Noema: Italy; China; Maintenance; and Concrete

Italy is full of places like Arquà Petrarca. Microclimates and artisanal techniques become the basis for obscure local specialties celebrated in elaborate festivals from Trapani to Trieste. (...)

All these specialties are encouraged by local cooperatives, protected by local designations, elevated by local chefs and celebrated in local festivals, all lucrative outcomes for their local, often small-scale producers. It’s not so much a reflection of capitalismo as campanilismo — a uniquely Italian concept derived from the word for belltower. “It means, if you were born in the shade of the belltower, you were from that community,” explains Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of food studies at New York University and the author of “Gastronativism,” a new book exploring the intersection of food and politics. “That has translated into food.” (...)

All across Italy, as Parasecoli tells me, food is used to identify who is Italian and who is not. But dig a little deeper into the history of Italian cuisine and you will discover that many of today’s iconic delicacies have their origins elsewhere. The corn used for polenta, unfortunately for Pezzutti, is not Italian. Neither is the jujube. In fact, none of the foods mentioned above are. All of them are immigrants, in their own way — lifted from distant shores and brought to this tiny peninsula to be transformed into a cornerstone of an ever-changing Italian cuisine. (...)

The Romans were really the first Italian culinary borrowers. In addition to the jujube, they brought home cherries, apricots and peaches from the corners of their vast empire, Parasecoli tells me. But in the broad sweep of Italian history, it was Arabs, not Romans, who have left the more lasting mark on Italian cuisine.

During some 200 years of rule in Sicily and southern Italy, and the centuries of horticultural experimentation and trade that followed, Arabs greatly expanded the range of ingredients and flavors in the Italian diet. A dizzying array of modern staples can be credited to their influence, including almonds, spinach, artichokes, chickpeas, pistachios, rice and eggplants.

Arabs also brought with them durum wheat — since 1967, the only legal grain for the production of pasta in Italy. They introduced sugar cane and citrus fruit, laying the groundwork for dozens of local delicacies in the Italian south and inspiring the region’s iconic sweet-and-sour agrodolce flavors. Food writers Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari argue that Arabs’ effect on the Italian palate was as profound as it was in science or medicine — reintroducing lost recipes from antiquity, elevated by novel ingredients and techniques refined in the intervening centuries. In science, this kind of exchange sparked the Renaissance; in food, they argue, one of the world’s great cuisines.

There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food (John Last, Noema; Image: Roman Bratschi)

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Repair is when you fix something that’s already broken. Maintenance is about making something last. (...)

The industrial world is aging, and the sheer quantity and geographic extent of transportation, water and energy infrastructure presents an unprecedented challenge at the exact moment that climate change forces us to rethink material use. More robust maintenance practices could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids to insulated homes. But first maintenance has to be valued outside of austerity, and right now it’s unclear if our current economic system is capable of that. (...)

It’s hard to imagine a modern ritual that would be equal to the task of perpetually renewing steel bridges, concrete highways and cement buildings. It would require an entirely new industrial paradigm. One label for such a system is “circular economy,” which the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which funds research on the topic, defines as “an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design.” (...)

Sustainability, and the climate discourse in general, fails to disentangle the built environment in this way. The built and unbuilt environment are treated as totalities caught in a zero-sum conflict. One barrages the other with smokestacks and landfills, the other retaliates with forest fires and flooding. Climate change becomes a hyperobject, bearing down on all of humanity at once, condemning and forbidding it.

Maintenance is necessarily more focused on the particular. There is no single all-encompassing maintenance regime. It is always specific to material systems and the labor practices that they require. Best practices emerge at the intersection of production and consumption, service and use, formation and dissolution. (...)

The incentives get even more distorted when stretched across industries and use cases. Here, again, maintenance distinguishes itself rhetorically from sustainability. Sustainability is a state; maintenance is a process. It requires work, and work of a certain type. Whatever its ultimate goal — safety, material efficiency, reducing carbon emissions — practical know-how and repetitive labor come first. This kind of pragmatism is sorely needed in the climate debate, which is so often preoccupied with end-states that it has no earthly or humanly way of achieving.

