Cultivated and Uncultivated

Let me sum it up for you: The environment is what adjusts in a cultivated setting, whereas it’s the species that must adjust in an “uncultivated” setting. In other words, mankind either stacks the deck, changes the environment, to advantage the crop and themselves (since human culture is our greatest cultivation), or… the crop must adjust to the environment in order to survive. It’s that simple. 
(Check out this slide show from my series of talks to promote my book #uncultivated, published by #chelseagreen.)

 

Now, the complicated part to all this, and where politics comes in, is figuring out what’s ultimately best for the crop, the environment, and for us (which includes our economy) because, they are all ALL related in a push-and-pull kind of way! (NOTE: every farmer adapts a “policy” for how to deal with adversity. Make no mistake about it, this policy is 100% related to personal politics and cultural politics.)

For example, if you, as a pro-active consumer want to support a natural farm policy (which, BTW, is an oxymoron, farming can only be "more natural" or "less natural") then chances are you have a different cultural politic than the people who lean toward “conventional agriculture” which intervenes greatly to produce the majority of our foods. (Fun-fact: nine times out of ten, “organically-grown” crops are also a form of high-intervention agriculture. There’s “good organic” and “bad organic” but consumers rarely bother to align their personal policies with which one.) What I’m saying here is this: Do customers and farmers align their health politics, their voting politics, their food-consumption politics and their environmental politics? Or, is it all superficial?… “Just tell me it’s natural and I’ll support it.” I’m sorry, but you are having to do better than that. If you want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth you are going to have to lawyer-up and ask a lot of questions. It’s going to be a fight if you truly want to match your politics.

Here’s a confession: I wrote the book Uncultivated (shameless pitch here to buy it or listen to it on Audible) because I am a critic of culture. (If you haven’t read my book then you might brush past the fact culture, as in “high-culture”, and cultivation, as in “agriculture” share the same roots.) The book is an exposé! As an agricultural-insider I know that there’s a major disconnect between what customers think they are buying and what they’re actually buying. And it’s soooo easy to “man”ipulate in this situation! What is “local”, for instance, is very often just the local re-selling of not-so-local produce, like when a farmer stands in front of crops at the farmer’s market to suggest he/she was the one to grow it. (I’m one of those people who consider purposely omitted information a lie.)

But as a critic I also don’t want to seem embittered. To be a critic is to love something. No one, for example, and I do mean NO ONE, loves art more than an art critic. So in the book I tried to temper my exposé with positive experiences. It’s true, in this environment of fear, distrust and partisan politics we are, more than ever!, in need of positive examples. So let me offer this to you: The apple tree gets it’s ass kicked by nature. They die, they get diseases, they lose out… they are the underdog. But they keep coming back and finding ways of adjusting to the situation. Even when farmers try to eradicate wild apples (as they often do) the apple tree keeps popping up again in new locations. Life is resilient.