Sick Veg 100

Twenty years ago at my blog WOEBOT, in December 2005, I made a list of 100 records.

 

For a couple of years I've been planning a 100 for the Sick Veg blog, but this time of non-fiction books. I first thought I would do it for Christmas - but I've had a little time free - so think of it as an early Christmas present. You're welcome.

 

This moment has arrived because I'm clearing my decks. Last week I finally got to the bottom of my pile of non-fiction books. I can date the start of this reading process with accuracy to 15th April 2017 when I ordered a copy of Theodore Roszak's "The Making of a Counterculture" and begun the research on "Retreat". Since that date, eight and a half years ago, I must have read close to two thousand books. One book lead to another - in most cases because it referred to another book that I ended up investigating - until the process felt complete...

 

The books themselves were not expensive, and it'd be inaccurate to think of this as an exercise in bibliophilia, with me showing off my valuable possessions. I was almost entirely concerned with their content. The real cost was the hours I spent reading when I might have been doing other things.

 

The books here are all ones which made a big impression on me, usually because the ideas they convey are luminous. I've broken down the one hundred I've chosen into the following categories: History, Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Tibet, Philosophy, Beat, Theodore Roszak, Self-sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Communes, Agriculture, Permaculture, Anthropology, and Self-help.

 

Strictly non-fiction, the list obviously doesn't include books of poetry (William Blake, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg) or fiction (Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Phillip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon). But also not writing on music (Simon Reynolds, Lester Bangs, David Toop), on artists (William Blake, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Van Gogh, Edward Bawden, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Crumb, Moebius, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Brian Bolland, Yayoi Kusama), or practical growing (Eliot Coleman, Charles Dowding, John Jeavons).

 

Collected together I see these one hundred non-fiction books as the ultimate progressive "Behaviour Change" curriculum.

 

Eliot Coleman: "The Self-Fed Farm"

 

 

Great interview with Eliot Coleman at The Real Organic Project for his new book, "The Self-Fed Farm."

 

Coleman argues that vegetable growers can effectively generate their soil fertility with Green Manures.

 

To the layman, the city-dweller, this sounds like obscure, agricultural jargon. Eyes roll. Why should anyone care about this?

 

Because it's so totally critical, let me break it down for you:

 

1) Everyone survives by eating food.

 

2) While it is perfectly possible to survive by just eating plants, of course, the meat that is eaten is first fed on plants we grow.

 

3) Growing vegetable and grains is extractive. So if we want to keep eating food, and, er, living... we have to engineer properly sustainable ways of making a contribution back to that fertility. This is what Sir Albert Howard called "The Law of Return."

 

4) Industrial agricultural systems cheat the replacement of macro-nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) by importing them to the growing site at great expense to the farmer and the environment. As for micro-nutrients - they usually don't even bother providing them for the soil, which leads to a reduction in their presence in the food we eat that these Industrial systems produce.

 

5) Other agricultural systems also import fertility to the farm. This includes Organic as well as Regenerative (for which there is no legal framework and is basically a free-for-all). With Organic this can be animal manures or other organic matter which feeds the soil microbiology.

 

6) Eliot Coleman and a few other innovative Organic farmers argue that, rather than importing this Organic matter to the farm, it is possible to grow plants called Green Manures. These can be legumes like clover, vetch, alfalfa, and peas, or non-legumes such as mustard, rye, buckwheat, and phacelia. If these plants are grown in a farmer's rotation, and then chopped down into the top four inches of topsoil (not deep digging which would damage the soil), they can provide all the fertility that the soil requires. Furthermore, as the Green Manures break down on the surface they produce carbonic acid which etches valuable minerals out of stone in the top and subsoil.

 

It's a system as elegant as it is brilliant. Not a new idea, but one which needs all the publicity it can get. It has been elbowed to one side by not just Industrial agriculture, but also Regenerative agriculture. The latter, with its emphasis on No Till, to the delight of herbicide manufacturers who can keep on selling Glyphosate to farmers, has vetoed even the minimal tillage that the system Coleman describes requires.

Finding Lights in a Dark Age.

 I've absolutely loved Chris Smaje's previous two books.

Smaje has been locked in life-or-death tussle with the journalist George Monbiot - bravely articulating what many of us think about Monbiot's celebration of lab food. Monbiot here is reduced to a very brief cameo - somewhat like a pantomime baddy; mercifully diminished.

"Finding Lights in a Dark Age" is, instead, a much more personal book. Smaje draws on his experience of the realities of managing land and market gardening. I laughed when he said he has been described locally as "not really a farmer" because it highlights the sclerotic attitudes of conventional farming and the countryside's too-common snobbery.

Bang up-to-date with the latest academic and sociological perspectives, the book nevertheless falls into the grand tradition of radical self-sufficiency. One could be reading Scott and Helen Nearing or John Seymour.

J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World" gets a very welcome mention and a highlight for me was the epic chapter twelve in which Smaje renders a genuinely excellent "Soi-Fi" projection of life in the South of England in the coming Dark Age he has conceptualised throughout the proceeding book. I'd read a whole book of that.