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February 5, 2012
It seems that during food icons month I managed to refer to Lady Eve Balfour as “nutty”, Xenophon as “sexist”, Ralph Waldo Emerson as “bogus”, Liberty Hyde Bailey as “racist” and George Washington Carver as a “Tom” who wasn’t actually a great scientist. My intention was to single out each of these individuals, to celebrate their accomplishments and suggest that people engaged in the food movement should learn more about them. All of which apparently goes to show, with friends like me, you won’t really need enemies. Go back and check it out, if you don’t believe me.
January was also a month with a few genuine comments that appeared amongst the robotic link-seekers. True to form, I’ve “approved” them all, and also according to my pattern, I’ve closed comments so that I don’t have to spend hours sorting through all the automata noting, “we like to honor websites we like…” or touting the new Zune. Those of you who don’t blog or manage websites would be truly amazed at how much white noise there is on the web. But I’ve complained enough about robots before. Go back and check it out, if you don’t believe me.
And speaking of which, it seems my blundering attempt to celebrate food icons has generated some hard feelings over in Van Buren County. Rather than drag regular readers of the Thornapple Blog into it, I’ll just provide this link, and then I’ll apologize to those who took umbrage at my choice of words. (If any of them find their way over to this corner of the World Wide Web, that is.) And then I’ll move right along to another puzzling leftover from food icons month: Xenophon’s claim that the principles of good farming are just so dead obvious that anyone can do it. Amazingly, no one called me out on this, though there is a fascinating new comment on “Blind Owl” Wilson’s influences (which apparently did not include the Anabasis, as I speculated). Go back and check it out, if you don’t believe me.
For readers outside the mid-Michigan area, the Thornapple CSA has a relatively unusual structure for community-supported agriculture. We’re based on the subscribers, not the farm. So far, we’ve had to go out and recruit a new farmer every year. We’ve found that it’s not easy to find one with Ischomachus’ level of knowledge, and as a result, one of the experimental components of the Thornapple CSA involves being willing to work with learning farmers, or at least farmers who are learning organic and sustainable methods. This means that sometimes the Brussels sprouts get covered with aphids, or that we fail to get out in the field on the first dry weekend in May, or that weeds overtake our carrots. Contrary to the Xenophon quotation I provided, I think these occurrences are less evidence of a recreant soul than a lack of sound farming knowledge on our part. Pull your copy of the Oeconomicus (in the original Greek) off the shelf and check it out, if you don’t believe me.
Maybe this is obvious enough, but it’s worth saying anyway. In Xenophon’s day (which is to say 2500 years ago) everybody knew something about farming, even urbanites like the urbane Socrates, who was able to answer all of Ischomachus’s questions on good framing correctly and with little coaching. Urbane urbanite that I am, I could not have done so. Fortunately for the Thornapple CSA, we do not rely on our blogger for farming knowledge. Our core group (that apple thing, again—check it out if you don’t believe me) has recruited a farmer for the summer of 2012 who will, I am sure, rival Ischomachus with her ability to astound and amaze us with the arcanae of sustainable horticulture. Melissa Hornaday will be meeting Thornapple members at an event Diane is organizing for Feb. 12. Come on over next week and check it out if you don’t believe me.
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
January 29, 2012
Just in case you don’t like my food ethics icons, a former Ohio extension agent named Andy Kleinschmidt wrote a blog back in 2009 in which he listed the 10 most influential people in the history of farming and agriculture. We have a bit of overlap: Norman Borlaug, George Washington Carver. Kleinschmidt’s “other notables” list includes Temple Grandin. Of course, I’m focusing on ethics in a way that Kleinschmidt isn’t, so it would be surprising if the overlap was total. His #1 is Fritz Haber, who developed the Haber-Bosch process for making synthetic fertilizer out of nitrogen freely available in the atmosphere. I’m not ranking my food icons, and I’m going out on this particular round with someone who fails to get a mention from Kleinschmidt: Lady Eve Balfour.
