jesi – She Grows Food

by Michelle Galimba

What does truth taste like? What does justice taste like?

These might sound like terribly pompous questions to ask. But they are worth asking as we learn, un-learn, re-learn the question: “What is food?”

What is food?

Food – we speak of it as good or bad, as healthy or indulgent, pretty or ugly, tasty or yucky, clever or boring,strange or familiar, pure or tainted.
What is it that we eat? It was there before each of us, like the air we breathe, and yet more complexly given to us by each other – cultural, social, ecological. It is what we have absorbed already before we became conscious; it is what we are formed from. It is what our first thoughts were bent upon, what our bodies cried out for before there were words. Food is a feeling, an interchange with the world, a necessary blessing.

Food can be beautiful and good. It should be so. Because it is the flower of the entirety of our knowledge, because it is the will of the community to nourish and sustain, to embody itself, animate itself. Because it is the form and medium of our conversation with the web of life, in which humans are but one node.

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The pathway of food should be known by all – its path from earth to belly and back to earth. What knowledge is more necessary?

Truth might have a taste. Would we know it when we tasted it?

At L’Ulu a year or two ago, Chef Ed Kenney of Town Restaurant handed me a little plate on which was half of a baby turnip with top attached, glazed with a slightly sweet clear sauce and sprinkled with a few crunchy popped grains. It made me think again about turnips. I had no idea they could be so lyrical. Like a fine green tea with all those scents and flavors of grasses and flowers, of crushed leaf and ground mineral, but more homely, like a turnip is, even when a baby turnip. It seems to me now that Ed Kenney was truthful with that turnip.

Which was a risky thing to do, because, of course, the turnip was very much outgunned and over-shadowed by the flashy, dazzle-y flavors of the usual sort of luxurious concoctions at these culinary grazing events. You know, shrimp and saffron, champagne and mangoes, beef and lobster.

But the turnip was there giving testament. It was clear that Ed Kenny knew these turnips. That they were not just ingredients in a list at the beginning of a recipe; that he had seen and even, perhaps, tasted the soil they grew in, had seen them grow from seed to seedling, to harvest; that he understood their cultivation.

Cultivation, what a miracle it is: the long, long partnership between human and turnip for centuries and millennia, generation upon generation; our relationship to the wild ancestor of the turnip that we met and knew long ago as wild beings ourselves – hunters and gatherers – and brought along with us, brought into our fold, as we became farmers and then scientists, constructed our cities, and then our civilizations. Without turnips and wheat, rice and taro, soy and corn, eggplant and cucumber, we would not be what we are – artists, scientists, businesspeople, teachers – and they would not be what they are without us, and our shaping, our planting and harvesting, measuring and selecting. Our very minds exist within an unacknowledged reciprocity. The civilization that we enact by our highly specialized jobs and technologies cannot exist without the simple turnip.

How do we do justice to the turnip?

Perhaps, simply to remember what it is and what we are, not to forget our long journey together; to taste the reality – bitter, earthy, sweet – of the turnip and remember.

by Michelle Galimba

galimba-intelli — Grazin’ at Kuahiwi Ranch

To be honest, I’m not so interested in food – as a commodity or a resource or even as a way to feed those who are hungry. What I mean is, I’m not so interested in the numbers – numbers of calories, pounds of product consumed, percentage of locally produced products, and so on. All of those are necessary and useful numbers. I have to pay attention to numbers because I have to produce so many pounds of beef each week in order to meet my customer’s needs consistently, or my business fails. So, I’m not saying that numbers are unimportant. Far from it. But the numbers are not what interest me, what keep me going day after day.

What interests me is culture. Not the kind of culture that you go to museums and theaters to experience, nor even the kind of culture that distinguishes the way of life of an Italian, or a Thai, or an American. What interests me is the culture – the values and beliefs – that structure the relationship between us human people and the other non-human people. I know, right there, I might lose some people who will say, “wait, humans are the only kind of people.” I get laughed at a lot for “forgetting” that most humans only recognize other humans as people. Which is fine, you know, it’s all just words.

