When I was in seminary, my Old Testament professor Michael Floyd spent some considerable time and effort trying to disabuse us students of the thought that we were somehow more spiritually advanced than our ancient Israelite ancestors who codified the complicated instructions governing community life set forth primarily in Leviticus. The peculiarities of the purity codes, which propound dietary laws and identify various human conditions as clean or unclean, tend to cause an outbreak of severe neck pain in sophisticated post-moderns due to the angle at which we look down our noses at such ridiculous, primitive thinking.

If you think you aren’t governed by purity codes, Michael said, then do this: take a spoon and spit into it, then put the spoon and its contents back into your mouth. Sounds of disgust arose from the class. Why is that such a gross idea? he asked. The spit’s not gross when it’s in your mouth; why does it become unclean the second it leaves your mouth? He forced us to consider the conditions by which we individually or collectively declare things or states as clean or unclean. He required us to wonder how we had learned these codes. He asked us if different groups had different codes, and how these usually unexamined codes applied to people outside the group.

Michael said (at least, I hope he said; I took his class years ago) that he had concluded that the codes in Leviticus, as strange as they may sound to our ears, are in some ways more humane than the invisible codes that govern contemporary culture(s), because, first, everyone knew explicitly what the codes are; next, everyone became unclean and thus set apart in the course of daily life (menstruation and the emission of semen, for example, caused uncleanliness); finally, there were routine procedures (washing, offering sacrifices) that usually rendered the unclean clean again and reintegrated them into communal life. In the Levitical codes, being unclean isn’t the same as being bad or evil or inferior; uncleanness is a necessary component of life, not a judgment.

When codes are unspoken and invisible, however, as they are in most of contemporary America, it becomes much harder to integrate those considered unclean into the community, since there are no explicit mechanisms for doing so, and often no recognition that everyone routinely bears the burden of uncleanness at some point or another. Because mainline American culture doesn’t think it has any purity codes, uncleanness can become a permanent status: think about race, poverty, sexual orientation, foreignness. And lest it sound as if progressives have risen above purity codes, think about political correctness: every group has some version of the clean and unclean, ways of thinking or being that render one impure, ways of segregating those considered unclean. In contrast to the Levitical codes, the invisible contemporary codes condemn those who are unclean as bad, evil, inferior, and offer no way into the community that renders those judgments.

I’ve smashed Michael’s elegant distinctions into an inelegant mass so that I can argue that dietary laws designating clean food from unclean food are alive and kicking today, and that, without realizing it, Americans have cultic feelings about food, giving it the power to determine who/what is clean or unclean, who should be part of or excluded from a particular group. If you think that the passage in Leviticus (11:20–23) that forbids eating four-footed winged insects except if their legs are jointed above the feet is peculiar, then you haven’t been paying attention to the weirdness of the current food wars.

Last Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review section featured a piece by Mark Bittman with the title “Bad Food? Tax It and Subsidize Vegetables.” My first impulse was to agree with him completely: he argues that American dietary choices are, generally speaking, so wretched from a health perspective that government intervention in the form of taxation of soda and perhaps other junk food is warranted—especially since these bad choices add tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of dollars to government spending in health care.

Now, Mark Bittman is a cook, a food writer, and a long-time columnist for the Times. In some ways, we’re members of the same tribe. I use his cookbooks. I’ve given his cookbooks to my children. His most recent book is Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. A fake sticker on the cover says: “Lose Weight, Heal the Planet.” I really like and agree with Mark Bittman. I don’t drink soda; I’ve never liked it, even as a child. It would cost me nothing if soda were taxed. In other words, there’s no reason I shouldn’t agree with him completely.

Except that I read many of the 273 comments posted by readers on the Times Web site and realized that he had written about something that has cultic status: the way we choose to eat. This food fight is not just about food. In his article, Bittman writes about the food-self and its relation to everything from quotidian family matters to personal responsibility to government philosophy. How could it not result in a heated discussion, or maybe even fisticuffs?

One particularly articulate negative response wondered if the foods Bittman deemed unhealthy would be taxed in high-end restaurants:

And what does the avenging Mr. Bittman propose as taxation penalty for the spiced fresh pork belly on Cafe Boulud’s menu? How about the salade frisee at Bar Boulud, (described by New York Magazine as containing “too many fatty pork lardoons”) or the Dunkin Donut-inspired beignets de morue? Does he make no mention of the celebration of fat and carbs so many upscale restaurants offer because these items are served to urban “sophisticates” and not the unsophisticated rubes whose lives his proposals would manipulate? Or does the mass production and delivery of affordable, corporately produced comestibles just not sit well with him on principle?

Food is not just about food; it’s about personal and tribal identity. If nutritionists, government policy wonks, chefs, organic farmers, conventional farmers, economists, eco-radicals, or concerned citizens think we’re talking about “just” food, then we’re going to sound as peculiar to each other as the Levitical laws sound to many contemporary Americans. We will use each other’s views to identify each other as unclean without knowing that’s what we’re doing.

