Posts Tagged ‘agriculture’
“The duty of a good Cuisinier is to transmit to the next generation everything he has learned and experienced.”*…
Five years ago, we marked the passage of Lynn Olver, a reference librarian who pretty much single-handedly created and maintained The Food Timeline: history of human eating habits for 20,000 years. Worried that her life’s work might lie fallow and spoil, her family was searching for a new host.
Happily, one was found. Later in 2020, Virginia Tech University Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS) offered Virginia Tech as a new home for the physical book collection and the web resource– and the site lives on…
Ever wonder how the ancient Romans fed their armies? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip…and why? So do we!!! Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it’s impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve…
Dive into “The Food Timeline,” courtesy of @vtliberalarts.bsky.social.
See also (the source of the almanac entry below) chef James T. Ehler‘s marvelous FoodReference.com– “on this date” history and more.
(Image above: source)
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As we dig in, we might send healthy birthday greetings to Gilbert Blane; he was born on this date in 1749. A Scottish physician who served on the Sick and Wounded Board of the Admiralty, he instituted health reform in the Royal Navy. Perhaps most memorably, he was largely responsible for requiring citrus juice (lemons, later limes) on all naval vessel to prevent scurvy.
“Wheat feeds the West, rice sustains the East”
Tomas Pueyo on why this is so… and what that has meant for culture and history…
What’s your staple, bread or rice?
This is a momentous fact, for it might have determined politics, culture, and wealth.
How? Well, bread comes from wheat, and rice from… rice…
… Wheat and rice are not harvested in the same places. Rice and bread are the predominant food where rice and wheat are respectively the predominant crops. Here’s another way to look at the same data:
This, in turn, is determined mainly by this:
… But this doesn’t fully explain it since it also rains a lot in Ireland, for example, but nobody grows rice there. You need the heat found closer to the equator: Rice grows in hot, wet, flat, floodable areas, whereas wheat prefers cooler, drier, better drained areas.
Flooding rots wheat but can 3x the yields of rice. That makes wheat well adapted to hills, whereas rice can only survive on hills when they are terraced.
This sounds like just a fun fact, but it ain’t. Because rice generates twice as many calories per unit of area.
This means that rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires. Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas, or four times with double cropping. A hectare of land can feed 1.5 families with wheat and 6 with rice.
Yet rice paddies also require a lot of work—twice as much as wheat. And that work is almost year-round: preparing paddies, raising seedlings in nurseries, transplanting every single seedling by hand into flooded fields, managing water, pumping it, weeding, harvesting, and threshing—often followed by a second rice crop or a winter crop. These tasks peak during transplanting and harvest, creating critical seasons where a huge amount of work must be done in a short window of time.
Crucially, this labor cannot be delayed—if you miss the planting window or harvest late, the crop is ruined. As a result, rice farmers developed reciprocal labor exchange: neighbors help each other transplant and harvest in time. The timeliness pressure meant rice villages became tightly cooperative communities to ensure everyone’s fields were tended before it was too late.
Wheat farming historically had a more seasonal rhythm with periods of relative quiet. Wheat is typically sown in the fall or spring and then mainly just left to grow with the rain. Aside from episodic weeding or guarding the fields, there was less continuous labor until harvest time. Harvest itself was a crunch period requiring many hands with sickles—European villages would collaborate during harvest, and farmers might hire extra reapers.
These differences made these regions diverge across politics, culture, and economy…
Read on: “How Bread vs Rice Molded History,” from Pueyo’s Uncharted Territories.
* adage
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As we deliberate on our diets and their destinies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires). It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the alamanc entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging open-range cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming.
“Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?”*…
In an excerpt from his book White Light, Jack Lohmann explores the rare and special element phosphorus…
In the moments that follow the death of a whale, when the light disappears and is swallowed by dark, the body’s weight draws to the base of the sea and compresses. It settles in mud. It forms an environment known as a whale fall, a world that will last for decades.
The whale fall grows in stages. The larger species come, the eels, the sharks. They rip apart the dead whale’s flesh. The tail, the head, the organs are consumed. The size of predator lessens as the length of time extends. Tiny mouths clean the bones dry. A skeleton remains; bacteria descend upon it. They turn bones into nutrition, consuming the whale in a process that is almost imperceptibly slow. Worms arrive and burrow through the skeleton. Other organisms come and eat the worms. Larger predators reinhabit the space. Within a barren, lightless plain, on the basis of decaying bones, a world is born.
