Reading In Defense of Food

I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. I had just reached the end of his forward when I was struck by one of the closing paragraphs, which says that eaters have real choices now thanks to the revival of local farms and farmer’s markets, which make practical the availability of whole foods. I had to stop, the words echoing in my mind, because they were incredibly resonant with what myself and Tom Davenport are doing at farmfoody.org, reminding us that our health, the health of the land, the health of our food culture are inextricably linked.

I continued my reading and came to the point where Pollan relates the story of dentist and amateur scientist Weston Price, who abandoned his practice to study the food culture and nutrition of various aboriginal peoples around the world, untouched by the Western diet. Price concluded the common denominator of health among these peoples was, as Pollan says “to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.”

Tom and me believe that the survival of small, independent farms is dependent on leveraging their local characteristics, just as wine makers leverage terroir as as an argument for the uniqueness of their wines. It is not a stretch to believe, as Pollan does, that the richness of the soil has an influence on the nutritional richness of food. Price’s description mirrors that of the small, independent farm supplying the local area with food, which was common before the second world war.

Moreover, Pollan writes that Price believed that “by breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain.” I am not sure about the disruption of nutrients, but it is those broken links we wish to restore by making some new links of our own, linking local soils, local foods and local peoples together again through social networking.

As I turned the pages, I discovered another passage that resonated with our intuitions about linking together the land, food and people though locality, food and culture using the technology of the 21st century. In the latter half of In Defense of Food the author lays out rules of thumb for escaping the Western Diet, but before doing so, he observes that food does not consist of nutrients alone, but “comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” Our hope this is exactly what our website will do, create a web of social relationships reaching back to the land and to other people, through the farms and foodies, sharing their pictures and their recipes, a little bit of who they are with each other.

That is as far as I’ve got, but with farmfoody.org, Tom and me want to enable people to create, sustain and nurture change in our food culture, because we believe that a healthy society and a healthy people is a product of nurturing a set of relationships with food, the natural world and people.

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Zen Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala Monastery

Tom Davenport, filmmaker, has released part one of his video Bodhidharma's Shoe: Zen Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala Monastery.

Part one of a two part documentary on an American Zen retreat at Bodhi Mandala Monastery in New Mexico. A seven day intensive retreat is called a "Sesshin" which means to bring the heart/mind together. The experience of a sesshin is transformative and intense, but there are dangers -- both physical ones ( I ruined my hip, for example) as well as spiritual ones (like believing that the Zen Master is a saint or a god). Zazen of this intensity changes you and a lot of good flows out into the world from it (as long as you take yourself lightly and have a sense of humor). But requires that we (the sangha) all support each other. I doubt that anyone could do this alone.

Tom Davenport, a old timer at Zen in America, who got a lot of help from his friends, tells the story of a novice's entry into zen, and says of the experience "...thinking back to those days, we did not really understand what we were getting into..." The video is on Revver.com because of the higher quality video. Or YouTube if you prefer:

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART ONE

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART TWO

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART THREE

Bodhidharma's Shoe: Sesshin at Bodhi Mandala PART FOUR (END)

Sorry about the links, but some controversy erupted over the film and I will have to get back sometime to correct the links.

A Trip Through The Minefield of Knowledge

I have frequently been the victim of an author who has a peculiar view on a subject, which turns out to be simply wrongheaded. Because there are so many books, many more than I could purchase, read and evaluate and because turning to book reviewers is frequently just as useless as getting the wrong view from the wrong authority, the value of books can be somewhat limited.

It is easy to assume that if a book is published on a subject that the author knows something about the subject, that they are well versed in he subject and

The problem is that authors have differing views on the same subject. They have different backgrounds and differ about what is important to them. Writers generally write what they know. This is a problem, for example, in music. Thirty years ago you could not find a book explaining harmonic theory behind blues harmony. Oh, there may have been a few academic or musicological works on the subject, but generally, if you wanted to learn blues harmony you had to listen to recordings or ask a blues musician.

