mandarine

By command of Her Royal Highness, I hereby answer a series of personal questions which make the blogging world a futile and friendly place.

Where I was ten years ago.

I think ten years ago was when I got my first doubts about my job. I had been working for two years then, in what is probably the finest job in the world for an engineer who likes hardcore technique: future spacecraft projects with the leading European space systems manufacturer. There’s nothing like achieving a childhood dream too early to kill glamour for good. The job was extremely interesting, but essentially abstract. One of the inventions I made back then did make it into a live spacecraft design, which is due to fly in 2010. That’s a five percent chance of seeing a concrete outcome for my work after twelve years. The job was (and still is) great fun, but essentially aimless. I have lost all illusions about space conquest (and will probably write soon why). There is no democratic debate on how the space subsidies should be spent either. I spend taxpayer’s money for things taxpayers have no clue about. Sometimes I feel like a Monsanto scientist doing fun stuff just because it can be done and it’s fun to do; and that which can be sold makes it to the market.

For the past two or three years I have been wanting to find some other job, one that would be more useful to mankind, but now I have decided to keep my fun (and mildly harmless) job, and save the world on my free time, like most superpeople do.

Five fatty snacks

1. Home-made nutella (which some would call Gianduja; it’s hazelnut butter with sugar and chocolate), by the spoonful
2. Roquefort cheese. My boy’s nanny is raising ewes, whose milk is used to make Roquefort. Each year, she gets discount cheese from the ‘caves’. We have six pounds of the treasure cheese hoarded in our freezer, bought for the price of burger-grade cheddar.
3. Saucisson. You’d probably call it dry sausage.
4. Foie gras. (We do it ourselves with our neighbour’s ducks, but not before November)
5. Tomates confites. Half-tomatoes that are slowly baked in the oven with olive oil, garlic and pesto.

Five other fatty snacks (no dietary duality in my world)

1. Tapenade. A paste made with olives.
2. Caviar d’aubergines. A paste made with eggplant and olive oil.
3. Ail confit. Garlic slowly cooked in duck fat.
4. Fresh cheese with herbs. Chives especially.
5. Onion jam.

Have you noticed? All go with bread. I must be French.

Five things I would do if I was a billionaire

1. Wonder where all that wealth came from
2. Subsidize conversions to organic farming in my region
3. Subsidize research in natural and organic farming all over the world
4. Donate heaps to open-source projects
5. Go back to work

Five jobs I have had

1. Math & physics tutor for rich but mediocre pupils
2. Summer camp leader (volunteer)
3. Metalworking lathe operator in French Guyana (2 month internship)
4. Flight control systems engineer for commercial aircraft future projects
5. Attitude control systems engineer for spacecraft future projects

Three of my habits

1. Going to sleep with the same chapter of the same audiobook on my mp3 player.
2. Commenting blogs in bed instead of reading serious books.
3. Reading blogs at work whenever I need a break. The more pressure there is, the more I read.
4. Driving slower than the elderly.
5. Taking a 30′ nap every other day.

Five places I have lived

1. Paris, France (0->1/2)
2. Trois-Rivières, Québec (1/2->2)
3. Paris, France (2-22)
4. Toulouse, France (22-32)
5. Home, Home (32-Inf)

Have you ever noticed how we laugh at other people’s supestitions, while we think we are not superstitious ourselves? Some of us find Feng Shue a stupid hassle that comes in the way of home and garden design; some of us eat pork with delight (sometimes with our left hand); most of us skip mass; we can say ‘rabbit’ onboard a boat. And we dismiss any claims that this will bring bad luck, bad spirits, or even hell our way.

And yet we rich westerners fall victim to a very dangerous superstition. A supestition which is destroying the planet, destroying other people’s livelihoods, destroying the livelihood of future generations. We believe that we cannot be happy with less stuff, less comfort, less energy. We sure believe we cannot be happy without a well-paying full-time job, however morally or environmentally or economically questionable said job might be.

All those who have stopped shopping, who have downshifted to a smaller house, who have sold their car will tell you readily: happiness and affluence are totally unrelated. And yet we cling to our stuff and our comfort like barnacles and limpets, and we feel helpless when we find out that our planet is dying, because there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Changing all the lightbulbs or buying a Prius or setting up photovoltaic arrays is OK, because it is about buying new stuff -this fits with our mental frame. But letting go of stuff and habits altogether is something we absolutely dread, unconsciously.

Emily’s challenge is about learning to let go, one finger at a time, so that we can discover not only that it does not cause misery, but it can even bring some feeling of pride (I am prone to this kind of feeling) and achievement. And in any case, it brings exactly the same kind of relief as when one unpacks after a long flight and finds out one had forgotten the anti-crash amulet home: we are still alive and well, regardless of what TV commercials want us to believe.

