A NEW KIND OF LOCAL

“Mutant Roots” by Cleve West

Have we ever been Neolithic? Stacy Adimando makes a case for root vegetables as a kind of quasi-causal operator for the emergence of agriculture, in contrast to the fixation on grains. Human-plant coproduction of food continues to reinvent itself as researchers in Finland have successfully “3D-printed” food from plant cells in a kitchen sized bioreactor. Often the technological transformations of food procurement are seen as creating distance between people and the land, but the researchers tout it as “a new and exciting way of producing local food in their own homes”. Not only is this food “local”, but it is also wild – Finnish varieties of Arctic bramble and cloudberries.

In other curious developments, the Bright Green Group of Companies has announced a partnership with the Acoma Pueblo tribe to construct 80 acres of greenhouses on the reservation for the cultivation of medicinal plants. It’s unclear whether “medicinal” is a wink at investors to imply cannabis, but in any case the rationalization of plants-as-medicine in collaboration with a Native American tribe sounds ripe for some ethnography. Those working on indigenous rights more generally may be interested in the new Free, Prior and Informed Consent manual from the FAO.

The sportswear company Patagonia has announced their own line of beer. Considering that they also have a history of establishing national parks, this is not so remarkable, but was is interesting is that Long Root Ale is the first commercial beer to be made from kernza. Kernza is a perennial grain being bred by the Land Institute, where such grains have been called the “solution to the 10,000 year problem of agriculture”

Those who read the New York Times Magazine’s food issue this week saw those problems in dizzying (and strangely beautiful) display in George Steinmetz’s photographs. In the leading article, Michael Pollan expressed his disappointment at the lack of change during the Obama administration in terms of farming and food. What about change from below? Anyone who has read Seth Holmes fantastic “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies” will be interested to hear that the indigenous Mexican berry pickers at Sakuma Brothers Farms have organized into the first new farmers union in many years: Familias Unidas por la Justicia.