Slimy Beastly Life

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DANAPHILLIPS

Slimy Beastly Life: Thoreau onFood and Farming

Nature Must Be Overcome

In the essay that lends his book Sick of Nature its title, DavidGessner complains about the straitjacket of nature writing. Being anature writer, he says, forces one to censor oneself, to hold forth

about the natural world without ever using the word

shit

(3). Asan advocate of wildness in literature, Gessner feels compelled toabandon the piety and sobriety that are hallmarks of the Americannature writing tradition. He is not mistaken to feel this compulsion.On the dialectical principle that a tradition's strengths, thanks to theineluctable workings of irony, provide the most reliable clues to itsweaknesses, piety and sobriety can be regarded as two of Americannature writing's greatest limitationsperhaps as the very arms of thestraightjacket in which our nature writers must garb themselves.

Because Gessner wishes to be impious and inebriate, he muses onshit and on the several pleasures of pissing outdoors, which he ndsespecially intense after he has pounded down a few beers.

The author of Sick of Nature is onto something that needs pur-suing, though perhaps it were best not pursued any further byGessner himself. He cashes out his plea for wildnessby treating histopic in an antic fashion and by posturing as a wild man, though hegives the impression of beingthough only on occasionno morethan a willfully bad boy. Committed rebels do not spend their free

time playing Ultimate Frisbee, as Gessner does (he writes about thesport, and the bros with whom he plays it, at length). So his reader

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment19.3 (Summer 2012)Advance Access publication September 5, 2012 doi:10.1093/isle/iss063 The Author(s) 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for theStudy of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]


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soon realizes that Gessner does not take wildness, much less shitand piss, seriously. He only wants to puncture the self-regard of hisfellow nature writers, while simultaneously foiling the expectationsof his readers. To be fair, neither is an unworthy thing for him to try

to do, and yet both are things he can do just once or twice withoutraising questions about his approach to his own subjectivity andsubject matter.

In another essay with an in-your-face title (Bigger thanShakespeare), Gessner goes further down the back alley he exploresin Sick of Nature when he exclaims, Fuck Thoreau. Let's party!(17). Again, Gessner is onto something, however unpersuasive hisrhetoric becomes once his reader grows accustomedwhich doesn'ttake longto his calculated outrageousness and his willingness to

use four-letter words like fuck and shit. (As regards the latter: DavePraeger, the author of Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by ItsGrossest National Product, has noted, Poop's use ina fortioriargumentis pervasive [144], and to argue a fortiori is to bluster.) That Thoreauwas reticent about partying, and about using the word shit,should be evident to anyone who has read Higher Laws, the mostcostive chapter of Walden. Higher Laws is also the most nervousand strained chapter of what is for the most part a fortifying book,even if it is always a contrarian and on occasion a contradictory one.

In Higher Laws,

Thoreau writes, If the hunter has a taste formud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tid-bits, the ne ladyindulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines fromover the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to herpreserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live thisslimy beastly life, eating and drinking (218). That the full stop isplaced where it is here, just after eating and drinking,is telling: weall know what ought to come next. So does Thoreau. How could henot? Yet he cannot bring himself to name these things plainly and in

the vernacular. He is more interested, at this point, in condemningthe hunter and the ne lady, along with you and I, than in franktalk about the universal fate of mud-turtles and calf's foot jellies oncethese savage tid-bits and delicacies have been tasted, swallowed,and digested. A few pages further on in Higher Laws, Thoreaudoes express his admiration for the Hindoo lawgiver,who teacheshow to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like,though he adds that by doing so, the lawgiver elevates what ismean(221).

That meanness needs to be elevated is, unsurprisingly, the centralpoint Thoreau makes in Higher Laws, though he makes it withunexpected vigor. His vigor is owing to his conviction, expressed in

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the paragraph following his indictment of the hunter and the nelady alike, that our whole life is startlingly moral (218). This state-ment has always marked a point past which I nd myself unable tosympathize with Thoreau, much less agree with him, even if I make

due allowance for his habitual extravagance of expression. The prop-osition that our whole life is startlingly moral is, I suspect, simplyfalse. For if it were true, morality might be a much less contentiousand debatable matter than it is, and we would not need philosophers,much less nature writers, to help us sort it out. There would be noquestion, then, of someone crying out, Fuck Thoreau! Let's party.We each would agree to don the straightjacket, because we wouldrecognize the need to be moral our whole life,and thus forever onthe alert,as the author ofWaldenphrases it in Sounds.

In the opening paragraph of that chapter, Thoreau distanceshimself from the high-minded and rigorous course of study he cele-brates in the previous chapter, Reading, and writes: No methodnor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on thealert. A paragraph later he confesses, I did not read books the rstsummer. I hoed beans (111). He shortly admits the whole truth: farfrom hoeing beans the whole summer, he spent long hours goongoff and basking in the sun coming in through his cabin doorway.Moreover, he found the time he passed in this way invigorating: the

Protestant work ethic be damned. At this point in Walden, Thoreauappears to be more interested in morale than in morality, and it canbe said in his defense that this is often the case elsewhere in thebook. It can also be said that for Thoreau, the two are always closelyrelated, and happily so: that he sees morale as the soil, or rather thecontext, the milieu, in which morality thrives best. However, heseems to lose sight of this relationship in Higher Laws, where hemakes morale seem secondary to and dependent upon morality, andexpresses a hankering for purity. His claim that our whole life is

startlingly moral

thus serves to remind us that his transcendental-ism, like all New England transcendentalism, is the result of ashotgun wedding between a residual Calvinism and a somewhattardy Romanticism. If Calvinism was superannuated, Romanticismwas also getting to be a bit long in the tooth by the mid-1840s.

Thoreau's insistence that our whole life is startlingly moral,while it does acknowledge that the all-pervasive morality of our exis-tence is something of a nasty surprisesomething to bestartledbyand therefore something inconvenient, taxing, and likely to prevent

us from ever nding an occasion to make merry, leads him to main-tain, a few pages farther along in Higher Laws,that nature is hardto overcome, but she must be overcome (221). This claim is itself a

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startling one, since it comes from the pen of the Cupid supposed tobe responsible for inspiring the enduring American affection for andidentication with the natural world. (Thus, the familiar image ofThoreau that graces the cover of even so disaffected a book as

Gessner's. The author may have wanted to fuck Thoreau

andparty; his publisher knew better.)

The statement nature is hard to overcome, but she must be over-come needs clarifying. I am condent that Thoreau means that wemust overcome nature in the sense of stie, suppress, hold incheck, or at least manage carefully, and despite his use of the femi-nine pronoun, not in the sense of dominate, force ourselves upon,ravish, or rape. He is a vigorous thinker, or rather writer, but not sovigorous as to contemplate much less advocate crimes against nature,

whatever its gender. Nevertheless, we seem to be faced with the taskof circling the square: of smoothing out the contradictions betweenThoreau's fondness for, say, huckleberries and ponds on the rectoside of the page, and his marked distaste for mundane bodily exis-tencefor this slimy beastly life and the nature which must beovercomeon the verso side of the same sheet.

I will return to the pages ofWaldenfor a closer look below. In themeantime, I want to provide some intellectual context that will helpus to see more clearly why Thoreau's language, both in the passages

from Walden that I have already discussed and in similar ones,deserves fresh scrutiny and reveals surprising things about itsauthor's attitudes toward nature. What makes Thoreau's attitudesimportant for us to consider is simply that his workas I haveremarkedhas so often and for so long been identied as the well-spring not only of American nature writing as a literary tradition, butalso of American environmentalism as a cultural and political move-ment. It seems inconvenient, to put it mildly, that in Higher Laws,Thoreau should have expressed a profound distaste for life itself, and

for the eating and drinking that sustains it. Nor does this appear tobe merely a case of a crux in his text of the kind that literary criticsand scholars tend to assume it is their job to resolve, so I will not tryto do anything like thatto circle the square, as I put it a paragraphagohere. Instead, I am going to propose that if Gessner is right toclaim that nature writers typically speak about the world withoutever using the word shit, and I think he is, and if Thoreau canspeak of this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking without catch-ing himself in a contradiction, as I think he should have done, then

these are facts which should be of keen interest to ecocritics. Theassumption I am going to make as I consider these facts is that theecocritic's job is to survey all traditions of writing about nature, and



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not only the American one, unsentimentally and dispassionately, andwithout any of the parochialism nature writing sometimes endorses.

