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“This is the kind of place where you realize Americans like to feel full, quick,” muses Verlyn Klinkenborg in this week’s New York Times, on the most ordinary of places, another American highway rest stop. It’s the type of place known best for its placelessness, a mere pause for 18-wheelers and station wagons to load up and get on the road again, where McDonald’s and Starbucks and Mobile Mart exude extraordinary ordinariness.
The particular place Klinkenborg, who writes the occasional treat of a Times editorial on farming and the rural life, muddles over spending the night in happens to be a node on California’s spine. Those of us who like to think of ourselves as cosmopolitan conduits between San Francisco and Los Angeles know the spine well. The 101, the 5, even the 99, which I have never adventured onto but I’m sure is thrilling nonetheless: they all run the length of California's spine and they all, at some point, slice through the solemn heart of the state’s agricultural industry, the Central Valley. The Central Valley is a bit of a paradoxical landscape to me. At once both industrial, pumped with chemicals and unjust labor, and the underdog in America’s agricultural wars, it's not the demonized target that Farm Bill activists and food geeks from the coasts have made out of the Midwestern corn-scape. It can’t be—the Central Valley actually gives us edibles. The largest domestic supplier of almonds, grapes and tomatoes, virtually anything non-tropical can be planted along the 400-mile long stretch and it will take root and yield fruit.
The most recent version of the federal Farm Bill passed by Congress finally allotted fruit, vegetable, and nut growers a portion of the subsidies traditionally handed over to the corn, soy, rice, wheat and cotton producers of the big square states. So it was that I went to San Francisco a few weeks ago with America’s freshly subsidized fruit basket at my side, in an airplane drawing a path parallel to Interstate 5.
The interstate was my anchor for knowing, vaguely, where we were on a map and as the dry mountains north of LA flattened out into the agricultural plain of the Central Valley, the landscape became etched with boxes and lines. The fruit and nut orchards are anonymous from above though the work of human hand and machine on the land is still visible, however dwarfed by its geologic context. Whatever land can be planted with crops and irrigated to an artificial green in the valley, is—except for where crops have been uprooted and replaced with solar panels. Solar panels? I doubted my eyes at first, but the reflective blocks nestled among fields of brown and green were unmistakable. Lucky for California's dwindling water reserves, they don't need to be irrigated.
Adding paradox to land-use paradox, can our thirst for fuel exist harmoniously with our desire for full bellies?
These solar panels add social and environmental texture to the Central Valley, a third dimension to the two-dimensional carpet of an agricultural cornucopia. They flickered opaquely, reminding me of the dozens of ‘golden’ lakes throughout Ethiopia’s southern Rift Valley that gleam under the spell of some naturally-occurring metallic compounds. The Rift Valley‘s food and fuel chain is simple and synergistic, with herds of goats, cattle, and sheep weaving back and forth across the single road in search of the freshest grass. Trees provide campfire fuel for the shepherds trailing their animals. There are no gas stations along the Ethiopian road, nothing to snack on if you’re not a cow, and cruising speeds are unobtainable due to frequent animal crossings. Yet I drove through this flat valley for hours and never felt deprived. Here, even the ordinary enchants.
I found myself in yet another window seat on my return to LA from the east coast a few days ago, next to a young woman returning home to southwest China after her first semester at college in the Northeast. Her trip to Massachusetts (she’s a Mt. Holyoke student) back in September was her first ever to the United States. She clutched a treatise on Wittgenstein, placed her slang perfectly in speech, had spent Christmas with her new best friend in Greenwich, CT and proclaimed that the only thing she missed about China was the food. She was a bit full in the face, and I was struck by how at ease she seemed to be with the transnational life she's embarked on. The woman to her left, a computer programmer for the air force, asked her if she ever eats dog. The Chinese girl made a gagging sound. I rolled my eyes. They don’t eat dog where she is from, she explained with patience, though some people in China do, she never does. Mostly she misses the simplicity of rice and vegetables and all the little dishes cohering into a meal. I asked her how the food was at Mt. Holyoke. So good, she told me, but there is so much of it! She asked if there was dessert at every meal at my college. Of course, I replied, we used to eat cornflakes with vanilla soft-serve at weekend brunch after sampling all the pastries.
“I’m afraid my family won’t recognize me,” she said, “you know, there is the freshman 15 but I gained more than 15.” There was no remorse in her voice over this, just a hint of incredulity. Just then, as I was about to offer unsolicited advice (which is what seatmates in the air are for, no?) on how moving off-campus to an apartment with a kitchen is always a healthier option, a floating pool of light appeared out of the blackness to our right. Oh look, I told her instead, there’s Vegas.
“How do you know that’s Vegas?” asked the air force programmer. How did I know? No matter what direction you approach Vegas from--southeast, northwest, or above--you just know. Vegas requires no highway marker or GPS coordinates, no billboard announcing its presence. It arises ahead out of dust as a veritable Oz in the desert, a most anticipated filling station en route to the sea, or the big square states.
Tonight it shone like an oblique Lite-Brite board, a fine-grained orange glow unhumbled by its context, a singular dimension of black.
We were an hour from touching down at LAX as Las Vegas drifted off to our right and finally out of sight, into the abyss of as-yet unlit, still frontier. What remained in sight was the city’s electrical tether, one thin illuminated line punctuated by crosshatching that stretched from the southern limits of this embodied civilization all the way under our plane and beyond. If one could dip a hand down from the air and slice through this thread with a fingernail, the city might fly away like a kite freed from its string. Until someone scrambled to plug it back into the outlet of infinite power, that is. Then the whole thing would rise from the earth again.
Happy New Year.
'Life is one continuous mistake,’ Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, used to remind his students. When he shopped he sought out the rattiest vegetables at market, all the discarded and maimed culls, and his meditation grew strong, nourished by the continuous mistakes of human life. --Wendy Johnson, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate
Buried in The New York Times last week was a write-up about a victory for vegetables. Two weeks ago the European Union pitched “overly curved, extra knobby, or oddly shaped produce” into the grocery store’s waste bin; now they let them stand proud in the grocery store next to all their perfect relatives. It’s a real high-five for the previously “discarded and maimed culls,” the twisted and misshapen vegetables and also a few fruits. Irregular tomatoes, apples and peaches are still banned, unfortunately, while carrots, peas (have you ever had a run-in with a deformed pea?) and a few dozen others are no longer. It must be a case of political discrimination. Where I think the real achievement lies though is in the acceptance of misshapen root vegetables, always the most macabre of the produce section. Any edible pulled from the earth wears scars of its life underground and if Edward Gorey had written a Thanksgiving tale, it would have been a tale of these misshapen root vegetables.
But farmer’s markets have never been discriminatory against ugly produce in the way that grocery chains have (sites of industrial agriculture that they are) and yet I realized that I always search out the most aesthetically perfect fruits and vegetables, however subconscious this practice may be. Inspired, I made a game out of looking for the most imperfect produce as I toured the Ballard farmer’s market in Seattle with my friend Michelle last Sunday. A truly good friend rarely questions one’s ill-justified pursuits and so Michelle didn’t press me on why I was attracted to the farmer’s market’s least-wanted. We found piles and bins: she pointed out twisted carrots and stood patiently while I took some photos of strangely curved beets, soft-edged cabbages and irregularly shaped Asian pears, three-pronged carrots and purple potatoes with pink splotches. Misshapen edibles were all over the Ballard market but rarely were they broken. No, these were not mistakes wrought by a human hand but by ecology itself: the beet that grows its sweet root down and hits a rock perhaps, or the apple that didn’t quite get enough sun on one of its halves and so shows its mis-proportioned growth. I don’t really know the why of the knobs and lumps and funny colors, but finding them all in plain view made me think about the why of caring what fruits and vegetables look like. So long as a fresh food isn’t showing signs of rot and thus danger, does visuality matter if we ultimately perceive quality through its flavor? Is the visual any reliable indication of the taste?
