Song of the fields
Feb. 1st, 2009 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWorried 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).
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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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 01:24 pm (UTC)Our basic resources aren't going to provide everything we need or want. Ruling our globalised chains/food miles is too simplistic.
A more interesting question is 'what do we really want life?'. Can we then think about a better allocation of resources?
For myself, I find that includes computers, smart phones, and travel etc...but not massive cars, over-expensive mortgages that last 30 years...
horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 01:39 pm (UTC)The trouble is it just sounds boring. If you want that you can have it - but don't live under the illusion that it is nothing more than the guilt of the privileged, wishing they all lived in the past. Our problems will only be solved through technology.
File this under 'if I run down Britain, I feel virtuous living in Berlin'.
I read this post stroking my beard, and drinking green tea from a handmade earthern ware cup. Fashion and politics are two different things.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 01:45 pm (UTC)Class-based ad hominem attacks aside, this re-connection of basic needs to basic resources (in an ugly phrase, de-derivatisation) is shaping up to be one of the main themes of this century. It isn't just "fashion".
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 01:59 pm (UTC)But the answer isn't 'back to the country/village life' with each community providing for its own needs (impossible, even just for food).
The answer has to be around the intelligent and responsible use of global supply chains, and ethical trading. And - as importantly - some kind of consensus on what we do want of life.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:01 pm (UTC)"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."
As I stated technology is the only way to solve these problems not dipsy values like those above. It's a lot easier to live in a mythical past than solve these issues - just ask William Morris.
Peruvian step farmers who developed, refined and honed their potato production used technology in the same way say Apple develop their products. Not through going back to a middle class year zero but through technique and process.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 02:02 pm (UTC)The other sponsor of the show, by the way, is JA Bank, an agricultural bank which specialises in giving loans to Japan's smaller farmers.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:09 pm (UTC)It reminds me of another important factor - the need for a new materialism and a love for the product. If consumers loved their food as much as macfans love their products, the product would be beautifully created through continuous innovation.
Instead, the food industry currently uses technology to hoodwink the consumer - putting unhealthy products such as fats in their products and churning out food which looks good but tastes bland.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:14 pm (UTC)You're mixing up the style with the content. I was comparing the semantic fields of the Guardian video and the Japanese TV show, and finding it interesting that one cast this in terms of selfishness and apocalypse, the other in terms of lyricism. Attitude is part of the problem, and ideology feeds directly into politics, including the ideology of cynicism.
On the level of the actual solutions being proposed, see my comment below. The farmer featured on today's Hatake No Uta was specifically inspired by the sustainability and diversity of the farming practices she saw in South America. A farmer, for her, is someone who should know how to do a hundred things. Sure, technique and process are always going to be important, but monoculture can learn important lessons from subsistence and sustainability practices of poorer and older styles of farming. We are only now beginning to realise the vulnerabilities the so-called Green Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution) brought with it. They're the same type of vulnerabilities that are making the current financial meltdown so serious. What we think of as efficient and logical suddenly, with the alteration of one or two factors (climate, the price of oil, a reversal in property values), becomes a massive collective liability. We do things in the "correct" way, we tie ourselves together, then one of us falls off the cliff and suddenly we're all falling.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:22 pm (UTC)Hang on - is this one of those false binary opposition, that we know and love so well?
The Guardian feature is presented in the wider context of their ongoing doom and gloom coverage of the wider global economic crisis.
Was this simply a show about sustainable farming, without the overhanging question and context of 'what happens if the banks/electricity/energy fails' ?
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:22 pm (UTC)Don't be too quick to blame the consumers though. It is rubbish that companies respond if the consumer speaks - they simply LOOK like they respond. It's about land ownership / class. Look at the difference between Italy and Britain. Traditionally good food is a local working class value in Italy. In Britain those values are hijacked by the middle class. We should return to the notion of the land being 'common treasury for all' and requisition land that has essentially been stolen.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:26 pm (UTC)Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:32 pm (UTC)No but perhaps I'm a little suspicious of you doing exactly the same thing. When somebody follows a recipe, attitude doesn't play as an important part as the basic ingredients.
I don't really SEE society in a meltdown.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:38 pm (UTC)It's like comparing apples and oranges.
