Metabolizing the Caloric Accounting of Modern Eating

Greetings Friends and Neighbors,

The Milk warms slowly on the woodstove.  The pre-dawn dark beyond the window is deep.  Trevor—the baby Ox-to-be in the pen just below the window—makes no sound this morning.  But over the past few days he’s found his voice and his hunger.  It appears no amount of milk could satisfy.  Once the bottle’s empty he’s after my fingers.  I affix a collar and rope halter—matching baby blue—to his rust-colored neck and white-splashed face and we set out for our first walk.  This is a big moment for a pair of students assigned to work together on a multi-year project, a pair who eagerly await the birth of the third teammate.  Trevor’s mother Tigger has a half-sister named Topsy, who is ready to pop any day now.  I’ve no assurance she carries a boy, but several have whispered prayers for that outcome.  Don’t hold back if you’re so inclined.  As for the word teammate, technically I will be the “teamster,” they will be the “team,” and I will drive them.  These terms might accurately describe the situation many long miles down the road from here.  But in the driveway this morning the scene more closely resembles a play group.  And then Trevor’s six-day-old hooves step from the icy yard onto the dry blacktop.  The fire that ignites in his body as he gains traction reminds me what he’s been bred to do.  Humans have been walking alongside their Cattle for a very long time, on a road lined by the mercy of Sunlight, Soil, and Rainfall, by the generosity of Grass.  Trevor and I break into a full run together down the middle of the road. 

Two invitations for you:

1.       The NOFA-VT Winter Conference continues this week with a remarkable line up of speakers.  I’ll be doing my best to contribute at my presentation next Wed. titled Experimenting with Gift Economy:  Looking back at 3 years of Brush Brook Community Farm.  I will invite the group that gathers there to wrestle with some of the questions I’ve written out in these Newsletters.  It would be an honor to have you join the conversation. 

2.       There are a couple more spots available in the second cohort of the Hospicing Modernity Study Group, meeting weekly by video conference call, Wed. evenings 3/23-4/20.  You can request a spot by responding to this email, or gather more information by reading the paragraphs below. 

Today brings the final gathering of our first Hospicing Modernity Study Group.  As I do each week, I’ve prepared notes and discussion prompts.  The final chapters of the book are positively dripping with wisdoms, generously dispensed.  As I read, I wonder about the grasping hunger we often bring to an encounter with Indigenous teachings.  Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk are two well-known books in this category.  And then I find the following quote from an interview with Hospicing Modernity author Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, in which she names precisely the dynamic I hadn’t yet found words to describe: “We consume not only stuff but also knowledge, experiences, critique.  And this consumption, many times, is not even digested.  It is just consumption for consumption’s sake, so that we can feel better.”

And so it is with some caution that I share the following teachings from the Chapter titled There Is No Away.  The title itself draws attention to the fact that our language allows us to throw something away.  If there is an “away” where we send stuff we no longer need, is there also a place called “away” where we imagine someone diligently collects the things that keep us alive?  The author begins, “At and Indigenous gathering in Brazil in 2010, I was told that there are three ways of imagining society:  individualism, collectivism, and metabolism.”  After three years at Brush Brook Community Farm, I can attest that the first move—from individualism to collectivism—this alone will require many generations of disciplined learning.  Given modernity’s foundational belief in separability—human from both other human and from all that is not human—the author suggest that it is “difficult to fathom what relating to the world as metabolism beyond concepts and metaphors feels, tastes, and looks like.  We have lost the metabolic literacies necessary to notice and sense how we are entangled with everything else…these literacies have been exiled from the house of modernity.” 

