The Dark Mountain Blog
Lessons from Burdock
posted by Ian M
26th June, 2012
When people find out that I forage a lot for wild foods and engage me in anything more than a cursory discussion on the subject, I’m often surprised by how quickly they jump to the question of whether it would be possible to subsist entirely off plants gathered in this way. Sometimes they use this as a fast-track to denial - ‘you can’t feed a family on weeds, so why bother?’ – while other times, at the other end of the all-or-nothing spectrum, you can see a utopian vision of freedom invading their imaginations in a heartbeat.
Usually, in these hyper-individualistic times, they then want to know how to do it for themselves, perhaps imagining it would help them in a survival situation – giving them a competitive edge over the panicked hordes in a zombie apocalypse – or allow them to retreat into the woods away from any contact with society. Sometimes they want to know if hunting and gathering could sustain a global population of 6 to 7 billion human beings (again this often functions as a dismissal of the whole concept of gathering wild foods).
Only rarely do they ask about specifics relating to their present situation: what’s available for harvest in their immediate surroundings; what’s a good plant to heal an ailment they or a friend or family member are suffering from; what’s a good recipe for including a new plant in their diet, etc. Only rarely do they show signs of a slow-burn commitment to expanding their knowledge and practice over the years in a considered attempt to improve the quality of everyday life both for themselves and for those around them.
But the more I learn about plants, and the more I gain practical, first-hand experience of how they can support me in my dietary, nutritional, medicinal and even spiritual needs, the less I find myself caring about the big, worldwide questions or about driving at maximum speed towards 100% pure, personal self-sufficiency. I’m already on my way. I can intensify my efforts if I want to get there quicker, but really, what’s the rush? It’s unrealistic to expect somebody to turn all their inherited culture’s ways upside down in one lifetime. I do what I can in my given circumstances.
In the meantime I needn’t fall prey to the new religious guilts of carbon footprints and hosepipe bans (which come with the implied message that all human activities are inherently destructive and suggest that the only responsible course is to minimise the ‘impact’ as much as possible) because I know that it’s possible for human beings to act in ways that actually benefit other plant and animal species while satisfying our own needs in a mutually supporting relationship. Working slowly to maximise my impact in this way feels about a million times better than the self-loathing embedded in most contemporary environmentalism.
Here are some specific experiences with a specific plant that led me to these conclusions.
It’s been over two years since I last dug up Burdock for the roots, and something like five since I first started searching for this plant after seeing Ray Mears unearth some huge specimens and talk about their potential, not only as an important starch-filled survival food, but as a likely caloric staple for the hunter-gatherer cultures which lived here before farming took hold some six thousand years ago. In my eagerness and enthusiasm to partake in this (pre-)history and get my teeth into a hefty wild food that could even compete with cultivated rootcrops like carrots, parsnips & potatoes for size and bulk, I jumped in head first and ended up making my first serious foraging error – mistaking the first spring growths of Lords and Ladies (aka Cuckoo Pint) for Burdock, based on the aforementioned TV footage and a handful of pictures and descriptions I’d seen on the internet.
I’d dug up a few plants that had hallelujah’d at me during a walk along the Thames near Oxford and brought them back home in my pocket. They didn’t have the same huge, deep roots, and came with a funny little tuber which I’d not heard mentioned. Nevertheless, ignoring the lingering sores on my hands (which I had attributed to unseen nettles during the digging), I proceeded to steam the stems and do a taste test on them. This was unremarkable by itself, but when I took a tiny nibble from the freshly cut, white inner flesh of the raw tuber, it was a different story.
Apparently Lords and Ladies defends itself using microscopic dagger-shaped crystals of calcium oxalate interspersed between the cell walls, and these shoot out when the plant’s body is broken or disturbed, embedding themselves fairly reliably in the flesh of the hapless creature responsible for the disturbance. Youch! So after a promising initial rush of sugary starchiness while I mixed the tiny morsel with saliva in the front of my mouth and gave it a cautious nibble, my mouth started to tingle, then ache and then burn all the way to the back of my throat, even though I’d spat and rinsed with cold water almost immediately. I finally identified the plant correctly (thanks mainly to my symptoms) and learned that, while they do have a recorded edible use as a ‘poor man’s potato’ and of being rendered into ‘portland sago’ (a thickener akin to arrowroot) or laundry starch, this requires careful baking and/or pulping in water to destroy or denature the crystals, and when eaten raw it has even been known to cause death through inflammation of the throat tissues and subsequent asphyxiation! Happily the burning died down within a couple of hours, but it was still noticeably sore for the following two days.
Lesson 1 - Respect the plants! Spend enough time to be able to identify them confidently and be careful what you put in your mouth!