Britain does have societies that work in the same way as the Japanese farmers you were talking about. Take for instance:
http://www.commonground.org.uk/
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:45 pm (UTC)What's hard, though, is getting these arguments across before a major event shows people that the way they're living is wrong. People are very resistant to the idea that a global system that seems to be making everyone richer might have a fundamental flaw. One way to appeal to them is to present alternatives as something beautiful, lyrical, utopian but reachable. I see this happening in the Japanese example. In the West, I don't think we've been good at this since the days of the Whole Earth Catalog and The Incredible String Band.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 02:56 pm (UTC)A true Romantic, the hero seems to survive by scavenging, more interested in touring all the cool abandoned museums and reading pilfered books than retreating to the forests. For Shelley, that's lyrical, if not pastoral, but wholly idealistic. The current British/Western fears of the end of civilization as we know it don't often seem to take in the basic human need for a peaceful, spiritual, sustainable connection to the earth, as those Japanese farmers do--though I'm wondering how easy it will be to keep their culture as well as their crops intact.
Re: horses are running everything
Date: 2009-02-01 03:02 pm (UTC)Yes, Britain has examples of sustainable agriculture and living --though, as Joe Howe found out recently, sustaiable communities unconnected to the national grid are currently failing to get planning permission in the UK, and can only be shown as demonstration models -- but, as I say, we were much better at talking this stuff up in the 60s and 70s. It's interesting that the mainstream reference point for self-sustaining lifestyles in the UK is still 1976 sitcom The Good Life, which treats the idea satirically.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 03:17 pm (UTC)Seriously though 'Our Daily Bread' does look like a very interesting documentary. I know it's completely off topic but I urge you to see 'Le Chagrin et la pitié' - I found it very moving.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 03:26 pm (UTC)I haven't mentioned Shinto yet, but I do think having an agrarian folk religion survive relatively intact to this day has prevented the Japanese from making the fatal mistake of opposing spiritual satisfaction and practical everyday activities.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 04:05 pm (UTC)At some point the West arrived at the idea that progress, utility, productivity and convenience were ends in themselves. We shudder at the idea of returning to farming and small-scale industry because it goes against our single guiding principle.
This is frustrating to me, but sometimes I consider the possibility that at the other end of this several hundred year rough patch may lie a point where technology somehow brings the entire population to lead more thoughtful lives.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 04:30 pm (UTC)I can agree with this in some ways, but I had my perspective on this changed by reading Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Through this lens, Christianity survived all-too-well in modern times, integrated into the apparent rationalism of double-entry accounting (the modern version of making account of one's actions to God) and "worldly asceticism", which emphasizes the deferment of gratification, re-investment into the business rather than taking pleasure, and a preference for monetary abstractions over the here and now.
Links
Date: 2009-02-01 04:47 pm (UTC)Three Points...
Date: 2009-02-01 04:59 pm (UTC)2. Our global food market IS unsustainable, but unhinging food production from oil-based fertilizer (which is the main problem, not transportation, since economies of scale can offset the price and can counter-intuitively, be a better allocation of oil use) anyway, cutting oil-based fertilizer, right now, would see a massive decline in the efficiency of food production which would fuck over the majority of the world's poor. If we did it now we'd reduce food production by something like 2/3. We simply don't have any viable alternative right now for feeding massive amounts of people, and pastoral fantasies of utopian farming don't help.
3. Furthermore, Japan was a major player in global economics. And while they didn't have a lot to do with the housing bubble, they had the exact same thing in the 90s, which led to the exact same results. Greed was and is rampant in Japan, regardless of you cherry-picking a small left-wing video against mainstream commercial crap. (Also, I doubted your word and just called my Japanese friends and they think Japan's newspapers are just as sensationalistic, even if they don't have stupid survival guides like the one above - speaking of, U.S. news is sensationalisatic, but none of the papers I read has any silly surival guides for the Apocalypse.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-01 05:04 pm (UTC)I agree that the culture is to blame, but think your thinking too broadly (as usual). This is a problem of an outdated and broken worldwide ideology. And Japan is not counter to that ideology - they are part of it. Japan has a massive role in this globalization go-go banking culture. They are as responsible as Germany, France, China or England, even if final responsibility rests with the U.S. model.
Remember, I worked for a bank and saw a different aspect of Japan - the business aspect, not the cultural one. And Japan's banks were not espousing hippie values. They were, and are, part of the problem.
Don't get me wrong...
Date: 2009-02-01 05:11 pm (UTC)Oh, and I might be an atheist, but I've read enough to know that Christ preached communal hippie values and preached against individualism, wealth, greed, and the rich.
Also, I grew up on a small farm, and I know that ALL farmers (regardless if they're in Japan, California, France, Kenya, or anywhere else) need to know hundreds or thousands of different things. That needs to be rediscovered for sure, but for now, we absolutely need industrial agriculture. But everyone needs to know it's a time bomb that will go off at some point.