Never was determined American stupidity in starker evidence than in the reaction to the brilliant Natalie Angier column on the secret defense systems of vegetables. No one whose knuckles do not drag on Applebee’s floors could read it as an argument against eating everything in the produce aisle from avocados to zucchini. But of course the kind of cretins who take everything as a personal insult went bonkers. Me, I still remember a guide on Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, pointing out the tiniest growth of algae on lava as: “This is the beginning of life.” Nowhere was it written that we cannot eat stone soup. Eggs, after all, are unborn chickens.