From the December 2008 issue of the Ester Republic.

A few Sundays back I attended one of the four or five farmers’ markets that serve the Tucson area. I was struck by the appearance of vegetable starts on many vendors’ tables, in November! I did not notice the strangeness of this right away; at first I merely browsed through the tomatoes, squash, peppers, and eggplant—all varieties that one might expect in the Southwest—and lamented not having a garden of my own to tend during this sabbatical. It was not until later, when I saw a sign advertising special pricing on pre-order lamb for Thanksgiving, that the right side of my brain turned on and alerted me to the incongruity. People grow their gardens here in winter! How fascinating, how different, how beautiful!

Some of the world’s greatest beauty can be found in how people adapt their foodways and home economies to the unique challenges of their environment, at the same time adapting their environment to suit their own lives, and in these things are lessons for our future. Take Alaska: there is much beauty in built structures like fishwheels, hoop-houses and greenhouses; in land use practices like controlled burns, beach gardens, and the cultivation of wild berry stands; and in food preservation, from salmon hanging in bright orange strips from smokehouse rafters, cans of vegetables lining shelves with patterns of greens and reds and yellows and silvers, to root cellars—mosaics of browns, purples, and all of the earth tones and earth smells that belong there. Each of these is work of art, each a living diorama of the Alaskan existence.

I think of these things often during my time here, out a kind of homesickness perhaps, but not because the Southwest lacks for a similar beauty. Rather people here live their own beautiful and unique traditions, as unique to the desert as ours are to the sub-arctic. There are some similarities in the patterns of agricultural life; whereas we have to prepare for late spring and early fall frosts, here they have to worry about them mid-season, in January! And just as an Outsider might be surprised by what can be grown in Alaska, even the familiar, cold-weather stalwart rhubarb can be grown here with some adjustment. They grow it as an annual, planting it in fall and harvesting twice in the spring!

Here too foodways create a living diorama of the desert; kitchen walls the color of the earth are adorned with bright red and purple braids of drying peppers. Dry beans, corn meals, and wild spices of every imaginable color and flavor can be found if you know where to look. Market tables are loaded with waxy, oil-stained boxes of salt-cured whitefish and sun-dried Angus beef. Ranchers take long, peaceful walks every day, followed by groups of children and dogs, guiding their herds to drink from the nearby acequia that runs with water that may or may not be ‘theirs.’ And tortilla making is a rhythmic, all-day affair, particularly in Mexico, something done almost idly with the hands during conversation with neighbors or children returned home after school.

Each of these acts and artifacts, in Arizona or Alaska, is one piece of a cultural landscape that includes both man and the land. Each on its own may not seem entirely rational when scrutinized, or be linked in some obvious way to some larger strategy for self-reliance, ecological stewardship, or sustainability, but each in their own way does lend something to these larger patterns, and it is for this very reason that each seems inexplicably beautiful. Of course there is equal potential for human adaptation of the environment to be an ugly and unsustainable; clear-cuts, placer-mines, and runaway sub-urban sprawl, each of these happen when people, unwilling to change themselves, try instead to force all of the change and compromise onto the world around them. But relatively speaking these are the exceptions, not the rule.

I think it is to aspire to a far more natural state of being, if there is such a thing, to pursue the beauty of mutuality in the apparatus of our culture, bringing man and nature together rather than setting them at odds. But to do so means casting off this more recent set of values that, in response to so much man-made destruction, has convinced so many that beauty and value lay only in a world without trace of humanity, a world within fences built to keep us out and ‘nature’ in. That we must dominate the land and that we must isolate it for its protection are ideas cut from the same cloth.

What do you see when you look at a farm of windmills? I see the same beauty, harmony, and possibility that I see in the markets of Tucson and Fairbanks, in fishwheels and acequias, and in garden starts going on sale in November. Many, however, see only man’s further spoiling of the landscape. This is no different than to look at the forest fire see devastation rather than renewal, or to look at the lion feeding on wildebeest and see death but not life. All are misunderstandings of the beautiful patterns and cycles in nature, and the worst misunderstanding of all is to assume that we and our culture are not, or should not, be a part of them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 3:57 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Anthropology, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.