wa(r)ning: "Upaklaklips"

Tom, after H. Bosch + H. Ramis

Bashō on the Moon

A farmer’s child

Hulling rice

Arrests his hands

To look at the moon.

The moon is brighter

Since the barn burned down.

From time to time

The clouds give rest

To the moon-watchers.

Regardless of weather

The moon shines the same.

It is the drifting clouds

That make it seem different

On different nights.

We started out

On our moon-viewing trip, calling to halt
A boat ascending the river.

— Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

red hand fish

"Meet the red handfish, a name that reflects the hand-shaped fins on the sides of its body. The striking creature doesn't really swim — it 'walks' slowly along the seafloor. And until recently, researchers say they were aware of only one colony of the rare animals, with around 20 to 40 fish." NPR

"New find of red handfish doubles estimated population to between 40-80." The Guardian

January-looking forward/back III: And Seeds

How did we get here? Even before then US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz infamously declared in 1976 that “food is a weapon,” we find traces of a similar geopolitics in US food policy and industry. Until the early 90s, the USDA published an annual Yearbook of Agriculture, and for the better part of the past century, each one of these was on a given theme. (1948 is Grass; 1949 is Trees; 1955 Water; 1958 Land; 1959 Food; 1960 Power to Produce; 1964 Farmer’s World; 1966 Protecting Our Food; 1973 Handbook for the Home, and so on.)

Here’s how then USDA Secretary Orville L. Freeman introduces the 1961 yearbook on Seeds:

“GOOD SEEDS ARE both a symbol and a foundation of the good life our people have gained. A basic factor in our realization of mankind's most sought goal, agricultural abundance, good seeds can be a means of our bringing about an Age of Plenty and an Age of Peace and Freedom. We can use our good seeds to help end hunger and fear for the less fortunate half of the human family. So used, our seeds can be more meaningful to a hungry world than can the rocket that first carries man to the moon

“Finding and developing better seeds is the oldest continuous service our Federal Government has rendered to our farmers—indeed, to all our people. We have collected valuable and curious seeds from all corners of the world. From the founding ninety-nine years ago of this branch of Government, our Department of Agriculture has worked continuously to aid the selection, advance the harvest, and further the development of improved seeds required to produce crops that could better resist drought, heat and cold, the threat of disease, the attacks of insects.

“What success we have realized!

“Our plant breeders and geneticists have accomplished miracles in the development of more useful plants. In our seeds we have a wealth we all enjoy in abundant foods.

“Now, often to the same foreign lands from which we gathered the parent plants, we return more useful seeds. We can do more.

“This Yearbook of Agriculture, compiling our vast knowledge of seeds for greater application in the United States, also serves well the peoples of the world. By designation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1961 is World Seed Year in an international campaign against hunger. This Yearbook of Agriculture can be regarded as a contribution of the United States and the Department of Agriculture to World Seed Year, and to the continuing search by the peoples of the world for freedom from hunger.”

In other words, here are flashes of a similar colonial arrogance and technophilic intervention that has run rampant in the past half century, but still in the earnest, perhaps more honest, salad days of US-exceptionalist optimism.

Also of interest from the 1961 yearbook, maize-wise, on the way to weaponizing food, and industrially hacking and privatizing its genetics, we first industrialize it into "products:"

“In the four and one-half centuries that the white man has cultivated corn, the only important improvements accomplished are the selection of present day dent varieties and the development of hybrids. The Indian had already developed the six nations of corn — popcorn, sweet corn, flour corn, flint corn, dent corn, and pod corn. The Peruvian Indians bartered maize for other foods. The tools and methods of preparing corn for food probably were discovered over and over again in many places. However corn was ground, the resulting meal or dough was the energy food of the Americas. Cornmeal makes tortillas in Mexico, johnny-cake in the South, scrapple in Pennsylvania, and corn chips in many places.

“Some corn flour is used as a component of oil-well drilling muds and other applications in which starch can be used but high purity is not required.

“The 300 million pounds of corn oil produced in 1959 from both dry and wet milling in the United States went mainly into salad and cooking oils and margarine. Most of the byproduct germ cake, hull, and gluten go into livestock feeds. Some gluten is a source of industrial protein. Zein, the alcohol-soluble protein from corn gluten, serves as an adhesive in printing inks, as a coating for wrapping paper for packaging frozen foods, as a glaze for candy and cookies, and as a coating for pills.

“Cornstarch, the principal product of wet milling, has numerous uses: In canned foods as a thickening agent, in puddings, pie fillings, and pastries, and in confections. The starch also is a diluent or carrier for vitamins and food adjuncts.

