John Miedema

The first trees had been planted perhaps eighty years ago; in fact, the whole orchard was a living library of old-fashioned fruits. Ed, an apple enthusiast, took a couple of cuttings home to California to graft onto his own trees. He prized the resulting fruit so much that he took one to an apple institute, which declared it a Shenandoah Strawberry. I once punched the name into Google: nothing. These old varieties are not the kind of information that is of interest to the Information Age; they only make themselves known when you stand in front of them. (pg. 112)

Smith & MacKinnon (2007). The 100-Mile-Diet: A Year of Eating Locally. Vintage.

My recent read of The 100-Mile-Diet has inspired many thoughts about locality and reading.

What does food have to do with reading? Both have an expiry date; no one wants to read old news. Unlike food, it is easy to push information around the planet via the web, no carbon required. Or are other costs involved? Consider:

The Internet is a massive hardware and software infrastructure. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, observed, “Google’s and Yahoo!’s second largest operating expense – after the people they employ is… electricity. That’s why they’re building datacenters next to smelting plants.”

The value we place on information technology as a people changes our priorities. I understand and appreciate One Laptop per Child, the effort to produce $100 laptops to educate children in developing countries. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who wonders if my $100 to charity should be directed to food and survival efforts rather than laptops. (Wiser people have pointed out that education helps people eat.)

The web is better suited to reading information snippets than complex pieces or literature. We always have the option to print from the web. We print more than ever in the digital age, wreaking havoc on our forests. Many read by screen. But given the inherent limitations of monitors and cell phone screens we are becoming consumers of a thin diet of information snippets. Often I can pick my answers out of the Google search results, without even opening the source page. Is there a psychic cost to this, a fragmentation of thought and self?

Smith & MacKinnon talked about the traceability of their food. “They know exactly where their food comes from, and under what circumstances it was produced” (pg. 54-55). This autochthonous knowledge is often missing from our web-based information. Schools teach students to properly cite their sources, including those from the web. But web-based material can change or vanish, and the sources can be quite obscure. How about the last book you read? What do you know about the author who wrote it? Or the context in which the author wrote the book? Is that kind of knowledge important? This kind of analysis has been called the “birth of the reader“; is its absence a sort of death of the reader?

Local writing is not necessarily better than global writing; it can often be worse. Writing is a talent that may not be present in your neighbourhood, and the global publishing industry serves a distillation function that filters out a lot of junk. It also filters out a lot of good and divergent voices that do not have sufficient mass appeal. How many capable writers aren’t frustrated by trying to scale the walls of the publishing industry? How many publishers aren’t equally discouraged, wishing the returns would allow them to risk more often on a new writer? The end result is the smothering of diversity. When we tire of our global fare, where do we turn for new stories?

For Christmas, consider buying someone a book by an author who lives within a hundred miles of your home.