Cry Me a (Dry) River

“’tis an ill bird what fouls its ain nest.”
--Scottish proverb

The recent announcement by a group of intrepid researchers that they have created a substance they call “dry water” serves as a remarkable case study in unintended consequences, and it hasn’t even been used yet.

The stuff is not really “dry”, and in many ways, it is also not really “water”, but without getting too technical, we’ll let the contradiction stand, because we rather like contradictions – they are whimsical, and get one’s linguistic creativity flowing.

Powdered liquids have the ability to “store” a variety of substances, most notably carbon dioxide, in ways that prevent their escape into the atmosphere. The producers of “dry water” are touting this ability as a potential boon to production methods which have run into conflicts over the quantity of carbon dioxide they produce – having a way to trap the greenhouse gas means these industries can manufacture to their hearts content, without worrying about contributing to global climate change.

Or can they?

Touting the storage properties of “dry water” is all well and good, but where, pray tell, will the “dry water” be stored once it is super-carbonated?

This is the classic problem with nuclear energy, as well. Per kilowatt, assuming nothing goes wrong at the power plant (an assumption the residents of Three Mile Island or of Chernobyl are not likely to be prepared to make), the typical output of a nuclear power plant is more environmnetally friendly than that of practically any other production method available. Solar and wind power have fewer outputs, but per kilowatt, they have more costly inputs in the form of manufactured materials.

The problem with nuclear power, of course, is that unlike solar or wind or geothermal (or a host of other renewable production methods), nuclear power has a residual element in its production – nuclear waste. The detritus of a nuclear power plant is, similar to the carbon dioxide suspended in “dry water”, contained in lead lined barrels which do not allow any of the toxic radiation to leak into the environment.

But that’s not the end of the story. Those barrels store the nuclear waste… but where do we store those barrels? In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences first recommended that the best means of protecting the environment from spent nuclear materials would be to bury the waste in rock deep underground. The site selected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, a geological feature located about 80 miles from Las Vegas.

Residents were not amused, and said so, so loudly that the project was put on hold. And now, 53 years later, this bad idea is still being pushed by those who want the government to change its mind, those who do not want to admit that hiding the problem does not make it disappear.

The phenomenon of “Not in my backyard!” (aka “NIMBY”) is as old as politics, and is especially poignant in the realm of waste disposal. Nuclear waste disposal in particular carries with it the specter of silent invisible “stuff” that could prove lethal should anything leak. It is small wonder that no one wants this stuff in their neighborhood, even with assurances that it is containerized, and nothing could go wrong. Particularly since there are so many readily available proofs that something can always go wrong.

The evidence that nuclear waste is not safe is so incontrovertible that no one disputes it. Rather, proponents of nuclear energy argue that it is not persistent, because it eventually becomes stable non-radioactive waste, and that putting it deep in a rocky hole means we can forget about it. It is “safe” there, and so we are “safe” out here.

The problem with this point of view is that it ignores what we know about how the universe really works. Unforeseen forces can – and do – always alter our present circumstances. Assurances that Yucca Mountain is not geologically active – meaning that there are no fault lines which have generated measurable earthquake activity in the past several millenia there – are utterly meaningless.

There are no places on Earth which are truly not geologically active. Everywhere there is surface, there is geologically active Earth; we live on a solid crust, which floats on a gooey liquid center; predicting what the Earth’s mantle will do next week is not always possible for the best geologists. Predicting what it will do fifty years from now is preposterous. It will probably continue to do nothing at Yucca Mountain. Given that if it does something improbable, it could kill everyone living within a several hundred mile radius, is it worth the risk?

And putting waste in a hole is quite literally just kicking the can down the road; how long until the hole fills up? Where will new waste go at that point? How many new holes in the ground will we have to find? How many new “geologically inert” locations will we need? There are currently 121 nuclear waste facilities throughout the country; it would be nice to reduce that number to just one, but wouldn’t it be better to not have any at all?

The sad history of landfills in this country ought to be an indicator of how infantile is the thinking that we can just bury anything in a hole and it will be alright. The death and destruction of cancer and malnutrition and slow environmental poisining caused by the leaching of toxic chemicals from every landfill in the country is not as sexy a news story as potential nuclear radiation poisining, but it is every bit as real.

Further, we have the sad story of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), most notably the “Dirty Dozen” chemicals proscribed by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, to which the United States is not a party. These are chemicals – like chlordane, or DDT, pesticides which, though now banned in this country, are persistent – they will not “go away” because they simply don’t break down. They will stay in our environment indefinitely, poisoning every plant or animal which comes into contact with them.

Several of the “Dirty Dozen” show up – in small quantities, naturally – in your city tap water. But don’t worry, there are standards, it’s “perfectly safe” to drink…. Oh, and Myrtle has this great investment opportunity, but you have to act now, before the regulators catch wind of the offer…

The fact that these chemicals cause endocrine damage and contribute to obesity, of course, is the least of your worries. Sterility? Cancer? ADHD? Autism? Hypothyroidism? Hypertension? Any of these things get your attention? All these conditions and more have been made much, much worse in recent decades by the accumulation of poisons in our air, our food, and our drinking water as a result of the type of thinking that says it is okay to use “just a little bit” of a given chemical, or to develop just a few acres of wetland, or to burn just a little bit of trash… or to bury our waste in a hole, whether we’re talking about home refuse in plastic sacks, or nuclear detritus in lead coffins.

So excuse us at Myrtle’s if we are a little suspicious of the notion of carbon capture, no matter how high-tech the material in which it is being captured.

Better than holding carbon dioxide in a powdery version of an emulsion, why not try a truly revolutionary approach to waste management – why not avoid creating the waste in the first place?  And if you can't come up with a production method sans carbon outputs, maybe you can... do without?

In the great list of manufactured items which produce carbon dioxide, which items on that menu are things we really need? There are not that many. Breathing is the only one that comes to mind which there’s just no way around – everything else, we ought to be looking at alternatives.

There is a thin line between clever and stupid. Bokonon would argue that “dry water” has obviously crossed that line. It may not be Ice-9, but if we all choke to death on our own waste, will it really matter how precise our literary analogies were?

We recommend a shift in perspective. The quest for sources of energy and resources “out there” drives the quest to make our processes for extraction, production, and consumption less noxious. We certainly applaud the desire to make things less noxious, but we recommend an end to the cynical assumption that we need things “out there” in order to achieve this end. Sustainability is more than just a buzzword; it is a valid description of systems which can perpetuate themselves with the pre-existing resources which form the starting point of your inquiry.

In the case of planet Earth, the only input we get is from the sun. There are a variety of inputs on a micro level – for example, wind flows across practically every patch of land on the planet; temperature differences between the surface and subsurface layers almost everywhere on Earth are also sufficient to provide energy; numerous other examples exist of resources which may be used without being diminished. Making use of these natural features does not require us to come up with any magical substances straight out of science fiction. A dry martini makes sense; dry water just doesn’t.

