Wordy Wednesday in the Amazon

This week's Wordy Wednesday is a double-header because I won't be able to update next Wednesday. Today's theme is the Amazon, where my friend Ranelle will be spending some time this winter. Winter for us, that is. It'll be the middle of the summer for her. As before, this words are from Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. I'm on the last section, which is about the Native American's ecological management, and I'm fascinated. Definitions brought to you today by the Oxford English Dictionary.

[Amazon terrain] is pullulatingly alive: howling insects, hot and humid as demon’s breath, perpetually shaded by mats of lianas and branches. (281)

pulluate: “2.b. To teem, swarm.” Latin pullulus young nestling or chick

liana: “The name given to the various climbing and twining plants which abound in tropical forests.”

Behind the canoe armada was a floating orchestra of horns, pipes, and rebecs like three-stringed lutes. (284)

rebec: “A musical instrument played with a bow and typically having three strings; an early form of the violin.” Probably after Middle French bec beak, on account of the shape of the instrument.

Like their confreres elsewhere in the Americas, Indian societies had built up a remarkable body of knowledge about how to manage and improve their environment. (286)

confrere: “A fellow-member of a fraternity, religious order, college, guild, etc.; a colleague in office.”

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. (297)

ineluctably: “irresistibly, so that one cannot escape from its grip.” Latin ineluctabilis to struggle out.

Like strawberries, peach palm throws out adventitious shoots. (303)

adventitious: “3. Nat. Hist. Appearing casually, or out of the normal or usual place, esp. in Bot. of roots, shoots, buds, etc. produced in unusual parts of the plant.”

There was the same cool green light from the canopy, the same refulgent smell, the same awe-inspiring sense of variety. (304)

refulgent: “2. Fig. and in extended us in various contexts: resplendent, glorious, illustrious, sumptuous, etc. Formerly freq. applied eulogistically to a woman.” Latin refulgere to radiate light, to shine with reflected light, to be conspicuous.

Dude’s reaching with this one. An illustrious smell? That's like C. S. Lewis's pale voice (name that chronicle!).

Childhood (Mis)conceptions

Every morning this week, I've showed up at the U of M's student organic farm. I stick around for a couple of hours, helping out with the tasks at hand: transplanting pansies, harvesting chives and cilantro, weighing the produce, thinning the turnips.

My mind often turns to images formed of farming in my childhood by the Little House on the Prairie books and even The Boxcar Children. Of course, we've got a Prius and more water sources than you can shake a stick at, but I hoof it an awful lot and watering, although it doesn't involve lugging water buckets, can still be tedious.

And then there's thinning plants. You may recall that in the first Boxcar Children novel, back when they were actually living in a boxcar, the Alden children do yard work for Mr. Henry. One task was to thin the carrots. I really had no idea what this meant: I imagined Jessie pulling out a carrot, running it between her fingers to "thin" it, and putting it back in the ground. Why would anyone pull out perfectly good carrots? When Jessie asks to take home the pile of thinned carrots (apparently they didn't all make it back into the ground), I always imagined a heap of pale, pinched roots, ready to wilt at a second glance.

The reality is less laborious. Thinning involves only the removal of the smaller plants, no size-reduction at all. We ended up with a healthy pile of turnip greens that destined for the Campus Club. No humble junkyard stew pot for these organic roots.

Photo source: http://mysticdomestica.blogspot.com/2009/07/boxcar-kid.html

Resilience on the brain

Warren Belasco is taking me on a fascinating and thorough trip down memory lane in Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, which I plan to review later. In a chapter on the modernists’ take on the future of food, Belasco makes a point that speaks to resilience, even if he doesn’t use the word:

Vulnerable to numerous maladies and very expensive to feed, house, and maintain, these hybrids [chickens] required a lot of chemicals, drugs, and machinery. These higher input costs favored further concentration of production, which in turn increased biological and economic vulnerability—a feedback loop resulting, almost literally, from putting too many eggs in too few baskets." (195)

Belasco briefly puts his finger on the efficiency trap that the animal industry has fallen into. The more efficient the animal, the more precarious and input-intensive it becomes to (ab)use it.

As a sidenote, I love making connections like this. I also love Belasco’s prose. It’s hard to tell from this quote, but he strikes the perfect balance, in my opinion, between an didactic and extravagant style.

Photo from Wikipedia: A White Leghorn, the most popular commercial layer.

Hold your breath for the release

Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, by Brian Walker and David Salt. Island Press, 2006.

Unlike the other books I’ve mentioned, Resilience Thinking was not a random selection. I attended a presentation by Julia Nerbonne at the U on how experiential learning teaches resilience. Nerbonne presented the idea of adaptive cycles, taken from Walker and Salt. I found the idea so compelling that I hunted down the book.