I know a lot less about Lady Eve Balfour than I do about any of my other food ethics icons. I know that she founded the Soil Association in the UK and that she is a revered figure among sustainable agriculture types from the British Isles. I know that she was involved in “the Haughley experiment,” a multi-year test of organic farming methods and soil fertility that took place northeast of London between 1939 and 1987. I know that Haughley is pronounced “Horley”. I know that Lady Eve was involved in forming the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). I know that she died in 1990.
I’ve read the speech she gave in 1977 called “The Living Soil”. It’s regarded by many as a manifesto for the alternative agriculture movement. You can read it yourself. It’s not that long. I haven’t read her book by the same title from 1943.
The notable thing about Balfour’s speech from my perspective is simply the way that she connects agricultural research with ethics. Here’s a quote:
There are two motivations behind an ecological approach–one is based on self interest, however enlightened, i.e. when consideration for other species is taught solely because on that depends The survival of our own.
The other motivation springs from a sense that the biota is a whole, of which we are a part, and that the other species which compose it and helped to create it; are entitled to existence in their own right. This is the wholeness approach and it is my hope and belief that this is what we, as a federation, stand for.
If I am right, this means that we cannot escape from the ethical and spiritual values of life for they are part of wholeness. To ignore them and their implications would be to pursue another form of fragmentation. Therefore, I hold that what we have to teach is the attitude defined by Aldo Leopold as ‘A Land Ethic’. This requires that we extend the concept of Community to include all the species of life with which we share the planet. We must foster a reverence for all life, even that which we are forced to control, and we must, as Leopold put it–’Quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem, but examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise’.
This is not, by the way, quite how Leopold put it, but never mind. Balfour is thought of as kind of nutty by some agricultural scientists because of her links to the Anthroposophical Society. Like Transcendentalism, I think that anthroposophy is more than a little too excessively magniloquent. But never mind. The point is a kind of intellectual discipline that comes from thinking of oneself working within a closed system. Farming has to proceed from the materials that can be generated within that system. Thinking that you can pull stuff out of thin air to increase soil fertility is a fool’s errand.
We can debate where the borders of that system really are, and we should. That would be a form of food ethics worthy of the name! If Lady Eve Balfour helps us get to that debate, she’s a food ethics icon in my book.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
January 22, 2012
None of this political speculation on the race for the Republican nominee for us! I’m sure both of my regular readers could care less about Newt and Mitt (sounds like a comic strip, don’t it?). My readers woke up this morning wondering who the next food ethics icon would be. My tendency would be to find someone with three names so that I can follow up the pattern of three previous blogs on George Washington Carver, Liberty Hyde Bailey and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Let’s see: Mary Baker Eddy? William Dean Howells? Except that as far as I know, neither of them had much to say about food ethics.
So we turn to Xenophon, who lived from approximately 430 – 354 BC, according to Wikipedia. Xenophon was a Greek general who led a hair-raising retreat following the defeat of Cyrus the Younger. He then retired to a farm near Sparta where he wrote a series of books, including a recounting of the expedition in support of Cyrus called the Anabasis. A loose English translation of Anabasis would be “Going Up the Country”. This leads me to speculate that Xenophon was the inspiration for Alan “Blind Owl” Wilson, who penned the immortal words “Well I’m so tired of cryin’ but I’m out on the road again. (I’m on the road again).” But that’s probably another story entirely.
Xenophon also wrote the Oeconomicus, which is mostly devoted to a philosophical discussion of agriculture. It’s set up as a dialog between Socrates and Critobulus, which shifts to a dialog between Socrates and Ischomachus, who is portrayed by Xenophon as being widely known among Athenians as an expert farmer. Of late, people have mostly focused on some passages where Ischomachus tells Socrates about how he instructed his newly wedded wife (some 15-25 years younger) in the arts of household management. He comes off as your run-of-the-mill male-chauvinist pig in this literature, except that no one uses the expression “male-chauvinist pig” any more. But that’s probably another story, too.
The Greeks are interesting because they developed a cluster of city-states, each of which institutionalized some form of political freedom and self-governance. They had to invent ways of talking to one another and deciding collectively what to do. They came to believe that some walks of life prepared a person well for the tasks of self-governance (which included self-defense), while others did not. Contemporary feminists (and I include myself here) fault them for thinking that women were unfit for these tasks, and Ischomachus’s instruction to his young wife is sometimes cited as exhibit A.