In fact, in the traditional schema of Carbon Storage and Sequestration (CSS) systems, increasingly, the push by proponents is for biochar systems. Biochar is the material left at the end of the pyrolysis process – the decomposition of organic material by heat in the absence of oxygen. This is typically non-toxic “stuff” which stores carbon dioxide and other gasses in such a way that as the materials decompose over time, the carbon dioxide reuptake process is much easier – biochar acts as a kind of replacement for the processes that take place naturally in rainforests, for example.

There are literally hundreds of different CSS schemes out there; unless someone demonstrates, however, that “dry water” fits the description of a sustainable variant – that is, that it processes carbon dioxide in a way that reduces the impact of production, use, and disposal of goods without increasing production and consumption of any other variables beyond their replenishable limits – we aren’t convinced. We’d rather avoid the pool-pah if we can at all help it.

Happy farming!

Theseus' Ship... Wherein Myrtle Wheedles Some Crazy Anarchists

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

--Plutarch, Theseus

The Paradox of Theseus’ Ship is a timeless exemplar of the French notion “plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose” – the more that things change, the more they stay the same.  However, in spite of finding reminders in every culture and during every epoch of history that change is the only real constant in human endeavors, people still have difficulty accepting it.

Worse still for many people is the uncomfortable implication in the theme of this paradox -- that identity is not so simple a question as we reducibly wish it to be.  “Who am I?”  “Why am I here?”  Practical minded folk don’t ask themselves these questions, in part because they do not want these questions to be asked at all, by anyone.

However, as rapidly as the world is changing, as we are overcome by events such as climate change, economic globalization, peak oil consumption, peak minerals consumption, genetically modified crops propagation, we may have reached a point at which not asking deeply philosophical questions may be less practical than emulating the ivory-tower eggheads who are unafraid of asking such questions.  It may be time to put down the hoe for just a second and put our heads in the clouds long enough to decide which way is up and which way is down.

Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent example of an attempt to conceptualize modern food consumption.  Pollan’s request is that we attempt a new degree of intentionality in our eating habits by stopping to consider how four different meals make their way to our plates.  This model is an intriguing starting point, but perhaps the most impressive part of this journey is that Pollan started at all.  He represents a practical point of view which is too rare; all too often, even those who recognize that something must be done simply inject a prefabricated answer and go merrily about their lives having assured themselves that prejudice is an adquate replacement for investigation.

Socrates’ injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth living” has never been so apropos as it is now, not only for those frustrated by increasing workloads rewarded by diminishing returns, but also by those who would throw out the baby of technical innovation with the bathwater of post-industrial dehumanization and oppression.  A claim that we have become “something less” is easily enough made; just scrawl a few angry lines and get printed in The Fifth Estate.  Substantiating such claims and then doing something productive as a consequence is an entirely different proposition.

As a point of reference, modern Anarcho-Primitivists like John Zerzan and Theodore Kaczynski (yes, that Theodore Kaczynski) take an unfounded assumption that hunter-gatherers have/had idyllic lives (supposedly having more leisure time than their civilized peers) and turn it into a philosophy/political agenda wherein anything humans have managed to accomplish since the advent of the bone scraper or flaked hand axe is the natural cause of all suffering, war, oppression, sexism, and possibly even flatulence.

Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin have been noted critics of this perspective, with Bookchin even penning a book entitled Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, which caused the so-called primitivists, ironically, to organize a remarkably complex social circling of the wagons.  Ranting and raving about how evil agriculture, language, and digital watches are and idealizing Homo habilis (while conveniently ignoring the fact that prior to technological advances, humanity might be better described as Purina Saber-Tooth Chow) doesn’t accomplish anything other than inspiring pathetic serial killers like Kaczynski, and selling a few books for hygeine-deficient narcissists like Zerzan.

The fundamental problem, of course, is that a rejection of all society or social institutions in response to the current slew of human crises, many if not most of which are self-inflicted, fails to recognize that whether maladaptive or not, our behaviors as a species have all evolved for a variety of reasons which will not simply go away just because we wish them to, or if we all go to live in shacks in the wood, or drink enough shots of wheatgrass juice while babbling back and forth at each other in highly technical jargon that has nothing to do with real survival, either of our species, or of our fellow species, or even of individuals, except perhaps individual proprietors of organic wheatgrass juice distributorships.

We have, in short, become something because we chose to respond to circumstances long ago.  Those choices led to other choices until our collective behavior, much like that of the caretakers of Theseus’ ship, has led to a complete replacement of our group persona.  Our identity is subsumed by the same paradox – are we still “human” in the same way that the people living in the Fertile Crescent just prior to the domestication of the fig and rye some 11,000 years ago were “human”?

Some cultures do not even view this as a paradox.  Taoists and Buddhists consider the idea of a thing to be its formal identity; this is very much in keeping with Aristotle’s division of four separate qualities of identity – the “is”ness of a thing differs with the slightest change in emphasis.  Getting bogged down in particulars misses the point, precisely because the particulars will never stay the same.  Theseus’ ship has different planks than it did when it was first built, but no matter. 

The very cells in Theseus’ body were different by the time he died than they were when he built the ship – did that make him no longer Theseus?  Of course not!  Western materialists and substantialists may not be able to make that philosophical leap, but there is really nothing mystical about it.  If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it isn’t a Kaczynski.

And being social creatures living in an unsustainable economy does not make us less human, either.  Instead, we are still very much human, but we have large problems with difficult solutions.  Whining that the solutions are impossible accomplishes nothing other than to make the solutions appear even more intractable than they really are.

Rather than chucking the whole enterprise, we ought to emulate those like Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver or a host of their contemporaries who, instead of asking “When does the Revolution start?” have chosen to ask “What’s for dinner?”  Theseus’ ship was not replaced by an exact duplicate; it was retrofitted a single plank at a time until every plank was new.  In a similar vein, humanity did not come to our current pass via one colossal social, economic or political decision.  We got here one decision at a time – how to get to work, what to wear, and what to eat.

All we can do is stop and think about what we are doing, and be a little more intentional about everything from getting dressed in the morning, to choosing how we entertain ourselves, to choosing what we eat.  After all, some ancient ancestral hominid risked his neck testing out that brand new spear he’d invented to scare off a saber-tooth, which gave us, his lucky descendants, some time to think and act.  Don’t we owe him our best efforts at getting it right?  And getting it right means replacing the ship one plank at a time.

Happy farming!

Grey Waters Run Deep

We have not done a comprehensive survey of municipal water regulations, but we suspect that most cities in the good ol’ U.S. of A. have a somewhat more progressive position vis-à-vis greywater reuse than Myrtle’s home, College Station, Texas.  College Station does not allow the reuse or recycling of greywater.  At all.  Period.

