More and more I think we would all be better off if we spent our days tending to our own little vegetable plots, having some soup, and then calling it a day.
The comment above drew more positive responses than any of my other NYT comments (405 recommends and counting). It is always hard to judge why some comments resonate positively and others do not. One reason is its position in the queue - early responses get the most hits. Other reasons include its length (short is better than long) and coherence (spelling and grammatical errors tend to turn people away from an idea, no matter how compelling it might be).
One reason I think the comment did so well, apart from the formulaic reasons stated above, is the simple beauty and benevolence of vegetables. They are so wholesome and the most wholesome part of any agricultural imaginary. Yes, collecting eggs from the chickens, milking the cow, and even slopping the pig and shoeing the horse all add to a place's bucolic charm, but a waving field of grain, or better yet, the simple vegetable plot, small but variegated, holds the most appeal, I think. The latter is the less industrial. Large fields of a single crop call to mind the serried rows of tractors that were often depicted in mid 20th century representations of agricultural production in both capitalist and communist contexts. Plants are what feed us. Everything else is a luxury, and often a fraught and messy one at that.
Personifying vegetables complicates our seemingly benign engagement with them. A friend and former colleague of mine described to me recent 'advances' in maple syrup collection/production that involve manipulations of the sugar maple trees that, as he put it, call to mind the industrial extraction of milk from cows. It is a troubling image for anyone who pays close attention to quickly evolving scientific and philosophical understandings of plants.
So the lesson is . . . eat your vegetables but treat them nicely?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html
The comment above drew more positive responses than any of my other NYT comments (405 recommends and counting). It is always hard to judge why some comments resonate positively and others do not. One reason is its position in the queue - early responses get the most hits. Other reasons include its length (short is better than long) and coherence (spelling and grammatical errors tend to turn people away from an idea, no matter how compelling it might be).
One reason I think the comment did so well, apart from the formulaic reasons stated above, is the simple beauty and benevolence of vegetables. They are so wholesome and the most wholesome part of any agricultural imaginary. Yes, collecting eggs from the chickens, milking the cow, and even slopping the pig and shoeing the horse all add to a place's bucolic charm, but a waving field of grain, or better yet, the simple vegetable plot, small but variegated, holds the most appeal, I think. The latter is the less industrial. Large fields of a single crop call to mind the serried rows of tractors that were often depicted in mid 20th century representations of agricultural production in both capitalist and communist contexts. Plants are what feed us. Everything else is a luxury, and often a fraught and messy one at that.
Personifying vegetables complicates our seemingly benign engagement with them. A friend and former colleague of mine described to me recent 'advances' in maple syrup collection/production that involve manipulations of the sugar maple trees that, as he put it, call to mind the industrial extraction of milk from cows. It is a troubling image for anyone who pays close attention to quickly evolving scientific and philosophical understandings of plants.
So the lesson is . . . eat your vegetables but treat them nicely?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html
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