|
|
November 27, 2011
It’s the first Sunday after Thanksgiving. Long-time readers of the Thornapple Blog may need to be reminded that the very first entry “snuck in” right after Thanksgiving two years ago. That was the “key blog” that announced how I would write once a week to supplement the share delivery that Thornapple CSA members were entitled to receive during the winter months. Do I need to point out for readers in warmer climes that we aren’t really harvesting all that much in Michigan here on the weekend of Thanksgiving? Do I need to explain why the Thanksgiving feast is organized around the slaughter of a large fowl that would, when the snows come, be especially vulnerable to the foxes and raccoons? Do I need to explain why this dish is accompanied by root crops—mashed potatoes, winter squash and candied yams? Or why dessert pies are made from other storable crops like pecans or pumpkins?
If you take a look at what the squirrels are doing to the pumpkins sitting on our front porch, you would question whether they are all that storable. But of course real farmers would not leave something as valuable as a pumpkin sitting out where the squirrels, racoons and remaining birds could get to it so easily. There’s quite a diversity among Thornapplists, some approximating the true folk knowledge needed to have pumpkin pie not only for Thanksgiving, but also for Christmas, and others more like the Thompsons. As Robert Young used to say, “I’m not really a doctor, but I play one on television.”
Which qualifies me to pontificate on all manner of issues associated with food and farming I suppose, at least as much as it qualified Dr. Welby to hawk health products. The original key blog announced that Aldo Leopold’s environmental philosophy would provide a framework for future entries. “It’s a nice little philosophical essay,” said Diane, “but it’s not very funny.” Harsh criticism, indeed.
So by the next week I was trying to interweave some background observations on getting the farm ready for winter with some Dadaist juxtaposition of quotations from Pliny the Elder and historical comments on St. Vitas dance and it’s possible linkage to ergot poisoning. I guess it was one of those things that you had to be there to see it. The week after that we were into “Take Out Season,” and the smile-a-little-bit but hardly-ever-slap-your-knees style of the Thornapple blog was full on. I still do those nice little philosophical essays now and then, but I try not to take myself too seriously.
A year ago I was questioning whether it was worth the effort it took to keep the Thornapple blog going. But due to the overwhelming response from my readers (well, one person did write), I’ve kept it going for another year. I’ve kept it on the food ethics/CSA way theme with just a couple of deviations, and I, at least, still think of it as working within that Aldo Leopold framework. If you’re wondering what that is, I’m providing a link right here: Original Thornapple Blog. I love it when real people post comments, but I appreciate the fact that it is an enormous pain to do that. I may or may not keep it going yet another year. Winter’s coming on again in Michigan, and folks do need something to tide them over ’til the sun shines again. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld might have said, “Yada yada.”
Which brings me to the song lyric for this anniversary entry. According to Wikipedia, the song “Ja-Da” was penned in 1918 by Missourian Bob Carleton and released on a piano roll by the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. The Original New Orleans Jazz Band featured a lead singer named Jimmy Durante, which establishes the analogy to George Michael and Wham! Michael went into the hospital suffering from pneumonia this week, and we all hope he gets better soon. But that’s not what I wanted to blog about.
Carleton’s lyrics went like this:
Ja-Da
Ja-Da
Ja-da, Ja-da jing jing jing.
(Repeat)
That’s a funny little bit of melody—it’s so soothing and appealing to me.
Ja-Da! Ja-Da! Ja-da ja-da jing jing jing.
Which is all well and good, but the connection to food ethics lies in the fact that the exact same chord sequence and melody is used in a blues standard that has the following food-related verse:
What’s that smells like fish pretty baby, I sure would like to know.
(Repeat)
That ain’t puddin’. That ain’t pie. That’s the kind a stuff that you got to buy!
So keep on truckin’ mama. Truck my blues away.
Now for some reason this is often given a lascivious connotation, but I believe that the original singers were probably referring to the fact that red-blooded (which is to say, hot-blooded) boys really were attracted to girls who had spent all day in the kitchen and really did smell like pudding or pie. They were suspicious of fancy types who wore perfume, which, very much like Mrs. Smith’s or Marie Callender’s, is just NOT part of the CSA way.