The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance (Alex Vuocolo, Noema; Image: Scott Balmer)

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As Thomas Piketty and several others have observed, America is now also experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology. Globalization did not deliver on its promise of prosperity for all Americans; instead, the outsourcing of production to countries like China profited multinational companies while hollowing out industrial towns. During the 2008 financial crisis, elites on Wall Street received bailouts from the government, while people on Main Street lost their jobs and savings. Exploiting popular discontent, Trump parachuted into the presidential race in 2016 with rallying cries to “bring jobs back home” and “drain the swamp” — and to everyone’s surprise, he won.

Contrary to popular cultural tropes, America and China today are not caught in the “clash of civilizations.” Rather, as I earlier underscored in Foreign Affairs in July 2021, we’re witnessing a curious form of great power competition: the clash of two Gilded Ages. Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves. Both are struggling to reconcile the tensions between capitalism and their respective political systems, albeit with greater intensity in China’s nominally communist system. Both U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi have staked their legacy on ending the excesses of capitalism, except under different banners. Whereas Biden pledges to “build back better,” Xi dubs his campaign “common prosperity.

To say that the U.S. and China are similar, however, does not mean that they are identical. America is a democracy with constitutional protections of individual freedoms, whereas China is a top-down political system ruled by one party. Thus, the two countries are pursuing progressive reforms very differently. At the turn of the 20th century, when America was an emerging industrial power, its society fought graft and inequality through political activism, civil service reforms, new regulations and by voting corrupt politicians out of office. Today, facing a deindustrialized economy and outdated infrastructure, Biden’s agenda is focused on passing legislation on large public investment and raising taxes on corporations. Xi, on the other hand, is trying to stamp out capitalist excesses through commands and campaigns to punish graft, eliminate poverty and rein in the “chaotic expansion of capital.” Like Biden, Xi aspires for fairer development — but with the CCP firmly in control.

The narratives we choose shape the realities we experience. The “clash of civilizations” implies that the U.S. and China are culturally — or worse, racially — destined to fight each other, and everyone else must choose one side. If you buy this narrative, a new Cold War can be the only outcome. By contrast, the “clash of two Gilded Ages” reminds us that the U.S. and China are rivals who share similar woes at home. Their competition should not be over who trips and outruns the other, but rather who fixes their own problems first. Competition can be a force for self-renewal instead of mutual destruction.

The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages (Yuen Yuen Ang, Noema; Image: Xinmei Liu)

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To make concrete, you need cement. To make cement nowadays, kilns are heated to more than 1,400 degrees Celsius — similar to the temperature inside a volcano. Into the kilns goes a combination of crushed raw materials (mainly limestone and clay). The heat causes a chemical reaction that creates a new product, clinker, which is then ground down to create the grey powder you see in cement bags. This is then mixed with sand, gravel and water to create concrete.

Concrete is now the second-most consumed substance on Earth behind only water. Thirty-three billion tons of it are used each year, making it by far the most abundant human-made material in history. To make all that, we now devour around 4 billion tons of cement each year — more than in the entire first half of the 20th century, and over a billion tons more than the food we eat annually.

Such a monstrous scale of production has monstrous consequences. Concrete has been like a nuclear bomb in man’s conquest of nature: redirecting great rivers (often away from the communities that had come to rely on them), reducing quarried mountains to mere hills, and contributing to biodiversity loss and mass flooding by effectively sealing large swathes of land in an impermeable grey crust. The other key ingredients all bring their own separate crises, from the destructive sand mining of riverbeds and beaches to the use of almost 2% of the world’s water.

But most significantly, the carbon-intensive nature of cement has been catastrophic for the atmosphere. The kilns used to heat limestone are commonly run on fossil fuels, which produces greenhouse gases, and as it heats up, the limestone itself releases more CO2. Every kilogram of cement created produces more than half a kilogram of CO2. The greenhouse gas emissions of the global aviation industry (2-3%) are dwarfed by those of the cement industry (around 8%). If concrete was a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter, behind only the U.S. and China. In Chile, the region that houses most of the cement plants, Quintero, has become so polluted that it was nicknamed “the sacrifice zone.”

Sacrifice is a fitting word for this paradox: On the one hand, we have the destruction wrought by concrete, and on the other is our desperate need for it to exist. It’s been estimated that to keep up with global population growth, we need to build the urban equivalent of another Paris each week, another New York each month.

Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It. (Joe Zadeh, Noema; Image: Newnome Beauton)