Are shrubs the hipster scented candle? Shrubs and Fermentation, part 2 of 2

As I should perhaps have explained in my prior essay struggling through the social justice implications of sugars and flavorings, shrubs are intense extractions of aromatic compounds from plant matter, contributing a much wider and more idiosyncratic flavoring of beverages. They are often extracted by the combination of fruits, herbs, and spices with sugar and cider vinegar, the active bacterial cultures of which continue to ferment the sugars and fruits, creating novel but recognizable flavors—often from produce that might otherwise have spoiled, such as softening fruits.

Given contemporary interest in mixology, shrubs represent a rediscovery of longstanding folk foodways, such as making switchel (highlighted in the haying scene featured in my childhood copy of the Little House on the Prairie cookbook, for example). They are often also used to perform claims about the tastes of place, taking advantage of locally characteristic flavors and preserving them in relatively storable — and marketable — ways.

Shrubs are also an excellent example of what are often characterized as hipster approaches to consumption and production, emphasizing artisanal craft and unique and intense experience, particularly in the mundane materiality of everyday life. As part of a recent project exploring the uses of edible signal species of climate change, I have been learning about shrubs, and experiencing their intensity has led me to pose this question about whether they represent something like a hipster version of scented candles, a question I think is interesting beyond the superficial similarity of enjoyable aroma.

As a person who has always avoided artificial scents because of unpleasant effects such as headache and respiratory tract pain, I have often been dubious about the appeal of cinnamon-scented stores, smelly candles and fruity personal care items, and air fresheners in general. (And research on the effects of phthalates and other substances used in these scented products reinforces my concern and suggests that people with heightened chemical sensitivities to such substances may well be providing coal-mine canary services to the broader populace.) However, the half hour I spent sniffing at my first shrub once it had brewed (when I had rescued impulse-buy strawberries and some leftover parsley) gave me a sudden appreciation for the sensory pleasure that scented candles must provide for others less punished by them!

Recognizing the joy and beauty of this sensory enjoyment — whether it's a more protected and less acute one, or a more sensation seeking version — makes me also recognize some of the social dynamics caught up in the celebration of the invitation to inhabit a particular place through the senses, or the deriding of poor taste around someone else's scent preferences. As with the precious approach to many food and "lifestyle" choice, things like scent can be used not only for enjoyment, but to perform that enjoyment in ways that signal class positioning as well as empathy for other (as with sugar boycotts). Implications for the ways we craft narratives of of the senses may include more attention to the way we invite others to share or explore our experiences of sensory delight, without dismissiveness or judgment and with attention to the embedding of privilege in foodie preciousness. (A wonderful film treatment of taste this evokes is The Taste of Others!)

Phenological Anxiety and Abeyance

Last year at this time, I watched the leaves flame out with peculiar detachment: for the first time, I was leaving my temperate deciduous autumn during the brief interval between leaf fall and snow fall, dissociating the exhilarating experience of gorgeous foliage transformation from the anxious anticipation of winter. This year, I am attempting to channel that dissociation to mitigate the seemingly unavoidable resignation that comes with the end of warm season foliage.

Psychologically, part of what was interesting about trading in my usual excruciatingly cold winter for a cool southern hemisphere summer in Dunedin was that it did not feel quite like summer—it was much more like coasting in a pleasant autumn/spring holding pattern, the kind of seasonal dawn/dusk people in places like Florida and California must experience, complete with a full panoply of broadleaf evergreens whose home range just doesn’t extend quite this far. This in-between season is quite a contrast with the ominous gloaming of both the second half of autumn and the first half of spring in Minnesota, both of which twinkle with the starry brightness of long clear nights and the occasional crystalline sunny days of a winter too cold to snow but also stretch out with snow cover that one knows will last almost half of the year before the leaves flesh out again. Even if it might be t-shirt and swimming weather (like it is today!) while the leaves are crunchy on the beach in Minneapolis, one knows that the lake could freeze within the week, and this leads to a certain pinchedness that contrasts the relaxed abandon elicited by extended warmth in summer.

In a Dunedin kind of summer, any warm morning is almost certain to be followed by a stiff breeze off the cold ocean separating you from Antarctica, sucked in by the lifting warming of interior Otago. The short half-life of warmth prompts somewhat more structured adventure: one is motivated to get out into the promise of warmth but without the illusion of extended heat or the punishment of overheating. This is consistent with spring/fall activities of my prior experience, times when I have found it easiest to plan around the possibility of being outside, getting some sunshine and warmth in whatever time of day best allows it, and then retreating inside to get work done with the rest of the time—a rhythm that feels well balanced and measured, overextended into neither lassitude nor action.

The summer/winter rhythm, in contrast, often feels like one of allowing catch-up relaxation time contrasted with the holing up of cold months recognized to not be much good for fun. Everyday winter sports like biking or snowshoeing or skiing (even as a commute) are process-intensive enough with their bundling and equipment to feel laborious. And the cold is punishing enough to elicit a constant low-level vigilance. Even on days nice enough to lounge around outside if dressed warmly enough, for example, I’ve had police stop to make sure I wasn’t dead when trying to soak up some sun sitting against a tree in the park. Constant reminders of how not to be killed by the weather require a fair amount of the “hygge” coziness that has become a trendy aspiration of cold winter sojourns.

So as I watch orange, red, and yellow leaves stream off the trees today in the uncertain mid-autumn sunny warmth, I am compelled by ways to build up my measure of phenological equanimity in the face of oncoming winter. Phenology is the study of the signs of seasonal progression, and it was an unusual gift last year to be able to watch these signs without bracing for the onrush of seasonal symptoms one expects next (ice! snow! dryness crinkly with static, dark mornings, afternoons, and long nights and slippery roads). This year, I find myself poking at the edges of this anticipation in a more exploratory way, wondering how to build mitigation by other means than escape.

I remind myself that I already organize my daily commute around sun gathering, and that I own a reasonable trunkful of warm winter clothes. The walking and bike commute may soon be more difficult, but I have just discovered a bus route that stops within two blocks of my home and office. I am looking for some better sources of humidity, and spaces to be active and at ease without a lot of extra clothing this winter. If I could build into my schedule regular sessions working in community greenhouses, pleasant spaces, and sunny places to write, can those feel as ordinary, well-balanced, and un-emergency as staying out of the high sun in summer or keeping the garden weeded?

Two Sharp Shakes

On Indigenous Peoples Day, being back on laundry feels mundane—but I am going to celebrate efforts to decolonize places by understanding the stories we use to shape those places, in the hopes that such efforts can help us shape them more equitably. 

Partly because of health problems, and arguably also because of class positioning and the effects that has on people's tolerance for disgust and their enthusiasm for demonstrating cleanliness, my mother taught me how to do laundry when I was quite young. And after twenty years living with my mate, one of the things I still often find myself trying to demonstrate persuasively is two sharp shakes of each laundered item as it goes from the basket onto the line or into the dryer. 

I have never liked ironing. (See also: learning to do laundry before being very good at controlling steaming metal appliances, or small ladder required to reach into washing machine, requiring climbing up and then down to the dryer for each piece of clothes...) Given my rather strong aversion, I've always thought of the two sharp shakes mainly as a way to prevent wrinkles. As I've tried to justify it in my demonstrations—and as I've learned more about the dynamics of laundering—I've realized it's not just about wrinkles (although the pre-emptive smoothing of the collar and placket and pockets does save me a lot of ironing). It also shakes off lint from the wash, pollen from the yard, and the various bits of leaf and insects that may be resting on the clothes. 

The pollen pieces (along with molds) aren't something I'd ever thought of before quite recently—and hence the justification felt quite ad hoc, even if it was legitimate. It made me notice, however, that I was adopting reasons that contributed to my feeling of doing laundry right. Noticing the distance between my ability to explain why and this definitive sense that two sharp shakes seemed to both serve some functions and also set the appropriate pacing for laundry hanging made me also notice than when I was too rushed to take the time for each garments' shakes (it turns out I shake them both before hanging and after), the need to shake them out lingers with the clothing, and I'll find myself wondering if it's legit to shake them in the bedroom, or if I need to shake any potential loitering spiders out on the porch, or out the window.

This is clearly a trivial case. However, it strikes me as a good example of the functions that lurk in practices, waiting to be explored. Exploration may provide insights into what makes these practices meaningful—not necessarily why they are persuasive or optimal, but perhaps why they have been made to feel right, perhaps through only dimly remembered instructions or modeled behaviors (it would not have been till years after my formative laundry learning that I regularly hung laundry outside with my mother and grandmother). And it reminds us that the way that we shape spaces to provide these instructions, often outside of explicit language, seems worth regularly exploring and reinvesting in.

Critical pastoral: Reorienting in complex contexts

I spent the past several months looking across the Dunedin Harbour at what is marked on the bus maps simply as "fertilizer factory." The Ravensbourne superphosphate plant bills itself as the premier source for pastoral nutrients in New Zealand, and considering the role of fertilizer in pastoral systems has made me understand something new aboutthe way that explanatory stories operate, especially when they are about something like food -- something we encounter often, may care about deeply, but do not necessary have much systemic knowledge about.

The short version of how I've needed to revise my story of pasturing sheep has to do with understanding of how pastures work. Although I have known, at various points, that people fertilize grasses and other fodder to make them grow better (and hence that pasturage represents a potential threat to water -- frankly, even without fertilizer, potentially, given the nutrients in animal waste), I found that I still romanticized grassland systems as, at best, letting animals forage in ecosystems adapted to their grazing.

This is not exactly the wrong story, but it makes me think about the trajectory of my understanding of corn agriculture: for the first third of my life, as far as I can remember it, I thought of corn as an attractive indicator of successfully retained agriculture (even when I realized it was "cow corn," as we called it in my childhood, rather than fresh corn for human food). As I studied agroecosystems in more detail and came to recognize the food landscapes I encountered in the context of their complex relationships, cornfields became a daunting manifestation of monocultural extractive landscapes, designed for the most efficient transformation of metabolic processes into industrial returns on investment. It has taken over a decade of further exploring corn—growing beautiful varieties in my garden, curating and exchanging gift corn with interesting stories and geographical histories—to learn to appreciate some of the further complexity beneath the surface of what appears to be a repellently stripped down productivist ecology.

The fertilizer factory has helped provide a similar entry point into stories of pastures, making me wonder how others see their complexity. If farmers are compelled to maximize the returns on their pastures such that they become "locked in," as those who study the production of scientific knowledge call it, to the whole system surrounding the relationship between particular kinds of livestock and particular kinds of pasturage (white clover and sheep, for example, despite the better contexts for nitrogen-fixing microbiota that red clover might provide), how can we invite someone just appreciating the pastoral landscape into the whole fascinating world of the political economy of agroecosystems, to debt, the models of nutrients and water flows and soil edaphon, and the many stories that govern how we orient ourselves amidst these complexities?

When to look for new instructions

Like many people in my latitude, where we have just passed the historic frost-free date, I spent a considerable amount of this weekend gardening. Or, to be more precise, painstakingly recovering plantable soil from a riot of opportunistic other plants. Many hours of tracing the rootlets of creeping yellowcress down into the dirt (after the prior three years' methods of reducing the amount of garden bed given up to this hungry and allelopathic rhizomatous creeper) gave me ample time to wonder about how environmental knowledge feedback loops work. 