This is the type of nonfiction I appreciate. David Salt is a science writer and Brian Walker is a scientist, so the big, important ideas are presented clearly but without the appeal-to-the masses style that so often irritates me. Chapters about concepts are followed by illustrative case studies. Frameworks for approaching social-ecological issues are translated into policy recommendations. I love the ideas-to-details beat.

Three key ideas are resilience, thresholds, and adaptive cycles. Walker and Salt define resilience as a system’s capacity to absorb disturbances without a regime shift. A disturbance could be fire, drought, flood, pests, etc. A regime is a particular stable state of existence. For example, the Everglades used to be a sawgrass regime. But in response to rising levels of phosphorus, it has shifted to a cattails regime.

A threshold in resilience thinking is a dead end, the critical level of a key variable, like the nitrogen content of soil. Once the level is surpassed, the entire system behaves in a different way, which is usually unpleasant and difficult to reverse. The closer a system is to a threshold, the less resilient it is.

Figure credit: Resilience Science.

And now for the concept that Nerbonne presented that I found so compelling: adaptive cycles. Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, is responsible for the original idea, and Gunderson and Holling have since taken it up. An adaptive cycle is a metaphor to describe change in an ecological system, but it can just as easily be applied to individuals, businesses, and sovereign nations. The cycle has four phases:

1. Rapid growth
2. Conservation
3. Release
4. Reorganization

Briefly, during rapid growth, a species or people “exploit new opportunities and available resources” (76). Think of weeds and dot com companies. During conservation, energy is stored and materials accumulate. Think of tall trees and bandwidth. Also, diversity can be sacrificed for efficiency and connectedness increases. Next is the release phase—the system comes undone. Bound up resources are released, structure breaks down. Think of a forest fire or the dot com bubble burst. Finally comes reorganization. From the chaos of release, options open up. Invention and experimentation attempt to bring order back to the system. Think of all the little plants that can now see the sun or entrepreneurs who turn their hand to something else.

Those are the biggies. Two other concepts that I will explore further: adaptive cycles and bottom-up change and the efficiency trap and the dairy industry.

Updated April 2015.

A pinch of optimism

Recipe for America: Why our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Jill Richardson. Ig Publishing, 2009.

Like Coming Home to Eat, Recipe for America is book that popped up in a search for something to read. I had never heard of it or Jill Richardson before, though the latter’s blog, La Vida Locavore, did ring a bell.

The book is a succinct summary of the major issues facing the U.S. food system. I appreciated Richardson’s attempt to pull together and lay out the social, political, and environmental issues that plague our food system. Out of necessity, she couldn’t go very deeply into any one of them. Most of the points Richardson raised were already familiar to me, so I was able to detect occasional bias or extra emotion.

Richardson mentioned a handful of things that I hadn’t heard before. She spent some time working at a Whole Food bakery, and could describe how the bread slicer, certain spoons and pitchers, and a separate sink were dedicated for organic products, because “accidentally mixing [a customer’s] organic latte with a few drops of conventional dish water would be a violation of trust (and the law)” (68). That’s dedication! On paper, at least. In practice, the employees must actually follow the conventions and stipulations for Whole Food's dedication to be actualized. Richardson did. Other employees didn’t necessarily.

Another example that I was unfamiliar with was the cooperative CSA. Richardson visited a cooperative of several Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Posted by Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative on Thursday, April 9, 2015

Each farm grows several crops rather than all of them to protect against coordination problems with crop variety and quantity. The cooperative model allows farmers to share costs, time, and split up marketing and financial management responsibilities. The model also softens the blow of natural disasters and poor crops that affect one farm. Of course, if the farms are located near one another, a drought in the region could affect them all equally.

I found the last chapter on the Farm Bill to be the most interesting. I don’t know very much about this piece of legislation except that it’s huge and passed about once every five years. Richardson’s brief treatment made me want to learn more.

The Appendix, "How to Cook Up a Recipe," for America is also interesting. It lists five ways to get involved and resources to do it.

1. Sign up to receive action alerts
2. Follow issues on blogs
3. Track legislation
4. Watch congressional hearings
5. Write letters to the editor.

I looked up all of the blogs and added them to my Google Reader. But I haven’t yet looked up the organizations she recommends:

• Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org)
• Food and Water Watch (foodandwaterwatch.org)
• Consumers Union (consumersunion.org)
• Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org)
• The Cornucopia Institute (cornucopia.org)
• Food Democracy Now (fooddemocracynow.org)

Recipe for America pushes me in two directions: to get more involved in changing the food system and to work for a publishing company, copyediting. (This book had several baffling typos, including “stsy” instead of “stay” and random switching between rbGH and rBGH.) I’d be cool with either route.

Coming Home to Eat

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, by Gary Paul Nabhan, Ph.D. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002)

I do the bulk of my reading on the bus. I have a half-hour commute to school, which often translates to an hour of dedicated reading time per day. Sometimes when I don’t have something to read, I get anxious.

