Eschatology, Natural Philosophy, and You - How Linear Time and Science Changed What You Eat

Good morning.

Three summers ago, I gave a talk titled, "What's for Dinner?" I laid out an epochal overview of how our species transitioned from a hunter-gatherer paleolithic culture, to an agrarian neolithic society. And how Beer played a part in that.

We also covered how over the past 15000 years, more and more food has been grown by fewer and fewer people. Well, I've continued researching and thinking about this field, and today I'll be focusing on two themes:

The first is how in the Axial Period between 800BCE to 200CE, western culture transitioned from a lifestyle of "cyclical time" to one of "linear time." The second is how this new mode of thinking has had profound repercusions that echoed down the ages, and has affected modern notions of recycling, renewability, and reuse. And strangely enough, about your and my diet this past week.

So, time. What do I mean by cyclical time, and how is it different from linear time?

Cyclical time is symbolized by uroboros, the snake chasing his own tail. In this view of time, the beginning leads back around to the end, and the cycle starts all over again. The Babylonians, Chinese, Aztecs, Mayans, and the Norse had cyclical calendars. Cyclical time is grounded in natural rhythms. Night follows day follows night. Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, followed by Spring. The moon waxes, wanes, and reappears to wax and wane again.

Linear time holds that the universe and humanity had a defining creation moment, and then a linear series of events, a history in fact, in which the Creator is an active observer and in some religions an active participant. Linear time concludes in a final day of judgment when all men will be evaluated justly.

Our opening reading, a responsive reading, is from my favorite version of the Bible, the King James. It is the "alpha moment" for the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.


Responsive Reading: Genesis 1:1
All: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Carl: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
All: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Carl: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
All: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Everyone in this room thinks in "linear time". You have to, in order to fit into our society. Yes, we are influenced by the cycles of life, although many of them end up being spiraling helixes rather than an uroboros, a complete return. Our progress through school is a helix, with a first grader returning to school in September, but as a second grader, and the next year as a third grader, until they finally graduate in a ceremonial transition. Unlike neolithic farmers and pastoralists, we hope that our children will have a better, different, improved life. We consider change to be, if not good, at least an overall positive experience.

So what is life like, when you're living in cyclical time? Close your eyes and think about an unspoiled river valley. Maybe it's the Nile in Egypt, or the Tigris or Euphrates river in Iran, or the Indus in India, or the Yangtze in China. How far back in time? Well, that's a good question, and illustrates one of the differences between our worldview and cyclical time. The whole notion of "history" is a linear concept.

For in cyclical time, change is never an overall positive experience. Change is deadly, change is catastrophic. Change means that the cycle will not return to its origin point. Maybe the river didn't flood this spring, and we'll starve. Or there was a plague, and there are no longer enough people to maintain the irrigation works. Or there was an invasion of outsiders, who killed and burned and raped and pillaged and enslaved. A positive experience in cyclical time is when the river floods and you can plant, harvest, and then plant again. When you grow up and marry and have children and grow old, as you saw your parents and your grandparents, and heard about how their parents and grandparents before them. In your free time between planting and harvest, you don't go to war -- you get together with neighbors and throw a barbeque and build monumental architecture. This is a somewhat Marxist theory about why the early pyramids were built -- to soak up excess labor and prevent it from being appropriated by an elite.

By 6000BCE, Egypt had completed the neolithic revolution, and switched to an agrarian culture. Wild animals and wild plants were domesticated, and pottery, irrigation were in wide use. For the next 7 to 8 thousand years the life if the peasant was unchanged.

Let me repeat that again, because it is nearly incomprehensible to our postmodern world, where our attention span is measured in minutes, not millennia. The life of 97% of the people, of the food growers, was unchanged.

Here's a poem about cyclical life by my favorite Victorian writer, Thomas Hardy. His stories and poetry focused on the disappearance of a cyclical agricultural lifestyle in Southern England between 1800 and 1850.

TO THE MOON
Thomas Hardy

"What have you looked at, Moon,
In your time,
Now long past your prime?"
"O, I have looked at, often looked at
Sweet, sublime,
Sore things, shudderful, night and noon
In my time."

"What have you mused on, Moon,
In your day,
So aloof, so far away?"
"O, I have mused on, often mused on
Growth, decay,
Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,
In my day!"

"Have you much wondered, Moon,
On your rounds,
Self-wrapt, beyond Earth's bounds?"
"Yea, I have wondered, often wondered
At the sounds
Reaching me of the human tune
On my rounds."


Here's another story about how a cyclical culture views change. In ancient Egypt, there was no artistic evolution, no competing schools. The goal of a sculptor was to produce a work that was identical to the extant body of work. Individualism was scorned. Think about how we react now to someone who plagarized, or slavishly imitates -- with disapproval or disgust. That was an ancient view towards change.

