Dujiangyan Irrigation Park shishi, or Imperial Guardian Lion (石獅), photo (c) 2013 Brian Awehali

Dujiangyan is a system of irrigation channels largely responsible for the renowned fertility of the Chengdu basin, in southwestern China. This elaborate engineering wonder, built about 2300 years ago, and still in use today, is what makes Sichuan province the most productive agricultural area in China. Most contemporary dams use a big wall to block water, adversely impacting the natural flow of fish and other marine life, but the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation works lets water and fish continue to flow.

I have no idea how old the statue above is (2300 years?), but the colossal millipede nestled in this gargoyle’s ear looks old and big enough to be from an entirely different geologic era.

Dujiangyan is also home to another old and elaborate example of Chinese engineering: the Dujiangyan Detention Facility, one of many outposts in the sprawling Chinese police state. Literally countless dissidents, political activists and otherwise problematically outspoken people have been detained, tortured and interrogated at these facilities.

Dujiangyan Irrigation Park signage, photo (c) 2013 Brian Awehali

A lot of even modestly well-informed Westerners don’t know about the full scope of China’s police state, it’s laogai prisons or its contemporary forced labor practices. One reason for this ignorance is simply that the Chinese government works very hard to control news and information about its internal security apparatus, but another reason surely has to do with just the sheer size of the apparatus.

In 2012, Al Jazeera produced a special program about the Chinese prison system, Slavery, A 21st Century Evil: Prison Slaves. In response to the release of this program, the Chinese government expelled Al Jazeera from the country.

Shortly before I visited the Dujiangyan Irrigation Park, I had the opportunity to meet outspoken Chengdu writer, historian and blogger Ran Yunfei. We met at a riverside teahouse full of mahjong players, and he commented on how Chengdu’s longstanding reputation as a place with a relatively easy pace of life and relaxed people owed quite a lot to the irrigation project, because it made it relatively easy for people in the area to grow food for themselves.

Chengdu writer, historian and blogger Ran Yunfei, at his home office.

Not long after I visited the Dujiangyan Irrigation Park, Ran Yunfei was arrested and detained at facilities nearby for publishing material the government deemed subversive. In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Chinese government’s moderately relaxed attitude towards people like Ran Yunfei constricted, and an untold number of writers and public figures were detained or strongly discouraged from voicing critical opinions of the government.

Describing the government’s previous, more relaxed disposition towards dissidents, writer, historian and political asylee Liao Yiwu told me during an interview that “you can criticize, but you can’t change… that’s the line you can’t cross.”

Ran Yunfei has since been released, and continues to write, though the overall political and intellectual climate in China is considerably less open than it was a couple of years ago. Ominous new interrogation tactics are reportedly being used, and even usually belligerent and outspoken dissidents have been returning from detention with lips uncustomarily sealed.

Of course, the U.S. incarcerates a higher percentage of our people than any other country, and a credible argument can be made that we, too, are a police and surveillance state. Witness how organized and unlawful law enforcement agencies were as they disrupted, infiltrated, entrapped and spied on the Occupy movement. When I would try to explain the subtleties of Democratic anti-democratic reality to Chinese people I met, they were most often shocked and disbelieving. Was America not a democracy? (No, not really; corporate oligarchy’s in the store, with democracy in the window.) What about the American Dream? (Like George Carlin said, “They call it that because you have to be asleep to believe it.”) If China is something like an Orwellian vision of an authoritarian regime, then the U.S. is something more like that envisioned by Aldous Huxley, where pleasures, distractions, and consumerism, and a sophisticated propaganda system, keep a significant portion of citizens from acting in any populist way that would challenge elite, mostly corporate, rule.

So-called capitalist or so-called communist, unaccountable power still exercises itself on those under its influence. As Liao Yiwu joked at another point during our conversations, “The biggest difference I see between our countries is that in China, the government owns the corporations and in the U.S, the corporations own the government.”

I laughed at this observation, and asked Liao if he knew of any Chinese anarchists.

“All thinking Chinese people,” he said without hesitation, “are no-government people.”

