Revenge of the Round, Red Tomatoes

I believe the contaminated tomato debacle unfolding over the last week has something to tell us about the factory food system, which supplies much of what we eat. It is fascinating how this came to be embodied in the shape of our tomatoes. A lot of people are asking the question, just what kind of tomatoes are safe to eat? One answer, we are told by news and government, is to suspect our round tomato friends of harboring salmonella. I had to stop and ask why is this? Why round tomatoes?

Although the description has caused confusion, my first thought was that by “round red tomato” they were talking about the class of nondescript tomato one finds commonly in the supermarket produce section, piled high in a bin. Typically, these are large, as nearly perfectly spherical as the tomato board can blandish producers into making them, bland looking orbs sold in the supermarkets and funneled by the ton into the fast food system to be slapped onto burgers. They are the perfect food to fit the machine.

A second later, it occurred to me that if I were to go to my local farmer's market or farm stand looking for tomatoes and I found some decidedly out-of-round, oddly shaped heirloom tomatoes, that I could very likely be assured they were uncontaminated. They are too imperfect, too delicate for the factory food system, and very likely grown on a local farm or garden. Their shape was a key to identifying their probable origin in a distributed, local food system. By the shape of the tomato I could judge its origin and quality, since I knew that no sane commodity grower would grow such a tomato, unfit for the fast food joint, unfit for the average consumer (who has lost contact with farm and garden, with whole food) frightened by a few blemishes, odd colors or funky shapes.

I can't promise you won't get sick from locally grown tomatoes. The independent farm system creates something big agriculture lacks: firebreaks. The decentralized nature of independent farms and their localized customer base create firewalls capable of containing an outbreak. The factory food system grows enormous numbers of a single crop and distributes the harvest through a sprawling food processing system, which spreads and amplifies even a small outbreak in one field across the nation, into all sorts of processed foods, just as happened with contaminated lettuce. It is the nature of the system, which has only dominated for a handful of decades, that has changed our relation to food and presented this problem of “wildfires.”

Although an individual tomato patch might become contaminated, the effects would be isolated to the one farm or local area. There is far less chance of cross contamination on the way to market. The farm down, in the other state, the road is unlikely to suffer the same contamination. A farm depends on its reputation. Any taint or question about its food and the farm will be devastated. Independent farms rely on their reputation to bring return business, unlike big agriculture.

Perhaps it is fitting the warning comes in the form of these alien orbs, signaling with their perfect roundness and flashing reds, the revenge of the round red tomatoes. Although at first glance, the oddly shaped heirloom at the farm stand might seem more alien, those are the fruits that piqued my curiosity when as a child my parents took me to visit farm stands. They were outstanding in the multi-lobed beauty, looking ready to burst. They were bursting with flavor, at least when we got them home and started the barbecue.

Haiku, Senryu or Other: Does expression or form matter most?

It doesn't matter to me whether I write haiku or senryu or whatever, as long as what I am writing is a satisfying expression of my need to share experience and thought. It would do no good to say a particular poem of mine is senryu and show me how to make it haiku, or to say I should withdraw it because it is not haiku.

It isn't the form of poetry that matters. I'm not trying to write haiku, I'm trying to express myself. That's a crucial difference. Beginners want to know how to write haiku. But I what I tell you is that you want to find the form that enables you to express yourself, not learn to write haiku or iambic pentameter. You need to learn from these forms the form that suits you best, or a form in between no one has ever imagined yet. Each form you may take something from, you may move toward one or the other, or among them, but there will be a form that liberates your expression and you should use whatever form that is. Haiku is the just form of expression that gets closest to perfectly expressing what I need to express.

Some of my poems may be failed haiku, but they are not failed expressions, if a poem I thought was a haiku, is not really a haiku, but expressed perfectly what I wanted to express, I am satisfied with not bothering to to classify or "correct" it to meet the requirements for haiku.

If making it more legitimately a haiku would improve that communication or expression, I would gladly do it, but without that reason, I would leave it well enough alone.

