but what i notice later is how Pollan's rhetoric works. He's making the point that a tremendous amount of energy and complexity goes into the creation of a freakin' bag of lettuce with hardly any calories.
That complexity is contrasted the simplicity of eating lettuce. He, and we (he insists) eat lettuce and when we do we imagine it as a wholesome activity:
"There are few things humans eat that are quite so elemental -- a handful of leaves, after all, consumed raw. When we're eating salad we're behaving a lot like herbivores, drawing as close as we ever do to all those creatures who bend their heads down to the grass, or reach up into the trees, to nibble on plant leaves. We add only the thinnest veneer of culture to these raw leaves, dressing them in oil and vinegar."
Please pause. The veneer of culture is the salad dressing! culture as opposed to nature. Close to nature. Behaving like herbivores -- fucking thank dog I don't have to bow my head to the ground to eat or get on my tippy toes and crane my neck...
Jesus Aiyth Kryst on a Broken Pogo Stick. It gets better:
"Much virtue attaches to this kind of eating, for what do we regard as more wholesome than tucking into a pile of green leaves?"
fuckifino!
that's all i do when i think of eating a salad: it's wholesome. i feel like... a giraffe. a cow. tomorrow, i can be another herbivore. whole again, i can go on with life once more! until my next salad!
[...]
...
All of which shows how the ideology which describes industrialized humanity as The Fallen is very deeply embedded in the sort of critique Pollan conducts. This doesn't destroy the value of his research and insights but it does bring his conclusions into more serious question.
As I said in a previous post, Pollan lies at the sensible (or at least, well written) end of what I'll hurriedly call Romantic Ecology (with people like J.H. Kunstler and fellow travelers at the not-so-sensible end, feeding like ghouls on every crisis while relentlessly shouting 'fire!') and does present a lot of useful information. Even so, when you read carefully, without the premise of a schism between humans and this big Other called 'Nature' acting as a suspension of criticism filter (a filter which, as others have noted, carries a lot of Christian eschatological freight), you come away not as impressed with the overall effect.
I'm fascinated by Joanna's mention of Gene Logsdon's "Living at Nature's Pace". This book not only serves as a compliment to Pollan's in the way Joanna suggested, it also amplifies what I'm on about.
Logsdon is an interesting fellow; a venerable, big scale organic garden farmer who has become a hero to a sizable segment of the general DIY and neo-farming movements (he's also gathered his share of opponents in the past 30-odd years).
A lot of what he says makes sense but, once again, the narcissism of Romantic Ecology appears. Intriguingly, this school of ecology (which often claims to BE ecology in much the same way that some types of feminism claim to BE the only sort worth listening to) insists on de-emphasizing human 'dominance' in favor of 'cooperation with natural rhythms, while it sub textually elevates one type of human -- the pursuer of the 'sustainable, naturally cooperative' lifestyle -- over others.
One of my favorite Logsdon stories involves a hornet's nest, constructed by the wee beasties near the opening to his house.
Logsdon writes:
Most visitors to our home become alarmed when we proudly point out a huge gray hornets' nest hanging from the porch ceiling uncomfortably close to the entrance to the house. But when my sister visited us (she's a country woman who knows a thing or two about hornets and such like), she made a different observation, which I consider the best compliment I've ever received. "You must have a peaceful environment around your home," she mused, staring at the nest, "or those hornets wouldn't have built a nest on your porch. They know there is not much fear or strife here."
I would like to believe her observation is true. We certainly try hard enough to make it true. At least I can say the hornets have never been alarmed; we have never given them cause for alarm. Sometimes when we ring the dinner bell which is just a few feet from their nest, they become excited—or did at first. But they seem to have gotten used to that, too. We can stand right beneath the nest—I have climbed up and stared right into the entrance—and the winged stingers pay no attention. They do not fear us, because they know we do not fear them. We both know there is no good reason why we cannot share the porch.
[...]
full at --
<http://organictobe.org/index.php/2008/05/12/what-organic-homesteading-is-all-about/>
This is a nice passage; it flows with an easygoing elegance. Reading it, you have no trouble imagining yourself sitting on Logsdon's porch, sipping from a glass of lemonade while Vespa crabro does its fascinating, social wasp thing. Perhaps one of the little scamps lands on your arm; you laugh at the silliness of people who freak out around such lovely creatures (full disclosure: hornets are actually one of my favorite animals to study so I do sorta feel Logsdon here).
What fascinates me however is the very subtle way Logsdon, using the quote from his sister, implies that the nest -- a construct which might pop up anywhere hornet queens favor -- is evidence of his naturally harmonious lifestyle. I might be wrong, but I doubt he would've reached the same conclusion about the nest built on the side of the busy, noisy downtown apartment I lived in for a few years.
In other words, something that happens for a complex set of reasons is interpreted as a sign of the fundamental correctness of a particular lifestyle. This is ideology, pure and simple.
To be fair, later in the same essay Logsdon does clarify that he doesn't believe 'Nature' to be a film loop of the quiet parts of "Bambi" -- there's violence too. But nature's violence, we're told, lacks "cunning" and so possesses a kind of purity. Our violence, on the other hand, is sullied by its unnaturalness. (Perhaps we could create a scale of natural, and therefore, acceptable types of violence!)
...
I'd also be curious to investigate why this pastoral genre (inevitably featuring books with pictures of rolling hills or country roads, blanketed with rust colored fall leaves on their covers) is so popular with middle and upper middle classerians who're very unlikely to do much more than shop at a farmer's market or Whole Foods.
The books seem to serve as totems, indicators of membership in class within a class: the group of Concerned Lovers of the Earth. There is a curiously earnest sort of narcissism at work here I think.
.d.