Rat sculpture at Dujiangyan Irrigation Park, photo (c) 2013 Brian Awehali

It’s interesting that 2300+ years ago the Chinese gave more free and natural passage to fish than they do, today, to people like Ran Yunfei and Liao Yiwu, or countless other people who might like to express opinions or take actions not entirely contingent on the permission of authorities.

Vital space music – Popol Vuh in the electronic era, Florian Fricke on the Moog Modular.

Who are Popol Vuh?

Perfect Sound Forever: “…a combination of ’60′s psychedelia, ’70′s progressive rock and a certain enigmatic German weirdness that resulted in some of the most cosmic and odd music ever recorded…While the music of Popol Vuh would sometimes skirt the boundaries of 70′s progressive rock and krautrock (in which categories they’re often lumped in with), they sounded like no other groups from those genres. In fact, they sounded like no other groups from any genre, and yet Fricke has been referred to as one of the founding fathers of electronic music, of ambient music and even new age music.”

Some people shot us weird looks when we announced “bugs” as the theme for the final issue of LiP. A few others reacted with exuberance, as if all this time we’d been talking about the political, what they’d been really wanting to read about was the entomological.

This issue was an attempt to slip a certain noose of predictable political formulations. One of several operational definitions given for “politics” is “the total complex of relations between people living in society,” yet the obvious interdependence of human beings and the natural and animal world makes it reasonable to expand the definition of politics to include, well, just about everything; even—especially, as it turns out—bugs.

The lineup and links to a PDF of the complete issue after the jump…

• Gods & Monsters: Bugs in Modern Western Culture, Inc. – by Christy Rodgers
• Breeding Resistance: Malaria & the Global Pesticide Pandemic – by Jeff Conant and Tim Krupnik
• Torture, Inc: Anatomy of a CIA Front Company – Brian Awehali interviews A.C. Thompson & Trevor Paglen
• Every Cockroach is Beautiful to its Mother – by Kari Lydersen
• Profit, Control & the Myth of Total Security – by Brian Awehali & Ariane Conrad
• Fear, Profiteering & the Culture of Mistrust – by Nell Greenberg
• Pheremoan (insect erotica, in a manner of speaking) – by Nikolai Kingsley
• Darwin vs. the Ant: The Altruism of Bugs & Humans – by Erin Wiegand
• [reading] Break the Bank: Counterfeiter Extraordinaire, Alves Reis, & the Portuguese Currency Crisis – by Sam Burton
• [excerpt] The Plague of Disbelief – Albert Camus
• Please Step Away from the Vernacular: Race, Slang & Roget’s Thesaurus – by Elizabeth & Stuart Ewen
• Flirting with Death & Living – Lisa Jervis interviews Kate Bornstein
• REVIEWED – Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 & How it Changed Everything; Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer & the Politics of Philanthropy; homegrown: engaged cultural criticism by bell hooks & Amalia Mesa-Bains; Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah & Sun Yung Shin; Transgender Rights, edited by Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang & Shannon Price Minter.

Download the complete “Grossly Unexpected” Bugs Issue of LiP [PDF].

San Juan chickens before harvest – photos (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

“I am largely worried about wingless chickens. I feel this is the time for me to fulfill myself by stepping in and saving the chicken but I don’t know how exactly since I am not bold. I only know I believe in the complete chicken. You think about the complete chicken for a while.”

― Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

I’d asked if I could come and see the chicken harvest. It was a sunny day in the San Juan Islands, and my acquaintance with two farmers had presented an opportunity to see a free-range, all organic culling, or harvest.

“Do you think they have any idea that today’s different from other days?” I asked one of the farmers as he beckoned the chickens.

He paused handsomely in his well-worn green t-shirt with a large peace sign on the chest and scratched an unruly sun-bleached beard.

“Nah. They have a simple life, and they’ve never known anything but this, so why would they?”

“And anyway, these are broiler chickens. They can’t live past about two years old, or their hearts give out.”

I watched the chickens, and the few dark ducks in the flock, who were eager to approach in hopes of being fed, and paid me no attention as I shot photos. A few had to be chased down and put into the enclosed truck bed, but most just filed in, clucking, in a way that made me think darkly of Black Friday.

About 9 billion chickens are harvested and eaten each year in the United States. Most are slaughtered in factory farms, where “cervical dislocation,” “asphyxiation by carbon dioxide,” and maceration (grinding) are considered the best “acceptable humane methods.” I was curious to see a smaller, sustainable family-run operation, where the farmers actually care about the quality of the chicken’s lives, care about what they eat, and where they participate directly in the harvest, rather than resorting to mass mechanical means.

Once all of the chickens were in the back of the truck, we rolled towards several white tents where the harvest would take place.

This type of chicken has been bred for early harvest, as well as for an easygoing temperament and generally pleasant appearance. They did not get too excited in the truck, nor did they put up much resistance before being placed headfirst into tapered metal bleeding cones, where their vivid yellow feet and bright red combs twitched as they bled out.

[Warning: graphic material follows the jump]

After the chicken’s wide eyes had grown slitted and oddly peaceful, the bodies were dipped into a vat of boiling water. Some twitched and thrashed a bit more; others didn’t.

“It’s just nerve reflex.”

Several days later, I showed some of these pictures to the farmers, and they professed a heaviness about it that I hadn’t observed during the actual harvest.

Only after the dip in boiling water did the chickens seem well and truly beyond suffering. Their bodies were then placed in a plastic drum lined with rubber spikes that spun rapidly at the press of a button and pummeled and rinsed the feathers from their bodies in impressively short order.

I’d resolved beforehand that I would buy, cook and eat one of these chickens. It seemed important.

I lost track of which chicken was which at some point, and have no idea if the one I ate was one of the ones depicted in these photos. I roasted it, with onions, carrots, potatoes and spices, but the meat was tough to eat, partially because of the chicken’s more active, natural lifestyle. It was a labor to get through.

Just prior to the unfortunate incident in the courtyard of the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI). – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

When the hatch opened, I heard music that sounded a lot like the cantina music from the first “Star Wars” movie. Despite associations with the needless bloodshed of that scene, where Han Solo kills a business associate with his blaster, I was excited. Stories of alien visitation are common in New Mexico, especially around Roswell, but I didn’t take them very seriously, and I definitely didn’t imagine I’d be having any such experiences first-hand. I imagined, mostly because of the music, that there was a grand party going on inside, and that I’d soon be dancing, knocking back shots of oddly-colored liqueurs, or smoking alien herbs through exotic pipes with new friends.

Unfortunately, the visitors had traveled all these light years merely for the purpose of collecting stool samples.

* * *

After traveling several hundred thousand miles to Santa Fe, some rays ran smack dab into a piece of abstract expressionist art. – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

New Mexico is a land of adobe, sun-bleached extremes, willful eccentricity, art, tall tales, Indians and reactionary Libertarian ideology.  Great beauty, ostentatious Anglo and Latino wealth and lush high-altitude forests commingle with ill-managed radiation testing and disposal sites, extreme poverty and bone-dry deserts that were once ocean floor. Above it all, the bluest of skies erupt daily into fiery sunset symphonies.

Santa Fe, where I’ve lived on three occasions, never for more than nine months at a time, brands itself “The City Different.” It’s definitely different from most of the rest of the state.

Mushroom cloud, with sky dancers.

For one thing, it has some money, thanks mostly to tourism and an aggressively marketed art scene. It also has rich people, many from California and Texas, who buy up expensive homes in the area, then busy themselves ignoring most civic or planning matters that don’t involve bolstering the Santa Fe art brand or real estate market. They come to Santa Fe to Get Away From It All, and they’d generally prefer the local media not spend too much time focusing on persistent city problems like drug addiction, domestic violence, drunk driving, pedestrian deaths and dismemberments, and an economy that bears a more-than-passing resemblance to feudalism. They’d also appreciate it if those stories about a few cases of plague popping up in New Mexico each year (true) would quit getting out and scaring potential fish away from the state’s tourist bait.

Speaking of extremes & facades: Compare the beauty of this mural to the shabby run-down hostel it adorns. – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Another way Santa Fe differs from much of the state: It’s hard to go a day in the city without one or more doe-eyed people asking you what your sign is within the first few minutes of a conversation. If you visit, have fun with this! Casually give a fake birth date or sign, and watch astrological pseudoscientists applaud themselves for already having guessed just that sign.

During my third and last stint in Santa Fe, I spent a lot of winter visiting the Santa Fe Art Institute, on the campus of the then-deserted college of Santa Fe. The school had gone out of business when I was there (it’s since re-opened as the Santa Fe University of Art and Design), and I enjoyed a lot of peaceful time wandering the campus and appreciating sculptures and architecture, especially when snow would beautify the campus and remain undisturbed for days at a time.

Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree… Yeah, makes perfect sense… But why make me stand here like this, Lord, with a decapitated baby?  Sculpture sighted on a visit to the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI). – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Pedal-powered creative re-use artist in Chengdu – photo (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Car ownership is on the rise, but bicycle culture in Chengdu, and China generally, remains amazing. Many, perhaps most, main roads have dedicated bike lanes, and it’s really common to see things like hard-working (and exhausted) trash recyclers carting Seussian-levels of stuff around on pedal-powered vehicles (above), or a lone cyclist pedaling calmly through a terrifyingly busy intersection (left).

I’m sure lots of the Chinese (Mandarin) lettering on t-shirts I see in the U.S. is mangled or just downright wrong, but since I can’t read traditional or simplified Mandarin, that’s nowhere near as funny to me as the botched English translations I saw everywhere in Chengdu. There’s quite a lot of emulation and outright copying of Western culture — especially consumer culture. This teenager stalking into an underpass near the Chengdu bus station might be expressing his esteem for striker/winger Ryan Babel (not Babeel), the Dutch football player who used to play for… Liverpool (not Liverpoot)… but it’s just as likely that the kid just liked the way this looked.

At Chengdu International Airport, the wheelchair-accessible stalls in the men’s bathroom have the pictograph you might expect, with Mandarin lettering and then, below that, in English translation: “Deformed Man End Place.” Picture after the jump:

Wheelchair-accessible stall sign in men’s bathroom, Chengdu International Airport

Some things really are the same everywhere. Though McDonald’s and KFC are considered kind of upscale in China — a place you might bring a date for a nice treat, and the employees have kind of stylish outfits compared to their U.S. counterparts — fast food work sucks about the same everywhere. I’d recommend not eating at a Chinese fast food chain called Dico’s unless you’d like to punish yourself and everyone around you for several gruesome days you’ll probably never live down.

Public life is really active in Chengdu. Riverside teahouses seem always to be packed with tea-drinking and mahjong playing. At People’s Park, there’s kite-flying, teenagers cruising, coordinated musical acts, men doing tai-chi (or qi-gong) and, in the mornings and evenings, women filling entire squares dancing along to the exhortations of lead instructors amplified through PA systems.

There are also things like those depicted above, where a woman with her mic and karaoke machine sits, with her bored-looking friend, singing to no one in particular. Maybe thirty yards away, the men depicted below were playing a form of badminton that doesn’t require a net.

Chengdu, and Sichuan, are known for their spicy food, and “ma-la,” which is about spiciness, but also a unique kind of numbness effected by the Sichuan pepper, or huājiāo (花椒; literally “flower pepper”). I found an informative post about Sichuan spice at Asianpalate.com.

The spice markets in Chengdu are impressive, and the medley of colors and aromas you experience walking through even a relatively modest one, like the one shown below, can be dizzying.

I’m pretty sure the guys below, who seemed to me like they ought to be speaking in Jersey accents about some effin’ guy or other, did not appreciate a laowai (foreigner) like me taking their picture as I strolled down the street.

