Refining my Tastes Closer to The Soil: The Least Offense Act Against Entropy
By C.P.B
11th/May/2013
I got day dreaming a very warpy sort of image not long ago, I imagined all the fat that hung on people, stretched evenly back to the earth where it first came from. I quite literally imagined it all taken from the lumpy sides of our bellies and pulled back to cover the surface of the soil as one might spread all the peanut butter from a jar evenly across a great piece of toast. Why had such an image occurred to me? It lingered one morning when I took a bag of sugar from my cupboard to sweeten my porridge. Like a ritual, I eat it every morning and from the same bag of sugar I’ve sweetened my breakfast with it for many months. It’s 1kg of white, refined sugar; almost three quarters gone and although it’s lasted me for many months, I became sort of disturbed by how much sugar I had habitually eaten. You cannot find 1kg of sugar in a concentrated form in many spaces of nature with the exception of honey perhaps. There are sugars found all throughout life, though not in such a concentrated form as one finds in a one kilo bag of Denmark’s finest. How many apples would I need to process before I could get 1kg of sugar? Grapes? Oranges? Carrots? Leaves? Grains? Beets? It’s the latter root my sugar was processed from, a great bloody load of beets refined and processed down to make granulated sugar. On my route to Lund one day, I rode past a beet farm just after harvest, in a huge pile lay tonnes and tonnes of raw beets waiting to be processed. Behind the pile was the land the beets were extracted from and like a desert, it was baron and brown. A miserable sight really, hectares of land laid waste for the energies exploited from the beets. The word rape comes to mind as a befitting image, a sort of hasty violence had occurred on this land, it had been raped of its fruit and nutrients to ingloriously sweeten my porridge.
Imagine all those beets laying in a pile right in the centre of all the land it was extracted from. Imagine then the pile of beets that lay there, magically turning into a 1kilo bag of sugar sitting centered still in the middle of the wasted land. Now imagine it all melting perfectly even across all that land, like a nail brush glossing it ever so thinly. That’s how I saw all the fat from our bodies put back to the land in that dreamy image I had.
It’s not just sugar either, it’s oats, it’s my pasta, it’s my chocolate, it’s my milk and tomatoes and carrots. Seeing the image done to fruit is sadder still, like a tree leaking its sanguineous nutrients in tears of fruit, we take everything and haul it into boxes and crates en route to those dreary “super”-markets. I see the orange tree and banana tree, and apples, plums and pears bearing fruit to spread its seed, like a woman giving birth, using stupendous energies for the final push until life is given, then we snatch this sweetened life and gulp it down like a miserable sort of machine. It’s so violent and such an unhappy thought, taking and taking the fruits and nutrients of the soil and giving none of it back. This specialised, mechanical sort of farming is ghastly and so utterly unnatural. Like the bags of sugar, rice and oats, and boxes of bananas, apples and pears, I scoff them via a one way route expecting no limit to my needs and nutrients.
This farming makes us fat. Like the bulky bag of sugar, so too do we become like it; concentrated and dense. While we eat the earth’s nutrients without bringing it back, we’re taking a very unfair share and it shows well on a western belly.
What if I had to produce everything I consumed? Now I imagine all the fat and energy I have in my body, and energy I expect to need for my body in a year, and I spread that over a piece of land. The land should be just large enough to feed me and small enough that I can manage it unmechanized, that is, entirely with the crude force of my hands! There would have to be an exacting balance between how much food I need to produce and how much I can manage.
What a fine thought! I can see it now growing my tomatoes and beans alongside pumpkins, potatoes and cabbages. Fruit trees, nuts and herbs, oh and of course I’d need some oats for my ritual breakfast. Yes, though porridge surely needs sweetening! Plain oats without sugar is like a woman without hair!
One soon thinks how much energy and land it would take to produce that kilo of sugar merely to sweeten one’s breakfast and it soon makes one think it’s hardly worth the effort! Well if I didn’t bother with porridge and sugar beets then I could grow something else, or I could just save the energy I would have spent growing sugar beets and oats and spend it doing something else, like reading! I think there’s a sort of wisdom in that, it makes me think of our 19th century farmer-poet, Henry D. Theroux, when he calculated how much food he needed to grow and how much effort it took to grow it compared to the amount of time he wanted to spend reading the Iliad, I think it was. The simpler the diet, the more time he had to spend on his book, indeed that is wisdom and certainly the thought of all that energy needed for that kilo of sugar is quite disturbing and hardly worth the soil it’s grown in, considering!
If one lived entirely within the limits of a piece of farmed land that was exactly large enough to satisfy one’s nutritional needs, is it possible that one could end up fat? I’m sure someone could make a physical calculation on this, all the energies put into farming your food, and the given size of a land farmed entirely by hand, could one become fat at all? Probably not, being fat comes from concentrated forms of nutrients such is the sole form produced from our monoculture, mechanized, specialised wasting agriculture. Working in tune with the soils and seasons and eating therefrom, is the least offense act against entropy, one works themselves to their simplest, most basic form and historically, if not a little romantically; the simplest occupation of production is sex, soon after comes farming as the most elementary act of production.
Getting fat would be a difficult undertaking on such a farm since getting fat defies the principal of entropy, like brushing wet mud on the side of your house; eventually it has to crumble off.
A person that lived like this, one who spread their energies evenly across a piece of land wouldn’t be like a jar of peanut butter sitting in the middle of a baron, miserable field, they’d be part of the spread. That’s how I imagine it now, the beautiful greasy glaze of butter would be spread evenly across the land with all the rest, I’d be part of the butter on toast, not a lonely foolish lardy jar of peanut butter all lonesome on a baron farm.
From the finest elements, to the rarest seed, to the grease on our bellies; everything is connected so we gotta share the love.
Harvested Sugar Beets, Near Lund (2012)
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