It turns out that burdock comes up significantly later than Lords and Ladies, and I did manage to find and dig up some plants later in that same year, learning to look for the dried-out second year stalks and remaining sticky burrs to indicate where I was most likely to find a community of younger plants poking through. It was during this time that I found some properly massive specimens, growing in gravelly clay soils by an artificial irrigation ditch.
These gave me my first indication that it might be possible to subsist entirely off foraged foods in this country (hence the triumphal, ‘take that, surburbia!’ pose struck in the second image above), especially after I got my eye in over several long-distance walks and started noticing the plants growing in large patches in many different places. My eyes swelled with fatness* from seeing a new abundance of food in the landscape in this way, but I also felt a new sensitivity towards the plants themselves and a growing reluctance to swoop in and put an end to all their hard work before they even got the chance to reproduce. I couldn’t just take from these beings. So for a long time I avoided digging plants up or, more generally, any kind of harvesting that would prove fatal to them. A small portion of the leaves, fruits, seeds – okay; whole roots – no, unless they had to come up for other reasons, eg: gardening operations.
Lesson 2 – Don’t kill unnecessarily. Consider the plant’s needs and, where possible, try to fit yourself around them so that both parties can get what they want.
A couple of things clicked in me over the following years. First I heard about Australian aboriginal practices of digging up edible roots and replanting the crown and the rosette so the plant would grow back again, allowing for a sustainable harvest, albeit over a long timespan. Then I saw Derrick Jensen talk about the fundamental law of the predator/pray relationship – ‘If you consume the flesh of an Other, you now take responsibility for the continuation of the Other’s community’ – and how life was only possible through this respectful bargain of looking after the land and all the species sharing the same space with you. Most importantly, ensuring that the sum total of your actions contributed to the health and resilience of the community, because in the end every species gets weighed in the balance** and those that are found wanting lose their right to life and become extinct.
Finally I got to grips with the notion that humans weren’t exempt from this law, and with the rather counter-intuitive idea that our direct involvement, even through heavy-handed, apparently destructive techniques such as fire setting, coppicing, hunting etc, could actually have a beneficial impact on ecosystems, as well as for the individual plant and animal species concerned. As Kat Anderson put it in Tending The Wild, an exploration of land management in preconquest native Californian cultures:
Several important insights were revealed to me as I talked with elders and accompanied them on plant gathering walks. The first of these was that one gains respect for nature by using it judiciously. By using a plant or an animal, interacting with it where it lives, and tying your well being to its existence, you can be intimate with it and understand it. The elders challenged the notion I had grown up with – that one should respect nature by leaving it alone – by showing me that we learn respect through the demands put on us by the great responsibility of using a plant or an animal.
Many elders I interviewed said that plants do better when they gather them. At first this was a jarring idea – I had been taught that native plants were here long before humans and did best on their own without human interference – but it soon became clear to me that my native teachers were giving me another crucial gift of insight. California Indians had established a middle ground between the extremes of overexploiting nature and leaving it alone, seeing themselves as having the complementary roles of user, protector, and steward of the natural world. I had been reading about how various animals’ interactions with plant populations actually benefited those plants – how grizzly bears scattered the bulblets of Erythronium lilies in the process of rooting up and eating the mature bulbs, how California scrub jays helped oaks reproduce by losing track of some of the acorns they buried – and it seemed plausible that the many generations of humans in California’s past had played a similar role. If it was true that native plants did better with our help, it meant that there was a place for us in nature. (Tending The Wild, p.xvi)
I remembered that in the footage I’d seen† Ray Mears had in fact made a point of planting the seeds from nearby mature plants when harvesting his Burdock root to help the plant propagate itself and hopefully replace what he had taken.
Lesson 3 - Others have to die so that you can live. In return, you have an obligation to look after their brothers and sisters and help their kind to thrive. Someday you too will die, and the loan these others have given you will be repaid in full.
This year, as part of my herbal apprenticeship, I had it suggested making a tincture or vinegar from burdock and mullein roots. Unfortunately I’ve not yet seen the latter growing anywhere near to me, but about a week ago it felt like a good time to go out hunting for Burdock again, so I grabbed my digging stick (made from a stout piece of Hawthorn), a small hand-trowel and fork and headed down to the river, where I’d gathered from successfully in previous years. Unfortunately there were no signs of growth yet in any of the usual spots, so I made do with some early ramsons (wild garlic) and baby nettles, and started making tracks back home via a different route. All of a sudden, in a sunny patch by the side of the path, I spied some old flower stems, and – hooray! – some of the flannely, white-bottomed leaves just starting to emerge from the sandy soil in several places nearby.
