Author Archives: Jason

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion Part II (1786)

Posted on by

So, picking up on Monday’s tale of the potato’s rise to the status of staple food and, more specifically, the height of fashion:  When France sent its army out against Frederick the Great’s in the Seven Year War, a 19-year-old pharmacist named Antoine-Augustin Parmentier signed up.  He ended up locked in a Prussian prison, escaped, was recaptured, etc. until he served, by some accounts, a total of five stints in the cooler.  Frederick, you’ll recall, had forced his starving Germanic masses to eat potatoes through the delicate wielding of the lash, and so Parmentier found himself eating nothing but during his stay.

In spite of the fact that the potato was banned as human fodder in his home country because it was believed to cause leprosy, Parmentier did not, in fact, lose any digits.  So when he made it home in 1763 and took the job of pharmacist at the Invalides Hospital, he tried to push the food.  Alas, the Catholic Church ran the hospital, and we know how open they are to new and healthful ideas.  Not even Parmentier’s win in a 1770 essay contest on “Foodstuffs Capable of Reducing the Calamities of Famine” changed their minds, nor the Paris Faculty of Medicine’s reclassification of the spud as legit food two years later.  So Parementier searched his brain, scratched his long, cartoonish chin, and discovered his inner Charles Barnum. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: The Leprous Potato and a Hint of High Fashion (8,000 B.C. & 1740)

Posted on by

The historical trajectory of potatoes joined ours sometime between 8,000 and 5,000 B.C.  The Incas developed enough different varieties that, according to National Geographic, they could glean every nutrient needed for survival from a potato-only diet.  They included spuds in their prayers.

The rest of the world was not so enamored.  When the Conquistadors introduced potatoes to Europe in the 1500s, folks suspected them not merely deficient for human consumption, but injurious.  They are not mentioned, after all, in the Bible.  Their lumps and eyes suggested disease in an age in which the appearance of a vegetable was often thought to reflect the maladies it could cause or cure.  In 1633, French Burgundy felt the need to pass a law forbidding people “to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy.”  Continue reading →

Yo, Did You Know That Monticello Has a Sweet Garden as Part of Its Deeply Ambivalent Legacy?

Posted on by

Monticello is the Virginia plantation that Thomas Jefferson spent 41 years building and the home to which he brought all of the inventions of clever common sense he found in Europe or Antiquity’s texts: a machine that duplicates with one pen on a piece of paper the motion of the pen worked by a human hand on another; a Lazy Susan for books; a clock to hang in a continent of folks who’d never seen one.  He invented a plow and designed into the house components so simple as to be plucked from the seed of artfulness just before passing the threshold of “invention”: a weather vane on the roof attached to swing a compass on the ceiling of  the vestibule; the weights that turned the clock unspooling up the wall along a seven-day calender, telling the time.

Jefferson imagined an America of gentlemen farmers.  He himself was a farmer, would have been a gardener were it not for the free labor of 200-odd slaves whom the museum now refers to as “enslaved workers.”  I like how it shifts the emphasis.

Jefferson considered the introduction of horticultural wonders a responsibility.  His slaves cut his vegetable garden out of the side of the mountain with hand tools.  They created a small bluff over sloping fields he would try unsuccessfully forever to turn into a vineyard.  The garden was dinner, botanist’s experiment, and showpiece.  It included a pavilion with a pyramidal roof and a reading bench.

The garden is kind of awesome. Continue reading →

Community News: Drought for Dinner

Posted on by

The U.S. lays claim to over half of the globe’s corn exports and nearly the same for soybeans.  Nobody else comes close.  China, runner-up in the corn category, exports less than half the amount America does.  The same is the case for Brazil when it comes to the soy market.

The majority of each ends up as feed for livestock raised abroad, and additional bazillions of tons of corn and soy beyond our exports go toward the domestic production of meat that we export (it takes roughly 10 lbs of grain to grow 1 lb of meat).  All told, we shipped $53 billion dollars worth of all three—corn, soy, and meat—in 2011.

But global warming has made 2012 the hottest year since we began keeping records in 1895.  A third of the country’s counties have been declared federal disaster areas on account of drought.  Crops across the Midwest (88% and 87% of the country’s corn and soy supply, respectively) have been burned brittle and brown.  That’s driven corn prices up 45% since mid-June and soybean prices nearly 30% since the beginning of that month and nearly 60% since the end of last year. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Aztec Peanut Paste and the Birth of Skippy (1519 & 1932)

Posted on by

Among the wonders the Conquistadors discovered upon setting foot on the Americas was peanut butter.  Well, it would have been more of a peanut paste—just roasted, mashed nuts—but the essentials were there in 1519 when Cortez and his lunatics showed up.  Let’s assume the Aztecs had a long history with peanut butter because peanut butter is awesome and so are storied, long-dead ancient empires.

And now let’s jump to the 19th century.  We’re jumping because even though peanuts spread around the globe after the colonization of the Americas and folks surely smashed and ate them, the public record rarely takes note of what Average Joe and Jane ate.  It does take note, however, of issued patents.

In 1884, a Québécois named Marcellus Gilmore Edson received a patent for the process of milling roasted peanuts into a semi-fluid state between heated surfaces.  When the goop cooled, it achieved, in Edson’s words, “a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment.”  Yum. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: The Kids, Various Neighbors, Garretta’s Laugh, & a Hundred-Plus Sunflowers in a Hurricane of Enthusiasm

Posted on by

Two Sundays back Shannon and I followed through on an idea I cooked up last winter.  We would start seeds indoors, organize a children’s morning in our community garden across the street, and lead a hand’s-on, dirt-on-the-knees lesson in, well, all things Plant.

