Most notably, Noah Webster’sblue-back speller, first published in 1788, sold 80 millioncopies by 1888 (Green, 2001).

With the advent of the Gutenberg press, typesettersand publishers became the new gatekeepers for reliableinformation.

Although form andcontent are challenging to divorce, the time at the end ofthe nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century wasa period when print was taken almost for granted. It wasalso a time when the logic of print itself became synony-mous with the logic of being literate and of understandinglinear text as a means of developing understanding of dif-ferent kinds of content matter.

Afterall, the goal of education was not to impart critical think-ing; early British politicians saw mass education as a meansof crime reduction. Therefore, a British child was consideredliterate when they were able to “recite from a tattered book. . . the extent to which he understood what he read wasnot inquired into” (Altick, 1998, p. 151).

A typical school day in early nineteenth-century Britainmostly involved the rote recitation of select lines fromscripture, philosophy, and maybe a little literature if theywere lucky.

Yet by the early modern era in universities, lecturesbecame more of a gloss or a commentary upon the readingsthat students would have access to outside of the lecturespace rather than simply word-for-word recitations frombooks (Friesen, 2017, p. 117).

What remains debated about reading practices in theancient world is how common it was to read silently incontrast to reading aloud, particularly when it comes tounderstanding how reading aloud or reading silently in-tersected with scholastic, secular pursuits. Scholars likeG. L. Hendrickson (1929) and Josef Balogh (1927) arguedthat ancient readers were suspicious of silent reading, evenfor secular texts, because they were concerned that silentreading would lead to the elision of particular thoughts.

What do all your books profit you, who are too ignorant toappreciate their value and beauty? To be sure you look uponthem with open eyes and even greedily, and some of themyou read at a great pace, your eye outstripping your voice; butI do not consider that sufficient, unless you know the meritsand defects of all that is written there, and understand whatevery sentence means (p. 192).

“how could they possibly thinkthat words that have been written down can do morethan remind those who already know what the writing isabout?” (Nehamas & Woodruff, 1997, p. 551)

Socrates’s concern, therefore, was that the expansionof reading and writing technologies would completely de-stroy human memory.

The contemporary concept that reading from paper is mosteffective for learning emerged over a long period of time. Thisis not to say that paper, as a reading technology, is not im-portant for learning. Paper is an accessible technology insofaras it is lightweight, flexible, and portable. Yet silent readingfrom some pieces of paper bound together by glue and mas-sively printed is actually not the way that people practiced,recognized, or understood “deep reading” even just twohundred years ago.

We may still worry about how access to informationdistracts, absorbs, and disconnects us, but our goal here isto take one step back from those concerns to acknowledgethat we’ve always valued the same things: learning fromand listening to each other.

Down to the acquisition ofmaterials and approaches to the manufacturing processesthemselves then, histories of oppression affect what wethink of when we think of the book today.

n other words, the prestige of buying expensive andtrendy green products does not require a political investment (i.e., substantive knowledge or commitment to a cause). Rather, green purchasingcan simply be part of a prestige cycle. T

he author makes direct reference to theastonishing amount of waste that is the byproduct of American consumerism, which presents an opportunity for comment on the environmentalimpact of overconsumption. Instead, freegans are portrayed as "extremegreens": eccentric and quirky scavengers rather than rational utilitarians.

Other articles focus on messages about health. Previous research onwomen s magazines has identified a tendency to make women feel obligatedto actively pursue healthy behaviors and "achieve" health for themselvesand their families (Hinnant 2009).

Although this piece doesn't make directrecommendations to purchase certain products, the focus is never far fromconsumer choices (organic bamboo washcloths versus single-use cleansing pads, natural-fiber-bristle brush versus exfoliating body scrub, foilfree versus traditional hair highlights, elaborate versus recyclable packing,etc.

Sandilands argues that what is being sold in green consumerism is notreally the product, but the feeling of being green (1993). Therefore, thegreen product is fetishized and the details of its production and environmental footprint become a secondary consideration

xtending the seventieth-anniversary theme, the accompanyingarticle states, "In the 70 years Glamours been around, we've made majorinroads with sexism and racism. Now well be fighting for environmentalism, too, over the next 70 years and beyond" (Sole-Smith 2009,196). Theoverall tone is extremely self-congratulatory: Glamour readers have beenmaking a difference by recycling, unplugging their cell phone chargers,and buying green produc

Readers of all four magazines are likely to be in their mid- to latethirties, to be college educated, and to have a yearly household incomearound or slightly above seventy thousand dolla

Glamour and Marie Claire were chosen to represent the typicalwomens lifestyle magazine, focused primarily on fashion and beauty. Selfwas chosen for its concentration on health and exercise, and Vanity Fairbecause it tends to incorporate deeper coverage of political and socialissues

other words, there is a disconnect betweenmaterialist values in consumer society and the finite capacity of the naturalworld to sustain our current level of production (Good 2007)

French Revolution

No comparative icon embodies my point more than the welfarequeen stereotype born from President Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign,an icon persistently shamed as a system cheat and public burden and utilizedas a straw- person for rationalizing funding cuts to robust public services.

welfare queen

ese publications, and their audiences, have typically been conscious of social class. The magazines have used this awareness to encourage "appropriate" behavior based on a particular conceptionof women's roles and feminine domesticity, one that generally supportedadvertising interests and patriarchal ideology (which often seemed to beone and the same) (Durham 1995, 1996). For these reasons, feministcommunication scholars have critiqued women's magazines for beingmere "constructions of patriarchal oppression" (D'Enbeau 2008,17

. Audience communities constructed around a particular text or textual form (for example, women s magazines) function in tworelevant ways. First, they provide "spaces of withdrawal and regroupment"(Fraser 1990,68) or a location for private (i.e., intra-audience) discussionand interpretation. Second, they can also serve as organizational bases formovements or social causes. Whether or not mainstream publications areable to realize this potential is a significant question. Does green communication in women s magazines present more than a "marketing approach"to environmental problems? D

Certainly, as environmentalism becomes more closely identified with green consumerism, itbecomes somewhat less of a threat to powerful corporations, which couldmean increased media presence. But for certain environmental organizations, even amplified media attention can be problematic if the messagerests on green consumerism

More than forty years ago, economist Anthony Downs speculatedthat media coverage of environmental problems would be subject to an"issue-attention cycle," eventually falling out of public view: "We shouldnot underestimate the American public's capacity to become bored?especially with something that does not immediately threaten them"(1972, 47).

here is growing social acceptance of the idea that women haveunique environmental agency and an obligation to ensure that their families are living in an environmentally responsible manner. Thus we are seeing a surge in green commercialism that primarily targets women, who arenow expected to take responsibility for addressing environmental problems that are largely the result of patriarchal capitalist expansion

Surprisingly little research has examined environmental communication in the mass media from a feminist perspective, even as environmental communication (as a subfield of media studies) is experiencing rapidgrowth. This shortage is particularly interesting because like feminism andcommunication scholarship, feminism and green theory have often beenintertwined. Theorists from both fields recognize common concerns: thefetishization of consumer goods, the twin subjugation of women and nonhuman nature to patriarchal desires, and the neoliberal reliance on divisiveindividualist discourse, to name a few. But perhaps because it is a relatively new area of media studies (research dates only to the early 1970s),environmental communication has not yet been the subject of much?ifany?feminist analysis. Starting with a preliminary examination of environmental messages in the women's popular press (specifically, women'smagazines), this essay addresses that lac

But to many women, including somewho cooked from boxes and jars, the hands-off approach to makingdinner was fundamentally unsatisfying. It didn’t have enough to do withfood, or genuine work, or the pleasure of eating. Analyzing the empti-ness at the heart of “the housekeeping role” in the age of convenience,the psychologist Lois Hoffman observed that “many a housewife is sad-dened to learn that with a package mix she can make an angel food caketwo inches higher than the one she had previously made from onecookbook and twelve left-over egg whites.”

The series flopped. In 1952 General Mills tried again with anotherformat, this one featuring Betty Crocker as the hostess of an entertain-ment show with guest stars. That flopped, too.28 Americans could listento Betty Crocker on the radio, they wrote her thousands of letters aweek, they bought her cookbooks in record numbers, but they werenever comfortable with a real, live Betty Crocker who sat down in theirliving rooms once a week for a visit. Apparently the cognitive dis-sonance was just too overwhelming. The portentous message of thefirst program too was unpersuasive: women never wholly submitted tothe notion that homemaking was their most rewarding way of life

Strikingly, while she calls him Win, he invariably addresses her asBetty Crocker. There’s an implicit hierarchy in Betty Crocker’s radioworld, one that subtly reverses traditional sex roles. Betty Crocker isthe professional, Win is the homebody; she’s the source of information,Win is the enthusiast; she’s authoritative, and Win is supportive. In herbooks and in print advertising, Betty Crocker often made a point ofpraising the housewife’s importance; but this message gained tremen-dous power by going undercover, in a sense, on the radio. Rather thanovertly patting housewives on the back, she simply ran the show withconfidence, described her work and travels, and emphasized that goodcooking was an achievement in which women could take a great deal ofpride.