There’s just a chance that Carleton was borrowing, but it’s also possible that the blues singers were making a creative adaptation of Jimmy Durante. Assignment for the week: Is there an ethics question here?
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
November 20, 2011
Greetings from BadhotelScheveningen! That’s actually the name of the place. “I kid you not!” as Jack Paar might have said. “I’m not making this up!” as Dave Berry might have said. “I am not a crook!” as Richard Nixon might have said. You get the picture.
What do you expect from a place that’s actually called Bad Hotel? Is this the next film in the series that brought us Bad Santa and Bad Teacher? That would be a hotel where everyone is vulgar and out for themselves. But since this is pretty much the reality at most hotels you might visit these days, it isn’t actually much of a premise for the next film starring Jason Sudeikis or some other punk I’ve never heard of. No, the pitch for “Bad Hotel” would probably go something like this: “Fawlty Towers meets The Office”. A klatch of dysfunctional losers occupy positions in the front office at the airport location of a chain hotel in some dismal Midwestern location like Omaha, Tulsa or Grand Rapids. I know, I know. Those of us here in Lansing think of Grand Rapids as the epitome of sophistication and cosmopolitan élan. But we’ve got to realize that the two-coasters who form the bulk of the film audience these days probably don’t see it that way.
At any rate, the head manager is some narcissistic fop who majored in hospitality studies at the local land-grant university (I spare myself and my employer no embarrassment at the Thornapple Blog), mainly because it was a great way to avoid interrupting video games or the occasional bout of heavy drinking to do something like actually crack a book. The special events director is actually competent and a subtly sexy and intelligent babe who read Rimbaud in the original French during college (not that our scripts will ever betray any hint of this), but she is continually stifled by the corporate structure and the unintended but devastatingly effective barriers to her advancement that are erected by the narcissistic fop manager. Then there are necessary losers we need to round the Bad Hotel scenario: vindictive petty bureaucrats, muscular, bright and generally disinterested security staff and a few well-meaning cultural stereotypes in the waitstaff or custodial service. It’s tough to resist those can’t quite understand the language mis-cues in a vehicle like this.
So now that I’ve given away another million-dollar idea in the Thornapple Blog (see “Fat Elvis” for the earlier instance), I’ll say that the Bad Hotel here in Scheveningen is actually nothing like this. Oh sure, we’re a block from the actual seaside, with at least two multi-story apartment buildings thoroughly obscuring any chance we might have of catching a glimpse of the ocean. And it is November, after all, and by noon we find that the bone-chilling fog that rolled in off the North Sea is only just now beginning to lift a little bit. Not that the sun is out, mind you, but the impenetrable steel gray cloud cover has actually risen to the point that I can see the top of the 11 story condo building that is the second of two between me and that ocean view that people would actually pay to come here and look at. But the hotel itself is okay. Nice little dining room with a street-side window where I sat for hours sipping bitter coffee and watching snugly dressed Dutch couples out walking their dogs.
Ah the bliss of being an internationally recognized food ethicist! Expense paid out-of-season travel to bad hotels at North Sea resorts that normally have only about six weeks when you could actually wear a bathing suit, in any case. Excuse me while I gloat.
I hope that volcano doesn’t crank up again. I’m looking forward to being home for Thanksgiving. Or as McGeorge Bundy might have said, “Mistakes were made.”
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
November 13, 2011
It seems that the noted philosopher Paul Thompson has a new book out. It’s called Agro-Technology: A Philosophical Introduction. The title is just a wee bit misleading because the main focus of the book is a bit narrower. Thompson gives an extended defense of genetic engineering in developing new crops, and argues that planting genetically engineered crops is far superior to conventional agriculture.
The main thrust of the argument is that the two main achievements of plant genetic engineering—herbicide tolerant crops and pest resistant crops that produce their own version of the Bt toxin—have led to an overall reduction of chemical use and resulted in the substitution of less toxic chemicals when they are compared to the farming methods used by most farmers in the industrial world. They have also improved soil conservation due to the way that they permit no-till farming. They have done all this with no decline in yields. That is, farmers are producing as many bushels of corn and soybeans or bales of cotton per acre as they ever did.