However, Ischomachus and Socrates both seem to agree that agriculture and farming are pretty central to the skills and talents of self-government, and since I live in world where I am surrounded by women farmers, I do not tend to read Xenophon’s praise of agriculture as particularly sexist. Some of it is dead obvious: “…where cultivation is inefficient, the garrisons are not maintained and the taxes cannot be paid.” But lots of it is rather subtle. A lot of it explores the links between self-discipline and the ability to inspire others. Other major portions are given over to explaining why “agriculture is the noblest of the arts because it is the easiest to learn.” This latter thought is connected to self discipline because a poor farmer can’t claim ignorance as an excuse, according to Xenophon, (eh, I mean Ischomachus). This leads him to the conclusion that “Husbandry is the clear accuser of the recreant soul.” That is, among farmers it’s pretty easy for us to separate the sheep and the goats, while among flute players or craftsman, one would need to have the arcane knowledge of the art to discern quality in its practitioner.
And speaking of arcane knowledge, there’s some pretty fascinating stuff implied by the way that Ischomachus convinces Socrates that agriculture is the easiest of the arts to learn: To wit, that Socrates (who was not a farmer) already knows everything about farming that allows Ischomachus to be the exemplary farmer that he is. Ischomachus convinces Socrates of this through a series of leading questions that exemplify Socrates’ own theory of knowledge and philosophy of education as it is presented in Plato’s Meno. But that’s probably another story entirely, and it wouldn’t make you a food ethics icon, in any case.
Paul B. Thompson holds the W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
January 15, 2012
Are farmers more virtuous than the rest of us? Is farm work character building? Does the small farm environment encourage the formation of positive character traits, at least in comparison to city life?
I’m not sure how either of my regular readers would answer today, but there was a time when affirmative responses to all of these questions would have been taken for granted. I suspect that even if many people would be skeptical or hesitant about it now, the thought that working on the farm is good for you in a spiritual sense still lurks in the unconscious. Getting a little vicarious virtue is part of the CSA way.
This idea shows up in a number of different cultural traditions, and it takes on different shadings and hues. I’ve noted before that people who attribute this idea to Thomas Jefferson generally don’t understand Jefferson, who was interested in a fairly specific sense of political loyalty when he wrote that “farmers make the best citizens.” I think that for Americans, the idea that farmers cultivate virtue at the same time that they cultivate their crops really starts to take hold later. It’s a theme that emerges in what some say is the first authentically American literary movement: Transcendentalism.
As for myself, I’ve always thought that there was something inherently bogus about this term “transcendentalism”. I could say more, but it would be boring, I assure you. So just go with the thought that the word is magniloquent and the whole movement panegyric (e.g. bogus) and we’ll get right to the point about farming and virtue. There’s no doubt that the doyen of Transcendentalism was Ralph Waldo Emerson and that Emerson did, indeed, think that farming was deeply connected to moral virtue. As for myself, I’m just happy to throw words like “doyen” and “panegyric” around on a grey January Sunday, if only to display my own personal magniloquence.
Emerson believed that human beings come into the world with a set of aptitudes and undeveloped abilities. To live well—to live a morally good life—is to realize those aptitudes as fully as possible. We do this through engagement with whatever environment we happen to find ourselves inhabiting. Emerson himself started out as a Congregationalist preacher, and he thought that writing poetry was his own personal path to self-realization. He came to believe that he had been mislead by living in a hothouse intellectual environment that was not actually all that well suited to expression of the most fundamental human capabilities.
So relatively late in his life, Emerson wrote an essay called “Farming” in which he praises the work that farmers do as more closely aligned to the capabilities that human beings have “by nature”. Think if it like this: A dog can be taught to walk on its hind legs by being placed in an environment where getting treats and avoiding beatings depends upon it. But herding sheep or tracking a pheasant would be a more natural expression of the natural capabilities inherent to the species Canis lupis. The species Homo sapien has different natural capabilities, but can similarly be placed in environments where survival depends upon doing tricks that are actually contrary to our natures.