This was because the cohort of music theory writers disdained or held blues music in contempt, did not listen to it and thought it base or childish. Blues, they thought, lacked the sophistication of Western classical music. It was all bump, bump, bump and grind. It musicologically wasn't worth the time of day to them.

Yet, blues music contains the most sophisticated polyrhythms outside of Polynesia and the most colorful expressions and sophisticated harmonies of any music, borrowing the Western harmony and mixing it with expressive melody moans and instrumental vocalizations and "harmony" bordering on chaos and dissonance. These writers could not see (or hear) this, because they didn't want to hear or see it. They were racists or elitists or just didn't like the music. My parents, who liked 50s rock and roll, never liked singers who "yelled" and where "you couldn't understand the words." So to them, at least some of the blues based music was inaccessible because of its affront to the senses.

I noticed that despite my love of various forms of hard edged music, that even after enjoying several hours of hard rocking music, that my ears would tire of the distortion. I loved cranking up the distortion when playing electric guitar, but have to admit that hours, maybe even minutes as I grew older, became grating on the ears compared to folk music, classical guitar or classical European music (my brother found he could not concentrate on his work while listening to classical music because the strong emotions it evoked were distracting).

However understandable the reluctance to write seriously about blues music was, it was incredibly damaging to the quality of description, transcription and writing of blues and blues based music in book or sheet music form for a long time. This did not deter people from learning blues by stumbling through poorly written books, slowing down records on tape recorders and asking friends how to play licks.

But it did make it terribly confusing and difficult to learn anything about blues from books. You might ask where is this all leading other than to the ran tings of a frustrated guitar player? It raises a profound question about information, whether the "Wiki" model of authorship, collective authority, is best or whether the traditional model of authorship as a single authority is best. With the wiki model wisdom becomes refined by becoming conventional. There is a tendency for collective authorship to become settled.

(A word about why this bothers me: One of the things I was taught (part of my miseducation -- a story for another time, but an important concept as an education, because everyone gets a miseducation as well as an education) when very young was that what separated us from both societies before the introduction of movable type and before literacy, was the capacity to record knowledge in book form, by which knowledge could be transmitted to future generations and distant persons with perfect accuracy. All that was necessary to learn something, was to find a book on it, and follow the instructions. This turns out to be impractical and bordering on the absurd. Although there are rivalries between "book learning" and "experience" nearly all crafts, professions, activities engaged in by people require more than "book learning" to achieve any results. Most professions, from computer programming to music, require "folk knowledge" such as "programmer lore" or ways of solving problems, common algorithms, etc. handed down from programmer to programmer by "word of mouth" and deemed to minor to put in books. Of course, this knowledge can be vital to success in the real world of programming.)

Collective authorship can create greater accuracy, given the weight conventional wisdom formed by this authorship is ordinarily correct, than from an author with a peculiar point of view. However, you are much less likely to encounter a disruptive point of view from a radical individual who takes on a false conventional wisdom. There seems to be no solution to this problem of authority in information, other than to say sometimes conventional wisdom is correct because it reflects the intelligence of mobs and sometimes a lone wolf is correct while the conventional wisdom mob rules with a pack of profitable, self-serving lies or delusions.

So will it be the Digg model where the mob tosses the good stuff up on the heap, the Wiki model where the mob through collective wisdom and weight of numbers creates a refined collective wisdom, the Google Knowl model of collectively peer-reviewed free form works with bylines, or will it be the social network that filters knowledge through a mob of friends and groups that works best?

Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku

I received Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, yesterday (the 19th of May), a poetic and anecdotal chronicle of the celebrated poet's journey in 1689 to the northern end of the island of Honshū. The book itself is beautifully made of high quality materials, typical of a Japanese paperback. I sent for Bashō after enjoying his poetry while studying haiku and having read the jacket cover blurb by illustrator Miyato Masayuki online before ordering. I was captivated by the description of Bashō "drifting with the clouds and streams" and "lodging under trees and on hard rocks," in his long journey to Oku.

