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Thou Shalt Not…
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. In the one thousand two hundred twenty-ninth year from the incarnation of our Lord, Peter, of all monks the least significant, gave...
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The Sincerest Form of Flattery, Part Three: Got You Covered…
Readers will recall Europe’s “The Final Countdown” (brilliantly mashed up with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”); now, via Cover Song Archive (“a collection of songs you know, by people you don’t”)… As we...
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“The future of the nations will depend on the manner of how they feed...
click here (and again) for larger (and legible) version This map, compiled and published by meat-packing company Armour in 1922, illustrates the extraordinary range of agricultural activities in...
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“Eating is an agricultural act”*…
… at least in these post-hunter-gatherer days, it is… and therein lies the problem? To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of...
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“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice”*…
“Average Dates of Last Killing Frost in Spring,” William Reed Gardner, Charles Franklin Brooks, and F.J. Marschner, 1916. Published in a 1936 Atlas of American Agriculture, put together by the United...
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“A tree is known by its fruit”*…
zoomable version here From the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), “Origins and Primary Regions of Diversity of Agricultural Crops.” * St. Basil ### As we reap what we sow, we might...
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“Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable”*…
By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible, and that the only attitude that made sense...
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“We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn...
According to Bioversity International, an international research and policy organization, just three crops — rice, wheat and maize — provide more than half of plant-derived calories consumed...
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“Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted...
In his economic masterwork The Wealth of Nations, the great Scottish economist Adam Smith reveals himself to be a deep admirer of Irish poor folk. Or, more specifically, their preferred food,...
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“First we eat, then we do everything else”*…
Imagine the ideal food. One that contains all the nutrients necessary to meet, but not exceed, our daily nutrient demands. If such a food existed, consuming it, without eating any other, would...
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“Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of...
For centuries, people in agrarian societies shared seeds to help each other subsist from year to year. Today, thanks to intellectual property rights and often well-intentioned laws, our ability to...
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“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed”*…
Surprisingly, the lawn is one of America’s leading “crops,” amounting to at least twice the acreage planted in cotton. In 2007, it was estimated that there were roughly twenty-five to forty million...
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“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”*…
We are on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals ten thousand years ago. This is...
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“He who controls the spice controls the universe”*
Spices were among the first engines of globalization, not in the modern sense of a world engulfed by ever-larger corporations but in the ways that we began to become aware, desirous even, of...
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“I vant to eat your cereal!”*…
Gabe Fonseca arranges some of the 200 cereal boxes, which are affixed by magnets to sheet metal and on display in his Los Angeles apartment At the end of a week during which stock market meltdowns...
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“The farmer works the soil; the agriculturist works the farmer”*…
Like the wheat barons of the 1870s who lived on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, [Stewart] Resnick isn’t of this place. He’s never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. He’s never put a dusty...
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“Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do”*…
From the USDA, a (zoomable) map of which crops are grown where in the U.S.: “Cropscape.” * Michael Pollan ### As we contemplate cultivation, we might note that today is National Animal Crackers Day....
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“Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you”*…
With harvest season nigh, the corn should be “as high as an elephant’s eye,” as the old Rodgers and Hammerstein song has it. Time to get that water boiling for the corn on the cob?Sure. But most of...
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“Who is to say plutonium is more powerful than, say, rice?”*…
Wild rice Rice is the most valuable agricultural commodity on the planet. Hundreds of millions of metric tons of it are produced every year, an amount valued at more than $300 billion every year....
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“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is...
source A century ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, our workweek would be only 15 hours long. What happened? We’ve crossed all the technological thresholds Keynes...
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