The "Usefulness" of Nature

To many people, NATURE is a place "out there." They fail to notice how indebted we are to the natural world - and how much a part of it we still are, despite thousands of years of trying to separate ourselves from it. It is neither supermarket nor recreation site nor messy menace we should keep out as much as possible.
Our food certainly continues that thread of intimate connection, even if some people would happily try to sell you lab-grown meat and genetically modified plants. In fact, our diet has probably been one of the biggest problems. We have evolved strategies to separate good from not-good food, and that mindset has led to separating "good" (useful) nature from "bad" or useless.
I think many would agree that we have messed up spectacularly in this dichotomy.
World-renown marine biologist Sylvia Earle says this about saving apparently useless species frome extinction. (A larger part of her essay appears here.)

[W]e need the leatherback, the panda and the worm because they might be useful to us. We have all heard about medicines that come from the rain forest. That is true. But consider this. With all of the millions of species on this planet is it possible that there is a cure for colon cancer in the genetic information of a beetle, a plant or a fungus in the forests of Costa Rica? The earth is like a house overflowing with wedding presents. When the bride and groom come home from their honeymoon they decide it is too crowded and throw out some of those gifts. A few weeks later they find that they don’t have a toaster or a vacuum. They were there but got thrown away. That is what we are doing, throwing away the gifts of biodiversity before we even unwrap (study) them. There are scientists who question whether biodiversity is needed for the stability of ecosystems. We might want to keep that biodiversity around until we figure that out.

 I see her approach, but it saddens me. In order to get people to agree with her, she's playing into the same dominant social paradigm that causes the problem.
In future posts I will try to wrestle with these issues.

The Omnivore Goes Shopping

One reason I started this blog was to discuss the brain - one of my favorite subjects. I certainly enjoy talking about food as well! The study of food involves almost every university course you can think of - from economics to physiology. Being a generalist, this suits me perfectly.
The omnivore brain evolved, I believe, to find us food in the best way possible - but the results have had influences in every other or almost every other part of our behavior. I hope to be discussing these in future posts.
One came to mind this monring, while I was reading Grist.org, a U.S. environmental news site. Have a look: http://grist.org/living/h-ahem-cheap-clothing-hurts-the-planet-the-economy-and-your-style/The subject was clothing - how cheap clothing harms the planet. Adjusted for inflation, the price of most clothes has never been as low as it is now. So everyone, rich or poor, can have a wardrobe packed with many, many clothes. Unfortunately, these items may be low quality. They don't hold up after several washes, the sewing is inadequate, and the colors are cheap. The more a person has packed in her drawers and closet, the less she is likely to wear any particular item - in fact, she may forget she even has it at all! That's false economy - for her. (Anything she paid - even if she got the dress at 75% off - is 100% wasted if she never wears it.) For the businesses and the workers who labored to get that item to the store, it's also a kind of waste. And the rivers polluted with textile effluence, the cotton and flax fields loaded with pesticides ... enough said.
Why do we buy many cheap things instead of a few good quality things that look better and cost about the same or even less than the total paid for the garbage? It's not simply a "bargain-seeking gene" at work. It's not simply the fact that many people do not add up how much they spend. It's the matter of the omnivore brain: it delights in abundance. Like the way it overeats fat, sugar and salt when the opportunity arises, because these nutrients were always in low supply in nature, it goes a bit overboard when anything seems easy to gather all at once - a rack of tank tops marked down twice could be a field of ripe blackberries to that part of our brain.
If we know the brain has these built-in tendencies, it's easier to control them. It involves self-awareness, for one thing: realize that you lose your common sense when you see a SALE sign, and maybe leave your credit card at home! Education also helps: my mother taught me from an early age to wait to buy one pair of good shoes instead of blowing a few dollars on a cheap pair that would hurt my feet (and end up in the trash). More education in the schools about sustainable fashion (teens go through these cheap-and-disposable clothes more than anyone) would help. However, my personal environmental agenda aside, I think that putting the emphasis on fashion instead of sustainable would convert greater numbers of buffet-style shoppers into wardrobe-building style mavens. Bring in someone who looks terrific on a small number of stylish, high-quality, long-lasting clothes and accessories, and let the class judge with their own eyes.
Meanwhile, society has to change as well. We are allowing business and its emphasis on high turnover to tell us how to shop - at the expense of low-paid workers in other countries, and the land where everything comes from and returns to....

