Saturday, October 13, 2012
Friday, October 12, 2012
The Master
It’s not that there is nothing going on in the movie, and we weren’t only bewildered and bored. We were also, intermittently, intrigued, daunted, amused, troubled. The very metaphor of the cause that I have just used is borrowed from the film, where something called the Cause (and distinctly resembling Scientology) is one of its elusive subjects. The questions it asks, again and again (in a way it doesn’t do anything else), are whether charisma can be portrayed and/or inspected and whether a charismatic leader can help anyone who seriously needs help.
The answers seem to be yes, no and no. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of the Master is remarkable because it makes charisma seem so unsteady and so complicated. He is lordly, mischievous, scoundrelly, conniving, bullying, petulant, perfectly in control, half out of control, always slithering from the posture of the sage into that of the snake-oil salesman. But then this brilliant picture is not an inspection or exploration of the person or the type, it’s a fascinated trailing after him. When he abruptly loses his temper two-thirds of the way through the film, thoroughly shocking one of his devoted rich acolytes played by Laura Dern, it’s the same temper and the same loss we have seen twice already. We’re not shocked, this is not a revelation to us as it is to Dern. The repetition has its eerie force, though. We have long realised that the Master is his own permanent self-invention, and we finally see that there is no limit to the vast contentment with which he can keep putting together the self he so enjoys and admires. Nothing unsettles him for long: defections, hostile questions, doubt, imprisonment, all small bumps in the long right road. At the end of the film, still smiling with an air of benevolence that would scare the life out of anyone not seeking to grovel, he says: ‘Everyone needs a master.’ He doesn’t mean he needs one. He means everyone needs him, and if they imagine they don’t they are doomed.
The Master’s counterpart, disciple and victim is Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix with a lurid tormented charm which spreads all over the large bright screen and makes you long for the days of lower definition and poorer visibility. He hunches his shoulders, twists his mouth, often talks unintelligibly, as if knowing what he is actually saying were a privilege he jealously wants to keep to himself. We first see him in the navy at the end of World War Two, frustrated, lonely, willing to fall in a frenzy on a woman made of sand as long as she has breasts that stick up sharply enough. The memory of this effigy recurs throughout the movie, and at the end, having found and lost and found the Master again, Freddie picks up a girl who has the right sort of breasts and is much more relaxed and amusing than any piece of Pacific beach could be. Perhaps he’s cured.
But cured of what? After the war, identified as a potential misfit in any arrangement where fitting might be required, Freddie becomes a photographer in a department store, cuts cabbages in a California field, and runs away to sea when the liquor he has become an expert at mixing – from paint thinner and various engine fuels – almost kills a man. The boat he hops onto belongs to, or is rented by, the Master, named Lancaster Dodd, who also has a taste for paint thinner. And so begins the weird relationship that so statically dominates the rest of the movie.
by Michael Wood, LRB | Read more:
Image: via Chicagoist
Disappearance on Mount Marathon
You’ve heard of Tough Mudder and the Spartan Race, but every Fourth of July, the town of Seward, Alaska, puts on a competition that rivals both. The Mount Marathon Race doesn’t look like much on paper: it’s short (just three miles long) and starts at sea level. But the race, which has been run as an organized event since 1915, is a beast, with a 3,022-foot vertical gain and loss over icy and treacherous mountain terrain, where racers pick their own way up—and down—the average 38-degree slope.
While injuries aren't uncommon at Mount Marathon, three unusually serious accidents marred this year's race. Iraq war veteran and Blackhawk pilot Penny Assman slid over a cliff, lacerating her liver and breaking several ribs; an Alaskan runner named Matthew Kenney fell at the same spot and suffered broken legs and brain damage. The most puzzling casualty, however, was 66-year-old Anchorage resident Michael LeMaitre, who vanished without a trace on his way up the mountain and is believed to be the first fatality in the race's history. The incidents left Seward struggling to understand how a runner could disappear on a course that's only a few miles long. We spoke separately to Karol Fink, a Mount Marathon organizer and 19-year race veteran who ran this year, and to MaryAnne LeMaitre, whose father has yet to be found.
THE MOTIVATION
The record time, set in 1981 by Bill Spencer, is 43:21. The average speed uphill is 2 mph. Downhill is 12 mph.
