A short dialogue from Ishmael by Daniel Quinn:
Ishmael: “The can of yams that you buy in the store – how many of you labored to put that can there for you?”
Narrator: “Oh, hundreds, I suppose. Growers, harvesters, truckers, cleaners at the canning plant, people to run the equipment, people to pack the cans in cases, truckers to distribute the cases, people at the store to unpack them, and so on.”
Ishmael: “Forgive me, but you sound like lunatics, Bwana, to do all this work just to ensure that you can never be disappointed over the matter of a yam. Among my people, when we want a yam, we simply go and dig one up – and if there are none to be found, we find something else just as good, and hundreds of people don’t need to labor to put it into our hands.”
When I was growing up, I remember looking forward to late summer. August was strawberry season. My parents would take me and my brother strawberry-picking. Watermelons were available in July; watermelon, the fruit that signaled the beginning of summer. I would dig into a large slice at summer camp, the sweet juice streaming down my cheeks. The best apples grew in fall. We would spend a day apple-picking in September or October. Pumpkins were ready by October, right in time for Halloween. Dad would take us to a local farm where we could pick a pumpkin, which we would later carve into a Jack O’ Lantern. As we searched for the perfect pumpkin, the chilly autumn air would sting our cheeks and force us to burrow our faces inside our windbreakers. We would warm up with a cup of hot apple cider.
Nowadays you can buy strawberries at the supermarket all year-round. The fruit is bigger than when I was a kid, but the taste isn’t. Strawberries don’t really taste like anything anymore. Every time we visited India, I loved eating salad. I couldn’t get enough. One day I understood why: the tomatoes over there didn’t taste like Styrofoam. The cucumbers were crunchy and the carrots were sweet.
What happened to the fruits of my childhood? What happened to strawberry season? Now you can buy fruits and vegetables all year-round; you don’t have to wait for them to come into season in the U.S. We eat salads in January, not cognizant of the fact that lettuce doesn’t grow in January, at least not along the East Coast. We import out-of-season produce from California and from the Southern Hemisphere, not taking into account the hundreds, even thousands, of miles that food has to travel to reach us. The tons of fuel that must be expended to ship produce around the country or around the world or the gallons of water, pesticides, and fertilizers that are needed to sustain large-scale agriculture mean nothing to us. We produce beautiful-looking fruits and vegetables, genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) with half the taste and half the nutrients of natural or organic produce.
My diet here is constrained to a large part by the season. During winter and spring, I had more vegetables in my garden than I knew what to do with: lettuce, carrots, broccoli, and parsley. At first, I made salads. Then I grew bored so I started making home-made salad dressings. I still craved more variety so I started experimenting. I made Asian lettuce-leaf wraps, carrots in a sweet sauce, and vegetable pie, to name a few. Because my tomatoes stayed small and green, I made green tomato chutney. During summer here, I get bags of guavas from my neighbors. They don’t want to eat them so they send their kids up into the trees and shake them practically the entire trees’ worth of fruit. I happily collect the yellow, smashed fruits and take them home. I make shakes, I cook them, I eat handfuls of them at a time. I hardly have a chance to grow sick of them before the season is over. Last year, I was drowning in avocados. I made guacamole, I put them in burritos, I even ate them like the Paraguayans with sugar, but there were still more.