Thompson is not averse to organic farming. It, too, results in reduced chemical use, but it doesn’t score the victories in soil conservation and he is skeptical that it can maintain adequate yields, especially in the developing world. In fact, he thinks it’s downright criminal that biotechnology is being kept out of Africa because African leaders have been made fearful of it my unscrupulous European representatives of NGOs. He also waxes eloquent over the products of genetic engineering that are just on the horizon.
As it happens, I agree with Thompson about most of this, though I have a bit of a “show me” attitude about the wonder products that are just around the bend. They’ve been coming any day now since sometime in the mid-1990s. Maybe. We’ll see. I also think that Thompson is a bit unfair to contemporary organic production, which is not really just any kind of production that eschews synthetic chemicals. It’s flatly irresponsible to say that poor African producers are using organic methods, yet I think he does come pretty darn close to saying just that.
Yet although I mostly agree with him, I would never have written a book like this, mainly because I think that the dichotomy between biotechnology and organics has been and continues to be one of the most unproductive ways of talking about what matters in agriculture today. It’s why I’ve worked up all the stuff about an agrarian vision that you read about in the Thronapple blog, and why I don’t find very many occasions to write about biotechnology here.
And then there’s also my sense that too many blogs like this one would just bore everyone to tears.
So I’ll just close by noting that the author of Agro-Technology is on the faculty of the University of Toronto, and that he served for a number of years on the Monsanto Company’s “Bioethics Advisory Board”. Neither is true of me.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
November 6, 2011
This week I’ll astound and amaze both of my regular readers (not to mention the random net surfer) with my amazing (not to say also astounding) powers of ethical analysis. About twice a year I get the random e-mail from some total stranger who describes some apparently outrageous circumstance having something to do with food or agriculture, and ending up with the question “Is that ethical?”
I’m usually unsure how to take this, because these random e-mails from strangers almost never describe the circumstance in question in anything that approximates genuine puzzlement. So why are they contacting me out of the blue? Is my role as a Big 10 university food ethicist simply to validate the common sense judgment of random websurfers?
Well, maybe that’s not such a bad role, afterall. But here’s my “Is that ethical” query for the week. I recently heard an ag economist talking about last summer’s outbreak of e-coli contamination in Oregon strawberries. Now, some of you might be asking “Is that ethical?” but according to my source the public health authorities determined that the e-coli came from deer. And we cannot actually hold the deer morally responsible for contaminating strawberries, so the answer to that question would be “It’s neither ethical nor un-ethical for a deer to contaminate strawberries with e-coli because deer are not moral agents.” But that’s not what I wanted to astound and amaze you with.
No, the ag economist went on to talk about how shocked people were when they found out that contaminated strawberries from this farm were being sold at a number of roadside farmstands and one or two farmers’ market stalls. People seemed to think the person wearing loose pants with bib and braces that they were handing their grubby moolah over to had personally supervised the entire life cycle of the berry in question. When they found out that some of these overall garbed yeomen cultivators schilling strawberries in farmstands had gotten them by trading with other overall garbed hucksters, er I mean tillers of the soil, they were outraged. Is that ethical?
There are a few circumstances where it clearly is not. Some farmer’s markets operate under pretty strict rules stipulating that only actual farmers can sell there, and that they must be selling things that they have personally grown on their own farms. If they are breaking market rules they are doing something unethical. However, some markets stipulate the first bit but not the second, which allows farmers to throw some cabbage or rutabagas from their neighbor’s farm in the back of the pick-up and sell that at the market, too. And those farmstands by the roadside do not operate with any rules at all, other that public health standards and laws that prevent them from out right lying to customers. Astounding as it may seem they could be reselling some of Bobby Driscoll’s amazing California strawberries they bought that morning at Wal-Mart. I met Bobby at an Ag. Food & Human Values meeting back in 1988 or ’89, though as far as I know he has nothing to do with Driscoll’s berries today. He was wearing blue jeans rather than overalls, but that’s another story entirely. My point was that these faux roadside berry drummers wouldn’t be vulnerable to complaint so long as they don’t tell you something different.
People might be shocked, shocked to find out that this kind of horsetrading is going on under their very noses at the local farmers’ market or the roadside farm stand, but it’s actually quite consistent with the whole spirit of local foods. However, things start to turn gray as the distance or the number of trades mounts. How ‘bout them apples that came from Uncle Chuck’s way up in Newaygo County, not to mention Uncle Chang’s from Jiansu province. Or the ones that came off Cousin Ronnie’s truck via her neighbor Lucinda who got them from an old school friend who come to think of it doesn’t actually have a farm, so it’s really no tellin’ where they came from. Is that ethical?
