Song of the fields

[imomus]

Worried by Britain's financial meltdown, The Guardian recently ran an Apocalypse Survival Guide on their website front page. It took the form of a video of their correspondent Tanya Gold trying to fend for herself in a forest. The question was framed in selfishly individual terms: "What do you do if you're the only survivor after the apocalypse?"

Within seconds, Tanya references Hollywood: "It's happened. The worst. It's over. You wake up one morning and every nightmare scenario from a Hollywood film of the last twenty years has come true. Government has gone. The water is off. Electricity has gone. Everyone is dead. So what are you going to do, go and live in Sainsbury's and live off cake, or are you going to try and learn to live off the land, take natural resources, and, you know, go and hang out in the woods?" Hanging out in the woods turns out to involve graphic scenes of Tanya in full-on yuk mode, twisting the head off a pheasant and sticking her arm up its anus to pull out its heart.



A completely different scenario -- and attitude -- is presented by TV Tokyo's Hatake No Uta (Song of the Field), which airs on Sundays at about noon Japanese time (you can watch it on the LiveStation Player, but first you'll have to work out which of the three channels named TV Tokyo it is).

[Error: unknown template video]

If the Guardian's Apocalypse Survival Guide models a return to the land on a dystopian Hobbesian-Hollywood model of selfishness and violence, Hatake No Uta goes completely the other way. Here, survival in the countryside is a matter of semi-religious respect for nature, love of food, poetry, gentleness, wholesomeness, teamwork, beautiful scenery, simple, heart-warming people, something utopian. Now, sure, I wouldn't know country life if it bit me on the nose. But I do recognise cultural difference when I see it.

The video above -- a compilation of the sections involving singer-presenter Ueno Juri (that's why it's called Song of the Field) munching various root crops -- doesn't quite do the show justice. Last night's report was on a couple who lived in a farm in the Japanese alps. The woman -- only 28, but somehow timeless -- said she'd been inspired to start a farm in Japan after a trip to South America, where the low-tech farming had appealed to her.

There were scenes of tofu-making in flowery housecoats, of pulling up radishes from under the snow, of a visit from an old lady neighbour, of produce kept in pink plastic buckets. The programme is sponsored by Food Action Nippon, a citizen movement which aims to improve Japan's 40% self-sufficiency rate for food, to slow food down, and to "preserve cultural heritage such as vegetables, fruits and cattle that are in danger of vanishing and tied to a specific region and special cultivation techniques".



The craziness of our current food situation came up in my interview with Mike Mills yesterday, when Mike started talking about the food miles represented by one cup of Starbucks coffee. One estimate of the commodity chain food mileage in a single cup of Starbucks coffee suggests the ingredients have traveled 18500 miles. I responded with a thought from an article I'd just read about the financial crisis in the New York Review of Books, How we were ruined and what we can do: "The mortgages traveled such a long distance from institution to investor that no one was in personal touch with the actual mortgage holder any longer."

Basic things like food and housing have become subject to transactions and logistics which are just ridiculously complex and tendentious. They've been over-globalised, over-sold, and over-abstracted. We need, now, to cut out the derivative-chain waffle that even computers have lost track of, and reconnect our basic needs to the basic resources around us.

One form of globalisation that should stay in place, though, is international communication. I totally welcome being able to watch a Japanese solution to this common problem in real time over the internet, and I welcome there being cultural differences in the ways we respond to the current crisis, because differences mean choices. Call me a hippy, but I don't believe self-sufficiency has to be a Hollywood nightmare.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And note: the EU legislation does allow him to slaughter his pigs at home himself, but only if they're to be eaten by him and his immediate family. He can't slaughter animals himself and then sell the meat. In other words, this is not control of his personal freedom so much as the regulation of commerce.

To compare this with baskets of derivatives in the banking world is one of your silliest arguments yet!

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Certainly not! You can't turn an attack on the banking system's derivative chains (designed only to benefit bankers, and not even benefitting them in the end) or the food system's ridiculous logistical chains into an attack on EU legislation!

You don't seem to be getting what I'm suggesting which is how intertwined these systems are... they all form the complex societies we live in. Your argument was "Basic things like food and housing have become subject to transactions and logistics which are just ridiculously complex and tendentious" -- That's because modern dveloped societies require complex systems to function. Think taxes, think transnational laws, think local laws, think government spending... Sure, we can tweak these systems so that sub-prime doesnt happen again but they will always be complex, there's more to the world of finance than just the sub-prime crash. The larger societies get, the more complex they become. Food and housing isn't basic in large societies, we can't just find a nice spot of land and build a house, or grow food whereever we feel like it. all this needs regulating, even outside of a Capitalist system.

"You're effectively saying "Oh, some bankers made really stupid risk baskets, let's dismantle the EU."

Am I? That's news to me.

"I think "act local, think global" is a good response to your later point."