“Cities make men talkative and entertaining,” wrote Emerson, “but they make them artificial.” Emerson’s journals are full of entries where the farm life is praised for it’s “adaptive fit” with the traits that human beings have “by nature.” Emerson’s most adept student Henry David Thoreau doubted this, by the way. Thoreau had more practical experience with farmers than his mentor, and he saw that they could become mean and penurious. His time at Walden Pond should be read as an experiment intended to test Emerson’s theory about human nature. As for myself, I think Thoreau surpassed his teacher, who ever remained imprisoned in magniloquence.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
January 8, 2012
Last year we did Norman Borlaug, winner of the World Food Prize and I think unarguably the most famous agricultural scientist of his time. Not that there are that many famous agricultural scientists. There’s Luther Burbank, who has a potato named after him. And there’s Justus von Liebig, the German chemist who pioneered the idea that plants depend on nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Liebig formulated the “law of the minimum,” which stipulates that a plant’s growth rate depends on which of these three nutrients is the limiting factor. We could include Humphry Davy, too. Both Davy and Liebig were bigtime scientific figures who made important contributions to fields other than agriculture. If we really stretch it, we might include Jethro Tull, though my guess is that, like me, if you know who Tull is, it probably has more to do with the flute playing of Ian Anderson than the cultivation of Onobrychis.
The most famous agricultural scientist of his time was probably Liberty Hyde Bailey, except that his time overlaps pretty much with Burbank’s and it’s hard to top having a potato named after you when it comes to the longevity of one’s fame. But we’ll go with Bailey because he is a native son of Michigan, born in South Haven in 1858. Bailey attended the Michigan Agricultural College, which has a street named after it in East Lansing. He was also on the faculty. There’s a building named after him on the MSU Campus today, and MSU has a special program for agriculture undergraduates named The Bailey Scholars Program. It’s not a potato, I’ll admit, but it’s got to count for something.
Bailey did a lot of things in his long life—he died in 1954. There’s a famous photograph in which he is standing next to a pile of books that he wrote, and the pile is taller than he is. A lot of what he did was pretty mainstream technical agricultural science, and I’m in no position to evaluate how influential that work is today. Bailey left M.A.C. (now MSU) to join the faculty at Cornell University, where he was the first Dean at the first formally organized College of Agriculture in the United States. He was also a public figure. He was well-known for advocating outdoor nature studies as a component of every child’s education. He felt that getting kids outside and engaging all their senses would stimulate their interest in learning. Learning would occur in a context where the knowledge imparted is immediately relevant, rather than abstract.
This reputation may have been the initial basis of his relationship with Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s autobiography also celebrates the importance of physical activity in the out of doors as crucial to character formation. It makes a person decisive—important if you plan to carry a big stick. Bailey chaired a government committee for Roosevelt called the Country Life Commission. Their report, written primarily by Bailey and published in 1911, explained why the decline of family-household farms was creating a crisis in rural America. It was partly economic: fewer viable farms led to unviable schools and business communities. But Bailey also believed that this crisis was spiritual, that the experience of growing up on and managing diversified farms created a population more geared to the practice of citizenship, and more attuned to the precarious balance between common purpose and individual self-interest.
A bit later in his career, Bailey published a series for the Methodist Church called “The Holy Earth”. Here Bailey argued that we need to recognize a moral obligation to “the land”. That is, we need to see land as more than just a resource, but as a locus of responsibility. This idea had a profound influence on Aldo Leopold. Today, Leopold is much more likely to get credit for the idea that ecosystems have moral significance than Bailey. For Bailey, all this fit with a more technically oriented agricultural research framework that was intended to create a “permanent agriculture”. Bailey saw that the farming methods of his day were depleting soils, and that emerging financial practices were creating economic vulnerabilities. Bailey’s “permanent agriculture” is pretty clearly a precursor of what we call “sustainable agriculture,” today.
I find Bailey pretty interesting for so many reasons. How did a set of ideas that were so mainstream in the early decades of the 20th-century get pushed so far to the margins by its closing decades? Are there lessons that advocates of local foods, better health and community development could learn from studying Bailey’s writings, or perhaps more relevantly, the fate of Bailey’s writings? Did Bailey have a philosophically viable way of interconnecting his work on farming methods, rural communities and the development of moral character? Could we learn from that? And I get my hackles up when young punks (maybe like myself when I was James McWilliams’ tender age) seem to think that they invented the food movement, that it came out of nowhere.