I judged that there were enough new plants to spare three for my purposes, so I selected a small group suitably close together and set about digging my trench. It was hard, sweaty work. A few horseriders and dogwalkers came past during this time, which made me slightly nervous because technically I think you need permission from the landowner before uprooting any plant in the UK. Because this was beside a public footpath I didn’t know who to ask, so I went ahead and assumed it was okay as long as I tidied up afterwards. Who within a ten-mile radius, apart from me, considers burdock anything other than a noxious weed, if they even can even recognise it in the first place? I disagree with Richard Mabey when he instructs his readers:
Never pull up whole plants along any path or road verge where the public has access. It is not only anti-social and contrary to all the principles of conservation, but also, in most places, illegal. (Food For Free, p.23)
Honestly, I don’t care what the current lot of bandits and gangsters ‘in charge’ of this country have defined as ‘illegal’, and generally view these as suggestions that I’m free to ignore as long as someone isn’t actually there & prepared to back up the law with violence or the other usual forms of coercion.‡ Anyway, nobody complained, and people appeared interested when I explained what I was doing. When I was done I scooped all the soil back into the hole, tamped it down a little, seeded it with a few handful of burrs and covered it with a loose mulch of leaves and twigs, making sure to thank burdock for its generosity, explain my intentions and promise that I would be back in the future.
Back home, after a couple of days, I got round to scrubbing one of the roots, slicing it up, leaves’n’all, in the food processor and dunking it in vinegar for a liver-supporting tonic that should be ready in a month or so. The following morning I sliced up another half-root’s worth to go into a breakfast fry-up:
(Ingredients: eggs, bacon, onion, red pepper, beechnuts, nettles, linseed, butter all fried together, plus tea, toast, tomatoes, salt, pepper, herbs, ramsons butter, nettle infusion. Mmmm…)
The root has a very distinctive smell when freshly cut. A sharp, slightly abrasive smell, at the same time earthy and musty, that seems to reach deep into your throat and lungs. As if it’s angry about being exposed to the air. The taste is more pleasant – vaguely nutty and radishy raw, but blander when cooked.
If you want to read more about the medicinal side of things, I recommend you read about Home-Sweetening Christine’s experiences with Burdock and check out this comprehensive page of info. PFAF go into some of the other edible uses for the aboveground parts. I’ve experimented with their suggestion to germinate the dark-brown woody seeds and eat them like bean-sprouts. They are actually quite nice this way – the taste resembles that of the older leaves, but takes a week-or-so to get to their shocking, bitter potency.
Common burdock/gobou (source)
Why is burdock root not known as a foodstuff in Britain (unless you count the dandelion and burdock drink, which most often contains only artificial flavourings)? Under the name gobō it is well-known in Japan (Masanobu Fukuoka grew it ‘semi-wild’ in his orchards), where they often cook it with pork, fry it with carrots or even snack on it like crisps. Perhaps chronic famines compelled the Japanese and other Asian culinary traditions to diversify their foodbase away from simple grains, as happened in France (and surely during earlier times in Britain). Or maybe they never saw any reason to totally supplant and forget earlier subsistence strategies from the times before intensive agriculture. Either way we’ve not been so lucky here. As Ray Mears & Gordon Hillman wrote in Wild Food, the book accompanying the BBC series:
Roots were an extremely important food source for our ancestors. In Britain we have more than 90 indigenous species of edible root of which most were probably used by the combined populations across the country. Even an individual band of hunter-gatherers probably used 20-30 species in the course of their annual round. Compare this to our present-day diet, in which root foods are dominated by a single introduced species – the potato – and in which our cultivated carrots, turnips, swedes and radishes were probably much later additions, domesticated in the Mediterranean Basin from where they were introduced into Britain, although wild forms were native here. The bland taste of these domestic forms probably appeals to a lot of palates in contrast to the broad range of distinctive and often strong flavours offered by wild roots. (pp.80-1)
I’ve wondered if, in the days before fossil fuels, the civilised/imperial culture put a premium on energy density in the foods it chose to cultivate, especially the carb-heavy grain staples. These provided a coarse fuel for the greatest possible amount of work from the slave classes of manual labourers and domesticated farm animals (neither of which are particularly well adapted to the food), and later fed the armies which would spread this way of life through conquest of neighbouring territories. This appears to have been the case with the potato which, freeze-dried and stored over long periods in the form of ‘chuño’, originally underpinned the Inca empire and was subsequently adopted by Spanish conquistadors, mainly because it ‘proved a convenient food for slaves in the Spanish silver mines and sailors on the Spanish galleons’ (link). Whenever I’ve done work that requires a lot of physical exertion I’ve found that I need bulky foods like bread, pasta or porridge to sustain the effort employers expect from me.
