Small Is The New Great!
Fighting The Sludge
Yesterday was one of those days that don't need to happen. I had an important appointment coming up and suddenly an indefinable mess bubbled up in the kitchen sink. Well, actually, it stopped bubbling pretty quickly: the drain was blocked.
I'm quite good at DIY, but I hate anything to do with plumbing. The mess, the filth, the stinking slop. I cursed: Don't we have to endure enough filth in these days? Listen to the news - a big political sink splashes with brown sludge!
Anyone who has ever experienced a blocked toilet knows the lesson to be learnt: it's best not to let it get to that point where the crap rises to the top and messes everything up. And if you have missed the moment because you thought problems would solve themselves, the remedies have to be quite radical.
So was I, rushing to the village shop. I was surprised to find three different drain cleaners. No experiments with small actions, I choose the red bottle with the radical promise, although the danger warnings sounded like death and destruction. I googled to make sure I wasn't producing chlorine gas in my kitchen or causing the sewer to explode (I had previously tried bicarbonate of soda and vinegar to no avail). But everything was fine, it only was better not to breathe in. Such a resistance against the sludge requires caution, sometimes sacrifice.
To cut a long story short: After a few hours, the drain farted very loudly. I rinsed it with plenty of clean water and everything was free. You could indeed hear the sewer blockage disappearing. What remained of that day was a pleasant appointment and the feeling of having overcome a stinking problem. It's these small achievements that count. They give you the energy for more.
And just then I found this link about someone in Wales who re-discovered tiny rare seeds. His threshing machine looked like the model in our farm museum. His language sounded like ancient days and lost worlds, like the music of a living landscape. I had goosebumps.
Watch this beautiful little film, read the article with its touching photos showing humans and a part of the world that's also reality quite now (click on the link in the photo):
Llafur Ni – Our Grains (Opens in a new window)
Growing Seeds
Right now, as the world's political sink is blocked and stinking, threatening to paralyse the entire wastewater system, some old and young people hold grains in their hands and are singing. They are small like their seeds, unknown to most of us. Big media will perhaps never write their story, headlines and social media not shout their names. What will remain?
And what do we want to take as an example: the great destructive screamers or an old man in the nowhere who has quietly joined forces with others to revive an old, almost lost grain?
This film particularly touched me because I often wonder what cultural heritage does to people (I volunteer in an Alsatian farm museum and heritage centre). And because our region has also been changed by old seeds.
(Opens in a new window)Our movement began with public Saturday lunches at a farm bringing together people with ideas and visions. It also started with a young couple restoring an 700 years old mill and working with ancient stone grinding methods. They worked hard, had to experiment, to revive forgotten knowledge. Their different kinds of organic flours and bread became famous on the regional markets. They catched even the most conservative people who were suddenly discussing which degree of grinding and which grain was best for grandma's cake recipe, the children's favourite pizza, or the thinnest crêpes.
Their mill is an Ali Baba cave of flours as you could never find them in a supermarket: next to the usual wheat, you get spelt, rye, emmer, and einkorn wheat but also flours from sweet chestnuts or buckwheat:
Small film about the mill (Opens in a new window) (Youtube, Alsatian with French subtitles)
In a region with dying structures, people like these started to live their visions of organic farming and cooperatives. After years of hard work and convincing people, their success was so great that regional politics helped with funding. Soon we had the first cooperative shop and a market bus for remote villages. While elsewhere vital hedgerows were cut down to promote the monotony of maize monoculture, in that area they seem to have gone backwards. Small farms needed something special to survive: whether it was traditionally produced yoghurts or cheese, cereals also had to be re-thought.
If you wander around this area on the edge of the Northern Vosges Nature Park (Opens in a new window) today, you will see grain that you may never have seen before. "Le grand épeautre" (Triticum aestivum subsp. spelta), as we name spelt or dinkel wheat (Opens in a new window), is widely known from the organic farming movement because it needs less fertilizer. Meanwhile you can find this flour in supermarkets.
But here grow two siblings: the einkorn (Opens in a new window), or as we name it 'the small one', "Le petit épeautre" (Triticum monococcum). Together with emmer (Opens in a new window), the middle one, "le moyen épeautre" (Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccon) you can start your time travel!
A Landscape For Time Travelling
These sibling species emmer and einkorn were one of the first grains cultivated by humans. Evidence from DNA printing, shows us einkorn wheat was first domesticated approximately 10,000 years BC in nowaday's Turkey. That means Neolithic times when humans started farming. Also native to the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, was emmer with oldest radiocarbonate datings from 17,000 BC. Your time travel machine lands among hunter gatherers collecting wild grains before domesticating them.
(Opens in a new window)Let us realise this once again: We happen to live in the chaotic year 2025, in a time of Monsanto, some very evil politicians and obscenely rich men, climate crisis, and species extinction. And thanks to a few unknown people who are interested in ancient grains and diversity, our hands can touch this ancient grain in summer. We can bake a bread with possible Mesopotamian taste or eat like a pharao in Ancient Egypt. We cook grains which were already on fire places of our hunter-gatherer and Neolithic ancestors.
These landscapes of deep history can be tasted but they also influence our gut microbiome. We literally are what we eat. We are landscapes and a living variety of microscopically tiny organisms.
This cultural heritage of farming has nothing of old-fashioned backward-looking. Nowadays, ancient seeds and grains are important for science and our survival in the future. Emmer for example has the ability to give good yields on poor soils and shows resistance to fungal diseases such as stem rust. Einkorn wheat is low-yielding but can survive on poor, dry, marginal soils, even in rougher climate and on mountains.
Nowadays, scientists investigate old, often forgotten food species for their ability to withstand the challenges of climate crisis and the associated diseases and pests. Modern industrial farming (Opens in a new window) has not only become an important factor of habitat destruction and biodiversity loss (Opens in a new window). It is itself a victim of species extinction. The species loss in the so-called agrobiodiversity is enormous: Worldwide we lost 90% of our crop varieties and some 75 percent of plant genetic diversity. Of the 4 percent of the 250 000 to 300 000 known edible plant species, only 150 to 200 are used by humans. (Source: FAO (Opens in a new window))
And now judge anew: Who are the most important world changers? Those who shout 'make XY great again' and walk over dead bodies in their greed? Or the more quiet ones who get together, let tiny seeds slip through their fingers, swap old varieties, and revitalise this important knowledge? No question: we need to fight the fascist sludge. But we need to cooperate - starting at local and regional structures - and tell more often the stories of a future we dream of, especially in social media.
A fist cannot dig up the earth. Even Scrooge McDuck had to learn that money does not germinate. But a plant grows from the smallest seed. It was these tiny seeds that held the real power over thousands upon thousands years.
Apropos Seeds …
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