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Posted on September 21, 2014 | 7 Comments
An unexpected benefit of having now almost fully moved to live permanently on our farm site (well, ‘permanently’ at least until our next reckoning with Mendip District Council, on which topic more soon) is that I no longer follow the news too much. Living in our town house, I just couldn’t help performing a morning ritual of flicking through the newspaper and listening to John Humphries wittering away on the Today programme, whereas now when I get up, checking on the sheep, or the seedlings, or the battery monitor, or the rain gauge, somehow seems more important.
Still, old habits die hard. The big political news last week of the Scottish independence vote could hardly escape me, and I even found myself listening to Radio 4’s You and Yours on my wind up radio while packing the veg boxes. ‘Wind up radio’ is the apposite term, because the programme featured a food historian called Dr Annie Gray, whose extraordinarily obtuse intellectual position amounted to the argument that because we in the Old World use foodstuffs in our cuisines like chillies and potatoes that hail originally from the Americas, there can be no such thing as ‘authenticity’ in a cuisine, and therefore anything should go – her preferred example being the joys of eating spam and creme egg toasties. Well, eat what you like, but by parallel logic I’m offering my pig sty as additional operating theatre space to my local NHS trust since it’s impossible to create a completely aseptic environment anyway. Of course, there’s an interesting debate to be had about what ‘authentic cuisine’ might mean. In some people’s hands, perhaps little more than a status-aggrandising opportunity to best those who don’t know that proper pasta is always eaten al dente. For Michael Pollan, it’s what your grandparents ate (so perhaps, worryingly, a spam and creme egg toastie might qualify). For the palaeo diet people, it’s what people ate before the big Neolithic blunder.
I guess my general line of argument would be that it’s never possible to place authenticity within unambiguous boundaries, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a try – you learn more from the attempt than you do from shrugging your shoulders at the whole idea and throwing another creme egg in the toaster oven, which ends up enforcing its own faux demotic concept of authenticity anyway. It reminds me of the endless circularities involved in debates about what’s ‘natural’, which culminate in the absurdity of people like Graham Strouts arguing that there is no such thing as natural limits, because there’s a natural tendency for people to supersede them in this best of all possible modern worlds. One teleology succeeds another. I think a farming rather than a culinary perspective would help when it comes to the matter of authentic food: the question is not what makes an authentic dish, but what makes an authentic relationship to the world around us.
I guess I just have to accept in these neoliberal times that attempts to define cultural or economic boundaries invite mockery, and the economic devastation worked by organisations like the WTO will be complemented by a cultural devastation worked by ignorant food writers like Jay Rayner, Steven Poole and Annie Gray who really ought to know better. Oh well, hopefully a few will survive this onslaught and be able to create properly considered local food and farming cultures in the future. At least there are some positive forces already rallying against eco-panglossianism and even some voices of ecological reason such as Ford Denison on this very blog. In the mean time, best I think to turn off the radio and get back to transplanting my Texel greens.
Oh, but how could I avoid following the Scottish referendum? As the great, great, great grandson of a Scottish crofter I was a little miffed to be denied the opportunity of having my say on this critical constitutional matter. Well, since the vote tellers didn’t ask my opinion I’m going to vent it to my blog instead – I would have voted ‘yes’. A yes result in Scotland would have nicely set the cat amongst the pigeons regarding local subsidiarity in the British Isles. Soon we would have realised that the ‘national interest’ was really just the interest of London, the southeast, bloated city fat cats, and their fellow travellers amongst the international plutocracy. ‘England’ would have become a rump state centred around London, and the rest of us would have happily seceded, breathing new life into more natural – even, perhaps, more authentic – smaller polities in the manner so cleverly articulated by Leopold Kohr in his book The Breakdown of Nations. We would have had to learn that our materially privileged former lifestyle – the cars, the instant broadband, the expensive foreign holidays, the property nest eggs – had been propped up by the privileged London elite we so despised, but that would be no bad thing. Back to the land we would have gone, and built a new, more materially sustainable small farm future.
Hang on a minute, though. An independent Scotland wanted to retain the pound, and EU membership? And voters were cowed by such terrible threats as having to pay more for their TV licences? Or perhaps were more rightly cowed by the football terrace rhetoric of separatism, its ugly 90 minute sectarianism. Meanwhile, in regionalised Britain the kind of faceless government bureaucrat who gave Vallis Veg planning permission for an agricultural residence would be swept away, and instead of inept Westminster government we would have the streamlined local responsiveness of Mendip District Council as our only arbiters?
I awake from this nightmare vision and tick the ‘no’ box. Perhaps we are not yet ready for a small farm future. But how badly I still want to tick yes. Yes – no – yes – no. Like a Democratic presidential candidate in the line of a Republican media feeding frenzy, I flip and I flop. Let us not be surprised in the coming years at the prospect of all sorts of strange and troubling but perhaps also enabling political realignments that make fools of all the pundits. As a callow graduate student in anthropology in the USA in the 1980s I was told by one of my professors that the Soviet Union had solved the problem of its ethnic and nationalist discords. And if you think it doesn’t matter what nonsense ivory tower academics might spout, let me tell you that the same fellow will shortly be the next president of Afghanistan. The problem of nationalism has been solved nowhere – not in the Soviet Union (if you don’t know where that is, just look on a map – so long as it’s 30 years old), not in Britain, and not in the USA. Which brings me on to the subject of nationalism, a small farm future, and the problems of agrarian populism. But first I really do have to go and transplant my Texel greens.
