A strange thing about blogging is the number of people you meet online, often to never meet them, ever. I’ve exchanged many emails with Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, the maverick young farmer, filmmaker, and revolutionary, and am looking forward to finally meeting her, in the flesh and hopefully in a pasture somewhere in upstate New York, a few weeks from now. Severine blogs at the Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles, and is currently working on about a million foodie projects, not least of which is her Greenhorns film, but took the time to share this post with us. Thanks, Severine!
(Photo from MorgueFile)
In my old neighborhood, we used to walk by the scruffy yard of Edward Bernays on our way to our cello lessons. “That’s Eddie Bernays; he’s the father of spin,” we would say as we passed. Bernays was a legendary baddie, a ghoulish propagandist with crazy white hair, and his untended lawn was as creepy as his reputation. The nephew of Sigmund Freud and PR guru to Woodrow Wilson, Bernays pioneered the realm of ‘crowd psychology’ and the “engineering of consent’ in the early 1900s. He was known as the Philosopher of Promotion and devised all sorts of tactics for transmitting commercial messages to the libidinous and greedy core of human weakness, which he believed to be the critical route for any corporate message making.
This spring, walking past Eddie Bernays’s house, I saw to my utter amazement and delight that its new owners had installed a new garden in its once-spooky lawn. In fact, they had installed an upscale, slate-bordered new garden — a little fancy for my taste, but what was that growing there!? Oh my goodness, sweet peas, and garlic! With lovely cast iron twirly awnings for the tomatoes and neat little patches of thyme and mint–Eddy Bernays, that ruthless mercenary of floridation, disposable dixie cups and cigarettes–had vegetables growing in his garden.
The times they are a-changing, yes indeed. Vegetable gardens are popping up everywhere. It isn’t the doing of exploitative spin-doctors, no! Thankfully, a new literary emergence has sprung into being, and this spring it seems to have really taken root. All over the country, people are reading Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Joan Gussow — and they are reading foodie blogs like Ethicurian, and Eating Liberally, and seeking out their Edible Communities. Aside from all this reading, they are shopping at coops and farmers markets, and they are recycling their shopping bags with Martha Steward intensity. I call this phenomenon “Kingsolverism,” and would hazard proclaim it a very good thing.
Although greenwashing abounds and agribiz PR reps may pooh-pooh this shift as a trend, the difference between the unquestioning consumption of fast food and the photosynthesis-informed generosity of homegrown, mother (or father)-tended tomato is literal. The machiavellian Bernays tapped into the subconcious weaknesses of Americans to exploit them as shoppers, but this spring, the seeds of Kingsolver have sprung in the shape of eco-mommies stepping out into the yard to snip some chives for the potato salad. Which literary tradition can you get behind?
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1 Guest Dish: Start them early // May 21, 2008 at 6:57 pm
[...] week, we were treated to a lovely guest dish about the growing green food movement, as evidenced by the booming popularity of foodie books, by [...]
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