Thanks for your help.
39.
The specific combinations of foods in a cuisine and the ways they are prepared constitute a deep reservoir of accumulated wisdom about diet and health and place. In Latin America, for example, corn is traditionally eaten with beans; each plant is deficient in an essential amino
acid that happens to be abundant in the other, so together corn and beans form a balanced diet in the absence of meat. Similarly, corn in Latin America is traditionally
ground or soaked with limestone, which makes available a B vitamin in the corn, the absence of which would
otherwise lead to a deficiency disease. Very often, when a society adopts a new food without the food culture surrounding it, as happened when corn first came to Europe, Africa, and Asia, people get sick. The context in which a food is eaten can be nearly as important as the
food itself.
40.
Now many kinds of superior coffee beans are being decaffeinated in ways that conserve strong flavor. But the public suffers from a groundless fear of chemical decaffeination and prefers instead to buy water-processed decaf.
Every process of decaffeination, whether chemical- or water-based, starts with steaming the green beans to loosen the bonds of caffeine. In the chemical process, a solvent circulates through the beans.
The solvent comes into direct contact with them, carrying the caffeine with it. The drained solvent is then mixed with water, and the caffeine is drawn out to be sold.
In the water process, however, no solvent touches the beans. After the beans are steamed, they are soaked in
water, which removes the caffeine -along with all the soluble solids in the beans. The solution is drained off to a separate tank, where the caffeine is drawn out from it.
41.
Processing a TV message is much more like the all-at-once processing of the ear than the linear processing of the eye reading a printed page. According to McLuhan, television is fundamentally an acoustic medium. To make this point clear, he invited people to try a simple experiment. First, turn the sound down on the TV set for one minute during your favorite program.
Now, for another minute, adjust the TV set so that you can hear the sound but you can t see any picture. Which condition was more frustrating? Which condition gave
you less information? McLuhan believed that people who tried this little exercise would invariably report more frustration in the condition where the picture was visible but the sound was inaudible.
