Eating the Landscape

Regarding this ambitious title, lvaro Domingues might have said: the landscape was
green, then a goat came along and ate it. But this title is not about goats diet. Instead, it
is about the Landscape as food, while symbiotic construction along with the bodies
which inhabit and feed on it. Eating the landscape is an ambitious title because it relates
the act of feeding, which is a special way of saying, of being in a relation, of articulating
from out to inside; and, simultaneously, to build the outside which postulates itself and
the inside that feeds in a plowed and nurtured transit between the mouth and the
landscape.
Eating the Landscape is to test the boundaries of the land arts: the cultivated landscape
and the communities living there. It is also to examine the bond between these limits as
it is quite easy to eat other landscapes, farther from the ones we inhabit.

Eating out the distance, or the physical impossibility of gorging on the world is a form
of alienating the landscape, of living without belonging, of forgetting the land arts
which ground us to the cultivated soil, sow with various seeds, memories, cultures and
rituals.
In another sense, it is easy to think that food contaminates the landscape and even that
same rural scenery filled with traditional staples is, nevertheless, transgenic, as lvaro
Domingues used to say. This geographer stated that recognisable elements were now
reordered in a landscape when the old phonemes no longer sounded like the words we
used to know; a kind of foreign language able to communicate the landscape, articulate
it, this is another way of eating it, of not being able to consent the landscape in and out
of ourselves.
As it would be expected, such an ambitious title for such a straightforward and dramatic
thing should be the seed hovering and not just the concept of a spontaneous generation,
and the blessed mnemonic of our days, a simple google research confirmed it as it
presented in its findings a book entitled Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories
of Food, Identity, and Resilience by Enrique Slmon, an ethnobiologist. From afar it
sheds light on how difficult is to eat the landscape. The author does not describe himself
as just as an anthropologist, but as an activist and ethnobotanist warning that what
interests him is how human societies interact with the vegetal ones. The book describes
the rituals, cooking habits, food, agricultural and gathering practises of several
American tribes. It circles an ingredient almost as sacred to us as it is for them: corn
whose diversity depends solemnly on its continuous domestication and selection. Eating
the landscape is a sign of a bidirectional symbiosis between the communities and the
land that fosters, feeds and invents them. Its way of showing activism is to remind us if
eating is a political act, eating the landscape is even more because to preserve food is to
protect the landscape; and that biodiversity is also a product of cultural diversity.
The enmeshed biocultural battles postulated in Eating the Landscape are transversal,
and concern all of those, who think that eating the landscape is, in fact, a way of
belonging and embodying the place where we live in. The battle against terminator
seeds against the uncanny seeds of the agrochemical industry which transform the
cultivation into an industry and which are stealing the land of those who cultivate it is
the battle for the biological and cultural heritage of the selected, adapted and chosen
seeds. A terminator is a seed with no legacy, no heritage without of an amount of
memory and collective labour which is shared and reinforces the bonds between
communities and their land. But the biocultural resistance has a political dimension,
translated in the claim of seeds sovereignty because only by controlling the seeds is
there a possibility of becoming a legacy. Of course, the anastrophe is meaningful as this
legislation is for many tribes a seed for sovereignty. The effort made some of the books
main characters is not just an archive, an inheritance bank of these seeds. It is the
growth in continuum a consistency achieves the Garden of the Elders, of arts of the land
regarding the landscape, the seed and the hand that sows in a large cultural cycle that
belongs to the land. When someone asked an Indian farmer why he did not water his
crops, he answered that doing so meant to abandon the rain spirits and the magic bonds
that link us to earth.
Another battle is the recollection either of edible or medicinal herbs. And eating the
landscape which we don not grow is a cultural, ancient and apprehended problem;
transmitted orally as a flowing register, like food, from body to body, generation to
generation which is not established in a botanical list, and fixes symbiotically with the
habitat in an ecology that promotes diversity through care. To recollect is to appropriate,
to benefit from what you have not grown and demands a particular attention not to
expropriate the landscape and others from what is being recollected. This precaution is
described in Eating the Landscape as another way of cropping, of nurturing the land as
they only harvest the biggest grasses in the tuft or picks the sprouts as if it only pruning
to make the bushes even more resilient. To recollect is to give meaning and purpose to
what we usually name as weeds; it is to stretch the boundaries of cropping and
cultivation; it is to turn the landscape even more complex and diverse and by far more
appetising. To name the landscape or to preserve the language that postulates it is
another battle; and another way of eating the landscape. One of the healthiest dietary
rules is not to eat what you cannot name, and it is quite good if applied to additives and
artificial preservatives used by the food industry, but it limits when you dont know
how to name it is only a reflection of not knowing how to eat. The common names
of plants are closer to the mouth of the eater than their Latin names and are a clear sign
of what is being eaten from the land. So like the morsel that we gorge on, or the monks
head mushrooms that would not be monks if there were not monks around to compare
their heads, just to mention mushrooms.
Even more dramatic is to think that to preserve the language is to preserve the culture
which she postulated. So to lose the language is to lose also biodiversity; it is to lose the
bridges that bind the landscape to the mouth, because to mention something is a way of
eating it, of chewing by anticipation, to savour it before reaching the mouth. When
words vanish, the emotion they evoke also fades out, as well as our collective memory
of flavours, smells and the sense we are inside food and to know how to eat from the
inside, to gorge on words. In Eating the Landscape, to lose words is to forget the ritual,
is to lose the strange connection between magic and technology, which has always
provided us food. The preservation movement could be to grow a garden of words, to
plant the language in an inherited garden of words.
The last battle we can learn from Eating the Landscape is the most traditional way of
turning it edible that is to say to cook it. To produce food, to recollect it and turn
everything edible is, in fact, a parallel battle. Cooking is the battle where the collective
memory piles up in the form of recipes and affections, holidays dishes and common
ones, plenty or scarcity but always of culture, of inheriting a way of dealing with
energy, nutrition, the collective memory. Contrary to common sense the recipes are
performative and are always changing; and are mainly the ways of negotiating the
availability of the ingredients, time, knowledge and workforce. Traditional food is
always a form of alchemy; it has an almost magical dimension which allows the
symbiosis with the habitat, the transformed perseverance of time throughout history.
The preposterous demonstrations of eating and cooking the landscape are to Native
Americans not only the evidence of obesity and malnutrition of so many populations,
the disenchantment of dying from complications caused by diabetes and other illnesses
caused by diet. The paradox scarcity is not of food, it is of culture, of the capacity of
interacting with the social and cultural atmosphere.