Well, maybe it is. It’s certainly legal, but it does put a little pressure on the old farmer to eater food chain we’ve grown so fond of here in CSA territory. So maybe it’s not. Guess you’ll just have to use your own judgment, and if you’re worried about this kind of thing, don’t feel ashamed to ask about it next time you buy a bag of fruit from someone wearing overalls. Astounding and amazing, ain’t it?
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
October 30, 2011
It was very nearly 15 years ago to the day that I was wandering around in a field near Tlachihualtepetl in Cholula, Puebla with Laura Westra. Tlachihualtepetl is a story in its own right, up there with the Nebra Sky Disc and an obscure reference well worth Googling for those of you who are casual surfers. But it’s less central to my theme this week than the simple fact that Laura and I were in Mexico just as the locals were ramping up for the Day of the Dead celebrations.
Laura Westra is a pretty famous Canadian environmental philosopher who has written on dozens of topics. Though it’s not so much what she’s known for, she attacks genetically engineered crops with an assertiveness that is remarkable, and she has also written that agriculture should be thought of as a buffer zone between wild nature and industrial areas. This latter point is my launching pad this week, because Laura and I were standing out in a field of cempasúchil flowers.
It was, in fact, a pretty stunning day. Bright blue skies and a sea of bright orange. The cempasúchil is apparently a marigold, but I tend to think of marigolds as petite little buds that we plant around the edges of the garden to keep away bugs. These bad boys are between 24” and 36” tall and the blossoms are ginormous. All of which leads Laura to make the innocent conversational remark “Isn’t it great to be out in wild nature?”
I could have responded with some bland and polite response like “It’s beautiful,” because it was. I still recall the day pretty vividly. But back in Puebla City we had been inspecting some of the memorial alters that had been built in tribute to the deceased. These things are pretty amazing, many occupying as much space as the typical farmers’ market stall and they are crammed full with photographs, sugar skulls, and mementos like favorite foods that recall the person being honored. And they are also covered with cempasúchil flowers. A single alter will have dozens, and there are hundreds and hundreds of these altars in Puebla alone.
And being the aggie freak that I am, I’m alert to the thought that when people need that many plants of a given kind all on a given day, they are very likely to be farming them. Indeed, that field out in the shadow of Tlachihualtepetl was full of plants that were all the same height, and all flowering at exactly the right time. Being the aggie freak that I am, it occurs to me that this is probably not an accident. So instead of simply saying “It’s beautiful,” my response to Laura’s happiness at being out in wild nature was: “Uh, actually this is a cultivated field.”
I don’t recall that Laura made any reply to this at all. I’ve occasionally told this story to make the point that even pretty famous environmental philosophers don’t necessarily know much about agriculture, and I do think that it’s a fair point. But it may not be fair to Laura, so when I tell this story to make that point, I usually leave her name out of it. A better point may simply be that one person’s cultivated field is another person’s wild nature. Laura was born and raised in Italy, where a walk in the country typically is a walk through farmers’ fields. On the one hand, she certainly would not have confused the typical Illinois soybean field for wild nature, and on the other hand, I had to agree that this particular field of cempasúchil flowers was a very nice place for a walk.
Is a day at Appleschram a day in wild nature? Americans are not very likely to put that adjective “wild” in there, but neither are we likely to call this “tame nature”. We’ve been socialized to think of wildness in terms of forests and mountains. But most of the Michigan “wild” is second growth, and its been pretty dramatically affected by the lumbering of the previous two centuries. Does the fact that it’s less managed than a typical farm field make it “wild”? Could a farm that scores well in our nature aesthetics test qualify for that status, too?
Hey! I’m just here to ask the questions. Maybe it’s up to the economists to answer them.