Chengdu wise guys, wishing they could offer the obnoxious foreign photographer a very bad deal? – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Several times a week, one of my hosts (and probable future mother-in-law) would take me grocery shopping with her. We’d stroll down a smaller side street, where the better markets seemed to be, and she’d make a point of tormenting me by asking which dimple-skinned and beheaded duck or chicken looked good to me. I’d made the mistake of saying they all looked unappetizing to me, laid out whole. Half a block of roasted ducks, hanging upside down from hooks, often with their heads and fried-smooth, featureless eyes somehow comically horrible, was not an uncommon sight. For most of my time in China, I lived in small but persistent fear of politely accepting soup, only to crunch into a rabbit head, or the organ of something before I could do anything about it.

So my host — a lovely woman, who grew up in the country, and whose family raised and regularly slaughtered chickens and pigs — would laugh at my delicate sensibilities. I really hated it at the time, but looking back, I think she was right to laugh at me. After all, I wasn’t saying I didn’t want to eat chicken or duck. I was saying I didn’t want to see them looking so much like their animal selves. I’ve since undertaken a year of eating (mostly) vegan, but at that time, I’d gobble up a chicken nugget or patty without a second’s thought.

Maybe I won’t ever eat poultry or meat again. After all, even the prized show birds in the final two photos of this post, in a Chengdu bird and fish shop, live in something like a sedentary dolorous gulag. Last year, after I photographed the “harvest” of a family farm’s organic, free-range chickens–basically the kindest, most humane, and cleanest circumstance available for chickens slated for the dinner plate –I came away feeling like  maybe it just wasn’t worth it.

If I lived in anything like a “natural” state, where I was foraging or hunting for food for my survival, I can’t imagine having any moral qualms about killing and eating an animal. I’d gladly hunt it down, kill it, give thanks and my respects, and then gobble it up. But this processed, mechanized, for-profit world I actually live in too dearly loves its various cages.

Chengdu market bird gulag – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Chengdu market bird gulag – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Horse and prayer flags at golden hour in Lhagong, Kham (ཁམས), Tibet – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

* * *

Townswoman and her generator in Lhagong, Kham (ཁམས), Tibet – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

* * *

The Mighty Crows of Lhagong, in Kham (ཁམས), Tibet – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

* * *

Tibetan nun and friendly rabbit, en route to Lhagong, Kham (ཁམས), Tibet – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Kitebird flown at People’s Park, Chengdu in 2010. – (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

“I’m very worried,” said Mr. C., our interpreter and guide, as our driver pulled into the courtyard. His eyes were wet. “Only two of my pigeons have returned from the race two days ago.”

Mr. C., a thin man with a sweet face, had arranged through a friend for us to make a weekend visit to a Chengdu suburb for a tour of a pigeon racing club and one racer’s private coop.

“How many pigeons did you release?” I asked.

“Ten,” he said mournfully. As we piled out of the sedan into a courtyard, he ran ahead.

Orderly pigeons in a Chengdu rooftop coop – (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

The owner of this private coop, who was meeting us inside, was the editor of a newspaper, and also a prominent local member of the Communist Party. Most officials of any substantial-sized business in China probably are, and one might consider it an occupational hazard.

I’ll be writing longer pieces about various aspects of China, the Communist Party and pigeon racing, but wanted to cobble together this short photo essay for LOUDCANARY readers.

Ah, sweet release:

Photo-of-a-photo on the wall of a suburban Chengdu pigeon racing club – (c) 2012, Brian Awehali

Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of earth, motherhood and fertility, played a redemptive role in the religious practices of Meso-American civilization: At the end of life, an individual was allowed to confess hir misdeeds to this deity, and according to legend she would cleanse the supplicant’s soul by “eating the filth”…

As they ride the wind, vultures seek dead things, not dying things, using a sense of smell far more highly developed than any other bird’s. They can detect a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet up. They are discriminating, preferring corpses between two and four days dead….Vultures, whose name comes from vellere, Latin for to tear, begin their eating at vulnerable spots on the carcass—the anus and eyes. All that being said, you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without them.

A truly fascinating article in the Virginia Quarterly Review, by Meera Subramian, and with gorgeous photos like the one below, by Ami Vitale, goes into a lot of detail about the vital role of vultures and scavengers, and the alarming decline of their species on the Indian subcontinent.