But then, why choose these field crops to cultivate as staples instead of tree crops like oak, hazel or chestnut, or wetland crops like reedmace – yields of which have been shown to compare favourably to grain harvests, and which don’t require the huge energy inputs of deforestation, drainage or annual tillage of the soil? As Patrick Whitefield has written:
No-one went to the trouble to invent a northern form of agriculture using the indigenous edible plants. If they had, the landscape might look very different now, perhaps more like the native wildwood and less like an imitation of the south-west Asian steppe. (The Living Landscape, p.85)
Others report that foods rich in animal fats and protein give just as much – if not more – energy to humans than starchy foods. For example, ‘Less than two pounds of pemmican [a mixture of dried meat and saturated fat from buffalo] per day could sustain a man doing hard physical labor. The ratio of fat to protein in pemmican was 80%-20%.’ Perhaps if the first Neolithic farmers and the subsequent waves of invaders hadn’t been so aggressive in imposing their foreign plant and animal domesticates, Britons would still be eating foods like nuts, berries, tuberous roots, fish, and meat from woodland animals and wildfowl. This would undoubtedly result in better human health as well as being more appropriate to the indigenous ecology. I don’t see why burdock wouldn’t fit into that mix.
Lesson 4: A plant may give you energy, but what do you need that energy for? If some start to harness it in a bid to concentrate and increase their power, using you as the tool (or weapon) through which it is channeled, then maybe you had best leave that plant, like the fossil fuels, safely in the ground.
I wish you luck and excitement as you get to know this remarkable plant.
Ian M’s blog can be found here.
——
* – Psalm 73
** – Daniel 5 (dunno why all these biblical references were springing to mind – maybe because I originally wrote this during Lent?)
† – Has anybody else come across this? I did find it on youtube a while ago, but haven’t been able to track it down for the life of me.
‡ – As I’ve written elsewhere, ‘People (or a class of people) who have degraded and brutalised the landscape so comprehensively over the last few centuries/millennia have no business telling the rest of us how, when (or if!) we will relate to the land.’
Posted by Ian M on 26 June, 12
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Awesome post and brilliant points; you’re blogs in my feed now :)
Awesome post and brilliant points; your blogs in my feed now :)
Marvellous – I’d been wondering about starchy roots, ancestors and animal fat! Thanks for this (and the excellent links.) Definitely time to get out more…
Great reading, thank you. Burdock is a favorite of mine.
The clip you mentioned from Ray Mear’s Wild Food with Gordon here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG8Z5O_2C-U&feature=relmfu two mins in.
“Honestly, I don’t care what the current lot of bandits and gangsters ‘in charge’ of this country have defined as ‘illegal’, and generally view these as suggestions that I’m free to ignore as long as someone isn’t actually there & prepared to back up the law with violence or the other usual forms of coercion.”
Tending towards the arrogant, brother, in your dismissive attitude to the law of the land designed to CONSERVE wild flora. Now I don’t know when this law first came in, but Mabey’s Food For Free was first published in 1972, so if it was in the 70s it’s not a law emanating from the current crop of overlords is it?
And surely you don’t think the content came from ministers and MPs alone? I imagine it was a result of representations and recommendations made by bodies like the wildlife trusts, by plant ecologists of the day, and so on. FOR conservation of biodiversity, in the days before the word “biodiversity” was coined (1986). I think it’s an example of a good law, and that your attitude is anti-social, rather than awesome and brilliant. If this is what Dark Mountain’s all about, Dark Mountain can fuck off.
Nice post. I live in Japan and eat burdock regularly. Its delicious, a kind of stringy, oaky, potato.
Thanks for the comments, all.
@Karen – THANK YOU. I’ve been looking all over the place for that damn sequence! I like what Mears says near the end [5:38]: ‘I’m confident Mesolithic hunters were not simply scraping a living, but were at home in forests full of opportunity and making use of it all’ – a handy retort to the usual association of foraging with abject poverty, famine or desperate survival situations. It turns the question around to one of “Why don’t YOU feel at home in the land?” and “Why are YOU scraping a living in the midst of such abundance?”
@ Jerry – Your comment provokes a lot of responses in me. I’ll try to limit my reply to the constructive ones.
Firstly, I take it you noticed the word ‘generally’ in the quote you posted – this was my view on how best to respond to ALL laws, as enforced by the authorities of the day, not a reaction to this one law in particular. It’s not my intention to dismiss the ‘law of the land’ – clearly it’s relevant to me if by breaking it (however inadvertently) I can get arrested, fined or imprisoned! But as a human being I have my own moral compass which I primarily steer by. If sane and sensible laws coincide with that, so much the better – good for them! More often, though, they act as a hindrance through their reflecting (and reinforcing) the views of the rich and powerful and working to consolidate their privilege.