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
October 23, 2011
It’s been a good eight to ten weeks since we had anything to say about tomatoes in the Thornapple blog, and as both regular readers know, tomatoes are not only a personal obsession, they are the driving value behind the entire local food movement in the United States. I won’t speak for Europe or Japan, but here in America, resistance to the industrial food system is predicated 96.3% on tomatoes that have been developed to withstand a 30 mile impact, then be gassed with ethylene before they sit on grocery shelves for 14-17 years before actually being sliced into pale pink discs or wedges to accompany iceberg lettuce in what the industrial food system refers to euphemistically as a “salad”.
And unfortunately, I’m not making any of this up. The big revolution occurred in the 1970s when those pesky scientists at the University of California collaborated with companies developing mechanical tomato harvesters. The harvesters (see one here) roll through the field ripping the vines out of the ground. They blow the leafy bits one direction and hurl the tomatoes into a waiting truck. Hence the need for a) all the tomatoes to be ready for picking at one time and b) the ability to with stand the impact of getting hurled into a truck. Breeding a tomato that does that was paid for by your tax dollars at work.
Even after the input of pesky plant breeders, green tomatoes are still better for this, but goofy nerds that that U.S. consumers are, they won’t buy green tomatoes. Hence the need for ethylene, which causes them to redden up. Or at least the skins redden up. One difference between a Thornapple tomato and one that has survived a 30 mile impact at some time in it’s life cycle is that our tomatoes look just as good on the inside as they do on the outside.
That part about multi-year shelf-life, however, may not be strictly true.
But it seems that many Thornapplists are very much like ordinary U.S. goofy nerd Meijer shoppers who pass on the green tomatoes. At least I have heard that baskets of green tomatoes have been languishing at the weekly Thornapple CSA pick-up stations. Well phooey on you because all those green tomatoes that were picked in late-August early September to avoid the killing frost have now pretty much gassed themselves. They may not have the succulence of a vine-ripened tomato, but they are most certainly red, inside and out. Red inside and out except for the Black Krim, which are not quite as black as they would have been, but still pretty obviously a different kettle of fish entirely.
(Note Well: The metaphor in the above paragraph is not intended to imply that Thornapple tomatoes contain fish genes. That’s a different kettle of fish [which is to say a different blog topic] entirely. We’re not going there, but this parenthetical comment satisfies my contractual obligation to supply at least one obscure reference in every blog that sends people scrambling to Google in order to figure out what the heck Thompson is talking about.)
So I’ve gotten those last tomato and cottage cheese season-ending treats here in October (or at least I have done so when I’ve been able to plant my feet in Michigan for a day or two). I’m also told that people have inexplicably passed on the poblano peppers. Poblanos are the prince of peppers, folks. Wonderful and subtle, and not really all that hot. They are the only proper way to make a chili relleno. I lack the temerity to provide a recipe, because I haven’t actually made a chili relleno in a long, long time. But it ain’t that tough and the Internet is replete with advice. Back to Google, my foodie compatriots! Learn to enjoy the bounty while it lasts.
Herb Magidson and Carl Sigman wrote it and Guy Lombardo had the hit. And I’m repeating a thought from last February’s Warren Zevon tribute, in any case. But our own Jen Sygit does a bang up version. I don’t recall whether she does this verse, but I’m going to close with it, in any case.
You worry when the weather’s cold, You worry when it’s hot. You worry when you’re doing well, You worry when you’re doing not. It’s worry, worry all of the time, You don’t know how to laugh. They’ll think of something funny When they write your epitaph.
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think. Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink. The years go by, as quickly as wink. Enjoy yourself, Enjoy yourself It’s later than you think.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
October 16, 2011
Sometimes my peripatetic ways give me an interesting angle on things. I was overseas a couple of weeks ago and during a few of the inevitable hours I spent in my room at the century-old Rôtes Ross hotel in Halle I explored the 100+ channels available on the television set. Only three were broadcasting in English, and all were news channels. There was a Euro channel coming out of Paris, with lots of news about France, and there was a channel sponsored by the Chinese that was available in three or four languages including English. And then there was Al Jazeera broadcasting in Arabic and English. Most of the coverage was about the United Nations debate over recognizing statehood for Palestine, but Al Jazeera did have some coverage on the U.S.