The New Materialism and Posthumanism

One important element of the context in which Thoreau's wordsin Higher Laws need to be read is provided by ecocriticism itself,where Thoreau has been and will remain a centrally importantgure. Yet a few ecocritics are willing to question the terms of his cen-trality, and in at least one case, to question it on grounds similar toDavid Gessner's. Thoreau's reluctance to broach the topics of theexcremental and the excretoryof shit and pissis, I suspect, one

reason Timothy Morton has little patience for him and the Americannature writing tradition he is supposed to have begun. Thoreau'sneed to strain the transcendence even out of the least promising expe-riencesto elevate what is meanwhen it comes to eating, drinking,cohabiting, voiding excrement and urine, and the likeis no doubtthe other reason Morton distrusts him. In his 2007 book EcologyWithout Nature, Morton concludes that the essential problem facingenvironmentalists, and hence ecocritics, is not the difculty of gettingin touch with and becoming aware of nature, as American nature

writers have assumed, but the more humbling difculty of knowingwhat to do with one's slime (one's shit) (159). In reaching this con-clusion, Morton is following Sartre and Lacan, for whom slime andshit represent a challenge to consciousness and the ego, one posed bythe unconscious and the body.

Unlike Morton, I have no desire to follow Sartre and Lacan. I wantto sidestep the rabbit holes postulated by psychoanalysis, for onething, and for another I think the so-called new materialism offersfresher insight into the problemsassuming for the moment that

they areproblems, in particular problems of the sort that might leadus to ponder higher lawsof eating, drinking, cohabiting, voidingexcrement and urine, and the like.A new materialist might suggestthat at the heart of Thoreau's difculty in coming to terms witheating and drinking, with defecation and urination, and with theexpectoration and regurgitation that must be referenced by thephrase and the like,is the fact that all sustenance is also substance,andcomplicating the matter enormouslyto substance all suste-nance will return. I do not want to bandy Latinate words about here,

but it is worth noting that while sustenance and substance are nottraceable to the same roots by way of Middle English, Old French,and Latin, their roots (sustinere, from sub plus tenere, and substare)

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were at least within shouting distance of one another. Once upon atime, these words occupied adjacent semantic topography.

New materialists are especially canny about substance, wishing todissociate their way of viewing the world from all earlier ontologies

that would lend to any given substance the properties of thething-in-itselfthe properties associated with essence, identity, andimmutability. So new materialists do not view substance as a viablecandidate for metaphysical bedrock and building block. Yet neitherdo they view it as endlessly fungible, as indifferent raw materialawaiting the impress of human ingenuity and labor, as in the briskmanner of capitalism and modes-of-production-oriented historicalmaterialism, or as in the more elaborate manner posited by theoriesof social constructivism. New materialists instead see substanceor,

to use the term they prefer, matter

as vibrant.

This is the meta-phor, though she does not mean it to be only a metaphor, used byJane Bennett in the title of her 2010 book, Vibrant Matter, where shewrites, The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore thevitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations(vii).

In the sentence I have just quoted, Bennett adds two more meta-phors to the list: matter is not only vibrant, it also has vitality,and its formations possess lively powers, too. Bennett's rhetoric ischallenging, intentionally so: she says that the political project of

her book is, to put it most ambitiously, to encourage more intelligentand sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things(viii). As readers of her book, one of the rst engagements we have tomake is with Bennett's choice of terms. She recognizes this, andexplains: By vitality, I mean the capacity of thingsedibles, com-modities, storms, metalsnot only to impede or block the will anddesigns of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with tra-jectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own (viii). Here,Bennett is following Bruno Latour, whose notions of the actantand of

distributive agency

(cited in Bennett ix) shape the case she makesthroughout her book for vibrant matter and lively things. Sheadmits, moreover, that to present this case, she must bracket thequestion of the human and elide the rich and diverse literature onsubjectivity (ix). Thus, new materialism offers its own version ofposthumanism. This offering should make new materialism of imme-diate interest to ecocritics eager to lay the ghost of anthropocentrism,for whom it might prove both challenging and instructive. Bennettherself notes that in contrast to some versions of deep ecology, a

school of thought with which it might seem to have some connec-tions, new materialism as she develops it posits neither a smooth



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harmony of parts nor a diversity unied by a common spirit, butinstead hearkens to the strange logic of turbulence(xi).

