i mentioned my last talk show guest was the energetic fermentation fetishist sandor katz. that guy eats some weird shit, and i mean that in the most complimentary sense. it’s radio, so of course i had to ask him about a cheese he mentions in his book, casu marzu, which is basically a pecorino left outside to be further ‘developed’ by fly maggots. one of the themes in sandor’s first book Wild Fermentation was that culture itself is what’s brewing in these crocks of rotting things. our conversation came round to our paranoia about raw food, and the thought occurred to me that these particular foods, out on the fringe of grossness, are where the really interesting connections are made between our consciousness and food.

if you want to know where a culture’s deepest insecurites lie, look at what it calls dirty; universally that has meant sex of many sorts, excrement, and a few culturally defined off-limit foods. for us more and more it specifically means unsterilized food - dirtied by human hands, not yet baptized by machines. most modern humans exist somewhere in a state of sterilized consciousness, where there are no dark shadows and no germs, nothing to infect their wonderbread thinking. no one is home, but the lights are on all the time. observe the fit of terror in an american as a fly lands on his el pollo loco, and you see someone severely stunted in the experience of his own psyche.

ultimately it all comes down to shit. shit scares the shit out of us. witness this hilarious comment written about a cool composting toilet that uses ash to dry and sanitize the waste:

Does anyone even care about the smell and potential health hazard problems with everyone shitting in their own backyards? It was kind of the reason we went to a centralized sewage system, isn’t this exactly what they do for all of us? Personally if I found a neighbor doing anything like this I’d have him reported, I don’t think any of my neighbors have the knowledge on how to safely dispose of their own waste. Never mind if there was flooding, fire or another natural disaster where this type of thing could be let loose.

and we definitely don’t want shit anywhere near our food, cuz man, that would be the end of us. (nevermind that it is in fact the beginning of us, mobile compost machines that we are.) so we blame the imaginary shit-stained hands of illegal farm workers rather than admit the real source of a beast like salmonella. but the harder you push your shadow side away, the more it rises to wake you up at night. ‘food safety’ is a deeply worshipped idea, but it’s only a procedural and psychological veneer over the most heinous filth humanity has yet excreted. casu marzu has got nothing on us.

at iowa state, more and more of the food served to students will come from local farms:

Last year, $153,000 worth of ISU Dining’s food purchases was from local growers and other niche producers in adjacent states. Director Nancy Levandowski has a five-year plan to grow that figure significantly.

imagine all the intellect that could be put to better use if we quit the tired old argument over city versus country. (seriously. take a moment.) this is the same small thinking that might imagine a seed is different than a root is different than a leaf, forgetting that they’re working parts of one being. i mean this only partially in the philosophical sense (that is, everything contains its opposite - light and darkness, female and male, birth and death. we know in the realm of the spiritual that believing one is separate from one’s opposite doesn’t make it so and that, in fact, refusal to integrate ‘the other’ is an obstacle to maturity.).

but whatever. i also mean it in a practical, physical sense: city and country being two limbs of one being, in a relationship of energy exchange with one another. in the same way that a navel-gazing manhattanite is ignorant of where his food comes from or where his shit goes, ruralers can be equally as blind to the benefits they receive from the city. thinking we’re separate is a mental shortcut that makes it easier to argue moral (and ecological) certitudes, but it is a wish, not a fact. we would do well to remember just how much of our man-made environment, no matter where we live, requires the collective input of large groups of people to pull off: anything made from mined and smelted metal for example, or glass, or milled lumber and paper, or rubbers and plastics and dense woven fabrics. even the most primitive of farm implements - steel blades for your fresh tomatoes, clothesline wire for your sundried clothes, a shovel to plant the okra, hammers, rugged waterproof shoes, woven pants, glass jars (for raw milk), the occasional but irreplaceable plastic bucket, your paperback copy of The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and a pen to take notes – all these are the products of the concentration of human energy. cities.
.

Dreamed the thong of my sandal broke
Nothing to hold it to my foot
How shall I walk? barefoot?
The sharp stones, the dirt. I would
hobble. And—
Where was I going?
Where was I going I can’t
go to now, unless hurting?
Where am I standing, if I’m
to stand still now?

