FOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT FOOD

In his two latest books Michael Pollan has presented to a wide audience a cornucopia of interesting ideas and observations, among them four  ideas of general significance.

BOOK 1:  The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (Random House, 2001)

IDEA 1 :  Plants use humans as much as humans use plants

Thus, as much as the gardener manipulates a plant, trying to enhance its desired qualities, the plant (potato, apple) manipulates the gardener to solicit his care.

This idea immediately attracted attention of readers because of its dog-bites-man appeal. The typical plant is an epitome of immobility and passivity. Moreover, the typical plants have no eyes and, most probably, no senses. 

The book with the catchy title, masterfully composed and exquisitely written, did not disappoint the readers. I had made a note of the author's name and was looking forward to Pollan's next book.  It did not disappoint me, either.

BOOK 2: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (The Penguin Press, 2006),

The second book seems even richer than the first. Three of author's ideas, although less flashy than IDEA 1, attracted my attention. My interpretation, however, may not necessarily coincide with the author's intent. 

IDEA 2:  The growing supply of energy increases complexity of its consumption

Along with the growing complexity of industries and their products, a counteractive trend emerges. A great complexity of food supply overwhelms the consumer and creates choice bottlenecks, through which food industry in developed countries pushes its enormous variety down the consumer's throat. A new type of complexity, very much reminiscent of weather, emerges: waves of food fads, i.e., alternating approbation and disapproval of various products, in a rather chaotic manner. A whole new business of food fashion and anti-fashion emerges to steer the traffic of food to and from the shelves and toward the affluent eater's table.

The business of advertisement and counseling is typical for the affluent society overwhelmed with complexity of choice. This happens with all consumer goods.

The "omnivore's dilemma,"� or anxiety of abundance, is also a pattern. We can see it in the entire area of consumption: with gadgets as well as information. We see it also in food for thought and soul.

I simplify my life with Consumer Reports with all their shortcomings. The giant of Google has grown right before my eyes, fatting its calves on the endless prairies of information and it is now looking for companies to munch, too. The area of information is in the constant flux: the newspapers as we know them are the next to go. The countless blogs would require several lives to read them all, but with little nutrition.  

Sunlight, exchanged for the coins of ATP, brings the grass from the soil, the cattle feed on grass, the chickens pick up grass, seeds, and insects, the food digested by the animals and birds fertilizes the soil, and humans feed on animals and plants.

WHAT IS DESIRE

This is how Michael Pollan remembers the moment when IDEA 1 emerged in his mind:

I realized that the bumble bee and I had a lot in common. 

The bumble bee feeds on the plant and pollinates it. The author interacts with the plant  in the role of a gardener who feeds on the plant and modifies it to his tastes. As the insect  and the plant form a  single system of mutual dependence, so do the gardener and the plant. In the language of abstract systems, the bee and the plant are interacting components of a system as much as the gardener and the plant are components of another system, overlapping with the first over the plant. All three are components of a larger system.

Having emphasized the reciprocal relations between the gardener and the plant,  Michael Pollan seems to hold back.

If so, there is a chance to find a "good vocabulary"� and language without limitations, at least, give it a try. And, by the way, arent we in fact both thinking subjects and thinking objects? 

We say that the gardener desires certain properties of the plant. Why cannot we say that the bee desires certain properties of the plant and the plant desires certain properties of the gardener?

The anthropomorphic terms desire, goal, purpose, love, hate, fear, joy, anxiety, despair, satisfaction, manipulation, use, domination, submission, will, hope, etc. relate to humans and systems of humans. Are they the artifacts of the language or signs for something applicable beyond human matters?

We have been endlessly arguing about similar questions since the appearance of modern robots and computers, i.e. for more than half a century. Do they or do they not? Can they or cannot?  We certainly attribute memory to them, and even acknowledge that it is better than our own. But, unlike the blueprints of exystems, it cannot mutate.  In this sense, computer is not alive. In this sense bureaucracy is dead.

What about desire? For the last twenty years, on a growing number of occasions I have had fleeting feelings that my computer, and especially my current Dell computer with Windows XP, has a desire to infuriate me with its unpredictable and unexplainable behavior. I punished it by turning off its energy supply and rebooting, which seemed to work, although not always. I begin to think that the only reason behind that was the desire of Microsoft to push another operating system down my wallet, but the next moment I suddenly realize that there is no proof that Microsoft is human and can desire. It is a corporation with humans as one kind of components: a system as much driven by economic hunger and prone to entropic decay as a human body driven by hunger and subject to aging and death.  It uses me by making me use its products. My computer uses me, too, with the purpose of propagating the species Fenestrae micromollae .  