Gardening seems like a perfect domain for this line of thought: one tries many different things, with fairly stable goals, and only moderately changing environments. Quizzing my fellow gardeners as we weeded, pulled out rocks -- and learned how to build a hoop house through a skillsharing workshop led by Cherry Page and Tim Flowers with the Urban Farm and Garden Alliance (pictured assembled!) -- I realized that the different modes people bring to garden observation may be quite salient to my ongoing exploration of frameworks for orientation.

Many people seem drawn to gardening because it is a domain of knowledge passed on from others -- while others seem more excited about the direct interactions with environment. And both of these approaches seem to have strengths and weaknesses for dealing with the need to change behaviors as conditions require. Hoop houses are a great example of the way that the changing conditions may be social as much as environmental: as people share techniques for building this kind of growing season extender, the process of sharing observations and experiences may invite others into ways of noticing and adapting. What did really well that warm spring or fall that might thrive with more shelter? Which weeds seem to have less yellowcress around them? What kinds of garden orientation seem to get people to come back and keep weeding?

Re-labeling a fierce wind: Listening more to internal dialogue

I commuted this morning for the first time to my new office against a head wind that was strong enough to beg for an additional adjective. The wind was whipping off the hills to the north and pouring into the valley with such strength that it stopped my bike on downhill slopes, and it took herculean pedaling to get to work in just under twice the amount of time I had estimated it would take. My route takes me around the bay end of Otago harbor, and especially as I got down to the south side of the water, the wind was not only trying to push me off my bicycle, it was also throwing fistfuls of water my way, and snapping branches down into my path. Passing through the lee of my favorite pohutukawa trees almost knocked me off my bike in the other direction, the contrast was so sharp when sheltered.

In this kind of retrospect, it is easier to deconstruct the various parts of my experience of the wind, and analyze their relationship to my emotional state in relation to it. At the time, however, my main reaction was terse. I kept finding myself exclaiming (to myself) about what a fierce wind this was, or how wicked.

This was clearly a practiced response—the kind of thing one might say to a companion facing into a stiff wind, perhaps to keep spirits up, or to check in to see whether a course correction might be in order, or if the goal is worth the punishment of the wind. It certainly summons a certain attention to the wind: is this the kind of wind that is bringing a change in the weather I need to pay attention to?

My immediate response was surprisingly normative: I found myself chastising my inner wind labeller. True, the wind is from the north northwest, and my northern hemisphere self braces against the Alberta Clipper-eque cold that often signals at the time of year. But here in Dunedin in summer, what if this is a warm equatorial burst? Pedal harder. And I would no sooner concentrate on pedaling again when I would hear the first voice start up again about what a fierce wind that was.

In the weeks that have followed since I wrote the first lines above on my first commute, this conversation with myself has stuck with me, and has made me notice some things about internal dialogue. First was its pre-formedness. I was not so much searching for descriptions for what I was experiencing as I was discovering what I was experiencing by the way my internal voice was narrating it to me. This was accentuated by the dramatic nature of the effortful windy bike ride, and my consequently narrowed mental bandwidth. When I wondered, somewhat involuntarily, “why is this so hard?” a preformed answer was already there with an explanation about the ferocity of the wind.

This was, secondly, not just a descriptive note, but a preformed normative analysis that constructed the wind as a character! By assigning qualities like fierce and wicked to the wind, my internal weather monitor was personifying what I was “up against,” and providing me a set of similarly preformed schemata for responding: fight, struggle, perhaps retreat. It was only through the second part of the internal dialogue that I could access a perhaps more interesting schema like explore—or even reconsider those hasty judgments that come from experience in a very different place.

Although fairly mundane, these observations about the qualities of internal dialogue made me start to pay considerably new attention to how much I was relying on presets to interpret and orient in new situations. And especially since I was already bringing the frame of reorienting myphenological expectations in a hemispherically reversed seasonal transition, I had yet a new tool for noticing when and how that second part of the conversation could be encouraged, figuring out what patterns I am observing, and how those work.