But although Bailey is clearly a food ethics icon, he’s also problematic. He was a racist, for one thing, and his writings include occasional sentences and paragraphs that are shocking to modern readers. His emphasis on family farms has been taken over by social conservatives who see him not only as an articulate defender of the traditional family, and but also as an opponent of women’s rights and gay rights. And in fact, I don’t doubt that they are partially right, the fact that Bailey was the first administrator to appoint women faculty at Cornell notwithstanding. Which brings me to another thing that I find interesting about Liberty Hyde Bailey’s legacy: I want to know whether present day food advocates can simply ignore the unpleasant side of Bailey, or whether there are reasons to think through the underpinnings and implications of a commitment to Country Life ideals more critically? And finally, is it really wise to have a significant undergraduate program at MSU named after Bailey, given these problems? Maybe it’s less troubling to hitch your reputation to a potato, after all.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
January 1, 2012
According to tradition, January is food icons month.
Well, we did it last year. I started out 2011 by posting a blog on Norman Borlaug, the Nobel prize winning agricultural scientist I got to know personally when I was on the faculty at Texas A&M University. This precipitated an e-mail from Terry Link who sent an article by Vandana Shiva, and though I’ve never met her, I was compelled to respond. Somewhere in there I had written a blog on Temple Grandin, who I met when she was a student in Stan Curtis’s lab back at the University of Illinois. So I found myself with three blogs about individuals who have had profound effects on food issues in our time, and it just seemed like Bob’s your uncle to finish out the month with blogs on Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry.
I got a lot of positive feedback on those blogs, more than on any others I’ve written in the two years that I’ve been at this fool’s errand. So I tried a follow up with mini-icons in September: Mark Bittman, Joan Dye Gussow, Bernard Rollin and James McWilliams. The mini-icons were people of lesser stature and lesser renown, (though that may not be true for Bittman). I don’t think these were so successful, and no one bothered to make a comment (other than McWilliams himself, who was incensed). But I’m going to give it another go this month. If doing something once doesn’t establish a tradition, I don’t know what does.
My idea this time around is to do some food icons from the past. I’m going to start with George Washington Carver. As anyone who clicked on the James McWilliams button above knows, I grew up way back in the middle of the last century, and in my world, Carver was famous. I’m blogging about him today because I don’t think he’s all that well known anymore. To test that out, I ran a Google search and discovered a blog posted only yesterday. Carver is there said to have invented crop rotation, which goes back at least to the 15th century. While my first thought was that maybe Carver is on the radar after all, this rather gross error made me a bit skeptical. All in all, it was a strange post in an extremely bizarre blog that seems to have been created in the last couple of days of 2011. The blog already has both dozens of lengthy posts on random subjects and numerous illogical links to external websites. Highly robotic. And there was an unabashedly robot blog for “George Washington Carver products” which is actually a redirect site that points you to a bunch of crap advocated by a guy named “Herman”. There were a couple of blogs that looked pretty school-project-like, even though they actually had some decent content. Everything else recent was mentioning something named after Carver and not the man himself. So in conclusion, I take my hypothesis as proved. There’s a good Wikipedia article on Carver. It’s not like he’s disappeared from history. But if you don’t set out looking for Carver, he’s not very likely to come up.
I was always alert to Carver because my Grandma Thompson took me to his boyhood home down in Southwest Missouri when I was just a kid. Carver was born on a slave plantation, and back in the 1950’s there was still a large tree on the site in Diamond Grove where someone had been hung by the thumbs during George’s years there. I don’t recall the details and this may be one of those things in the Thornapple Blog that is not strictly true. The site was the first U.S. National Monument dedicated to a black man. Although this story about being hung by the thumbs undoubtedly made me much more aware of George Washington Carver than other white kids from Denver, I don’t think anyone growing up in my era would have failed to know who he was. We learned about him because he came up from slavery to become a “great scientist” and because he was black.