I felt a sensation of deja vu wash over me as I read the blurb. I looked up to one of my drawings on the wall behind where I sit at my computer, which depicts a poplar leaf caught up in the flow of a stream and about to run aground on a rock. I had seen many a leaf in this predicament, turning and twirling with the current until it snagged upon a rock, in my explorations of Four Mile Run, a local stream (I grew up in Northern Virginia, which is blessed by a myriad of small streams running through valleys).

I was certain there was more here than a description of a journey, but the words were metaphor for Bashō himself caught up in the currents of his journey, like a fallen leaf lodging under trees laying across the stream, escaping for a moment to twirl and spin, then come up again on hard rocks, until once again released by the force of the current, the journey can continue. I just had to have this book.

Before I continue, a word on the illustrations. The torn paper art of Masayuki illustrating each haiku is simply astonishing. I would have said it was done with an airbrush or is digital artwork unless I was told the illustrations were constructed from torn bits of paper. Simply amazing. I would have liked to seen the originals, since the printing does not do them justice. I could write a whole essay on just the illustrations alone.

Although the title is difficult to translate, I believe its meaning comes through clearly. Oku refers to the Northern provinces of Honshū and is known as the "interior." Knowing that Bashō chose this title for his work despite the road playing a very small role in the account, suggests the title was chosen for its double meaning, that he was traveling literally to the interior of northern Japan and metaphorically into his own interior life and that of poetry.

I am fascinated by many aspects of his poetry. The use of ordinary descriptions and freedom from grandiose visions or exaggerated emotions typically associated with poetry. The indirection and use of context and implication in communicating (or failing to communicate--many of his poems are difficult to understand without the help of the journal. I doubt I would be as satisfied by the poems without the story of his journey) contrast with the Western poem.

Bashō's poems frequently end with a line that only makes sense in light of the previous verse.

At a point in his travels, Bashō passes between a rice field and the sea.

Sweet smelling rice fields
to our right as we pass through
The Aristo Sea.

Another chronicler of a "road trip," Kerouac might have portrayed the journey with greater intensity, but not with greater delicacy than Bashō. His poetry is all the more remarkable considering this is simply a description of a scene passing by, recorded with delicacy and detail. This poem makes a complete sentence over its three short lines, but the last one is still jarring. On first reading it, there is a strangeness I cannot quite put my finger on. Typical of his haiku, it is less than a sentence fragment, not much more than a multi-word noun, frequently the name of a natural wonder. The line has a tendency to stand still, which may explain why they so often come at the end of a poem.

It is still a bit jarring to my ears when encountering a line that does not seem to state anything, but makes a statement only through counterpoint with the previous verses.

Turbulent the sea--
Across to Sado stretches
The Milky Way.

Then again, I may not be reading it right, since it does form a complete sentence with the second line. It may just be the novelty of reading haiku.

A better example from Bashō's poems that end with a line that only makes sense in light of the previous verse is this one:

At Yamanaka
No need to pick chrysanthemums--
The scent of hot springs.

I thought if I had read the last line alone, I would ask "the scent of hot springs ... what?" But when followed by the first two lines, the meaning becomes clear. The hot springs are as fragrant as the chrysanthemum.

For a while, Bashō stopped to rest under a willow tree famous from poetry and wrote the following haiku:

They sowed a whole field,
And only then did I leave
Saigyō's willow tree.

It is remarkable how Bashō measures time by how long it takes for a rice field to be planted. We must remember in ancient times, before clocks were commonplace and before the invention of the minute that rules our lives, people measured time by how long it took to complete some common task. Bashō was measuring time using the most immediate unit at hand, which offers a poetic opportunity for sowing a field to stand in place of the clock (at least with reference to the time addicted modern reading it, the poet may have been merely descriptive). It is an example of the brand of poetic indirection Bashō is known for.

What this tells me about poetry (and song alike) is that the poet must forget about imbuing his poetry with meaning, and just write down their experiences. Time will change the meaning and imbue the lines with meaning discovered by each reader or generation of readers. I feel he was merely describing what he saw and did while visiting a spot mentioned in poetry (a favorite activity of Japanese travelers) in concise and flowing words. It is very hard for a Westerner to give up that need for the poem to be _about_ something, to convey some grand meaning. The haiku is very much like a photograph, a graceful and economical record of an experience.

