The Vegetable Underground

ARCHITECTURE OF FOOD SYSTEMS

I was arrested once, handcuffed at the podium, speaking to the press about how vegetables are sentient. Back when cereal grains came in cardstock boxes and cardstock came from conifers. Dr. Kellog put a heat-sealed plastic bag around the outside of the box. Later, he put instead the box around the outside of the bag and painted recognizable faces on the cardstock. The grains were wisps of data mapping statistical genetic probabilities and historical weather patterns. Their conscious tractors drove themselves, dug holes themselves, created market swells themselves and put themselves to bed. Someone put radium in the rain and universalized radium-resistant grains. Money was printed on cotton with transgenic pesticide inside its genes. Ghosts of nutrients haunted unearthly sweetness. Dueling personalities of superficial celebrity and dubious authenticity defended their relevance by claiming to be comparatively more "real" than the other. Interpersonal relationships bifurcated conceptually according to the inclusion or absence of face-to-face physicality. Whenever information was mediated, and it almost always was, content was obscured by facade.

Don't worry, I'm not one of them, the vegetable elite, assaulting you with photos on expensive full-bleed pamphlets of sad baby chicks in factory tubes, and saying, "Plants are people, too!" Whatever you're putting ketchup on, it's all OK with me, whatever you're decriminalizing and making into tea.

However you desecrate sweetness, building better strippers stripped of every single nutrient, it's not illegal yet. Socio-normative behaviors are anyway often destructions of human biology. Such as, proudly obviating sustenance, displaying playful labels, zero this, zero that, the premarital protected sex of food. I think we can all agree it’s not what God intended.

God is planted in the ground and food is medicine. No, don’t worry, I’m just kidding!

Telepathic plants? Don't make me laugh! As if a simple root system could impact its environment! As if consuming food could impact mood!

It's true, I was in the Vegetable Underground, but that was back in college. One time, I saw a watermelon with female seeds. Don't tell anyone. I’m beyond all that now. I know how to push a cart through illuminated aisles. I know how to eat for a week on only ten American Dollars.

Will it be tasty? Will it be healthy? Is it too heavy to be carried home? Can I afford it? Do I really want it? If I steal from the olive bar, will a minimum-wage employee take the loss as their own?

Standing at the register perplexed comparing auto-measure vegetable of name unknown to scribble-folded written lists of Spanish-language produce codes, some root with diametric nodes, I’m going to need you to tell me what this is. I seriously don’t know the name of it, so I can’t key it in. The other cashiers laugh: I didn’t eat it as a kid. I was in suburban womb and this was a hospital emergency room, not a grocery store. It wasn’t yet converted serving relocated food consumers queuing up at checkout while their clothes are at the laundromat in what had been the morgue.  

The good news is your neighborhood is no longer a food desert. The bad news is your rent’s too high and we no longer carry unmarked rice in clear plastic bags with twist ties. Where there had been a bench for outdoor lunch between cashier shifts, a cool new little sushi place, reviewed for its dope miso paste, straight annexed the beloved bench, put customers on top of it. The forebears and the groupies of the freshness renaissance are aptly digging through the trash behind the sushi restaurant. Garbage food is stigmatized selectively by social groups.

Help me show this fashion food across my distribution news. I know it's not a contest, but to the extent that it is, palatable taste doesn't factor, not even a little bit.

One time, I used my key to nighttime trespass in the grocery store, came echoing through the sliding doors, and moved all of the foods. I thoughtfully relieved them of their sales-centric positions. I freed them from their relative-to-eye-level prescriptions. Packaged foods I distributed newly through the numbered aisles by a one-to-ten assessment of descending medicinal value. I grouped the fruits and vegetables, and nuts, by nationality. Seafood traded festively decorated display cases with the pastries. Cleaning product boxes failed on freezer shelves disgracefully.

This is how you make a seedless watermelon: Find a baby watermelon with female seeds. Give it an X-ray. Pray that when it mutates it grows double-chromosomal. When you succeed in doubling the chromosomes, mate it with a diploid male to make a sterile hybrid in a polyploidy orgy. But one-third of your farming land will have to be for normal males so you can shake their pollen off and trick your inbred cultivars into producing sterile fruit.

To make a watermelon square like a shipping crate, grow it inside a square mold.

First, we put seeds in the ground and stopped moving around. That was the Neolithic Era. We conceived of territory, and of property. Then, we bought each other's debt to finance higher-yielding farm technology. Well, that was a little later. In between, we domesticated rice, we chose the genes we liked and tried to breed true phenotypes, we invented little vacuums for emasculating hermaphrodites. Prices collective of rices domestic inflated to satiate phantom demand. Surpluses selectively shipped overseas direct, for strategic position, or to end malnutrition, it was one of those two, I forget, the rice came eighty times as much from foreign water as the ground. It moved around.

The money, it moves too. It's on a business dinner table in the national capitol. It's in machine guns guarding mines and pomegranate worker lines. It's fixed between two glossy covers illustrating lifestyles. Recovering unwell from sugarcane and allegations. Learning FDA translations of nutrition content statements off of lactose-poster ketchup lunches provided by school cafeterias featuring theories of micro-type food-unit meaning and extracurricular disordered eating.

It was the dawn of the economy of monetized superficiality and people living in urban areas were especially accustomed to mediated interactions and abstracted self-identification. Certain public relations firms specialized in mediating people's relationships with manufactured food- engineering the food’s presence, negotiating the food’s community involvement, handling communication on behalf of the food, and so forth- building the biophysical and cognitive-emotional architecture between food production and consumption, expanding the role of food in the urban environment to include an outer layer of brand identity around the comestible core. The cardstock box. The purpose of the cardstock box was to obscure information about the part of the product that went into the body. What consumers valued more highly, what cost more to make, was the cardboard that went in the garbage.

Push-up bras swelled, filled with silicone gel, headlines were padded with adjectives, produce was bred to be colorfully large, packaged foods used unfood additives. Food didn’t have to be food anymore as long as it had a good stylist. Business foods with good P.R. were offered to consumers not as solutions to their requiring continuous nutritional input but as recreational diversions akin to drugs and toys. Many of the foods marketed to growing children were equal parts addictive, entertaining and benign-edible. Advertising budget tended to be inversely proportionate to digestibility. The relationship between shopper and digestive product involved two kinds of consumption. Transferring branded meaning to personal identity became more important than transferring food energy to body.

We started a grassroots organization to do food energy’s public relations. We specialized in representing grains- the seeds and fruits and flowers and roots, the bran and germ and endosperms- but our best known clients were vegetables. We made pamphlets, and curricula, and policy recommendations for more stringent regulation of playful cardstock food-product labels. We raised the funds we needed to bring our agendas to the right tables. It wasn’t long before they pushed us underground. Firms with more substantial resources whose interests conflicted with our own forced us out of ad spaces like they forced the only brand of local jam off of the shelves of the Ithaca Wegmans, by accruing the bulk of the market share then threatening to pull it. Airing announcements warning water wasted from a toothbrush and it's months and months of fire storms while almond farms use the water up. We were made a display of in court. We signed away our licenses and promised not to talk.

Now, we're using old paper pads and tubes and lines of chalk on sidewalks. The word on the street, the current underground school of thought, what kids are calling Enlightenment Tree-ism, not that I believe in it, teaches that plants can give us knowledge, that they are preexisting shamans. I'm not saying plants have empathy. I'm saying we wouldn't notice. Unless it added shelf-life or supported branded content. It's as if plants aren't talking.

Get it? Like Enlightenment Deism? God gave us reason so we could know God. Seriously though, only talk about it quietly.

I'll teach you a magic trick: If you concentrate on the existence of your central nervous system, comprised as it is of a brain and spinal cord, and feel yourself outside yourself and everywhere alive, and really do it right, you will know innately what not to eat if you want to survive. You will be physically unhungry for food-safe wax, poison color numbers, dehydrated cake powders- even the one in your favorite cardstock box. The trick is that with your eyes closed you can taste only invisible energy, the true kind, not the kind measured in calories and uncalories. Which may remind you of the old folk song about biochemical energy, "Where it comes from, where it goes, nobody knows, nobody knows." They say, the patients of multiple heart surgeries faced with death or veganism, one never becomes unhungry for vegetables.