As she explained in a speech to advertisingcopywriters in 1948, her research among modern homemakers had con-vinced her that they felt “uncertain—anxious—insecure” about theirwork and its status. When she asked what they would need in order tofeel satisfied with their domestic careers, the answers echoed one an-other: “Encouragement and appreciation . . . Appreciation and recog-nition . . . Family appreciation. . . .” 18 Hence nobody in Betty Crocker’svicinity was in danger of being identified as “just a housewife,” not evenRita, whose chocolate cake—“What a success!”—was applauded prom-inently by all. In any home where Betty Crocker reigns, her radio showspromised, the woman in the kitchen finally reaps the respect she’s due

The most famous by far of these figures was, of course, BettyCrocker. A treasured property of General Mills, Betty Crocker has out-lived her sisters by several decades. Over the years her job has varied—today she’s more symbolic than genuinely authoritative—but duringthe immediate postwar era she was a sure, steady voice guiding home-makers through a time of tension and change in the kitchen. Millionsof Americans listened to her on the radio, read her column in the news-paper, and watched her on TV.

When Irma Rombauer, au-thor of The Joy of Cooking, published a cookbook emphasizing conve-nience foods in 1939, she listed and thanked all the “home economists”who had helped her but made no distinction between, say, JeanetteKelley of Lever Brothers (real) and Martha Logan of Swift (fictional)

Ever since the end of the SecondWorld War, chemistry labs and assembly lines had been taking overmore and more of the nation’s cooking. Now the food industry wasoverhauling the very concept of “cooking.” In ads and other promo-tional materials, such traditional kitchen chores as cleaning vegetables,chopping ingredients, measuring, and mixing were dismissed as old-fashioned drudgery. The new “cooking” meant opening boxes, defrost-ing foods, combining the contents of different packages, and decoratingthe results.

She was Mary Blake, well known as a spokeswoman for Carna-tion. Magazine readers may or may not have been aware that MaryBlake, per se, didn’t exist: Carnation’s home economists wrote hercopy, signed her mail, and made her speeches. At Libby’s, homeeconomists did the same for Mary Hale Martin; at Dole, she wascalled Patricia Collier; Ann Pillsbury presided over Pillsbury’s reci-pes, and there were dozens more, typically portrayed in the ads withpen-and-ink portraits of smiling women. These women weren’t real,exactly, although real women stood behind them.

BettyCrocker was little more than a signature at first, but she gained a voicein 1924 when “The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air” beganbroadcasting from a Minneapolis radio station, with a WashburnCrosby employee as Betty Crocker. The show ran for nearly three de-cades, registering more than a million “students.”

The most famous by far of these figures was, of course, BettyCrocker. A treasured property of General Mills, Betty Crocker has out-lived her sisters by several decades. Over the years her job has varied—today she’s more symbolic than genuinely authoritative—but duringthe immediate postwar era she was a sure, steady voice guiding home-makers through a time of tension and change in the kitchen. Millionsof Americans listened to her on the radio, read her column in the news-paper, and watched her on TV.

When Irma Rombauer, au-thor of The Joy of Cooking, published a cookbook emphasizing conve-nience foods in 1939, she listed and thanked all the “home economists”who had helped her but made no distinction between, say, JeanetteKelley of Lever Brothers (real) and Martha Logan of Swift (fictional).

Ever since the end of the SecondWorld War, chemistry labs and assembly lines had been taking overmore and more of the nation’s cooking. Now the food industry wasoverhauling the very concept of “cooking.” In ads and other promo-tional materials, such traditional kitchen chores as cleaning vegetables,chopping ingredients, measuring, and mixing were dismissed as old-fashioned drudgery. The new “cooking” meant opening boxes, defrost-ing foods, combining the contents of different packages, and decoratingthe results.

She was Mary Blake, well known as a spokeswoman for Carna-tion. Magazine readers may or may not have been aware that MaryBlake, per se, didn’t exist: Carnation’s home economists wrote hercopy, signed her mail, and made her speeches. At Libby’s, homeeconomists did the same for Mary Hale Martin; at Dole, she wascalled Patricia Collier; Ann Pillsbury presided over Pillsbury’s reci-pes, and there were dozens more, typically portrayed in the ads withpen-and-ink portraits of smiling women. These women weren’t real,exactly, although real women stood behind them

Placing reproductive justice understandings ofbody sovereignty in dialogue with food justice possibilities opens meaningfuldialogue about the complexities of choice language, while also acknowledg-ing its political salience in reproductive health and policy.

One of the central looming dilemmas in US food movements isbridging the gap in this economic divide that separates lifestyle change, policychange, and the day-to-day material realities of institutionalized inequalities.

At best, fat people are seen as victims of food, geneticcodes, or metabolism; at worst, they are slovenly, stupid, or without resolve.”Author Kathleen LeBesco similarly argues, “Many thin people can indulge in allmanner of unhealthy behaviors without being called to account for their bodysize. In other words, fat people are imbued with little subjectivity [while] thinpeople are imbued with heightened subjectivity.”66

Chef-activist Jamie Oliver has responded to the dilemma with mea-sures such as promoting healthy school lunch options available in publicschools, food theatres, online anti-obesity fundraising, and establishing com-munity kitchens as featured on his ABC reality television series and nationalcampaign Jamie’s Food Revolution.

