Wednesday, January 31, 2018
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.
A boat ascending the river.
Saturday, January 27, 2018
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
"New find of red handfish doubles estimated population to between 40-80." The Guardian
Thursday, January 11, 2018
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.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
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 16th 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.
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.
“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: