cared for me, a nameless baby, made me tiny clothes and colorful booties. One nurse, Mary, decided I needed a name and dubbed me Katie Rose. For years after I left the NICU, my adoptive parents and Mary kept in touch, exchanging Christmas cards and letters with pictures of me and updates on my progress. When I got older, I wrote the letters myself; Mary and I began a friendship that would endure for decades. It made me feel so special that this nurse who had cared for me when no one else did still cared about me.
Melissa Ohden, You Carried Me (2020)

“After years of living in the absence of friendliness, after the toxicity with my family, losing my friends, the unstable housing and black mold, my invisibility as a maid, I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me. I was hungry in a way I’d never been in my entire life.  When people think of food stamps they don't envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they'd known in highschool, someone who'd been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they'd be in the same place as me.”
― Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

It was never my intention to write an autobiography. The very notion made me uneasy. You see them congesting the bookshop shelves at Christmas. Rows of needy smiles, sad clowns and serious eyes, proclaiming faux-modest life stories, with titles such as This Is Me, or Why, Me?, or Me, Me, Me. I didn’t want to do that, it’s not really me. And who

cares anyway? I don’t and I’m the faux-modest sad clown with the needy smile and serious eyes who has to write the damn thing. There’s something presumptuous in writing an autobiography, as if people’s interest in your life is a given. Fair enough if your life is full of orgies; and murder and murder orgies, you can assume a little interest from outside; that stuff flies off the shelves. However, geeky boy comes good? I didn’t see the appeal. What I actually wanted to do was write fiction about a suave, handsome superhero and his robotic butler. The story of a tricked-out vigilante, with innumerable gadgets, a silver tongue and deadly fists; like Batman without the costume and a more pointed ‘gay subtext’. Sure, it’s not particularly original but it’s far more interesting than my life. I don’t even have a robotic butler. Not any more.

Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy's Journey to Becoming a Big Kid (2011)