This places our fair city in direct opposition to the State of Texas, which allows residential greywater recycling, without a permit, provided less than 400 gallons a day are being used.  HB 2661, enacted in September 2003, was an amendment to the Texas State Water Code, and established the following paramaters for reusing water from sinks, bathtubs and washing machines:

• Graywater can be used in agricultural, domestic, commercial, and industrial situations, in accordance with applicable Health and Safety codes.
• A permit is not required for the domestic use of up to 400 gallons of graywater daily if the following criteria are met:

• Graywater originates from a private residence,
• Graywater is used by the occupants of that residence for gardening, composting, or landscaping at the residence,
• Graywater is collected with a system that overflows into a sewage or on-site waste treatment and disposal system,
• Graywater is stored in tanks that are clearly labeled as non-potable water, restrict access (especially to children), and eliminate habitat for mosquitoes and other pests,
• Graywater system uses piping that is clearly identified as non-potable water conduit,
• Collection of graywater does not generate ponds or pools,
• Collection system does not create runoff across property lines or onto impervious surfaces,
• Graywater is distributed by a surface or subsurface system that does not spray into the air.

• Builders are encouraged to install plumbing in all new houses in a manner that allows graywater collection and reuse.
• The installation of subsurface graywater systems around the foundations of new houses is encouraged so as to minimize foundation movement and cracking.

Some of these rules make more sense to us than others, though all are necessary to a greater or lesser degree.  The marking of water as ‘non-potable’ seems a little silly, given that, if the tanks and hoses are located near a garden, and the hoses are, in fact, soaker hoses, it should be obvious to any onlooker that the water is intended for the plants, not for human consumption.  Still, in a society where even toothpicks come with instructions, we suppose this is to be expected.

The use of collection systems probably deserves some attention.  We remember our grandfather (who lived just outside the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Llano, Texas, many years ago; if you aren’t familiar with Llano, it’s near Art and Casteel) running a line from his kitchen sink to the St. Augustine lawn growing under the huge oak trees in his back yard.  While we ordinarily despise lawns at Myrtle’s place, Grandaddy Mints’ lawn took up a small portion of his acreage, and in our memory, he never used well water to keep it green, opting instead for either greywater from the kitchen, or occasionally diverting water pumped from his stock pond, which was the primary source of water for his half-acre garden, as well.

Grandaddy Mints did not filter or treat his water before running it out to the grass; we know now that this was not right, given that the dishes in the kitchen sink were washed with commercially available soaps all of which were high in phosphates, a lot of nasty chemicals were getting leached into the groundwater when he let the water run straight into the ground.

There are two alternative solutions to this problem, now that we know what phosphates can do to the environment.  The institutional mindset, reflected in the State of Texas’ rules regarding greywater reuse, assumes that phosphates, nitrates, chlordates, and other nasty chemicals are necessarily going to be components of greywater, and therefore any use of greywater requires that the water first be run through a filtration system of some kind.

There are many such systems, some of which involve manufactured tubs full of artificially created filters a lot like what you get with those “reverse osmosis” water filtration systems at which we distillers scoff, and we at Myrtle’s place obviously do not recommend these systems.  The use of plastics, alone, suggests that these systems are not environmentally friendly.  Other systems make use of filtration through a planter with algal and other biological remediation systems – ie, plants which soak up the offending materials but not all of the water – before dripping out into final use.

We are intrigued by the bioremediation systems, but not enough to advocate them on a small-scale facility like, say, a backyard microfarm.  No, we think a paradigm shift is in order which makes filtration systems unnecessary.

The reason greywater systems require filtration, according to the government, is that they contain phosphates, etc.  So… why not remove the offending chemicals at the source?  There are plenty of soaps and cleansers available which do not pose any environmental dangers, some available as homemade solutions, others available at your local grocers.  Castile soaps (that is, soaps made with a vegetable oil base) pose virtually no risk of groundwater contamination.  Clean white sand as an abrasive works at least as well as chlorine based abrasives, and is what has been used from time immemorial until, oh, the 1950s anyway.  Organic toothpastes, shampoos, conditioners, etc. are all readily available.

In short, nothing noxious to your plants has to go in your sink, bathtub or washing machine.  While you will still want to review your local ordinances, we recommend a small stainless steel collection tank for greywater overflow, with a screen to filter out largish particles like the aforementioned scrubbing sand, with output running to soaker hoses running underneath loose mulch in your vegetable, herb, or flower beds, or around your fruit trees.

But don’t forget to print out a label for the overflow tank stating “Non-Potable Water”.  Wouldn’t want any innocent passersby to get the wrong impression!

Happy farming!

Get the Good Stuff... But Only a Little Bit

“We still think of air as free.  But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water.  The price tag on pollution control is high.  Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”

--President Richard M. Nixon

Asking is the worst possible way to find out what someone values.  If you really want to know what someone believes, don’t ask them, watch them.  What you spend your time doing, what you spend your money buying, what you spend your energy daydreaming about, these are the things you cherish.  These are your values.  These are your Gods.  We all claim we have a certain set of principles, a certain theology, but what we say is invariably different in some fundamental ways from what we do, and it is not what we say, but what we do which reflects what we really believe.

This is as true of groups of people as it is for individuals. 

There are frequently political clamorings for government to have to balance its budget because “We have to live within our means, why shouldn’t the federal government?”  The disconnect in this statement never quite seems to percolate through to our cultural awareness… Do individuals really have to live within their means?  Are they doing so?  And what does “live within our means” really mean?  Is it as simple as a calculation of financial ways and means, or is there more to the equation? 

After all, the American obesity epidemic really comes down to people not living within our means, consuming far more calories in Big Macs than we are expending via getting out and exercising.   There are other debts besides monetary debts, and we are collectively running up huge deficits in more ways than we can possibly keep track of.

Do Americans simply not care about social inequality, ecological devastation, obesity, and impending economic devastation?  Expressions of concern are almost universal, crossing all party and philosophical lines – Ronald Reagan bowed to public sentiment and joined “Hands Across America” – clearly, though there are serious disagreements about methods, objectives are fairly universal – we all agree with the beauty pageant contestants who clamor for their one wish, world peace.

People do care about social inequity and natural resource iniquity; they simply don’t see.  Why not?  The inescapable conclusion when observing the sociological and ecological components of the American economy is that Americans do not value balance, because our collective actions have been so thoroughly unbalanced for so long.  So why the dissonance?  How can someone driving a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle, clearly oblivious to their economic, ecological and social budget busting, have the wisdom to say the federal government ought not spend more money than it possesses?

The best possible explanation is that a fallacy inherited from neoclassical economics dominates our collective consciousness.  The neoclassical Venn diagram for discussion of sustainability shows “Social”, “Environmental” and “Economic” components of development as top level spheres, with the union of the three being the shaded “Sustainable” area.  Where only “Social” and “Environmental” unite, you have “Bearable” conditions; where only “Social” and “Economic” unite, you have “Equitable” conditions, and where “Environmental” and “Economic” concerns unite, you have “Viable” conditions.  Thus, in the neoclassical model, the center, the united “Sustainable” area, represents a compromise between these three entities.