Vultures scavenging human remains left at the burning ghats on the banks of rivers in India – Ami Vitale / Corbis

As the article explains,

Vulture numbers in the region had plummeted by 97 percent—the most catastrophic avian population decline since buckshot wiped out the passenger pigeon. Just fifteen years ago, there were at least fifty million vultures on the Indian subcontinent; today, according to Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, less than sixty thousand individuals of the three species survive in the wild—and a newly-completed Indian-sponsored census, the first in three years, is yielding even more distressing results…

Vultures, who are a kind of sin-eater, and who used to pick clean carcass dumps in India like the one depicted to the right, were dying, it turns out, from chemicals farmers were giving to livestock:

The three species of Gyps vultures were dying from ingesting livestock carcasses treated with diclofenac, a mild painkiller akin to aspirin or ibuprofen. After taking it themselves for decades, Indians began using it in the early 1990s to ease the aches of their farm animals’ cracked hooves and swollen udders. For reasons that remain unknown, vultures that feed on animals treated with diclofenac develop visceral gout—untreatable kidney failure that causes a crystallized bloom across their internal organs. Death occurs within weeks … India must find a way to restore its prime scavenger or risk untold human health consequences. Vultures once rid the landscape of diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, and foot-and-mouth. Their strong stomach acids and high body temperatures allow them to ingest an anthrax-infected carcass and suffer no ill effects. The fear is that with vultures gone, and the human handling of dead livestock increasing, that these diseases could spread among both animal and human populations.

* * *

Vultures also play a vital role in Tibetan Buddhist death rituals. Resources are scarce at high altitudes, and disposing of bodies presents significant challenges. Tibetan “sky burials” involve an undertaker cutting apart and exposing a corpse on a sacred ledge, where highly efficient vultures then consume and redistribute the remains:

On a long road trip several years ago, when I was still eating even very bad roadside food, I listened to the book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall, and I found myself delaying gas and bathroom breaks because I was too interested in what would happen next. McDougall told a wildly entertaining story about traditional and modern competitive “ultra”-runners that managed to also be a sort of ethnography and a treatise on a significant aspect of human evolution: our unequaled long-distance running ability and our related unique ability to sweat from every part of our body, instead of just from our tongues, as basically all other land mammals do.

Why is this significant? As an October 2012 article, “The Running Man Revisited,” from Seed magazine explains:

“…[R]oughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. [...] A deer and a decently fit man … trot at almost an identical pace, but in order to accelerate, a deer goes anaerobic, while the man remains in an oxygenated jogging zone. The same is true for horses, antelopes, and a slew of other four-legged creatures … and because quadrupeds can’t pant while they run, they also quickly overheat.”

Humans can’t outrun a cheetah or an antelope over short distances, but those animals can only run at their faster speeds for short distances compared to humans. Organized human “persistence” hunters can run an animal until it literally drops of heatstroke, as illustrated by the BBC documentary clip below (hard not to feel bad for the prey):

Hunting doesn’t interest me–if I needed it for survival, I’d feel differently–but hunting for sport seems needlessly cruel and stupid.

But this book made me take up running, an activity I used to loathe unless it happened on a basketball court. I’ve always been basically athletic; I was a competitive swimmer in school, played basketball several times a week on some good Oakland courts through the latter half of the oughts, and ditched my car entirely in 2004 to be a full-time bicyclist in the Bay Area (I’ve since moved away and am driving a car again). But a once daily love of weed, along with various sedentary computer-oriented jobs–designing, editing and writing–just made running seem needlessly intense and ache-producing to me. Bicycling and swimming aren’t weight bearing, and although swimming can be very cardiovascularly intense, you also never really sweat in the water, and it’s easy to loaf and glide without feeling stupid. I don’t like to jog, I like to run, and without working up to it, that meant I always felt vaguely dumb huffing along after 10 or 15 minutes.

Born to Run encouraged me to quit running on concrete, to run barefoot or in trail shoes, and to change entirely the mechanics of my running form. Hell, it even more or less led to me reading ultramarathoner Scott Jurek’s book, Eat and Run, and then undertaking a year of eating (mostly) vegan.