Emily’s ecojustice challenge is good for you. Everybody else does it. You’ll feel bad if you don’t. Do it now.

I hereby declare the 2008 hammock season officially Open.

Two weeks after moving in, our hens (at least one of them) have started laying. So far, we’ve had six eggs in one week. It would be enough if the eggs were standard calibre. But it takes two of our bantam eggs to make one ‘normal’ egg.

In any case, they tasted delicious.

Now is the time for my farmer self to say good-bye and move to roomier premises. The Mandarine half here will presently revert to literary mutterings, amateur photography, dilettante philosophy and leftist social criticism.

For those interested in my experience (and my errors) as a gardener, you can visit my new website, l’arpent nourricier, which I declare open as of now. If you read French, good for you. If not, you can still look at the pictures

My primary objective is to write about this wager of mine that I’ll be able to farm a garden big enough to feed a family while still working full-time (80% full-time) as an engineer. My secondary objective is much more pretentious: I want to transfer to the French-speaking internet all the experience and resources I can from the very vast corpus of resources and techniques for new, small-scale, organic farming from the English-speaking internet. My ultimate goal (apart from the obvious selfless contribution to the good of that part of humanity which happens to read French and among whom I happen to live) is that there is a chance that like-minded people might get to know me, and offer me to participate in projects involving local, small-scale, organic farming.

The name “l’arpent nourricier” translates to “the nurturing acre”. It is too bad that the term “nourricier” in French only conveys the “food” idea, and not the “care” idea that “nurturing” implies. It would have been an even better name.

PS: do not worry about the theme, I will be changing it as soon as I can.

I could have named it the ‘gnôthi seautòn’ meme, or the Socrates meme, let’s just call it the ‘why’ meme. The rule is the following: pick any number of big life choices you have made or are about to make, and recursively ask ‘why’ until it makes no more sense. I believe that we should do this for almost every choice in life, so that we make sure we are aware of our true motivations.

- I want out of the treadmill of wage-slavery and leave the insane train of industrial production and gdp growth to reinvent a homesteader’s peaceful life.

why?

- Because I think the world is going nuts and that the insane race for quantity instead of quality is already banging against the limits of our small planet.

why?

- Because I think that science and technology can now give us comfort with very little work, but the human mind cannot easily adapt to the new paradigm of plenty. But instead of all rethinking how we want our lives to be, we are prevented from enjoying this by a work ethics which equates ‘more’ with ‘better’, and we have invented the economic structures that concentrate plenty into the hands of few, so that plenty is artificially out of reach from the majority, therefore giving more credit to the work ethics of penury. Always running for more leads to exponential growth. Continued exponential growth in a finite world is not possible, so this race will stop sooner or later anyway. However, I think I should step aside and leave the race before it crashes.

why?

- The obvious answer is that I hope I can make a Noah’s ark for my family and me, but this is at best improbable. If it crashes, we’ll all be in the same boat. But if it does not, I still believe that the ‘race’ is making everybody miserable, even the ones who are not denied a share of the plenty. By stepping out, I can pause and think and invent a life of quality instead of quantity. Ever since I started to work part-time, I have seen how much more quality I could put into my life while relinquishing only a tenth and now a fifth of my income. In fact, I think the best life is the one where the amount of one’s monetary work is not set by conventions but by exactly how much monetary income I strictly need, and also how much good it does the world if I work one extra hour.

why?

- We have all been trained as mercenaries, and now hardly anyone questions the validity of one’s job, whatever the job. But as I have said, it is quite certain that the world does not need more stuff, so I have to be really careful about what good it does the world if I work more at what I do. For instance, if I work for the armament industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, the aircraft industry, the automobile industry, the bioengineering industry, there are serious doubts as to whether more of my work actually makes the world a better place, given the circumstances. Now if I can find a job which is useful to the world, how much of it should be paid and how much of it should be volunteer? If it is paid, it participates in the ‘race’ of money flow, GDP growth, wealth concentration, etc. If it is volunteer work, it profits the world, period. I want to live the best life without having to walk over other people’s bodies, so I have to make the volunteer/commercial work ratio as high as I can afford.

why?

- Because I feel my life has already profited too much from walking over other people’s bodies (especially people in the so-called ‘South’), although I am convinced that the new ‘paradigm of plenty’ (even in the absence of cheap oil) makes slavery of others an optional contributor to one’s comfort. I am not sure that I can ever repay the debt I have, especially if we count in terms of inheritance of the colonial times, but I can at least relieve the pressure our economies put on the world at large and on the poor in particular. Therefore, if I am to earn the least money, I should make my own stuff, grow my own food, and try to rely more on the local economy than on the globalized economy. Hence the homestead. In addition, I wish that my experience can serve as an example to other people and show that other life patterns are possible outside the commercial race.

why?