This model is tidy, which neoclassicists appreciate, but it is fundamentally flawed.  A more accurate picture shows that “Environment” is the top level sphere; “Society” is not a separate sphere, but a subset of “Environment”.  “Economy” is a subset of “Society”.  Talk of united concerns between any of these three aspects misses the point entirely – there are no economic concerns which do not impact society and the environment; neither are there any social concerns which do not impact the environment.

All economics are social; all economics are environmental; all social exchange is environmental.

The relevant question, then, is not whether social and environmental concerns should be part of our thinking about economic issues, but rather are we willing to accept that economics ought by order of precedence to be the lowest level concern?  Environmental and social issues take precedence because if either of those spheres collapse, they will by nature take the economy out with them. 

Witness what happens to local economies during environmental or social catastrophes – who can do business in the middle of a hurricane, wildfire, tornado or earthquake?  Who can do business in the middle of a riot?  Where is the free market during protests and counterprotests?

Acceptance of this basic tenet leads to a wholesale rejection of common wisdom on a host of contemporary concerns.  “We have to increase domestic production of oil,” for example, is a fallacy accepted by most of the philosophical spectrum in American politics.  The justifications for drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas come down to economic independence and security against instrusions of socially unacceptable foreign enemies – the hegemony of OPEC nations strikes most Americans as being more important than biodiversity or global warming.

We do not, however, have to increase domestic production of oil.  Economic growth is not our primary concern; environmental security is our primary concern, and the petrochemical industry has demonstrated quite clearly for the entirety of its existence that it is incapable of coexisting peacefully with the environment.

Pursuit of economic growth through energy consumption has lead to irreversible climate change, has polluted our water supplies, has killed off several ecospheres, has put carcinogenic hydrocarbons in the food chain and has, in short, drastically lessened the survivability of contemporary social structures based on a consumption-driven economy.

Drilling for more oil, in other words, doesn’t make us safer; it makes us immeasurably less safe, both in terms of the immediate environmental dangers inherent in climate change, etc., but also in terms of the social and economic strains which will become inevitable as the results of unsustainable consumption manifest themselves.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, in their 2008 “Living Planet Report” summarized the dangers:

“Humanity’s demand on the planet’s living resources, its Ecological Footprint, now exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 30 per cent.  This global overshoot is growing and, as a consequence, ecosystems are being run down and waste is accumulating in the air, land and water.  The resulting deforestation, water shortages, declining biodiversity and climate change are putting the well-being and development of all nations at increasing risk.”

“But we have to have oil, so it’s better if we have American oil,” the argument goes.  This is nothing more than saying we ought to only impale ourselves on hirikiri knives manufactured in Pennsylvania, because the steelworkers there should take precedence over Japanese knifemakers.  We’re just as dead regardless of where the knives (or oil) are produced.

An ecological economist looking at the initially described problem – insufficient energy exists in order to meet the demands of the economy –would ask several different questions:

• Can the energy demands be mitigated (ie, what energy conservation methods need to be tried first)?  
• What sustainable methods for delivering these energy needs can be substituted for the unsustainable method of burning fossil fuels?  
• Are there opportunities to localize energy production to the specific places where energy consumption will be occurring?  
• Can those primarily responsible for consuming the energy be made more directly invested in the creation of that energy so as to reduce impact on those who are not consumers?

“That doesn’t sound like economics to me,” say the more mathematically and statistically grounded critics.  “It sounds like philosophy or even theology.”

There is some merit to this argument; ecological economists make no secret of the need to inject values statements into economic writing.  However, they further point out that neoclassical economics may claim to be a “positive” (empirical or evidential) science, but it is inescapably “normative” (values laden), which goes a long way towards explaining how the same data set can be used to defend so vigorously diametrically opposed ideas such as laissez-faire capitalism and determinist Marxism. 

All economic theories with any sort of following have of necessity at some point demonstrated strong predictive abilities which have garnered intellectual agreement among various students and researchers; however, the diversity of theories can only be explained by means of a differentiating grid, and in the case of theoretical frameworks, that differentiation comes in the form of normative “ought” statements, not positive “is” statements.

Which leads us back to our original premise – we value that which we pursue.  Evelyn Waugh wrote in The Razor’s Edge that “anyone can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  The true test of ethical systems lay in which hard choices adherents are willing to make.  Paying a little extra for the organic fruits and vegetables raised with fair trade practices, for example, seems like a sacrifice, but it is a far more ethical decision than selecting the lower priced alternatives which really represent a subsidy for laziness and sloppiness, a subsidy paid by future generations. 

Your great-grandchildren, in other words, will be paying more for everything because you just had to have that gas-guzzling SUV, that extra Big Mac, that brand new iPhone, that vacation at Disney, and on and on.

Do we want to continue to pursue economic growth at all costs?  Or are we willing to start putting our money where our mouths are?  Because ultimately, ethical behavior will mean we must consciously decide we are going to be satisfied with less.  If we truly care about future generations, we will decide that quality of life is far more important than quantity of dollars produced.

Ultimately, we have to decide we will pursue development, but not growth.  This means investing in technologies which produce non-polluting outputs using significantly fewer resources, none of which are non-renewable, and doing so across all sectors of the economy.  “Smaller is better” needs to replace “supersize me” in every aspect of our lives.

Heck, Myrtle isn’t even our biggest chicken.  The meek shall inherit the Earth; let’s just make sure it’s worth inheriting, okay?

Happy farming!

Pigheaded for Pigweed

One of the limiting factors in turning an urban homestead into a completely self-sufficient ecological niche is the fact that most grain crops require an inordinate amount of space.  In fact, this is part of why organic cereal crops are so rare – the investment of time and space involved in raising grain crops is substantial, and most farmers who are interested in organics are also interested in saving money.  They therefore opt for less spatially intensive products, like fruits and vegetables, or eggs, or dairy.

So, those of us trying to scratch out an edible living on a half-acre in the city are left holding the empty cereal bag.

Which is why we are curious about a new possibility.  Our research on world foods has led us to an admiration of the staple of the Inca diet, a little pseudocereal called quinoa.  Foodies have long been familiar with quinoa, but it is not part of the general public’s culinary vernacular, and with good reason.  Although this is almost the perfect grain – the approximation of complete proteins in quinoa is closer than in any other starchy crop besides the potato – it is also very clearly a specialty crop.

The outer covering of the quinoa grain is heavily laced with saponins, which give it an exceedingly bitter flavor.  This is bad news for anyone who wants to eat it raw, of course, but good news for farmers who have to worry about avian intrusions.  Birds do not poach a quinoa harvest the way they do with corn or even wheat.

“But Myrtle,” you may be asking, “why would we want to eat something at which the birds turn up their prim little noses?”

Good question.  The answer?  You don’t have to eat quinoa with the saponins still attached, silly goose.  You soak it before cooking it.  Most boxed quinoa you might find at your local grocery store will come pre-soaked to remove the saponin content for you.  Those of us who are used to soaking our pinto or black beans prior to cooking will not find this extra step all that tedious.

So, well and good, we have established that there is this grain which is bird-proof and high in protein.  How do you grow it, and what do you use it for?

These are excellent questions, and unfortunately, this is where our research takes a bit of a left turn off the expected path.  Being a native of the Andes mountain range, as you might expect, Quinoa prefers weather a tad more temperate than what we experience on the Texas coastal plain.  There are some successful quinoa producers in Colorado and New Mexico, but we fear if we were to try the plant in any serious sort of way, we would have to limit ourselves to fall and winter production, and even then, the growing season might not be long enough before the return of hot weather, sometimes as early as late March, never later than mid-May.  Quinoa takes a while to reach maturity, and we just don’t have the pleasant cool weather you find in Peru or Ecuador.

However, never being prone to dispair for long, we continued to dig after hearing these discouraging words, and we found that there is a relative of quinoa called “pigweed” which was cultivated in North America until as recently as the middle of the 18th century.  In fact, in Mexico, it is still being raised as a cash-crop.

Known variously as “pigweed”, “pitseed”, “goosefoot”, “huauzontle”, or “lambsquarters”, Chenopodium berlandieri is an annual herbaceous plant widely regarded as a weed.  However, several varieties are grown for food, utilizing different characteristics of the plant, which has many characteristics of the better known Chenopodium album or, of course, its relative with which the conversation got started, Chenopodium quinoa.  Varieties of pigweed are grown for the broccoli-like seed heads; other varieties are grown for grain; still others are grown because the leaves of the plant are much like spinach.

Quinoa is almost exclusively grown at altitude, although we suspect it might thrive at lower elevations provided the other climate requirements were met.  However, we are more likely to experiment with the other Chenopodiae simply because we suspect we will have more success with them.

While scrounging for information about what grain crops we might reasonably expect to be able to grow at our altitude and in our hardiness zone, we stumbled upon another pseudocereal which, like quinoa and pigweed, is far more nutritious and versatile than the more popular wheat and corn alternatives.  Amaranth is, like the Chenopodiae, considered a weed by most American farmers.  However, in most of the rest of the world, and more particularly, in those parts of the world where drought in spite of high humidity is a very real concern, Amaranthacea Celosia is considered a wonder crop.  The leaves and flowers are edible, tasting much like spinach, and the seed is another lysine-rich close-to-complete protein food.  And in some quarters, amaranth, like lambsquarters, is called "pigweed" because it only grows where the pigs forage!

Amaranth seeds were popular with Native Americans from the plains states; in Mexico, you can still see a candy made with amaranth grain called alegría at festivals in some communities; in India, amaranth is called rajgira and is served popped and mixed with jaggery (a south Asian sugar) to form a dish called laddus, which is a staple in school cafeterias throughout the subcontinent.  And in sub-Saharan Africa, farmers are viewing amaranth as manna from heaven, because many of their traditional crops are failing with increased climate change induced variability in the local weather patterns; amaranth thrives in conditions other grain crops abhor, which goes a long way to explaining how several varieties have taken hold in the U.S. as pernicious weeds, resistant to many herbicides.

And like another crop we have come to appreciate more each year, the sunflower, amaranth plants are just plain attractive.  The bright red varieties in particular have the potential to transform even a small garden plot into a vibrant, velvety canvass.  One of the chief complaints about vegetable gardens is that they lack the aesthetic sensibilities of herbs or flowers; this does not have to be true.  The inclusion of trap crops like sunflowers and nasturtiums was our introduction to this fact; now, we learn that the floral attractions can themselves be on the menu, and we are overjoyed with the discovery.

This will be part of next year’s veggie garden revamp – in the Spring, we will plant amaranth, and in the Fall, we will plant lambsquarters.  And if we can get a good grain crop out of that mix, then we’ll see what kind of homegrown breads we can turn out; Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance -- we don’t mean to brag but can’t help ourselves -- is perhaps the best baker we know.  Her challenge will be to turn out good product with nothing but what comes from our yard.  If we were tending ten acres instead of a half of one, it would be no challenge.  But, as the inimitable (if fictional) Jimmy Duggan says, “It’s the ‘hard’ that makes it great!”

Happy farming!

Vegetables, Fractals and Herbs, Oh My!

We have been thinking about patterns a lot lately.  Reading about Masanobu Fukuoka got us interested in some other early permaculture literature, which in turn lead us to think about design and layout in urban garden spaces, and how frustrated we have been up to this point in getting our vegetable garden to fit into our schematic as easily as the herb gardens have done.

The great irony is, we laid out the herb gardens as we did because we couldn’t think of anything else to do.  They sort of follow the curve of the driveway on one side, and the curve of the path to our front door on the other side.  And the only thing vaguely monoculturish about them is the fact that rosemary is the dominant feature of the curve; however, we actually have three different varieties of rosemary, and they are interspersed with thyme, cannas, and an italian variety of oregano.

The veggies, though, have been something of a thorn in our sides.  We started with twelve raised beds, and they worked well enough at first, but there is something about intensive gardening approaches with which we just didn’t grok.  Even though we were not using any artifical means of production beyond the inclusion of a lot of elbow grease, it didn’t feel natural at all.  We had to add so much in the form of compost and chicken poop the second year to approximate the qualitative and quantitative success of the first year, that we began to wonder.  In year three, in fact, we are abandoning our fall garden almost altogether as we retool the design.

Having read all we could get our hands on about microenvironmental design, we have come to realize that we have been forcing the land to move to realize our vision, instead of the other way around.  The idiomatic expression sounds quaint, but we are fairly sure the mountain never actually goes to meet Mohammed (peace be upon him).  Mere mortals have to adjust ourselves to our surroundings, lest we end up with gardens more reminescent of slag heaps than of Eden.

In a stunning bit of serendipitous synchronicity, we recently read a blog posting by our good friend Hugh Stearns who was musing about fractal geometry in two-dimensional spaces, and reflecting on how patterns are not always visible to those who are refusing to see them.  Depth is out there, but only if your eyes are open.

We suppose, given that this is all pretty much in line with what Hugh does for a living, we ought to have consulted him first before attempting to mould our garden to our foolish desires by means of sheer will.  Two things stopped us however:  first, we have an immense quantity of stubborn self-determination in our family which bodes ill for our ever accepting advice, even good advice.  Second, there is no way on God’s green earth we could afford Hugh’s professional services.  We’re cheapskates, and he is a top tier professional; that sort of combination does not work out.  So, to the books we go.

Early in the 20th century, the agronomic forebears of the modern locavores, slow fooders, organic advocates, et al., were the progenitors of the paradigm known as “Permaculture”.  This approach focuses on systems which mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies; in other words, taking the way each individual part of your garden interacts with every other part of your garden, your home, your nieghborhood, your city, your hardiness zone, etc., and making it function as closely as possible to the ways in which those individual parts most successfully interact when found in a state of nature.  You would not, for example, want to emulate naturally occuring plants which die out in nature, you would want to find examples where they succeed, and copy them.