I can’t really say there have been many books that have had such a direct impact on my life. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde, The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing, Vol. 2 (read as a teenager), and the non-fiction essays and commencement speeches of David Foster Wallace are maybe the only others with comparable direct impact.

And so I spent this past summer on the trails and in the ponds of Western Massachusetts with my dog, fighting past the early physical limits and aches, and inching towards veganism, which I didn’t undertake in earnest until September.

I dislike the culture of veganism, in part because I lived in the Bay Area for many years and had to endure the obnoxiously self-righteous, puritanical and often passive-aggressively confrontational drivel of a lot of vegans. I don’t agree with people like chef Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential, who notoriously wrote that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans … are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit,” but I sympathize completely with his disgust for a great deal of their culture and totalizing modes of communication.

If you get your packaged, processed, chemical-ridden food from the industrial food system, and paid war taxes on your purchase, you’ve got no righteous leg to stand on. Nor does an intellectually honest look at the sentient (emotional, intelligent) life of plants or the true environmental impact of mass agriculture on wildlife and the biosphere permit those who don’t eat animals any moral high ground or comfortable distance from cruelty. Everything in the world eats something else to survive, and that something else, whether it runs on blood or chlorophyll, would always rather continue to live rather than become sustenance for another. No animal wants to be penned up and milked, or caged and harvested, and you’ve never seen plants growing in regimented lines of their own accord, or giving up life voluntarily at any point in their life-cycles.

I undertook this as a psychological, nutritional and culinary experiment, mostly in response to my understanding of our industrial food systems. I was curious to know how animal fat had impacted my satiety points, for one thing. I spent a good part of my teenage years homeless and experiencing scarcity of various kinds, and I remember how, especially in winter, almost nothing satisfied me into a pleasant coma-like stupor more than several pounds of fatty hamburger meat. I didn’t have a refrigerator, so I’d cook it all up and eat it in one sitting before passing out for the night, utterly sated. To this day, especially at stressful times, I have a powerful desire to sate myself with even very bad meat.

Fat, and animal fat in particular, coats, and is satisfying in a base way few other things are. The manipulation of satiety points is a major part of our current industrial food system’s behavior. And every caterer can tell you the three things that make people happy and satisfied at a catered event: fat, salt and sugar.

As it so happens, these are the three main things (along with calorie density, texture, free glutamate, and starch, among other things) that the food engineers employed by food manufacturers count on and aggressively manipulate in order to get customers hooked on their products.

As one online blog notes,

“Important systems in the brain and body control appetite (the desire to eat), hunger (the physical manifestation of needing food), and satiety (feelings of fullness and satisfaction). These systems have done us very well for millennia.

However, these systems evolved in conditions of food scarcity and irregularity. They evolved when food was high-fibre, often high-protein, and high in naturally occurring “good” fats. And they evolved in conditions where we might have to trek many, many miles to get that food. We evolved to run after beasts, to scoop fish from streams and oceans, to scrabble roots out of the soil, and to pluck tiny berries from bushes as we walked and walked and walked. Sweetness signaled “good to eat” and “fruit.” Salt came from the sea, or from the blood of animals freshly killed.

We did not, in other words, evolve to manage an overstimulating environment replete with artificial fats, mountains of sugar, constipatingly fibreless hunks of gluten, artificially generated scents that remind us of sizzling meat on a grill or fresh strawberries, nor a host of other chemicals that stimulate our reward pathways.”

So I’ve wondered for a while how much of a product I am — how much my tastes and food satisfactions are the result of manipulated realities of food manufacturers. I’ve known for a very long time that people who sell me food are mostly interested in profit, not my, the customer’s/addict’s, health or well-being. I’ve avoided high fructose corn syrup, refined sugar, MSG, white bread (unless it’s part of a particularly tasty pastry or confection), and a host of other obviously unhealthy things for a long time, and so this year’s experiment is really a natural progression on my path. Everything I’ve made a study of related to food and nutrition leads me to the conclusion that the simplest and healthiest, non-commodified dietary approach is: Eat what’s grown naturally, nearby, in-season, and lead an active life.

It’s great when the answer to something important turns out to be utterly simple.