Little disclaimer: This text is written from my Western European perspective. So, when “our” or “we” is mentioned, I mean people from a western society.
Have you ever gone on safari in your own kitchen? Ever lowered your eye level to just above the kitchen counter, taking in every single thing you find, in search for something extraordinary? Because, as it often turns out, the greatest stories are found right under our noses. And the most unusual insights in the most usual things.
I went on a kitchen safari at the beginning of last year. And it was right there, right then that I found the most dull and mundane object you can possibly imagine: a lid. Only to discover that this lid would give me some unexpecting insights into food preservation and our attitude toward nature.
The Invention
But let’s start at the beginning. The lid as we now know best, the mason jar lid, origins from 1858.1 Yet, the history of food preservation goes way back. Once upon a time our ancestors lived nomadically. Living day by day and constant wandering was the norm.2 With change being an everyday business, both in season and environment, it was natural and necessary for people to fill their diet with what was within their reach at that moment. The hunter- and-gatherers lived by what was given to them and were therefore dependent on their direct relationship with the forests, waters, and mountains that fed them. But it was hard work and constant change brought uncertainty. Especially in the cold months. Nobody knows exactly when, but at some point, people discovered ways to keep food longer than a few meals. In many places around the world ancestors developed preserving methods that fitted their climate. From drying to fermenting and smoking.
From Gathering to Growing
The simple fact that people were able to keep food, made it possible to carefully look beyond
a few days. With that, their dependence on their environment on day-to-day basis decreased, and the once hunter-and-gatherers dared to settle down in one place. The food that the ancestors ate, evolved from found to harvested. Because if you want to preserve food for multiple days, you need more ingredients at once. More than the forests naturally provide. So, they found a way to grow (and later cultivate) their own crops, and agriculture was born!3
The new build settlements where less dependent on the seasons. Nerves where calmed as change and uncertainty were becoming more and more ghost from the past. People could start exploring the world and had time to develop social and cultural complexities.3All that caused by the simple act of keeping food.
The small agrarian communities started to grow, from village to cities. The larger communities grew, the more food they needed (to preserve) to sustain themselves. Rome, for example, housed up to a million (hungry) citizens by the first century A.D. Carolyn Steel describes in
her book Hungry City, how agriculture and cities where first closely bound together.4 Yet,
the fast-growing cities soon outgrew their own agricultural fields and had to look for sources elsewhere. Food started to travel as bigger cities where sustained and provided with food from distant fields and far away farms. As for Rome, they made Egypt as their granary.
During the Industrial revolution, hundreds of years later in the 19th century, the cities underwent another growth spurt. Along with many other things, keeping food was industrialized and saver than ever. People moved to the city to work in factories. Food was put in glass jars or canned by people at the assembly line. The fields now where hidden far away, slowly starting to turn into a fading memory. Economic wealth increased in the cities that filled themselves with prosperity, safety, and leisure. Yet, at the same time the streets, started to feel grey and cold. The wealthy city people, alienated from the fields that fed them, developed homesickness towards the thing that, only a few decades ago seemed as the most dangerous and scary place. The uncertain, uncontrolled, constantly changing environment that the ancestors successfully escaped, never looked this appealing. It was our distance from nature (as we knew it) that changed the way we looked at it.
Here and there, a wilderness dualism
In the late 19th century, the European Romantics (such as William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley) and later the wilderness cult in America, transformed our view on nature from “a soulles clockwork machine”5 into a place to escape in. From a place full dangerous bears, plagues and toxic plants to one rich of poetry and adventure. City people who had the time and privilege to visit this outpost came back with stories filled with pleasure, freedom, terror and vastness. Later described (by John Muir among others) as a felt presence of God or a display of the sublime. With that, more and more people started to see nature as a sacred space, especially in its pure state: just like after God’s creation and untouched by human hands: A pristine wilderness at its finest. Which later became a baseline for many studies of environmental change and the inspiration for the fundamental ideas still used in modern nature conservation: We must protect nature from our (human) destructive touch!5
With this new appreciation for the far and vast wilderness and the picture it paints of nature (as something pristine), we have placed ourselves (humans) outside of nature. As it is only wild when untouched by us. This divides the world in two: The human world and the natural world. The wild and the civilized standing opposite of each other. The place for nature far from the place for the human, both kept save from each other (William Cronon calls this the wilderness dualism)6.
Keep, save, preserve, conserve
This division is sensible today, present more than ever. With climate change seemingly approaching a peak, the solution seems to lay in conserving the far away corners of the nature world. Hidden in the disappearing jungles, oceans full of plastic, and dying soil. Greenpeace and other environmental activist groups are fighting to protect the rare places of “real” nature. (Which is more than necessary, don’t get me wrong).
At the same time, in the human world, we do everything to protect ourselves from the unexpected and wild. Kitchens have never been so clean, food never so indestructible. Fear of fungi and bacteria caused by lack of knowledge.7 Plastic packaging is taking over the supermarket filled with perfect vegetables. The white boxes and expiration dates keep most foods good. Our kitchens are specialized in keeping us safe from anything wild, while we struggle to keep the wild safe from us. Protecting seems to be the motto of this human focussed century. Keep, save, preserve, conserve.