By turbulence, Bennett means both the turbulence that altersbut also informs the operations of all dynamic systems, and more

broadly the turbulence that might be caused by any lively thing.

Our own digestive tract is both a turbulent system (of a sort) and alively thing. As a system, it interacts with a number of othersystems (with our endocrine system, for instance, but alsoandsometimes just as immediatelywith the healthcare system). As alively thing, our digestive tract regularly plays host to any numberof other things, some very lively indeed (parasites and viruses) andothers not so much (the roughage that serves as grist to our internalmills), and some introduced by us deliberately (the roughage again)

while others occupy us by stealth (the parasites and viruses again).Bennett offers the example of omega-3 fatty acidsthose wondroussubstances whose family name is now emblazoned on packages ofaxseed, sh oil, and free-range eggs lining the shelves of grocerystores, and which also can be found in some other, less easily obtain-able organic sources ranging fromCannabis sativato krill to kangaroomeat, or so the latest iteration of the entry for omega-3 fatty acidson the Wikipedia web site tells me. These foods (I realize thatCannabisonly qualies as a food if you add it to your pot brownies)

and others are, according to Bennett, bodies vying alongside andwithin an other complex body (a person's own body) (38). This isthe case precisely because food isand I do regret having to empha-size the obvious in this waywhat we eat, and is thus an actant inLatour's sense of the term: it acts inside and alongside humans,and is an inducerproducer of salient, public effects, such as atu-lence (a kind of turbulence, after all), or the crisis of obesity(Bennett 39) brought on by eating too much of the less healthfulkinds of fat along with too much starch.

Lest we launch into a discussion of the social construction offatness at this juncture, Bennett suggests that as actant, food has aform of agency that may render cultural persuasionsand dissua-sions!relatively moot. To eat chips,she writes, is to enter into anassemblage in which the I is not necessarily the most decisive opera-tor(4). Bennett is rifng, I suppose, on the old Frito-Lay advertisingslogan Betcha can't eat just one. Given what we now know about thevibrant materialityof potato chips, larded as they are with the satu-rated fats that stimulate human beings to gorge themselves, so that

they become increasingly obese as they snarf down increasingamounts of fat and starch, this slogan has come to seem downrightinsidious. That fat-laden potato chips are part of what Bennett (again

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following Latour) calls an assemblageone that effectively com-pounds their agency, while helping to produce itis evidenced bothby the fact that fats act on us not only as foods but also asmood-altering drugs, and by their universal presence in vending

machines, at sandwich shops, and on television. That an assemblageof this sort can constitute what amounts to a vicious circle, if not afeedback loop (to use an expression that seems richly suited to thisdiscussion), is suggested by the coincidence, if it is one, that potatochips are among the munchies most favored by pot smokers.

According to Bennett, foodall food, that is, and not only thesnack food on which I have been focusinghas the negative powerto resist or obstruct human projects, but it also has the more activepower to affect and create effects. She adds: Eating appears as a

series of mutual transformations in which the border between insideand outside becomes blurry: my meal both is and is not mine; youboth are and are not what you eat(49). Viewed through new materi-alist lenses, self-image and body image cannot be teased apart, andthus neither can be brought into sharp focus. In the eating encoun-ter,as Bennett makes a point of calling what other folks might call ameal, all bodies are shown to be but temporary congealments of amateriality that is a process of becoming, is hustle and ow punctu-ated by sedimentation and sustenance(49). In other words (my own

this time), all gastronomy is molecular gastronomy, and whether youhappen to be the thing eating or the thing being eaten does not mate-rially alter the case.