Anyway, you forced me to do some research… With regards to foraging the laws we’re talking about are the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000) and the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981). Fergus Drennan put a solicitor’s summary of how they relate to foraging in the UK up on his site here. Straight away you see different standards applied to landowners vs. the general public:
What of wild roots?
These statements, along with later comments about wild & domestic animals are rife with the standard civilised assumptions, not to say delusions, about ownership and the entitlement it confers. They violate the natural sense that NO creature can be the ‘property’ of another; that we belong to ourselves and ourselves alone. Furthermore: if there is no ownership, then there is no ‘theft’ or ‘trespass’. People are free to (shock!) wander where they will and interact with plants & animals they come across in ways of their own choosing.
A quick search dug up this article on the ‘History of Conservation Legislation in the UK’. It’s old, so doesn’t mention the CROW and some of the info may be out of date, but this bit on the WCA is interesting:
So it seems you were right about the conservation lobby’s effect on the law, though they were clearly limited on the kind of amendment they could pass.
Finally, regarding antisociality – have you considered inter-species sociality? Does it make sense to fight to protect a chosen species on the one hand, while on the other you get all your food from damaging agricultural practices which destroy the habitats of myriad species across the globe? I’ve tried to show with this article that foraging doesn’t have to be a strip-mining, extractive activity; that it’s possible to develop long-term, mutually sustaining relationships with plant (and animal) communities that don’t preclude consuming one another. Conservationists here seem remarkably slow coming to the conclusion that ‘plants do better when [we] gather them’ (as per Kat Anderson, above). The ‘look but don’t touch’ attitude still seems very much in vogue, feeding the cultural mythology that humans beings are separate from something Out There, called ‘the natural world’, and that we can only ruin things if we get involved.
I don’t believe this attitude has a future. In fact I’d say we continue to ruin things by NOT being involved.
all the best,
Ian
PS: speaking of ruining things by not being involved, check out this post by Peter Bauer, aka Urban Scout. Some wild plants might depend on being dug up and eaten by humans, possibly in violation of well-meaning conservation laws:
A new twist on the concept of ‘conservation through gastronomy‘!
Sadly, I doubt we have any such deep human/plant interdependencies surviving over here. Those relationships must have disappeared along with the wolves, bears and wild aurochs hundreds or thousands of years ago. These days it seems that, if anything, many of the rare plant species have adapted to depend on the continuing depletion of soil fertility through intensive farming, grazing and forestry regimes – hence the conservation interest in maintaining grassland meadows and coppice woodland.
I’m interested in building up (or rekindling) new relationships with the plants and animals we most often consider to be ‘wild’ – i.e. outside of our sphere of influence, excepting our capacity to destroy. Already with Burdock I’m starting to see how my actions of digging up the roots and re-seeding the same area changes the growing conditions for future plants. Thanks to my digging stick they will have a much looser soil to grow in, perhaps allowing for thicker or deeper roots and more vigorous above-ground growth. In time this low-key form of cultivation might extend the selection pressure to other aspects of the plant, e.g. flavour, size, appearance, texture etc, as appears to have happened with the various Japanese varieties. Oak species are known to have less bitter acorns in places with a tradition of management, either for livestock fodder or directly for human consumption.
Authentic indigenous traditions might be extinct in this country, but whose to say we can’t build new ones?
I
A very enjoyable read. Thank you.
I am a keen forager living in Japan where, as you noted, burdock (gobo) continues to be a popular food. It is rarely wild harvested though as it has found a privileged place in crop fields. Burdocks nutritional and medicinal qualities were well recognized and so it has been taken in to the fold of domesticated food plants. And the Japanese have some really fantastic ways of preparing it.
The Japanese do continue to have a strong cultural conection to some wild foods but, as I am discovering, for only a tiny proportion of what is actually edible, nutritious/medicinal and widely available.The deep roots these wild plants have in the culture is, as you assumed, partly due to their importance as crop replacements in times of hardship. Early Japanese farmers certainly had their fair share of famines but beyond catastrophic crop failures there was an appreciation for the wild foods that filled the gaps in the yearly harvesting cycles and for the wild foods that provided powerful tonic cleansing effects in the spring (celebrated to this day in Japan as the seven herbs of spring). Further, there is the east Asian notion (still persisting to a small degree in hyperindustrialized Japan) of food as medicine and a recognition that many wild foods are far more nutrient dense and medicinally potent than their cultivated cousins.
There is an astonishing abundance of wild foods in Japan. In the forest where I live I eat wild foods daily throughout the year and spend very little time in harvesting efforts. I strongly suspect there is a connection between this abundance and the lifeways of the hunter-gatherer-planter Jomon, the first peoples of Japan. There is some evidence that the Jomon were engaged in a form of forest gardening. Certainly they were consciously aiding the spread of chestnut trees, tending valued timber species and on wetland edges spreading various grains. Interestingly almost all of the domesticated vegetables commonly associated with Japan were known to be consumed by Jomon before the arrival of the agriculturalist Yayoi people. Yet there is no evidence of Jomon practicing what we would recognize as agriculture. And this brings us around, I think, to your points about humans interacting with wild plants in a manner that aids their spread and vigour but without subjecting them to domesticating processes.
Thanks for a great comment, Dion! Very glad to have someone fill in the gaps and substantiate my ill-informed hunch like that. :)
I’m interested in this ‘hangover’ phenomenon whereby preceding hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies survive in the succeeding culture as a fall-back for hard times, an aid to the poor (my understanding is that agriculture fosters hierarchy whereas foraging inclines towards egalitarianism – see Anthropik) or a supplement to the bulk energy provided by the annual grains. The ‘seven herbs’ sound like a good example of this. In Britain we had the ‘Tansy omelette’ made with the newly emerged leaves of the highly aromatic plant which gave a jolt of energy after the heavy, sluggish foods of winter and also attacked any parasites that had made their home in you during that time. There’s evidence of regular acorn consumption by early farmers in Europe, interpreted by some as a kind of insurance policy against crop failure and (my speculation) possibly a remnant of earlier practices. The practice of pannage doesn’t differ so much from hunting wild boar who fed on the same acorns. And then you have the chestnut-eating peasant traditions of Southern Europe or Kentish cobnut orchards in the UK which persist to this day. Surely there’s some underlying continuity there…
Fascinating stuff about the Jomon and Yayoi peoples. We don’t even have names for the last h/gers (or, for that matter, the first farmers) on these islands, much less an enduring, intact legacy from their land management practices.
Yes, there’s still something deeply distasteful to me about the process of domestication. It smacks of slavery: “From now on you will serve only my needs and submit entirely to my will. You may no longer follow your own path, independent from my total control.” I’m looking for a different kind of plant/animal relationship that doesn’t require coercion and routine existential assault. Kat Anderson suggests there’s a pretty large grey area to play with:
I like that bushman quote – ‘Why should we [farm], when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’ ;)
Anyway thanks again and apologies for the slow response.
I
Ian,
thanks for the link to Anthropik. I read the piece you linked to and I’m looking forward to reading more in the 30 theses series. My own understanding of the eglaitarian nature of h/g socities comes largely from reading James Woodburn (‘Egalitarian Socities’, John Gowdy ed., Limited Wants, Unlimited Means. 1998, Island Press). Woodburn distinguishes between “immediate return” and “delayed return” societies. All agricultural socities are, by definition, delayed return but not all h/g socities are necessarily immediate return socities (e.g. those where boats, nets, beehives etc., are used – where considerable time and/or technical skill is invested to obtain yields over months or years). But, and this is the crucial point, the further the society moves from an immediate return system the less egalitarian it becomes.
If we are to call domestication a form of slavery then it raises the very interesting question of who has been enslaved by whom? Is it not humans that have been enslaved by corn and rice and wheat? Woodburn’s work (and that of many others) suggests that the domestication of plants and animals might just be what puts egalitarianism beyond our reach.
But then there is that large grey area that you mentioned. I first encountered this while spending time with Kalunguya forest dwellers in the Philippines. They occupied this in-between space where they grew rice in steep terraced paddy systems and some had small vegetable gardens but they relied on the forest for much of their food, medicine, craft and building materials. Interestingly, the geographical space they occupied was also very much in-between: beyond their valley lived the Agta, Negritos hunter/gatherers and, in the opposite direction, from where the road ended (about forty minutes walk from their village) it was all agriculture replete with air thick with the stench of fertilizer or the smoke from fields being burnt over, filthy water, desparately poor villages…. As we moved through the forest someone would notice a coffee sapling or a medicinal herb and would take a machete and clear around the plant a little to give it a slight advantage over its neighbours. Also, keeping seeds of food eaten in the forest in their pockets and tossing them around in suitable locations. Certain plants were even named after the animals that did the best job of spreading the seeds around. I was really impressed with how low labour their methods of propagation were. Work was a stroll in the forest! And work in the rice fields was a social gathering. The whole community planted and harvested each others fields together. The sugar cane liquor went around just as energy was getting low and lunch was a feast laid on by which ever families field was being worked on that day.
I find this grey area particularly interesting as a transitional strategy away from agriculture. (The Kalunguya are even more agricultural than what I am thinking of.) My partner and I are playing with this here. Its very similar to the forest gardening approach espoused by Robert Hart and many permaculturalists but a little more feral. Letting a place go wild while maintaining a high proportion of plants that can meet our needs (a nomadic h/g existence being rather out of the question with all the farmers around). It has surprised us how far we can take this. So far we have identified upwards of a hundred edible and/or medicinal plants almost all of which are within an area about one acre in size.
