Free The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 by Mary Roach Page A

person who's decided that they have to tell me that I'm believing a lie," he told me. "That the HIV is meaningless and doesn't make people sick. That if I follow this link and read the truth, I will be freed from that lie and will stop having to take toxic pills and live happily ever after." Live cultures have been part of his healing, he said. They may even help prevent diseases like cancer. "But that doesn't mean that kombucha will cure your diabetes. It doesn't mean that sauerkraut cured my AIDS."
    The trouble with being a diet guru, it seems, is that the more reasonable you try to be, the more likely you are to offend your most fervent followers.
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
includes a chapter called "Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat." It begins, "I love meat. The smell of it cooking can fill me with desire, and I find its juicy, rich flavor uniquely satisfying." Katz goes on to describe his dismay at commercial meat production, his respect for vegetarianism, and his halfhearted attempts to embrace it. "When I tried being vegan, I found myself dreaming about eggs," he writes. "I could find no virtue in denying my desires. I now understand that many nutrients are soluble only in fats, and animal fats can be vehicles of rich nourishment."
    Needless to say, this argument didn't fly with much of his audience. Last year the Canadian vegan punk band Propagandhi re-leased a song called "Human (e) Meat (The Flensing of Sandor Katz)." Flensing is an archaic locution of the sort beloved by metal bands: it means to strip the blubber from a whale. "I swear I did my best to insure that his final moments were swift and free from fear," the singer yelps. "But consideration should be made for the fact that Sandor Katz was my first kill." He goes on to describe searing every hair on Katz's body, boiling his head in a stockpot, and turning it into a spreadable headcheese. "It's a horrible song," Katz told me. "When it came out, I was not amused. I had a little fear that some lost vegan youth would try to find meaning by carrying out this fantasy. But it's grown on me."
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    The moon was in Sagittarius on the last night of April, the stars out in their legions. Katz and I had arrived in the Smoky Mountains to join the gathering of the Green Path. About sixty people were camped on a sparsely wooded slope half an hour west of Asheville. Tents, lean-tos, and sleeping bags were scattered among the trees below an open shed where meals were served: dandelion greens, nettle pesto, kava brownies—the usual. In a clearing nearby, an oak branch had been stripped and erected as a maypole, and a fire pit dug for the night's ceremony: the ancient festival of Beltane, or Walpurgisnacht.
    We'd spent the day going on plant walks, taking wildcrafting lessons, and listening to a succession of seekers and sages—Turtle, 7Song, Learning Deer. Every few hours a cry would go up, and the tribe would gather for an adult version of what kindergartners call Circle Time: everyone holding hands and exchanging expressions of self-conscious wonder. The women wore their hair long and loose or bobbed like pixies'; their noses were pierced and their bodies wrapped in rag scarves and patterned skirts. The men, in dreadlocks and piratical buns, talked of Babylon and polyamory. The children ran heedlessly through the woods, needing no instruction in the art of absolute freedom. "Is your son home-schooled?" I asked one mother, who crisscrossed the country with her two children and a tepee and was known as the Queen of Roadkill. She laughed. "He's unschooled," she said. "He just learns as he goes."
    The Green Path was part ecological retreat and part pagan revival meeting, but mostly it was a memorial for its founder, Frank Cook, who had died a year earlier. Cook was a botanist and teacher who traveled around the world collecting herbal lore, then writing and lecturing about it back in the U.S. He lived by barter and donation, refusing to be tied down by