However, more and more people seem to discover that this attitude born out of the illusion of a dualism is the first problem to solve. As dying soils and disappearing jungles (in the natural world) are mostly caused by the monoculture food production and effect our own sterile kitchens (human world). Our overprotecting attitude towards food causes illnesses8 and fills the world with waste. As microplastics for instance are already found everywhere, including people’s bodies.
On kitchen safari
One of those people who looked for change was Henry David Thoreau, who wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world”.9 Rather than referring to the pristine wilderness
as a blueprint for the future world (as many environmentalists seem to believe), Thoreau “[...] preferred a middle ground between the truly wild and the truly civilized”.5 In a place where there is both space for the human and non-human lays the key to sustainable futures. In contrary with wilderness, wildness can be found everywhere. It challenges us to look beyond the wilderness dualism and find nature in the most ordinary things.6 In the weeds between the tiles, the moldy cheese in the fridge, and the walnuts in the supermarket. It rejects the idea that the human doesn’t play a part in nature and that there is no sign of nature in our own kitchens. Only with that in mind can we build a sustainable relationship with our food and through that with the natural world.
So, let’s go on safari in our own kitchens. Lower your eye level to just above the kitchen counter and take in every single thing you find, in search for something extraordinary, something wild.
Sources:
1. Bryson, Bill. Een huis vol (Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Atlas Contact, 2013)
2. Shephard, Sue. Pickled, Potted & Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preservation Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster paperbacks, 2006)
3. Mann, Charles C. The Wizard and the Wizard: two remarkable scientists and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s world (New York: Vintage Books, 2019)
4. Steel, Carolyn Steel. Hungry City (Vintage Publishing, March 2013)
5. Marris, Emma. Rambunctious Garden: saving nature in a post-wild world (USA: Bloomsbury, 2013)
6. Cronon, William. The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Excerpted from Uncommon Ground: Towards Reinventing Nature (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc)
7. Crain, Liz. Countertop Culture (The Sun Magazine, Issue 413, 2010) https://www. thesunmagazine.org/issues/413/countertop-culture 8. Pollan, Micheal. Some of My Best Friends Are Germs (New York Times, May 19, 2013)
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria- that-make-up-your-microbiome.html
9. Thoreau, Henry David. Walking (San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1962)
BEYOND THE LID (essay)
How our relationship with food is inextricably connected to our attitude towards nature, and why we can’t keep it!Have you ever gone on safari in your own kitchen? Ever lowered your eye level to just above the kitchen counter, taking in every single thing you find, in search for something extraordinary? Because, as it often turns out, the greatest stories are found right under our noses. And the most unusual insights in the most usual things.
I went on a kitchen safari at the beginning of last year. And it was right there, right then that I found the most dull and mundane object you can possibly imagine: a lid. Only to discover that this lid would give me some unexpecting insights into food preservation and our attitude toward nature.
The Invention
But let’s start at the beginning. The lid as we now know best, the mason jar lid, origins from 1858.1 Yet, the history of food preservation goes way back. Once upon a time our ancestors lived nomadically. Living day by day and constant wandering was the norm.2 With change being an everyday business, both in season and environment, it was natural and necessary for people to fill their diet with what was within their reach at that moment. The hunter- and-gatherers lived by what was given to them and were therefore dependent on their direct relationship with the forests, waters, and mountains that fed them. But it was hard work and constant change brought uncertainty. Especially in the cold months. Nobody knows exactly when, but at some point, people discovered ways to keep food longer than a few meals. In many places around the world ancestors developed preserving methods that fitted their climate. From drying to fermenting and smoking.
From Gathering to Growing
The simple fact that people were able to keep food, made it possible to carefully look beyond
a few days. With that, their dependence on their environment on day-to-day basis decreased, and the once hunter-and-gatherers dared to settle down in one place. The food that the ancestors ate, evolved from found to harvested. Because if you want to preserve food for multiple days, you need more ingredients at once. More than the forests naturally provide. So, they found a way to grow (and later cultivate) their own crops, and agriculture was born!3
The new build settlements where less dependent on the seasons. Nerves where calmed as change and uncertainty were becoming more and more ghost from the past. People could start exploring the world and had time to develop social and cultural complexities.3All that caused by the simple act of keeping food.
The small agrarian communities started to grow, from village to cities. The larger communities grew, the more food they needed (to preserve) to sustain themselves. Rome, for example, housed up to a million (hungry) citizens by the first century A.D. Carolyn Steel describes in
her book Hungry City, how agriculture and cities where first closely bound together.4 Yet,
the fast-growing cities soon outgrew their own agricultural fields and had to look for sources elsewhere. Food started to travel as bigger cities where sustained and provided with food from distant fields and far away farms. As for Rome, they made Egypt as their granary.