They made seed bombs to lob over barbed wire fences onto the tightlycropped lawns of military installations and corporate headquarters. Packedwith the seeds of native flowers, the bombs would take root and grow. Littleclumps of vegetative anarchy. 55

Drawing from areproductive justice angle to generate a parallel conversation of the aforemen-tioned examples then, sovereignty-centric models center intersectionalism asa framework of choice rooted in the needs and desires of bodies and commu-nities rather than in right-consumerism.

. Rather, that going back to the land (or backto the kitchen) might be a direct action solution for some, yet prove uninter-esting, or prove to be a completely impractical impossibility for others, giventhe time, labor, and spatial necessities.

They take a patronizing, moralizing tone without di-rect discussion of the research cited. Both critiques rely upon loaded termslike complaining, whining, personal choice, male oppression, and social valuesto dismiss rather than ponder the extensive North Carolina State Universityethnographic research cited. Salatin challenges, “Since when are women theonly ones who are supposed to shoulder the burden for integrity food?” Brianargues that “of course wives, mothers, and women . . . shouldn’t shoulder [the]burden of preparing good food.” Yet the research represents 150 interviewswith racially diverse low-income and poor families, including more than 250hours of fieldwork. It does, in fact, delve in detail into work economies, un-paid labor, the legacy of food and sexed cultural values, and time constraints

Let’s StopIdealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner.”

When chal-lenged as to food inaccessibility due to the high cost of organic grapes at afarmer’s market venue, though, Waters notes, “Some people buy Nike shoes—two pairs. Some people buy grapes to nourish themselves. I pay a little extrabut it’s what I want.”

We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buyingexpensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s somethingvery Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I’mnot crazy about [America’s] obsession with corn or ethanol . . . but I’m[uncomfortable] with legislating good eating habits.45

There is an inundation offocus on green living, energy reduction, recycling, and individual-centeredenvironmental action, recapitulated with a long line of ads for increasedexpenditure—soy candles, vegan shoes, energy-efficient light bulbs, and thelist continues.

Beyond the genderand race dynamics of US food insecurity statistics, as well as farm operator-laborer demographics, the global dimensions speak yet another truth, whichis that women remain central to global food production, generating over 50%of the world’s total food supply—60–80% of the food in developing nationsalone.43 As the UN suggests, if we fundamentally see food as a human right,not as a privilege based on access to special resources, justice-centric para-digm shifts must lie at the heart of food movements.

Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity fromConsumer Culture constructed a more middle-class, gendered understand-ing of farming and food production as hobby-centered, noting, “All of thesegals—these chicks with chicks—are stay-at-home moms, highly educatedwomen who left the work force to care for kith and kin. . . . Th e Omnivore’s Di-lemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a wayfor women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper.”33

“Republicans wanted to impose new work requirements on foodstamp recipients; allow states to require drug testing for food stamps benefi-ciaries; ban ex-felons from ever receiving nutrition aid; and award states fi-nancial incentives to kick people off the program. None of those measureswere in the final legislation.”25

Specifically addressing the rise of eco-normativity as it relates to classedand gendered consumer trends and choice rhetoric, both Catriona Sandilands’1993 article “On ‘Green’ Consumerism” and Alexandra Nutter Smith’s 2010 ar-ticle “The Ecofetish” are here helpful for engaging the problematic ways inwhich women are often expressly targeted by green consumer trends in, asNutter suggests, “a surge [of] green commercialism primarily [targeting]women who are now expected to take responsibility for addressing environ-mental problems that are largely the result of patriarchal capitalist expansion.”

Feminist environmentalism isa useful lens for engaging the choice-centric discourse implications of foodpolitics and reproductive justice, given the field’s historical dedication to en-vironmental topics as relational to social justice endeavors, and as intercon-nected to human and non-human existences including seeds, water, wildlife,trees, domesticated animals, insects, and soil.

[Those] were our first community gardens [before] the term commu-nity garden was even necessary because the underlying assumption was thateverything was for the community. We didn’t have to clarify in the way thatwe often do now.”

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s 2012 Draft Principles forFood Justice similarly underscores the right “to produce, process, distribute,access, and eat good food regardless of race, class, gender, ethnicity, citizen-ship, ability, religion, or community.” 8 The focus in a justice-centric model,therefore, is not simply that all have the same legally recognized rights butthat some “may need different things to achieve them based on our intersec-tional location in life—our race, class, gender, sexual orientation and immi-gration status.” 9

Why?

These battles have exposed weaknesses in the facade of Big Food’s power, soft spots that some grass-roots food activists have recently figured out how to exploit. One example: Since the 1990s, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been organizing the tomato pickers of South Florida, some of the most underpaid and ill-treated workers in the country. In their decades-long quest to improve pay (by 1 cent per pound) and working conditions (until recently some Florida tomato pickers were effectively enslaved by their employers), the coalition tried every strategy in the book: labor strikes, hunger strikes, marches across the state. But the growers would not budge.