Which leads to the question -- how did we transition from cyclical time to linear time? My answer can be summed up as, "iron, the Greeks, and the Christians." The transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age came chronologically first, but I'll explain the impact when I talk about the three "Rs" of renew, reuse, and recycle in a bit. And this will eventually get to food, and explain why I'm serving homemade bread.

So, the Greeks.

The pre-Socratic philosophers in Asia Minor and the islands in the Ionian and Aegean Seas began to think about nature in a non-natural way around 700BCE. Or rather, in a logical cause and effect way. Instead of saying that disease was caused by the gods and unknowable and ineffable, they elevated a level.

"The gods may curse you with sickness, yes -- but sickness happens with the four humors in your body go out of balance. And just in case the gods did not will you die, perhaps we can modify your bile, phlegm, and blood proportions and keep you alive. "

Or, "The gods created the earth, but the did so out of earth, air, fire, and water. Which element is the building block on which the others are based?" There was a fascinating debate through the centuries between those who felt air was the primal element, vs those who thought fire was. Each had good arguments. So the stage was set for a more logical, rational, - dare I say, modernist view of the world.

A few hundred years later, Christianity theology completely rejected cyclical time, led by St. Augustine of Hippo. As we read together earlier, Judaism in the Old Testament had a notion of an alpha point the Creation moment. Genesis also describes a single fall from grace. Augustine said that clearly cannot be a cycle returning to the origin for a rerun, for Jesus had been crucified but once. And there would be but one eschatological omega point, one final Revelation and judgement.

In this light, the mass conversion of cyclical cultures by of Christian missionaries makes more sense. It isn't that the natives are embracing belief in doctrinal matters like the divinity of Jesus -- it is that they are pragmatically using Christianity to switching paradigm to a linear world view. Because the linear world view, with firearms, iron ships, canned food, and antibiotics, appears to be more successful.

Embracing linear time elevates humans above nature, half way between to God, and from this lofty place gives license for humans to extract and consume non-renewable resources. Genesis 1:26: "and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Dominion means, plants, animals and natural resources are there for us to exploit. Unwinding cyclical time, stretching it out, means you are no longer required to return your environment back to a normative rest state. Instead, you can leave things messy.

This is not to say that cyclical civilizations were ecological utopias -- far from it. The Mesopotamian civilizations collapsed when irrigation caused excessive salination of their fields. But they do so unintentionally. Nothing on the scale of say, ripping the top of a mountain for copper or coal, or pumping petroleum out of the ground.

Here are two readings highlighting the difference between renewable and non-renewable resources. I first read versions of them in "Coevolution Quarterly" magazine, back in 1980, based on a story that Gregory Bateson told Steward Brand.

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded in the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top -- as large as two feet square and forty-five feet long. Each.

In the mid-1800s, an enterprising entomologist climbed the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams, and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays?

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.

And he pulled his forelock and said, "Well sirs, we was wondering when you'd be askin."

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for four hundred years. "You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College Hall."

And here's the story about non-renewable resources:

The stone which formed the step up to the main door at the dining hall had become worn down after centuries of students of use, and would have to be replaced. Unfortunately, there were hardly any funds available for the replacement. Then someone came up with the bright idea that the replacement could be postponed for many years by simply turning the block of stone over.

They discovered that their great-grandparents had beaten them to it.

These are great stories, and how stories become memes, and memes become myths, and myths are more real than the boring facts is something I may give a summer service on in another three years. But nowadays we have the internet and scopes.com. And I asked myself, did this happen? is this true?

Um, sorta.

The "Long Now" foundation asked the Oxford Historian about this, and she came back with the following report from their archives. The part about a student discovering the beetly beams is reported as happening in 1859.

In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden [the head of the College]). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (forests which the College had owned since 1441), he had the largest oaks cut down and used to make new beams for the ceiling.

It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.

Personally, I think this is an even better story about renewable resources, because it demonstrates that the institution did not "forget" about the oak trees for centuries, and that there wasn't a dedicated stand of oaks vulnerable to drought or lightning.

But I digress.

I'll repeat -- in a "cyclical time" society, the economic basis for your existence must be on renewable resources. In our Egyptian example, the yearly spring flood deposits fertile ground in the form of alluvial silt, and new clay deposits for pots and bricks. Reeds grow for your baskets and roofs. Flax or animals provide yarn for your clothes. What about stone and metals, like silver, gold, copper or bronze? Well, they are used for societal aggrandizement (remember the monumental architecture?), or personal ornamentation, in the form of jewelry.

Or... used for technological machines, or weapons. And weapons are antithetical the scope of a cyclical lifestyle, because war causes change, and change is bad.