In the darkness gathering over a lonely beach, amidst the fishermen's huts and a forlorn temple, where Bashō went to collect little masuo shells, the poet left us with the second to last poem of his journey, a question:

What do the waves bring?
Mixed in with little shells
Bits of clover blooms.

This is the most memorable of my favorites, surfacing from time to time when thoughts are idle, holding on to unconscious attention more tenaciously than others, in the short time I've been acquainted with the Narrow Road to Oku. I believe it resonates with the way I see the world and reminds me my approach to photography, which hopes to accomplish what Bashō does, to call attention to the grace of ordinary things. It requires sensitivity and courage to take notice, as Bashō did, of bits of clover blooms amidst the stones and shells of tidal shallows. It's hard to consider we nearly missed having it, being the next to the last poem his journey inspired!

Out of many, one: The acceptance of many views.

I've talked before about the need to accept the inconvenient existence of multiple of truths that exists in genealogy. Incomplete knowledge about the past is unavoidable. The past is gone and we are not getting back to put under a microscope. Even the present is difficult to pin down. We only know what we experience or someone tells us, which is pretty much what we know about the past, only through source material and what someone tells us. We are left frequently with only sketchy knowledge about family history. This leads to different families claiming the same individual, each with their own basket of evidence and story. I've learned to accept this as a reality and moreover, I've learned to accept this as being a Good Thing (or at least the best thing we can expect given the nature of reality).

The net it turns out is very good at handling incomplete information as it rapidly emerges and changes from multiple authorities. The applications emerging ont he web are gradually all taking on a similar shape. They all in one way or another incorporate the acceptance of many views. The wiki synthesizes a single view out of the many views of its authors. Social bookmarking (and other social networking) sites allow multiple "truths" to exist within the same space. The social network creates an ecology where authority can develop implicitly, without saying. Most of the social networks incorporate the many views or truths into some kind of aggregate view that is useful, a kind of single view out of many. This represents a democratizing of knowledge, but I hesitate to call it democracy since that is just one particular method for synthesizing a single truth out of many views. Democracy works in a very crude way by voting and we know that voting systems are subject to gaming by malicious people and other flaws. The kinds of systems, wikis, social networks, voting systems used by various collaborative news sites all represent vastly more sophisticated methods of synthesizing a single view out of many than democracy, which is relatively weak and produces a "tyranny of the majority" when not mediated by some system of individual rights.

I was explaining how social networking works to Tom Davenport today in regard to a farm website we are developing. I explained to him how if he had an account on a social bookmarking site, he would for his own benefit maintain and organize his bookmarks online. He would bookmark sites on pork and beef as he does now in Firefox. To do this he would create tags for Pork and Beef, organizing sites about pork and beef under those headings. Because the bookmarks are shared publicly and the tags exposed to to browse and search, a person can click on the Beef tag and discover his bookmarks (among others sharing their bookmarks). That person might click on his user profile to look to see what links he has on Beef. They might find his bookmarks are highly reliable and useful. Therefore, the user would be likely to turn to Tom's bookmarks when looking for accurate information on beef and cattle raising. They would not necessarily even know that Tom is a farmer, but they would discover him as an authority simply by observing the quality of his bookmarks on the topic. Tom Davenport implicitly becomes an authority. He implicitly shares his expertise with others. All without declaring himself a farmer or an expert on anything. Of course, he might mention in his profile he is a farmer; he might link to his farm site and you might have more reason to trust his bookmarks.

I tell this story because it illustrates the acceptance of many truths that lies behind the way the web works today. There may be ten thousand people on a social bookmarking site who think they know something about beef. Each may have a different idea of how to raise beef. Their bookmarks will implicitly reflect their knowledge, experiences and differences of opinion with others. The gestalt of the social network will reflect this diversity. The more accurate providers of bookmarks will become popular, the ones with less accurate bookmarks, reflecting radical, not very useful or very different views will remain less popular. One might object that this creates a kind of stagnation on popularity, but in reality it relates directly to the idea of the "Long Tail" where more people may be accessing the less popular bookmarks more than the popular. So the social network embodies two kinds of authority simultaneously. The authority of popularity and the authority derived from the long tail...the authority of individualism, of the disruptive idea, gives freedom to both kinds of authority and the freedom to move back and forth between the two kinds of authority...for the disruptive idea to start as a seed and grow to an oak, to move from being "indie" knowledge to "popular" knowledge all within the same framework.

