Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Corn Moon

August moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

Happy Corn Moon! We have moved into the lunar cycle known as The Corn Moon in the old Celtic calendar. It is the time of year when grain is ripening in the fields, readying for harvest. Throughout much of United States the plant zea mays is being harvested and Americans are enjoying plenty of their beloved sweet corn.

I have been able to witness this abundance of corn in many states as I've been traveling. I've eaten ears of it raw out in cornfields near Madison, Wisconsin and the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I've demo'd one of my corn-rich seasonal recipes -- calabacitas -- more times than I can count: at farm festivals, in farmers' markets, in food coop teaching kitchens, and even on television. And I'm not done yet! I'm squeezing the most I possibly can out of this corn season. . .

Many people across America are looking at corn a bit more critically this year than they have before -- thanks to Michael Pollan turning his probing journalistic eye onto the plant in his popular new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Of course it's not the plant itself that he is critical of, it is our relationship to it in our modern society. It is a story that badly needed to be told.

I have to admit that in the first few months after the release of The Omnivore's Dilemma, I developed a mild case of adolescent resentment against the book. Our books came out within a few weeks of each other's, and his was instantly on the New York Times Bestseller List. What this meant was that -- as my publisher put it -- Pollan's book "sucked up all the oxygen" around food issues for a number of months. His was the book that everyone who was interested in food and sustainability was reading; excerpts from it were the cover stories in all the alternative magazines; and he was the person everyone in the media wanted to interview about food.

In the long run this explosion of interest is a really great thing -- for all of us who care about transforming the food system and even for the rest of us writers who have something important to say about it. The American consciousness is being raised once again about the many failures of our current approach to feeding ourselves. And hopefully, people will want to continue to educate themselves about how they can make choices that will support the transformation that needs to happen, and will pick up one of the many other wonderful books that are out there on the subject -- including mine!

But for the past few months of traveling around promoting MY book, I have to admit that there were times when if one more person asked me -- as I was trying to get them excited about Full Moon Feast -- whether I had heard of a book called, perhaps "the carnivore's dilemma" or "the omnivore's delight" or a writer named -- maybe -- "Michael Pollard," I thought I would scream. The scream would go something like this: YES OF COURSE I HAVE -- I'VE HEARD ABOUT NOTHING ELSE FOR MONTHS!!!!! CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT MY BOOK FOR JUST ONE TEENY TINY MINUTE?

But most of that resentment melted away as I began to actually read Pollan's book. It is a wonderful and important work of journalism that gets down to the nitty-gritty of the food issues that we're struggling with in this society. Except for the issue of traditional fats, I agree with Pollan on just about everything. And I have learned a great deal that is new to me, and gained fresh insights into many aspects of the food system that I thought I knew well, including corn. Pollan shines a sharp spotlight on a food system that masquerades as a diverse horn of plenty, and reveals an insidious monoculture instead.

It is a monoculture of corn.

Corn seems such a sweet, innocent and appealing symbol of American agrarian life. Steaming hot, dripping with butter, corn on the cob promises pleasure, and something beyond pleasure too -- a sense of well-being and right-relation, a connectedness to the earth and the season and the history of this continent and its peoples.

How strange that something so redolent of everything I do believe in should also reek of everything that drives me crazy about the state of food in America. How ironic that this most promiscuous of plants, which cross pollinates readily and easily to produce an endless array of variations in color and sweetness and starch should be reduced to a few bioengineered hybrids planted in monocultural fields.

Pollan points out that the government-subsidized glut of conventional corn has made its way into nearly every processed food we eat in America. It is the basis for sodas, cereals, and even for the milk, eggs, and meat products we eat -- which come from animals fed a diet made up largely of the excess cheap corn we grow in the Midwest. Pollan discusses isotope tests done on Americans to see what plants are at the bottom of the food chain we consume. The tests look at the proportion of carbons in our flesh, and carbon 13 (C-13) is an indicator of a preponderance of corn. Pollan points out that the people of Mexico have long identified themselves with corn:

Very interestingly, the isotope tests tell a different story:

Ever since reading that, I can't seem to get the phrase out of my head: "processed corn, walking."