That means nothing! If I say "Buy local to support British farmers and lower carbon emissions" would you argue for it because it's environmentally friendly and protectionist, or would you argue against it because it would greatly harm foreign business? I'm just trying to get you to consider how complex these issues are.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You don't seem to be getting what I'm suggesting which is how intertwined these systems are... they all form the complex societies we live in.

My point was not to attack complexity per se, but the specific forms of complexity represented by the distance involved in mortgage derivations and food logistics. It's just stubbornness to say I must therefore hate cities and the EU! No, it's not stubbornness, it's -- technically -- the syllogistic fallacy of the undistributed middle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_undistributed_middle):

All students carry backpacks.
My grandfather carries a backpack.
Therefore, my grandfather is a student.

In your case:

Momus says derivatives and logistical chains are bad.
Derivatives and logistical chains are complex.
Therefore, Momus says all complex things, from cities to EU legislation, are bad.

[(Anonymous)]

I think what Kuma is saying is pretty clear. You don't like long logistical chains but you see the counterpart as greater food self-sufficiency. Greater self-sufficiency means reduced international trade but what Kuma is pointing out is that healthy international trade is what keeps modern cities ticking.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, but don't you guys see that you're effectively saying that cities require there to be one billion food miles in a skinny latte and one billion dodgy credit derivatives inside a mortgage? You're saying these things are normal, natural and necessary. The problem in your argument is that there's a big jump from these greedy, weird and wasteful oddities -- things which have only arisen in the last twenty years -- to the kind of "healthy international trade" which has gone on for hundreds of years.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't said anything about what is necessary but I suspect a lot of the things you enjoy about your current life require a good deal more than you realize. For instance, I assume you enjoy the ease with which you can convert the income you earn from sterling, dollars, yen or euros into whichever currency you need at the time. You mentioned this as a major reason you'd like to see Britain adopt the Euro. We could always put an end to the advances in international banking and increase your transaction costs accordingly.

On the subject of "food miles", it has taken some time for us to appreciate the environmental damage we risk with some of these food chains so it isn't especially surprising that we haven't got used to factoring these costs into our calculation. Even a cursory look at the subject will show, though, that long distance transportation doesn't automatically equate to ruining the environment. We also need to account for the positive impact on a less developed countries of increased agricultural trade.

A far more effective environmental campaign would be to get us all to eat a lot less beef which of course includes countries where the average amount of beef in the diet has been rising - specifically Japan and China.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

You criticised derivatives and logistical chains in the food trade in contrast to rural simple living.

It's my strong belief that derivatives and logistics in some form or another are necessary for complex, international, large-scale societies to function. They cannot be compared to tiny communities. They cannot function like tiny communities. It's completely naive to think we could have a giant, international society without the use of derivatives or logistical chains.

A house in London is worth more than a house in Berlin because its desired by more people -- a derivative at play. What is considered a luxury in one culture could be considered a necessity in another -- Another derivative. There are thousands of these factors all linked and affecting the global economy. Stop confusing real life deviratives and logistics with shakey sub-prime mortgages, they're not the same thing.

If you want to live a simple lifestyle where you can build a wood house on some cheap land you bought and trade your tomatos for some preserves Mrs. Jones made last summer and live completely detached from the world at large, completely disregarding whether your tomatos might be worth more or less in the wider world than her preserves, it's entirely possible. If you want international world cities, imported foods from Japan, Apple computers from America, and general modern living you need to accept derivatives and logistics because they're the wheels keeping it rolling and making it all possible.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You criticised derivatives and logistical chains in the food trade in contrast to rural simple living.

No, I praised a farmer who had to do "one hundred things" and criticized the kind of farming in which the farmer does only one thing, ie monoculture. You're desperately trying to introduce the binary simplicity = good / complexity = bad into my argument, but it ain't there. You're also saying that the excessive and self-destructive derivative and logistics chains introduced only in the last twenty years -- which have led to ecological and economic collapse -- are integral to a system which has lasted centuries. This argument is absurd.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

" You're desperately trying to introduce the binary simplicity = good / complexity = bad into my argument, but it ain't there."

No, I'm trying point out "Sustainable, rural, simple-living =/= Trendy cosmo pad in Berlin", you've already said you couldn't ever see yourself living outside of a major city so what exactly is it you're in love with? The idea of other people doing it rather than you? *shrug*

"You're also saying that the excessive and self-destructive derivative and logistics chains introduced only in the last twenty years -- which have led to ecological and economic collapse -- are integral to a system which has lasted centuries. This argument is absurd."

You do realise that society hundreds of years ago is drastically different to society of today right? Today's transnational societies wouldn't function under 200 year old rules. And we've had boom and bust before, its not new.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Just tell me where I used the word "simple" about life in the countryside, Kuma? Come on, specific citation, please!

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Basic things like food and housing..."

These things are anything but basic in large societies.