Eat This Newsletter 268: Will the Circle …
Hello
I shouldn’t be surprised, though I often am, at how the things I find intertwine with one another. This week, for example, the customary opposition of rural vs urban is recast as old rural vs new rural in three separate items. The circle is unbroken.
Malthus: Not Wrong, but Not Right Either
People who proclaim “Malthus was wrong” are also wrong, suffering from acute myopia. Sure, you can mine fossil sunshine for a while and even build vertical farms, but all you are doing is buying time until unchecked exponential population growth overwhelms the geometrical expansion of productive areas. That makes me a neo-Malthusian, opposed to most economists, for whom there is no threat of food scarcity. What of historians?
I was intrigued to read Oliver Cussen’s long essay on Malthus in the London Review of Books, a review of The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History by Deborah Valenze. Cussen’s crucial question is: “Why does a theory of scarcity endure in an age of abundance?”. Along the way, he provides an excellent account of the man’s background of comfortable wealth and educational privilege and how his ideas about food and population set him against Enlightenment ideas of the perfectability of man and society, and justified both colonial expansion and harsh treatment of poor people at home and in the colonies. What really brought me up short was what Cussen says is Valenze’s message to environmentalists; “Malthus is the problem, not the solution”.
Her point is that although Malthus witnessed other ways than living off the land, he could not fit them into the rigid hierarchy that saw European progress as the fruit of property and the cultivation of grain and so simply ignored them, resulting in modern agriculture doing the same and destroying non-Malthusian ways of life. As a (possibly former) neo-Malthusian, I am duty bound to give Oliver Cussen the last word.
What if Malthus was right in the long run? Valenze turns the question on its head. What if all of this is Malthus’s fault? In the early 19th century the quest to turn the world into a permanent field displaced Fenland commoners and Bengali peasants, who then needed to be fed, which justified yet more enclosures. Today the same logic is driving a ‘new global land grab’ in areas such as the Guinea Savannah Zone, the vast expanse of grasslands south of the Sahara which is, according to the World Bank, ‘one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the world’. It is also home to 600 million herders and peasant farmers. Speculators like Richard Ferguson, author of African Agriculture: The Other Eden, hope to turn the Ethiopian bush into ‘industrial-sized farms of a million hectares’ – all to feed a newly redundant population, uprooted from the land.
But really, you should read the whole thing.
From Fiction
For most people, and it doesn’t matter which you prefer, there is a natural opposition between the urban and the rural. You may think that country life is slow, boring and backwards and that the city is where the buzz is, where things are moving and shaking. Or you may long to leave the stress of the city behind in search of rustic peace and quiet. An essay by Bartolomeo Sala centres on a different dichotomy, between the possibly illusory country of the past and the intrusion of modern agriculture. Rural Fictions looks at the conflicts of country life as seen in a couple of books and movies. I’m not sure I’ll ever see the films or read the novels, but I enjoyed the way Sala dissected the disputes and bad blood underlying the conflict. I wonder what he’d make of The Monkey Wrench Gang?
To Fact
One of the books Sala discusses focuses on huge water reservoirs that have become a flashpoint in French politics, mega-basins that use energy to empty aquifers into storage lakes that exist to irrigate farmland during droughts. As if to point up the reality behind the fiction, an article in Euronews looks at the collateral damage wrought by the Alqueva reservoir in Portugal, “the largest artificial lake in Western Europe”.
Thanks to the reservoir, intensive irrigated olive plantations have flourished, threatening an ecosystem that supplies almost all the commercial cork in the world and much else besides. The dam has turned Portugal into one of the biggest exporters of olive oil in the world, but while it was intended to bring economic prosperity to a very poor region, most of the benefits have gone to the large corporations behind the olive plantations. And the olives have not kept young people in the region of Alentejo, which lost more people between 2011 and 2021 than any other region in Portugal. Who knows, perhaps the region has already seen the kind of dark deeds that will inspire another round of old rural vs new rural fiction.
To Myth
Fleeing urban life for an imagined rural idyll is nothing new, but it gained a huge boost in the late 1960s and early 1970s from young people disaffected by the Vietnam War and inspired by Silent Spring and perhaps even The Monkey Wrench Gang. For some of them, the quest was not to move back to the land but rather to bring the land into the city, with “fantasies of a city remade with salmon swimming in daylighted streams, community gardens in vacant lots, and an endless bounty of organic kale”.
That’s from an essay by Washington State University historian Jeffrey C. Sanders, explaining how he came to study what he calls “a network of agricultural rebels”. Sanders’ excavations in a WSU archive uncovered the close links between town and country across the Pacific Northwest and how the people involved planted the seeds of more sustainable agriculture in the region.
Sanders is based at WSU’s Pullman campus in the far east of the state. To me, that campus’s most famous resource is The Bread Lab. This past week, the lab announced that it had been “ordered to cease spending on our Soil to Society grant, a 5-year, $10 million project funded through the USDA’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s (AFRI) Sustainable Agriculture Systems (SAS) program”. This act of vandalism, far worse than any wrought by a monkey wrench, is, I know, just one among many, but it will mean a lot to a lot of people. I just hope that someone is archiving material on these attacks on science so that future researchers might begin to understand what was lost.
Today we have naming of plants
This is a bit of an insider story, but I enjoyed a recent piece from Ambrook Research about how modern plant breeders in the US go about naming new crop varieties they put on the market. There are rules, of course, like no duplication, and also ample room for personal whims that include religious feelings, college sports, or a technical interest in olde tyme music.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I have a bit of nostalgia for older naming conventions, where a seed merchant would simply attach their name and a superlative, like Perfection, which Sutton’s Seeds applied to quite a few crops. Then there are the names that required an education, Ne Plus Ultra peas, for example. I suppose my absolute favourite variety name is Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter tomato, which I have never actually grown. The story varies in its details; I like the version from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Mercury in Retrograde
Mercury in fish such as tinned tuna remains a worry, especially for pregnant women and young children, even though most of us do not eat enough of it to raise concerns. Up to now, there has been no way to avoid mercury, other than by choosing a specific brand if you can. A recent article, however, alerted me to a different approach: pack the fish in water that contains cysteine, an amino acid to which mercury binds strongly.
Although the technique has not yet been commercialised, looking at the paper, I have my doubts.
For a start, the mercury is not removed from the tin; it moves from the proteins inside the fish cells to the cysteine in the surrounding water. The water has to be carefully drained before eating the fish, or else a little packet containing a compound that will bind the mercury even more tightly than the cysteine has to be packed in with the fish. And the process is most effective when the fish is minced and is bathed in an almost equal amount of liquid. Do that, and you remove almost a third of the mercury in the fish. But do you really want to eat minced tuna, no matter how well drained? I thought not.
Good Samaritans
This week, I learned that while Samaritans celebrate Passover, they are not Jews. An absolutely riveting article from the Public Domain Review told me that and so much more.
Take care