I don't necessarily believe that human beings need to eat a varied diet, despite the fact that this is virtually a sacrosanct concept in nutritional circles. A look at healthy traditional diets will show that the diet was often limited to a few staple foods -- especially in Northern climes that supported a smaller array of plants and animals. Many pastoralist peoples consumed half of their daily calories or more in the form of dairy products alone.

But when you look at the plants that were at the bottom of the food chain in these limited traditional diets (which is what you do in an isotope test) you begin to see how nature's biodiversity is at the base of even a very limited traditional diet. Pasturelands are not a monoculture at all, but an incredible polyculture of grasses, clovers, weeds, herbs and other plants. Traditionally, hay for winter animal feed was simply the dried cut form of this same diverse polyculture. Similarly, the plant life of the oceans that was at the bottom of the food chain for peoples who depended largely on seafoods for sustenance was also made up of an amazing array of different species. And hunters who depended on buffalo or other game were also ultimately drawing their food from an extensive polyculture of wild plants that wild grazers and browsers feasted on.

So even if traditional diets don't support the notion that humans need to "eat a variety," I believe they absolutely do show that our diets should still be built on biodiversity, and not based to any great extent on any one plant species. How strange that the American diet, which seems on the surface to be so incredibly varied, is just hybrid corn dressed up to look like a thousand different foods; and that a traditional diet such as the Norse one, which looks like milk and meat and then more milk and meat, would actually be made up of incredible biodiversity at root.

I love unexpected and surprising revelations like that. Another one that may be new to many people who read Pollan's book is that grazing pastures in a well-managed system actually increases the biodiversity of plant life in those grasslands. The relationship between grazers and pastures is a synergistic one -- as cattle, bison, or other animals browse the grasses they allow sunlight to reach a greater variety of species, thereby encouraging them to thrive -- not to mention fertilizing them with their manure. Without grazers, pastures can tend to be dominated by a few more aggressive species, or can become depleted of nutrients.

I love the idea that biodiversity is an essential truth in the way that nature works. It is science's way of saying: "It takes all kinds." I find that the older I get, the more I cherish and value diversity -- the wonderful diversity of human cultures on planet earth (what ethnobotanist Wade Davis calls 'the ethnosphere'), the limitless, still uncharted biodiversity of plant and animal life in nature ("the biosphere"), and of course all the different ways life is expressed through each individual organism.

I spent some time recently with a woman who has worked for the Kinsey Institute in Indiana, where the legacy of American sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey is being kept alive. She reminded me that Kinsey was -- by training -- a biologist, and that his work on sexuality came out of his understanding that life expresses itself through variation and diversity. He knew that our sexual and gender identities couldn't be adequately represented in the oppressive monoculture that was 1950s America -- a monoculture that despite Kinsey's very important work and the sexual revolution -- is still very much with us today. Our notions of sexuality and gender are still pretty binary: a person is either male or female, straight or gay.

But I don't think life on Earth can be adequately expressed in these simple dualisms, and I think it is crucial that we begin to deepen our appreciation for diversity and its importance for life on earth. It will help us understand what is so tragic about being "processed corn, walking"; it will help us appreciate what is so miraculous about well-managed pasture grazing; it will help us to preserve the wisdom and gifts of the vanishing indigenous cultures of the world; it will help us appreciate a diversity of writers' voices on an issue as important as food; it will help us see beyond our prejudices about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

On the Corn Moon, I give great thanks for variety -- it is not only the spice of life, it is the very nature of life.

click to: book summary

Full Moon Feast Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice Full Moon Feast invites us to a table brimming with locally grown foods, radical wisdom, and communal nourishment.