–”The Broken Sandal,” Denise Levertov

this week on the politics of food i’ll be talking to sandor katz about his second book, the Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. after that, i’m cutting the show loose and getting the hell out of here. i hope to keep making podcasts. we’ll see.

in february i was hired as a training consultant with a software company. as debtor’s prisons go it was easy to say yes to. it’s not fulfilling, but neither is it torture; it pays unreasonably well and is still part-timish; i get to fly all over the country to train clients; and i don’t work out of an office, so i can live wherever i damnwell please.

i feel like i’m getting on the last bus out of Armageddon, and i don’t even care where it’s going. as much as i would like to take the last last bus out, to some rain-blessed land with my name on it, i can’t, not yet. it’s amazing how unattended debt can crowd out every other decent thing you’d want to do in life. so i have to stop first at a halfway house for financial knuckleheads, but i figure it may as well be near where my friends are, close to good climbing, and have plenty of farmer’s markets. i’ve thought about moving to a random cheap town in the middle of the country to save an extra couple hundred bucks a month. but there are livable fragments of northern LA that skirt the san Gabriel mountains, about two hours north of here, where i could nest for a while and in the meantime get to really studying the things i now just write around the fringes of. we’ll see.

remember the Nothing? the creeping swamps and shriveled black trees, the cold vague sense of panic, the pale empress clinging to life and lipgloss?

i thought of this as i read about yet another pasteurization edict: if the ministry of almonds has its way, as of august 1 of this year, all almond handlers will be required to kill any residual life remaining on almonds. they give you a bunch of choices, like steam, blanching and oil roasting, but the industry favorite seems to be fumigation by propylene oxide, a robust carcinogen and polluter. expert sensory evaluations have indicated that the treated almonds demonstrate no meaningful or significant difference from untreated almonds. except that they’re DEAD. they’ve been Nothing’d. will they still sprout? dunno. will they be a perfectly clean slate for any opportunistic bacteria in the neighborhood? likely. how long before good-natured research drones at a former land-grant university are put to task finding a ‘cure’ for this bacterial plague?

ha.

when it comes to DIY food, nuts (and for that matter legumes) still seem to be on the periphery of our consciousness. sure, we’ve figured out how to grow lovely yellow tomatoes and fresh cilantro and heirloom chilis, and we’ve snuck a goat into a corner of the backyard, but nuts?? where do they even come from? try to imagine for a moment the land required to cull a tin worth of hemp seeds that are now in vogue. for that reason (i suspect), these days nuts are still squarely the domain of gargantuan industrial producers. we’ve gotta get them back.

check out this bamboo bike.

such as,

- quality time alone without even having to ask for it
- no-cost, in-home colonic irrigation
- glowing skin and better-fitting jeans
- getting to use peristalsis in a sentence
- renewed gratitude for municipal plumbing
- renewed gratitude for the thankless, invisible workings of private-sector plumbing
- hard cash savings of three days of not having to buy food
- watching as much What Not To Wear as i can possibly take
- don’t gotta floss! i hate flossing.
- crossing off “spring detox” from my to do list

you may have heard the shocking news that chiquita does business with terrorists, but this is only half the truth. chiquita are terrorists, ones that deal predomininantly in bananas but not exclusively; guns and cocaine have made passage on their boats too.

why bother? it’s just fruit, right? why would thousands of silly latin americans need to die just so we in america - who eat an entire third of the world’s production - can have these mushy, sterile slices in our denny’s cream pie? because bananas are still among the top five currencies of neocolonialsim, behind coffee, sugar, and wheat. people will stop dying when WE STOP EATING THEM. (i tried to fix that sentence so it wouldn’t mean we’re eating people, but i couldn’t.)

for some background on chiquita’s dealings, the following is from a series of 1998 investigations by the Cincinnati Enquirer. the reporters were subsequently fired and prosecuted, and the paper pled for mercy from the terrorists in the form of a multi-million dollar settlement and a front-page retraction.

In addition to using interlocking trusts to hide control of Latin American companies, Chiquita has used a system in which local citizens are named as company shareholders but secretly sign over their shares in blank, thereby allowing the Cincinnati-based banana giant to exercise control.

The company used this method to avoid restrictions of national security laws and limits on land ownership by foreigners, and to reduce political and union pressure.

—

Nothing remains of Tacamiche but a few concrete foundations. No one lives here any more but lizards and crows.

The churches are gone. The homes of the banana workers are gone. Even the streets are overgrown with tall grass.

After six decades as a community among Chiquita’s banana fields in northeastern Honduras, the village was plowed under in February 1996 by about 500 Honduran soldiers. Former residents have not forgotten their village, nor have they forgiven Chiquita and its subsidiary for the fact that soldiers with bayonets and bulldozers forcibly evicted more than 600 people before wiping Tacamiche off the map.