Carver died in 1943. Wikipedia says he spent his last two decades mostly being a celebrity and promoting the cause of racial harmony. By the 1960s, the relentless promotion of Carver as a model African-American probably led many blacks to take a jaundiced view of him. Carver wasn’t really a “great scientist” in the way that we use that term today. He never earned a doctorate, did not publish findings in scientific journals, and cannot, in truth, be credited with commercially successful technical innovations. It would be pretty easy to conclude that his fame was at best patronizing by well-meaning whites. At worst, Carver was a “Tom” being fêted for his compliant and subservient manner.
What Carver actually did during his productive years was to develop and publicize ways that poor farmers could accomplish a lot of practical tasks using natural materials ready to hand on their farms, avoiding the need to purchase goods from commercial suppliers. He and others also helped establish peanut farming across the South as a more sustainable crop that could replace the cotton agriculture that was both depleting soils and requiring ever greater amounts of insecticide. By my standards, that makes him a food ethics icon.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
December 25, 2011
It might be time to finish out 2011 by cleaning up the blog a bit, correcting errors and passing along the random bit of mail. I’m not sure I can make a whole blog out of it, but here goes.
The big error in last week’s blog was the song lyric from “Christmas in Jail” which was both misquoted and mis-attributed. I’d like to say that Ray Benson called me personally in order to complain, and why shouldn’t I? I did remind readers that not everything you read in the Thornapple blog is strictly true.
As for mail, my dad e-mailed to remind me not to complain about traveling too much, as it’s always my own fault when I do, and then I’ve had a few of these viral links sent. The only one I’ll pass on was from a loyal reader who may prefer that others do not know he was Moo-ved by the U-Tube video at the following Link. I have the usual comments from robots, but the gems were already reported back at the end of September.
And I guess that’s about it for 2011.
Talk about going out with a whimper! But hey, it’s Christmas Day, and the stockings are hung by chimney with care. Santa Claus is back in town, and he ain’t got no sleigh with reindeer, ain’t got no pack on his back. This year he’s coming in a big black Cadillac.
Enjoy some good local food this holiday season. The blog will be back next year.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
December 18, 2011
Still looking for that perfect gift this Christmas? Every kid wants The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Shop for it at Amazing dot com right cheah. Just imagine the joy on those cherubic faces next Sunday when they shred the wrapping paper from that package ‘neath the tree to discover their own personal copy of this scintillating, entertaining and (of course) edifying book. It’s the Kewpie doll, the Barbie, the Cabbage Patch Kid, the Pet Rock, the Tickle Me Elmo of the Oh Teens. I promise. And unlike Elmo, The Agrarian Vision does not require batteries! That is, unless you get the Kindle version, which is in fact available. For a limited time only, the author will be offering to personally autograph your copy at no additional charge (try that with a Kindle). Nothing will please your tots and toddlers (not to mention those from nine to ninety) than the gift that keeps on giving: a lifetime of personal enlightenment about the deep philosophical significance of the CSA way!
Well, maybe not. There was that bonehead Santa that brought my daughter a copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web back when she was about seven or eight years old. I’ll never forget the disappointment on her face that Christmas morning. And “some pig” The Agrarian Vision ain’t. So here’s an idea: make a donation to the Thornapple CSA in your child’s name! There’s a link right on this very webpage where you can find the information you need. Just imagine their excitement when they learn that this important social institution in mid-Michigan has gotten the boost it needs, and that they are being personally commemorated by your gift. And just think about how much they will respect you for making a charitable gift to an organization that is not even a recognized charity, and that therefore lacks the attendant tax advantages. If you think the subtleties of tax policy are lost on the younger generation, well all I can say is “Don’t sell the children short, my friend.”
On the other hand, a charitable donation is a bit abstract. Even I admit that it takes up too little room under the tree. So maybe you should give your teenager his or her very own subscription to the Thornapple CSA. They will enjoy a good seven to eight months of healthy and delicious fresh fruits and vegetables. And in accordance with our philosophy (see The Agrarian Vision above) these little buds and bodices are grown without the use of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. They aren’t technically organic, but that’s because the United States Department of Agriculture (in its infinite wisdom) requires expensive certification procedures for all fruits and vegetables that are represented as “organic”. And we’re just a poor Community Supported Agriculture, not for profit but too preoccupied with doing good works to have completed the forms for non-profit status with the Eye Are Ess, so we pinch our pennies and we don’t pay for organic certification. If this bothers you, see “charitable donation” in the above paragraph. Yes, nothing soothes the adolescent soul more than a big box of homegrown tomatoes! It’s the perfect gift for those of you considering the ubiquitous “gift card”.
