mandarine

Day after day, I am more deeply disturbed by the contradictions between our speech and our actions on the environment front. Every time I hear or see someone complaining about the state of the environment, it seems there is always a third-party that can conveniently be blamed for the situation. Let us pick a few examples:

• the price of gasoline: Chinese growth.
• deforestation: Brazilian peasants.
• water pollution: farmers and agribusiness.
• nuclear plants: the nuclear lobby.
• overfishing: those stupid fishermen.
• biodiversity: sprawling third-world mega-cities
• lack of investment in renewables: the government
• financial insanity: those greedy stock-exchange traders
• ad lib.

No need to use a microscope to see that in each instance, we are a link in the chain that leads to the disorder decried. We drive cars, we eat beef or fish, we prefer to buy the cheaper good, we use electricity and we would not want its price doubled overnight, we want our savings to generate an income, etc.

Just like a throng pushing towards the exit can trample or suffocate dozens of people without anyone actually pushing that hard, each time we are a part of one of these chains, our weight adds up to the weight of all the other actors, putting an enormous stress on the end-links until the Earth gives in. The Brazilian lumberjack felling a 200-ft tall tree is no more guilty than his boss, his boss’s stakeholder, or me.

This is not about buying hybrid cars or compact fluorescent light bulbs. It is not about buying organic or fair trade once in a while. ‘Buying’ is the problem; not the solution.

Climatologists, energy experts, agronomists, social workers: they are not talking about a 20% change in fifty years, but about an 80% change in five years. It is about stopping before doing anything and ask myself: if seven billion people behaved like I am about to do, how would the world end up?

Somehow, it is a moral obligation to change radically right now, so that whatever catastrophes happen, I will have tried my best. And if catastrophes don’t happen, then I will jokingly congratulate myself on saving the world. But there is no carrying on pretending. Fortunately, there are tons of things I can do.

While my friend the aerophant is slowly recovering from whatever ailment these engaging beasts tend to suffer from, I offer you a ‘phantesque riddle.

Guess the picture. You have as many answers as you want.

Self-catering is the cultural norm

You have a kitchen. You buy your food, but you cook your meals. And you know you would not relinquish your kitchen and always eat out or call a caterer or buy instant food because:

• you could not afford it (*)
• you’d lose the pleasure of cooking
• you’d lose on quality
• you would not really know what went in the meals you eat

Why cook and not grow?

Maybe agricultural practices of olden times were inefficient enough that any job at the factory paid more food that one could grow otherwise. I doubt that. I would rather say that the social conditions drove people out of the land and into factories regardless of the economic interest for them. In any case, new techniques and practices (mulching, crop rotations, polyculture, cover crops) have considerably reduced the labour needed to grow food on the garden scale since the time when our society bifurcated from distributed micro-agriculture to the ugly industrial model which is currently ruining our lives, the planet, and our kids’ future.

I say that, just like we can show that the average speed of a car is not much higher than that of a bicycle if we count the time one works to pay for the car, we can show that the time one works to pay for food is not much shorter than the time it would take to grow said food (**).

Obviously, I have taken the real-estate factor out of the computation. Not everybody can afford 300 square meters of vegetable garden + 500 square meters of cereals and another acre of grassland for one ewe. This is another matter and relates to a future post on why we pack people into cities in the era of the internet.

My project for 2008

I wager that personal agriculture can make a new dent in the over-centralized, over-specialized, industrial model, just like personal computers wiped out mainframe systems when nobody expected them. In 2008, I will try to prove something: I will spend one hour per day in my garden (maybe two because I am a beginner; maybe three because one must not forget the pleasure factor) and I will try to feed my family.

I will blog about my endeavour. In French. Soon.

Meanwhile, enjoy this song (by French artist Ridan) which expresses my current state of mind better than I could.

Je préfère être pauvre avec mon âme que vivre riche avec la leur ; si le blé me file du bonheur, je me ferai peut-être agriculteur

I had rather be poor with my own soul than be wealthy with theirs; if [growing] wheat makes me happy, maybe I’ll turn farmer

Footnotes

(*)

I will have less time in 2008 and thus will not be able to spend hours each week writing 1000-word-long posts starting with a preamble, developing my arguments step by step, suggesting a conclusion and finishing with my customary epilogue.

And I cannot get round to posting only once a month. I have more than a hundred posts waiting to be written, and the backlog is growing by the day. The only sustainable approach is probably to write my mind more concisely, with posts that will be dryer and with less rhetorical decoration.

Therefore, I will ask my readers to do the job of connecting the dots, of filling the blanks, of fleshing the imaginary skeleton of what I have to say. I will have more pictures to avoid total drought. I hope the blog will not lose its soul in the process.