We’ve long privileged vision and hearing over the other senses, with taste often falling to the bottom of the philosopher’s hierarchy. It was considered to be a bodily and therefore primitive sense by Aristotle, who favored the cognitive senses, seeing and hearing, that allowed for objective rationality and thus the production of knowledge. Taste, as a gustatory pursuit, was too subjective to contribute to that. So what does the European Union’s turn away from using vision to judge produce quality suggest? Ironically, one would think that those cultures with deeply rooted peasant cuisines, the French and Italian being chief among them, would have always privileged the flavor of a vegetable or the succulence of a fruit over the item’s physical appearance. After all, those who grow what they put on their own dinner table could hardly dismiss a deformed peach or stunted carrot as a parent wouldn’t cast away an ugly baby. Unless, of course, the compost pile needed beefing up.
I didn’t allow myself the luxury of searching out imperfect produce at the Santa Monica farmer’s market this morning, though it did occur to me that there seems to be less of it in Los Angeles than in Seattle. It was back to the usual market business instead, sizing up the availability of apples (the ladies with the Gold Rush variety were there!) and economizing on lettuce, four small red leaf heads for three dollars. My splurge, as I was retreating from the market’s dead-end where the row of stalls threatens to lead you into the Pacific, was on persimmons. A strange and whimsical fruit, if only because my tour guests told me so when I chatted them up around the vineyard and garden in Napa when I worked there: how can a tree lose its leaves and leave the fruit hanging, they would ask as I led them past Frog’s Leap winery’s two Fuyu persimmon trees. Or more commonly, what is that orange thing, they’d exclaim, can we eat it? And inevitably a tall man would reach up and pluck one for his wife, who never had the audacity to bite into a strange fruit in front of the crowd. The Fuyu variety, squat like a pumpkin-colored tomato, remains hard even as its insides become sticky with sugars so I’d tell her it was safe for transport inside her purse.
The practicality of these Fuyus means I usually prefer them to their cousin, the Hachiya, which are only sweet when they’re soft enough to scoop with a spoon. Until then, they remain stoically firm, a powerhouse of bitterness that rivals that of the uncured olive (which occasionally a winery tour guest would grab from the tree, chew, appear to be poisoned, and promptly gulp down his, and his wife’s, glass of red). But feeling whimsical myself today, I dropped $4 for three Hachiyas, curious how different they’d actually taste from the Fuyus. They were like little tapered bowling balls and the man who took my dollars told me that they’d take six or eight weeks to ripen. I almost asked for my money back.
“Think of them as edible art,” said the persimmon peddler. “Put them in a bowl to look at, check them a few times a week or so and then one day you’ll be surprised-- they’ll be ready to eat.” So it is that I have a display of pretty persimmons sitting dormant on my table, perfect to the eye... but not to the palate.
For all the seduction surrounding food these days, the earth that gives us such a bounty gets remarkably short shrift. Sure, small farmers are basking in all sorts of glory if you know where to look, and terroir has always been a sexy topic among certain connoisseurs. But how do we rally the troops, as we’ve started to around glaciers in the Arctic or forests in the Amazon, and convince the masses that soil is important, really important? What will persuade us to pay attention to the quality of our soil as the element of our kosmos that offers up nutrition, flavor, and ultimately oxygen for us all but is often referenced by its pejorative nickname, dirt? This recent National Geographic article and the accompanying photographs did a pretty good job at illuminating soil (though I expect as much from them). But the author describes unsexy subjects such as this in terms of MEGO: my eyes glaze over. It’s true. What could possibly make soil, as a subject, sexy? If there’s anything out there that does it for you, I want to know about it. While I continue to mull this task over, a lifetime’s work of a self-proclaimed ethnopedologist (one who studies the cultural dimensions of soil, I didn’t make it up), I want to share with you some of my favorite characters who’ve grabbed my attention and thrown it back to earth. Believe it or not, they aren’t chefs and farmers glamorizing vegetables and the ecologies that yield them (though a remarkable job of calling attention to agriculture these foodies do). They also aren’t scientists who write persuasively about the demise of our soils around the globe. Here instead are a photographer, an historian, and a Buddhist gardener who all have a creative way of reminding us how valuable our soil is. I call upon their work whenever I’m forgetting.One of my favorite modern photographers is one who has taken planes into the sky and lingered over fields of toxic waste. And Los Angeles sprawl. And cozied up to canisters of human remains. Mostly I like the toxic waste series, for its vibrant aerial depiction