In its most recent issue, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture published an article blandly entitled “In Defense of Food Science,” a reference to my guru Michael Pollan’s most recent book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. If you’ve read Pollan, you know that he consistently pushes back against “food science,” by which he means processed foods. If the label on a food makes any health claims or lists more than five ingredients, avoid it, he says. The four authors of this unassuming piece take quiet issue with him. They say that Pollan “makes valid criticisms of the modern food industry and offers some useful recommendations for improving the health and well-being of the population.” They are clear and precise about the ways in which they agree with him. They take issue, however, with Pollan’s persistent emphasis on organic local foods, especially for “those who live in challenged economic conditions, in areas where the growing season is short, or who have busy working lives.”

The authors refer to the gap between science and the arts that physicist and novelist C. P. Snow pointed to fifty years ago in his seminal book The Two Cultures, a gap they claim has narrowed somewhat since the book’s publication. Food in particular offers a bridge between the disciplines, a “prime opportunity for science, art, craft, and the humanities to engage constructively with each other.” The article points to the ways in which food science has offered us incontrovertible (at least to me) advances in understanding about foods. They point to a need for mass-produced, inexpensive, and convenient foods, given the realities of the age. “We are not suggesting that a diet should be based entirely on processed foods, but every type of food has a place in a balanced diet. The focus should not be solely on processed versus whole food, but also on good-quality processed food versus poor-quality processed food.” They point out that some foods that we now consider “wholesome” are, in fact, processed: cheese, cream, beer, olive oil, vinegar. They concede that many processed foods are nutritionally null and void but insist that this is not and need not always be the case—that food science can and must be a tool in helping fix our current broken food system.

As someone who has railed against mass-produced processed foods, I’m a little flummoxed to find myself agreeing with them: I’ve always identified “food science” with the soulless stuff we eat alone without knowing or caring where it came from, the stuff we put in our mouths that has more to do with unconscious identifications than with the conscious pleasures of eating well-prepared food in community. Despite their white coats and hairnets, in other words, I’ve considered food scientists unclean. Well, well. I’m going to have eat my own words, a heavily processed meal filled with unconscious identifications. In my last post, I moaned about the tendency among disciplines to demarcate their own turf so emphatically that heavy traffic and frequent discussion about the surprising and fruitful overlaps among them becomes difficult, if not impossible. For my tribe of proponents of local and organic foods, that would mean we would talk to other tribes with particular expertise on food topics—food scientists and conventional grocery store operators, for example. People who eat at fast-food restaurants. People who don’t like to cook. People offended by foodies. This may give me a terrible crick in my neck from looking down my nose. But it may also make my invisible purity codes more visible, and thereby begin to offer a way to reintegrate a fragmented and self-reinforcing discussion.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus

Watching the bats from the kitchen stoop at Madroño Ranch the other morning was a little like watching my own thoughts. They swooped in and out of my line of vision, limited by the dawn darkness, more audible than visible.

Actually, my comparison is disrespectful of the bats; their flight is only apparently erratic, driven by the ever-changing location of the insects they were chasing. My thoughts are actually erratic. As the promise of light bloomed into dawn, the bats settled into the bat house, a feat of precision flying and landing almost like none I’ve seen, and I noticed the pile of guano under the house and thought that soon it would be time to collect it and put it into the compost pile.

And so began my musings on shit and the difference between good shit and bad shit. My apologies to the bats become ever more profound.

One of our current projects at the ranch is figuring out how to use the abundant quantities of manure the residents of the Chicken Palace produce. Currently, it’s just collected and dumped onto the compost pile, but we’re working on a plan to get the chickens more fresh greenery to eat, in part self-fertilized (by the chickens, that is). We’re planning to cordon their pasture off into sections and seed the sections with cover crops, alfalfa, rye—whatever the season will grow. We’ll soon have a rainwater collection system in place and will be able to irrigate with it (assuming it ever rains again). Using a portable fence, we’ll be able to rotate the chickens from section to section. We have no idea if this will work, but it seems like a good idea and a fine, closed-loop use of all that poop. We’re also looking to collect buffalo leavings (summer “interns”: consider yourselves warned!) and use them as well.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I used all sorts of synonyms for shit in the previous paragraph; one of the few I didn’t use is “waste,” because in natural systems, or systems that mimic natural systems, shit isn’t waste, it’s integral and beneficial. Paraphrasing Our Hero Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan notes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Mealsthat industrial agriculture has taken an elegant solution—crops feed animals, whose manure in turn fertilizes crops—and “divide[d] it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm… and a pollution problem on the feedlot.” Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), the current source of most of America’s meat, produce mountains of manure that becomes toxic to the animals and to the communities around them, and the monoculture farming that produces most of America’s grains and vegetables doesn’t use animals to fertilize the soil, requiring farmers to use chemicals instead. That’s the difference between good and bad shit: when something that could be beneficial becomes useless, even toxic, waste.