The one exception to seasonal produce is the imports from Brazil. The fruits and vegetables from Brazil are always so much bigger and so much more readily-available at the grocery store. Everything is bigger and prettier (In fact, it’s common for the Paraguayans to refer to any bigger variety of fruit as brasileiro and any smaller variety as paraguayo. For example, there are two types of mangos that grow in Paraguay, one of which is more than double the size of the other. Paraguayans predictably call that one Brazilian). It’s hard to ignore the rows of perfect pineapples, bananas, avocados, mangos, etc. Even then, I will buy Paraguayan produce any day over Brazilian produce. Brazil, like the U.S., relies on large-scale, mechanized, input-dependent (fertilizers and pesticides) agriculture. In contrast, the majority of Paraguayan farmers engage in small-scale agriculture with few machines and smaller quantities of chemicals. I say “constrained,” but I shouldn’t. A few weeks ago I caved into the temptation and bought guavas because the guavas in my site weren’t ripe yet. The guavas were pink and perfect, I couldn’t resist. Guess what? They weren’t that sweet. It wasn’t guava season yet. Even the smashed guavas from my neighbors (half of which I have to throw away because of worms) are infinitely sweeter. Why look elsewhere for fruits and vegetables when there are some always available here? Sure, it might not be pumpkin season anymore, but I can make do with a squash instead. There’s always next year’s pumpkins to look forward to.
The tastiest strawberries still only grow in August.
Showing posts with label Ishmael. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ishmael. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
A New Interpretation of the Fall
In Ishmael and The Story of B, Daniel Quinn proposes that the solution to our generation’s cultural collapse lies not within our culture itself, but outside of it. What is our culture? He calls East and West, “modern” society, one culture because of its shared belief in salvation and human conquest: “The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.” (188) In other words, what we refer to as globalization or “McDonaldization” is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it has its origins in the not-so-recent past, 10,000 years ago, when a single culture decided that its survival hinged on “devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.” (85) At that point in time, the “Great Forgetting” occurred. What did we forget? We forgot that before the advent of this single, all-powerful culture, “before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.” (245)
Humankind dates back millions of years, yet, its history commences just ten thousand years ago. Everything before that receives the label prehistory. What changed between the periods of history and prehistory? Minds. With the emergence of modern – what Quinn refers to as “totalitarian” – agriculture came “a new mind-set, a mind-set that made us out to be as wise as the gods, that made the world out to be a piece of human property, that gave us the power of life and death over the world. They thought this new mindset would be the death of Adam – and events are proving them right.” (97) That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the Fall of humankind. I’d prefer not get into a religious debate about this new interpretation of the Fall. Rather, let us delve into the argument about agriculture.
Quinn discusses how during prehistoric times existed several different styles of agriculture. Totalitarian agriculture differed from these earlier styles by its “subordinate[ion of] all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food.” (247-248) Biology necessitates competition, but within other species (and ancient humans) that means fighting competing groups or species, not destroying them. Only within the culture of modern humans has competition come to mean elimination of the enemy. Quinn gives the example of farmers killing coyotes to save their chickens. Ancient humans would have hunted the animals that entered their farms, not wiped out the entire population of coyotes in a given area (Reston, VA is a case in point). He posits that “It is the policy of totalitarian agriculture to wipe out unwanted species.” (257) Why adopt such a brutal strategy?
Totalitarian agriculture was not adopted in our culture out of sheer meanness. It was adopted because, by its very nature, it’s more productive than any other style…Many styles of agriculture…produce food surpluses. But, not surprisingly, totalitarian agriculture produces larger surpluses than any other style…You simply can’t outproduce a system designed to convert all the food in the world into human food. (260)
“So?” you might ask, “What’s the big deal?” Population spikes, war, crime, corruption, slavery, revolt, famine and plague, economic chaos, drugs, species extinction, exploitation, poverty, genocide, and finally cultural collapse. From 5000 B.C.E. to 2000 A.D., the population grew from 50 million to 6 billion. During the same period emerged a whole horde of problems that had never before existed on such a large scale in human history. For millions of years the number of humans increased by an infinitesimally small annual growth rate. Since the emergence of modern agriculture, the population has doubled 7 times!
Ever heard of the story of the king and the wise old man? The king decides to grant the old man one boon, to which the latter asks for one thing: a chess board’s worth of grains of rice. On square one the king should place 1 grain of rice; the quantity must then be doubled for each of the 64 squares of the board. That means that on square two he has to place 2 grains, on square three 4 grains, on square four 8 grains, and so on. The power of the square, 264. Try calculating that sum. A calculator can’t do it. Now square our population. It took 2000 years – 5000 and 3000 B.C.E. – for our population to increase from 25 million people to 50 million. It only took 40 years – from 1960 to 2000 – for our population to double from 3 billion to 6 billion people! That’s scary!