Whalebone contains an element that is rare: phosphorus, a limiting ingredient in life on Earth. Of all the elements of the periodic table, phosphorus is one of six that are absolutely necessary for the existence of life. Of those six, phosphorus is the most limited. Because of its rarity, it controls life—it determines who grows and shrinks, who lives and dies, what areas become biologically wealthy and which ones will be biologically poor. “The maximum mass of protoplasm which the land can support, like the maximum that the sea can support, is dictated by the phosphorus content,” Isaac Asimov, the biochemist, wrote in 1959. Phosphorus, he wrote, “is life’s bottleneck.”
Each of the six essential elements performs a vital role. Carbon forms long chains, connecting compounds together to create large, complicated structures. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. Nitrogen and sulfur create proteins, providing organisms with food. Phosphorus converts energy, carries information, constructs cell membranes, and performs a host of other actions that underpin life’s complexity. Phosphorus allows seeds to grow and fruit to ripen. It is the main ingredient in matches. It both enables life and destroys it. Sarin gas, created from white phosphorus, is a potent agent of chemical warfare.
When it is isolated, phosphorus emits a steady, menacing glow. Phosphorescence is the name that is applied to this phenomenon: it describes materials that glow without ignition. The glow of the upper ocean is phosphorescent. Some paint glows. One consistent feature of the near-death experience, reported by people whose hearts stopped beating and bodies began to fade, has been the presence of a peculiar brightness all around. Images flash, the soul floats, and the body is left behind. The mind feels calm. (It is, in fact, surging with electricity: its final moments are seemingly near.)
When phosphorus burns, it bonds with oxygen, creating phosphate: one atom phosphorus, four atoms oxygen. Phosphate is remarkably prevalent in all life forms, although it is otherwise comparatively rare throughout the world. It is crucial to our existence. Outside of life, phosphate exists in geological form, made up of condensed, crystalline structures that are hidden in the crevices of our planet. Inside of life, it exists in every cell. It forms the membranes that hold the parts of cells together. It provides energy, in the form of adenosine triphosphate, ATP, which powers the actions of all life-forms. Even before birth, each of us gained identities by way of the cumulative influences of small phosphate groups, which held together the strands of our DNA. As we grew from zygote to cellular zillionaire, those groups enabled the replication of DNA and the formation of more complex beings—us.
The phosphorus in our bodies came, at first, from molten lava, hardened into rock. That rock eroded out of mountains, flowed down rivers, and fertilised the land below. The land supported the growth of plants, which allowed the spread of animals. The human body is, roughly speaking, one percent phosphorus. Phosphorus is spread throughout our cells, but it is concentrated mainly in our bones. We are extensions of the planet—we forage for phosphorus by eating plants and animals, and we fertilise the soil through waste and death. Plants thrive on this natural fertiliser. Phosphorus moves through the bodies of plants and animals, fungi and bacteria, and ultimately, usually, makes its way to the water. It is deposited as sediment: it forms new rock on the seafloor. The rock is made of compressed bodies, phosphorus squeezed from lives that are no more. It is littered with phosphatic bones, with phosphate-encrusted bivalves, with fossilised phosphate scraps. These things are hidden, set to be released in geologic time. As this time passes, the Earth’s plates move. The underwater rock becomes land. The land erodes. The cycle continues.
The story of phosphorus runs through every strand of DNA in every organism in the world. It runs through every piece of food and waste, and every living thing. But the story of how humans changed the phosphorus cycle is rooted in a few specific spots. We first found phosphate rock in England, and the fertiliser industry began. The industry changed when rock of greater scale was found in Florida; but today, the Florida rock is almost gone. Our global agricultural system rests upon the dictates of Morocco’s monarch.
Already, in some places around the world, the end of phosphate rock has occurred. It happened on the island of Nauru, far out in the Pacific, and there we see a world that passed its limits. It peaked, declined, and fell to ruin. Amid those ruins, the story of our broken phosphorus cycle comes to a close.
But it does not need to end there. There is mass resistance to the modern expansion of corporate farming methods. The world’s small farmers, who produce half our food, work their land with the nuanced understanding that agriculture has always been an ecological effort. They safeguard phosphate and replenish it.
Scientists, economists, and engineers are working to make phosphorus recycling compatible with modern life. Food, we now know, feeds our bodies better when it comes from healthy soils, and healthy soils come from nature, not from machines. Supported by this understanding, people are working to create a better agriculture. Cities are composting food scraps. Disenfranchised farmers are fighting for their land. If we listen to those with knowledge—rather than those with money—it is possible to restore the cycles of the earth.
There was once, long ago, a different kind of phosphate problem. When life first started, 4.5 billion years ago, the problem was that phosphorus existed only in rocks—and then, of course, no one was available to mine them. Life needed concentrated pockets of phosphorus in order to form. In a century of study, scientists have not come to an agreement about how nature solved its problem. Something happened in a pond, around a vent, near a meteor strike—something. We do not know exactly. We do know something happened, though, because we are here.
Today, phosphorus remains a part of the mix of chemical elements present in the earth’s magma, and volcanic eruptions create sprawling beds of igneous rock that hold within them trace amounts of the mineral. Now, however, humanity has transferred large amounts of phosphorus onto farmland, into streams and ponds, into rivers, and, ultimately, into the ocean.
The result of this is somewhat murky, but it appears that humans are changing the geology of the world. We are leaving a legacy in stone, and we are doing it by creating anew a world that once existed—one overrun with algae in the waters, with dying fish, with widespread oxygen loss in the sea. This new world is not, for us, ideal. (For algae lovers, it may be paradise.) But it is conducive to the formation of phosphate rock. This new rock will be formed and buried over intervals of millions of years. It will be hidden beneath the ground, prepared to be discovered in the future.
Just as phosphate enables life in humans, so too does it feed the life of the whale fall. The destruction of the bones of the whale provides enough fat to support a community of bacteria, and it releases enough phosphate to support the expansion of the ecosystem. The whale fall lasts because of the barrenness that surrounds it: the cold temperatures and darkness of the deep ocean preserve the whale carcass for the creatures that can access it, allowing the ecosystem to exist without floating away or being quickly eaten. Instead, whale falls remain as they begin—remote, shadowed, and teeming with life.
The nutrients provided by a whale fall represent, in a single day, two thousand years of sustenance. Their effect, ecologically, is strong enough that biologists have identified dozens of species of ocean-dwelling organism that evolved to specialise only in whale falls, those thousands of little worlds beneath the sea. There are four-foot worms and hairy crabs, clinging shrimp and curious sharks, bacteria that float, fish that feast, a mess of life, growing and thriving, a community unto itself, separated from all other beings by a dark emptiness that extends in all directions.
This blip of abundance seems bound to recede, and eventually it will. Over a period of half a century, the whale fall’s nutrients begin to dwindle, and the organisms that feasted on them go away in turn. The ecosystem fades into the landscape that surrounds it. Barrenness overtakes the ground. Just decades after a new world of opportunity opened up, life disappears; this little spot of seafloor is unlikely to be visited by such prosperity ever again…
Of the six chemical elements necessary for life, phosphorus is the rarest. It determines what grows and shrinks, who lives and dies: “Life’s Ancient Bottleneck,” via @quillette.bsky.social.
* Stendhal
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As we esteem an exquisite element, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that Jell-O was introduced in strawberry, raspberry, orange and lemon fruit flavours. The product is based on gelatin, derived from a protein produced from collagen– importantly (a la whalebone) composed in part of phosphorus— extracted from boiled bones, connective tissues, and other animal products.
Peter Cooper, inventor and founder of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, obtained the first American patent for the manufacture of gelatin in 1845. In 1895, cough syrup manufacturer Pearl B. Wait purchased the patent and developed a packaged gelatin dessert. Wait’s wife, May David Wait named it “Jell-O.” In 1899, Wait sold Jell-O to “Orator Francis Woodward”, whose Genesee Pure Food Company produced the successful Grain-O health drink. While sales were intitially slow, they grew steadily, and Walt’s company (which changed its name to Jell-O Company) merged first with Postum, then General Foods, then Kraft– which reports that they sell more than a million packages of Jell-O brand gelatin each day.
