I was reminded last night of the classic definition of a
weed – a plant simply growing where you don't want it to be. At issue, in other words, is the eye of the
beholder and not the intrinsic character of plant.
Dan Barber, chef/owner of Blue Hill Restaurant in Manhattan
and Blue Hill at Stone Barns a little further upstate in New York was in town to speak about moving beyond farm
to table – the focus of his recent book The
Third Plate. He traced the elaborate
rotational system of a New York grain farmer who harvests breathtakingly
delicious wheat – wheat that depends on the nutritional/agricultural alchemy of
those 4 prior crops in the rotation to create the kind of soil necessary to
generate its memorable flavor. The
problem, according to Barber, is that only the wheat is profitable. The “marketplace” has no interest in the
other four. Never mind that all of them
have culinary value; from a commercial standpoint they are the equivalent of
weeds.
Waste.
Commercial nuisances to plow under to make room for what you want.
We have a problem with discards. Our lifestyle is predicated on the assumption
of waste. We unwrap and throw away. Our trash cans have grown bigger and
bigger. And how many plastic can liners
do we go through in a year – bloated and draw-stringed and hauled to the
dump? How many heads have been scratched
bald over the dilemma of what to do with all these landfills. We bury them, barge them, ignore them, and
truck them to less-populated areas, but we never question the assumption that they are a requisite accompaniment to modern life. There
will be waste.
And let me just say that the problem is not just trash. Every dimension of life has elements we
discard as useless – professional, spiritual, relational, religious; the
equivalent of those multiple crops in the rotational system that we must, by
necessity, “get through” in order to “get to” the one we want. We throw certain life experiences away, we
throw certain people away, we view certain journeys as benign but necessary
spaces to cross in order to reach our desired destination.
But what if we are missing something?
In 1940 Sir Albert Howard published his landmark book, An Agricultural Testament, in which he
makes observations about nature’s way of farming. Among his summary conclusions is this: “In nature there is no waste”. The cast-offs or by-products of one function
become the raw material of another.
Think autumn leaves and animal manure.
There is no waste. There is no such thing as a weed. Everything has a purposeful use. Everything is an expression of value.
It's easy, in this age of environmental anxiety, for me to
get on my high horse and decry our abuse and declaim the necessary
corrections. I have righteously refused
to purchase one of those Keurig coffee makers because it takes my breath away
to think of all those plastic cups and foil lids sacrificed to satisfy my
constant caffeine craving. How many
mountains of those little cups have we already discarded? But what if the problem does not start with our behaviors but rather with our inactive imaginations? What
would happen if we changed our paradigm about “waste” and came to view it as
“resource” for which we simply haven't imagined a good use? What if as much ingenuity was invested in
conceiving a use for expended Keurig cups as was harnessed in their initial
invention? What if, as in nature’s
farming, our assumption would be that there would be no waste; that everything
has good use?
Who knows what might be cleaned up, nourished, flavored,
enjoyed, created – or better still, saved?
No comments:
Post a Comment