Villagers had been told to leave. When they refused, Chiquita’s subsidiary Tela Railroad Co. obtained a court-order to evict them. When they still refused to leave, Tela brought in the army.

—

Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk on Monday defended his acceptance of a $1.5 million donation from Carl H. Lindner Jr. and his family after a prominent Catholic bishop characterized it as “blood money.”

Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton called for Catholic institutions to refuse such donations because Mr. Lindner is chairman and chief executive officer of Chiquita Brands International. … His statement was in response to revelations in Sunday’s Enquirer about Chiquita’s Latin American business practices. Those findings included aerial spraying of pesticides while workers were still in the fields; brute force used on peasants by guards on banana plantations; and failure to adhere to established health and safety standards for workers.

“The money from the Lindner family is being used to fund computer technology and equipment for seven inner-city Catholic schools serving 1,327 children, 75 percent of whom are black; 70 percent of whom are non-Catholic and 64 percent of whom have family incomes below the poverty level.” [cute!]

When asked whether the archbishop had any additional concerns about Chiquita based on the Enquirer’s report, Mr. Andriacco responded: “Sure it raises concerns. There were many, many allegations raised by the Enquirer and denied by Carl Lindner, and we are not in a position to choose between the two.”

Warmer-than-usual winters are throwing things out of kilter, causing confusion among maple syrup producers, called sugar makers, and stoking fears for the survival of New England’s maple forests.

For at least 10 years some farmers have been starting sooner. But last year Mr. Morse tapped his trees in February and still missed out on so much sap that instead of producing his usual 1,000 gallons of syrup, he made only 700.

Over the long haul, the industry in New England may face an even more profound challenge, the disappearance of sugar maples altogether as the climate zone they have evolved for moves across the Canadian border.

“One hundred to 200 years from now,” Dr. Perkins said, “there may be very few maples here, mainly oak, hickory and pine. There are projections that say over about 110 years our climate will be similar to that of Virginia.”

burrp.

Boulder, Colo.-based Wild Oats has annual sales of about $1.2 billion. It operates 110 stores in 24 states and British Columbia, Canada under the nameplates Wild Oats Marketplace, Henry’s Farmers Market, Sun Harvest, and Capers Community.

Whole Foods will evaluate each banner as well as each store to see how it fits into its overall brand and real estate strategy. Wild Oats Markets has been pruning its store base over the last several years to shed underperforming stores, but some additional store closures are expected as well as the relocation of some stores that overlap with stores Whole Foods currently has in development.

two weeks ago it was below freezing here; yesterday we reached 80. i’m calling it global weirding. but here at my desk everything seems still. a morning dove coos outside my window. nothing is shifting beneath my feet. today.

off the coast of germany though, a string of old pretty islands are being nibbled at by the hungry north sea. soon they will have dissolved, leaving the coast to fend for itself against a now-constant stream of bad winter storms. soon, we will have to redefine words like soon. we have brought geological time down to meet us, at a scale we can understand. no more fantastic stories of possible collisions with comets 2 billion years from now. soon is now.

and in north africa, the sands of ecological poverty are marching north toward the mediterranean. (and even a new green revolution can’t do shit with sand.)

Going in to 2007, the Sahara will have advanced to within 200 kilometres of the Mediterranean coastline of this North African state. And, warns President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, it may well extend further north to the shores of his country if more concerted action is not taken.

For several years, said Bouteflika, “Algeria lost, each year, 40,000 hectares of its most fertile lands because of desertification.”

Ninety percent of the country is already desert, including the south and a large part of the north. Desertification has also affected 13 million hectares of territory over the past 10 years, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture.

—

“One can create committees for each ecological catastrophe, adopt action plans or sign conventions, have the best of intentions — but if the financing does not follow and if the state is not determined to act on the ground, then desertification will cause yet more disasters,” an indignant Pauline Akamba, who teaches primary school in Kousseri in the extreme north of Cameroon, told IPS.

During the dry season, residents of the village use a mulching technique which entails covering the soil with straw in order to protect it from the sun’s rays û something which is already delivering positive results in the Sahel, particularly in Burkina Faso.

But in the absence of solid support from the state or NGOs, these efforts are failing to gain traction — to the sole benefit of the desert, which just doesn’t stop advancing, says Djouldé.

—

but i’m sitting here and everything is still. and i’m thinking of when i was a kid and we’d visit my ancient aunt dorothy, always ancient even thirty years ago, smoking away on her lay-z-boy and watching daytime tv. “like sands through the hourglass… these… are the days of our lives”.

i recently read vine deloria’s book red earth, white lies, in which he argues that many of the global geological events we associate with the prehistoric, unimaginable past - like the ice age - actually occurred within recollectable human time. the book is a bit incoherent at points, but you can’t gloss over how many native american narratives - describing fantastic geological changes - map so well with archaeological evidence.

mountains moving. lakes vanishing. seas eating cities.

in order to tell our grandchildren what happened in these days of our lives, first we must really begin to see them, to register the loss, to scream WTF?! most people throughout most of time have seen a volcano or two, or lost a village in a lifetime to a flood, but otherwise lived in relative stability. our fate is to witness the submergence of thousands of islands, arctic sheets in puddles, whole continents gone to sand - in the time it takes nature to change editors. and we don’t even know how to talk about it. our myth will begin with, “For a long time we just sat there, numb.”

this is lettuce, growing up a public stairwell in cuba.

the image is from a presentation by urban-garden-theorist andre viljoen, given at the soil association conference in january (the link has lots of other great podcasts and transcripts, too). i don’t know about you, but i was a bit surprised at how gray and mundane all those cobbled rows of vegetables can look. imagine our own cities in ten years!

…but 70 african organizations have said thanks, but no thanks, to bill gates’ new scam.

The push for a corporate-controlled chemical system of agriculture is parasitic on Africa’s biodiversity, food sovereignty, seed and small-scale farmers.

We reject these new foreign systems that will encourage Africa’s land and water to be privatised for growing inappropriate export crops, biofuels and carbon sinks, instead of food for our own people. We pledge to intensify our work for food sovereignty by conserving our own seed and enhancing our traditional organic systems of agriculture, in order to meet the uncertainties and challenges that will be faced by present and future generations. Agricultural innovation must be farmer-led, responding to local needs and sustainability. We celebrate Africa’s wealth and heritage of seed, knowledge and innovation. We will resist these misguided, top-down but heavily-funded initiatives from the North, which show little or no understanding or respect for our complex systems. We ask that we be allowed to define our own path forward.

vandana shiva speaking at the soil association:

…the Economist has finally reported on Indian farmers’ suicide and it’s called the great unravelling. And 80% of it is about how the subsidies of the North are pushing down prices, how the Bt cotton seeds are failing the farmer, but at the end of it, he doesn’t say the global trading system needs to change, the global food economy needs to change, the global agriculture economy needs to change. The last sentence is ‘The solution is the farmer must escape from the soil’.

Soil isn’t our prison; the soil is our liberator. The soil is our meaning, and disembedding from the oil economy in the post-peak oil world means re-embedding in the soil and in all of its life. All of its life including the ability of the soil to renew itself, the ability of the soil to provide for the needs we have, the ability of the soil to give us another meaning.

Which brings me to the second example that has to be set from the North. When I was thinking and hearing about transition towns, I was just thinking wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these gyms that have come up for people not working were shut down and everyone was told ‘your workout is going to be on the farm’.

Because surely something has gone wrong where on the one hand we say every technological invention is ‘don’t work, don’t work, don’t work, just sit’ and then health is ‘workout, workout, workout’. We have to overcome this schizophrenia.

And I don’t know how many of you read the Competitive Enterprise Institute put out ads… they have the line ‘and we can’t get rid of fossil fuels because they are the reason we got out of drudgery’.

Now to the extent we will keep talking of work as drudgery we will annihilate the small farmer and talk about it as their liberation.

so bees everywhere are going pooft. someone got up early this morning and already wiki’d it. maybe we’re just not the target species for the rapture, and we’ve done been left behind.

The number of bees in a hive typically diminishes over a period of days to the point where there are very few or none left… There is no indication of where the bees have gone or what drove them away… the bees may have been killed off by a combination of factors including parasitic mites and a lack of nectar in pollen. Scientists are also looking into whether there is a link with significant recent bee losses in some European countries, particularly Spain.

or maybe they just felt something amiss and bolted. oft-quoted entomologist jerry bromenshenk said once,

A honeybee’s body has branched hairs that develop a static electricity charge, making it an extremely effective collector of chemical and biological particles, including pollutants, biological warfare agents and explosives.

and jerry would know. he’s in the business of training bees to detect the stuff:

By giving the bee a little TNT dipped in sugary syrup, for instance, he conditions it to love the smell of the explosive.

i wouldn’t stick around for that either.