“I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts.”*…
… a sentiment that grates on the indivisualists among us. Still, there’s no denying the enormous impact that standardization has had. In an excerpt from his book, Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, Simon Winchester on the revolution that came from interchangeable parts…
Lewis Mumford, the historian and philosopher of technology, was one of the earliest to recognize the major role played by the military in the advancement of technology, in the dissemination of precision-based standardization, in the making of innumerable copies of the same and usually deadly thing, all iterations of which must be identical to the tiniest measure, in nanometers or better. The stories that follow, in which standardization and precision-based manufacturing are shown to become crucial ambitions of armies on both sides of the Atlantic, serve both to confirm Mumford’s prescience and to underline the role that the military plays in the evolution of precision. The examples from the early days of the science are of course far from secret; those from today, and that might otherwise be described in full to illustrate today’s very much more precise and precision-obsessed world, are among the most secure and confidential topics of research on the planet — kept in permanent shadow, as the dark side necessarily has to be.
It was in the French capital in 1785 that the idea of producing interchangeable parts for guns was first properly realized, and the precision manufacturing processes that allowed for it were ordered to be first put into operation. Still, it is reasonable to ask why, if the process was dreamed up in 1785, was it not being applied to the American musketry in official use in 1814, twenty-nine years later? Men were running, battles were being lost, great cities were being burned — and in part because the army’s guns were not being made as they should have been made. There is an answer, and it is not a pretty one.
Two little-remembered Frenchmen got the honor of first introducing the system that, had it been implemented in time and implemented properly, would have given America the guns it should have had. The first, the less familiar of the pair, despite the evidently superior nature of his name, was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, a wellborn and amply connected figure who specialized in designing cannons for the French artillery. He supposedly came up with a scheme, in 1776, for boring out cannons using almost exactly the same technique that John Wilkinson had invented in England, that of moving a rotating drill into a solid cannon-size and cannon-shaped slug of iron. Wilkinson had patented his precisely similar system two years earlier, in 1774, but nonetheless, the French system, the système Gribeauval, as it came to be known for the next three decades, long dominated French artillery making. It gave the French armies access to a range of highly efficient and lightweight, but manifestly not entirely originally conceived, field pieces. (Gribeauval did employ what were called go and no-go gauges as a means of ensuring that cannonballs fitted properly inside his cannons, but this was hardly revolutionary engineering, and it had been around in principle for five centuries.)
The second figure, the man who did the most to bring the system of interchangeable parts to the making of guns, and whose technique was, unlike Gribeauval’s, unchallengeable, was Honoré Blanc. He was not a soldier but a gunsmith, and during his apprenticeship he became well aware of the Gribeauval system. He decided early in his career that he could bring a similar standardization to the flintlock musket, for the benefit of the man on the battlefield.
Yet there was a difference. A cannon was big and heavy and crude — a gunner simply touched his linstock, with its attached lighted match, to the vent, and the cannon fired — and so such parts as there were proved easily amenable to standardization. With the flintlock, however, the lock (that part of a musket that delivered the spark that exploded the priming powder that ignited the main charge and drove the ball down the barrel) was a fairly delicate and complex piece of engineering, made of many oddly shaped parts and liable to all kinds of failure. To the uninitiated, the names of the bits and pieces of a flintlock alone are bewildering: a lock has parts that are variously known as the bridle, the sear, the frizzen, the pan, and any number of springs and screws and bolts and plates as well as, of course, the spark-producing (when struck by the aforementioned metal frizzen) piece of flint. To render the lock into a standard piece of military equipment, with all its parts made exactly the same for each lock, was going to be a tall order.
Cost, rather than the well-being of the infantryman or the conduct of the battle, was the prime motive. The French government declared in the mid-1780s that the country’s gunsmiths were charging too much for their craftsmanship, and demanded they improve their manufacturing process or lower their prices. The smiths not unnaturally balked at the impertinence of the suggestion, and promptly tried selling their products to the new armories and gun makers across the Atlantic in America, a move that alarmed the French government, as it imagined it might well run out of weaponry as a result.
It was at this point that Honore Blanc entered the picture, taking a civilian job as the army’s quality-control inspector. His brother gunsmiths expressed their dismay over the fact that one of their number was going over to the other side, was a poacher turning gamekeeper. Blanc dismissed the criticism and got on with his job, his own motivation being the welfare of the soldier out in the field rather than allowing the government to cut costs. He was greatly influenced by M. de Gribeauval, and decided he could ape his system of standardization, ensuring that all the component parts of a flintlock he made as exact and faithful copies of one perfectly made master.