What they were covering was the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations. They compared these demonstrations to the “Arab spring” protests that have led to dramatic changes in Egypt and Libya, and that are the source of ongoing unrest in Syria. The Al Jazeera reporters also made a special point of the fact that the U.S. press had chosen NOT to cover the rally. I believe that the coverage suggested that the story was being “repressed” in the United States, though I may not remember that correctly. I do recall them pointing out the way when mainstream press sources did write about the Occupy Wall Street protestors, they described them as desultory and without a clear agenda. And from Al Jazeerah’s perspective this was (as we said last week) déjà vu all over again. It was, in other words, very much like the way that media controlled by Mubarak and Gaddafi had covered demonstrations in their countries.
Then I spent a few days in Washington DC where I emerged from the Metro at McPherson Square, site of the “Occupy DC” activities. I gather that momentum has built considerably since I was there, but indeed, stuff was happening. And The Washington Post chose to cover it mainly by talking about how the unemployed and under-employed protestors who were encamped there had been able to persist mainly because two nearby Starbucks locations had been relatively lax about enforcing their “Customers Only” rule for use of the restrooms.
Meanwhile, back in Lansing my brother-in-law was visiting from Boston, where he was among those arrested during the “Occupy Boston” protests. Although I missed his visit, he inspired his sister (and Thornapple CSA members know who that is) to turn out for the “Occupy Lansing” rally that was held at the Capital yesterday. If you watched the news or checked the paper, you know that event did get some notice, though it ran second billing to the Spartan’s fourth consecutive victory over the Downstate Regional College boys.
The protests are deliberately vague because a) they want to be inclusive; and b) the point is to make an unmistakable expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo that also avoids the reactionary bias that dominates the so-called Tea Party movement. Lots of people are pissed, in other words, but that shouldn’t just be a default open-door for changes that roll back progress on healthcare, progress on environmental quality and decades-old progress on labor. Is there a food connection here? Well, obviously there is. One of the Capital speakers decried the use of GMOs, for example.
Too late in the blog to take up that issue, I’m afraid. I respect your attention span, dear readers. More generally, economic justice clearly has to take up food access. The Community Supported Agriculture movement has always (at least partly) been about taking back control of the food supply. It’s worth thinking about turning out for the next “Occupy X” activity, even if it does turn out to be another simple desultory philippic.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
October 9, 2011
Had a balky internet server yesterday that kept me from posting on Sunday (as is my wont). Or maybe I should blame it on the balmy weather. Yes, folks, it’s October, but you could hardly tell it from being outdoors. And outdoors is where anyone should be on a Sunday afternoon like yesterday. Like last week in Berlin, it was a day for basking and ambling thoughtlessly, though unlike last week in Berlin, I was able to both bask and amble. Which I did.
According to Wikipedia, the term “Indian Summer” appears first in the writings of John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, who was describing the North American climate for a European audience. A contemporary of Thomas Jefferson, de Crèvecœur was the author of Letters from an American Farmer, a work that gets a passing reference in my own book, The Agrarian Vision. He was one of the first authors to write down the thought that the North American landscape was especially well suited to a particular style of farming that was conducive to egalitarian polities rich in liberty and self-reliance.
de Crèvecœur farmed in what is now New York State. The hills and valleys there frustrated attempts to effect centrally-organized and bureaucratically managed farming systems such as had been characteristic of Egypt or China. The climate was neither so mean as to preclude a harvest sufficient for both sustaining the local populace and the gradual accumulation of wealth, nor so forgiving as to make industriousness and careful management unnecessary. These observations were the premise for an argument that American farmers are more likely to develop the virtues needed for governance of a republic.
Also according to Wikipedia, the term Indian summer “is also used metaphorically to refer to a late blooming of something, often unexpectedly, or after it has lost relevance.” Whoa! Déjà vu all over again, as the great French yogi Monsieur Berrá once commented. Too late, too late we attend the agrarian message. Is the farm de Crèvecœur celebrated one of those places that do not exist?
And speaking of balky servers that arrive too late, who among us hasn’t waited in vain for the waitperson to come back with your creditcard so that you can sign the chit and make haste for greener pastures? Or show up with the chit (in the first place)? Or to bring the food? Or to show up with drinks so we can order the food? Or to show up with the freakin’ menu (in the first place)?
