the long entangle
El Bulli chef, Ferran Adrià, once said that cooking is the most conservative form of art. That’s why he developed the field of molecular gastronomy, to fight that tendency to stick to the familiar. His are not the sort of meals you can likely prepare at home, though, unless you have a hyperbolic chamber or chemistry lab handy. Cooking maintains the stubborn potential to be the most deeply grounded in nature, place, and the rhythms of the Earth of any cultural practice, if only because of its ubiquity. We eat “nature” daily. Aside from breathing, it’s likely the most intimate way our bodies interface with the world around us to the point of inviting gastronomically curated bowls-full of other life forms, liquids and minerals, directly into our bodies, transforming them through friction, chemical processes, earth, air, water, fire, into us.
Stuart Brand of the Long Now Foundation has a chart that shows different levels of time from slow Earth time to culture and infrastructure all the way up to fast fashion. Most art tends to dance at the top of that scale. Eco-art that engages with infrastructure, water treatment plants, large-scale landscaping, habitat, reforestation, communities, and governance may have more multi-layer integration. As projects, though, they are rarely articultural, although they could be.
Food may be more conservative (i.e. slower) because of that deep material connection to “nature”. It’s also a daily ritual so it gets reinforced regularly. You could paint using pigments from far away but without fossil fuels, you’d run out of colors fast if you had to source locally and wanted to paint often. Historically, we cook and eat what grows seasonally around us because it’s what was most available and abundant. Recipes, seed saving, and cooking traditions emerged from those constraints over generations.
Fossil fuels have made year-round tomatoes and bananas grown far away accessible at most local supermarkets. Now if we think of regenerative culture, and consider how we might actually live within our ecological footprint, we might feel localized constraints are enormously conservative, oppressive, even. What? No coffee? Any quick look at the stunning variety of traditional cultures worldwide and their seemingly infinite forms of expressing themselves should give us a sense that living within our means doesn’t have to be dull or unimaginative, yet to do it today, in a city, can feel near impossible.
As limitations due to a lack of biodiversity or capacity to grow things arises, how might creativity still bloom? After exploring 100 different ways to serve zucchini (or the equivalent in fashion, music, or ritual), you may bump against some limits of creativity or expression. It is here where the idea of articulture comes in. How might we bring deeper meaning, poetry, and resonance to what might at first just seem merely a prolific vegetable? Inviting in other art forms and using them to explore the spaces between things and what they represent for us, offers an infinite tableau for culture makers. I believe that’s how pre-industrial cultures kept things fresh and found meaning and spirituality in what might to us, feel like limited options.
Naturally, they also lived at a time with vastly more intact ecosystems, astounding biodiversity, and the profound ancestral knowledge of how to steward, make use of and nurture the local systems they depended on. Today, our choices come from a globalized food market, and our diets tend to be more conceptual (let’s have pasta primavera!), than strictly seasonal.
Articultural systems entangle and interweave deep roots into Brand’s Pace Layers holding them intact long enough to keep us in the game. Without cultural patterns of resilience, you risk the loss of cultural topsoil, infrastructural erosion, and the polarization of social and economic conditions, none of which are particularly supportive of interdependent life.
I see food, in particular, as an extremely powerful anchor for articultural systems. The tea ceremony, salmon festivals, rites of passage, and countless forms of religious expression make use of food and drink as sensory anchors. It’s also a great way to celebrate after a day of hard work in the fields, bring people together and share seasonal abundance. It’s a highly adaptable cultural element that can root down through the layers of Brand’s chart, stabilize the soil, and anchor people’s attention and gratitude enough to let other elements such as architecture, sculpture, painting, and performance shine. It’s an opportunity to engage with a broader range of what scholar Vanessa Andreotti calls “living metabolisms”.
Looking ahead, we can try relocalizing our diets and seeing what needs more cultural support. For many, it will be land access. We simply can’t afford a farm or do much beyond supplemental food in a backyard garden. How much land would you need to grow ALL your own food? Depending on where you live, it’s likely to be several acres, not to mention where you’d get your water, tools, and infrastructure, who would help you do the labor, and how amenable the land was for any of this—assuming you knew how to do all this in the first place.
But do not despair! Somehow, we need to reduce our footprints, regain skills and build local infrastructure while adapting to a changing (and sometimes angry) climate, build community, avoid plagues, pay the bills enough to fend off eviction, and all the rest of it. If this process isn’t at least occasionally fun, delicious, and metaphorically rich, it won’t work. It’s just too hard to sustain without cultural support. That’s the opening we need. Every time we can articulture the process of getting closer to what we want or to what makes more sense, we can begin to heal the soil of possibility and interconnection. Perhaps start with a gathering, but don’t just buy the food. Grow it. Use local heirloom seeds with stories to them and recipes that reflect those unique flavor profiles. Invite a local regenerative farmer whose produce you rely on if you want, a weaver, a handful of biologists, an urban planner, some acoustic musician friends, and hand-tool carpenters, your best food lovers, and plan a day without electricity or fossil fuels. Explore together the idea of all of this as a system. What does it need to feel right? What might contribute to improved infrastructure, tools, or capacity next time?
I’ll do the same and we can share the results.
One day of articulture…