One of the first things the permaculturalists noticed was that monoculture – the exclusive prominence of one variety of plant – is almost non-existant in nature.  You may encounter areas where a particular species or variety is the predominant feature of an area, but you almost never find a place where it is the only feature.  As a thought experiment, imagine yourself in a wild copse where the plants are all familiar domestic garden plants, but grown randomly and with no friendly farmer about.  Compare this vision with a farm, and the most noticeable difference is likely to be that you picture the farm having row after row of corn stalks and cabbages, neatly divided, with little placards telling you what is planted where.

You would notice the difference if you walked out of a wildly overgrown meadow and into a corn field.  It’s just… different.

Polyculture, it turns out, actually produces more and healthier plants than does monoculture, but modern farming practices are monocultural because, well, just because.  Lev. 19:19 importunes against planting more than one type of crop in the same field, but if you are looking to the Torah for agricultural science, you've got deeper issues you need to deal with first.  We suppose on large scale industrial plots, the need for individual attention and the lack of any way to mechanize processes like planting and harvesting would make polyculture difficult and prohibitively expensive, but on small scales, it really just comes down to tradition.  And since we argue that all agriculture ought to be brought back down to small scales anyway... you can see where we're headed.

The earliest American farmers all worked with traditions learned from observation of nature; the “Three Sisters” or “Trinity” are almost as familiar to school children studying the pilgrims and their aboriginal benefactors as the use of fish when planting corn.  “Guild” planting is a cornerstone of permaculture – “companion planting” is another name this concept goes by.  The classic example of the “Three Sisters” references the symbiosis of corn, squash and tomatoes, which do especially well when planted in clusters.  We have also noticed tomatoes, peppers, and basil do well in the same plot, a fact that makes for convenient dinnertime harvesting on nights when italian food strikes our fancy.

Another thing the early permaculturalists noticed was that the symbiosis of different plant species reflected a similar symbiosis between types of terrain – the “edges” of systems, as it were.  A good example would be the places where ponds meet grassy slopes, or where grassy slopes meet forests.  Beans provide nitrogen needed by corn, which provides an excellent climbing surface for beans; in the same way, water feeds microbes and rhizomes which aerate soil, and vegetation falling from surrounding terrain decays in water and provides nutrition for phytoplankton, which feed the fish who are then eaten by land creatures and re-deposited in the soil to nourish the plant life there.  Polyculturalists emphasize maximizing your transitional spaces in order to recreate these kinds of cycles.

Applying this bit of wisdom to our problem will, we hope, provide the needed sledgehammer to the wall blocking our creative path vis-à-vis our veggie garden.  A fractal extension of Big Myrtle’s place to a vegetable garden in the “big open space in the middle of the back yard” would look something like a wavy rhomboid plot with taller plants on the outside stepping down to flatter plants in the middle.

This actually answers another riddle we have been grappling with, too.  We intend to plant a variety of trees, including avocados (In preparation for global warming, naturally!  Thereby hangs another tale, for a future post…), plums, and peaches.  The avocados will be a tier step down from our oak trees, the plums will be a tier step down from the avocados, and the peaches will be a tier step down from the plums.  Voila!  We will have the trellised look so valued by permaculturalists.  And if we swirl these new trees around the perimeter of the vegetable plot, we will accomplish the fractal pattern look our design guru amigo suggests, as well.

We are going to procede cautiously, however.  Taking a snapshot of the layout as it currently exists and then superimposing corrective changes certainly sounds like a good plan, but the very act of planning represents a recurrence of our original mistake.  We do not believe that “Design” should preclude the flexibility of improvisation which is necessary for the ultimate “design”.  The act of designing a patterned environment, in other words, should not be a replacement for the creation of designs in a patterened environment.

If you don’t see the distinction, don’t worry.  All such intellectual abstractions are beside the point when you pick up a shovel and a hoe and actually get to work.  Fukuoka would probably disapprove of all this moving of dirt and plants, but then, you can’t please everybody.  He did his all-natural gardening in Japan, where 100+ degree days and fire ants were utterly inconceivable, so we take his serenity with a grain of salt.

One of Fukuoka’s contributions to which we will pay more attention, however, is the idea of “fairshare”.  Even organic farming can fall prey to the trap of taking more out of the soil that it ought; in fact, there is an entire movement in agriculture called “biointensive” farming.  This is a system in which maximum yields are engineered from minimum spaces.  This is an attractive lure, particularly in urban areas, because it sounds like doing more with less.  The problem is, as we have discovered after a mere three years growing food in the nutrient-deficient soils of the Brazos Valley, you have to work the topsoil so intensively that even organic methods are not “sustainable”.

It isn’t natural, and those things which do not emulate natural processes tend to break sooner than those things which do.  To put it in the context of the Laws of Physics, entropy suggests that things move from states of lower likelihood to higher likelihood.  To tell what system of growing things is more or less likely, just look around at what naturally occurs.

It isn’t rocket science; it’s simply observation.  If something seems to work; do it.  If it seems to be too hard to get it to work, maybe it is; maybe you should try something else.  We’re off to try something else!

Happy farming!

While the Big Potato Burns...

“Wheat.  I’m dead, and they’re talking about wheat.”
--Woody Allen, Love and Death

The old joke about the difference between a recession and a depression is that if your neighbor is out of a job, it’s a recession, but if you are out of a job, that is a depression.  Catastrophes and disasters, both the natural and the man-made kind, are received with  much the same ego-centrism. 

Not a day went by during the summer of 2010 when you did not see news headlines on every major media outlet in the United States about oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, and rightly so.  It was, and still is, a big news story.  In fact, the real tragedy is that even though the impacts of this spill will last centuries, it will probably be leaving the headlines soon, now that the principle villains in this little melodrama have won the propaganda war.  Truth is the first casualty when profit battles public health.

However, numerous stories with at least as big, and frequently bigger impacts never got airplay in this country, because they happened to our global neighbors, and not to ourselves.  In Nigeria, for example, by some estimates as much as 100 million barrels of oil were spilled between 1960 and 1997, and the trend continues to this day.  In essence, the oil industry in Nigeria self-regulates, because the government is weak and incapable of enforcing much of any kind of environmental rules.  New spills are hardly ever reported, because they are now just a fact of life.  The wonder is that the Niger Delta is still habitable at all – soon, Nigeria may join Somalia as an ungovernable wasteland, and oil is directly to blame.

Elsewhere, beginning in May of 2010, and up to the time of this writing, 1,420 people have died and over 1,700 are missing in China as massive flooding and mudslides have wracked that country.  The $25 billion Three Gorges Dam project is in danger of being swept away by floods, or at the very least severely damaged by an inundation of toxic flotsam and jetsam from major flooding and erosion from upstream.  This story has received a little bit of front page play in the U.S., but not much.