A case can be made that Michelle Obama, with little more at her command than the power of persuasion and her personal example, has achieved more on food issues than the rest of the administration. (It helped that she chose to focus on issues that resonated with ordinary Americans concerned about their children and did it in a voice that never sounded elitist.)

But the industry would accept nothing less than complete victory: It succeeded in killing any new curbs on its market power when the House Appropriations Committee stripped funding for Gipsa enforcement from the U.S.D.A.’s spending bill for 2012. And 2013, and 2014, and 2015.

That summer, the new administration mounted what would turn out to be its most serious challenge to the food industry. In fulfillment of Obama’s pledge to America’s small farmers and ranchers, the administration began an ambitious antitrust initiative against Big Food, investigating the market power and anticompetitive practices of the poultry, dairy, cattle and seed industries.

The first lady also helped establish a farmers’ market a block from the White House; a photo op featured her heaping a market basket with local produce and singing the praises of fresh vegetables.

Soon after the inauguration, the Obamas gave Big Food a case of heartburn when, in the spring of 2009, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn, a symbolic but nevertheless powerful act that thrilled the food movement.

The North American Meat Institute represents Big Meat, working alongside each animal’s dedicated trade association (the National Pork Producers Council, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Chicken Council).

According to one traditional yardstick, an industry is deemed excessively concentrated when the top four companies in it control more than 40 percent of the market. In the case of food and agriculture, that percentage is exceeded in beef slaughter (82 percent of steers and heifers), chicken processing (53 percent), corn and soy processing (roughly 85 percent), pesticides (62 percent) and seeds (58 percent). Bayer’s planned acquisition of Monsanto promises to increase concentration in both the seed and agrochemical markets.

In ways small and large, Obama left the distinct impression during the campaign that he grasped the food movement’s critique of the food system and shared its aspirations for reforming it.

In his long-shot quest to win the Iowa caucuses, he courted the state’s small farmers, many of whom feel victimized by the oligopolies that dictate the prices and terms by which they’re forced to sell their crops and livestock. He also courted rural Iowans whose communities are increasingly befouled by the hog and chicken CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) replacing the state’s family farms. Though CAFOs pollute the air and water like factories, they are regulated like farms, which is to say very lightly, when at all. Obama promised to change all that, vowing on the campaign trail to bring CAFOs under the authority of the federal Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and Superfund program “just as any other polluter.” He also promised to give communities “meaningful local choice about the placement, expansion and regulations of CAFOs.” To big pork and chicken producers, which had largely succeeded in gutting both local and federal authority over CAFOs, these were fighting words. And agricultural reformers cheered.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture. And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food.

One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.

In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school-lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce.

Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world? There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food.

Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined.

The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs?

These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration.

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion.

Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.” The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors. Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance.

There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before.

At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods.

they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street.

In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food.

It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.

But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production.

Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration–the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril.

The world has only so many places suitable for coffee production. Climate scientists estimate that at least half of the acreage now producing coffee—and an even greater proportion in Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change. Capitalism may be killing the golden goose. Yet capitalism is nothing if not resourceful. Employers who now offer coffee breaks might, someday soon, instead hand out tablets of synthetic caffeine, one in the morning, another in the afternoon. This would offer the employer several advantages. Pills are cheaper than coffee, and less messy.

Greinetz made the coffee breaks compulsory, but he decided he didn’t need to pay his workers for the half hour they were on break. This led to a suit from the Department of Labor and, eventually, to a 1956 decision by a federal appeals court that enshrined the coffee break in American life. The court ruled that because the coffee breaks “promote more efficiency and result in a greater output,” they benefited the company as much as the workers and should therefore be counted as work time.

The women began doing as much work in six and a half hours as the older men had done in eight.

He is especially good on the marketing of coffee to Americans, going back to independence, when the country broke from England’s tea habit and drinking coffee became a patriotic act.

Communism was another Manchester export that found its way to Santa Ana, this one arriving during the Great Depression, when coffee prices collapsed and unemployed coffee workers could no longer eat from the land. It turns out that leftists were also able “to transform hunger into power.” The climax of Sedgewick’s narrative comes in the early 1930s, when thousands of mozos, organized by homegrown Communists who had spent time abroad, rose up against the coffee barons, seizing plantations and occupying town halls. Revolution was afoot, at least until 1932, when the Salvadoran government, again at the behest of the coffee planters, launched a vicious counterinsurgency. Rounding up anyone who looked like an Indian, soldiers herded them into town squares and then opened fire with machine guns. The government’s campaign against the coffee workers came to be known as La Matanza—“The Massacre”—and its memory burns bright in the Salvadoran countryside.