WHAT IS HISTORY

Weather (which I linked to Pollan's IDEA 3) has often been used by scientists as an epitome of complexity within the framework of ordered chaos.  A whole wave of books and articles on chaos and complexity arose and subsided between the late 1980s and 90s. Practically each of them mentioned a butterfly in Hong Kong creating a hurricane over Florida, with some geographic variations.

I find no use for the butterfly, but the phenomenon of weather may help us understand the phenomenon of history. I prefer history to a more ambiguous term: evolution. The latter is used in natural sciences to denote any gradual process going through a series of identifiable steps. It applies also to a particular case of origin and evolution of life, society, or paper clip. The term has a whole spectrum of meanings. On the contrary, history is usually understood as history of humankind from cave people to kings and slaves and further to the demise of the kings and the redemption of the slaves. Human history includes the histories of all man-made things, ideas, and institutions, as well as the history of the entire Earth under the impact of humans.

The view of planet Earth as a single system in which everything is connected was passionately expressed by Russian geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Владимир Иванович Вернадский, 1863-1945). Vernadsky, who remains well remembered and esteemed in America, and kind of cult figure in Russia, regarded Earth as result of three waves of evolution that started at different times but have been running concurrently since: geosphere (minerals and fluids) , biosphere (life), and noosphere (human matters). The latter is the stage at which humans begin  to change the entire planet by means of rational activity (which our posterity may deem irrational). But this subject deserves a separate and closer look.

The history of the butterfly effect itself is an example of emergence and subsequent evolution of a small component of human culture. Geographic variations play the role of mutations. The butterfly effect, in terms of Pattern Theory (see next section), is a pattern of "large consequences from small causes"� and the variations are regular configurations embraced by the pattern.

A butterfly may or may not cause a tornado. But the original story of Ray Bradbury, itself with roots in H. G. Wells The Time Machine, which I trace far back to the Sumerian cuneiform dream books, seems to imply a more rigid chain of cause and effect. Therefore, somewhere in the history of this metaphor a more significant mutation occurred.

The weather in the little State of Rhode Island today has no direct relation to the weather a year or a century ago. Even though an exact prediction is not possible, the prognosis partially depends on the weather yesterday and even more on the weather an hour ago. It also depends on the weather within 200 miles west, north, and south of Rhode Island and is still sensitive to what happens at 2000 miles in those directions. The rain comes from the West, hurricanes from the South, and the freezing cold from the North. Hardly anything comes from the East

The weather today also depends on climate and the climate has a history. The history of climate may include one time catastrophic events, like volcanic eruptions. Climate also has unique long range events, such as the emergence of oxygen in the atmosphere, attributed to the growth of algae and plants, last ice age, and something we do not even know. 

History happens on a different scale as compared with weather. It is unique and irreversible.   Thus, the shrinking of the ozone layer and its subsequent partial restoration as result of the ban on chlorofluorocarbons around  1990 was a short time unique event. It has confirmed the idea of Vernadsky that any history on earth is ultimately global. 

I would use a metaphor of a ballroom dance competition (only because it impresses me more than any sport except soccer) to illustrate the difference between the weather and the climate or everyday human life and human history. We could also look at a dog show, but dance has a pronounced two-dimensionality, which the dog show has only to a limited degree.

If the weather can be compared with a dance on a floor, in which the movement patterns may repeat and the exact positions do not, history is the entire sequence of performances that can happen only once in the competition and never repeat again. The difference is that the program of the competition is known in advance, while history is not (unless you believe King Solomon).  Nevertheless, everyday life, i.e. the weather of our existence, can be predicted in many instances for a long time ahead. As far as a competition with elimination is concerned, although the program is known, the exact sequence of events that will go to the annals of ballroom dancing is unpredictable. 

Another detail will add more to the comparison: this year ballroom competition has only a limited bearing on the next year results.  In human history what happened four or fourteen hundred years ago may have more influence on tomorrow than what happened yesterday.

I believe that in human matters the best way toward understanding how everything emerges and what happens afterwards is to avoid definitions and use illustrations. The reason for that is the property of history which I call novelty. As soon as we invent the typewriter and learn to use it, the computer comes and knocks the typewriter off into the dustbin of history. As soon as we invent a floppy disc to store what we type, flash memory without moving parts comes and we fill up the garbage dumps with floppy disks.  The dazzling, extravagant, or elegant French kings, ruthless Chinese emperors, and solemn Russian czars leave the global stage now populated by their theatrical and cinematographic shadows. The crowd on the global stage pushes aside the mighty America through economic and political novelties the significance and consequences of which are fiercely disputed, while even climate and weather stir up a global controversy. This is history and it happens only once, unlike a movie that we can rewind or run fast forward

One might note that science also moves ahead through changes in theories and paradigms, but this exactly what it means to have history. Science has its history. History does not have its science.

