I think we might be talking past one another. When I think of the romanticization of something, I think of the tendency to emphasize the mystery and power of nature and attribute redemptive qualities to nature. IT's redemptive because, via civilization we have "fallen"; nature takes the place of god as our redeemer. That is what the Romantics tended to think. And that is how I'm using it. I'm not talking about him getting all sappy writing about hunting. Cripes: I get sappy writing about walking on bricks and urban architecture or the way a cloudy sky reflects off a skyscraper. I'm not much to talk about sappy dorkness. I'm queen of it!
Anyway, consider this syllabus, http://www.ajdrake.com/e212_sum_04/materials/guides/rom_nature.htm
a) Romantics consider "nature" as the antithesis of inherited and institutionalized practices of thought, self-alienated ways of making sense and assigning values and priorities.
b) They also see it (nature) as a substitute for traditional religion. By the mid-Victorian Period, "doubt" becomes endemic to the whole middle class. Religion is a source or moral knowledge, a source of faith that the world is intelligible.
c) Romantic "nature" is a vehicle for self-consciousness. The Romantics' preoccupation with natural phenomena amounts to a search for the true self, for one's real identity. See Thoreau's Walden Pond: "the wilderness is the salvation of the world." Nature makes people know what they truly are, what god wants them to be.
d) Nature is a source of sensations--healthy feelings. It is therapy for a diseased, overcivilized heart. Humans can discover emotional health in nature. Such health leads to moral and spiritual clarity.
(I snipped the last two b/c they don't seem to pertain. e) is about imagination and f) is about nature as a form of symbolism.)
Now, Dwayne's point early on is that, while Pollan isn't as stark in his contrast between nature and culture as McKibben, he still slides in very similar assumptions.
As I said previously, Pollan trades in the alienation from nature thesis. The entire point of this book, as he says in the introduction is that "a few themes kept cropping up." Thus, he writes:
"One is that there exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, at least as its presently organized. "
I think that it can easily be said of Pollan that he thinks that industry, as it is presently organized, is the "antithesis" of the "logic of nature." His prescription, as you know, is that our food industry should, in fact, operate more as nature does. And, in turn, he writes about the ways that we make sense of the world through science as failing us because of the way science "assigns values and priorities."
Let me illustrate more with the words Pollan choose to summarize and introduce readers to his thought:
"(A)t various points our technologies came into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead."
Nature never practices monoculturism. As such, the human practice of raising our food in monocultures is the "antithesis" of nature's polyculturalism. It isn't just opposite, no. It is the antithesis because it is opposed to and destructive of nature's way of "always" practicing diversity.
Pollan continues:
"I don't mean to suggest that human food chains have only recently come into conflict with the logic of biology; early agriculture and, long before that, human hunting proved enormously destructive. Indeed, we might never have needed agriculture had earlier generations of hunters not eliminated the species they depended upon. Folly in the getting of food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today are of different order. By replacing solar energy with fossil fuel ... etc. (I'm only snipping for the interest of space and time) .. we are taking risks with our health and the health of the natural world that are unprecedented."
so, he fairly acknowledges that it is _natural_ for species to threaten themselves and their survival by following the "logic of nature". He nonetheless believes that what we are doing now is of a different order and this is precisely because, as he shows through out the book, that what we are doing is engaging in an industrial (and scientific) logic that is the _antithesis_ of the "logic of nature."
Pollan continues:
"Another theme, or premise (* my asterisk) really, is that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world." (what follows this sentence is a series of illustrations of how that is the case.)
He concludes that paragraph with: "Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us."
Thus, by eating, we get as close to nature as we can possibly be. It is a "profound engagement with the natural world."
As a consequence, "eating... defines us."
From c) above: "Nature makes people know what they truly are..."
But this knowing of what we are, this activity that is "profound" and "defines us," he goes on to say, is an activity that is undertaken in an industrial food system that "obscures all these relationships and connections."
In other words, the industrial food system alienates us from nature and turns eating into something that is no longer a "profound engagement with the natural world."
He writes:
"What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from the chicken... to the Chicken McNugget is to leaves this world in a journey of *FORGETTING* (my emphasis) that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too."
I emphasized 'forgetting' because he is suggesting a _fallennes_. We are fallen, alienated, because we are no longer able to connect with nature through our eating, and thus we are on a "journey of forgetting."
It is "sad" and it is "costly" -- "not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too." (I will speak to that later, when I turn to a passage near the end, on the ethical life and the pleasurable life).
We are fallen and alienated due to our own cognitive talents, as he writes in the very next passage:
"But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would sure change the way we eat."
IOW, we would make different _choices_ if we didn't have the wall of alienation separating us from nature. If we understood how we get our food, we would make different choices. If we treated eating with thought (which I contrast to his line later about people who "eat without a thought in the world"), knowledge of how we get our food and how nature's logic works, we would make different choices.