Actually the choice wasn’t initially quite so stark. Even the lands newly planted with coffee still offered plenty of free food for the picking. “Veins of nourishment”—in the form of cashews, guavas, papayas, jocotes, figs, dragon fruits, avocados, mangoes, plantains, tomatoes, and beans—“ran through the coffee monoculture, and wherever there was food, however scant, there was freedom, however fleeting, from work,” Sedgewick writes. The planters’ solution to this “problem”—the problem of nature’s bounty—was to eliminate from the landscape any plant that was not coffee, creating an ever more totalitarian monoculture in which nothing else was permitted to grow. When a chance avocado tree did manage to survive in some overlooked corner, the campesino caught tasting its fruit would be accused of theft and beaten if he was lucky, or shot if he was not. Thus was the concept of private property impressed upon the Indians.

There, he built a coffee dynasty by refashioning the Salvadoran countryside in the image of a Manchester factory. Hill became the head of one of the “Fourteen Families” who controlled the economy and politics of El Salvador for much of the 20th century;

familiar red tins of Hills Brothers coffee.

“This wakeful and civil drink” also freed us from the circadian rhythms of our body, helping to stem the natural tides of exhaustion so that we might work longer and later hours; along with the advent of artificial light, caffeine abetted capitalism’s conquest of night. It’s probably no coincidence that the minute hand on clocks arrived at roughly the same historical moment as coffee and tea did, when work was moving indoors and being reorganized on the principle of the clock.

That chemical of course is caffeine, which is now the world’s most popular psychoactive drug, used daily by 80 percent of humanity. (It is the only such drug we routinely give to our children, in the form of soda.) Along with the tea plant, which produces the same compound in its leaves, coffee has helped create exactly the kind of world that coffee needs to thrive: a world driven by consumer capitalism, ringed by global trade, and dominated by a species that can now barely get out of bed without its help.

desirable

We have given it more than 27 million acres of new habitat all around the world, assigned 25 million farming families to its care and feeding, and bid up its price until it became one of the most valuable globally traded crops. Not bad for a shrub that is neither edible nor particularly beautiful or easy to grow.

A ballot initiative currently being drafted in Oregon would legalize guided psilocybin therapy under a state regulatory regime. It’s too soon to say whether this represents a sensible approach to making psilocybin available to healthy (as well as ill) people in a way that minimizes risks.

Researchers are currently on a promising path toward federal approval of psilocybin as a medicine. Unlike the case of cannabis, where the federal government actively blocked research into marijuana’s medical benefits, no obstacles have been placed in the way of psychedelic research and the process has not been politicized in any way I am aware of. I’m concerned that politicizing psilocybin at this particular historical juncture could jeopardize that process, which is widely expected to lead to federal approval and rescheduling of psilocybin in a few years’ time.

The prohibition of cannabis has been the foundation of the drug war, and led to the incarceration of thousands of people, many of them people of color.

While it is true that prohibition takes a psychological toll on mushroom users, I don’t see the same emergency in the case of psilocybin, where arrests have been relatively few and generally have not been targeted at people of color.

The risks of unsupervised psilocybin use are considerable, and of a different order than the risks of cannabis.

 Unlike decriminalization, legalization would encourage businesses to enter the market; they would not merely offer access but would actively promote the use of magic mushrooms

This confinement of cultural production has obviously not been limited to the written work: plays move to stages and music to concert halls during the parenthesis.

The primary impact on the mediated context of content during the parenthetical period is containment.

Pettitt thinks that studying past phases will allow a better understanding of where we are today and, conversely, that by studying Google we will have new ways to understand Gutenberg.

He points out that there is a common theme when people consider these changes — that they are not simply something new but also the end of something old.

Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period — Shakespeare’s — when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.

Similarly, tempestuous political debates over reproductive health in theUnited States are often couched in rhetoric pertaining to good or bad, rightor wrong “choices” rather than as extensions of environmental and socioeco-nomic constraint or healthcare limitations, including accessible, reliable, oreven simply available resources.4

On the other hand, given my research in wastepolitics and industrialized commodity flows, I couldn’t help but view themessage as another extension of ethical consumerist trends in environmen-tal activism, wherein individual consumption remains at the center of popu-lar environmentalisms, while systemic, highly profitable industrial models gounquestioned, even protected, by the state.2

that argues not for a war on the drugs so much as for a war on poverty — on the conditions of life that make using drugs seem like a reasonable solution or means of self-medication.

 Switzerland has perhaps the most ambitious approach to treating heroin addiction. The government gives you a prescription for heroin but then makes sure you have a job, decent housing and therapeutic support, on the theory you will no longer need the drug after your circumstances improve.

Ninety-five percent of them simply stopped using.

Two findings underscore this point, both described in Johann Hari’s 2015 book on drug addiction, “Chasing the Scream.” Much of what we know, or believe we know, about drug addiction is based on experiments with rats. Put a rat in a cage with two levers, one giving it heroin or cocaine, the other sugar water, and the rat will reliably opt for the drug until it is addicted or dead. These classic experiments seemed to prove that addiction is the inevitable result of exposure to addictive drugs, a simple matter of biology. But something very different happens when that experimental rat is sprung from solitary confinement and moved to a larger, more pleasant cage outfitted with toys, good food and companions to play and have sex with.