The problem with human matters is that history knows no reproducible experiments. Theoretical science, in spite of the initial enthusiasm around the systems theory, can tell us very little about the fate of humans on our planet.  True, this little is extremely important, but it was said by physicists.  

In order to exist, life on earth, society, economy, and even culture (just look at what is happening to the struggling Public Radio and classical music in America) need a source of energy in the currency of money. The main long term source of energy for evolving complex systems on earth is the sun. The mineral or nuclear fuel is a temporary source not just because its resources are limited (the limits are, strictly speaking, not known) but because the products of its burning or fission put limits on the growth of energy consumption. 

 This is an inverse omnivores dilemma: how to get the one and only resource—money—for an overwhelming variety of desire.  This is the problem of omnispender.

WHAT IS INSTABILITY

Unlike energy, instability is not a universally accepted, defined, and understood property outside physics and mathematics. In my eyes it makes it an ideal substitute for energy, which is a universally accepted, understood, measured, but highly tainted by physics concept.

Without going into details, when energy of the system increases, especially, in an  non-uniform, local manner, its instability goes up and stability goes down, which means that the probability of the state with higher energy is less than the probability of the state with a lower energy.

My personal problem with energy and probability is that both are the most fundamental concepts of science and, as anything truly fundamental, they cannot be defined to the satisfaction of all who dwell on this foundation. They can be defined for particular systems. I am interested in EVERYTHING and for me stability/instability embraces all of Everything. Moreover, since human matters are in the focus of my attention, stability is better understandable intuitively than energy.  

High stability means that the system cannot be expected to change in near future, but we have no idea when. High instability means that change is coming, but we have no idea when. In mathematical statistics probability and energy are related for well defined systems: the higher energy, the lower probability. But in human matters we never deal with well defined systems. One reason is that we do not know what people think, but there are plenty of other reasons. One of them is that we never encounter closed systems in real life. An open system cannot be defined without some substantial knowledge about the larger system that encloses it.

We talk about stability, stabilization, instability, and destabilization regarding such poorly defined systems as markets, fashion, weather, economics, politics, war, tastes, careers, family relations, and love life.  It is also known in human matters as stress, tension, anxiety, uncertainty, and frustration. This justifies in my eyes the use of instability instead of practically synonymous energy and probability. Energy is for inanimate matter of for a well defined part of life, as in biophysics.

When we deal with the sun light and mineral fuel as the source of physical energy for our civilization, we can measure it in physical units only. We can predict with certainty that any instability of the energy supply will cause instability of our entire life, as it happens on small scale after a hurricane or tornado interrupts power supply to our homes.

In chemistry we use energy instead of instability. The great blessing of chemistry is that chemical experiment today is simple (small kitchen counter will do), usually fast (most results overnight), low cost, reliable, reproducible, and scalable. This is why the chemists get their answers from experiment rather than from equations. Besides, no equation can produce the material sample in a vial. Moreover, we do not need to know the absolute values of energy and can operate with differences.

WHAT IS TRANSITION STATE

The most important question we can ask regarding large evolving complex systems is not what can happen with them—anything imaginable can indeed happen—but when will it happen. Most things that we imagine, like hitting the jackpot in lottery,  will never happen during our lifetime.  The answer is: it is what can happen faster that most probably will happen indeed.

Transition state is the fleeting, unstable, irregular configuration between the stable initial and final ones. It is always very unstable in chemistry because it is irregular. If the transition states were stable, anything that happen in the world would immediately slide down to the most stable equilibrium and freeze there. That will be the true end of the world. The transition state limits the speed of a transformation from one stable structure to another, see Figure 7.

PATTERN HISTORY

Sometimes a historical change is quasi-reversible: while complex configurations do not repeat, patterns do. For example, the formerly stagnant history of Soviet Russia now offers patterns of change. The old authoritarian patterns, however, come back.

When we speak about butterfly effect as a pattern "large consequences from small causes," how can we measure the size of consequences and causes? 

Figure 9, taken from History As Points and Lines (Figure 21-7 ), is a typical example of history as weather. Any point of the wavy line stands for a certain social configuration. Some of configurations of history are given in the book.  They would look less naïve if drawn by professional exystemologists.