“Most wet-milled starch for human consumption, however, is converted into corn sirup or corn sugar. Between 800 million and 900 million pounds of corn sugar and about 2 billion pounds of corn sirup are used yearly as sweetening agents in foods, candies, confections, and soft drinks and for table use as sirup. Nearly 1.5 billion pounds of cornstarch, one of the most widely used organic chemicals in this country, are used each year in industry. The largest outlet is in paper and paper products, in which cornstarch is an internal bonding agent, surface size, and coating adhesive. It also is a prime adhesive for corrugating and laminating boxboard and hardboard. The textile industry consumes large quantities of starch as a sizing to protect yarns in looming of fabrics. Laundry starch is applied as a textile finish.   Low-quality starches are components of oil-well drilling muds that lubricate the bit and carry cuttings to the surface. Starch also is used in explosives, in gypsum board, and in core binders. Flour, particularly from corn and sorghum, can replace starch in many applications.

“Corn sugar, obtained from starch, is converted chemically to sorbitol and saccharic acid and by fermentation to lactic, gluconic, and ketogluconic acids, which are used as humectants, food acidulants, metal-sequestering agents in hard water, and as intermediates in the synthesis of other chemicals.

“Garlands of "parched maize like a very white flower" were worn by Aztec temple maidens. We used to make strings of fluffy white popcorn for our Christmas trees.   Sweet corn represents another food use of seed, although the crop is harvested before maturity. The commercial crop of sweet corn of 1958 was more than 2 million tons and had a farm value of 80 million dollars.”

January-looking forward/back II: Toledo+Seeds

When we were in Oaxaca a couple years ago, we saw several of Maestro Toledo’s art spaces and libraries, including a couple visits to the IAGO, where we were also fortunate to be able to see this children’s play, “Caracol y Colibrí” (“Snail and Hummingbird”).

Here Caracol and Colibrí improvise a startled reaction to the roar of police helicopters circling low over the trellised courtyard, surveilling the massive teachers’ strike in the streets just outside.

The play ended with a praise and invocation to maize in several indigenous languages (Mixteco, Nahuatl, Zapoteco, and Mixe; noni, zintli, xhuba, and mook, respectively), and then all the kids sitting on the floor in the front row were given handfuls of enormous, colorful (red, yellow, blue, purple) dried kernels of various traditional landrace maize to take home with them.

We’ve grown different kinds of corn successfully in our garden most years, but in the two seasons since we brought these back, we’ve still been unable to get them to produce viable ears within our comparatively short growing season. But the plants themselves have reached well over 10 feet high by the end of the season, leaving us with some great, long-ass stalks for fall decorating. We’ll see if we can get our remaining seeds to finally yield this year.

That same summer in Oaxaca, we passed a couple times through the Tehuacán Valley of Puebla, where maize was first domesticated and cultivated nearly ten thousand years ago, as well as the surrounding region, where a lot of it was being farmed in big milpa plots worked by mules and oxen. Given the damage NAFTA has done to traditional Mexican agriculture and rural communities (flooding local markets and diets with cheap, subsidized US commodity surplus GMO corn, etc.), one can understand why Maestro Toledo and others have recognized the need to educate people (locals, visitors, etc.) about how to resist crooked forms of “progress & development.” Protecting local and traditional strains of maize, and local and traditional methods of cultivation and preparation, is not just a matter of ecological and cultural patrimony, but also one of food sovereignty and security.

Just one ugly example: Following the 16^th century European adoption of maize cultivation, pellagra swept across many regions of Europe, Africa, and North America, mainly because those who brought maize back, and subsequently others who went to farming it, failed to recognize the need to nixtamalize corn in their cooking and preparation methods (boiling it with ash or lime) to release the niacin, the way Indigenous practice has been doing it for millennia. It would be nearly three centuries before western science (re)discovered this lost detail. Also, I cannot recommend asking the Google about images of pellagra.

But here are some images of Maestro Toledo’s and others’ work to keep us honest and grounded here.

Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO)

Maíz: Exhibition partnership between El Museo Latino of Omaha, Nebraska & El Museo de Filatelia (Stamp Museum) de Oaxaca.

Limestone (cal) for nixtamal at the Saturday a market in Tlacolula, Oaxaca.

And here's a quick video of Toledo with Rubén Albarrán at IAGO, demonstrating against Mexico's adoption of maíz transgénico (GMO corn) back in May 2014.

“We do not accept that a company, a corporation, attempts to patent life, attempts to patent our food. We cannot surrender our food independence for this supposed ‘progress.’ Progress does not exist when the earth is being contaminated, when water is being contaminated, when air is being contaminated, and when we are ourselves being contaminated. That is not progress.”

also:

Nixtamal

No País sin Maíz