A return to horticulture supplemented by foraging is likely to become all the more appealing as climate craziness makes growing those domesticated annual food crops all the more precarious. Taking an approach to food production that requires reafforestation has got to be a good idea at this point.
Hi Dion,
Happy to introduce you to Anthropik, a big influence of mine. Enjoy the 30 Theses – some classic, essential writing in there IMHO.
I’ve heard a few others make the distinction between immediate and delayed return and how this affects the social makeup of cultures. It makes sense as a theory the way they (and you) have described it, so I guess I’ll have to check out Woodburn’s writings to see how he fleshes it out. Is the key to it the ‘considerable time and/or technical skill’ of delayed return and how this would lead to increased specialisation and division of labour, with the ‘higher’ skills earning more prestige, allowing their practictioners to lord it over everybody else and hold them to ransom if they refuse? This again speaks to the situation with medicine, where everyday folk remedies are undermined – even criminalised – until only an elite class of specialists are in a position to master and wield the hugely complex machinations of industrial/synthetic medicine.
Yes, a very interesting question. I’m not convinced about the ‘they did it to us as much as we did it to them’ line, though. People who make this argument tend to accept the idea of wide propagation of genes (through a brute expansion of population) as the one and only measure of species success. But what about the quality as opposed to the simple quantity of life? I don’t think it’s an accident how close the word ‘wild’ is to the word ‘will’. Have a look at this short video of our friend Ray Mears helping some steppe Mongols domesticate a camel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrBu9OfQTIk
The end result? ‘In a year’s time this camel will be tamed, receptive and obedient to its master’s commands.’ Domestication, at least when it comes to animals, seems to rely upon first breaking the will of a wild individual, subordinating it to your own, and then breeding out any further expression of this primal, independent selfhood in successive generations through what basically amounts to a campaign of eugenics. It takes a vast amount of energy on the part of the domesticator, because he has to work constantly to frustrate & defeat that will – the inborn tendency of every living creature – which never stops trying to reassert itself. Watching that camel, the process looks to me like a kind of existential assault or spirit-murder, with the humans applying the all the trauma of physical death, only it never comes to an end.
Relating this to the annual grains that have provided most of the food calories for every major civilisation, from one perspective this looks like a great success from the point of view of the wheat, rice, corn and other chosen species. But then you have to ask whether their deeper needs are met by this giant expansion of their genepool. As I understand it most of the seed-bearing annuals have an ecosystem role of ‘emergency first aid’ to land that has been damaged by flood, fire, volcanic eruption or other disturbances that rid the soil of vegetative cover. They put down shallow roots and grow rapidly to cover the soil before contributing heavily to the seedbank so to be ready to germinate when the next disturbance comes along. However, this is only meant to operate as a stop-gap until the perennial plants get a chance to re-establish. Generally the annuals don’t tend to stick around for more than one or two growing seasons unless there is renewed disturbance. Enter agriculture, described by Richard Manning as:
Seen from this perspective a field of wheat might not be crowing about a victory over all its competitors using mankind as its unwitting dupe, but instead crying out in exasperation at not being allowed to do the job it evolved to do. Instead of dying back gracefully, giving the ground over to the deeper-rooted, longer lasting perennials (whose job is to build greater stability and more diversity of habitat), farmers perpetuate the disturbance and never permit the land go past the first stage in the healing process, with depleted fertility, exhaustion and final loss of topsoil the inevitable consequences. Even the seedbank contribution is limited – one of the first developments in the domestication of wheat was a mutation that caused the seed to ripen on the stalk rather than falling to the ground. Early farmers of course seized upon this as a means to facilitate harvesting, propagating only the mutant strain from then on. The Green Revolution in the 20th century and recent genetic tampering further distort the plant’s biology in the name of production – always & exclusively for human needs.
Anyway, that was more than I intended to write… It’s a question I’m still struggling with, not least because of this ‘grey area’ where some degree of disturbance seems to have its place without necessarily leading to full-blown domestication. Thanks for the illuminating examples from the Phillippines. I’d love to be able to experience that almost archetypal difference in cultures someday. Like you I think I would be most inclined towards the ‘low labour’ end of the scale! Over here the most likely transitional route seems to be through allotments, back garden veg-growing (digging up all those useless lawns!) and other ‘dig for victory’ efforts on the gardening front. There’s plenty of foraging to do too, even in urban spaces, but I think we’ll have to wait until the failure of industrial agriculture before larger scale horticulture and agroforestry projects can begin to gain traction. Hopefully the farmers won’t fuck the land up too much in the meantime…
Yes!
