Fresh or Cooked?

In recent years tomato sauce was in the nutrition news. It turns out that cooking tomatoes makes Lycopene more available than in fresh tomatoes.

This went against the prevailing grain of nutritional thinking, which said that fresh was always better. Nutritionists argued that cooking reduced the amount of vitamins in food. They backed this up with scientific studies showing that cooking vegetables (or fruits like tomatoes) does reduce the amount of vitamins. An obsession developed over "keeping as much of the vitamins" in your food as possible. Steaming was touted as a way to avoid "losing" the vitamins into the cooking water. The typical English way of preparing vegetables was dammed as washing away nutrition. New technologies were advanced in an attempt to retain as much of the nutrients (known ones) as possible. Some radical eaters adopted entirely raw diets hoping to not lose a single molecule of nutrition. The trouble with this view, was that it overlooks the reality cooking can make certain nutrients available that are not available in fresh foods.

Why bring this up? I've been reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (well, actually I read it in two days and lent it out and haven't seen it since). I had thought of this before reading his book, but I was reminded of this "paper vs. plastic" debate brought about by nutritionism and of the importance of culture to eating. The question is, how do we decide what to eat, fresh or cooked? It seems to me that food culture provides the answer to this question. A cuisine or food way develops over a long period of time to satisfy the nutritional requirements, the survival, of a people. Embodied in this food way must be the right balance between fresh and cooked.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the cooking and crushing involved in the canning process makes the Lycopene in tomatoes more available than fresh, since canned crushed tomatoes are frequently the base of pasta sauces. Because Lycopene is fat-soluble, serving cooked and crushed tomatoes in an oil-rich sauce is thought to make the nutrient more available.

If we look at Italian cuisine, we are probably going to find an optimal balance of fresh versus cooked tomatoes, otherwise the people eating according to the Italian food ways would likely be very sick. That the cuisine offers a lot of cooked tomato sauces attests to the nutritional value of sometimes cooking away those vitamins. Here is a food way that encapsulates nutritional knowledge that food science took centuries to get around to counting and measuring. Ignoring the wisdom inherent in Italian food ways is another example of nutritionism and the reductionist view of nutrition, which only considers the parts we can count and measure. It ignores what our senses, our taste and smell can tell us.

The reality is that cooking foods makes available nutritional elements unavailable in fresh food, and very like fresh food contains higher levels of other nutritional elements than after cooking. The right answer is a balance between them. We really do not know yet what nutrients are made more available by cooking, combining or processing foods. Food traditions are a good way to make the decision, given that nutritional science is still in its infancy. We can make use of hundreds or thousands of years of food tradition to answer this vexing question: fresh or cooked?

The Growing Importance of Folklore

With publication of Pollan's In Defense of Food, I think we are seeing the emergence of folklore into the mainstream. Most people think folklore is something they have very little in common with. It is old fashioned music or people dancing around in costumes they wore hundreds of years ago. People feel it has very little relation to their lives. They also believe that we live in a scientific, rational world and somehow folklore does not belong. There is also an association between myth, legend and folklore as meaning fraudulent, fantasy, lies. This is a problem of perception and mis-perception, which is not new. Shortly after becoming literate, the Greeks abandoned and ridiculed their own folklore, the "myths" we read about today.

For a new perspective on what I call "folk knowledge" or what might be categorized as "folk culture" instead of folklore, since it is more correct and encompassing, we need only look to authors like Adrienne Mayor. Through long, independent research, she discovered that the ancient Greek myths about monsters were actually stories about people finding beds of fossilized bones of ancient creatures. These "geomyths" as they are called convey, real, true, factual information and represent a kind of scientific method even preliterate people engaged in, despite conveying them in a dramatic way.

In Pollan's book, food culture or food ways, as a folklorist would call them, represents knowledge that the best scientific nutritionists failed to see, take advantage of and learn from. The nutritional systems which evolved out of thousands of years of trial and error passed down by mothers through the generations, amounted to a better set of food choices than did a hundred years of scientific rational nutritionism.