A Minor Trauma: Eating Away From Home

Ever wonder why many cities are starting to look the same? I mean, if you travel a fair bit, or you watch the details on mainstream movies. There are fast food chains almost everywhere (and the same kind of chains; I won't honor them by listing even a few). Is the world simply becoming less imaginative, allowing the insidious creep of homogeneity to flatten out our food choices? Are people in other countries eager to have fun "food" instead of their tradtional fare, so they can be "like us"?
Yes, all of these are probably true. But these chains proliferated across North America in the first place, before going overseas, because many people were used to seeing those brands, and the familiarity comforted them, perhaps even more than the taste or texture of the foods themselves. Eventually, the companies expanded wherever they could.
Eating new food, even if you are only in a neighboring county, let alone in an entirely new culture, is a potentially dangerous venture. Part of being an omnivore - the by-now famous "omnivore's dilemma" - is the need to balance fear and desire. (It has that in common with life in general, I suppose!) You desire novelty, because new foods may be more nutritious or simply tastier. An ancient human who scorned new foods would have had to be extremely lucky that his tried-and-true favorites never became scarce. On the other hand, if you are too eager to try new things, and aren't careful, you could eat something poisonous or toxic. Ever wonder why we evolved to eat in groups? Watching others eat something and suffer no ill effects is a great reasurance in the hazardous world of omnivory.
Individuals vary greatly in how they balance fear of and desire for novelty. Conservative thinkers are less prone to poisoning, perhaps, but they lack variety in their diets. The disadvantages of this monotony may extend beyond the pleasures of the palate: they may lead to hard-grained habits that will never budge, even if the doctor orders a change of pace for health reasons.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the cowboys of cuisine, the daredevils of the diet. I don't need to mention their names, because those people already make plenty of money by attracting attention to themselves (what better entertainment for an omnivore than the chance to watch someone foolish enough to eat something still alive or fermented to the point of putrefaction?).
Back to travel. Being away from home is risky in itself. Then add new customs, perhaps a new language or two, and try to find something to eat! Everything looks kind of ... odd, until.... Hey, there's that hamburger place we used to go to back home! It's a bit boring, but at least we know what it's supposed to taste like, and we won't have to worry about the local dishes!
Understandable, yes, but you wonder why some people bother to travel at all, if they're just going to eat "at home" while they do!

Omnivore perspectives from Down Under

How the time flies!
I have meant to keep this blog from sliding into oblivion, the place where all good intentions tend to end up, but y'know ... life got in the way.
I have been focussing on various kinds of nonfiction and fiction in the intervening months, always busy thinking and writing and reading. There is more about the human brain coming out every day, in the media, and in published papers and books. All encouraging.
Nice to have more to read, but the pressure to get my own theories sorted out and set on paper/screen is greater than ever!
I found this blog entry today from a former correspondent, Peter Grant, a fellow generalist in Hobart, Tasmania. Here are his thoughts on omnivores: http://www.naturescribe.com/2012/05/omnivores-delight.html
It's interesting that he uses bears as his prime examples of omnivores. Like us, they are intelligent, selective, and wasteful. Studying the way bears navigate the food web may shine some light on our own habits.

Acceptance of anomaly

Here in the eastern seaboard, we neatly avoided a big - and definitely freakish - snowstorm a week ago. The autumn was mild for weeks, so not only did the leaves not fall, they barely turned the colors we all know and love. When some cold hit a large patch of precipitation, snow resulted - quel surprise! And when that snow accumulated on all those un-fallen leaves, many, many trees died from the damage.
My friend in NY city said about 1000 trees in Central Pk died or had to be pruned down to just about nothing.
We, here, have large areas of green trees among the gold and red. When the temperatures plunge further in the next few days, I hope the air remains dry, or the same calamity may befall our precious trees.
With increasingly frequent freak occurences, abnormality may be the new norm. At what point will the general consensus be that something just ain't right? How many anomalies does a person have to witness before the idea of "right" starts to shift?
Everyone knows how difficult it is to change a food habit. (We can thank the omnivore brain for that.) Perhaps all resistance to change comes from this most basic one. The omnivore brain evolved to deal with an embarrassment of riches, food-wise. Our metabolic needs require dietary variety - yet a measure of conservatism is necessary to prevent or minimize accidental poisoning. Foolhardy gourmets die young.
But people tend to cling to other notions - plenty of them, in fact - not only what kind of breakfasts works best. The tendency to stick to something once it works ("bacon and eggs - what's not to love?") can lead to inflexibility when it comes to abstractions such as climate change.
It would be interesting to do an experiment in which opinions on controversial and fairly abstract environmental problems were measured along with the person's dietary range. My hypothesis is that those who eat the most conservative diet (i.e., least open to novelty) are also conservative thinkers.