The Grossest Groceries

The encounter that Jane Bennett describes, the engagement with ahustle and ow punctuated by sedimentation and sustenance, iscentral to Higher Lawsand throughout the rest ofWalden, too. It is

an encounter and an engagement that more often than not provesirritating to Thoreau, and it occasions some of his prickliest com-ments. In Economy, for example, he discusses the very naturaland pertinentquestions that the townsmenof Concord asked himabout his life at Walden Pond, and despite the qualiers he applies tothem, it is clear that these questions often annoyed him. Some, hewrites, have asked what I got to eat (3). This seems to be both avery natural and pertinentquestion, and an innocent if a somewhatclueless one. (As many townsmen knew, Thoreau took a lot of his

meals where he had always taken them: at his mother's table.) Waldenwas written, in large part, to address everyday but essential questionsof this sort, which in a better state of society (as Thoreau might have



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put it) would not need asking, because men (as Thoreau would haveput it) who lived in such a society perforce must have answered themlong since. Nevertheless, that he perceived his own society to havefallen far short of answering these and other basic questions satisfac-

torily does not explain the language Thoreau uses when addressingthe question of foodand, more broadly, the question of anythinghaving to do with material life. That language is habituallypassive-aggressive and dyspeptic, and often turns on metaphors ofingestion even when it does not directly concern what Thoreau hadgot to eat.

On the question of owning property, for instance, Thoreau writes,Man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt (Economy 5). Heseems to be rifng on Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt

thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wastthou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. YetThoreau goes further than Genesis goes, which is going to anextreme: he implies that all we really are required to consume in thislife is ourselves, our very lives. This straightened line of reasoningmight be called anorexicno fats and carbohydrates allowed!andThoreau often pursues it with a vigor that verges on the pathological,and is intended precisely to put us off our feed.

Pondering what sort of house might be ideal for someone like

him, Thoreau declares, They can do without architecture who haveno olives nor wines in the cellar (Economy 47). Toting up hisexpenses for food, he admits, Yes, I did eat $8.74, all toldand inthe spreadsheet laying out his expenditures item by item, notes in themargin that the sweet potatoes, the pumpkin, and the watermelon hebought and presumably ate, along with some our, sugar, lard, andapples (fresh and dried), were all experiments which failed(Economy59). I have been wondering about this marginal notationfor years: wondering how sweet potatoes, a pumpkin, and a water-

melon might amount to failures in an experimental context, or in anycontext other than, say, gardening. I have been hoping (and tellingmy students) that Thoreau is joking, that this account of hisgrocery bill is a punning and reductive version of the largeraccount of a life that Walden is meant to be. Why else wouldThoreau note his incomes and outgoes down to the half and quartercent, as he does in Economy? It belies the preference he declares inSoundsfor maintaining a broad marginto his life (111).

Lately, however, I have begun to think that Thoreau's ippant atti-

tude toward architecture, accounting, and food cannot be sustainedafter all, the Walden experiment as a whole did prove not to be sus-tainable for much longer than a couple of years. No doubt this is

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why Thoreau is on the defensive in Economy,as he will be again inHigher Laws.He runs the numbers on the Walden Pond experienceto illustrate the failure of those numbers, paltry as they are, to capturethe gist of that experience; and to show his indifference, if not his

utter imperviousness, to economic forces and, more broadly, to allthethingsof this lifeto incomes and outgoes alike, and more partic-ularly to olives and wines as well as more humble food and drink.Rhetorically as well as factually, this indifference was a luxuryThoreau could afford, since he lived at Walden for free, as a squatteron Emerson's land, and since he had no one to support while helived there but himself, and no responsibility for the upkeep of anyproperty that might have been called real. As he told the IrishmanJohn Field, he did not work hard,so he did not have to eat hard,

either, and so it cost him but a trie

for his food (

Baker Farm

205). One imagines that John Field found Thoreau's advice galling:no doubt he did have to work hard to eat at all, and a trie wasprobably more money than he had to spend most days. This wouldcontinue to be the case for John Field for some time to come (asThoreau predicts), just as it would for other poor Americans livingon slender margins and struggling with the difculties raised bytheir need for sustenance.

