Prep Entry #3

“The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.” –William Ralph Inge

One of my new year’s resolutions is to be conscious of what I eat. Or more appropriately, to eat consciously: to think about what I am consuming and where it comes from and how it is grown or raised. Eating is one of the most concrete ways that the average American interacts with the environment today, however unwittingly – you will be hard-pressed to find someone who can tell you where the proverbial twinkie comes from. I think one of the biggest problems facing our national psyche is the disconnect between us and our natural resources: water, energy, and food. I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The two authors approach the subject of food in different ways and with slightly different rhetoric, but the end conclusion is the same: in the United States, we have a backwards way of thinking about food.

The way I see it, to decrease the cost of food, we have industrialized the whole system, choking out small farms from the marketplace in favor of expansive monocultures and harvesting machines. The whole of the problem is that we are treating agriculture as separate from the ecosystem. By applying the laws of economics (about which I don’t have the foggiest) we are trying to fit complex interactions and slow human-driven selection into a formula of: genetically modified seed + pesticide + herbicide + nitrogen fertilizer = large, cheap yield. Anyone who has taken an ecology course or spent time watching interactions in nature knows that ecology is at its core complex. Ecology is one of the least advanced scientific fields, due in part to macrophobia: how do you fit the world into a set of theories that don’t contradict eachother? How do you look at the world on different levels (population and ecosystem ecology, for example) and at different scales (a square foot of soil, a tree, a meadow, a continent) without getting lost in the sheer volume of information? Modern food production is reductionist, reducing a complex system to a set of controls (various –cides, a root meaning “kill”) and inputs (seed, chemical fertilizer) leading to a predictable output (yer sterile vine-ripe tomato in January).

That tirade was mostly inspired by Pollan’s book. On this trip, I will be hiking (or cycling!) through a lot of North Carolina’s farmland. I am curious about what types of crops are grown on this low-nutrient soil. Not that I’ll see any of it; if I were really interested in learning about agriculture, winter would clearly not be the time to cross the state. I am more interested in talking to the farmers, and trying to piece together a history and story by first-hand experiences. Last summer, I hiked south through Virginia, following the Appalachian Trail for 500 miles. I received an independent research fellowship from Carleton College to test stream quality using aquatic invertebrate sampling. I wrote this a week before I started the hike/study:


























A thought I have been mulling over a lot is what it will be like to intertwine two completely different interests of mine (1) backpacking, which for me is at its heart personal control over movement and direction, arguably the closest that we can come to freedom with two feet on the ground. and (2) science, which at its core is rigorous, thorough, quantitative. This could either equal balance, or chaos.



























While I wouldn’t describe it as “chaotic,” this contradiction ended up being the problem. I was on a schedule and had regimented stops, which detracted from the inherent whimsy of backpacking. And the unpredictable nature of rainfall or lack of rain confounded some of the results. The challenge of field studies is trying to apply control to a system that at its heart is variable and dynamic. I had a fantastic summer. All but one of the streams were rated as “acceptable conditions” due to invertebrate presence, absence, and diversity. At the end, however, it was clear to me that the most valuable part of the research was not the scientific data, but the conversations with other hikers and people in towns about water quality. Which of course got me thinking, “The next time I do I long hike…” I could just hike. I love hiking. But why settle for something simple when it could be so much more educational?

Today is the third day I have been fasting with Amelia and Salam, which is a perfect way to begin a year of eating consciously. We have been waking up early to make breakfast and drink water before sunrise (6:58 am). All day long, there is no eating, no drinking, nothing can enter your mouth. Salam says it is a way to think about those who don’t have access to food and clean water. At sunset (5:48 pm), we drink water and eat to our heart’s delight. Amelia and Salam will continue until the end of January, as a belated observance of Ramadan (October of 2007). Today is my last day fasting, but I hope to continue with this pattern of appreciating food and water.