C. Vitae
Food Warrior: Making the World Safe for Eaters
For more than 30 years Michael F. Jacobson has tried to help Americans take a closer look at what's on their plates.
The nutrition label on your candy bar doesn't have a byline but it might as well: without Michael F. Jacobson, AB'65, it wouldn't be there. That label isn't his only accomplishment. The executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), he is the author of numerous reports and more than a dozen books, including Restaurant Confidential (Workman, 2002), a look at the nutritional value-or lack thereof-of some of the most popular foods served in U.S. restaurants.
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Between the Lines
47 Mark Bauerlein's July 19 Chronicle of Higher Education essay, "Reviewers are from Mars, Scholars are from Venus," contains references to plenty of Chicagoans-including a half-dozen alumni academics and public intellectuals: George Steiner, AB'48; Anthony Grafton, AB'71, AM'72, PhD'75; Gertrude Himmelfarb, AM'44, PhD'60; Susan Sontag, AB'51; Richard Rorty, AB'49, AM'52; and David Brooks, AB'83. Not mentioned by name, however, is Robert Silver, AB'47, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, known for its habit of assigning writers to review books outside their fields.
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From Our Pages
1912 Construction began on a new grandstand and cement fence for Marshall Field, later renamed Stagg Field. The $200,000 project increased seating capacity to 18,000 (25,000 with portable bleachers). Turrets at either end contained fan restrooms and team locker rooms, and underneath the grandstand were handball and racquetball courts. The stadium in its final form-with 50,000 seats-was most famous not for football, but for the first-ever self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, which occurred under the west stands on December 2, 1942. Stagg Field was torn down in 1957 to make room for Regenstein Library.
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