Karol Fink: It’s a bit mysterious—the feel of it. It’s dangerous, so you’re not only competing against other people on the mountain, but you’re competing to get across the finish line healthy and safe. I’m never going to be a professional runner, and I’m never going to be a racecar driver or a rodeo person, but this is my chance to push that edge.
What happened this year—it was quite devastating for the community. It was the talk of the town: Two people falling off the waterfall. A missing runner. People were out searching, helicopter going constantly. It consumed the energy of the town.
MaryAnne LeMaitre: My dad—he has always had an adventurous spirit: He did the Iditaski several times; he had a lot of exciting adventures on the water. He was definitely physically fit. But he hadn’t been on the mountain before. He won the lottery for getting into the race, and that was it.
THE SETTING
Mount Marathon in the Kenai Mountain range in southern Alaska looms over town of Seward, an active fishing port, with a population of about 3,000.
Fink: Distance in this race isn’t as critical as vertical. When the competitive men come down from the top of the mountain to the bottom, they’re descending over 3,000 feet in about five minutes. They’re not running, they’re free-falling.
This year, it had rained the night before, so it made the race really slick and muddy for the juniors. Next was the women’s race, and it was a pleasant temperature, in the low 60s, with a little bit of fog blowing in and out in strips. The men’s race was also foggy, but the trail had dried some.
LeMaitre: I was told it was overcast. Clouds were moving in and out, but you could still see Seward at times. It was rainy, but it didn’t sound like it was raining all the time.
by Caty Enders, Outside Magazine | Read more:
Photo: jseattle/Flickr
Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles
Leave it to Lucinda Williams, whose astringent lyrics have proven her capable of leaving no romantic notion unexamined, to ask the question of the hour. Sitting backstage at the Izod Center, in East Rutherford, before doing her turn at “Love for Levon,” the all-star tribute concert for Levon Helm, who died last April at seventy-one, Williams confessed to some confusion about the honoree. Helm was most famous for singing and playing drums in the Band, whose golden era ended in 1976. “Everybody is asking why he was important, and I don’t know what to say, because I never thought of most of these songs as Levon’s music—they were the Band’s. Did they do all this after Rick Danko died?”
The answer, obviously, is that there was no such reaction in 1999, after Danko, the Band’s bassist and singer, died in his sleep, at the age of fifty-six. Why, then, the outpouring of feeling for Helm? Oddly, Don Was, the esteemed musician and producer who served as co-musical director for the concert, had been pondering that very question. “Maybe it comes from reaching sixty,” speculated Was. “I’ve seen it before—Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson. All the jokes that people make about the I.R.S. or whatever. Suddenly you turn sixty, and that’s the stuff you’ve survived.”
Helm could serve as Exhibit A in Was’s argument, for, by the time he turned sixty, he was a veritable curator of stuff to survive. There were an abundance of garden-variety career disappointments, money setbacks, and legal problems maintaining a steady background behind larger crises. In 1986, after playing some club in Florida, longtime friend and bandmate Richard Manuel left Helm’s hotel room and hung himself in his shower. In 1991, Helm’s beloved home and recording studio in Woodstock burned to the ground in an electrical fire. In 1998, he was diagnosed with throat cancer and advised to get a laryngectomy; instead, he took twenty-seven radiation treatments that killed the tumors but robbed him of his voice. He faced each insult not only stoically—deprived of singing, he resolved to improve his drumming—but with an affability that was his signature. “I don’t care what kind of shitty mood you were in,” says Steve Berlin, the keyboard player and saxophonist for Los Lobos, “seeing Levon just brightened your day.”
Unfortunately, amiable perseverance alone is not enough, and by the end of 2003, Helm was facing foreclosure on his rebuilt home. With the help of his new manager, Barbara O’Brien, he began holding rent parties. These shindigs proved doubly useful: the earnings showed that he had regular income, which enabled him to refinance, and more importantly, their popularity gave Helm the idea of turning the parties into a regular show. Calling it the “Midnight Ramble,” after the almost-anything-goes medicine shows that would come through his Helena, Arkansas boyhood home, Helm tapped Larry Campbell, who had distinguished himself as the guitar-, mandolin-, and fiddle-playing sideman for Bob Dylan and others. Together with guitarist Jimmy Vivino, they built a band, one that eventually came to include Levon’s daughter, Amy, and Larry’s wife, Teresa Williams. They played songs from the Band’s repertoire, but also country, blues, gospel, Cajun, and rockabilly.
Soon, word began to circulate that Levon had a hot band that played at his house on Saturday nights, and before very long, Helm’s musical friends began sitting in: Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Dr. John, Phil Lesh, Norah Jones, and many more began making the trip to Woodstock, and the audience followed. “It was one of those ‘If you build it, they will come’ things,” says Campbell. “And they did.” Standing on Helm’s outdoor deck, he pointed into the woods that fronts the eighteen-acre property. “On Saturday evenings, you could stand here and see the headlights stretching all the way back to the highway.” Capacity was two hundred, tops, and the audience would pack around the stage, sitting with their backs to his fireplace, or peer down from the loft space under the great peaked ceiling. To help foster the down-home feel of things, the guests, who had paid a hundred bucks apiece, were asked to bring a dish to the potluck supper that preceded every show.
“There’s a lot of bullshit that surrounds the music industry,” says Jim James of the group My Morning Jacket, who played the Ramble twice, expressing a widely held sentiment. “But Levon always conveyed a great sense of community and spirit, and put the music first.” Then the real miracle occurred: Helm’s voice returned. Gone was his strong tenor, replaced by something raspy and ornery, the voice of old man who has something to say. In 2007, he went back into the studio and recorded an album called “Dirt Farmer,” co-produced by Campbell and Amy Helm, which won a Grammy. For an album recorded with friends and family, in the home he rebuilt after an inferno, in the studio seized from the jaws of foreclosure, with the voice reborn after cancer, the honor must have been like gilding on a lily.
by Jamie Malanowski, New Yorker | Read more:
Why Is This Man Running For President Of The Internet?
It’s the off-the-cuff version of a stump speech I’d seen him give a few hours earlier, to a crowd of about a hundred at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. ("We need to be good stewards of technology.") I’d watched him tell the crowd about Geek Day, a digital march on Washington that he had set into motion the day before, and tout his site's success in fighting the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA — including the $94 million in lobbying, largely from the entertainment industry, that had pushed them to the brink of passing. He also tells a story about a trucker he met in Colorado who didn’t even know he was an “Internet Freedom” supporter until Alexis explained what that meant, and then — from the stage — he calls Nebraska Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican who supported SOPA, to ask him why (he gets voicemail). He refers to the President of the United States, without hesitation, as POTUS.
The whole time, though, he’s subtly code-switching to speak to one of the invisible constituencies he knows is present: Redditors. These, after all, are his people, his true believers. So he references bacon. He uses the word “epic.” He acknowledges memes, like Advice Animals.
When he leaves the stage, he shakes hands and poses for pictures; had a baby been there, he might’ve kissed it. Then he’s off to the next stop, a high school football game, in a tour bus that had at one time been leased by the McCain campaign and converted into the “Straight Talk Express.” Now, it’s been painted over — half red, half blue — and along with Ohanian and a few other Reddit staffers, is also carrying a small press corps (BuzzFeed included), a documentary crew, representatives from farming startup AgLocal, and a staffer at the newly formed Internet Association lobbying group. It is trailed, loudly, by an impressive car-buggy designed by open source automotive startup Local Motors.
If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Alexis Ohanian — the insistently goofy, imposingly tall, never-off 29-year-old cofounder of what is arguably the largest cohesive community on the internet — is running for office. And in fact, he kind of is — but for a position that doesn’t yet exist.