In books like Blink, Albion's Seed and Stuff of Thought, we are beginning to see how our unconscious knowledge and folk knowledge shapes our decisions and opinions, sometimes without our knowledge, absorbed by osmosis through our culture. Frequently, this knowledge proves more accurate and useful than scientific rational knowledge, especially when the science is new, incomplete and arrogant, such as nutritional science.

If you don't think you participate in folklore or that it has a place in the modern world, take a look at Sadobabies, a film about urban homeless kids. Or Music District, a film about urban music. Everyone creates folklore, everyone lives in a folk culture, in reality, many folk cultures, for each folk way is a folk culture, you probably practice a food way, a work way, a everything way. You also build new ways out of old ones, from both things learned from your parents and neighbors and scraps of commercial culture. Rap is a folk culture. Commercial rap feeds into rap, and the folk culture cycle goes on. At work, if you are a programmer, you probably learned many things that are not in books on coding. This is "programmer lore" and is a folk culture and represents folk culture, which shapes the software we use in daily life, that controls elevators and space shuttles. If you don't think folklore affects your life, think again the next time you're riding an elevator.

From the Brother's Grimm on DVD

My friend and partner in developing Farm Foody and project director of the Folkstreams project, Tom Davenport, has opened a store for his From the Brother's Grimm series of films for sale direct to individuals (for institutional use, see his Davenport Films site). Tom is a farmer and filmmaker in Delaplane, Virginia.

The films were frequently featured on PBS in the local D. C. area, so they should be familiar to a generation of children who are now adults. They are live action retellings of classic folk tales in an American setting. Some tales are from Appalachia while others are interpretations of European folk tales with strong overtones of Appalachian culture and setting.

Willa, a favorite, draws upon traditional medicine show culture, documented in films like Free Show Tonight available for anyone to watch on the folkstreams.net website. Mutzmag
is a powerful film in an Appalachian setting, which contains a fair amount of traditional fairy tale violence, but the lessons are appropriate given the dangers children face today. Perhaps they could learn a few survival lessons from Mutzmag's clever outwitting of the ogres and other less than savory inhabitants of the forest, who have designs for her.

There Grew a Tree by Liberty Dawne

On March 11 2007, the audience of the AFI Silver in Silver Spring Maryland was treated to live music from a group of young musicians after the screening of the documentary film on Stephen Wade, Catching the Music. I attended as a member of the Folkstreams team (we had to sprint to the local Office Depot for a ethernet cable or the Folkstreams presentation would never have made it to the silver screen) and we enjoyed the music afterward very much, as did the audience. The musicians Stephen brought with him played wonderfully, each featured on their own and along with Stephen's magical banjo playing. My favorite was Liberty Dawne who sings and plays the fiddle. She has a CD available, which I purchased from her at the show and that you should give a listen to.

A favorite of mine is Pass that Burley Down, a standout song of the set and one of two songs written by Liberty from an experience stripping tobacco. It is reminiscent of work songs and field hollers from African American music (upon which the blues is based). It occurred to me this song draws upon a similar tradition of field work in Appalachian culture. I must be attracted to this quality it shares with the blues, since I have loved the blues since I discovered the music as a teenager in the late 1970s. My attraction is not an academic one. I don't like the song because of its associations, but on its own merits. The song is a good one. This song shows off Liberty talent's, being fast paced and sparkling.

I am attracted to albums that stand as a complete picture of the artist without being obviously autobiographical. I like the music to represent the essence of the individual not a detailed report on their life. I am not so interested in whether each song is successful in a popular sense, but that each song, and the songs as a whole, represent who the songwriter authentically is. It doesn't matter to me if a song is sentimental (which seems to be the art-crime of the last century) as long as it authentically represents the sentimentality of the artist in an artistically interesting way. That is all we can ask for from art.

As such, one of my favorite albums is Mary Chapin Carpenter's first, Hometown Girl, which I tend to identify with since I grew up in the Metro DC area and share some of the feelings expressed in the songs. I spent a good many hours of my childhood in the Air and Space Museum. I think I also share the romantic vision of a suburban kid who grew up close to the fading cultures of the Eastern Shore and the Appalachians close at hand. My family, like many others, frequently visited the Chesapeake and over to the Delmarva, or west to the Blue Ridge, passing through farm country, stopping at farmer's markets, and the like, which may explain my interest in Folkstreams and co-founding a website bringing social networking to solve the problems of sustainable farming, FarmFoody. I am drifting off topic. Although I think she would like to compare well to folk music superstar Alison Krauss, another fiddle player who sings, I think she mines a vein closer to Gillian Welch, who sets modern themes to traditional music.