Pakistan has been devastated by the worst flooding in that country in at least 80 years; the terrorist organizations which we have known for decades pose the greatest threats, to India to the East and to all-points West, are also providing the greatest amount of humanitarian aid to the several million displaced Pakistanis.  Who will those people be most sympathetic to in the future?  Westerners preaching at them about the evils of fundamentalist Islam?  Or radical Muslim leaders who actually did something for them and their families in a time of need?

The list of stories like this goes on and on.  All corners of the globe are experiencing traumatic crises either directly caused by or at least made worse by global climate change, but in this country we largely ignore these stories.  There are valid evolutionary reasons for this phenomenon; frankly, as Douglas Adams noted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the one thing no human being could ever hope to survive is a sense of perspective.  Nevertheless, our selective reading of global news comes down to a form of triabalism which no longer serves a useful function.  It may not be comfortable to think about people vastly different from ourselves living in places we will never visit, but for our own good we need to start paying attention.

A good place to start is in a country which the West has spent the better part of the last century demonizing.  Russia has a long history of paranoia – again, with reasons paleopsychologists would have no trouble explaining, given that a list of countries who have not invaded Russia at some point in the past millineum might be shorter than a list of those who have.  And Russia’s callous abuse of their own natural resources – to the point of using tactical nuclear weapons as instruments of civil engineering – have given even the most sympathetic of westerners reasons to turn a cold shoulder when the bear gives a cry of distress.

However, we might wish to reconsider our attitudes towards Moscow after the events of this summer.  Following a heat wave of epic proportions – a heat wave predicted several years ago, by the way, due to a new “feedback loop” created by excessive peat moss consumption in a post-permafrost melt era – Russia is now experiencing runaway wildfires, which they have virtually no resources to combat.  It doesn’t help that they disbanded their national fire service a couple of years ago, choosing to decentralize – the Tea Party movement would be proud of their anti-government furor over the past decade, though some Russians are now beginning to yearn for a stronger central government again.  To understand how vast these fires are, picture a line running from Denver to Houston.  Now, burn it.

Given the magnitude of these fires, it is remarkable that so few lives have been lost.  “All” that has been burned has mostly been comprised of crop land – along with a naval research facility, several villages, and a good deal of infrastructure.  No major cities have been directly impacted yet, although that may still change, if the Russians don’t get some help soon from Mother Nature.

Still, leave aside the question of long-term global consequences (some have theorized leftover radiation from Chernobyl might be spread globally; others worry about particulate matter pollution spreading globally as often happens following volcanoes) and assume the Russians are able to put out the flames on their own.  Assume, too, that the human component, the requisite humanitarian aid to all those injured or displaced by this catastrophe, can all be handled internally by the Russian people, and that no outside assistance is required.

Why, then, would the rest of the world have any reason to care?

Putting aside all moral and ethical objections to global apathy, there are practical reasons why the global community should care about its individual parts – “we are all connected” sounds like either a commercial for an international telecommunications consortium, or else a variation on one of a thousand insipid, kumbayatic campfire songs at an “Up With People” day care facility.  However, “we are all connected” is, in every conceivable way, an apt description of the 21st century economy.

We should care what happens in Russia because what happens there, much like what happens anywhere else on the planet, has the inherent potential to complicate all our lives, even to extremes unforeseen and unforeseeable.

In the case of the burning Russian Steppes, the chief danger (outside of the long-term consequences which we are glossing over at present) lay in the destruction of wheat crops.  On July 23rd, before the widespread fires began destroying even more of the nation’s wheat and barley fields, Russian Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik announced that low rainfall and high temperatures had damaged 32% of all Russian grain crops.  There is no telling how much will eventually be salvaged, but is difficult to conceive of even half of the usual Russian crop being available, and that is only considering part of the equation – the distribution network is also going to be affected by these fires, with railroads, highways, trucks, fuel depots, communications centers, grain silos, all being reduced to ashes.  Even if the grain matures, there may not be any way to harvest it and ship it to market.

Agricultural economics has always been an interesting shell game, with devastating losses for some producers resulting in a bonanza for other producers, and surely there are some Kansas wheat farmers who are going to feel like they won the lottery this fall and next winter, but any discussion of the implications of wheat yields should not stop just with producers.  Consumers world wide will be affected, and the consequences will quickly spiral farther than any rational analysis of cause and effect can follow.

Easy to see consequences will include higher prices for bread and cereal; these are things with which even American Idol fans can relate.  Harder to see will be the effects of 3rd world hunger exacerbated by higher prices for smaller quantities of grain.  More children than would have otherwise gone hungry will starve, but this is a tragedy against which our sense have been innured.  “Surely you’re not saying we have the resources to save the poor from their lot?”  Yes, even Christian sensibilities can handle the idea that a child somewhere will go hungry.  That, after all, is a big part of why remote controls were invented – we got tired of hearing Sally Struthers asking why no one will think of the children.

But what of the child whose father reacts the way Mr. Myrtle Personell would react, were his children to be going hungry through no fault of his own?  There are 6 billion people in this world, most of whom, we imagine, would not be averse to taking up arms if it meant life or death for our children.  It sounds like a grand thing to do, fighting for your family, but the problem is that even though this biological impulse is almost universal, it never really does any good.  You kill other human beings, and now their children go hungry just like yours.  Misery may love company, but it does not have much time for real solutions. 

We sympathize greatly with the people of Palestine, for example, because expecting people caged up like animals and then deprived of every necessity to react with anything other than all available means – which, in their condition, are almost exclusively violent means – is just… and there is no other word for it… stupid.  Of course they react violently.  They are being slowly starved to death.  The fact that firing unguided rockets into your enemy’s cities does nothing but alienate your potential benefactors elsewhere in the world does not displace your fundamental need to do something for your starving children.  We would react the same misguided way.

Now picture dozens of other nations being slowly starved to death because they cannot afford to buy wheat.  Picture some of those nations being places where the United States has reasons of national security to not want rioting in the streets – say, Egypt, because such violence would threaten our historical ally Israel, or Indonesia, because they are a key (and often underreported) component of our fight against al Qaida, or Japan, because a colapse in the Japanese economy would bring down global credit, and with it, cause a descent into another Great Depression, or a host of other places like South Africa, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and on and on, where we get vital natural resources and precious minerals we cannot do without.  If social unrest due to famine were to occur in any of these places, our troops would have to be dispatched; we would have no choice.  It would be a matter of our vital national interest; our men and women in uniform would go in harms way because somebody who needs to feed their children and cannot took up arms in a foolish attempt to secure grain, and instead started a war.

That is why we should care about what happens in Russia, even if we choose not to care because they are our fellow human beings.

For the time being, we can afford to just wait and see what happens on the steppes.  European nations are pouring aid into Russia, and we suspect that the fires will eventually burn out, as summer gives way to fall, and somehow a global food crisis will be averted this time, or at least mitigated to the point that it does not cause World War III.  But at some point, someone is going to have to come up with a way to make a sense of urgency a viral quality.  Global Warming is now a four decade old concept, and there are still people in positions of authority who deny that it is a fact.