of abandoned strip mines, evaporated lake beds--sites in the western United States where culture and nature collide and erupt into gaseous form. The photographer, David Maisel (whose work I will refrain from unethically posting on my blog and instead send you to his website here), spoke to a seminar I was taking around this time last year on his interest in images that blur aesthetics and ethics. His photographs are undeniably compelling, most would say beautiful, though his subjects are often places where the earth’s surface has been contaminated and degraded beyond habitation, or cultivation. Can, or rather should, the toxic be depicted as beautiful? Does the beauty of his images obscure the fact that these are indelible scars of human action and inaction on the land, or does it jumble the all-too-persistent dichotomy in which nature=good and people=evil? Maisel claimed not to have an explicit environmental message in mind when he shot these series, but it’s hard not to imbue them with your own. A more recent find was the book Dust by Carolyn Steedman, also suggested for a class, on the history of, and created by, the archive. It’s an irreverent treatise on why historians do what they do, which is create a present out of a past that is mostly empty until they come to find it and piece it together. Steedman speaks her piece through the perils of book dust (which used to pass along anthrax spores to unsuspecting archive-dwellers) and the pleasures of tearing apart a narrative constructed outside of the archive, as such is the 19th century’s Middlemarch. But towards the end, when few passages had yet been deserving of ink underlining and stars in the margins, I was roused by this: ‘This is what Dust is about: this is what Dust is, what it means and what it is. It is not about rubbish, nor about the discarded; it is not about a surplus, left over from something else; it is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed.’She, of course, is referring to the concept of the narrative, of the inscription of history. But the soil is also a record of history, and can be read both scientifically and culturally to understand our history and the planet’s. This, I think, is what ethnopedologists do. And soil too is Dust, the opposite of Waste, at least until it becomes degraded to the point of no restoration and hung framed in a photography gallery. Wendy Johnson has a book called Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate and I must warn you, if you read it, she might have you convinced that moving into a Zen monastery is the best way to spend the rest of your life. She’s no proselytizer, but she does have a way with words that renders the mundane transcendental. Johnson was the master gardener at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin County for many years and she weaves accounts of her daily routine at GGZC with dharma (‘the way’ as practiced through Buddhism) passed along from her Zen teachers. Toiling closer to the land that produces our food than the others I’ve mentioned here, the humility surrounding her knowledge of gardening’s produce makes me feel ever boastful of my cooking endeavors; her wisdom falls from her prose in pieces that I want to snatch and keep on my nightstand, like the seashells I’ve swiped from the sea. Because it’s getting late and I must return to reading about soil fertility and undernutrition in Rwanda, I leave you with only this brief quote of hers. For the moment, it’s keeping my eyes from glazing over, even more so than coffee.‘Composed of clouds of countless, invisible microorganisms digesting the land and running it through their intestines, soil is feces, and within the body of soil, all beings garden.’
Sometimes, stirring bread flour into my sourdough starter or dolloping jam into jars feels like an indulgence. I devote time, and subject my debit card, to the pursuit of food for pleasure on a near daily basis. Should I really have made another pot of fruit preserves? Will the dozen cups of flour I’ve devoted to sourdough starter ever manifest into something edible… and did four more cups really need to be tossed into yet another batch of pumpkin-based baked goods? I’ve learned to let go of thinking too much about what constitutes luxury versus necessity, and nutritious or practical versus indulgence, when it comes to my personal food decisions. But what I have a harder time contextualizing is how I can spend time stirring a pot of mulberry jam in between reading article after article on the recent violence in eastern Congo, near to where I spent most of last summer and where few people are able to make dinner for their families right now. The violence has kept aid workers from even distributing nutrient bars. I know, it’s the old refrain: “You have to finish everything on your plate because there are children starving in Africa.” I cringe thinking that anyone should be forced to eat all that lies in front of them as children with protruding bellies look over their metaphorical shoulder. This, after all, exemplifies a treacherous global paradox in which half the world stuffs themselves while the other half starves (to paraphrase activist/writer Raj Patel). But nevertheless, I’m not beyond being able to reconcile my brimming pantry with the information that people in a place I’ve