Perhaps this is why I like "visionary" artists, since they are just doing their own thing, putting whatever is on their mind into their works, without worrying about the "art scene" or what some professor told them, trying to be the next Picasso (or Beatles). I think people need to stop trying to be the next anything, since we know that a general fighting the last war is a losing proposition. After all, that is what artistic expression is, putting what's on your mind or what you are feeling into an external, material form.

I don't quite feel that coherency as strongly in There Grew a Tree, perhaps because many of the songs are traditional and perhaps because of that, lacks the authority of a singer songwriter's first album, but since the album is one of traditional music, that can be expected. For her, the traditional songs are part of her identity. The songs were chosen more in connection with her family and her memory than written from those with the exception of the two songs she penned. The first albums by singer songwriters are frequently powerful since they usually represent the bottled up emotion of their first decade of song writing. Perhaps There Grew a Tree is much the same, only through the medium of a selection of traditional and popular songs important to the artist.

I must apologize if this review has drifted into myriad other directions, but it can't be helped. I'm just made that way.

Among the covers, Billy Gray is an excellent well written song, which Liberty runs through with an attractive quality to her voice. I think she struggles a bit with some of the more complicated melodies, but I'll leave that to people who judge singing contests. The instrumental playing on this album is wonderful and all who participated are excellent musicians.

Happy Farmer/Redwing is a mashup of a western swing tune and a classical piece. She pulls it off pretty good and I like the idea of combining music from different eras and styles, which I attempted couple of times in my own pathetic musical ramblings, giving the mashup some resonance with my inclinations.

She includes You are My Sunshine, Walkin' the Dog, Orange Blossom Special (very nicely done), Kentucky and Runaway Train.

She includes Amazing Grace on the album. Along with Silent Night, Amazing Grace is one of my two favorite traditional songs, which stand above nearly every song I know and inhabit some transcendent space we barely comprehend.

The second song written by Liberty, There Grew a Tree, is a wonderful metaphor for the growth of family and generations. I find the two songs Liberty wrote to be the most effective of the album and I had assumed they were traditional numbers until I read the CD notes. It may be that the songs she wrote fit her style better than the others. They are both strong songs and perhaps it was singing her own songs that gave them greater strength. I wish the songs had been all her own.

The CD was released in 2001 so I have no doubt her playing, writing and singing has improved, but There Grew a Tree can still be had from amazon I recommend you seek it out. I don't think much of music reviews, so I really don't write them. Just go out and listen.

The Folksnet: Folk Culture and Web 2.0

Although I am not a folklorist, through my work on the Follkstreams website, I have come to appreciate the study of folk culture and understand how expansive a field it represents. Folk culture is the culture people make for themselves and share with others. Web 2.0 is a folk culture, it even coined a phrase "folksonomy" to denote a system of categorization that replaces a vocabulary controlled by an authority or group of authorities with a vocabulary created ad hoc by the people involved in using the system of categorization. The media sharing sites like YouTube and MySpace and "mashup" systems like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly enable a rich shared folk media culture to arise. Increasingly, as we head into the 21st century, it is a supreme irony that folklore is taking on greater importance as nearly everything is democratized and individualized, and is poised to become perhaps the most significant field of research in this century, after having for centuries remained an overlooked backwater in academia.

Folklore already possess the vocabulary and methods to comprehend and measure such a brave new world. It has the attitudes and assumptions, the knowledge frameworks ready at hand. As we understand how the mind works, as we democratize, we will realize the central role played by narrative in the workings of the mind and society, that society is a kind of virtual reality similar to the internet in which abstract things affect the real world, that narrative and oral tradition exist everywhere and explain how people know what they know and apply what they know to the world around them. This is a profound shift from the rationalist assumptions that have driven Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment.

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.