Indeed my friends, our food habits are hardly those of de Crèvecœur. Nonetheless, in the words of the great French yogi Monsieur Van Morrisón
Won’t you meet me
In the Indian summer
Well before
Those chilly winds do blow
Won’t you meet me
In the Indian summer
Take me way back
To what I know
Oh won’t you meet me
In the Indian summer
We’ll go walking
By the weeping willow tree
Oh won’t you meet me
In the Indian summer
We’ll go walking to eternity
Paul B. Thompson holds the W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
Oct. 2, 2011
Bored out of my gizzard with icons, I decided to impose a bit more carbon debt on my children, their children and their chlidren’s children (not to mention their grandchildren and their grandchildren) so I could enjoy at least one more beer al fresco before the autumn gets here in earnest. Thinking why go halfway about such things, I wound up in Berlin on Friday enjoying a very fine German pilsner along with a bowl of potato soup. It was about 79° in Berlin on Friday and the sky was a particularly nice shade of blue. It might have been better in the Tiergarten than my hotel restaurant, but there is something to be said for have a nosh by the pool just a stroll from the opportunity for a good nap, should that strike your fancy.
This all being said, you understand, not in the form of a travelogue but solely in the Thornapple Blog’s spirit of finding particularly significant food experiences to celebrate from time to time. A fine German pilsner drank outdoors on a sunny day is certainly one of them, and especially (so I learned) when it accompanies a Berlin bowl of potato soup. This is not the cream style soup I’ve come to expect, but a light broth flavored with what the Euros call rocket greens, onions and carrots. This (and the potatoes, of course) floats around a rather nice Wiener sausage.
We’ve covered wieners in the Thornapple blog recently, so I won’t go there. Nor will there be jokes about “The wurst is yet to come!” What I will point out is that in Berlin (or elsewhere in Europe) the capitalized Wiener is intended to convey meanings that never would have occurred to me as an all-American boy growing up in 1950s Colorado. Of course we would have been much more likely to call them “hotdogs”, and for us wiener was just another name for the same thing. No, on a warm late September afternoon sitting by the pool on and enjoying your pilsner, Wiener sausage means “in the style of Vienna”. This is nothing at all like what we mean when we talk about Vienna sausage (which I also like, but am mocked incessantly when I am caught with an empty can in the trash). No, it’s more like what we actually call a Vienna-style hotdog, or what, when you order a Chicago-style hotdog is referred to by the trade name of Vienna Beef. Not exactly, you understand. I rather thought this Wiener sausage in my potato soup was something a little more special, though it could have been the warm sun, the glint off the pool or the pilsner.
But to come back to the point, this is called a Wiener sausage (that’s what it said in the English menu I ordered from) rather than a Vienna hotdog because it is, after all, a sausage in the style of Wien, which is what the Germans and the Austrians call Vienna. Not that you could get a proper German sausage by ordering a Berliner instead of a Wiener. If you did that, they would bring you a jelly donut, which is, of course, a pastry in the style of Berlin.
Some of the more dust-laden readers of the Thornapple blog will remember when President John F. Kennedy voiced his support for the Germans isolated in West Berlin during the cold war by flying to Berlin not for a beer and potato soup but to deliver a stirring speech whose capstone line was “Ich bin ein Berliner”. History has since struggled with the question of why the Leader of the Free World would have thought it useful or appropriate to inform the rapt crowd (not to mention the international community following his address through the media) that he was a jelly donut.
Well, the Thornapple Blog is here to resolve this historical puzzle! The answer is to be found in in the Nebra Sky Disc, which I was able to consult during my visit to Halle (Salle), just a couple of hours from Berlin (and the true purpose of my trip). It’s worth Googling “Nebra Sky Disc” so you have some idea what I am talking about here. This meaning of this ancient artifact found on the Mittelberg mountain has been debated by scholars. Some think it is a calendar, others think it is the first recorded version of the ubiquitous “Smiley Face” icon. I was able to definitively discern that this is actually the world’s earliest known example of lithographed advertising. The disc represents a cereal bowl being filled with a shower of cornflakes and banana. The large orb represents our friend Mr. Sun, who still appears on boxes of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran to this day.
Amazingly tuned in to the importance of a hearty breakfast for a man of his time, Kennedy was intuitively connected to the spirit of this important 3600 year old Germanic artifact. He expressed the deeper meaning of his mystical connection to the wider world by avowing solidarity with a breakfast food he took to be of especially deep significance for the people of the city he was visiting. I will be writing all this up for publication in an important scholarly journal over the coming months.
