Vincent's Sweets: A Baking Experiment

Vincent has asked me a few times if he can bake cookies - from his own recipe that he makes up. I haven't wanted to let him because I have a miser's abhorrence of waste, and given his limited culinary knowledge, I anticipated having to throw out the mess of inedible ingredients post-baking.

That's probably not a good reason to quell curiosity and experimentation. The other day, I decided to let him try, with the caveat that he make a small batch. Here's how it went:

Vincent's Peanut Butter Chip Banana Cookies with commentary and handy tips from V

In the wet bowl:
1 egg (whisk)
1/8 cup oil ("hold the cup upside down a little bit; oil takes a while to come out"
1/8 cup milk
1 banana (he asks me to slice; he then smashes with the whisk)

V: Why don't we make a recipe store here if my cookies turn out good?

In the dry bowl:
1 tsp flour ("No, 1/2 a cup! Maybe two of them")
1 cup flour
1 tsp sugar (for next time, he suggests a tablespoon)
1 tsp salt (I said no to this amount)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup peanut butter chips

V: Shouldn't we write what they taste like? They taste like artificial banana flavouring with cookie dough and a little bit of sugar.

In sum:
V: I'm proud. I enjoyed making them, but I'm not going to enjoy the dishes.

I was very impressed that he'd remembered to separate wet and dry ingredients and had remembered all of the major components to most baked goods. He also chose fairly accurate measuring cup and spoon sizes for the ingredients. The cookies tasted a bit biscuit-like but definitely edible. 

In which we travel in time to the 1950s.

 

Can you read this? It was taken from a moving car again, as billboards in our city tend not to be in places where people walk.

I'll read it for you. Let me put on my horn-rimmed glasses first and help myself to one of those cocktail franks - thanks, Doris.

"Food powers mankind [sic]. But what powers food?"

Potash, my friends. Potash, the gasoline in our corporeal Studebakers. Potash helps nature provide. That floozy Nature, who will be made to fully submit to the rigorous standards of Science and Technology! That's true power, friends! The power of Mankind!

Jill-of-all-trades.

Recently, I heard about the value of being a generalist from two different places. First, I attended a workshop on permaculture by Rob Avis of Verge Permaculture. He suggested that being a generalist was valuable for permaculture because you need to be able to see whole systems and integrate a lot of different parts. You can, of course, specialize in mycellium or straw bale building, but you need to be able to put that together with a working knowledge of botany, climatology, animal husbandry, energy flows, nutrient cycling, etc. in order to create a permaculture system.

On her science blog, Sharon Astyk reviews some homesteading/small farming how-to books and says,

Agriculture requires a wide-ranging set of skills vaster than almost any field I can imagine, and while one becomes deeply expert in some parts of the work, it is still necessary, even imperative, to constantly be gaining some superficial understanding of a host of new things. The generalist is jack of many trades, but master of few. That's not a criticism.

This is good news if you're a person who's highly curious, who likes to see how things fit together, or who has a five year old who asks 'why' and 'how' a lot. In a way, it's what attracted me to my first career, teaching. A mentor told me, "You will never be bored." It was true, except for during staff meetings.


I also think there's danger in our becoming a world of specialists. For one, it results in certain metaphors being transposed where this may not be appropriate - so that, for example, everything is a business. To a businessperson, this seems axiomatic. Post-secondary education must produce workers trained for a specific career, and must pay for itself. I am expected to do a financial cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to take a job in another city, and if I decide to turn it down for family reasons then I am not a serious candidate. If I sell vegetables with business profits foremost, then I must try to achieve a premium price and lower my costs, which may mean that my produce is only available to the rich, or that I use free municipal waste, replete with pharmaceutical residue, to fertilize my crops. If I sell vegetables with the goal of increasing food security, biodiversity, and community engagement, my practices will look quite different and I may use a different metaphor to guide my practices - perhaps the metaphor of an ecosystem.