Except that nothing happens until at least April, and not much of a serious nature until late May. And we can all recall how good we were at delayed gratification in our own adolescent years. So what’s left? Well, looking back to 2009’s Thornapple Blog, we might suggest egg nog. In the words of Jerry Jeff Walker (from his beloved holiday classic “Christmas in Jail”): “Egg nog? Egg nog! Yeah, I’ll have some egg nog.”
I just haven’t figured out how to make a buck on it.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
December 11, 2011
I had lunch last Tuesday at a place called Baan Thai. This is not the one in Waltham, Mass, or the fancy wine bar in San Francisco. It’s not the Baan Thai in Indiana, the Baan Thai in Newport, VT or the Baan Thai in Leavenworth, KS. I can’t speak for the others, but the Baan Thai on Broadway in southwest Portland is one of those shacky kind of places where you go up a flight of stairs and then you find yourself in what was once the living room or dining room of a house that’s been half-heartedly converted to commercial use. The tongue-and-groove on the walls has been painted pink and there are a few random posters of vaguely Asian locales to get you in mood. Lots of these places are pretty good, even when they are run by Phillipinos rather than Thai. The mere fact that there is a Thai restaurant in Leavenworth, KS is pretty clear evidence that the world has changed, but that’s not what I wanted to blog about.
What set me to thinking was the two guys sitting at opposite sides of the table across from me. These are two relatively big men dressed neatly but quite unobtrusively in dark trousers and still wearing the storm jackets that seem to be ubiquitous in Portland about this time of the year. It was pretty chilly in Portland on Tuesday, and the fog really penetrates the bones. But this is all atmospheric mumbo jumbo so far, because what’s notable about these guys is that they are not speaking a word to one another. Both of them have their heads bowed as if they are peering intently into their cupped hands resting on the table below. And I’m noticing that this intense silence is going on for a long time. Of course, I’m waiting on my order of Pad Kee Moa and maybe I’m just impatient, but I’m inclined to think that the meditative trance behavior I was observing continued for five or ten minutes. Maybe more.
It’s pretty rare to see people saying grace in a public restaurant these days, though there are parts of the lower Mid-West and South where family groups make a pretentious display of it. Two 30-ish males in a West Coast eatery is not typical, I assure you. But there are many things to recommend this activity, even if you are not religious in a conventional sense. It’s prudent to pause a bit before eating and put yourself in a more placid and receptive frame of mind. Helps the digestion. But there’s also an issue of moral character at stake. Recognizing that you are among the lucky ones every time you sit down to another meal… Taking note of the fact that someone has taken the time to prepare a plate of food for you, even if you do intend to pay them for it… Thinking for a moment that someone grew the rice, the soya, the cabbage, the chilies, that someone made the tofu and that countless others were part of the chain that got all these things down to Broadway on Dec. 6, 2011… Putting all this into a social context that celebrates the way that we depend upon the kindness of strangers…
And then there are all the ways in which natural piety involves acknowledging the place of humanity in a larger world. It’s good to be aware that in eating a meal, one is participating in a pretty fundamental dependence relationship. Without earth, sunshine and water, there would be no Pad Kee Moa. All the ingredients in my Pad Kee Moa are living organisms, and even if I happened to leave off the chicken or pork last Tuesday, there were animals—worms, field mice and voles—that perished when the soya was cultivated. Getting the stuff to Portland (not to mention getting me to Portland) also imposed a burden on living things. There is an Inuit saying sometimes attributed to the shaman Aua that goes like this:
The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls.
That captures it, I think, and reminding oneself of that just before taking a meal should develop the natural piety that I am talking about. Just watching the two guys across from me has adjusted my own attitude, and when my Pad Kee Moa finally arrives, I’m more in the mood to relish it not only for its gustatory qualities, but in a spirit of thankfulness and humility. And as we sit in the hammock between Thanksgiving and Christmas feasting celebrations, when better to remind ourselves of our vulnerability and interconnectedness?