Alexis Ohanian wants to be the President of the Internet. And he’s pretty sure he knows what he needs to do to get there.
by John Herrman, Buzz Feed | Read more:
Illustration by John Gara
Let's Start the Foodie Backlash
The name of the Food Rave is entirely appropriate for a modern culture in which food is the last ingestible substance you can indulge in with obsessiveness without being frowned on by society. Alex James, the Blur bassist turned gentleman cheese farmer and Sun food columnist, has said: "My 20th birthday party was all about booze, my 30th birthday was about drugs, and now I realise that my 40s are about food." And he is not alone. Food replaces drugs in the gently ageing food-fancier's pantheon of pleasure, and brings along with it traces of the old pharmaceutical vocabulary. You hear talk of taking a "hit" of a dish or its sauce, as though from a spliff or bong; and a food-obsessive in hunter-gatherer mode is thrilled to "score" a few chanterelle mushrooms, as though he has had to buy them from a dodgy-looking gent on a murky Camden street corner. Food is valued for its psychotropic "rush"; Nigella Lawson refers to salted caramel as "this Class A foodstuff". Yes, food is the new drugs for former Britpoppers and the Ecstasy generation, a safer and more respectable hedonic tool, the key to a comfortingly domesticated high.
Western industrial civilisation is eating itself stupid. We are living in the Age of Food. Cookery programmes bloat the television schedules, cookbooks strain the bookshop tables, celebrity chefs hawk their own brands of weird mince pies (Heston Blumenthal) or bronze-moulded pasta (Jamie Oliver) in the supermarkets, and cooks in super-expensive restaurants from Chicago to Copenhagen are the subject of hagiographic profiles in serious magazines and newspapers. Food festivals (or, if you will, "Feastivals") are the new rock festivals, featuring thrilling live stage performances of, er, cooking. As one dumbfounded witness of a stage appearance by Jamie Oliver observed: "The girls at the front – it's an overwhelmingly female crowd – are already holding up their iPhones […] A group in front of me are saying, 'Ohmigodohmigodohmigod' on a loop […] 'I love you, Jamie,' yells a girl on the brink of fainting." The new series of The Great British Bake-Off trounced Parade's End in the ratings, and canny karaoke-contest supremo Simon Cowell is getting in on the act with a new series in development called Food, Glorious Food!– or, as it's known among production wags, The Eggs Factor.
If you can't watch cooking on TV or in front of your face, you can at least read about it. Vast swaths of the internet have been taken over by food bloggers who post photographs of what they have eaten from an edgy street stall or at an aspirational restaurant, and compose endlessly scrollable pseudo-erotic paeans to its stimulating effects. Right now, five of the 10 bestselling books on amazon.co.uk are food books, withNigellissima outselling Fifty Shades of Grey. According to the spring 2011 Bookscan data, British sales of books in nearly all literary genres were down, except for the categories of "food and drink" (up 26.2%), followed by "religion" (up 13%). (Before 1990, the bibliographic category of "food and drink" didn't even exist.) That food and religion alone should buck the negative trend is no coincidence, for modern food books are there to answer metaphysical or "lifestyle" rather than culinary aspirations, and celebrity chefs themselves are the gurus of the age.
It is not in our day considered a sign of serious emotional derangement to announce publicly that "chocolate mousse remains the thing I feel most strongly about", or to boast that dining with celebrities on the last night of Ferran Adrià's restaurant elBulli, in Spain, "made me cry". It is, rather, the mark of a Yahoo not to be able and ready at any social gathering to converse in excruciating detail and at interminable length about food. Food is not only a safe "passion" (in the tellingly etiolated modern sense of "passion" that just means liking something a lot); it has become an obligatory one. The unexamined meal, as a pair of pioneer modern "foodies" wrote in the 1980s, is not worth eating. Most cannily, the department of philosophy at the University of North Texas announced in 2011 its "Philosophy of Food Project", no doubt having noticed which way the wind was blowing, and presumably hoping that it would be able to trick food-obsessives into hard thinking about other topics. One can of course think philosophically about food, as about anything at all, but that is not what is going on in our mainstream gastroculture.
Where will it all end? Is there any communication or entertainment or social format that has not yet been commandeered by the ravenous gastrimarge for his own gluttonous purpose? Does our cultural "food madness", as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich suggests, tip into "food psychosis"? Might it not, after all, be a good idea to worry more about what we put into our minds than what we put into our mouths?
by Steven Poole, The Guardian | Read more:
Photo: Alarmy
Thursday, October 11, 2012
The Neuroscience of Stage Fright
Public speaking is one of our most common fears, topping flying, financial ruin, sickness, and even death. The fear can get so bad that people become physically ill before getting on stage. But this fear — often called performance anxiety or stage fright — extends beyond the pressure to perform in the moment. It's about the underlying social psychology of exposing oneself to an audience. It's this vulnerability that sets off an entire cascade of physiological processes throughout the body in a defense mechanism that at one time served an important evolutionary purpose.Understanding the science of stage fright can also help ease the fear.
A common fear
Back in 2007, I gave a talk at a futurist conference in Chicago that featured such speakers as Ray Kurzweil, William Shatner, and Peter Diamandis of XPrize fame. If this wasn't pressure enough, the day before my presentation I learned that one of my longtime heros, cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, was going to be in the audience. It was at this point that my body started to rebel against me; I broke out into a nasty rash, began vomiting, and contracted a rather unpleasant case of diarrhea. The next day, I stood on the stage and desperately fought back the urge to panic, delivering a presentation that was stilted, awkward, and completely uninspiring.
Sadly, this was typical for me back then. But this experience finally made me snap out of my denial: I have stage fright — and I have it bad. And I am hardly alone.
Celebrities with stage fright include Rod Stewart, Barbara Streisand, Mel Gibson, and Carol Burnett (who reportedly threw-up before many of her performances). Many prominent athletes tend to suffer from it as well, including nervous hockey goalies and boxers who just can't seem to perform when everything's on the line.
Generalized anxiety
Stage fright is an emotional and physical response that is triggered in some people when they need to perform in front of an audience — or even an anticipated or perceived audience (such as standing in front of a camera).
While feelings of stress and anxiety are present during the actual performances themselves, individuals with stage fright often start to experience its effects days or weeks in advance (something that was particularly bad in my case). Consequently, stage fright is more than just a fear that's elicited during a performance — it's also very much about the lead-up. And in fact, for some, the performance itself can be a kind of cathartic release from the tension. (...)
Like most phobias, stage fright is a perfectly normal and even natural response to situations that are perceived to be dangerous or somehow detrimental. Psychologists who work with stage fright patients describe how their inner chatter tends to focus on those things that could go wrong during the performance and in the immediate aftermath of a potential failure. For people who have it quite bad, this can amount to a kind of neuroticism in which fears are exaggerated completely out of context — what psychologists call chronic catastrophizing.
And in fact, studies have shown that these fears can be driven by any number of personality traits, including perfectionism, an ongoing desire for personal control, fear of failure and success, and an intense anxiety about not being able to perform properly when the time comes (which can often serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy). Psychologists have also observed that people with stage fright tend to place a high value on being liked and regarded with high esteem.
Moreover, during the performance itself, individuals with stage fright tend to form a mental representation of their external appearance and behavior as they presume it's being seen by the audience. Consequently, they turn their focus onto themselves and interpret the audience's attention as a perceived threat.
Like most phobias, stage fright is a perfectly normal and even natural response to situations that are perceived to be dangerous or somehow detrimental. Psychologists who work with stage fright patients describe how their inner chatter tends to focus on those things that could go wrong during the performance and in the immediate aftermath of a potential failure. For people who have it quite bad, this can amount to a kind of neuroticism in which fears are exaggerated completely out of context — what psychologists call chronic catastrophizing.
And in fact, studies have shown that these fears can be driven by any number of personality traits, including perfectionism, an ongoing desire for personal control, fear of failure and success, and an intense anxiety about not being able to perform properly when the time comes (which can often serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy). Psychologists have also observed that people with stage fright tend to place a high value on being liked and regarded with high esteem.
Moreover, during the performance itself, individuals with stage fright tend to form a mental representation of their external appearance and behavior as they presume it's being seen by the audience. Consequently, they turn their focus onto themselves and interpret the audience's attention as a perceived threat.
by George Dvorsky, io9 | Read more:
Frogs
[ed. Mo Yan winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.]
by Mo Yan, Granta | Read more:
Photo: Polarjez
First in Line
They fill the sidewalks with tents and sleeping bags, transforming once pristine city blocks with their very presence, sharing thermoses of coffee and small hot meals.
They don’t care about the evening chill, or the stares of passerby, or the police. And the police don’t care about them. Because on that bright morning when the Apple store opens, they’ll roll up their blankets, strike their tents, and go home with a shiny new iPhone 5, as happy as clams and just as stupid.