In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if a community’s or even a culture’s capacity to endure might not be assessed by how effectively it mimics nature in dealing with its own discharge. I’ve just been rereading T. C. Boyle’s darkly comic Drop City, which begins at a northern California commune of the same name in 1970. The commune’s stated raison d’etre is to provide its residents with a place to escape the confines of bourgeois America and get back to the land and basic values by expanding their consciousness with meditation and drugs.

Of course the place is utter chaos, overflowing with the metaphoric excrescences of abusive sexual practices, racism, child neglect, and rampant narcissism, along with literal shit. The septic system is overloaded and the two characters who concern themselves with the problem get no help at all from the community. Eventually, the county government threaten to raze the buildings because the commune constitutes a health hazard. Because they can’t deal with their own shit on any level, the residents of Drop City abandon what was once beautiful land and move their chaos to the bush country of Alaska just as summer is waning. When they get there, most of them realize that they need to leave or get their shit together so they don’t die.

The problem is that getting your shit together necessitates acknowledging that you are, in fact, going to die. (It’s still Lent, after all. You knew we’d get to this.) Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, identifies the human dilemma in scatological terms: we are the “god[s] who shit.”

Look at man [sic], the impossible creature! Here nature… [has] created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience…. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, not even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden…. Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, “It is precisely the god-like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” There it is again: gods with anuses.

Human civilization, says Becker, is built on this unease, which encourages us to throw our energies into an “immortality project” by which we deny our smelly mortality; those who confront it with none of the filters an immortality project provides wither into mental illness. Becker doesn’t attempt to solve this conundrum but rather to set some boundaries within which we can wrestle with it with “the courage to be.” He writes in his conclusion: “We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility.”

So it was with interest that I watched the video produced by a Japanese media artist to explain to Japanese children why everyone was so worried about the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it was damaged by the tsunami and earthquake on March 3. The video compares the damaged nuclear reactor to a boy with an upset stomach who needs to poop. So far the boy has just farted—smelly enough for everyone around him—but the video assures us that a team of selfless doctors are doing all they can to prevent Nuclear Boy from pushing out his stinky poop.

The video says that the Fukushima reactor is more like Three Mile Island Boy—who just farted—than like Chernobyl Boy, who not only pooped but had diarrhea that went everywhere, likening nuclear waste to a dirty diaper. My first thought after watching it was that Japanese doctors would be overwhelmed by waves of constipated children, convinced that evacuating their bowels might bring their struggling nation to even deeper depths. My next thought moved me to images in last Sunday’s New York Times of the city of Chernobyl in its abandoned state and the interview with one of the guardians of “the sarcophagus,” the concrete structure built to contain Reactor No. 4, and that can’t come in contact with water without risking the escape of highly radioactive fumes. Scientists estimate that an area around the reactor the size of Switzerland will remain affected for up to 300 years. The aftermath of a nuclear meltdown “is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame.” The guardian figures that the work he does will be available to his children and grandchildren.

Using my heavily truncated recapitulation of Becker’s thought, it seems that proponents of nuclear power (which I have sometimes been) are refusing to be “as hard headed as possible about reality and possibility,” are as unwilling to get our shit together as the drug-addled utopians of Drop City. We are as schizophrenic as the video artist who proposes that we just not poop. A few pages away from the article about Chernobyl was a piece by a Japanese astrophysicist who wrote in reference to the Fukushima reactor crisis:

Until a few years ago, power usage in Japan was such that during the summer Obon holidays, when people typically return to their ancestral homes, it would have been possible to meet demand even if all nuclear power plants were turned off. Now, nuclear energy has come to be indispensable for both industry and for our daily lives. Our excessive consumption of energy has somehow become part of our very character; it is something we no longer think twice about.

Now that I’m trying to tie together all these thematic threads, I have to swoop back to my bat-intensive stoop, to the manure-heavy compost pile in the pasture outside the Chicken Palace. May we humans be as useful as Madroño’s bats and chickens as we consider our energy future; may we refuse to resort to the narcissistic chaos of Drop City’s residents, who left their spiritual and literal bad shit for someone else to deal with.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

And now for the next installment in our internationally celebrated series of lists… and what could be more appropriate from the proprietors of a place called Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment than a list (in alphabetical order by author) of our ten favorite books about the environment?

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability
Mary Oliver, What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

Of course, we’re struck by the many wonderful and influential books we had to leave out to get down to ten, and we’d love to know your favorites. Let the arguments begin!

What we’re reading
Heather: Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Martin: Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey&#8212and Even Iraq&#8212Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport