After a recent client visit – a thankfully rare occurrence in his day job – Mr. Myrtle Maintenance stopped for lunch at a sandwich shop he had never before frequented (for the simple reason that it was in a neighboring town we seldom if ever visit), wherein he discovered with great pleasure that the calorie content of each sandwich on the menu was listed in big bold numbers. And, shocking though it may seem to some, tuna salad (a favorite of dieters for decades) turns out to be a heftier chunk of the alotted calories permitted for Mr. Myrtle Maintenance than the modest avocado and swiss with assorted veggies for which he ultimately opted.“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it… it says ‘Chicken of the Sea’.”
–Jessica Simpson
So, tuna is not especially diet friendly; but wait, dear tuna lovers, the news gets juicier. Now comes word this week that bluefin tuna from the Pacific have been shown to be contaminated by radiation from Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant, damaged by last year’s massive earthquake. 6,000 miles away from Fukushima, off the coast of California, tuna were discovered to have levels of radioactive cesium 10 times higher than the amount normally measured in these fish – still considered “safe” by the U.S. and Japanese governments, but… really? Safe?
Atlantic tuna are, of course, no better. While those who think about tuna at all think of them as inhabiting the colder waters where only deep-ocean fishing trawlers dare venture, the truth is, these huge fish are migratory predators. They are near the top of the ocean food chain, fearing only the largest species of shark, and feasting on everything smaller than themselves (which includes all manner of squid, smaller fish, and who knows what all else), making them the perfect species for the concentration of pollutants, including those in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil spill which is slowly but surely receding from the oh-so-short-term attention span of modern society. There are still huge plumes of oil in deep pockets of the Gulf, and they will be affecting the food chain – bottom to top – for decades.
We don’t mean to bring only bleak news, of course. It’s a big, dangerous world out there, but we actually want to emphasize the dangers of consuming a food source which literally spans the globe for a more hopeful reason, totally unrelated to the sadistic pleasure some bloggers have in giving people the willies. We only wish to highlight the undesirability of searching for food thousands of miles away from our plates.
There are alternatives.
We have frequently written about our preference for locally grown foods, and have emphasized that there is nowhere as local as your own yard. “Chicken shot in the yard,” as one of our more colorful friends describes such food.
The trick, of course, is how to make such a local source of sustenance work on a quantitative and qualitative level.
Permaculture has the unfortunate fate of being a catchy word, like “paradigm” or “meme” or a thousand other irritating words of the day which have come and gone, but it represents such an important concept that we feel inclined to drag it out one more time.
The idea is simple: “permanent culture”. In a universe in which change is the only constant, this seems impossible, but that is taking the concept too literally. What is meant by “permanent culture” is not that everything stays exactly the same; instead, the idea is that everything in a given living system (or “culture”) is sustainable, or perpetually capable of self-contained organic continuity.
For a garden, this means from year to year, you might (nay, you will) see new plants and new growth on old plants, but you will also see the same fundamental processes in play from season to season and year to year, and the evidence of outside intervention will be sparse at most. And incorporating livestock into the scene makes it a self-contained ecosystem, as much as possible. Not counting wildlife, of which we have an abundance, chickens currently comprise our entire menagerie, though we will be adding fish and crawdads soon, and will possibly be adding ducks or geese, as well. Some permaculture enthusiasts have added goats, cattle, llamas, butterflies, worms… pretty much anything that has ever walked, crawled, flown or swam.
There are as many different interpretations of how to reach this utopian vision of a self-contained world as there are advocates of permaculture; even among the earliest proponents of this concept there was considerable diversity of opinion. Probably the two greatest thinkers regarding permaculture as it relates to food production were Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese visionary whose system was often referred to as “do nothing” farming, and Bill Mollison, an Australian who once remarked that on international flights he would observe that he was often the only person aboard with properly dirty fingernails.
Mollison spent much of his time protecting “bush country” where any intervention at all by humans invariably led to loss of diversity – though an avid gardener, his philosophy was so anti-development that he was often accused of being an agricultural agonist. Fukuoka had great respect for brambles and weeds on farmland – it must be noted that Fukuoka never had to deal with Texas sticker grass, but that is an argument for another time. Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution laid out his method, declaring that the object of agriculture ought not to be food production, but “the cultivation and perfection of human beings”.
Other similar observations relate to ideas such as what defines “healthy” for a fruit crop – traditionally, shoppers walk into a grocery market and want the biggest, brightest, most unblemished peaches or melons or apples, etc. However, in nature, the “healthiest” crop – the fruit which is most likely to have seeds which perpetuate the species – are frequently the most wrinkled, often not the largest, seldom without blemish. This is because nutrient content is more important than visual appearance, and under natural conditions – drought, for example – the fruit will be more concentrated, and the meat of the fruit will pull back from its skin or shell, causing it to be easily bruised or “damaged” in the eyes of traditional shoppers.
We at Myrtle’s believe in a hybrid system. We don’t exactly “do nothing” as Fukuoka would have it, but we try not to intervene more than absolutely necessary, either. Worrying about the pollutants in tuna from cans on a shelf is bad enough – worrying about chemicals in plants we have grown ourselves would simply be more than we could handle. So we grow our fruits and vegetables entirely without any sort of supplementation, other than composted leaves, food scraps and chicken poop.
We also believe that artificial edges are every bit as effective in creating the biodiversity Fukuoka, Mollison et al. observed in natural edges. As such, we feel perfectly at ease with our man-made ponds, and with trellises to hold our pole-beans (Mucuna pruriens, about which we have spoken before), and we will eventually be enclosing our garden plots with low berms and thus creating raised beds, all of which represent transitional zones from one kind of environment to another. In fact, our trellised velvet beans give shade to our solenacea (tomatoes and eggplants), meaning our spring salsa garden survives the brutal Texas summer and produces again when cooler fall temperatures come around. This is how these plants “behave” in the wild in subtropical regions; it is also how they behave in the microclimate of our backyard.
Additionally, there are a wide variety of self-seeding annuals in our garden – we do cultivate our amaranth, but we have volunteers scattered willy-nilly, and we encourage them. Likewise, epazote, catnip, basil and sunflowers come up all over the place, and we happily let them do so.
Our object, long term, is to structure a system in which all of these chaotic elements find a way to coexist and reproduce themselves year-after-year with as little intervention on our part as possible. Some folk focus on the “do-nothing” part of Fukuoka’s description of such a design, and come to the mistaken conclusion that permaculture is all about not bothering oneself with traditional farming tasks such as weeding or pruning or pest control. Nothing could be further from the truth – we work our fingers to the nubs in this system, and we do it because “food shot in the yard” is much, much less likely to be contaminated by nuclear radiation from thousands of miles away, or even by an oil spill just a few hundred miles away, or even (hopefully) by exhaust fumes from a few dozen feet away.
Sorry, Charlie, who needs chicken of the sea, when we can see perfectly good chickens out our kitchen window?
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The "hot tuna" article, Madigana, Baumann, and Fisher [2012], notes that measured levels of radiocesium in post-Fukushima tuna were ca thirty times less than the naturally occurring 40^K, and 137^Cs was estimated to be 0.5% of that from the α-emitting 210^Po. Which isn't to say that things are hunky-dory under the sea (dory, get it?). The protocol we used for cesium tracers in the vet lab were enough to make anyone chary of radiocesium. Nevertheless, after the Fukushima meltdown, the amount of radioactive material in tuna has not raised much over the background levels. Still, I prefer my Hot Tuna like so.
ReplyDeleteYou can debate metrics until the chickens-of-the-sea come home, I still insist my zucchini is less likely to be affected by Fukushima than anything in the ocean is.
ReplyDelete:)