Population increases as a result of an increased food supply. That’s a fact. So why do we continue increasing the food supply? Quinn gives the example of a box of 100 mice. Give them enough food to sustain 200 mice and they will reproduce until they have a population of 200 mice (or at the very least a population that fluctuates between 190 and 210 mice). Produce enough food for 6 billion people and the population will stabilize around 6 billion. Why continue to pursue a strategy of totalitarian agriculture that produces food for more and more people year after year when it only results in a population increase year after year? Think about it.
Humankind dates back millions of years, yet, its history commences just ten thousand years ago. Everything before that receives the label prehistory. What changed between the periods of history and prehistory? Minds. With the emergence of modern – what Quinn refers to as “totalitarian” – agriculture came “a new mind-set, a mind-set that made us out to be as wise as the gods, that made the world out to be a piece of human property, that gave us the power of life and death over the world. They thought this new mindset would be the death of Adam – and events are proving them right.” (97) That’s right ladies and gentlemen, the Fall of humankind. I’d prefer not get into a religious debate about this new interpretation of the Fall. Rather, let us delve into the argument about agriculture.
Quinn discusses how during prehistoric times existed several different styles of agriculture. Totalitarian agriculture differed from these earlier styles by its “subordinate[ion of] all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food.” (247-248) Biology necessitates competition, but within other species (and ancient humans) that means fighting competing groups or species, not destroying them. Only within the culture of modern humans has competition come to mean elimination of the enemy. Quinn gives the example of farmers killing coyotes to save their chickens. Ancient humans would have hunted the animals that entered their farms, not wiped out the entire population of coyotes in a given area (Reston, VA is a case in point). He posits that “It is the policy of totalitarian agriculture to wipe out unwanted species.” (257) Why adopt such a brutal strategy?
Totalitarian agriculture was not adopted in our culture out of sheer meanness. It was adopted because, by its very nature, it’s more productive than any other style…Many styles of agriculture…produce food surpluses. But, not surprisingly, totalitarian agriculture produces larger surpluses than any other style…You simply can’t outproduce a system designed to convert all the food in the world into human food. (260)
“So?” you might ask, “What’s the big deal?” Population spikes, war, crime, corruption, slavery, revolt, famine and plague, economic chaos, drugs, species extinction, exploitation, poverty, genocide, and finally cultural collapse. From 5000 B.C.E. to 2000 A.D., the population grew from 50 million to 6 billion. During the same period emerged a whole horde of problems that had never before existed on such a large scale in human history. For millions of years the number of humans increased by an infinitesimally small annual growth rate. Since the emergence of modern agriculture, the population has doubled 7 times!
Ever heard of the story of the king and the wise old man? The king decides to grant the old man one boon, to which the latter asks for one thing: a chess board’s worth of grains of rice. On square one the king should place 1 grain of rice; the quantity must then be doubled for each of the 64 squares of the board. That means that on square two he has to place 2 grains, on square three 4 grains, on square four 8 grains, and so on. The power of the square, 264. Try calculating that sum. A calculator can’t do it. Now square our population. It took 2000 years – 5000 and 3000 B.C.E. – for our population to increase from 25 million people to 50 million. It only took 40 years – from 1960 to 2000 – for our population to double from 3 billion to 6 billion people! That’s scary!
Population increases as a result of an increased food supply. That’s a fact. So why do we continue increasing the food supply? Quinn gives the example of a box of 100 mice. Give them enough food to sustain 200 mice and they will reproduce until they have a population of 200 mice (or at the very least a population that fluctuates between 190 and 210 mice). Produce enough food for 6 billion people and the population will stabilize around 6 billion. Why continue to pursue a strategy of totalitarian agriculture that produces food for more and more people year after year when it only results in a population increase year after year? Think about it.
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