It's at this point that Gregory Bateson weighs in with the suggestion that

"whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon "operationalism" or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking" *

In other words, a wide experience helps us to think of new ideas, to see new things, which can then be refined and tested. Perhaps all the things that I am learning, seemingly dissociated, will be used in ways I can't yet foresee. Learning many ways to learn may be the best strategy.

* Bateson, G. (1941). Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material, Philosophy of Science, 8(1): 53-68.

Whose Side is Science On?

The kids and I went to the Saskatchewan Science Centre this morning. The soap bubbles were a big hit, as was the mirrored table where you could create kaleidoscopic images with coloured plastic shapes. Lest you think my kids are Luddites, I hasten to assure you that they were also enthralled by Richardson's Ag-Grow-Land, which "celebrates the science and cutting edge tools of modern day agriculture in Saskatchewan": the exhibits had buttons to push and levers to pull.

http://www.sasksciencecentre.com/here/exhibits/aggrowland.html

In one agricultural exhibit, you can climb inside a John Deere tractor cab and have the virtual experience of growing a crop - choosing tillage methods, when to apply chemicals and fertilizers and how much, that sort of skilled technical decision.

I have a friend who is a rural sociologist. Her father is an organic farmer. She decided to play the game and farm organically. Turns out she wasn't offered the chance to cover crop, use green or animal manure, intercrop, or any other organic or agroecological methods. She ended up with the worst score of anyone in the game.

Well, maybe that's scientifically valid. Surely the Science Centre would have vetted its sponsored exhibits for scientific veracity. Let's see, shall we?

Your farming performance, based primarily on yield, is rated against previous players at the end of the game. I have some problems with the equation of good farming with yield, but let's accept that assertion for now. How do the yields of organic agriculture compare with those of conventional agriculture?

The answer, of course, is "it varies", based on type of crop, region, how long the land has been in organic production, and specific weather events that might occur. But for many crops, organic yields are quite close to conventional yields. A twenty-one year European study found an average yield of 20% less for organic, but this ranged from 10% less for winter wheat, no difference for grassland yields, and 33% less for potato yields mainly due to a potassium deficiency. Another twenty-one year trial in Pennsylvania found similar yields for corn and soybeans in both methods. 

So if the entire world switched to organic agriculture, would that mean a reduction of 20% in food supply? Of course not. Much of the world's production, in developing countries, shows drastic yield increases with the adoption of agroecological methods. Drastic, like tripling yields of grain in Honduras just by cover cropping. Reviewing several studies, Altieri* found that "integrated farming systems in which the small-scale farmer produces grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder and animal products out-produce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms." Studies in Mexico found that it takes 1.73 ha of maize monoculture to produce as much food as 1 ha of mixed maize, squash and beans.

Another post will have to address all of the additional benefits of organic farming found in these studies and others, including 30% fewer fossil energy inputs, increase in biodiversity, more resilience to weather shocks, greater water retention and nitrogen and carbon levels in soil, and waste recycling.

The divide between conventional and organic methods isn't as clear-cut as Richardson et al might like you to think, of course. Conventional farmers increasingly use organic methods such as cover cropping, or planting a legume in rotation to increase nitrogen in the soil. What is clear is that agribusiness benefits from positing conventional, chem-dependent methods as not only normal, but examplars of scientific progress. Hey - you aren't anti-science, are you? Against progress?! 

Luckily, agroecology is cutting-edge science, both physical and social. And smart farmers, if they can find out about them, will adopt methods that work.

And, luckily, if you take your children to visit the Science Centre, you are armed with some data to help them critically think about what they're seeing.

*Altieri, Miguel A. and Victor Manuel Toledo. (2011). The agroecological revolution in Latin America: rescuing nature, ensuring food sovereignty, and empowering peasants. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:3.

Dei ex machina and the social scientist

With all this talk about climate change, food insecurity, peak oil, and the growing dead zone in the gulf of Mexico caused by overuse of agrichemicals, it will cheer you to know that farming in Saskatchewan right now is sustainable. So I was told by the director of R&D from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture. Extrapolating from the ministry's research focus, the director no doubt attributes this sustainability to the innovations of Science and Technology.

As a social scientist, I don't have the technical scientific background to understand how losing over 10% of our farmers per decade, and having only 10% of farmers under the age of 40 is sustaining farming, rural communities and economies. Likewise, I don't know how the suggestion of an MBA student at the last conference I attended, that we "find new sources of water", will work to ameliorate the problems with climate change effects on the South Saskatchewan River basin, but guess I'm meant to have confidence in anyone who can create a mean RSI graph.

 All snark aside, the problem is this:  These are all social problems that people are trying to solve using technology or theoretical economic models. Drought in Saskatchewan is not just a lack of moisture. It involves questions about values - green lawns? - about ecological appropriateness - thirsty monocultures? - about governance - will the market decide who gets water and who doesn't? - about imagination - what kind of future are we planning for and with how long of a view? 
 
But we have been conditioned to believe that technology can - or if it isn't now, will very soon - solve all of our problems, including the ones it has created. Heavens forfend that, for example, a social scientist working in the field, with real people and real data, should be asked what to do about potential long-term drought in Saskatchewan and come up with research that addresses vulnerabilities to climate change by looking at how an individual or community's adaptive capacity to drought is enhanced or constrained not only by their access to infrastructure, knowledge, resources and technology but by the institutional framework, their capacity to act as a collective, and their human capital.* In other words, why do some people and communities adapt, or not, and what gets in their way or helps them to do that? These are important questions that the theory of "rational economic actors" and industry, science, and technology do not address adequately.

*See, for example: Pittman, J., V. Wittrock, S. Kulshreshtha, and E. Wheaton. (2011). "Vulnerability to climate change in rural Saskatchewan: Case study of the Rural Municipality of Rudy No. 284." Journal of Rural Studies, 27(1), 83-94.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

One of the problems with irrigation is that it often increases the level of salts in fields. What is the obvious answer?

Crop scientist: develop salt-resistant crops!

Any other ways of looking at this problem?

Agricultural research: Follow the money.

I recently attended a presentation from the director of Research and Development at the Ministry of Agriculture. He was explaining how to apply for funding from the R&D fund, and what type of research was likely to be appealing. New crop varieties and biotechnology were at the top of the list. They pretty much were the list. You can check out the funded projects there.

I can't quibble with some of the research. Heck, I'm government-funded right now myself and I'm sure there's plenty who would scream in horror if they knew the tack of my research. So, I can't complain about $51,500 for a solar-operated irrigation system. Kind of cool - for application in other places, since we happen to live in a drought-prone province with looming water shortages. New grape and apple cultivars? That would make life more pleasant. Someone may as well get funding for developing the things that experimental gardeners and farmers do for free, I guess.

I have a few more questions about their funding of "Integrated production systems and practices that reduce agriculture's impact on the environment". First, I didn't see very much evidence of it in this year's funded projects. The word "sustainable" is very appealing, but if you can tell me how it figures in the project "Cool Season Corn Grown in Saskatchewan in Sustainable Livestock Production" I'll give you a prize. Corn is a "heavy feeder", requiring lots of nitrogen that, without suitable crop rotations (and even with, at times) our farmed-out soil requires massive chemical injections to provide. Corn is also used primarily in feedlots, not by farmers or ranchers pasturing cattle on grasslands which primarily made up this ecosystem before settlement. Feedlots may be "efficient" - bringing cattle to market in a shorter time than grass-fed - but can contribute to environmental degradation with results like those in Walkerton.

And in the end, I have to question who this research is serving.

Funny that I've never heard farmers who couldn't make it and had to give up farming, or those struggling, say, "If only there were a new crop variety I could have tried - that really would have made the difference!" or "If I had an efficient way to finish my cattle a month earlier, that would have made up for the US ban on Canadian cattle during the BSE crisis." Why is that?