Myrtle knows better, and she’s a chicken.  She’s also a chicken who, after watching the evening news, really wants a shot of vodka.  We sympathize, sister, we really do.

Happy farming!

In Praise of Pomegranates

Few foods have as many mystical qualities as the pomegranate; often found in Christian art, the pomegranate figures prominently in many representations of the Madonna and child.  Judaism holds the pomegranate dear, as well – the old wives' tale is that pomegranate seeds number 613, one for each commandment found in the Torah.  Legend in the Islamic world says that each pomegranate contains one seed which has come down from Paradise.

And in Buddhist teaching, the three blessed fruits are citrus, peaches, and pomegranates; the demoness Hariti, who devoured children, was transformed when the Buddha gave her a pomegranate; she then became a guardian goddess who in her various incarnations is invoked by infertile women.  This mirrors medieval European Christianity, wherein the headboard of a marriage bed was frequently carved with pomegranate flowers to ensure fertility.

The pomegranate has a fairly long agricultural history, probably first being cultivated in what is now Iran and Afghanistan.  Military conquest led to the pomegranate’s westward migration; Herodotus, in fact, mentions golden  pomegranates adorning the spears of soldiers in the Persian phalanx during the Graeco-Persian wars.  There were undoubtedly numerous oral traditions surrounding the fruit prior to recorded history; we have only the faintest traces of these prehistoric accounts – the Persian myths reference the warrior Isfandiyar who gained invincibility by means of eating a magical pomegranate.

And the most famous reference of all is the capture of the flower goddess Persephone by the death god Hades, who tricked her into eating the seeds of a pomegranate fruit, ensuring that she must remain with him for one month for each seed she had eaten, and thus was winter born.

However, as popular as this fruit has traditionally been, it seems to have dropped off the map in the West.  Still widely grown in Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, few other places in the Western world treat the pomegranate as anything other than a novelty food.  Southern California, so perfect a climate for growing practically anything, is home to a burgeoning trade in pomegranates; very few other places in the United States boast more than a few scattered trees grown by hobbyists.  Commercial orchards just don’t grow them.

That may soon be changing.  Pomegranate juice is on the minds of many nutritionists and dieticians, particularly as people look for ways to combat high cholesterol and other ailments related to the chronic American problems of poor nutrition and obesity.  The medicinal qualities of the pomegranate have long been known; it is not a coincidence that the British Medical Association features the pomegranate in their coat of arms.

Overwhelmingly, the scientific community is lining up behind this fruit.  As summarized by Penugonda and Basu of Oklahoma State University in their 2009 paper “Pomegranate Juice:  A Fruit Juice”:

Pomegranate juice is a polyphenol-rich fruit juice with high antioxidant capacity. In limited studies in human and murine models, pomegranate juice has been shown to exert significant antiatherogenic, antioxidant, antihypertensive, and anti-inflammatory effects. Pomegranate juice significantly reduced atherosclerotic lesion areas in immune-deficient mice and intima media thickness in cardiac patients on medications. It also decreased lipid peroxidation in patients with type 2 diabetes, and systolic blood pressure and serum angiotensin converting enzyme activity in hypertensive patients. Thus, the potential cardioprotective benefits of pomegranate juice deserve further clinical investigation, and evidence to date suggests it may be prudent to include this fruit juice in a heart-healthy diet.

Miguel, Dandlen et al. pointed out in their 2004 paper “The Effect of Two Methods of Pomegranate (Punica granatum L) Juice Extraction on Quality During Storage at 4°C” that pomegranates are rich in precisely the kinds of polyphenol compounds which are best suited to fight a whole range of human ailments:

“Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that the composition of phenol-rich food retards the progression of arteriosclerosis and reduces the incidence of heart diseases by preventing the oxidative stress, that is, lipid peroxidation in arterial macrophages and in lipoproteins.More recently, some authors reported that anthocyanins decreased cadmium accumulation in liver and kidney, the concentration of bilirubin and urea in blood serum, and aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase activities.  Pomegranate juice is an important source of phenolic compounds, with anthocyanins being one of the most important, especially the 3-glucosides and 3, 5-diglucosides of delphinidin, cyanidin, and pelargonidin.”

With all of this going for it, why has the pomegranate not supplanted the Dorito as America’s snack food of choice?

For a few obvious reasons, and some not so obvious.

For starters, Americans have grown increasingly disenchanted with fruit generally over the past several generations.  A quick review of the most popular breakfast foods reveals that berries and grapefruit, formerly staples in most households, have been displaced by pop-tarts and microwaveable sausage biscuits.  Even the most health conscious consumers all too often forego fruit first thing in the morning, opting instead for a granola bar or a container of yogurt.

Then, too, among fruit choices, the pomegranate is perhaps one of the most labor intensive once it reaches your kitchen table.  Grapefruit?  Slice it in half, and then dig in.  Oranges?  Peel them and go.  Grapes?  Wash them, then pop them in your mouth.  Apples?  Peaches?  Pears?  Munch away, peel and all.

But pomegranates require a bit more work.  First, you have to break open the outer leathery layer and find some way to peel it off.  Then you have to soak the insides and allow the arils (the edible portion which includes the seeds) to sink to the bottom of the bowl, while the pulp floats to the top.  Finally, you take the arils and either eat them raw, or mix them into whatever concoction you are making with them.  That’s a lot of steps for people who now eat breakfast “on the run” instead of at the family dining table.

Finally, there is the question of taste.  Raw pomegranate arils, especially of the golden varieties like Wonderful, are fairly sweet, in addition to being tart.  However, as anyone who has drunk pure pomegranate juice can attest, there is a definite bitter component to the flavor, making consumers who are used to downing high-fructose corn syrup by the bucketfuls in the rest of their dietary lives somewhat averse to even trying pomegranates.  Like cranberries, pomegranates have been relegated to the “fruit juice cocktail” category for many would-be imbibers.

This is a shame, but it is not an irreversible state of affairs.  The pomegranate has a glorious history, and, we believe, limitless potential for an equally glorious future.  Renewed interest in healthy whole foods diets, coupled with changing conditions brought about by global warming and the increasing unpredictability of water supplies make this plant a perfect fit for 21st century production needs.  We have noticed a surge bordering on a tidal wave of increased interest in pomegranates at local garden centers over the past couple of years; we suspect there will be even more interest as our local climate shifts further from sub-tropical and more towards temperate or even semi-arid conditions over the next several decades.

The conditions of the fertile crescent, the birthplace of civilization and of the pomegranate, are becoming more commonplace in parts of the world currently unfamiliar with the foods of a bygone time and place. 

M. Pekmezci and M. Erkan of Akdeniz University in Turkey note that “The pomegranate requires a long hot Summer for fruit to mature, can withstand low temperatures in the Winter and is drought and salt-tolerant.”  If this does not describe the ideal fruit crop for farmers facing uncertain weather, we don’t know what would be. 

We at Myrtle’s are just getting a jump start; we suspect a lot of other growers will be joining us in planting pomegranates.

Happy farming!