(no subject)
I know a number of you have read and enjoyed Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dileman (I admit, I have not), but y'all should check out his piece in today's Times. I'm a fan, as he really takes an ecological perspective.
Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal’s needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal use of the plant.
Speaking of, it's Just Science! week over on I'm a chordata, urochordata! (feed urochordata) starting tomorrow. Should be fun. I'll be posting science articles every day - some exciting, some more esoteric - I'm trying to shimmy a dataset into swivel or Many Eyes today so that anyone can play with some of the data I talk about it and make pretty pictures and pretend what it's like to be me, swearing and cussing at a dataset when patterns are a bit funkier than you anticipated.
Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal’s needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal use of the plant.
Speaking of, it's Just Science! week over on I'm a chordata, urochordata! (feed urochordata) starting tomorrow. Should be fun. I'll be posting science articles every day - some exciting, some more esoteric - I'm trying to shimmy a dataset into swivel or Many Eyes today so that anyone can play with some of the data I talk about it and make pretty pictures and pretend what it's like to be me, swearing and cussing at a dataset when patterns are a bit funkier than you anticipated.