Addiction may be less a disease than a symptom — of trauma, social disconnection, depression or economic distress.

This is uncomfortable territory, partly because few Americans regard pleasure as a legitimate reason to take drugs and partly because the drug war (with its supporters in academia and the media) has produced such a dense fog of misinformation, especially about addiction.

West in the middle of the last century, they arrived without an instruction manual and so were sometimes used recklessly, without regard for set and setting.

Field Trip Health has opened a half dozen lavishly appointed clinics (with more on the way) offering ketamine-assisted therapy for depression, which is already legal, in anticipation of Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA and psilocybin. A psychiatrist on staff screens “patients” — i.e., customers — and then a doctor or nurse practitioner administers the drug; trained facilitators prepare the clients for what to expect and then sit with them during the experience, afterward helping to “integrate” — make sense of and apply — whatever they have learned.

Some legal experts expect them to prevail. This Supreme Court’s expansive jurisprudence on religious freedom has created a wide opening through which a parade of new psychedelic churches may be able to march. The same majority that ruled that the religious beliefs of a corporation, Hobby Lobby, exempted it from provisions of federal law may find it impossible to rule against the right of the Church of Lysergic Acid to use its chosen sacrament. Americans could soon be able to go to a church to have a ritualized psychedelic experience.

But what about the rest of us

These drugs are already well along in that process, and both should be approved for use in psychotherapy within a few years — MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin to treat depression and addiction. After that happens, doctors will be able to prescribe these compounds, though not willy-nilly. The agency is expected to issue regulations stipulating exactly how and by whom they can be administered, probably with a trained facilitator in a safe place, in order to maximize the value of the therapy and minimize the chances of a bad trip.

as well as MDMA

But the prospect of magic mushrooms being commercialized like cannabis — advertised on billboards and sold next to THC gummy bears in dispensaries — should fill us with trepidation.

In many Native American communities, peyote, a psychedelic, is not at all disruptive; to the contrary, its ceremonial use promotes social cohesion and heals trauma.

That conversation begins with the recognition that humans like to change consciousness and that cultures have been using psychoactive plants and fungi to do so for as long as there have been cultures. Something about us is just not satisfied with ordinary consciousness and seeks to transcend it in various ways, some of them disruptive (as psychedelics were in the West in the 1960s) and others generally accepted as productive, like caffeine. Hence the ritual of the coffee break, in which employers give employees both the drug and paid time off in which to enjoy it.

The blunt binaries of “Just say no” that have held sway for so long have kept us from having this conversation and from appreciating how different one illicit drug is from another.

Political opposition to all these measures has been notably thin.

In the past two years, a new drug policy reform movement called Decriminalize Nature has persuaded local governments in a half dozen municipalities, including Washington, D.C., to decriminalize “plant medicines” such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, iboga and the cactuses that produce mescaline.

Measure 109, specifically legalized psilocybin therapy, directing the state’s health department to license growers of so-called magic mushrooms and train facilitators to administer them beginning in 2023.

Fifty-nine percent of voters supported Measure 110, which decriminalized the possession of small quantities of all drugs, even hard ones like heroin and cocaine.

How did people themselves — when there were no books, how did people sort out the truth? How did they decide what they would rely on and what they wouldn’t rely on?

And I suppose the press, and journalism, and newspapers, will have to find their way. They will have to find some way of distinguishing themselves in this — it’s now a world of overlapping forms of communication. People will no longer assume that if it’s in a newspaper, it’s right. Newspapers are spreading urban legends, some of the time. Or at least now we know that they pass on urban legends. And the formal press will need somehow to find a new place in this chaos of communication where you can’t decide the level, the status, the value of the message by the form of the message. Print is no longer a guarantee of truth. And speech no longer undermines truth. And so newspapers, or the press, will need to find some other signals — it’s got to find a way though this.

‘if it’s in a book, it’s right,’ ‘if it’s in writing, it’s less right,’ and ‘if it’s in speech, it’s less reliable.’ We don’t know where we are.

I often tell my students that they should start their literature work, their work here, by tearing a book to pieces: Take a book, take some second-hand book, that looks impressive — and just rip it to pieces. And you can see that it’s just made, it’s just glued, it’s just stitched. And it’s not invulnerable. It’s just that someone’s made it. It doesn’t have to be true because it looks good.

And then paperback books weren’t quite as reliable, and newspapers and newssheets were even less reliable. And rumors you heard in the street were the least reliable of all.

Words, printed words — in nice, straight columns, in beautifully bound volumes — you could rely on them.

Yet imagine what could become of our gardens, and our relationship to them, if we won the right not only to grow but to prepare and take these psychoactive plants into our bodies, so that they might change our minds every now and again. I can attest to the fact that plants appear different when under the influence — in my experience, their agency and their subjectivity become blazingly apparent.

