Nowtopian

Mark Morford makes a nice contribution to an ongoing shift in the discussion about what we eat, approvingly citing Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and intelligently reframing the tired opposition between vegetarian and omnivore in favor of an ecologically informed emphasis on local vs. industrial. This ongoing discussion seems like one of the most potent entry points to a deeper shift in our sensibilities these days. I’ve been reading a few different things that underpin this feel-good shift with some interesting reconceptualizing analyses.

One book I acquired a couple of months ago is “Soil and Civilization” by Edward Hyams, written in 1952. I’ve only read the beginning of the book, but already it’s quite fascinating, rethinking human history from the point of view of the relationship to different kinds of soil giving rise to pastoral or agricultural societies. Any history can be accused of narrowly promoting its own framework as an oversimplification of complex histories. Hyams acknowledges as much himself. Nevertheless, in spite of a somewhat Eurocentric approach (or Euro-Asia-centric anyway), he has a good account of the emergence of agriculture on the Nile and in Mesopotamia based on millennia of alluvial soil deposits in the river flood plains. Alternately he describes the rise of pastoralism as a phenomena of loess soils produced by glacial grinding and wind, leading to grasses suitable for ruminants, which in turn eventually lead to domesticated livestock. I’m oversimplifying it of course, but it leads to my larger point about the interrelationship of organisms that, while obvious, is finally starting to gain some real traction in everyday thinking. Hyams’ argument is basically that humans are but one member of a larger community of life tied fundamentally to the soil. And soil is an incredibly dense and interdependent environment of symbiotic and parastic (mostly bacteriological) species that are the basic source of the entire food chain.

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