A year ago, I made a list of objectives for this blog. Not that I am a great fan of goal management, but a I need to know what I want, don’t I?

1. “Stay alive”. Check. Piece of cake. Too many things demand writing about.
2. “Keep my blogging friends”. Check. And I met a handful of new ones.
3. “Avoid overwhelming popularity”. Check. (I got hit by a tsunami on my absidea blog, with 85,000 visits in one day in May, just because Carl referred an article to Reddit, but that won’t happen here).
4. “Fix the theme for IE”. Missed. I wish Microsoft fixed their browser instead.
5. “Add a navigation sidebar in the single-post view”. Done, and then lost when I moved (see 8). To be continued in 2008.
6. “Answer comments individually”. Check (see previous post).
7. “Produce an integral pdf version for the blog”. I am not so sure. Raise your hands those who need it; “and if I am bold enough, an audio version for my big posts” No way. If you be nice, you’ll hear me at LibriVox. In French.
8. “Move to www.wisemandarine.com”. Check. The cheapest hosting company is infinitely better than the free system I was relying on.
9. “Quit checking my e-mail compulsively for new comments every ten minutes”. Missed. It’s even worse now.
10. “Write shorter posts”. Not really. The objective was to make reading easier for readers. In fact, I write fewer long posts, but I could not get round to squeezing them or chopping them.

That’s it. No dwelling on failures, no bonus for achievements, no promotion, no raise, no warnings. Hey, this is blogland, not mandarine GmbH.

How would you feel if you were invited to have tea with friends, and the host, after having done all the talking for half an hour, then turning to the guests for feedback, receives each comment with a mere: “OK, next comment, please”, and then “all right, thank you, what was I saying,…” and carries on? How would you feel if you were attending a lecture by some specialist you absolutely love, and the lecturer leaves the room during the Q&A session, leaving you and your co-lecturees to discuss between yourselves?

In real life, I love to squeeze remarks into a discussion when I feel comfortable with the subject and the people, and if my wittily pertinent attempts meet with indifference, I will soon stop trying and leave the discussion on the first occasion. This is exactly how I feel when I visit blogs in which the author does not reply to comments. I am under the impression that the commenting feature is enabled simply for the sake of freedom of speech. I do agree that few comments are ever written in a way that calls for a reply, but when utter silence follows the comments section, it makes me doubt there’s somebody on the other end of the line.

In short, I just wished to explain that I find it hard to keep up with first-person blogs in which comments never or seldom get a reply. I’ll pick just two examples: the QC report (good thing she’s no reader of mine). Q’s writing is fabulous. I found the blog totally addictive. But when I decided I’d “de-lurk” and give commenting a try, I found my initiative as effective as (pardon the vulgar French expression) peeing in a cello. A couple of posts later I deleted the entry from my feedreader. In fact, I’d probably still be a fanatic reader if comments had been turned off altogether, clearly signifying that this was more like an online book and less like a group of friends. The same happened with Tim’s Mother Tongue Annoyances.

Knowing that my blog-reading time is not stretchable to infinity, you will understand I’d rather spend some time with people who are friendly and act friendly, than with people whose friendliness I can’t assess. Now because I am a fervent observer of the ‘do as you would be done by’ principle, I try to answer all comments here, lest I should lose a single reader. Obviously, this is more work for me, but I must confess I like commenting so much that I love an opportunity to comment on any blog, including mine.

P.S. there is something I have to ask: do you come back to read my replies to your comments (I personally keep coming back compulsively until I get a reply whenever I comment on someone else’s blog) or should I drop the practice because I am the only one who cares?

When I was a kid, my parents had a very hard time making me eat. I seem to be affected by a rare physiological indifference to hunger. It is by no means anorexia, as I always take great pleasure in food. Only I never feel a physiological urge to eat before I actually start eating. I do feel uneasiness in the stomach in the hours around meal time, but there is no unconscious drive to really eat something — quite unlike the sensation of thirst, which clearly tells me I must drink. Therefore I generally have to decide consciously that I should eat if I want the gurgling in my stomach to subside.

When I was a kid, I was so keen on whatever I was doing when it was in fact time to eat, that the conscious decision had to be enforced by my parents.

When appetite rules

However, once I got started eating, appetite kicked in, and as I grew up, it gradually took over. Around the time I got married, I became quite a cook, so that every meal became a temptation for greed. Whereas my childhood meals were often quite bland (pardon Maman), now was the time of elaborate veloutés, engineered sauces and delicate seasonings. Every other meal, I would eat until I was full. By the time I turned 30, there was no denying that my weight was diverging. Nothing worrying by anybody else’s standards, but I was too used to being slender to simply accept my new waistline.

