Fire and Knowledge

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 54.

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Library of America, 1996; orig 1955), p. 225.

Much of the litter that now defaces our country is fairly directly caused by the massive secession or exclusion of most of our people from active participation in the food economy. We have made a social ideal of minimal involvement in the growing and cooking of foods. This is one of the dearest “liberations” of our affluence. Nevertheless, the more dependent we become on the industries of eating and drinking, the more waste we are going to produce.

—Wendell Berry, “Waste” in What Are People For? (1990), pp. 127-128.

A food culture of anti-eating is worse than useless. People hold to their food customs because of the positives: comfort, nourishment, heavenly aromas. A sturdy food tradition even calls to outsiders; plenty of red-blooded Americans will happily eat Italian, French, Thai, Chinese, you name it. But try the reverse: hand the Atkins menu to a French person, and run for your life.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 17.

The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 287

Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 279

From the NYT:

This year a new weapon against smog was introduced in the United States: cement. Called TX Active, it was developed by the Italian company Italcementi. Enrico Borgarello, Italcementi’s head of research and development, says the product can literally “kill” pollution.

The cement’s chemical composition is enhanced with titanium dioxide, which under the right conditions can neutralize some harmful pollutants. When exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet light, the titanium dioxide is “activated,” Borgarello says, and pollutants that come in contact with the surface of the cement are oxidized. Hazardous nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides, for example, are transformed into harmless nitrates or sulfates, which simply rinse off the building with rainwater. This also keeps it especially clean.

Titanium dioxide, commonly used to make paints bright white, was added to the standard cement’s mix. It was only later that Italcementi realized that TX Active had pollution-busting properties. For instance, in Bergamo, where Italcementi is based, a stretch of road downtown was coated with a layer of TX Active. Borgarello says that residents reported better-smelling air within 4.5 square miles. The company says their research shows that if 15 percent of the surface area of Milan were covered in TX Active, air pollution would be reduced by 50 percent.

If every youth and man, from fifteen to fifty years old, could wield an axe two hours per day, dyspepsia would vanish from the earth, and rheumatism become decidedly scarce.

–Horace Greeley, Reflections of a Busy Life (1868) as quoted in Scott and Helen Nearing, The Good Life, p. 305