Category: History

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Frankincense and disharmonic energy fields

One of the more amazing travel experiences I had when I was working in the Middle East was to drive from Muscat through most of Oman to Salalah, the capital of the province of Dhofar, in the south of the country. You drive on and on for ten and more hours through desert, mile after mile of barren sand and rock. Then you go over a slight rise, and suddenly drop down an escarpment into a lush landscape of thickly forested slopes: the crescent-shaped mountains of Dhofar block the rain-laden clouds of the monsoon for months.

The leaward lip of that escarpment is the home of the frankincense tree, Boswellia sacra, the start of famous trade routes to the Mediterranean and India. And such pleasant recollections were prompted by an article in the NY Times on how frankincense “has the ability to generate this really powerful force field that has been shown to be able to neutralize and transmute what we call disharmonic energy fields.” Right. Let’s hope that New Yorkers’ demand for such force fields doesn’t lead to overexploitation.

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Turfing out the lawn

Smaller American Lawns Today. Edible Estates. Freedom Lawns. Recent thinking about the American suburban lawn sounds like a microcosm of the debate about diversity and sustainability in agriculture in general. Read all about it in The New Yorker.

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Nibbles: Desert garden, Funding, Vegetables, Communication, Ecosystem services, Bees, Native grasses, Soil, Raspberries, Ancient ag trade, Soybeans, Ag origins

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La Zucca

That early stirring of globalization that was the Columbian Exchange changed Italian food and cooking forever. That’s well known. What would pizza be like without pomodori and peperoncini, after all? There’s also polenta — and pasta e fagioli. And no doubt also traditional potato-based dishes, though I can’t think of one just now. But the third member of the Mesoamerican Trinity is often forgotten when the usual suspects of the exchange are trotted out, as I’ve just done.

Which is a pity, because the pumpkin features in some pretty nice dishes. ((Ok, I cheated a bit. The Mesoamerican trinity is maize, beans and squash, rather than pumpkin, but you know what I mean.)) So it was nice to see it celebrated last week in Tolentino. We found this sculpture in the piazza which houses the regular fruit and veg market.

On the wall is the text of an ode to the vegetable (or fruit, but I’m not going there) by the local poet Giovanni Sebastiani (1874-1959). You can read “La Zucca” here. But don’t ask me to translate. The local Marche dialect is all but impenetrable to me.

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Mash-up

There’s an article in the latest Science entitled Celebrating Spuds. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to join in the celebrations. But even if you were, I’d suggest settling down with John Reader’s new book Propitious Esculent instead. I fancy myself moderately well informed about the potato but Reader served me with plenty of interesting new tidbits in addition to the usual fare. He has a terrific knack for putting things in context and for managing to take you off on detours so interesting that you hardly notice that you’ve deviated from the straightforward path. The silver mines of South America, for example, may well have been fuelled by potatoes, but the entire social set-up goes well beyond the potato as fuel and illuminates much of the Spanish conquest. Likewise, his very personal reminiscences of life in Ireland in the 1960s help to bring the great famine into perspective. His discussions of various food price crises in history is especially interesting today. When English farmers decided to abandon crops and instead grow sheep for wool, riding a boom in prices, there were riots in the streets over high prices for bread. Sound familiar?

The one thing I didn’t find, and that may be because my memory is playing tricks on me, was a discussion of a mad scheme by a Geoffrey Pyke, a wonderful Englishman who is sadly all but forgotten. After World War II Pyke wrote a series of articles outlining the benefits of using teams of cyclists to haul railway wagons around Europe. He calculated that the energy in food, and the efficiency of human muscle, made this a far better bet than expensive fossil fuels. In my memory, the calculations were all based on feeding the teams of cyclists potatoes. But Wikipedia says it was sugar, and Wikipedia is never wrong. The articles were in the Manchester Guardian of 20, 21 and 24 August 1945. Alas, I can’t find those pages online, so I can’t check. But why would I have remembered potatoes if it really was sugar Pyke was talking about?