To liberals of the 90s, Bill Gates was the symbol of both wealth and malevolence incarnate. Not only was he the richest man in the world, but his monolithic and monopolistic enterprise was based on a mediocre product with built in buggy obsolescence. He didn’t innovate; instead he partnered with IBM, purchased DOS, and then exploited both. And through ruthless business savvy, the narrative goes, Microsoft strong-armed the market despite a middling product, terrible customer service, and ruthless cost cutting.
But one man, one company, made a career (and cult) out of this “critique” of Bill Gates. (...)
Apple surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable tech company in 2010, but Jobs had long before eclipsed Bill Gates in the consumer’s CEO-aspirant imaginary. Benevolent Jobs, who died merely the 42nd wealthiest American, was worshipped by liberals with the same intensity that Gates was hated. (...)
What’s really going on in these ads? It’s not exactly the classic hip/square dichotomy: Jon Hodgman is funny and charismatic, and there is some amount of mutual respect here. Although Hodgman is clearly a square, ‘Mac’ is not primarily a cool guy who rejects Hodgman’s identity. Instead, ‘Mac’ is unshaven, informally dressed, kinda average. The difference is not between the square who sells out and the cool guy who opts out, but rather the technocratic office worker and the precarious creative. Mac admits that PC is good at getting business done, but business is boring, and he’d rather be drinking a latte at the co-work space he shares with an industrial designer and a start-up architect. Wouldn’t you?
The ascension myth of Jobs over Gates and of Apple over Microsoft is a spectacular reflection and reenactment of the rise of post-Fordist precarious labor over the sort of middle class white-collardom historicized by C. Wright Mills. Gates was a man who rationalized the computer business. He ensured his software was packaged with outside manufacturers, who would then do the messy work of race-to-the-bottom competition for him, but would all carry the same (and same priced) Microsoft OS.
Microsoft made money on every shitty Dell or pimped out IBM, requiring almost no hardware overhead of their own. Once Windows had achieved a certain level of dominance it was impossible to make a cheap computer without either it or a high level of technical savvy (e.g., Linux). Microsoft won, as Žižek put it in a London Review of Books essay, when it had “imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolizing the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect,’ meaning collective knowledge in all its forms … Gates effectively privatized part of the general intellect.”
Since Apple couldn’t fight on the grounds of cost, it would compete on ease-of-use and, more fundamentally, “lifestyle”: it would fight for its patch of general intellect. Rather than infinite customizability, Apple would come bundled with iTunes, iMovie and Garage Band. Apple made the hardware, the software, and ultimately even the store you bought it in. Microsoft sold a product that was ubiquitous and fundamental, but Apple sold a whole line of products, an experience, a way of life. The narrative is well rehearsed.
Microsoft predominantly (and unabashedly) produces work tools: the Microsoft Office Suite remains its flagship product. The PC has always been clunky when it comes to media production and consumption (though less so than Apple and its legions want you to believe), and the graceful handling of these functions is what sets Apple apart. Of course, these “creative” fields of production are just as much work tools as Office; it’s just that your work is fun. You make music! You make movies! You’re not a slave!
And though gamers have always used PCs, they did so because you could upgrade video cards and processing speed and power as you needed — keeping up with the latest generation of games without replacing your computer — so that gamers ended up with machines whose internal functioning little resembled their office counterparts. A Mac, however, is a Mac, its functions largely black-box and proprietary. You don’t hack it and you don’t upgrade it, you just buy a new one.
Of course, it is in design and packaging, not computing, that Apple has really excelled. Other than its innovations in touch-screen technology and battery life (significant but outsourced achievements), Apple has offered little in the way of technical invention. What Apple does best is user interface and visual design, which, if you’re feeling generous, you can call a kind of beautiful craft: sowing the glove to exactly fit the hand while also grabbing the eye. But design, especially when it comes to the mass-produced consumer object, is really just the arty end of the marketing spectrum.
by Willie Osterweil, Jacobin | Read more:
Everyone Eats There
I left Los Angeles at 4 in the morning, long before first light, and made it to Bakersfield — the land of oil derricks, lowriders and truck stops with Punjabi food — by 6. Ten minutes later, I was in the land of carrots.