visited have nothing to eat today. A dairy farmer at a grass-fed livestock conference I was at once proclaimed to me that “producers” must be referred to as farmers. And “consumers,” the other half of the food chain dichotomy, I asked? “Consumers are citizens!” said the dairy farmer.But those who have managed to return to their farm plots in eastern Congo as the fighting subsided this weekend are not citizens, at least not as we define citizens. They often struggle for the right to be even consumers, picking up each other’s scraps of unripe banana and papaya as they wander along footpaths, wondering where they’ll lead their families to sleep that night. In a region perpetually destabilized by bloodshed, the inhabitants of eastern Congo are subjects of a pawn game played out in a power vacuum by various armies. A messy arrangement of rebels hawking ethnic affiliations, UN peacekeepers, and a ragtag Congolese national army that is better equipped to rape and pillage than protect can hardly be considered governance. Congolese haven’t elected any of these groups to power and yet all of the armies strip the people of eastern Congo of their basic rights to food, shelter, and safety. When any one of the rebel groups stirs from hibernation, hundreds of thousands of Congolese scramble to escape, flee, scatter. Whatever verb best describes it, it’s a routine that involves putting down their hoes, packing up their houses, and uprooting their families for an uncertain amount of time. This past week, droves of Congolese fled Goma, a city on the northern edge of Lake Kivu and on the border of Rwanda, in advance of an encroaching rebel line. The fact that these particular rebels (who are accused of being propped up by Rwanda’s government) were threatening to take Goma surprised even the most battle-hardened journalists stationed in the area. Goma has long been considered a safety zone for UN aid workers and also for tourists from Rwanda stepping cautiously, rebelliously, over the border. There’s been a cease-fire in effect for the past few days and according to The New York Times life has all but returned to normal in Goma this weekend. The headlines on this particular spat of violence couldn’t have faded from the news any faster. But I haven’t been able to get this whole story to fade from my mind. I spent a weekend in Gisenyi this past July, at the nicest hotel in Rwanda that is a mere 15 minute walk from the Congo border. This violence thus seems all the more real, and also more surreal. The hotel shares a beach with Goma’s hotels; the single connecting road has been a lifeline for refugees from both countries. I briefly contemplated paying the $50 visa fee to walk across the border and take a few photos in Goma but my companion at the time, James, had already made a few visits there. I resigned myself to watching the subdued scene from the passenger seat of James’s jeep, munching on Trader Joe’s Asian rice crackers while James renewed his car permit at the border. A blue-helmeted African UN peacekeeper peered into the jeep and squinted at the sight of all the road-trip snacks we had in the car. The Congolese soldiers milling around projected the authority of Tappan Zee Bridge toll collectors. Everyone was stroking their guns, and yawning.Later that night we drove to a high point in Gisenyi to see the spooky red glow of Goma’s active volcano, which spewed ash all over the region in 2003 and baked Goma’s crop fields to dust. Its stirrings are as unpredictable as the activity of the rebels. What is predictable in eastern Congo right now is the rainy season, which has just commenced. I imagine it’s both a blessing and a curse, having made sleep miserable for those who spent this week on the run but also bringing life to fields of potential food. This New York Times article from the other day titled “With Tense Calm in Congo, Time to Assess the Damage” ended with:
Rebel soldiers were working with village elders on Friday to assess the damage caused by the departing government forces, who residents said had picked clean dozens of homes and robbed the local bank, cracking open the safe and stealing the villagers’ savings. But Mr. Nkunda’s troops may have committed similar abuses. “These guys are bad, too,” one man whispered in Kibumba.
But he did not want to elaborate.
Instead, he slipped away, down a path toward the bright green bean fields. It is planting season now, and many people have said that if they don’t go back to work, soon again there will be nothing to eat.On the eve of our own most prominent ritual of citizenship, we’re gearing up to exercise the privilege (or is it a fundamental right?) of choosing those who we will trust to govern us. Few Americans fail to recognize the significance of being able to do so, particularly this election year. But there’s another ritual of citizenship that so often goes unacknowledged, that of feeding ourselves without fear. Whether or not we farm our own food, or even bake our own bread, all of us here eat as citizens, not just consumers. So I’ll keep stirring pumpkin muffin batter and grinding my $17 a pound coffee, wondering if Congo, or Rwanda for that matter, will make the front page headlines tomorrow, and feeling proud and powerless all at the same time.
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