Oct14

12: OCT 14

Assigned Reading

• Montgomery, David. Chapter 1: "Good Old Dirt" Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations(pp. 1-9); (9)
• Montgomery, David. Chapter 2: "Skin of the Earth" Dirt(pp. 9-25); (16)
• Diamond, Jarred. "Agriculture's Mixed Blessings" (180-191) (11)

• Some claims that we have challenged in the course:

• Your gut is only full of waste.
• Food is only nutrients.
• Your diet is part of a culinary cosmos, whether traditional or modern.
• Plants aren't aware. (Previous version of the course.)
• Animals don't have lives. (Coming up.)
• And now, there are ecosystems in the soil. (today)

Culinary Cosmos Photos

• Let's make some observations together of some of the culinary cosmos pantry and fridge photos:

• I appreciate better how constrained the space for food is for some of you.
• Some evidence of plant proteins, but not alot. Exceptions: Hen, Tarsier, Tree.
• Columbia wins biggest pantry award.
• Lots of industrial fridge stable sauces. Many of these are not eaten in quantities that cause a health concern, but they might not be good for your pallette.
• Consider a trade up on some industrial versions of basic foods. Prego has added sugar. Better tomatoes (Cento, for example) might increase satisfaction of a home cooked marinara sauce.

Practical Eating Series, "Dietary Design and Practicality".

Dietary Design

• It might be helpful to use "design" and "optimizing" approaches to review or improving your diet and food practices. By design, I mean that things have to fit a certain way to meet all of your requirements. You can think of it like a puzzle, but you can also think about it like an engineer might. Choose your own metaphor here.

• "Optimizing" can involve individual foods, dishes, meals, etc. Of each of your current meals you can ask the N S P questions. "Trade-ups" are another way of thinking about optimizing.

• Appeal of design metaphor: More consistent with an aesthetic approach, beginning with the space and mood of the kitchen.

• Appeal of engineering metaphor: diets have parameters and requirements. They are "systems" with supply chains, production and storage process, and quality (satisfaction) requirements.

Notes on Practicality

Practicality can be thought of at several levels from food waste in the kitchen, to the logistics of supplying your diet, to sustainability, etc.

• You have a practical diet when:

• you always know what you need at the store, (easy methods here)
• you rarely waste food, (favors batch process)
• you don't spend more time preparing food than you can afford, (But how much is that?)
• your food is portable when you need it to be, (gear, favors something boxable)
• your meals are flexible when they need to be, (can be delayed if you change you mind about eating at home, can be quick)
• you have plenty of opportunities to prepare food when you aren't busy, (time shifting meal prep time)
• but you never have to do it when you are too busy, (measure reserve or quick dinner options)
• you always have something great to eat and many choices about dinner, (assess need for variety)
• And, it's all completely affordable. (cost assessment)

Some measurement and goal setting challenges:

• How much time should you "afford" for food preparation and enjoying. How often? Slow Food thinking supplies some answers to this.
• How much time do you (should you have) have for making meals? When is that time available to you during the week?
• What are the main strategies for "time shifting" your meal preparation? for batch preparation?
• How many different dinners do you need?
• On any given night, how many different dinners could you choose to make quickly?
• When you make food from scratch, how often do you make multiple dinners?

Montgomery Chapter 1, "Good Old Dirt"

• David Montgomery's on what's new in soil science.

• At the start of agriculture 98% of food producers supported a small ruling elite that controlled food distribution. Now only 1% of the population work in agricultural food production.

• Wants to tell a history soil and of human use of soil. Historical failures, but also interested in sustainability.

Chapter 2, "Skin of the Earth"

• Darwin's studies of worms. Worms are moving a heck of a lot of dirt. 10-20 tons per acre per year. digestive juices.
• Note the recentness of our lack of knowledge of this. Also why antiquities sink.
• Darwin's calculations were off: underestimated the time scale for effects. Didn't know about isostasy - a process which lifts rock as well. But did understand soil formation as breakdown of minerals.
• 15: overview of soil ecology relationships. read. even theories that soil formation was involved in first forms of organismic life.
• guanine and cytosine in clay-rich solutions.
• 15-16: overview of plant colonization of cooling earth (350 mya). earth plant life accelerated soil formation. lots of other physical and chemical processes (17).
• nitrogen fixation (18): note mechanism. "nitrogen fixing plant" a misnomer.

• effects of agriculture:

• tilling releases nutrients, but also disrupts soil life, short-totation farming reduces soil diversity, increases vulnerability to parasites,

• p. 20: Connection bt farming methods and soil erosion and soil health.

• Note how starting your account of food from soil gives you deeper sense of your trophic relationships.

• you are what you eat. you are what you eat eats.

Diamond, Ch. 10, "Agriculture's Mixed Blessings"

• Old "progressivist" view
• Ants practice agriculture and something like animal husbandry
• Details about the spread of agriculture - not like other great ideas (hand ax designs). Spread slowly, failed alot.
• Advantages of hunter gatherer lifestyle

• short work week, more leisure - as long as you have enough Mongongo nuts!
• better nutrition (in some comparisons)
• no impact from crop failures
• (new research, not Diamond): very violent and competitive.

• 185: paleopathology and medical anthropology: what you tell from old bones and cookware Am. Indians who changed to ag.

• health evidence from early adoption of agriculture
• height, nutrition, cavities, anemia, tb, syphillis, mortality
• mono-crop dependency a risk in early ag.
• low carb, varied nutrients
• class structures emerge after agriculture: diff outcomes dep. on class
• sexual inequality

• other differences that sustained agriculture

• increased population density made hunt/gather politically vulnerable
• hunt/gather requires lots of room
• agriculture created society that could produce sophisticated art (churches).
• grants that agriculture led to lots of great things, but also to large populations, which affects the equation about quality of life.