Three Sisters Soup

The end of summer/beginning of autumn is the time to reap what we sowed. Harvest. Such a comforting word! No better reminder of eating locally can be had.
I really like old recipes that were very locally inspired. What choice did they have back then but to be local? It was a necessity not a fad.
One such recipe is the soup composed of the tres hermanas: squash, beans, and corn, the mainstays of Mexican diet and culture. That native diet works due to a delightful confluence of factors.

1. The plants grow together well. The corn grows tall, providing a "pole" for the climbing bean vines, and slight shade for the creeping squash vines below. The beans' roots also provide nitrogen in the soil for the other two species.
2. The vitamins and amino acids in the three products complement each other. Adding rice makes for an even healthier meal.
3. The flavours and consistencies combine superbly in a single dish, or several dishes eaten together.
4. The plants ripen around the same time - or can be stored easily until it all "lines up."
5. All plants are indigenous: adapted to a long growing season and very hot, dry conditions.

Although the conditions where I live in Canada are fairly different, during the summer they can resemble Mexico's - especially lately. I never had the space to grow the three sisters together (where they are happiest), but I certainly have enjoyed putting them together in soup every August and September. The local farmers' market can provide all three ingredients. If not, I buy a local squash (delicatas and acorns are best) and add frozen corn and canned beans, all organic. [About 100% of non-organic corn is genetically modified, so I avoid it.]

To make Three Sisters Soup, bake a squash (cut in two and de-seeded) until it is nearly entirely cooked. Remove the skin off and cut into small pieces. In a medium pot, put the cubed squash, 2 cups of vegetable stock, herbs to taste, about a cup of corn kernels, and about a cup of small pre-cooked beans. (I prefer navy, cannelli, or baby lima.)  Cook for about 20 min. on a moderate heat. Add a dollop of butter and stir in before serving. For a creamier soup, purée the squash before adding to the stock, and add a bit of organic milk or cream. Serve with a green salad and garlic bread - all locally sourced, of course!

!Buen provecho!

Holding onto Summer

It's still warm outside, but already the sun is winking over the mountain (where I live) a little later every morning, signalling to my deep brain that the summer is edging away. Soon, the days will be significantly shorter. In their "deep brains," plants will start shutting down and birds will prepare for migration. The science of such signs - day length, mean daily temperature, flowering rates, animal sightings, etc. - is called phenology. The deep brain, of which I speak, is the part - call it instinct, if you prefer - that learned long ago to respond to nonverbal signs in the environment (and probably branched out to pick out cues from other people, too). It's only a few years ago that I noticed how a certain time of year would bring on a mood: the phenological data were reminding me on a visceral level of an event (sad, bitter, regretful, whatever) that had happened at the exact same time, years before.
[This year, I am remembering several happy-sad experiences I had exactly a year ago. Even if I am preoccupied with other duties, the very act of going outside in similar weather brings those experiences back to the surface. And the emotions that accompanied them come rushing back as well.]

Spring is a special season because of its association with rebirth, but summer's a virtual synonym for leisure, fun, relief from school or work, time with people we care about, and - most of all - bountiful food. Most people in western countries might not think of the food aspect too much; after all, air transport has wiped out much of the seasonality of most food stuffs for us here. If you can get something in January as easily as you can in July, that plus side of summer is less noticeable.
But there's no denying that local, seasonal produce is best. Even before the locavore movement, or the 100-Mile Diet, people extolled the qualities of June strawberries, July tomatoes, and August blueberries.
Is there some way of holding onto that taste, that delight? Is it possible to extend the shelf life of a summer's day?
The most prosaic answer is yes: dry, freeze, or can the produce at its peak and enjoy it in somewhat degraded but still delicious form throughout the year, even in deepest winter, when the only tomatoes, peaches, and strawberries available taste like cardboard. 
Here's one set of instructions to start: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/07/nigel-slater-classic-soft-jam
I have never canned anything - a series of small kitchens (including the present one) put an end to any such ideas. But I have had a lot of fun making soup ingredients with a food dryer, and hope to do so again soon. I also freeze wild blueberries, red and black currants, and my own black raspberries. I held off the last batch as long as February, and served them at a special meal. The fact that I had picked most of them myself made it even more special.
I will embrace autumn when it arrives, and even enjoy winter, but I am not ashamed of holding onto summer as long as I can.