Cyclical culture societies fail when one of two things happen: outside invasion, or what they thought were renewable resources run out. One theory about the Mayan collapse in Mexico is that either widespread human-caused deforestation or a climate change destroyed their agricultural base. As you can imagine, this is a sensitive political topic given today's Global Warming debate.

I mentioned silver, gold, copper, and bronze. Not iron. Iron, especially cheap iron, changed the face of warfare and led to a centuries long "dark age" everywhere it came into widespread use.

Here is a hierarchy of materials. Flint weapons are marginally better than heat-treated wood. Obsidian is better, but brittle. Copper is better but is too soft hold an edge for long battles. But bronze... Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, both materials which are relatively easy to mine. But since tin is so scarce, bronze is scarce, meaning it ends up being restricted to a warrior elite. Think of the Iliad, and descriptions of how a bronze-armored fighter can mow through the unarmored men.

The "Bronze Age" started around 3500BCE, and the cultural impact of the warrior elite took a few hundred years to settle out. But the cyclical time mindset survived, because it was limited.

Now lets compare bronze to iron. The Bronze Age knew about iron, because occasionally the gods would throw down an iron meteorite and the smiths could easily forge the iron/nickel mass into a truly superior weapon. Iron is more flexible, stronger, holds an edge longer, and most importantly, iron ore is plentiful and freely available. There's just one problem -- it is technically complicated and requires sophisticated techniques and management to mine and smelt.

But around 1300BCE, a group of people, somewhere in either the Balkans or Asia Minor, broke out of cyclical time thinking long enough to solve this problem. And the impact was devastating. A warrior leader could give iron weapons to many followers, and their war band has an overwhelming advantage against the bronze warrior elites.

How bad was it? Archeological evidence shows that in just 50 years -- between 1206 and 1150BCE, every major city between Troy and Gaza was burned. It was so bad, Greece lost their written language, Linear B, for 300 years until the alphabet was imported from Phoenicia. No wonder the Greeks in 800BCE said to themselves, "What happened?" and began questioning.

Now I'd like to turn to the foodie portion of my talk, and make use of my visual aids that have been sitting here so tastily. I have a number of items here, both renewable and non-renewable.

I'll start with what I consider one of the most egregious and dare I say, blasphemous examples of modern consumerist overreaching: Fiji Water. On the other side of the world is the largest body of salt water, the Pacific Ocean, and in the middle of them, the Fiji Islands. In one of their volcanic calderas is a fresh water aquifer that has slowly filled over millennia. And there is an industrial factory pumping water out of the fresh water aquifer. Not for the islanders, though. For us.

I'm not making this up. After all, the corporation owned by two American billionaires is providing 3% of Fiji's GNP. Never mind the impact on tourism or the corruption of it's politics. This is progress, right?

The fresh water is only one non-renewable resource being exploited. Diesel fuel runs the bottling factory. Oil is transformed into disposable plastic bottles in China. Fuel oil is burned on ships carrying empty bottles from China to Fiji and then again to carry full bottles from Fiji to the west coast. More Diesel fuel to truck it to the local grocery store. At least I walked from my house to the grocery store, and carried them in reusable bags.

I cannot conceive of the culture that thinks this is ok. Or rather, I can, and here's a story to illustrate that.

In 1972, the leadership at the Coca-Cola company had a retreat and talked about how to raise profits. The best way is to cut costs, which they managed a decade later by replacing cane sugar with high fructose corn syrup. The next best way is to increase sales. So they identified their biggest competitor. When I tell people this story, I ask them to guess who Coke competes with, and most people get it wrong.

Hint: It isn't Pepsi. Any guesses (from people who I haven't had this conversation with.)

It's tap water. Ther's roughly a trillion gallons of liquid consumed world wide each year. The Coca-cola company had an infinitesimal fraction of that. They decided on a goal of 90% - that 90% of the total potable consumption worldwide should be consumed via their company.

I remember growing up. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Coke was for special occasions. Birthday parties. When you got a stomach ache. A treat when you went out to eat. And so Coke started the "I'd like to buy the world a coke" and later the "It's the Real Thing" campaign, and convinced many people that carbonated, caffeinated, calorated beverages should be drunk every day, instead of tap water.

But that wasn't enough. When scientific evidence mounted that people should be drinking more water, Coca-Cola and the other industrial food companies went on another advertising spree. Again when I was growing up, there was Perrier Water, for people who didn't drink alcohol but didn't want to feel left out at parties. Now, we have Fuji Water.

That date, 1972, is important. The 70's was the Decade of the Conglomerate, of mergers, of Bigger is Better, of double digit inflation. Small and medium sized companies that were in the business of harvesting, preparing, and selling food at the grocery store were aquired by bigger companies. The new management said, "We want you to show earnings growth of 10-20% a year." And the food scientists laughed, and said, "Not possible." Now, conglomerate owners don't like hearing that, so they "discussed" it further, and found out that the reason why the food sector of the economy had decades of 2-5% growth is that, um... that's how quickly the population grows. And people tend not to buy more food than they can eat.

