On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 11:34 AM, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> At 07:52 AM 10/19/2008, Andy wrote:
>> I took a long break here, and was planning on continuing in a similar
>> vein, showing how Pollan could get where he goes by rational means.
>> But it dawned on me that that might be beside your point: whatever
>> Pollan's reasoning, his summaries still echo the themes of
>> Romanticism. I see how you think that, though I'm uncomfortable with
>> the device, as I'll explain. I'll continue with this if you think
>> it's useful.
>>
>> --
>> Andy
>
> Yeah, it would be useful.
>
> But one question: I'm not sure what reasoning or rational means have to do
> with this? I don't see Pollan as opposed to reason or rational means at all.
That's what I thought you meant, and that's the vein I was going to continue in. It would fit nicely with either a romantic viewpoint, or Romantic one, what with all the reaction to the Enlightenment. Plus your, or what I thought was your, characterization of his attack on science.
>From what you were quoting and emphasizing, were you pointing to
similarities between him and Romanticism?
[Some quoting of proto-organic people, NPK as over-reductionism]
> Where I think I'm going with this is how does Pollan jump from human
> industry as following a natural logic to one that is a reductionist
> industrial logic. I have no doubt thatwe can create industrial ecology.
>
> I simply think that it's all rather sloppy. Where is the magic moment
> crossed. And more troubling still, since I have been reading the Botany of
> Desire on and off, in that book he was trying to make the case that, while a
> gardener thinks of herself as master of her garden, cultivating and creating
> certain breeds, etc. etc., she is not really. Maybe it's best to think of
> the potato as doing its utmost to get the human to do what the potato wants.
> (Like cats :)
>
> Did he choose to plant the potato or did the potato choose him?
As for a magic moment or line to cross, I don't see much need for one.
He's talking about more of a hazy spectrum between the holistic (grrk) "logic of nature" and the reductionist "logic of industry". I realize that is at least congruent with a Romantic outlook, but he mostly uses it as an induction, built on observation. I don't think he builds any arguments for prescriptions on it.
That domesticated species are in a kind of symbiosis with us, using us to successfully multiply, has been mentioned elsewhere, probably in much deeper ways that I've read.
[Pollan questioning dichotomy between nature vs. domestication]
> And that's one of my complaints with TOD. Put bluntly: if in TBOD nature is
> in the cultivated garden and the epicure's kitchen, if it's "in here" under
> the roof of civilization, then how does it happen that our human cognitive
> talents continuously slip into something that isn't natural? Instead,
> reductionist science embodied in industrial logic is not natural.
>
> But this, I do not understand. If we as humans are nature, then how is that
> something we do is not of nature? I mean, it'd be one thing if he simply
> wants to say, nature here, culture there and a fuzzy blurred line between
> them (which is the metaphor he used in TOD). But he doesn't. He wants to
> avoid that.
>
> And yet, even in TBOD, when he's writing about apples, he decides when
> something we've done goes to far, and that is always when we don't follow
> the "logic of nature." (it's on p. 52 where h e writes, "the domestication
> of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species' fitness for
> life in nature (where it still has to live, after all) has been dangerously
> compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones that
> suit our taste and agricultural practice, the apple has lost the crucial
> variability -- the wildness -- that sexual reproduction confers."
>
> I am intrigued by this line that gets crossed, from something natural to
> something that is not; from something that is natural within the natural
> house of civilization (which would be your industrial ecology) to something
> that is unnatural within the house of civilization.
I think for him the line gets crossed -- not so much between nature and industry, but rather to what he objects to -- when practices start harming the food, or threatening its viability or the ecosystems it depends on. So he starts out saying, don't take this nature/nonnature thing too seriously, but look at what's happened to the food: breeding for looking like a happy apple after transportation from New Zealand puts taste, variety and nutrition in the back seat. Treating animals like modifiable production units creates an environmental disaster and gives PETA a field day. Making food safe for shelf-life strips out much of what makes it nourishing, but that's ok because we know what to put back. In fact, we seem to know more of what to put back every month (for the past century or so). So we have all these examples that start sporting the absurdity of a Taylorized clockwork orange, and we know how well humans take to Taylorization. Hence the "logic of industry".
[some stuff about shag's sort of unintentional organic gardening]
> I don't know what all this is supposed to mean, just one of those reveries I
> got into prompted by the irritant of Pollan's text. I am not sure what I
> mean by that. Perhaps I am bothered by the whoop-de-doo made of what
> doesn't have to be and wasn't something I experienced as whoop-de-doo. It
> just was.
>
> This may be the result of a generational gap, though Pollan is older than I.
It might be something he discovered late. I think he mentions his father being a big meat-and-potatoes kinda guy. Actually it would be interesting to see the reception among industrial cultures where they garden more.
[about the primalness of salads]
> No. It's not. It is what I experienced, and that experiencing is informed by
> all kinds of social factors, including reading books ordered from Rodale
> press or listening to gramps. Eating lettuces is a relatively new thing --
> or at least a new thing after not being much a part of the diet until .
> Salads like those described by Pollan are recent to the Anglo-Am diet. They
> were introduced by a vegetarian in England, John Evelyn, who wrote about
> growing greens and how to eat them in Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets.
As I recall it was referring to the "supermarket pastoral" concept -- perhaps something you're immune to, but I recall John Thornton suggesting there was something to it as a marketing hook.
[regarding the recent Anglo history of salad]
> "Why, we have to ask, did the author John Evelyn inflict this on his
> readers? Because not one of his readers was ready to try a salad. Everyone
> agreed with the wisdom of the ages: civilized people just didn't eat salads.
> They ate meat and grains. Raw greens were for animals and savages. For the
> civilized, they offered no nutrition. Besides, they made you sick to the
> stomach when they rotted in your gut, just like they rotted on the compost
> heap."
Just a suggestion -- by "civilized" he presumably didn't mean "peasant".
> But more later. The neighborhood art show and food festival is hollerin'
> "Shag get away from the computer and look at Art while eating a hot sausage
> sandwich slathered with greasy peppers and onions!"
Yummo!
-- Andy