Picture a healthy and thriving natural ecosystem:

• jungle
• ocean
• tundra

Now picture a domesticated form of greenery:

• freshly mowed lawns or golf courses
• fields of corn stretching across the horizon in all directions
• mulberry trees lining a neighborhood boulevard

Whenever I go to the grocery store, I imagine the processes and events that have brought me each piece of food that I select. I'm not exaggerating– every single item, every single time. I imagine the vast amount of blood that has been spilled for my inexpensive bananas, and to make them consistently the most purchased item of all at retailers such as Walmart. We call bananas murder-fruit in our home. I also recall that the bananas we eat today are cavendish bananas– they're all clones of the same banana. I recall that we eat these as a replacement for the Gros Michel banana which was the clone variety eaten previously.

I recall that there are so many more varieties of bananas that exist, and have existed, but they're not as marketable for various reasons. Perhaps the seeds, the flavor, or their ability to keep over long distances. Things that wouldn't be issues if we purchased locally, although clearly no one is going to be growing bananas in Maine, although I could buy or grow tomatoes locally in season. We consume not only a single variety of bananas, but a single DNA sequence.

I remember that all the apples you and I have ever eaten are descended from two trees from the last wild apple forest in the world, near Almaty, Kazakhstan. In this forest, there are varieties of apples that are very different than what we consume, varieties that exist only the forest.

I imagine the Svalbard Seed Vault.

Tomato Sandwiches

In the summer I love eating tomato sandwiches. Good toast, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, and of course, thick cut slices of tomato. I can get fresh tomatoes year-round in our globalized economic system, but I would never use them for a tomato sandwich. When I'm at the grocery store, I get sad looking at the tasteless varieties of tomatoes in the produce section. These tomatoes were not only selected, but bred and hybridized much less for taste, or even nutritional content, but for yield and ability to keep over long distances so that they can make it from one part of the world to the next, to your store, your home, and your food.

I only eat tomato sandwiches in the summer because it's the only time of year we grow our own tomatoes, and we don't grow the bland varieties. Essentially, the only way to get them is to grow them yourself or if you happen to have a gardener friend willing to share.

I think about how all tomatoes used to have flavor.

I think about how in the US, outside of a Thanksgiving turkey and the occasional seafood, there are essentially only three animals which are regularly consumed, all of which have been successfully domesticated over vast amounts of time:

• Chicken
• Pig
• Cow

This is not to bemoan the fact that we don't consume more animals, but I do find it fascinating that we've narrowed it to just three. We only regularly eat eggs from chickens and we only regularly drink milk from a cow.

The Romans had drive-thru fast food restaurants where they sold burgers. Sure, they drove chariots and they flavored the burger with pine nuts, but you take your burger with pickles and ketchup and I take mine with mustard. Drive-thru fast food burger restaurants are older than communion bread.

One of the most delicious things on the planet is a simple tomato sandwich with fresh tomatoes from an heirloom variety, and there is perhaps nothing sadder than a tomato sandwich made from a store-bought tomato.

I see olive oil on the shelves and I think of Palestine. I see bread in the bakery section of the store and I think of Ukraine, the supply and cost of wheat and the cost of bread across the world. I think of rice and the rush to get to the store on new rice day in Japan, and how most of the rice on the shelves in the US is at least a couple years old, and how the rice distributed by the UN in humanitarian environments is over a decade old. I haven't double checked these numbers lately, but it used to be something like this and I doubt much has changed. I should mention there's also nothing inherently wrong with this– the quality mostly affects flavor and texture and although the nutritional content does decrease over time, it's not enough to matter.

I think of all of the different varieties and flavors of rice that I've eaten in Asia and how much I love rice and how amazing it can be, and how in the US, rice is just rice. It's just considered a tasteless vessel for other stuff to go on top of and to fill your stomach.

I imagine riding my bicycle through the rice paddies every day on the way to work and back, and the way the shoots would pierce dotted lines across a perfect mirror of the sky. I think about harvesting the rice in the field and feeding it through the combine with my own hands and then bringing it to the grain elevator. I remember the jealousy in every single one of my coworkers eyes when they found out that I got to keep a couple kilograms of the rice after helping with a local harvest because it's one of the best and most expensive rices around, and how they jokingly threatened me over the mere thought that someone might ever try to eat it with something on top of it– no, this rice was too good not to be eaten plain. It really was the best rice I've ever eaten.

I look at the shelves in the grocery store and I think of the massive coffee brands. I think of exploitation of labor forces and I think of the ways our consumption drives extractive processes upon the land in faraway places. I think about the fact that I don't know where Starbucks gets its coffee, then again, I don't purchase from them. I think of how upset I was when I was growing up and they kept putting all of my favorite local coffee shops out of business. I think of it hand in hand with how Barnes & Noble put all of my favorite bookstores out of business, and how I feel about Amazon killing even Barnes & Noble to a certain extent.

What am I getting at?

Communist bread lines. Kind of. Not really.

Variety

When I was growing up, I was taught repeatedly that "under communism" people have no choices, no variety. There is one brand, there is one style, there is one flavor. You get what you get. I've no doubt that this is true under an authoritarian regime, especially one alienated from global access and suffering the effects of, well, everything.