You know that huge pile of cello-wrapped carrots in your supermarket? Now imagine that the pile filled the entire supermarket. That’s how many carrots I saw upon my arrival at Bolthouse Farms. Something like 50 industrial trucks were filled to the top with carrots, all ready for processing. Bolthouse, along with another large producer, supplies an estimated 85 percent of the carrots eaten by Americans. There are many ways to put this in perspective, and they’re all pretty mind-blowing: Bolthouse processes six million pounds of carrots a day. If you took its yield from one week and stacked each carrot from end to end, you could circle the earth. If you took all the carrots the company grows in a year, they would double the weight of the Empire State Building.
At Bolthouse’s complex, carrots whirl around on conveyor belts at up to 50 miles an hour en route to their future as juliennes, coins and stubs, or baby carrots, which the company popularized and which aren’t babies. Other carrots become freezer fare, concentrate, salad dressings and beverages. Fiber is separated for tomato sauce and hot dogs. Whatever’s left becomes cattle feed.
Bolthouse is just one of the many massive operations of California’s expansive Central Valley, which is really two valleys: the San Joaquin to the south and Sacramento to the north. All told, the Central Valley is about 450 miles long, from Bakersfield up to Redding, and is 60 miles at its widest, between the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west. It’s larger than nine different states, but size is only one of its defining characteristics: the valley is the world’s largest patch of Class 1 soil, the best there is. The 25-degree (or so) temperature swing from day to night is an ideal growing range for plants. The sun shines nearly 300 days a year. The eastern half of the valley (and the western, to some extent) uses ice melt from the Sierra as its water source, which means it doesn’t have the same drought and flood problems as the Midwest. The winters are cool, which offers a whole different growing season for plants that cannot take the summer heat. There’s no snow.
The valley became widely known in the 1920s and 1930s, when farmers arrived from Virginia or Armenia or Italy or (like Tom Joad) Oklahoma and wrote home about the clean air, plentiful water and cheap land. Now the valley yields a third of all the produce grown in the United States. Unlike the Midwest, which concentrates (devastatingly) on corn and soybeans, more than 230 crops are grown in the valley, including those indigenous to South Asia, Southeast Asia and Mexico, some of which have no names in English. At another large farm, I saw melons, lettuce, asparagus, cabbage, broccoli, chard, collards, prickly pears, almonds, pistachios, grapes and more tomatoes than anyone could conceive of in one place. (The valley is the largest supplier of canned tomatoes in the world too.) Whether you’re in Modesto or Montpelier, there’s a good chance that the produce you’re eating came from the valley.
I came to the valley both by choice and by mandate. In preparation for the magazine’s Food and Drink Issue, I asked readers to suggest my assignment. They could send me anywhere they wanted, within limitations of climate and jet lag. After reviewing the suggestions, it became clear that readers wanted an article that incorporated big farming, small farming, sustainability, politics, poverty and, of course, truly delicious food — and in the United States, if possible. So I decided to head to the Central Valley, where all of this was already happening. This also happened to satisfy a curiosity of mine. From a desk in New York, it’s impossible to fathom 50 m.p.h. carrots, hills of almonds, acres of basil and millions of tomatoes all ripening at once. How can all of this possibly work?
But I was also inclined to head to the valley because I know that, for the last century or so, we’ve been exploiting — almost without limitation — its water, mineral resources, land, air, people and animals. Mark Arax, a writer who lives in Fresno and has chronicled the region’s past and present, offered his opinion while serving me and a dozen others marinated lamb, a terrific recipe from his Armenian family: “This land and its water have gone mostly to the proposition of making a few men very wealthy and consigning generations of others, especially farmworkers, to lives in the dust.” I’d already seen an example of how wealth has been concentrated and captured in the valley: this summer, Campbell’s bought Bolthouse Farms for $1.55 billion. Meanwhile, there are thousands of valley farmworkers who are often victims of wage-theft and (illegally) required to supply their own tools.
So for five days I drove through the southern half of the valley. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the agriculture in America’s produce factory; where thoughtful farmers were leading it; and how — if at all — it might become sustainable.
by Mark Bittman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Vincent Laforet
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