wow. no shit. I just borrowed Pollan's example, which he uses a handful of times. But thinking about how he used the example, I've finally located precisely what Dwayne is talking about. It's in that passage that he condemns science as the source of our woes.
At one point he says that we're lucky, as omnivores. If something wipes out a crop of corn, we can eat something else. If something wipes out the eucalyptus leaves, the koala will die.
This is one of the things that troubles: Of course, hey, that's evolution for ya! Food source croaks, so does animal that depends on food source. But we'll pull on your heart strings with this particular story - cute fuzzy animals from our story books die when disease wipes out food source -- without ever referencing earlier stories where we encourage the reader to not feel any remorse at all about the way evolution works.
This is because, later, you learn that, while evolution is pragmatic, its pragmatism is toward the end of chicken happiness -- of chickens being precisely *what* they are and corn being precisely *what* it is. This business about the Chickenierness of Chickens and the Corniness of Corn, it's as if Chicken and Corn are ossified, in the same state, forever more.
But wait, what about elsewhere, when Pollan says this:
"(E)volution doesn't stand still," Pollan says, "eaters are constantly evolving counter-adaptations to overcome the defenses of nutrient sources: a new digestive enzyme to detoxify a plant or fungal poison, say, or a new perceptual skill to overcome an edible creature's camouflage. In response, the plants, animals, and fungi evolved new defenses to make themselves either more difficult to catch or to digest. This arms race between the eaters and potentially eaten (nb: apparently, it's necessary to see them as either/or when in fact they are both, but neeevermind that) unfolded at a stately pace until early humans came on the scene. For a countermeasure such as cooking bitter plants completely changes the rules of the game. All at once a species' painstakingly developed defense against being eaten had been breached and, assuming it could erect a new defense, that was going to take time -- evolutionary time.
Cooking is often cited ... as evidence that the human omnivore entered a new kind of ecological niche in nature, one that some anthropologists have labeled "the cognitive niche." The term seems calculated to smudge the line between biology and culture, which is precisely the point. For these anthropologists the various tools humans have developed to overcome the defenses of other species ... represent biocultural adaptations, so-called because they constitute evolutionary developments rather than cultural inventions that somehow stand apart from natural selection.
In this sense learning to cook cassava roots or disseminate the hard-won knowledge of safe mushrooms is not at all that different from recruiting rumenal bacteria to nourish oneself. ... (W)e depend instead on the prodigious powers of recognition, memory, and communication that allow us to cook cassava or identify an edible mushroom and share that precious information." (p. 294)
Sounds good, right? No division between humans and nature here, no talk of a veneer of culture over nature. Well, not so much that there's no division; instead, it's a continuum for Pollan. At least it seems...
But wait? What about the natural pigness of a pig? What about engaging in practices that allow a pig to be what a pig is -- and avoiding practices that prevent that pig from being the pig that it is? A pig, as it is now, is what a pig must be. None of this business of, uh, you know domesticating Pig to turn it into something we can husband for food. Errr, well, that kind of thing was OK. Yeah, so maybe we domesticated and farmed pigs and they evolved to be different kinds of pigs -- as our cats and dogs evolved to be different kinds of dogs and cats as pets (says he). But, as for this business of cutting off pig tails to accommodate mass industrial farming -- that is unnatural, that is not allowing the pig to be its piggy self. No sir. So, when it comes to pigtails, none of this business of adapting to a new environment .... I mean, it's one thing when we domesticate terriers to kill rats for us. It's quite another thing to cut off cute lil corkscrew pigtails.
Something happens at some point, where what was natural -- the development of cooking and entering a new "cognitive niche" in this ecology -- is no longer natural and simply an expression of our natural selves in our special cognitive niche in an ecological system. At some point, humans are sprung out of that ecological circle like Wile E. Coyote is sprung from a teeter totter once an anchor drops on the other end. We are cut loose from the ecological circle for having, say, the cognitive capacity to invent nitrogen fertilizer or chopping off pigtails. (not that I think that is a cool thing to do or anything. I'm just sayin...) but we remain part of this ecological cycle as cookers of pig and corn.
Cooking --> Natural Chemical Fertilizer --> Not Natural
So, certain things are dissociated from nature, deemed not in accord with the way nature *is*, the way a particular ecology works, as it is *now*. He describes it earlier as the unnatural penchant for science to be reductive, to remove pieces from a w hole and study it in terms of parts, and then attempting to manipulate those parts to get a desired result.
Reducing things to parts, manipulating parts is a cognitive capacity that is, well, not quite as cool as disseminating "the hard-won knowledge of safe mushrooms." Cooking and Edible Mushroom Cataloguing? That's part of evolution. Cooking fertilizer? That is clearly not.
I really think one of Joel Saletin's expressions would sum it up for Pollan:
"Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale insures moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness."