I
[@the webmaster(s): so now using more than one hyperlink gets you arrested by the spam filter? Attempt #2 at this...]
Hi Dion,
Happy to introduce you to Anthropik, a big influence of mine. Enjoy the 30 Theses – some classic, essential writing in there IMHO.
I’ve heard a few others make the distinction between immediate and delayed return and how this affects the social makeup of cultures. It makes sense as a theory the way they (and you) have described it, so I guess I’ll have to check out Woodburn’s writings to see how he fleshes it out. Is the key to it the ‘considerable time and/or technical skill’ of delayed return and how this would lead to increased specialisation and division of labour, with the ‘higher’ skills earning more prestige, allowing their practictioners to lord it over everybody else and hold them to ransom if they refuse? This again speaks to the situation with medicine, where everyday folk remedies are undermined – even criminalised – until only an elite class of specialists are in a position to master and wield the hugely complex machinations of industrial/synthetic medicine.
Yes, a very interesting question. I’m not convinced about the ‘they did it to us as much as we did it to them’ line, though. People who make this argument tend to accept the idea of wide propagation of genes (through a brute expansion of population) as the one and only measure of species success. But what about the quality as opposed to the simple quantity of life? I don’t think it’s an accident how close the word ‘wild’ is to the word ‘will’. Have a look at this short video of our friend Ray Mears helping some steppe Mongols domesticate a camel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrBu9OfQTIk
The end result? ‘In a year’s time this camel will be tamed, receptive and obedient to its master’s commands.’ Domestication, at least when it comes to animals, seems to rely upon first breaking the will of a wild individual, subordinating it to your own, and then breeding out any further expression of this primal, independent selfhood in successive generations through what basically amounts to a campaign of eugenics. It takes a vast amount of energy on the part of the domesticator, because he has to work constantly to frustrate & defeat that will – the inborn tendency of every living creature – which never stops trying to reassert itself. Watching that camel, the process looks to me like a kind of existential assault or spirit-murder, with the humans applying all the trauma of physical death, only it never comes to an end. Also, I don’t think you could argue that the camel was the one domesticating/enslaving the humans in this instance!
Relating this to the annual grains that have provided most of the food calories for every major civilisation, from one perspective this looks like a great success from the point of view of the wheat, rice, corn and other chosen species. But then you have to ask whether their deeper needs are met by this giant expansion of their genepool. As I understand it most of the seed-bearing annuals have an ecosystem role of ‘emergency first aid’ to land that has been damaged by flood, fire, volcanic eruption or other disturbances that rid the soil of vegetative cover. They put down shallow roots and grow rapidly to cover the soil before contributing heavily to the seedbank so to be ready to germinate when the next disturbance comes along. However, this is only meant to operate as a stop-gap until the perennial plants get a chance to re-establish. Generally the annuals don’t tend to stick around for more than one or two growing seasons unless there is renewed disturbance. Enter agriculture, described by Richard Manning in his classic essay ‘The Oil We Eat’ as:
Seen from this perspective a field of wheat might not be crowing about a victory over all its competitors using mankind as its unwitting dupe, but instead crying out in exasperation at not being allowed to do the job it evolved to do. Instead of dying back gracefully, giving the ground over to the deeper-rooted, longer lasting perennials (whose job is to build greater stability and more diversity of habitat), farmers perpetuate the disturbance and never permit the land go past the first stage in the healing process, with depleted fertility, exhaustion and final loss of topsoil the inevitable consequences. Even the seedbank contribution is limited – one of the first developments in the domestication of wheat was a mutation that caused the seed to ripen on the stalk rather than falling to the ground. Early farmers of course seized upon this as a means to facilitate harvesting, propagating only the mutant strain from then on. The Green Revolution in the 20th century and recent genetic tampering further distort the plant’s biology in the name of production – always & exclusively for human needs.
Anyway, that was more than I intended to write… It’s a question I’m still struggling with, not least because of this ‘grey area’ where some degree of disturbance seems to have its place without necessarily leading to full-blown domestication. Thanks for the illuminating examples from the Phillippines. I’d love to be able to experience that almost archetypal difference in cultures someday. Like you I think I would be most inclined towards the ‘low labour’ end of the scale! Over here the most likely transitional route seems to be through allotments, back garden veg-growing (digging up all those useless lawns!) and other ‘dig for victory’ efforts on the gardening front. There’s plenty of foraging to do too, even in urban spaces, but I think we’ll have to wait until the failure of industrial agriculture before larger scale horticulture and agroforestry projects can begin to gain traction. Hopefully the farmers won’t fuck the land up too much in the meantime…
Yes!
I
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