And management told the scientists to fix that problem. And given enough incentive, the scientists did -- by changing what people eat, and changing how much people eat. And now it's finally time to talk about food.

I do the majority of the grocery shopping and cooking in my family, and so I've been able to change our eating habits the past year, influenced by the works of Michael Pollan. We've joined a CSA from which we get 10lbs of locally-produced and slaughtered, antibiotic-free, grass fed meat a month. I'm using healthier cooking techniques from the Weightwatchers web site. As a result, Trish has dropped over 40lbs since January, and me about 15.

Here are Michael Pollan's 7 Words: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
And a few words about the words.

"Eat Food" means "don't eat edible food-like substances." If you bought it at the same place you filled up your gas tank, or your gret-grandmother wouldn't recognize, its likely not "real food." If it won't "go bad", its not "real food."

I have here a week-old piece of bread that I cooked last Sunday. Bread flour, water, olive oil, salt, yeast. Delicious on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Somewhat crunchy on Wednesday. Moldy by Thursday. For refreshments today, we'll be having bread I baked yesterday. Yum.

I have here two twinkies. Flour, Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate Riboflavin Folic Acid, Sugar, Water, Corn Syrup, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening (contains One or More of: Soybean, Cottonseed or Canola Oil, Beef Fat), Whole Eggs, Dextrose. Modified Corn Starch, Glucose, Leavenings (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate)Sweet Dairy Whey, Soy Protein Isolate, Calcium and Sodium Caseinate, Salt, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60, Soy Lecithin, Cornstarch, Corn Flour, Corn Dextrin, Cellulose Gum, Sodium Stearyl Lactylate, Sorbic Acid (to Retain Freshness)FD&C Yellow 5, Red 40.

One bought yesterday, one bought 8 days ago. The shelf life for a Twinkie is 24 days, so it may be as much as a month old. Can you tell the difference? If you can't, are you sure you want to put it in your digestive system?

"Not to much" means that how you eat is just as important as what. I've already noted that 3% of the population grows food for the rest of us. But another fascinating and less well documented statistic is the amount of time that people spend preparing, eating, and cleaning up. The government knows what employment people have, but not so much about how they spend their time during the day. But it's clear that the combination of the microwave and pre-packaged food, rather than unprocessed plant food, means that the average person spends far less time dealing with food. And this is probably not healthy.

Is there a link between obesity and eating until you are full? Between obesity and the amount of time one spends in the kitchen cooking food, and how much time you spend afterwards? Is your health improved when you sit down to eat with other people and enjoy their company? Probably. Is there research about this? Not really.

I did read a fascinating study this week from the Pew Foundation, examining teenagers and their consumption of electronic media. Two thirds of all kids between 8 and 18 live in a house where the TV is on during dinner. But that's another whole talk, and this time I won't digress.

"Mostly Plants" sounds pretty clear -- eat more green stuff. But it also means to avoid eating "fake food" that is created in plants. Industrial plants.

So the first way those whacky scientists improved corporate profits was by the creation of edible food-like substances, and handing them off to the advertising agencies to sell. The second way is by tricking people into eating more food. The canonical example here is "supersizing."

Another personal note -- when I was growing up, people didn't want to be thought of as greedy or piggish. There was a certain societal disapproval towards ordering too much of anything. So, you dialog with their stomach and their wallet and their conscience, and walk up to the fast food counter having already decided that they wanted a medium soda, a medium fries. And then the clerk asks, "Would you like to supersize that? It's only another 20 cents!"

Your brain now starts fighting itself. This question hooks into a primal human characteristic, of wanting to get a great deal. "Only 20 cents! Look at how much more we'll get! 20 cents is tiny! Pay it. Pay it now now now!!!"

And once you've bought it, you're going to eat it, with drastic consequences. There's a large poster on the wall in every fast food joint; I counted calories at Burger King one day. A supersized Triple Whopper with Cheese, supersized french fries, and supersized non-diet drink came to 2400 calories. For those of you not familiar with diet plans, 2000 calories is an entire day's intake for most people. And here with one supersized meal, you're exceeding that by 20%.

If you look into Michael Pollen's other books, he describes how the modern food industry has corrupted the political system, destroyed the ecosystem in the heartland of America, and ruined our public health.


We've reached the linear end of the formal part of my talk. I'll conclude with the "omega moment" from the Bible

Revelations 20:11-14

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.

What happens after the final judgement? The Creator cleans up the floor, turns the lights out, and walks away. But before that happens, I invite you to partake of some homemade bread and tap water. My apologies in advance for people with wheat or gluten allergies. Thank you.