TheSMARTSeed

If you walked past the farmhouse, past the barns, and manure pits, along the line of birch trees you would find what we called “The Gully”-- a wooded ravine that spanned acres wide. A tractor trail knifed its way down, across the creek, and up to a hidden wheat field. The trail provided a clear path for us to explore. On the right, we walked past the unmarked graves of our lost pets, on the left was piles of old rusted chicken cages. The broken wooden fence that skirted around “the gully” and the crab apple trees that lined the trail betrayed a different time and a purpose. A time before the agricultural industrial “green” revolution. The broken fences had once boxed in grazing cows and the crab apple trees were what was left of an apple orchard. We skipped along broken slabs of cement--a haphazard bridge across the creek. Before the cows and perhaps before the apples “the gully” bore witness to the “Battle of Longwoods” which took place on March 4, 1814 and was apart of the British-American War of 1812. On that day Americans defeated a coalition of British Soldiers, Canadian militia, and Native Americans. Where the creek trickled through the bottom of the ravine two hundred years prior bodies lay dead. Near the creeks embankment it would not be completely unusual to find spearheads from the Natives arrows. Arrows that were used perhaps during the war and before. A time before white people and before colonization.  My father had a little tin box full of them, which he had been collecting since he was a child walking through the same gully. Around the hidden wheat field, into The Gully once more, off the tractor path through dense forest growth my sister and I explored unaware of our footsteps and the past that was beneath us. On the other side, closer to home as we walked out of the woods we hit a patch of weeds. The weeds had leaves that looked like elephant ears and soared up beyond our heads. They were also covered in a prickly, brown burr. We kept walking. As we stepped out into a clearing my sister and I looked at each other with a bit of shock on our faces. Our hands gently touched our heads and we slightly tugged at one of the hundreds of burrs that had Velcro-ed to our hair. It took our mom a good part of the evening to release the burrs grip from our long brown hair, scolding us for our recklessness as she pulled them off. Even on a day of truce, my sister and I were still able to get into trouble. As I looked in the mirror, grimacing in pain, I again was oblivious to what I was interacting with. It’s past and it’s place. This week’s episode is Burdock: Everywhere and Nowhere. Photo Credit: GRH7447 Flickr via Compfight cc

To be placed in a box, labeled, or classified can be frustrating. I, personally, know this frustration all too well. You, your abilities, and your purpose are all of a sudden limited in the eyes of those who have placed you in that box. For a plant, maybe the worse label is that of a weed. A weed is a nuisance. It has no benefits. So, you should just pull it out, burn it, or spray it.   In an 1878 article titled “About Weeds” a person by the name of W.W Bailey stated, “What is a weed? Generally speaking it is any plant that interferes with the operations of agriculture or gardening. Some plants are weeds because by their rapid growth they thrive to the exclusion of better things; others are so, simply from their unsightly appearance and their uselessness.” Oh, to be seen as lesser, ugly, and useless. Concerning Burdock, Bailey was a little more nuanced. He begrudgingly admitted that Burdock was kind of pretty. However, the fact that it grew everywhere and often in places where other plants wouldn’t grow was seen as a negative. How dare you burdock? If marigolds won’t grow there neither shall you!  Photo Credit: kevinandrewmassey Flickr via Compfight cc

To most of us Burdock is a word that literally means nothing. To my sister and I,

If you walked past the farmhouse, past the barns, and manure pits, along the line of birch trees you would find what we called “The Gully”– a wooded ravine that spanned acres wide. A tractor trail knifed its way down, across the creek, and up to a hidden wheat field. The trail provided a...

We all have a story that we would like to tell. The stories we choose to tell to our friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers say a lot about how we would like to be seen. In marketing terms, our stories help create our brand. There are some that we frequently repeat when there is a new person to meet. They can be about lost relationships, nightmarish jobs, and great adventures. Collectively, these stories shape a narrative that we have, perhaps, sub-consciously created. We choose to tell some stories over others and we often choose to embellish some details and leave other details out. In the end, we are our own writer, and why we choose to tell the stories we tell has a lot to do with our motivations. Do we wish to make friends? Do we wish to get a promotion? Do we need to gain new customers? Do we need to maintain a competitive advantage?

We have been telling our stories over thousands of years, and some have been utterly fantastical that you would be forgiven if you thought you had been plunged into the Game of Thrones. None more so than a few tall tales that were spun by some Arab Spice Traders hundreds of years ago. All in an effort to keep the origin of their spices secret from an entire continent.

In the Medieval ages, Europeans loved their spices and they went bat shit crazy over it. Some have argued that Medieval European food would actually be more closely associated with modern day North African or Indian cuisine compared to modern day European cuisine. And it just wasn’t one or two spices. Cooks tended to have twenty or so spices in their repertoire.  The one spice that we will focus on, for it was about the most popular spice of the day and subsequently changed the power dynamics within our world was--pepper. And, when I say pepper I mean black peppercorns and not chili peppers which we can thank good old fuck-up Christopher Columbus for confusing us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAfiduVxE2I

Europeans loved black pepper and back in the day it was expensive. They called pepper “black gold” as it could be used as its own form of currency. There is even a term for it--peppercorn rent. The reason for the high price of black pepper during Medieval Europe is the same reason why commodity prices tend to go up and down now. It is the relationship between supply and demand. To Europeans, pepper was fashionable, used medicinally, and in religious ceremonies, therefore, multiple uses to create demand. The supply, on the other hand, was tightly controlled. For being so fashionable, Europeans knew very little about where their spices came from. They knew pepper came from a place called India, which was out east somewhere over there, but they knew precious little about the country and its people and could only guess on the routes to get there.

At the time the spice trade was largely controlled by Arab traders, who were the only people that knew about every aspect of the spice trade from start to finish. The pepper farmers in India had no idea about the Europeans and the Europeans reciprocated that ignorance. This gave the Arab traders a tremendous amount of power. They could buy the spices at a very affordable price and sell it at a very high price. However, they still had to defend those high prices, and in order to do that they relied on stories that had been told for centuries.

According to our Arab middlemen pepper was grown in forests of pepper trees. Pepper was abundant. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was in the harvesting of pepper. For, you see, the pepper trees were all guarded by poisonous snakes. In order to harvest the pepper, farmers had to set fire to the trees and drive away the snakes. It was the fires that turned white peppercorns black and gave them their dry and shriveled appearance. After each burning, the trees would have to be replanted which required money and time adding to the price.

We all have a story that we would like to tell. The stories we choose to tell to our friends, family, acquaintances, and coworkers say a lot about how we would like to be seen. In marketing terms, our stories help create our brand. There are some that we frequently repeat when there is a...

In 1099, a group of knights traveled to the Holy Land, banded together in a mission to protect Christian Pilgrims from pirates and gangs. These knights called themselves the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.”  Obviously, the name was quite the mouthful and over time they became known simply as the Knights Templar. The Knights Templar started dressing up in white tunics with a blood red cross stitched along the front and thirty years later they evolved into more of a militaristic monastic group and took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Photo Credit: Paul Bratcher Photography Flickr via Compfight cc

The Knights Templar were a feared force during the medieval times and thanks to the support of the Vatican, Kings, and Lords the group as a whole became very wealthy and influential. Then, in 1305, rumours started to spread from an ousted Templar that the group was participating in anti-christian and homosexual activity. Not many thought much of the rumours. However, the King of France at the time, King Phillip IV, had a problem. You see, the King was indebted to the Knights Templar as they had loaned King Phillip some money to help fund a war with England, and the King really did not want to pay that money back. So, King Phillip decided to put pressure on Pope Clement to prosecute the Knights Templar for their rumoured crimes. In 1307, Pope Clement ordered all members of the Knights Templar arrested and all assets seized. Dozens of people were burned at the stake and the Knights Templar were disbanded.

Centuries later in the Mexican state of Michoacan, which happens to grow the highest percentage of avocados in the world,  the Knights Templar re-emerged. You would assume that if you decided to create a group and then name yourself after a medieval band of Christian knights that you thought perhaps, “You know what? We can be like them. We can protect our neighbours and be heroic minus the poverty and chastity part, of course.” The one hiccup of course was that this version of the Knights Templar was a drug cartel.

The Knights Templar of the Michoacan state emerged in March 2011. In public,they said that they were providing an essential service to their neighbours--protecting them from larger criminal organizations. In demonstrations, they would evoke the history of their namesake and use religious imagery to portray themselves in an altruistic manner. Reminding everyone that they were a force for good. However, their role as Mexico’s third largest drug cartel utterly contradicted with their message. In Michoacan and throughout Mexico they were regularly responsible for drug trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion. For reasons we won’t really get into today, let’s just say the U.S government was somehow involved, the Knights Templar were forced to find more profitable avenues to make money due to complications in the drug trade. Their foray into legal trade put them face to face with landowners, miners, and shopkeepers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzalpuffwFI

It’s in this environment where we learn that there are events that can occur, some random and others more deliberate, that are completely out of our control and yet can have a devastating effect on our lives. There are three elements, one economic policy, one environmental, and one social that thrust the drug cartel--the Knights Templar--into the business of food, and it put avocado farmers in a position where they were forced to wage a war.

On the surface, it was all good news for our Mexican Avocado Farmers. In 1994, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) came into effect which opened the borders of the United States and Canada. Trade restrictions were lifted against Mexican Avocados and in 2015 the state of Michoacan exported $500 million worth of avocados to the United States and Canada. Then, what seemed to occur almost simultaneously, North American avocado consumption skyrocketed at the same time t...

In 1099, a group of knights traveled to the Holy Land, banded together in a mission to protect Christian Pilgrims from pirates and gangs. These knights called themselves the “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.”  Obviously, the name was quite the mouthful and over time they became known simply as the...

Coconut farmers don’t make a lot of money. In fact on average they make so little that I really should stop complaining about how much I make. Approximately 60% of small-scale coconut farmers live in poverty. They make anywhere between $70 to $7000 per year. Let’s say that again. They make anywhere between $70 to $7000 per year.  Poverty cannot be easily explained and definitely not easily solved, but to be sure the system that coconut farmers find themselves in takes advantage of that poverty. In order to better understand poverty’s reign we must take a closer look at the conditions that support its existence.

The Philippines is the second largest producer of coconuts in the world, accounting for 26% of the world’s production. Indonesia is number one. Most coconut farmers in the Philippines do not own their own land. They are tenant farmers, and their landlords tend to be teachers, managers, military officers, and other professionals, and for the most part these landlords are absent. The fact that most coconut farmers do not own their own land already places them at a disadvantage. First, most farmers are under agreement with their landlords to share in the profit. These types of agreements can vary from reasonable to outright exploitative. Second, because the farmers don’t own their own land that means that they have little to no assets or equity. Therefore, unlike most farmers in Canada, Filipino Coconut Farmers cannot use typical financial mechanisms, for instance, lines of credit, to reinvest in their farms and improve their profitability. Third, their reality limits their power in decision making and negotiations. Coconut Farmers usually have no say in investments in their industry or national programmes.

The plight of these farmers really came to light after Typhon Haiyan damaged or destroyed more than 33 million coconut trees in the Philippines in 2013. Coconut farmers were stuck in limbo as there was no communication or agreement with the landlords concerning who would cover the costs of the clean-up. They did not have the necessary equipment to clean up the damage themselves if they wanted to, and they were without any source of income or food. Quickly following the typhon international agencies urged the Filipino government to make wide-sweeping reforms in order to improve the situation, and one of these reforms had to do with a decades long battle between the government and the coconut farmers, and it also highlights probably the main reason poverty can be so entrenched. And that reason is corruption.

   In 1971, the Filipino government enacted a law to establish the Coconut Investment Fund. A fund that was created to invest in the development of the coconut industry. Guess where they were going to get the money for this fund? Well, they were going to tax the coconut farmers. Not surprisingly at all, the money that was taken from the coconut farmers over a decade did not go into building up the industry, instead the President and his friends personally profited when they used the fund to buy a bank and other corporations in which the President and his friends held a majority stake. The issue is still ongoing today, with the farmers fighting for a share in the investments that was made with their money. There is currently $1.3 billion in the coconut levy fund.