But you, dear readers, know today!
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
September 25, 2011
As both my regular readers know, I periodically do a blog to report feedback that does not show up in the “comment” box. I have gotten a few robot entries that it was very tempting to approve. Most of the time I just get stuff like the following: “Hello there, I found your web site via Google while searching for a related topic, your site came up, it looks great. I have bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.”
This is the kind of generic comment that robots make in hopes you will approve it, boosting their own search ratings. However, some recent robots have gotten creative. My post “Places that Do Not Change” elicited responses like “It is a horny world, HOT post!” and “What is up with blaming Greenspan and Bush? He made great points but you always strike while the irons hot, thats Capitalism. Also has our lifestyles really changed that much this year?” If anyone sees the connection, please do explain it for the rest of us. Here’s another twist: “I just thought you should know that you could do a lot better with your titles. Try to find out what keywords people use to find your site and incorporate them in your titles. For instance what do you think you can chance in Joan Dye Gussow Thornapple CSA? Best regards, Jenni”. But sorry, Jenni. This looks too much like cut and paste and not enough like you are actually responding to my blog.
I also got a creative one: “I lost my manual and have no idea how to recline the seat of my stroller. Anyone know how?” I very nearly approved this stunning comment owing to its obvious connection to the vague existential musings in “Places that Do Not Change”. But I resisted the temptation.
And sometimes I hear from human beings. Within about two hours of posting my September 4, 2011 blog, I got an e-mail from James McWilliams at my MSU account. Here is what he said:
Professor Thompson,
Not that I think you really care, but, a few clarifications on your recent post:
McWilliams is a young historian [I'M 42--IS THAT YOUNG?]with what look like impeccable credentials. But he wrote a singularly stupid book [I'LL ADMIT FLAWS, BUT MY BOOK CANNOT ACCURATELY BE CALLED "SINGULARLY" STUPID] called Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly [YOU OBVIOUSLY DID NOT READ THE BOOK, AS YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW THE TITLE--YOU ARE QUOTING THE WRONG SUBTITLE--DON'T TRUST THE GOOGLE!!]. McWilliams also blogs. He combines militant vegetarianism [VEGANISM, PLEASE] with a love of Monsanto [SHOW ME, PLEASE, ONE SCRAP OF EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THIS LOVE. I DISLIKE MONSANTO VERY MUCH] and rabid [CAUTIOUS] advocacy of [FRESHWATER] fish farming.
Sir, subtleties seem to be lost on you, judging from your thumbnail sketch of me.
Onwards,
James
James E. McWilliams, Ph.D.
Professor of History
Texas State University–San Marcos
So I hauled his book off the shelf. I have indeed read it through to the end, as the underlining and brackets indicate. He’s right about the subtitle. It’s “Where Locovores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibily” And he’s actually right about it not being singularly stupid. A charitable reading suggests that he is interested in improving the quality of debate over food issues. He may think of himself as trying to be helpful to locovores and other foodies. He’s pretty pro-biotech in the book, but I can be almost as pro-biotech, and that could also be read in the spirit of improving the quality of thinking.
He does come off a bit like Dan Ackroyd in the old spoof that he and Jane Curtin used to do on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. Curtin was impersonating Shana Alexander, who would square off against conservative pundit James K. Kirkpatrick every week on a 60 Minutes feature called “Point/Counterpoint”. After some randomly whiny rant from Curtin, Ackroyd’s standard comeback was always the same: “Jane you ignorant slut!” It’s probably on You Tube, but I’m too lazy to search for a link.
So I may have been unduly put off by McWilliams combative style, and failed to give him credit for trying to do something I try to do myself: make things complicated. My apologies, Professor, and if by some extremely unlikely turn of events you find yourself reading this, congratulations on having horned in on mini-icon status in the Thronapple Blog. As for my loyal readers, I do want both of you to understand that this is not be construed as an actual endorsement of McWilliams book. But in a phrase we’ve used before, it does not (totally) suck.
And as for that “young” issue, any college professor who got their terminal degree in this century qualifies. Unless you were at least in your third decade when you first heard Ackroyd trash Curtin during the original broadcast you are, in my book, young,
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
|