Coming Home to Eat is a result of that anxiety. I was searching through McGrath Library’s collection at the U of M, looking for something relevant to keep me going while I waited politely for my requested library books to show up. Gary Paul Nabhan’s book describing his year-long experiment in eating locally and related events during that year was an unexpected gem.

If this sounds like a knockoff of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, be assured that Coming Home to Eat came first. Also, it is undeniably different. There’s no reason to not read them back-to-back. If you do, you are in for 600+ pages of delicious prose.

Now, Nabhan is an bone fide ecologist and ethnobotanist, to be sure, but he is also a “rural lifeways folklorist,” and his list of credits includes a book of poetry. It shows. Here’s a passage wherein he describes eating freshly foraged greens.

Quelite. Photo credit: juanvc.

Tonight I entered quelite heaven, enjoying the freshest greens I could imagine. I grilled some scallions and poblano chiles, then added a mound of hand washed greens to the saucepan. … Their flavors were so fresh, so buzzed with their recent photosynthetic surge that my meal sizzled with sunshine. (142)

Coming Home to Eat is also fascinating because of the subject. If you raised an eyebrow at Barbara Kingsolver’s quest to eat locally in Virginia, raise two at Nabhan’s quest to eat within 250 miles of his home in desert-y southern Arizona.

Many of the foods he eats are totally unfamiliar to me—thank goodness for Hannah Hinchman’s pen and ink illustrations—mesquite tortillas and roasted mescal, dried tepary beans and cholla cactus buds.

And that’s one of the two things I like about this book. Nabhan introduced me to the food resources of the southwestern deserts, something I know nothing about, and something I don't necessarily need know about. I live in Minnesota, I want to eat things grown in Midwestern soil.

I'm appropriately astonished at the variety that desert soil produces and heartened that some people still know how to find and prepare it. What I can take inspiration from is Nabhan's creation of access points to alternate food resources, his purchases of mesquite tortillas from Esperanza and duck eggs from Ms. Soto.

I was mightily refreshed by the narrative style of Coming Home to Eat. I read a lot of nonfiction nowadays and there's often a stark difference between these nonfiction texts and novels. Nabhan blurred the line between these two forms, including touches like dialogues with his sweetheart Laurie, mulling over the death of his stepfather, and describing a meeting with the EPA over Bt corn. Illustrative facts and figures, important names and dates are all there, as is a comprehensive index.

The blend of professional and personal, presented with polished prose stirs a deeper, more holistic reaction to the message I've heard so many times.

Updated April 2015.

Why am I here?

I am here to read, to think, to write about the connections between healthy land, healthy food, and healthy life. It’s a broad theme. It has to be.

That’s the justification in a nutshell. For the whole meal deal, keep on reading.

The seminal reason for starting this blog is selfish and has to do with my high school social studies teacher, Mr. Scarlett. He had us write one-page reflections on almost every reading he assigned. Standard practice for students, but he claimed he did the same in his own life. Always attracted to record-keeping, I continued the practice outside the classroom and diligently wrote down something about almost every book I read. I wrote on lined paper, scrap paper, colored paper, and white paper, sometimes for several pages, sometimes just one line.

These pages are three-hole punched and sit quietly in a big black binder next to a big blue binder of financial records. Keeping a record of what I've read for its own sake seems increasingly pointless to me. I need to not simply absorb and document, but also read and reflect. This blog will help me to reflect.

Also pointless is relegating the thoughts and reactions I had to a static binder when I what I read nowadays feels so urgent. People don’t need to know what I thought about The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, but I would like to tell them about Coming Home to Eat and the Heathy Food, Healthy Lives Institute. I want to share with others the complex and fascinating fields I'm picking my way through.

I am no longer focused on the corner of Nutrition. In fact, my love affair with the topic imploded earlier this semester. Our relationship was tested when I began making reluctant friends with the Food System. Things came to a head during a Human Nutrition assignment to frame a nutrition-related question and review the relevant literature. I found that studying the effects of a single nutrient in a randomized clinical trial involves asking very specific questions with a limited vocabulary. I found that the data analysis from epidemiological studies is beyond my comprehension. In short, I found that all the nice tidy details I found in my intro textbooks are not tidy at all.

Nutrition is certainly not the unique in this aspect. Push any area of study far enough and you will find its limits. One could view these limits as opportunities, take up research, and find more answers. My reaction, however, has been to step back - way back. I asked Nutrition if we could just be friends. I need some space right now. I need to see what else is out there.

Since my classes are not designed to address the Food System, I happily seek access points elsewhere, both on and off campus. I read books, I attend seminars, I watch the occasional movie. These are what I want to digest and disseminate. So stay tuned! I hope to post updates once a week. Send me things to read, events to attend, movies to watch, and ask questions. I look forward to engaging with you.

Updated January 2015.