Warm thoughts swirling through my head as the heat from the chilies in the Pad Kee Moa warms my innards, I glance back to the table where the two gentlemen have barely moved. I notice a faint glow coming from the cupped hands of the man whose back is mostly turned toward me. A prayer candle. Now this is truly extreme!
But in fact, both of them were staring at smart phones.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
December 4, 2011
Not everything you read in the Thornapple Blog is strictly true.
I got bawled out this week for implying that the Thompson household does not know how to store pumpkins over the winter. Someone grabbed my collar and hoisted me down to the basement where there are tidy rows of cute little pie pumpkins all lined up, waiting for Christmas Day, I suppose. Meanwhile, as locals or readers of the New York Times know, we had a big snow in mid-Michigan this week, so the squirrels have really been enjoying the uncarved Jack o’ Lantern pumpkins that someone left out on the front porch. Just to be sure that I’m making full disclosure in this week’s edition of the blog, I should probably point out that the squirrely pumpkins aren’t actually on the front porch anymore. They are out back where the neighbors don’t have to look at their gnawed carcasses. And just in case one of my regular readers is wondering who it might have been who grabbed my collar or bawled me out, I point out again that not everything you read in the Thornapple Blog is strictly true.
Which presents a dilemma. Because as Cephalus once said down at the Piraeus, what is justice but to speak the truth and to pay your debts? And if I’m supposed to be a food ethicist, what am I if not just? And if not everything you read in the Thornapple Blog is strictly true, how can I represent myself as one who speaks the truth? Let’s not get into the paying your debts part here. I still owe Larry Huang the fifty bucks I borrowed back in 1973 to buy a guitar amplifier. Except that when I think back on it, there’s no way I could have been buying a guitar amplifier in 1973, so it must have been something else. Remember, not everything you read in the Thornapple Blog is strictly true.
Piraeus is “a name which roughly means ‘the place over the passage’,” according to Wikipedia, though if you are into Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance you may recall a more creative translation that might have been material to a popular ‘70s author’s failure to impress un un-named figure that many have presumed to be Leo Strauss back at the University of Chicago. Strauss had a theory about the great philosophers, holding that they wrote in an elaborate code in order to ensure that that the great unwashed would not be able to understand what they were talking about. Today we refer to “the great unwashed” as the other 99%, but if you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. Not everything you read in the Thornapple Blog is strictly true.
Owing to my acute intelligence and highly developed since of irony, I have myself developed a code that allows elite readers (some of whom may even be among the 99%) to decipher when they should take what is written here with a heavy dose of salt. The phrase “Give ‘im a dose ‘o salt & water” is often sung as a verse to the folk standard “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” Few people know that I actually wrote this song back when I was the bass player for Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, though I cannot take credit for that particular verse. I was not, at that young age, the expert on food ethics (if we can presume salt and sobriety to have something to do with food ethics) that I am today. According to Billy J.’s website, he performed in New York City as recently as October 9, but as far as I know, he does not read the Thornapple Blog. Need I say that not everything you read in the Thornapple Blog is strictly true?
And speaking of Thanksgiving dinner, I also coined the use of the word “Turkey” in reference to people who are generally clueless or obtuse, as in “How do you keep a turkey in suspense?” My code, which owes nothing to turkeys like Cephalus or Leo Strauss, is an extremely subtle use of the tagging function that is built into WordPress. Some of my regular readers may have noticed that in addition to the subject matter tags like “politics” and “song lyrics”, there are (at this writing) four categories for entries in the Thornapple Blog. Some of them are marked “Serious” and others are marked “Funny”. Still others are marked “CSA Beeswax” and if I don’t check anything, they get labeled “uncategorized”. I leave to elite readers with a highly developed sense of irony (not to say sarcasm) to discern the meaning of these categories. As for the Monsanto thing (and for those of you who remember Lance Ritchlin and me entertaining gullible co-eds with tales about our days in the Dakotas): Not everything they say about me is strictly true.
Paul B. Thompson (Kellogg Professor at MSU) bends his elbow down at the Piraeus every Sunday. Join him some time.
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