Other people might say, “Hey, you’re a rancher. How can you recognize other animals as people and still raise cows for food. Send them to slaughter every week.” And all I can say is: It’s not an easy thing, but we all eat and get eaten, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the cows and the grass that they eat, and the soil that the grass eats, and which will eat me someday, hopefully.
What interests me is the intelligence that is embedded in the food that I produce. A lot of us are interested in knowing where our food comes from, in knowing the story of the food that we are eating: who raised it and where, and what were the methods used. And that is exactly the story of the intelligence that went into the making of that food, the culture, the values, the relationships that were cultivated and shaped between human, plant, animal, soil, air and water.

I hope that in the future more people will be interested in actually being involved in, rather than just knowing about, the intelligence that makes food. Despite what we might tell ourselves about the absolute dominance of human will and technology, it takes more than human intelligence to make food, it takes partnerships with the non-human realm.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether we intend to continue on our path of treating the world as if it is an object which we have every Gods-given right to exploit as we please in the name of civilization, the economy, or some other supposedly higher purpose. Or do we recognize that in treating the world like a dumb object, not only do we disrespect the world, which is a terrible thing in itself, but we also create dumb systems that are incredibly fragile and vulnerable to disruption exactly because they are simplistically mechanical in conception, design, and execution. A dumb system might be more efficient in generating numbers, but it is also less resilient than a system which incorporates the intelligence of four billion years of life on this planet.

If we treat cows like dumb eating and meat or milk-making machines, we miss out on their capacity to restore soils that have been depleted by monoculture cropping, to eat forages that human’s can’t digest; we miss out on that species multi-million year relationship with the grasses. If we treat plants like dumb solar-energy-converting, calorie-making mechanisms (which is miracle enough) we miss out on their ability to process waste materials, to build soil, to create microclimates, to form the complex web of relationships that they can form with microbial, animal, and other plant species.

If we treat ourselves like dumb consumers and dumb employees then we get strip malls and dead zones and unemployment statistics, and we miss out on the chance to make something beautiful and useful with our own hands for our community and in relationship with the non-human realm.

We miss out and we feel that loss, although we might have no words to name it.

I read recently in Lapham’s Quarterly that we human people do not yet have scientific instruments sensitive enough to measure the olfactory capabilities of dogs (much less the philosophical ability to comprehend the full implications of that olfactory intelligence); that dogs are capable of registering parts per a trillion, which is the limits of what our instruments can register at this point. We don’t really understand them, what they are capable of, and they have been our closest non-human companions for tens of thousands of years.

The vision of agriculture that interests me (and the culture and civilization that this agriculture will be the foundation for) is one that respects and respectfully incorporates the intelligence that has evolved on this earth, rather than blindly wiping it out in pursuit of simplistic, mechanical goals such as maximum return on investment and the maximum efficiency of a dumbed-down system.

Mechanistic rationality is a tool that we have developed to interact with our environment: to understand, predict, order and manipulate the world that we can perceive. Having grown out of the European Enlightenment, that powerful suite of ideas rooted in a vision of human dignity, liberty and equality, it has achieved much that is benign.

But it is a limited tool. It is blind to the non-conceptual, to the non-human, to the weave of life. It is blind, really, to life and the instincts and drives, the hungers and thirsts, the bodies and beings that make up life.

As such this world view favors machines, because machines are rational. This is the world view that is and has been dominant for some time. It is both dangerous and incredibly useful. It is a world view that has provided us humans with unquestionable benefits – modern medicine, widespread, if not universal, prosperity. Comfort and security of a kind, but also blindness, dullness, ugliness. Ugliness is rampant and it is a toxic ugliness, not merely aesthetic. It is the ugliness of less life, of sterilized environments, sterilized in order to maintain the civilized environment that we have become accustomed to, that we consider our birthright, and which is, insidiously, killing us. Killing us with diabetes and obesity and pollution.

But such ugliness is not inevitable. We can develop and rediscover another strand of culture: one that sees and respects the intelligence of the non-human realm, of the ecosystems and environment of which we are just a part; one that will uncover new kinds of talent and intelligence within our own kind – intelligence that loves life.