The increase in riding mileage bought me some respite, but hardly. As appetite ruled my eating habits, I would often not stop until the reward of eating another bite was counterbalanced by the growing abdominal uneasiness of having eaten too much. Had I had a slightly different metabolism (and a more sedentary life), I would have reached a hundred kilos in no time.

Then two things happened this summer.

Fasting is not starving

I read a booklet about survival in an urban environment in times of crisis. The author had been a journalist and/or a relief volunteer and had often had to live for weeks in besieged cities all around the world. One of the first chapters was about dedramatizing fasting. It was quite a revelation to me. The main message was that one could fast for up to two weeks without feeling horribly hungry (after the first couple of days), that there were no damages to the body, and that many people actually felt better. Because I had been chased by my parents to always come eat at fixed hours, I think I had not even contemplated the possibility of not eating. To me, skipping a meal had always meant the beginning of starvation.

I put this to the test by fasting for two days (i.e. supposedly the worst period of a longer fasting deal). It confirmed what I had believed: I did not feel especially hungrier than on normal days, and providing that I drank enough, I felt no worse in the stomach than how I usually feel in the hour or two before lunch or dinner.

Fasting is however an essentially intermittent practice, as it is certainly not sustainable. Therefore I could not turn fasting into a routine. I could decide for two meals a day instead of three, but this was not socially convenient, though: at work, one of the moments I like best is re-inventing the world with colleagues at lunch. I could not possibly skip lunch on a regular basis. And I do need my breakfast and my dinner.

I don’t really want to eat that much

So I decided I’d try to eat less, with an objective of eating roughly 50% less than the usual quantity. And to my surprise, it was not the tantalizing ordeal I had believed it would be.

There came the second revelation: the frustration coming with the swallowing of the last mouthful of an excellent dish is completely independent from the number of preceding mouthfuls.

In fact, this is probably the very same mechanism as in the survival instinct theorem: just as I do not really want to live long but I never want to die now, I do not really want to eat more - I just always want the next mouthful.

And the corollary: I feel much better when I stop eating before I am full, because I get the same frustration of having to give up on the next mouthful, but without the additional discomfort of “feeling stuffed”.

Fewer obligations for a simpler life

These revelations came as I was sketching my overall design about how to live a simpler life, focusing on the core business of life, which is essentially living, and outsourcing the rest (debt slavery, wage slavery, consumerism, etc.). At that moment, it occurred to me that I had been giving way too much importance to eating habits: I had to have three meals a day, and unless I managed to prepare lunch and dinner with the traditional structure “starter, main course and dessert”, I felt this was no true meal. In the long run, this perspective was turning me into the daddy equivalent of what both my grandmothers had been: catering slaves. Fortunately, my spouse was doing half the work, and I did not have five kids, but it was the same spirit of inescapable culinary duty.

So I decided two things:

1. instead of eating as much as I could without getting too fat, I would eat as little as I could without getting too thin. I would essentially not modify what I was eating: I like meat, butter and cheese too much; but I would eat roughly half as much as I used to (except for breakfast, which I am currently trying to promote to a complete meal).
2. and I’d stop being so demanding and strict about eating habits. We do not need perfect meals all the time. If I have played too long with my son or we’ve been having tea with friends and now it’s too late to prepare a conventional dinner, there is no shame in drinking a bowl of soup and some oatmeal or a yogurt. In fact, I am now convinced it is OK to skip meals when we do not really feel like eating. Maybe just a salad or a herbal tea, to keep the bio-clock on the right tick.

A brief account after five months of testing

I thought I’d share some of this here, but first I had to make sure I was not going to screw up miserably. I only speak from hearsay, but I believe that diets often fail because of adverse surrounding social conventions. The only convention I am swimming against is quantity, and really this is no big deal.

At home, I can be a little stricter: I have shifted the proportions towards more vegetables and less meat and carbohydrates.

The net result after five months is absolutely stunning. Predictably, I have lost a few pounds, going back twelve years in time, then stabilized my weight (more than that would probably be unhealthy). But in addition, I have been feeling a lot better:

• In my body, I believe this change was necessary to get all the benefits from the cycling I do. I feel fitter without a doubt.
• On the health front, I think I have never been that well in a really long time. It has been the first winter I have not had so much as a common cold…so far (keeping fingers crossed); it proves nothing, but it feels good.
• And in my mind I feel freer. I feel as if I am not addicted to food anymore; as if I could do without. Obviously this is not true, but I know I can take a break from food any time a want; food has become a means instead of an end, and this really feels like freedom.

I just hope Food will be OK if we just stay friends

And while you’re at it, congratulate me about my floor.