During the Industrial revolution, hundreds of years later in the 19th century, the cities underwent another growth spurt. Along with many other things, keeping food was industrialized and saver than ever. People moved to the city to work in factories. Food was put in glass jars or canned by people at the assembly line. The fields now where hidden far away, slowly starting to turn into a fading memory. Economic wealth increased in the cities that filled themselves with prosperity, safety, and leisure. Yet, at the same time the streets, started to feel grey and cold. The wealthy city people, alienated from the fields that fed them, developed homesickness towards the thing that, only a few decades ago seemed as the most dangerous and scary place. The uncertain, uncontrolled, constantly changing environment that the ancestors successfully escaped, never looked this appealing. It was our distance from nature (as we knew it) that changed the way we looked at it.
Here and there, a wilderness dualism
In the late 19th century, the European Romantics (such as William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley) and later the wilderness cult in America, transformed our view on nature from “a soulles clockwork machine”5 into a place to escape in. From a place full dangerous bears, plagues and toxic plants to one rich of poetry and adventure. City people who had the time and privilege to visit this outpost came back with stories filled with pleasure, freedom, terror and vastness. Later described (by John Muir among others) as a felt presence of God or a display of the sublime. With that, more and more people started to see nature as a sacred space, especially in its pure state: just like after God’s creation and untouched by human hands: A pristine wilderness at its finest. Which later became a baseline for many studies of environmental change and the inspiration for the fundamental ideas still used in modern nature conservation: We must protect nature from our (human) destructive touch!5
With this new appreciation for the far and vast wilderness and the picture it paints of nature (as something pristine), we have placed ourselves (humans) outside of nature. As it is only wild when untouched by us. This divides the world in two: The human world and the natural world. The wild and the civilized standing opposite of each other. The place for nature far from the place for the human, both kept save from each other (William Cronon calls this the wilderness dualism)6.
Keep, save, preserve, conserve
This division is sensible today, present more than ever. With climate change seemingly approaching a peak, the solution seems to lay in conserving the far away corners of the nature world. Hidden in the disappearing jungles, oceans full of plastic, and dying soil. Greenpeace and other environmental activist groups are fighting to protect the rare places of “real” nature. (Which is more than necessary, don’t get me wrong).
At the same time, in the human world, we do everything to protect ourselves from the unexpected and wild. Kitchens have never been so clean, food never so indestructible. Fear of fungi and bacteria caused by lack of knowledge.7 Plastic packaging is taking over the supermarket filled with perfect vegetables. The white boxes and expiration dates keep most foods good. Our kitchens are specialized in keeping us safe from anything wild, while we struggle to keep the wild safe from us. Protecting seems to be the motto of this human focussed century. Keep, save, preserve, conserve.
However, more and more people seem to discover that this attitude born out of the illusion of a dualism is the first problem to solve. As dying soils and disappearing jungles (in the natural world) are mostly caused by the monoculture food production and effect our own sterile kitchens (human world). Our overprotecting attitude towards food causes illnesses8 and fills the world with waste. As microplastics for instance are already found everywhere, including people’s bodies.
On kitchen safari
One of those people who looked for change was Henry David Thoreau, who wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world”.9 Rather than referring to the pristine wilderness
as a blueprint for the future world (as many environmentalists seem to believe), Thoreau “[...] preferred a middle ground between the truly wild and the truly civilized”.5 In a place where there is both space for the human and non-human lays the key to sustainable futures. In contrary with wilderness, wildness can be found everywhere. It challenges us to look beyond the wilderness dualism and find nature in the most ordinary things.6 In the weeds between the tiles, the moldy cheese in the fridge, and the walnuts in the supermarket. It rejects the idea that the human doesn’t play a part in nature and that there is no sign of nature in our own kitchens. Only with that in mind can we build a sustainable relationship with our food and through that with the natural world.
So, let’s go on safari in our own kitchens. Lower your eye level to just above the kitchen counter and take in every single thing you find, in search for something extraordinary, something wild.
Sources:
1. Bryson, Bill. Een huis vol (Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Atlas Contact, 2013)
2. Shephard, Sue. Pickled, Potted & Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preservation Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster paperbacks, 2006)
3. Mann, Charles C. The Wizard and the Wizard: two remarkable scientists and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s world (New York: Vintage Books, 2019)
4. Steel, Carolyn Steel. Hungry City (Vintage Publishing, March 2013)
5. Marris, Emma. Rambunctious Garden: saving nature in a post-wild world (USA: Bloomsbury, 2013)
6. Cronon, William. The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Excerpted from Uncommon Ground: Towards Reinventing Nature (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc)
7. Crain, Liz. Countertop Culture (The Sun Magazine, Issue 413, 2010) https://www. thesunmagazine.org/issues/413/countertop-culture 8. Pollan, Micheal. Some of My Best Friends Are Germs (New York Times, May 19, 2013)
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria- that-make-up-your-microbiome.html
9. Thoreau, Henry David. Walking (San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1962)