Reading this section on abandoned metabolic literacies—as I begin to learn to drive Oxen—I am reminded of a founding story from the very early days of Brush Brook Community Farm.  A creation myth, if you will.  I will try to tell that story here.  Two notes before I begin:  Firstly, you will see the word calorie in the story.  Calorie, a French word that means simply “full of heat,” was adopted more recently to signify a specific measurement of energy.  Imagine the word calorie as the droplet of dew that illuminates the previously-invisible spider web extending in all directions from our every decision—what and how much to eat, whether to drive or walk or stay home, which house we purchase, etc.  A web that has been diagnosed with such ailments as catastrophic climate change and mass extinction.  Webs are sticky, stunningly beautiful, entangling.  Secondly, I have often shied away from telling this intimate story.  I am embedded in a relatively small community of farmers, and I have experienced the emotional discontent of a community member who interpreted my telling as a criticism of their farming practices.  This couldn’t be farther from the life force—the caloric nourishment—carried by the story.  The farmer in the story is simply reporting on the grievous circumstance he observes, employing truth-telling as a form of prophecy.  I remember the prophetic words Wendell Berry employs to introduce his 1998 Collected Poems:

In a time that breaks

in cutting pieces all around,

when men, voiceless

against thing-ridden men,

set themselves on fire, it seems

too difficult and rare

to think of the life of a man

grown whole in the world,

at peace and in place.

But having thought of it

I am beyond the time

I might have sold my hands

or sold my voice and mind

to the arguments of power

that go blind against

what they would destroy.

Metabolizing the Caloric Accounting of Modern Eating

That summer we set out to try to make some hay by hand using traditional hand tools—scythes, rakes, pitchforks, and the power stored in our own bodies.  The work pleases the eye much more than it does the low back and the tender palms and the summer leisure schedule.  I ambitiously imagined we would be able to put up a winter’s worth of Hay for our small Flock.  Get started and think again.  Over the years since we’ve mowed hay by hand in fits and starts, recently using a tractor to ted, rake and bale the mowed grass.  This is where the oxen come in—supposedly they will provide labor-savings at some point.  It turns out that re-introducing real physical labor into modern life is not only physically humbling to the extreme, but quickly illuminates how many fewer other things we would need to do each week to reduce our dependence on the machines that do the work for us.  Or is it we who work for them?  Back in 1973 Ivan Illich wrote in his provocative, short book Tools for Conviviality, “For a hundred years, we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that ... used for this purpose, machines enslave men.”  More on that later.

The day was hot.  Nearing high Summer.  We had mowed just a fraction of what I’d hoped for, with six of us behind the scythe for many hours.  Sore and blistered all over, I jumped in the car and raced off to a memorial for a farmer who had committed suicide.  He was about my same age.  Trying to be obedient to the perfect haying weather, I had stayed long in the field and so by the time I arrived I had missed the ceremony.  The shockwaves of grief had rippled through the farming community, and so the presence of so many farmers at one gathering at this time of year was already deeply moving.  They were in to the food and drink section of the event.  I sidled up to a farmer who I had looked up to since I first moved to the area—an Elder in the community.  I told him of our hand-hay-making efforts, how it seemed nearly impossible to imagine putting up enough feed for even a few animals.  With grief hanging heavy in the hot afternoon air, this farmer began to tell me the story of the energy audit—call it a metabolic accounting—that had been conducted some years back at his Farm, a well-run organic vegetable operation that grows food for hundreds of households.  A passionate graduate student undertook the complex research, and came up the staggering figure that it took seven calories of inputs to produce just one calorie of food.  And just a fraction of one of those seven calories was derived from human labor.  The rest came from the embodied energy stored in the farm’s machines, from diesel fuel, plastics and propane, from organic fertilizers and purchased seeds and so on.  This meant that only a few leaves of each head of lettuce actually came from that Farm’s specific allotment of sunlight and soil and rainfall.  How does one contend with the news that there’s not much localness in the food we commonly use the word to describe?  Now this farmer is revered as a leader in the sustainable farming movement in the state, and so his confessional moved me deeply.  Many I know cherish this farmer and his farm, and, if asked, would hold up its continued existence as something that gives them hope in a time of ecological crisis.  What I heard from this troubled farmer on this grief-soaked day, was “It’s a lot worse than they think.”  I wondered if the farmer whose life and death we were gathered there to remember might have taken some of this knowing with him into the ground.