The impoverished reality of coconut farmers cannot be more starkly contrasted to the seemingly overwhelming success of today’s coconut industry. There is not just coconut oil, but there is cold-pressed, raw coconut oil. There is coconut flour, coconut meat, coconut chips, coconut ice cream, coconut creamer, coconut milk, coconut hand wash, coconut shampoo, oh and let’s not forget...coconut water. There are so many coconut products out there that at one time I opened up my fridge, turned to my husband and said, “I think we are slowly turning into coconuts.” As well, these coconut products are not cheap. So,

Coconut farmers don’t make a lot of money. In fact on average they make so little that I really should stop complaining about how much I make. Approximately 60% of small-scale coconut farmers live in poverty. They make anywhere between $70 to $7000 per year. Let’s say that again. They make anywhere between $70...

Alright, so if we really wanted to be accurate than using a Globe Eggplant emoji as a metaphor for male genitalia is probably not the most appropriate shape. Now, if you used a Japanese Eggplant emoji, which is longer and uniformly thinner,  then you would be on the right track. And, if you are already confused, and don’t know what a globe eggplant is. Well, it’s large, dark purple, and has a bulbous end to it.

Photo Credit: USDAgov via Compfight cc

 There are a few caveats  to the eggplant’s new role as an anatomy substitute that I should lay out. First, this is primarily a North American, I-Phone user phenomenon. The tech giant, Apple, uses a different set of emojis compared to Android phones.  And, it just so happens that Apple’s eggplant is better suited as a penis replacement compared to the Android eggplant.  Also, the reason this is mainly a North American phenomenon is for the same reason why I wanted to talk about the eggplant in the first place, because for the most part, we don’t eat it.  The fact that we in North America don’t have a cultural connection to the plant has allowed some of us to create our own meaning uninhibited from past experiences.  For example, we could use the Corn on the Cob emoji; however, most of us have actually ate corn on the cob. Chomping down into the cooked kernels and getting little bits of corn stuck between our teeth. That experience could possibly put a damper on the metaphor. I don’t know about you, but every time I eat corn on the cob I’m not necessarily thinking of a sexual act, and if I am then it is definitely a painful one.

It’s good to note that none of this is new.  From the use of the banana in sex-ed as a training tool  to imagery found in medieval paintings we have created a tradition of using food as a means to describe sexual behaviour.  In 1518, a painter by the name of Giovanni da Udine painted garlands of fruits and flowers. In one of his paintings he painted a squash, with eggplant for testicles, penetrating a fig.

Giovanni da Udine, detail of border surrounding Raphael’s Cupid and Psyche, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Nicole Dacos and Caterina Furlan, Giovanni de Udine, 1487–1561, Udine [Italy]: Casamassima, 1987, Vol. 1, p. 26

In Mesopotamia they used the same words to describe the abundance of a garden as they would to indicate sexual attractiveness.  There is a love poem from ancient Sumerian Literature, which describes the subject as an apple tree with fruit on the top vigorously sprouting and then watering some lettuce and watering some more. There’s definitely a lot of watering occurring.       

Vigorously he sprouted,

vigorously he sprouted and sprouted

watered it --it being lettuce!

In his shaded grove of the desert bearing much yield

did my darling of his mother,

my barley stalk full of allure in its furrow,

water it -- it being lettuce,

did my one -- a very apple tree bearing fruit at the top --

water it -- it being a garden!

 The reason behind our sexualization of food is censorship. Whether it be a thousand years ago or today, in certain public forums we have just never been able to freely discuss and communicate sex, and so we must improvise. If there was actually a penis emoji then we wouldn’t have to use the eggplant and I could write an article on nightshades instead. Fruits and vegetables also just make sense. They are the produce that nourishes and feeds a desire--hunger. They also hold the seeds for future reproduction. In a sense, we are mimicking human biology into plant biology.

Which brings me back to the Durex Condom and my naivete. Turns out, Durex also believes that an eggplant flavoured condom would not be so tasty. The condom is in fact not real, but a clever marketing attempt to get the Unicode Consortium to create a safe sex emoji.  Although I understand that painters who lived 500 years ago would need to be creative with their fruits and veggies, I don’t understand in this day and age why we need to cont...

Alright, so if we really wanted to be accurate than using a Globe Eggplant emoji as a metaphor for male genitalia is probably not the most appropriate shape. Now, if you used a Japanese Eggplant emoji, which is longer and uniformly thinner,  then you would be on the right track. And, if you are already...