It is helpful, with the constraints of lives like Field's in mind, to

compare the account of a family whose circumstances

given thepassage of time, and the forward march of progressought to havebeen remote from those that obtained in mid-century Concord, toThoreau's thumbnail account of his grocery bill in Economy. Inmaking such a comparison, we will be following Thoreau's advice, sowe will be treating him fairly. Near the beginning of Economy, hewrites:

It would be some advantage to live a primitive andfrontier life, though in the midst of an outward civiliza-tion, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries oflife and what methods have been taken to obtain them;or even to look over the old day-books of the mer-chants, to see what it was that men most commonlybought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what arethe grossest groceries. For the improvements of ageshave had but little inuence on the essential laws ofman's existence. . . . (1112)

I will now do the latter of the two things Thoreau suggests wouldbe some advantageif we want to learn what are the gross necessa-ries of life,and thus the grossest groceries.



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One of my paternal ancestors farmed near the tiny hamlet ofBartow, Georgia. I have in my les the original ledger pages of thisancestor's account with a storekeeper in Kite, Georgia, a man namedM.R. Perkins. What I nd most striking about this account is the evi-

dence it provides of the paltry amount of store-bought rations withwhich the J.J. Bush family eked out an existence, and of the triingsums that they were unable to muster in cash money. Buying oncredit on June 29, 1893, the Bushes took home $0.10 worth of salt,$1.20 worth of our, and $1.00 worth of syrup. On July 10 of thesame year, the family obtained a melon and more our, and went$0.70 deeper into debt. (The melon cost a dime, which is ve timesmore than Thoreau paid for his melon in the 1840s, but of coursethese gures need to be adjusted for several cycles of ination and

deation, and for variations between local markets.) On May 26,1894, the Bush family obtained from Perkins $0.50 worth of coffee,$0.10 worth of sardines, $0.05 worth of shhooks, $0.25 worth oftobacco, and $0.05 worth of matches, and thus they incurred a debtof $0.95. Apparently, a shing trip was in the ofng, which suggeststhat the nutritional value of the catch may have offset the costs of theday's ventureeven that the Bushes might have sold their neighbor amess ofsh that evening, and come out a few pennies ahead.

That the Bushes ever realized any capital gains, whether from

shing or from farming (they cropped cotton and tobacco), seemsdoubtful. A receipt from ve years laterit is dated July 19, 1898,and was drawn up by M.R. Perkins on the back of a piece of station-ary from the Wadley and Mount Vernon Railroad (waste not, wantnot)acknowledges that Sarah Bush has paid off a mortgage held inhis favor. Perkins agrees to return this mortgage to her husband J.J.marked canceled (if Perkins ever nds the note, which he has mis-placed). It is hard to tell with any certainty just how well the familyfortunes fared, since the record is spotty and much else besides that

mortgage note has been lost. To complicate matters, J.J. Bush was illit-erate and left no other account of his life.

I have the Bush family's papers in my possession owing to thecoincidence of the eventual marriage of one of J.J. and Sarah Bush'sdaughterswho wore shoes purchased from Perkins at the price of$1.25 a pair, which can only mean that the young ladies were notvery well turned outto my great-grandfather, James Bareld. Hisaccounts extend the material and economic history begun by theBush family well into the twentieth century, and illustrate what it

meant to be a dirt farmer in the American South in the three decadesbefore World War II.

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One of the things it meant, apparently, was keeping every scrap ofpaper relating to the dirt farmer's nances: in this case, these scrapswere kept in an army surplus ammunition can tucked in the back ofan old chifforobe it was my pleasure to plunder when I was a child.