I am mindful when writing of an experience I wish to share, to write it as I think a haiku should be written, consisting of statements about concrete objects, which taken together erect in the mind of the reader a metaphor that creates a satisfying "buzz."

Degas and the Little Dancer

I recalled the story of Degas's sculpture the Little Dancer the other day. For a long time I have looked upon it as an example of how creativity really works and some of the misunderstandings about creativity our society perpetuates.

It might surprise you to know that Degas was not a sculptor. Although he made a number of sculptures, none of them were ever shown to the public except for the dancer. For a long time Degas was frustrated that sculptors were failing to explore what we now call realism in sculpture. It appears that Degas' interest in photography may have inspired him to envision a new vocabulary for sculpture, which depicted the subject as it really was, instead of attempting to inspire people with an idea or vision of what ought to be. Most sculptors of his time continued to work in this tradition of heroic or uplifting sculpture. Oddly enough, this is akin to "socialist realism" of the 1930s, which demanded that art earn its living by bringing about social change or improvement in society, otherwise it was not worth the effort. If art was not uplifting the individual or society, it was not worthwhile. The art world was astonished by the little dancer, many critics were disgusted and offended by its realism. It was revolutionary and introduced realism to sculpture. Degas had a truly innovative vision for sculpture and despite not being a sculptor he decided that it would be up to him to realize this vision.

An article on Degas published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the quality of his work politely, saying "the artist's armatures were often inadequate." (Timeline of Art History, Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Bronze Sculpture http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/dgsb/hd_dgsb.htm 2008). My understanding is that this was an understatement, that restoration artists working on the original wax sculptures found them to be very fragile, falling apart. This may be due to their intermediary role in casting a bronze, but I believe it is another piece of the puzzle demonstrating Degas was not a professional sculptor. It is believed Degas had help from friends who were sculptors from time to time while creating the Little Dancer.

There is a website, the Daily WTF?, devoted to sharing the coding mistakes (among other things like funny or confusing error messages) of naive, inexperienced or confused programmers. It occurred to me that if a Daily WTF? existed for sculptors when the Little Dancer was presented to the world, Degas would have made the front page. It certainly would not have met with approval from professional sculptors in his day. The site could be viewed as akin to group of master craftspeople getting together to laugh at the mistakes of apprentices and lesser craftspeople.

What is the lesson in all of this? What I came to understand was there is a difference between craft and art. Sculptors have "doing things correctly" as the measure of themselves and their profession. Sculpture should be done the "correct" way otherwise it should be regarded with contempt. Degas showed that one does not need to meet this standard to create a significant work of art that demonstrates the possibility inherent in a new artistic vocabulary, in this case, the introduction of realism into sculpture.

Degas was frustrated that sculptors were not exploring realism in sculpture. When he saw that they were not going to do something about it, he decided that he had to step in, despite not being a sculptor. The sculptors were capable of creating refined, polished, correct works according to their traditions, but they were not up to creating a revolution in art. In fact, their devotion to craft made it more difficult to (and less likely) to create an artistic breakthrough.

It happens that many good creative people restrain themselves out of fear. I know there are people who had ideas for innovative software applications, which were created in private but never released, because the code might end on the Daily WTF? Or whatever equivalent they imagined existed within the programming community at the time. They could have released their code to the wild and might have been influential and garnered attention for their work, but they failed to do so out of fear. This is not unique to software, but afflicts all creative activities.

It is the fear that you're not good enough to write a novel unless you're as good as the best novelist. It is the fear you're not good enough to make a film, because you're not as good as the best filmmaker. It is the fear you're not good enough to paint a significant painting, make a significant photograph, write a good story, because you're not equal to the best practitioners in the field. But that's not what art is about. Art is about the idea and you only need to be good enough to get a revolutionary idea across to succeed, not live up to the expectations of a craft community.