- Because I think that as soon as one is locked as a nameless mercenary in the economic treadmill, having to beg every penny of one’s needs from the globalized economy, freedom discreetly leaves the scenery. How free am I when all my livelihood relies on the economic welfare of my boss’s shareholders? How free am I when less work means less food for my family? Imagine if all the people in the world were homesteaders who could make their own food, clothing and shelter, would they not represent the kind of ideal free citizenship which was the foundation of the US of A? In addition, if people return to the land, they’ll tie new bonds with the Earth, and instead of being abusers of Nature, they’d all be stewards of the Earth. I owe that much to my son.

why?

- Because messing up the Earth unknowingly is one thing, but carrying on when we know we are is another thing altogether. How is my son to understand if I did not try my best to make his world livable. And by being around nurturing the land he lives on, I believe I give his life the best quality.

why ?

- Because I am certain that he cares more for a mouthful of homegrown strawberries, a walk in the forest, a game of ball in the garden, or wrestling on the lawn than he cares for a large bedroom, a brand-new TV set and a comprehensive collection of Disney DVDs. When kids can count on their parents being around (though not always on their back), they develop the kind of security that makes balanced grown-ups. When people are not afraid they might be abandoned, or loved less, they do not see the world as a battlefield against their neighbours, but as an adventureland with their friends.

why?

- Because I am certain that human aspirations, once the means of survival are provided for, are often the unconscious ripples of unsoothed childhood wants. Nobody is ever rich enough to compensate for an archaic fear of poverty; nobody is ever powerful enough to exorcise a history of humiliation; nobody is ever famous enough to erase a childhood of apparent lovelessness. When one seeks power, wealth, or fame, the goal is always just over the horizon. When one seeks love, happiness, health, one can take them by the hand from birth to death, and walk the walk of the good life. I picture the good life as a hike in the wild, with each step requiring a slight effort but rewarded with new sights, sounds and smells, each step bringing me a little further along whatever path I choose. A walk which is so beautiful in itself that I would have no regrets if I had to stop anywhere.

why?

- Because we have but one life, and we never know when it will end. I am not going to sacrifice now for tomorrow because there could be no tomorrow. But I will not sacrifice tomorrow for now either, because there might be a hell of a lot tomorrows ahead.

why ?

- Because I might live long for one thing, and also because although I fully embrace a purely materialistic viewpoint, I cannot completely discard the possibility that something in people is immortal, whatever it is

why?

- Because I find believing gives a special light to the world.

why?

- Because it sort of answers the final why.

why?

- Why not?

Through the very excellent soil and health library website, I have discovered a fascinating author, tackling the contradictions of our industrial model 80 years ago, and forty years before Ivan Illich.

This author is Ralph Borsodi, and his social and economic insight is very sharp ; extremely sharp when you think that he had come to his conclusions in the 1920s.

I will be telling more about the author as I carry on reading his works, and there will be several quotes finding their way into my blog, for there are views I could not express better.

[…] the idea that mankind’s comfort is dependent upon an unending increase in production is a fallacy.

It is more nearly true to say that happiness is dependent not on producing as much as possible but on producing as little as possible. Comfort and understanding are dependent upon producing only so much as is compatible with the enjoyment of the superior life. Producing more than this involves a waste of mankind’s most precious possessions. It involves a waste of the only two things which man should really conserve–the two things which he should use with real intelligence and only for what really conduces to his comfort. When he destroys these two things, he has destroyed what is for all practical purposes irreplaceable. These two things are the natural resources of the earth and the time which he has to spend in the enjoyment of them.

in This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi, 1930

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.

You may have seen it coming; I think I have reached a tipping point in my life. I want out of the treadmill of (debt- and) wage-slavery. My career as a classical engineer for the aerospace industry will have to gradually give way to a new life as a farmer. Not the intensive-type farmer. Just the type of farming that can feed family and some neighbours and leave time for whatever things I feel must be done (like continuing with the well-paying engineering work while it remains so interesting, working for LibriVox, developing websites for community initiatives, blogging, reading, raising kids, cooking meals for guests, whatever makes life the best experience possible).

Additionally, the new way of life will probably be more robust in case when we get hit by one of the looming crises (oil, finance, climate). Funny that the lifestyle I want should also probably be the life I would have to adopt sooner or later anyway, like all those who fled cities and returned to homesteads during the great depression or WWII. If no crisis comes, so much the better.

I do not think the tone of the blog will change much, but I will sure write more about my farming endeavour and try to share some of my enthusiasm.