On July 27, 1914, James Bareld took out a mortgage with the SamWeichselbaum Company of Dublin, Georgia, in the amount of $20.00and at the rate of 8% per annum, renouncing all homestead rightsboth for himself and for his family. His collateral: a red milk cownamed Daisy, two red yearling cows, both male, and a light-coloredheifer. (Presumably, the yearlings and the heifer were unnamedbecause they were going to be eaten or sold.) On January 17, 1931,after moving to a farm near Lyons, Georgia, Bareld borrowed $12.00from the First National Bank, putting up as collateral a black mare

mule nine years old named Maud, who weighed a thousand pounds,give or take; the note fell due on March 17 of the same year. Tenyears later, on February 1, 1941, he borrowed $26.50 from the PeoplesBank. This time he put up as collateral a dark red mare mule namedSid, who was eleven years old. At a hundred pounds lighter, Sid wasmore svelte than Maud had been, and she was mortgaged along witha red butthead milk cow whose markings were a swallow fork in herleft ear and a square in her right. A month later, Bareld borrowed$25.00 from the same nancial institution, this time putting a mule

named Nell up for collateral along with two more milk cows.These mortgages (and many others) were usually taken out so

that cottonseed, seed corn, and guano could be bought in time forspring planting. It amuses me to see that my patrimony, merely spec-ulative as it ever was, was squandered in part on purchases of guano:of bird and bat shit, that is, or some simulacrum thereof. (I do notthink it matters all that much if the guano, the fertilizer, in questionwas real or merely synthetic; if it was the latter, then perhaps thepathos of all those mortgage notes is even greater than I assume:

imagine having no choice but to go into debt to buy fake bat shit.)Let me be clear: I see the family history I have just related as a narra-tive (however piecemeal it may be) about both the material circum-stances and the very materials that antedated and informed my ownexistence. Note the complete absence of olives and wines. It accordswell with the lack of cellars beneath the pine-board clad houses dirtfarmers built for themselves.

I have offered a few details of family history so that I might eshout farmers' lives and lifestyles of the sort to which Thoreau opposes

his own life and lifestyle in Walden. In Thoreau's defense, I shouldnote that in Walden, he does say that he writes as someone with nointerest in the economic arrangements of his day. Whether this pun



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means he was truly disinterested or simply uninterested, or merelyhad never invested, in those arrangements is the question. In eithercase, the admission, even if it is meant to disarm potential critics inadvance, is revealing. In the uncertain light it sheds, the question I

now have to ask is this: would it have mattered to Thoreau, if hecould have witnessed their excursion, that the Bush family, when itbought those sardines on May 26, 1894, and ate them on what musthave been a shing trip to the Ohoopee River, was combining thecrude taste of the hunter for savage tid-bits with the exotic taste ofthe ne lady? Like the hunter, and despite the purchase of the sar-dines, they were doing what they could to eat locally and sustainably,which as everyone now realizes is easiest for people with more cashmoney and more free time at their disposal than the Bushes had. The

same reasoning can be applied to the watermelon they bought onJuly 10, 1893. It must have been eaten for lunch somewhere along theroad between Perkins's store and the family farm, and I doubt thatthe Bushes felt they had the luxury of considering it a failure, even ifit did not compare favorably to the watermelons they surely grew intheir own vegetable garden at home. In short, Thoreau and theBushes were both words and worlds apart. What the New Englandercalled horned pout the Georgians called catsh; what he called hastypudding they called grits; what he called hoeing they called chopping

cotton; and what he called sustenance, and found sustaining, like theIndian bread he ate at Walden, they called cornbreadand eating toomuch of it probably gave them pellagra.

If economy is a story we need to be able to tell ourselves aboutthe sustenance we need, then it matters greatly how this story getstoldand how the materials it references get arranged, both in ourimaginations and in the world where we go to obtain them. Thoreauarranged these materials by pushing them to the margins of his nar-rative in Walden, where they nonetheless proved to have a power

with which he struggled to come to terms. How much he struggledhas generally been overlooked, though it does seem to be attractingsome attention recently. Jane Bennett makes Thoreau the subject ofone of her chapters in Vibrant Matter, taking as her inspiration apassage from the opening of Higher Laws that I also nd bracing,though I do have doubts about the claim it makes. Describing theevening of the very same day on which he gave advice to the poorIrishman John Field, Thoreau writes, As I came home through thewoods with my string of sh, trailing my pole, it being now quite

dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path,and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly temptedto seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for

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that wildness which he represented (210). It is refreshing to seeThoreau acknowledging temptation in this way, even if he does notyield to it. How much woodchuck, one wonders, would he wolfdown, if he could bring himself to wolf down just one woodchuck

raw? The passage is not without pathos; and part of the pathos isowing to its admission that a woodchuck is what passed in 1840sConcord as representative of wildness. A woodchuck is not so muchsmall game, as it is no game at all. Its esh, however, isgamy, and forme, the other source of the pathos of the opening passage of HigherLaws has always been the fact that woodchucks are not especiallygood to eat when well done, and never mind what they must be liketo eat when raw. In other words, which I will borrow from Thoreau,woodchucks really arethe grossest groceries.