I am reminded of Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition appearing in a 1759 letter, he asks “why are originals so few?” His answer is that “illustrious examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate” creative people into silence. He goes on to say that we must not imitate the works of a great author, but should imitate the method or understanding by which their great works were arrived at. He asks authors to not become overawed by authority, to “let not great examples of authorities browbeat” you into dismissing your own ideas, your own creativity. He says we should “reverence” ourselves so as to prefer the “the native growth” of our own mind and “the man who thus reverences himself will soon find the world's reverence to follow his own.” Only by not being “strangers to our own abilities” and not “thinking meanly of them” can we learn to “cherish every spark of intellectual light.” Degas was an accomplished painter but not an accomplished sculptor, so how did he manage to revolutionize the vocabulary or sculpture? By not deferring to authority or exhibiting “diffidence” to his own ideas about what sculpture should be.

We teach people the wrong thing, we teach them to be perfectionists, to do things the correct way or not at all, but we don't teach them about Degas, we don't teach them that the creative act is more important than perfecting the craft, but then most people are engaged in some kind of craft or another, because that is where they derive their income and the world is mostly concerned with ensuring people earn a living. I know some people will argue that it is possible to perfect one's craft and to be a great artist. I am not arguing against that possibility, but it is rare, and doesn't apply to Degas.

Degas perfected his craft as a painter, but his ability to paint did not help or hinder his task of demonstrating the possibility for realism in sculpture, which required that he move into an area that was not his practiced expertise. He didn't have to perfect his craft as a sculptor to create a sculpture that was a declaration of a novel idea. Just as a sum can be greater than its parts, a lesser work can be greater than the best works of the day. It is greater because of its intellectual light, it's daring and reach, not the quality of its manufacture.

Is Hollywood the "Shadow Government?"

Increasingly, as so-called intellectual property becomes more prominent in the economy of the information age, is the entertainment industry becoming our government?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11885

Copyright is beginning to destroy our culture and exterminate the arts until Western art will be an empty shell, if it isn't already.

On second thought, this is easy to defeat. Just take an empty media player with you and fill it up from the network once you arrive at your destination...most people will probably fill it up with "pirate" editions since those will be the easiest to obtain. Someday, there won't be any source other than the network anyway. Or, as one person commented, mail your ipod to you.

I have to agree with the other comments that this is a futile effort by hidebound executives to put their finger in the dike. What troubles me is that this erosion of our culture has been going on for a long time, since the introduction of recorded media. I've said before that we should consider avoiding recorded media, that society should return to entertaining itself by playing our music, singing, gathering to hear music played locally, similar to the local eating movement. The invention of the phonorecord, despite the positive of being able to preserve music, has done a great deal of damage to the existing music culture. In the 19th century most people were in a band, played piano, sang in a choir, perhaps many still do, but when I compare our culture and attitudes toward music to a society like Ireland or others relatively untouched by recorded music, there is much greater participation. Everyone sings or plays a musical instrument it seems, and it's not shameful for ordinary people to join in and sing even if they aren't up to "professional" standards, yet the same culture produces some of the best singers and musicians. Recorded music appears to have eroded the incentives to play and sing, and created disincentives to perform publicly, reduced the outlets and venues, turned performance into an industry, much like farming has been turned into an industry.

It is strange to hear music of any and all genre coming at you from random directions and sources. It's like food, with technology, there are no seasons. Hearing music without the musicians divorces it from its culture and locality. One car goes down the street thumping out rap, the next blaring Latin rhythms, a country song, rock, pop, jazz. Which is the real music? Which is the real feeling? I think this is something that recorded music has done, cut us adrift from musical culture, musical practice, musical community. When we can have any music at our fingertips, played back as a card board cutout of the original through speakers, its volume controlled by a knob, it is like food disconnected from the seasons, from growing, from cooking.

Guide to writing haiku

Empty sheet
of paper--
guide to
writing haiku.
-sek, May 2008

Farm Food: A conversation connecting food to people

It occurred to me that farm food is about more than finding fresh vegetables. We don't just visit a farmer's market or roadside stand because of the fresh vegetables. We go there to experience a sense of community. At the market we get to relate to real people. To meet people. To talk to vendors who know what they sell, care about what they sell, and can answer our questions. A supermarket produce section is like a warehouse peopled by stock movers who know little or nothing about the produce they sell. You may find a knowledgeable individual here and there, but the system is designed to move produce like boxes at a warehouse. The produce guy at the supermarket is not there for conversation. The relationship gets very personal when you have the same grocer for many years, when you visit the same roadside stand, when you buy vegetables or eggs from a neighbor with a microfarm.