So I started some sunflowers inside, staggered the timing so we had one about six inches tall with its new yellow face and five just green, half-inch sprouts with plump leaves.  We armed ourselves with about a hundred seeds of sunflowers of various heights and colors, two boxes of crayons, and a big bottle of tangerine orange juice.

We had, as we explained to Garretta, our neighbor and grandmother of our first four participants, an educational program.  The explanatory exchange went something like this:

Jason & Shannon: Okay, kids, let’s talk a little about plants for a—

Garretta: You four get on over to that plot and start pulling those weeds!

(Kids shoot from the picnic bench like bees are at their butts.)

Jason & Shannon: Well, first let’s talk about roots. See—

Garretta: Pull those weeds because we aren’t gonna be here all day; we have to go to that park to play in the water.

Jason & Shannon: Damn, Garretta, we have an educational program planned here!

Garretta:  Ha-ha-ha-ha….. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Man Made Maize and the Gods Made Man (3,700 B.C.)

Posted on by

Writing about genetically modified food last week got me thinking about Humanity’s history of mutating the plant world to its gastro-nutritional whim.  It is those directed mutations that created civilization itself.  For instance:

This Mayan maize god was, among many diverse roles, the partron of scribes.

In the beginning, the gods of the Maya created humans out of mud.  But the mud men squinted at the world, and could not take it in.  They could not move to chase game or to seek shelter, and their thoughts were clogged.  The rains washed them away.

The gods then made humans out of wood.  These men could speak and see and move.  On all fours, they climbed through the jungle canopies and rambled over the valleys, but they failed to honor the gods as the gods saw fit.  Perhaps their taste of freedom was too complete.  Perhaps they razed the jungles where their flesh was found.  The gods thus destroyed them.

And so the gods tried a third time.  They made Man out of maize.  And this Man was in harmony. Continue reading →

Community News: Chief Justice Roberts on Your Fruits and Veggies

Posted on by

The hubbub over Chief Justice John Roberts deciding in favor of the Affordable Care Act—specifically, the way he found it constitutional on the basis of taxation rather than the power of the federal government to regulate commerce—got me thinking about our gardens and dinners.  See, a shocking amount of American law that I think essential to an equitable society rests on the rather narrow Constitutional text “The Congress shall have the power to regulate commerce.”  A significant aspect of the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, depended on the Court’s determination that the Commerce Clause gave the feds the power to regulate businesses that served mostly interstate travelers.  Thus motels and restaurants across America could not discriminate against black Americans. Equality through Commerce.  Crazy, right?

Okay, so what does this have to do with food?  Well, the House is currently considering the next Agricultural Appropriations bill, which happens to contain a rider, known as “the Monsanto rider,” that has received, curiously, little to no coverage in the national press.  This rider requires that the Secretary of Agriculture grant a farmer or industrial agri-giant a  permit to plant genetically engineered crops (GMO), even if a federal court has ordered the planting halted for safety or environmental impact studies.  You can read it here.

Monsanto, DuPont, etc., only have to ask, and every ruling by a federal court or enforcement of current consumer protection laws on the part of the White House or a federal regulatory agency is overridden and they can plant whatever crop they chose.  Even state congresses become powerless: if they try to create local or state laws to protect eaters and farmers, they are in violation of federal law, a federal law that is written to override all other pertinent federal laws. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Stealth DNA and One Stubborn Old Man (1970 & 2005)

Posted on by

Canola is also known as Rapeseed. Its seeds are crushed to make vegetable oil.

Since we’re only a few days past Independence Day, I thought I’d take a look at the borders between the dominion of the public and the gated garden of the private.  In 1998, multinational industrial agrichemical giant Monsanto discovered that a Canadian farmer named Percy Schmeiser was growing its Roundup Ready Canola in his fields.  The seeds that grow into our food have generally been considered public property.  That is, our foods are held in common by allhumans; no one person or company can own the seeds that sustain civilization.

Monsanto had the U.S. Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 at their back, though.  That law gives companies the right to exclusively own the DNA of the plant varieties they develop.  That right of ownership includes the sole right to “reproduce” the plant, i.e. to generate the seed from which the plants grow.  That means that a farmer or gardener is forbidden to save the seeds produced from one year’s crop in order to plant the next year.  Schmeiser was growing Monsanto’s genetically-modified (GM) plants without paying for them. Continue reading →

When You Just Can’t Get That Garden Going ’til July

Posted on by

A reader in North Carolina posted this comment last week:

Love the articles! I’m buying a house and will finally have a yard to start a garden. I’d love to get your opinion on the best times of the year to plant certain foods and some that would be easier for a first time gardener.

Thanks!

So we’re going to oblige.  Because we’re cool like that.  And believe that if you have the means to buy a house, you most definitely should rock a garden in the backyard.

This is a cool photo that has nothing to do with the content of this blog post

The best way to find out what plants will succeed when planted mid-Summer is to check with a local plant nursery or find region-specific info on the internet.  Since a plant’s suitability to your garden depends significantly on the temperature and on frost, the answer to your question varies depending on where you live.

Also, a good rule of thumb for less experienced gardeners is to buy seedlings, rather than seeds, to plant.  Doing this will give you an added advantage in that you’ll save time that you don’t want to spare since we’re already well into the season.

So, some recs…

Tomatoes! Good, homegrown, heirloom tomatoes are about the best thing you’ll ever taste.  They typically take up to two months to produce fruit, but if you pick up some seedlings at a nursery and get them into the ground, you’ll probably be able to start harvesting by mid-September, only about a month beyond when the “normal” tomato crop comes in.  The plants will keep producing well into Fall; I routinely continue to harvest tomatoes in Brooklyn in mid-October. Continue reading →