This master he made himself, carefully and with great precision, and with all the specifications laid down as precisely as possible (using the arcane system of the Ancien Régime, which still employed dimensional measures such as the pointe, the ligne, and the pouce) to tolerances of about what today we would recognize as 0.02 millimeters. He then made a series of jigs and gauges to ensure that all the locks made subsequently were faithful to this first perfect master, by the judicious use of files and such lathes as were available. The gunsmiths hired by Blanc to perform this task — by hand, still — made each lock exactly as the original. Providing that they did so, exactly, all the pieces would then fit perfectly together, and the whole assembled lock would fit equally perfectly into each completed weapon.
Yet only a small number of gunsmiths were willing to work under these stringent new conditions. Most balked. Making guns simply by copying parts reduced the value of the gunsmith’s craftsmanship to near insignificance, they argued. Unskilled drones could do their work instead. By arguing this, the French smiths were voicing much the same complaints as the Luddites had grumbled over in England: that precision was stripping their skills of worth. This argument would be heard many times in the future as the steady march of precision engineering advanced across Europe, the Americas, the world. The kind of mutinous sentiments heard in the English Midlands half a century before were now being muttered in northern France, as precision started to become an international phenomenon, its consequences rippling into the beyond.
Such was the hostility in France to Honoré Blanc, in fact, that the government had to offer him protection, and so sequestered him and his small but faithful crew of precision gun makers in the basement dungeons of the great Château de Vincennes, east of Paris. At the time, the great structure (much of it still standing, and much visited) was in use as a prison: Diderot had been incarcerated there, and the Marquis de Sade. In the relative peace of what would, within thirty years, become one of postrevolutionary France’s greatest arsenals, Blanc and his team worked away producing his locks, all of them supposedly identical. Blanc made all the necessary tools and jigs to help in his efforts — according to one source, hardening the metal pieces by burying them for weeks in the copious leavings of manure from the castle stables.
By July of 1785, Blanc was ready to offer a demonstration. He sent out invitations to the capital’s nabobs and military flag officers and to his still-hostile colleague gunsmiths, to show them what he had achieved. Many officials came, but few of the smiths, who were still seething. Yet one person of great future significance did present himself at the donjon’s fortified gates: the minister to France of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson…
On the making of the modern world: interchangeable parts, from @simonwwriter, via the invaluable @delanceyplace.
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As we mix and match, we might spare a thought for another contibutor to our modern age, Jethro Tull; he died on this date in 1741. An agronomist who promoted planting seeds in rows (as opposed to “broadcast,” simply casting the seeds around), he perfected a horse-drawn seed drill in 1701 that economically sowed the seeds in three neat rows; because of its internal moving parts (including a rotary mechanism that became part of all sowing devices that followed), it has been called the first agricultural machinery. He later developed a horse-drawn hoe, a four-coultered plow that made vertical cuts in the soil before the plowshare.
Tull’s methods– horse-hoeing and row seeding, effectively a rejection of traditional Virgilian husbandry– were initailly controversial, but were steadily adopted by many landowners and helped to provide the basis for modern agriculture.
“As a work of art, I know few things more pleasing to the eye, or more capable of affording scope and gratification to a taste for the beautiful, than a well-situated, well cultivated farm”*…
That sentiment dates for the middle of the 19th century. The business of feeding humans (and our livestock) has changed a good bit since. George Steinmetz has traveled the globe documenting current practices. While (on the evidence of his remarkable photos) the process is still beautiful, it does raise some important questions…
Since the domestication of plants began some 11,000 years ago, humans have converted 40% of the earth’s surface into farmland. With the global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050, combined with the rising standard of living in rapidly developing nations, it is estimated that we will have to increase the global food supply by 60%. The Feed the Planet project is an examination of how the world can meet the rapidly expanding challenge of feeding humanity without putting more natural lands under the plow. Most of us only come into contact with raw food in the supermarket, and are unaware of the methods used to raise it. In many cases, the food industry goes to significant lengths to prevent us from seeing how our food is produced. Access to this information is central to the personal decisions we make about what we eat, which cumulatively have huge environmental impact. This project seeks to show how our food is produced, so that we can make more informed decisions…
Many more striking photos, and their illuminating stories, at: “Feed the Planet.”
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As we study sustenance, we might recall that it was on this date in 1825 that Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kensett of New York City were granted the first U.S. patent for food storage in tin cans. Canning had been practiced at an “industrial” scale in the U.S. since 1812 (when Kensett established the first U.S. canning facility for oysters, meats, fruits and vegetables in New York); Daggett and Kensett had been canning seafood since 1819.
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