In his classic book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Euell Gibbonsdescribes some transcendental gastronomic creations (245), includ-ing a woodchuck recipe for the true neoprimitive who has a strongstomach and weak prejudices (248). This recipe, Woodchuck inSour Cream, begins with up to 48 hours of proper dressing andsoaking (248) in a saltvinegar solution formulated to draw out ofthe meat all the rank avor that would otherwise make it nearly ined-ible, after which Gibbons recommends freezing the meat to furtherimprove its taste. As for cooking it, he recommends boiling the prop-

erly dressed and soaked and defrosted woodchuck for three hours,when it is safe to remove it from the potand best to throw theboiling water away, as this stock has been used merely to avor themeat and is going to taste too much of woodchuck to be serviceablein a broth. Only now, when at least 51 hours have passed, is it time tofor the assistant chef to step aside so that the executive chef may takeover. Using all his skills, he will prepare the Woodchuck in SourCream, which entails still more boiling and a further 20 minutes ofsimmering before the dish is rendered ediblealbeit debatable as a

dish still containing actual woodchuck.I have never eaten a woodchuck, and I bet Jane Bennett has never

eaten one, either. Bennett admires the opening passage of HigherLaws because she thinks it illustrates Thoreau's awareness of food'smateriality, of its capacities as an actant to effect material changes inour bodies while also changing our affections, perhaps even ourminds. Wildness, she writes, was a not-quite-human force thataddled and altered human and other bodies,and it named an irre-ducibly strange dimension of matter (23). I am willing to take

Bennett's larger point here just as she intends it. However, I doubtthat Thoreau would have been willing to do so, even if wildnesswas his own keyword. Frankly, I think that what Thoreau failed to



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appreciate was precisely food's materiality, something he does notseem to have been able to contemplate with any equanimityinThe Ponds, he describes a model farm as a great grease-spot,redolent of manures and buttermilk! (196)and thus something he

often treats with a remarkable lack of common sense, as when hereports that he sometimes tried to get by on a diet of rice or huckle-berries alone.

Bennett gives Thoreau too much credit: he was a lot charier offood-actants, and of vibrant matter,than she realizes. In her discus-sion of his work (see Vibrant Matter 4547), she completely overlooksthe passage from Higher Laws that lends a title to this essay. Shealso ignores, as I too have been doing, the fact that Thoreau did onceeat a cooked woodchuck, after he caught it raiding his bean eld,

and found that it was infused less with wildness than with the rank-ness Euell Gibbons urges his reader to avoid. Thoreau's woodchuck,though it had been killed, skinned, and dressed out with his ownhands, failed to be a transcendental gastronomic creation once itwas plated and served.

Thoreau got the recipe for sustenance and sustainability wrong: itturns out that in salt, vinegar, and sour cream, and not in wildness, isthe preparation, and likewise the preservation, of the world. Hisbravado should not mislead us. For him, food is in the main not

something to lecture about, but something to lecture against. InEconomy,he writes: My excuse for not lecturing against the use oftobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformedtobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I havechewed, which I could lecture against (78). This is one of Thoreau'sbetter jokes. Yet it is a barbed joke of the kind he likes to make whenhe want to impale both himself and his reader on the horns of whathe perceiveswrongly, I have arguedto be a moral dilemma posedby this beastly slimy life.

W O R K S C I T E D

Bennett, Jane.Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP,2010. Print.

Gessner, David.Sick of Nature. Lebanon: UP of New England, 2004. Print.Gibbons, Euell. Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Putney: Alan C. Hood, 1964.

Print.Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

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Praeger, Dave. Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest NationalProduct. Los Angeles: Feral, 2007. Print.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP,2004. Print.


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