I always remember how refreshing it was as a child when my mother would take me to the grocery store to buy meat for hamburgers or roast. We would always ring for the butcher behind the mirrored wall of windows above the coolers. A real, live human being would come out from behind the supermarket slickness and suddenly the store seemed more real to me. Here was a real person we could talk to in a big empty store. There were employees in the store, here and there, to be seen occasionally stacking products on the shelves or moving boxes. There were the checkout people. There were customers pushing their carts about the aisles. But you didn't hold a conversation with these people, you couldn't ask anything of them or get anything from them. No relationship existed with them. But the butcher was someone, the last person in the supermarket you could engage in conversation with, interact directly with, to build a relationship, however small.

We would ask him to grind our selection of chuck for us. We didn't trust what went into the prepackaged ground beef and wanted to pick the piece of chuck with the marbling and amount of fat to meat we wanted (invariably, we wanted more fat than lean offered, but less than the real fatty stuff). He would grind our beef and return it to us in a white paper package, or later, in the same kind of Styrofoam and plastic wrap package the prepackaged meat came in. What I liked about going to the butcher was that we could participate in the making of our food. We could choose the cut of meat we wanted. Inspect it for the marbling, fat content, redness, etc. and then the butcher would grind our beef to order. There was something to seeing the cut of beef before it was ground, still whole, like a steak, which gave a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that it was a good cut and where the ground beef came from, unlike the prepackaged ground beef. It was a social interaction, requiring conversation between producer and consumer, which was very satisfying. Even a child could notice. We came away with ground beef we felt comfortable with, arrived at through a negotiation, had our say in the process, did not have to take what was offered to us. It felt good.

A farm is a lively place of growing things. It is more of a happening that never stops than a location. A farm is not a depot for food where we pick it up and move on. It is a center of activity, socializing and participation. The farm offers the same kind of interaction I enjoyed at the supermarket butcher's.

As the driving force and principal developer behind farmfoody.org, I am beginning to realize a social network connecting farm to garden embodies what I enjoyed as a child about going to the supermarket butcher. It is a model for why we enjoy visiting, shopping for produce at farm stands, farmer's markets and local farms.

The Inuit Paradox

"How come the people here, who for long periods eat nothing but the meat from one type of animal, are healthier than we are?" Andreas Viestad, author of "Where Flavor Was Born," poses the nutritional question in Where Home Cooking Gets the Cold Shoulder. This is another example of how an evolved system is superior to an engineered one. It shows the connection between culture (cuisine and taste) and nutrition. A food culture that survives, survives because the people are still alive to continue eating according to their food ways. This is also another way in which folklore affects us.

The more distance you put between yourself and the nutritionists with their reductionist theories, the better your health will be.

I disagree with the statement by nutrition researcher Harriet V. Kuhnlein, who says "Every time you process or cook something -- anything -- you are likely to be losing nutrients at every step..." This is not true for cooking tomatoes, which liberates and makes certain nutrients more bioavailable. We don't know what the tradeoffs between raw and cooked are.

It is worth noting the author's book is concerns flavor. Because taste is an important determinant in the choices a food culture makes. We suspect that in pre-scientific socities people somehow discovered what foods, what parts of the animal, were the most nutritious and the higher status or wealthier people (quite the opposite in the West, where eventually wealth meant less nutritious foods) ate the best parts. It turns out the best parts provide critical nutrients not found in other parts of the animal.

Traditional cultures cannot afford to waste any part of the animal and therefore generally eat liver, brains, etc. that are undesirable to most Americans or modern Westerners. These parts have gradually disappeared from the Western diet because they are "yucky" to think about. These parts can be an acquired taste. So it leaves open the question, were these pre-scientific people guided by taste or by observing people were healthier when they ate these parts? Maybe it is simple as a large number of groups eating different diets, the ones with a better diet survived, and their choices became a food tradition.