How amazing is it that a chemical invented by a plant — a plant I can grow in my garden! — should turn out to be one of the molecular keys to human consciousness?

Since they can’t locomote, plants have had to master biochemistry both to defend themselves and to attract the attention of animals who would disseminate their genes.

Plants produce all manner of poisons, but as Paracelsus, the Swiss Renaissance medical pioneer, famously observed,“the dose makes the poison”. Many of the dangerous alkaloids plants manufacture to defend themselves do other, more interesting things at low doses, including changing the texture of animal consciousness. There it is, right in the middle of the word intoxicate: toxic

But the elephantine leaves of the original tobacco plants, their undersides sticky with nicotine resin, deserve a place in the psychoactive garden, in spite of the plant’s evil reputation. Long before European colonists transformed this New World native into a lethal addiction, tobacco was revered by indigenous peoples as a sacred medicine with the power to purge ill health and evil spirits.

It has a drive for life few plants can match.

cannabis

The same is currently true for psilocybin mushrooms, except in a handful of jurisdictions — including Oakland, Santa Cruz, Denver, Oregon and Washington, DC — that have recently decriminalised “plant medicines”.

Peyote, the other mescaline-producing cactus, is straight-out illegal to grow or possess in the US, which is the only reason I don’t grow this lovely pin-cushion-shaped cactus.

The status of San Pedro is slightly different: it is legal to grow these hand-some columnar cacti, no matter your intentions. However, the moment you begin cutting up and cooking a chunk of the cactus (slowly simmer a stock from its flesh and drink a cup or two of that, or so I’ve been told) you are guilty of manufacturing mescaline, a felony that in the US carries a prison sentence of five to 20 years.

How would the authorities prove such an intent? Well, one way would be if your seed pods have been slit by a razor; the milky sap the pods bleed is opium. Another would be if you were in possession of an article explaining how simple it is to turn poppy seedpods into a mild narcotic tea (simply crush and soak them in hot water) or laudanum (soak them in vodka instead).

coca

I suspect that many of us gardeners regard ourselves as minor alchemists, transforming the dross of compost and water and sunlight into substances of beauty and power

I suppose we will always go to the garden to idealise our relationship to nature, but lately I’ve been looking to my garden to do something a little different, something a bit more like the old physic gardens. I’ve begun to pay more attention to the invisible chemistries percolating through it than to its outward forms and pleasures.

But the genius of plants is such that they can deploy the same chemistry to attract or repel, please or poison, depending on their objectives.

Though it turns out caffeine is already being produced in my garden by my lemon tree, albeit in quantities too small to be of any use to me.

This season I’m growing opium poppies (papaver somniferum); wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), the source of thujone, the alleged hallucinogen in absinthe; cannabis (which it is now legal to grow in California); morning glory, tobacco and three species of mescaline-producing cacti that go under the common name San Pedro or Wachuma: trichocereus pachanoi, t. bridgesii and t. macrogonus. Wanting to add caffeine to the collection of psychoactive molecules being synthesised in my garden, I recently added a tea plant (camellia sinensis).

The medieval and renaissance “physic garden” was less concerned with the beauty of plants than with their spooky powers: whether to heal or poison, they could change us in some way, whether in body or in mind.

Every garden tells a story, a tale about nature written by our species and starring an obliging cast of plants.

giant metal filing cabinet in your parents basement

<img src="https://d3h1lg3ksw6i6b.cloudfront.net/media/image/2018/04/26/5fab3bf3c6954e8685900ff3d729ccd4_Crazy+Rich+Asians_1.png" alt="Dim sum breakfast anyone? (Credit: Crazy Rich Asians YouTube.)"> Dim sum breakfast anyone? (Credit: Crazy Rich Asians YouTube.)

Some of the stalls looked too “modern” and had to be rebuilt so that they looked like it was set in the 1990s. Four stalls, including a fried carrot cake stall and a chilli crab stall, were built from scratch in the middle of the hawker center.

The Hawker Center Scene Featuring Nick, Rachel, Araminta and ColinLocation: Newton Circus Food Center

See revealed that about 40% of the food was edible.

The dining table was decked out with ornate gold platters piled with 12 to 15 types of food. These included chicken rice with four de-boned white chickens, vegetables with mushrooms, yong tau foo, lobster and prawn cocktail, soup in an intricately carved winter melon bowl and auspicious gold-hued pineapples stuffed with rice.

See, who does commercial food styling jobs across Asia, also had to take note of the actors’ dietary restrictions. For instance, Constance Wu, who plays Rachel, is allergic to shellfish and cannot handle spicy food.

He added that the food in the movie’s dining scenes were extensively captured from a multitude of camera angles. For example, for a shot of Peik Lin’s grandfather taking a bite of an abalone, 24 abalones were used to film just that one scene.