IOW, the cognitive niche? We're kinda fallen coz of that. Human cleverness knows no bounds. It's propelled us right out of the cognitive niche of an ecological system and we aren't properly disciplined and bound by moral and ethical strictures.
Yes. You read that right: human cleverness must be kept in check by the morality and ethics of nature.
You don't find humans on the covers of ecology books because we have no ethics or morality, only nature brings that to us.
That is a fucking trick, lemme tell you! Humans aren't ethical and moral; nature is.
And it's such a perfect word for Saletin to choose: clever. He could have used "intelligence" -- but that, well, it might have looked like he doesn't think much of intelligence.
Use the word "clever". it's so biblical, really. It evokes something, dare I say it? Sinister. Clever ... there's something just a little bit... wrong .. about it.
Now, just don't EVEN get me started on his, at first promising, section on "America's Eating Disorder"
Y'see, cuisine emerges from cooking, which was a biocultural adaptation associated with entering a new ecological niche: the cognitive niche.
Cuisine is culture, right? And if you look closely at cuisine, you'll see that so much of it does things like marry wasabi with raw fish to kill the bad microbes. Cooking corn, lime, and beans and serving fermented soy with rice, "renders these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would be."
In this instance, culture is a *good* thing. We can celebrate culture - our cognitive niche -- when, and apparently only when, we do things that science later confirms as useful to our survival, we just didn't use modern science at the time to come up with those cultural practices, just the old trial and error or perhaps mere accident. (It's OK to have science around to confirm stuff like this, natch, it's just that if we use it to figure out how to solve the problem... that would probably be Bad.)
So you see, when culture is hhmmmm... well wait a minute, next thing you know, Pollan is saying this:
"If nature won't draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the ominvore's eating habits under the government of all the various taboos, customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture." (p. 298)
OK. So huh. Cooking is a biocultural adaptation. Culture's no longer of nature, and the food rules and taboos and cuisines distinct to Culture have magically escaped the biocultural, no longer a niche in an ecosystem. I don't know when the line gets crossed exactly, but it happens in Pollan's text.
But we haven't gotten to the best part.
The u.s. has no cuisine. You know, basically, it has no culture:
"American has never had a stable national cuisine; each immigrant population has brought its own foodways to the American table, but none have ever been powerful enough to hold the national diet very steady."
So, while scientific thinking brings us ruin (unless we're using it to confirm the wise and ancient ways of the Aztec or the Italians) when we flex that aspect of our cultural niche-i-ness, the steadiness of a cuisine brings us the pendulum swings of food fads and food fears.
*bites nails*
oh my. we have no culture! This is so bad!
wait for it. the problem is SCIENCE.
Quoting Harvey Levenstein's social histories of American foodways (well, someone thinks we have a cuisine or culture or sumthin enough to actually study it!), "neatly sums up the beliefs that have guided the American way of eating;"
1. "taste is not a true guide to what should be eaten"
2. "that one should not simply eat what one enjoys"
3. "that the important components of food cannot be seen or tasted"
are you ready?
you sure?
here it is:
4. the important components of food are *gasp* determined "in scientific laboratories"
5. "and experimental science has produced rules of nutrition that will prevent illness and encourage longevity."
He calls this an "orthodoxy". The French have a culture of food; we have an orthodoxy:
"The French eat all sorts of supposedly unhealthy foods, but they do it according to a strict and stable set of rules: They eat small portions and don't go back for seconds; they don't snack; they seldom eat alone; and communal meals are long, leisurely affairs. In other words, the French culture of food successfully negotiates the omnivore's dilemma, allowing the French to *enjoy* their meals without ruining their health." (p 300-1)
I know you are waiting to hear why we fail. We have "no such culture of food."
Yepper. Were you shocked? No? Thought not.
He goes on to talk about all the different ways people eat: they graze, they eat three squares, veggie, vegan, low carb, organic, raw, cooked, paleolithic...
In the absence of a culture to tell us what and how to eat, we are fucked.
It isn't possible that we have a culture and cuisine, just not one like France's, no. He doesn't even consider it. I mean, clearly, eating dinner together, as a family, THAT is culture. But this other stuff we do? Eat alone after preparing our own thing? NOT culture.
And so, we quote Daniel Bell's _The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism_ and talk about how "the family dinner,and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest such casualty of capitalism."
"Instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of a cuisine, or even the wisdom of our sense, we rely on expert opinion, advertising, government food pyramids, and diet books and we place our faith in science to sort out for us what culture once did with rather more success. Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet, throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape deeply shadowed again by the omnivore's dilemma."
Dwayne? You still reading? Yeah, coz you know all this already. But anyway, this is what Dwayne is talking about.
Science is Teh 3vol.
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)