We were told to contrast with our own grocery stores and the amount of variety we could find under our capitalist system in the US. Remember to pledge allegiance at the start of every weekday.

I do think about all of the choices and varieties we are told that we have in our own lives, even in our supermarkets. We have an entire aisle dedicated to so many flavors of cereal, most of which are just made from corn and flavored with corn syrup and when you think closely, aren't really all that different from each other. They're made by the same couple of companies with the same inputs and supply chains.

I think of Taco Bell and the fact that they only have like three ingredients in the entire restaurant, but they have a large menu with new items constantly rotating week to week, season to season, all made with the same handful of ingredients but designed to make you feel like you're experiencing something new.

The word restaurant is of French origin, referring to the refreshing and restorative nature of food you would find at such an establishment. Taco Bell. Bland tomatoes. Corn syrup.

Variety

I think again about the Svalbard Seed Vault. I think about all varieties of flora and fauna that are gone or face extinction. I think about our supply chains.

I think about the difference in the way my food tastes and how I feel after eating from my own garden, or from a local farmer or homesteader, things I can't buy at a grocery store and are not in our restaurant chains.

The whole idea of a restaurant chain is something that makes something consistent in every location, taking the place of what otherwise would have been a service provided by a number of single restaurants, serving food specific to the tastes of perhaps a single chef.

Consolidation

For every thousand franchise locations, we have consolidated the variety of tastes and flavors from a thousand palates, and we have put pressure on a supply chain to consolidate market demand on what is grown and harvested by farmers and producers. This shapes what is supplied to your grocery store, shaping even the variety of food you are able to cook at home. It has shaped the recipes you learned from your grandmother. It shapes your cooking shows. It shapes the horizon and the landscape that surrounds you.

Noodles originate in China. Tomatoes are native to the Americas. Spaghetti Bolognese is an Italian dish. Chicken Tikka Masala was created in, and is the national dish of England.

Prairie & Corn

I grew up in Iowa for a good portion of my youth, a place named after the Ioway tribe– Ioway is redlined by my spellcheck, I should add. I was taught that Iowa is prairie. It once was, but it was a lie when I was taught it still was when I was a child. Iowa has one of the largest portions of some of the richest farm soil in the world due to the prairie that once thrived across the land.

Iowa is now one giant cornfield with little patches of soybean in the name of "crop rotation." It can be beautiful as long as you don't think about it too long. One giant monoculture.

The prairie is gone. Dead. We extract from its corpse. In its place is an industrial field upon which we spread harmful chemicals we use to kill what kills the monoculture. It leaches into the streams and the groundwater, poisoning it across the entire state. We do this to maintain that breakfast cereal aisle and the corn syrup in all of our food, and to feed the cows, chickens, and hogs that we eat. This is, of course, not exclusive to Iowa.

Variety

We get together in the evening after a long day and we ask each other what we want to eat, no one has an answer. Too many options. Or maybe you're sick of always having the same thing. Maybe it's a bit of both. Maybe you have too many options of the same thing. Maybe we are trying to create the entire world into a Taco Bell:

• Cheap
• Good enough
• The illusion of variety
• Filled with calories to simply keep you able to do your work at a low cost

We feed our livestock this way. Cheap. Good enough. Filled with calories. Low variety.

Why do we do it this way?

To increase profit margins for shareholders.

Capitalism. Of course.

Industrialized agriculture has pulled off marvelous feats. Specialized labor and more efficient tools increase productivity, enabling us to feed more people with lower input. It has made us more resilient. We have far more than enough food to feed the world (but we don't). Although, we cheat when we burn fossil fuels and use extractive processes drawing from the land to rob from the future in order to benefit ourselves today, and also when we exploit each other in order to keep these margins– the negative effects of these processes are labeled externalities in economic terms, as if to say they are aberrations, and not fundamental to the system itself.

Variety

Why do we do it this way?

Variety

Diversity

Resiliency in our food supply. What happened to the Gros Michel bananas again? And why doesn't anyone roast chestnuts on an open fire anymore? The answer is the same for both.

And where did all the buffalo go?

Picture again

I want you to again picture a healthy and thriving natural ecosystem:

• jungle
• ocean
• tundra

Now again picture a domesticated form of greenery:

• freshly mowed lawns or golf courses
• fields of corn stretching across the horizon in all directions
• mulberry trees lining a neighborhood boulevard

What is missing?

What makes an ecosystem thrive?

Whether you envision either the natural ecosystem or the examples of domesticated greenery, it's possible to envision something beautiful, but one is filled with life, and the other is devoid of anything but monoculture.

When we think of building a better future, what is it exactly that we are building? What is this legacy?

Often it doesn't feel that we're building much of anything. It feels more like we're widdling away and leaving mostly scraps on the floor.

I think of these things every time I enter a grocery store, even as I buy my bananas, coffee, and tomatoes.

I wonder sometimes how different the world would be if we all thought about these things.

What are we building?

What do we continue to sacrifice?

no ends, only means