The romantics turned to nature (and away from alienated civilization and religion) as a template for "making sense and assigning values and priorities" as is pointed out above.
Nature would, in other words, give us new ways of thinking and feeling and, thus, would help us make choices about those "values and priorities." (Would we only care about price if we knew about how our chicken was raised? Religion was no longer a source of moral authority for the romantics, so they turned to nature. Pollan is, likewise, asking us to get back to nature and behind the wall of industrial agriculture, to understand how nature works (and how it is harmed) so we will make different choices based on values derived from the "logic of nature."
From the syllabus:
" Nature is a source of sensations--healthy feelings. It is therapy for a diseased, overcivilized heart. Humans can discover emotional health in nature. Such health leads to moral and spiritual clarity. "
I'm getting tired of quoting, but I'll continue on if you disagree that Pollan thinks that doing the things he's done -- hunting, gathering, etc. -- are not ways of discovering spiritual health from an "overcivilized" world -- read: overindustrialized world.
Now, I want to connect this to the pleasure of which he speaks by turning to the chapter, "The Market: Greetings from the Non-Barcode People", p 258:
In Pollan's own words, he speaks of the fact that "(t)here's nothing to stop a local farmer from using chemicals or abusing animals -- except the gaze or good word of his customers. Instead of looking at labels (which are distanced from nature -- my addition), the local food customer will look at the farm for himself (which is not distanced from nature), or look the farmer in the eye and ask him about how he grows his crops or treats his animals. ... [1]
He goes on to talk about the values sustained by eating locally and eating organically.
Then, he says that eating your view "takes work":
"All of which is to say that a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food prodcer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparig, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life, rather than a chore. One whose sense of taste has ruined him for a Big Mac, and who sense of place has ruined him for shopping for groceries as Wal-mart." *
From the syllabus: "Romantics consider "nature" as the antithesis of inherited and institutionalized practices of thought, self-alienated ways of making sense and assigning values and priorities."
* BTW, I was typing quickly, there, I almost wrote simply "shopping at Wal-mart" -- interesting that shopping in general isn't an interesting, only shopping for groceries.
But back to the Romanticism. In this case, Pollan is telling us that we will need new eaters who think and act very differently. Our customary (normative, typical, institutionalized) practices of getting and eating food are *ruined* -- they appear to us as the awful, unpleasurable, alienated ways of shopping and eating -- once we engage in practices that mimick the "logic of nature."
We are ruined for a life of unthinking alienation from nature. He explains this more in the next chapter:
"The is precisely the mission that Slow Food has set for itself: to remind a generation of industrial eaters of their connections to farmers and farms, and to the plants and animals we dpend on."
In other words, he harkens back to the introduction where he speaks about "remembering" -- which is evoking a kind of forgetfulness, a fallenness, that we can be redeemed from if we go back to the logic of nature and remember what we _lost_.
He continues:
"The movement .. recognizes that the best way to fight industrial eating is by simply recalling people to the infintiely superior pleasure of traditional foods enjoyed communally. .... Even connoisseurship can have a politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his SENSES (my emphasis) ..."
I'm going to stop here to recall the section from the syllabus above:
"Nature is a source of sensations--healthy feelings. It is therapy for a diseased, overcivilized heart. Humans can discover emotional health in nature. Such health leads to moral and spiritual clarity. "
I don't really think I should have to elaborate. it's smacking me in the face like a Polyfarm egg. :)
Pollan explains some more and finally gets to the part where pleasure and ethics become one:
"an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleaure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It's all very Italian (and decidely un-American): to insistt that *DOING THE RIGHT THING* is *THE MOST PLEASURABLE THING*...." (my emphasis)
In other words, through eating we are in our most profound engagement with nature. When we choose to participate in the polyculture food web, we are much more in touch with nature and learn to appreciate the pleasures of eating the food. This will reinforce our choice to continue eating in a polyculture food system -- and so we make the *right* ethical choices by mimicking the "logic of nature" and leaving behind the "logic of industry". It won't even be tempting to us, because our pleasure will be so thoroughly bound up in the polyculture food web, that the enemy of that food web -- which is the "logic of human industry, at least as its presently organized" -- won't ever tempt us.
doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing.
In other words, from nature we derive morality. And that morality will put a check on the "logic of industry". A morality and ethics derived from nature places a boundary on "human cleverness."
Or, as Saletin puts it, "NATURE'S TEMPLATE: Mimicking natural patterns on a commercial domestic scale insures moral and ethical boundaries to human cleverness."
I'll write and answer the rest of your questions later.
shag
[1] which is interesting because you'd think that, if closeness to nature mattered, then the farmer would be very unlikely to use chemicals and abuse animals. After all, if closeness to nature helps us recognize that our "industrial logic" is in "conflict with" "natural logic", wouldn't the farmer be the one to benefit most from that closeness? If he eats his own food... This is *why* the market becomes important here. This is why Pollan *wants* markets, just not big ones. But I'll get into that later...