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Yep, I’ve been mulling over what an authentic cuisine would consist of in this era.My own modest contribution was: http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2014/08/31/our-local-table/
I was interested in how many people not living in Scotland seemed to be quite vested in a “yes” vote. An interesting take to look at it from the local control/local food angle. But I was even more surprised to find how many Scots wanted independence so they could drift into some sort of Scandinavian Social Democracy fantasy-land. It is an interesting world.
Hope the Texel greens are happy in their new home.
So am I to understand you went to Columbia and there had occasion to visit with Ashraf Ghani? One suspects you’ll soon be invited to Kabul to help with Texel green husbandry. And if not, then peace and prosperity in Central Asia is surely farther off than we can hope.
I really can’t expect to understand how Mr Ghani came to imagine the Soviet Union had solved ethnic discord. I can report how one former Soviet Republic appeared to this American at the beginning of this century (and many years following their early 90s independence). Kazakhstan is still full of many (perhaps MANY is more apt) different ethnicities. As only one of several former Soviet Republics it may serve as simply one example.
I was in Almaty and Chimkent City for most of my three week visit (Farmer to Farmer exchange). And I was not there to evaluate nationalist feelings. But attitudes bubble to the surface at times, and other ‘facts on the ground’ make me think I got to see a couple things that could suggest ethic harmony in the newly independent subset of the former USSR was still a distant possibility.
There were still many (2-5%?) Rus still living in Kazakhstan at that time and for the most part it appeared to me they were accepted. There were so many other ethnic groups that even the local folks I visited with dared not enumerate some specific figure. I didn’t see any evidence of overt racial, ethnic, or religious disharmony, but there were plenty of signs that to me appeared as shaky levels of tolerance among various groups. Urban areas seemed more tolerant of diversity than rural areas (but the same could be suggested of the parts of the U.S. that I’m familiar with). All that said I do have to wonder how someone imagined in the 1980s that the USSR had a solution.
I do want to offer my appreciation for the link to Brandon Keim’s piece about the Earth not being a garden. More to read.
Thanks for that, gentlemen – Brian, your post is a darned sight more considered than the BBC’s food history expert. Hope to hear you on BBC Radio 4 some time while I’m packing veg boxes…
Clem, I think in the spirit of these security-conscious times I’d have to say that I can neither confirm nor deny that I studied at Columbia with Ashraf Ghani. But if you twist my arm I’ll tell you that this statement is in fact half-right. And thanks for your interesting report from Kazakhstan. We had a Kazakh farm volunteer this summer, which was interesting. When we asked her to tell us a word in Kazakh, she generally told us what it was in Russian. Not sure what to make of that in relation to your wider theme.
In regard to an ethnic Kazakh sharing a Russian word instead of a Kazakh word I can offer a couple of thoughts.
While in country (April ’02) I saw lots of signage in Cyrillic script. At the time both Russian and Kazakh were officially recognized languages and both employ Cyrillic script [they both may be official languages yet today… but I do not know this]. I could not tell the difference between Russian and Kazakh by looking at the signage – but the interpreter could… as her ability to read Kazakh was very limited. From that fact I inferred the opposite would be that literate Kazakhs who couldn’t read Russian would see Russian signage as just a bunch of letters. It was pointed out that lots of signs were written in both languages – so if you read either you’re all set. That still left me out.
I’ve recently heard a news story on radio about Kazakh nationalistic aspirations and while I’m not sure of details it seems part of the story concerned a move away from using Cyrillic script as a means of establishing a more distinct Kazakh identity. BTW, I think there is an American Academic assisting them with the phonetics as they make the move to a different alphabet.
So neither of these thoughts directly suggests a reason why your Kazakh volunteer might offer a Russian word… but here’s another (purely speculative) idea:
Russian is (to me) a far more evolved language. Think of all the Russian poetry and literature. My sense is that Kazakh is simpler – and I don’t mean to imply less important or somehow inferior. It may be that there are not individual words in Kazakh that translate one to one with an English equivalent. And if a descriptive phrase is needed to make the translation – then a single Russian word may seem a better choice.
And then there is also the possibility that like an English Small Farmer I know of… “in the spirit of these security-conscious times” the volunteer chose to go with Russian to sidestep something better left alone.
Thanks for those observations Clem, very interesting.
I think the idea of “authenticity” as an “Occam’s razor”-type argument is misplaced. As dietary studies have shown, down the ages humankind used to either live “within its means” or die. The Mayans had just left most of their cities before the Spanish conquerors could be made responsible and probably because of some mismatch between what they took from their soil and how much they put back. That said, local cuisine often used the produce of the land, but in a healthy combination, i.e. a source of protein, another of fats, another of carbs and so one, with the right phyto factors thrown in the bargain. Of course if we changed one component that left the mixture “intact” then we could develop a new dish and stay as healthy as before. However, the authenticity meant that the produce combined was from local sources as refrigerated transport was out of the question. Authenticity therefore is -in terms of, say, systems theory- probably at the same time the combination of elements with the best (not least) impact on environment and resources, at least if we go back far enough in researching local dishes.
Yep, certainly agree that an agronomic rather than a culinary perspective is the way to go with this.