It is fascinating that the web reflects this reality by its nature. That a concept coming from an obscure activity like genealogy is moving to the center of intellectual pursuits. That it can create a framework where out of many views a single truth can emerge without denying all the other views. It reminds me of the vast jumble of "junk genes" that we carry along in our DNA from our distant past, which are there because they might just come in handy some day. It reminds me of how organic the web is and utterly incomprehensible within the old framework of bell, book and schoolhouse knowledge it is becoming.

Only something organic can be becoming. And the web is always becoming. Always becoming something. A book is never becoming, it only was or is. Scholarship is locked into this model since the Enlightenment (oops, the E. slipped in there...was hoping not to mention it), what it means to posses knowledge, to share knowledge, to build knowledge and discover the truth is all changing now that we are connected to knowledge on the network. So strangely different than books. I've rambled enough for now and must retreat to the high tower of Brandymore again for the night.

When They Severed Earth From Sky

I also read When They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber last summer. This is another book in the gathering storm against rational purism. It also suggests an intriguing possibility, that when a society becomes literate that it loses certain capacities for understanding intuitive knowledge of the kind carried in myth.

The authors propose that myths function like delivery systems for messages, with an interesting story acting as an envelope for the myth, keeping ordinary people interested enough to pass the myth down generations, the useful information contained within the envelope. When at some future time, trouble erupts (literally, such as a volcano), the payload is delivered and people can be warned about a future event or danger. What literate people seem to unlearn when they make the transition from a pre-literate culture, is that the myth has a payload. They concentrate on the story, gods and their daughters fighting, etc. and miss the message encoded in the myth. The story is merely a "soap opera" designed to ensure the story with its payload intact is delivered down the halls of time, ready to deploy when the right circumstances arise.

This book relates directly to another book with similar themes: The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which discusses the resistance by ancient natural philosophers to include the fossilized remains of ancient creatures in their Linnean systems for categorizing biology. Yet, the myth makers and the followers of phenomenology interpreted these remains more accurately than nineteenth century science. This says much about creativity and science, about as Huxley once said, that that science advances by the investigation of anomalies, or in Mayor's terms, an interest in phenomenology, a curiosity about the strange and paradoxical, which science could well do with a dose of today. The intuitive and phenomenological may be vital to creativity in science and mathematics, if one looks honestly at the history of those fields.

If science had known about emergence then, how different the Greek philosophers systems for classifying creatures might have been. The possible bird like origin of the dinosaurs might have been recognize two thousand years ago.

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Last year I read Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer for the first time, after seeing him on CSPAN BookTV several times and hearing a lot about the book. I was a rewarding experience and opened my eyes to many things and answered many questions. I can't say more right now, but this is an important book, perhaps one of the most important books you will ever read. It can change you mind about a lot of things.

He will open your eyes to the folk culture that informs our supposedly rational opinions and decisions, which amounts to a kind of folk knowledge that everyone absorbs by osmosis from their parents, neighbors, community and surrounding culture growing up. What is very striking, and counter intuitive for many rationalists, is how the behavior of people is shown to be determined more by a persistence of culture than by a framework of social or ideological forces acting on them in their own time. Or at least the culture frames the debates and decisions they make, the sides they take in culture wars. A good example is the consistent adherence to royalist sentiments in the ancient kingdom of Mercia to the later periods of conflict over hundreds of years. The social and political divides in England remained in place for hundreds of years.

Another example is how similar cultures in colonial America mirrored those in locations where migrations occurred. It seems obvious and simple that people would bring their culture with them, but historians have frequently overlooked the obvious and instead invented theories explaining American cultures as being the result of forces unique to the American experience, when they simply originated in the cultures where people migrated from.

Much of Albion is concerned with the persistence of culture.