Saving More Than Seeds by Catherine Phillips

Author:Catherine Phillips [Phillips, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography
ISBN: 9781317059400
Google: 9cDeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-01T06:01:57+00:00

Knowing Carrots

Let’s start with carrots. ‘A day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution’, said Paul Cézanne. He would not have been speaking of saving, growing or eating, but of art – specifically of the post-impressionist approach shifting art worlds. But we can still take a lesson: paying serious attention to seemingly insignificant things, sensing them anew, alters worlds – maybe even in revolutionary ways. As Law and Urry (2004: 391) suggest, ‘to change our understanding is to change the world, in small and sometimes major ways.’ Painting for Cézanne was lived experience rather than objective representation, and he aimed to convey a sense of that living through his painting. But let’s get back to carrots – and the learning of them.

Learning and knowing carrots might be related first to eating practices. Carrots and consumers’ knowing of them provide material for Roe’s (2006a) investigation of edibility. Roe’s study, though primarily concerned with how GE foods become inedible, includes analysis of group discussions about edibility of three kinds of carrots: tinned; young and bunched; and, fat, mature. Taste is individual, she finds, but carrot materiality is important overall in determining edibility. How carrots look and feel – their appearance and textures – are clearly sensual and easily related with consumers’ material experiences, but ‘invisible’ properties – like vitamin levels or quality of sunshine – are also inferred. For her participants, how orange or how old a carrot appears, for instance, implies the carrot’s production processes and nutrition. Roe further argues that consumer considerations are both haptic and cognitive, integrating senses with memories, practices with preferences, and so on. Consumers judge whether they will eat carrots, and how, by material, affective and cognitive engagements (see also Eden et al.’s (2008) ‘mucky carrots’).

Carrots are not only those things we’re used to eating though, they have other experiences and other ways of knowing them. As Roe (2006a: 474) notes, ‘[c]arrot bodies, even when diced, sliced, boiled, fried, have a “sameness” that stands out more than that process by which it developed from seed to carrot shape.’ If we want to know some of this carrot difference, we need to look at other carrot–people practices such as growing.

Second, then, learning carrots may manifest in growing practices. Pollan (1991: 118–20) recounts his own quest to grow carrots well – something he struggled to do season after season. In trying to understand what is going wrong with his carrots, asks himself, ‘what does a carrot care about?’ and considers ‘what matters to them, what they require in order to fulfil the terms of their destiny.’ After much careful thought and through experimenting with varied growing practices and spaces, the problem is found in heavy soil and crowded carrots. Pollan then goes about providing his carrots ‘a propitious place by lightening the soil’, ‘ruthlessly’ thinning the seedlings, and finally growing carrots of which he is proud. Through his experience of learning carrots, Pollan develops skills that will now allow him to ‘grow fine carrots without a moment’s reflection.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.