PACIFIC STANDARD
T H E E N D O F C AT T L E FA R M I N G FED UP:
STORIES THAT MATTER SEPT/OCT 2016 PSMAG.COM
THE TOXIC IMPACT OF INDUSTRIAL FEEDLOTS ON THE LAND. P.42
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“THE FIRST ESSENTIAL COMPONENT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE IS ADEQUATE FOOD FOR ALL MANKIND.” —NORMAN BORLAUG
PLANT-BASED PATTIES AND THE FUTURE OF FOOD
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FIGHTING BACK AGAINST PARKINSON’S SALVATION IN THE BOXING RING. P.26
WAR OF WORDS WRITING FICTION HELPS VETERANS OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN PROCESS THE UNSPEAKABLE. P.64
IRRIGATION NATION HOW A SINGLE PIECE OF FARM EQUIPMENT CREATED AMERICA’S BREADBASKET— AND THREATENS TO DESTROY IT. P.56
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“Our kids may expect their burgers to come in an audacious array of textures and flavors, none of them held back by the physical limitations of meat.” Photo by Sam Kaplan P.32 COCONUT PIECES
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
CONTENTS
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016
FEATURES
VOLUME 09, NUMBER 05
TASCOSA FEED YARD BUSHLAND, TEXAS Elevated levels of ammonia around feedlots can lead to algal blooms in nearby lakes and streams. Photo by Mishka Henner
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THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLANT-BASED BURGER One man’s mission to make meat obsolete. By Rowan Jacobsen
PHOTO ESSAY: FED UP Aerial views of feedlots illuminate their toxic impact on the land. Photographs by Mishka Henner
SPOILER ALERT Millions of containers, thousands of ships, hundreds of scientists, 30 laws, 15 federal agencies, and we still can't prevent the next foodborne illness outbreak. By Kathryn Miles
IRRIGATION NATION How an esoteric piece of farm equipment created America’s breadbasket—and threatens to destroy it. By Ted Genoways
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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NATURE HYDR ATES
Did you know that each person needs
20-50 liters of fresh water a day to meet their basic needs for drinking, cooking and cleaning? *
By preserving and restoring essential lands upstream, we help strengthen the natural flow, filtration and regulation of watersheds that supply drinking water to people across Latin America, North America and Africa. How can you help meet nature’s needs? Learn by visiting nature.org/water. * World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP)
CONTENTS
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016
DEPARTMENTS
VOLUME 09, NUMBER 05
PRIMER
17
06 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Our Fragile Food System 07 THE CONVERSATION 09 SINCE WE LAST SPOKE
14 KNOW IT ALL The New American Inequality
SUBCULTURE BY NICK FANCHER; FIELD NOTES BY STEVE MCCURRY; THE CULTURE PAGES BY TRU STUDIO
18 IN THE PICTURE Cold Deck
26 FIGHTING BACK AGAINST PARKINSON’S Individuals struggling with the mysterious, debilitating disease are finding relief in an unlikely place: the boxing gym. 30 THE LOSS OF LANGUAGE Thousands of the world’s languages are on the verge of extinction. A small non-profit in one of the most linguistically diverse cities on Earth is documenting them before they disappear.
11 THE SMALL STUFF
17 SUBCULTURE Tulpamancers
THE FIX
20
FIELD NOTES
THE CULTURE PAGES
21 THE LONE PINE
64 CULTURE FEATURES War of Words
22 COMMUNIST WI-FI
67 GUEST PROGRAMMER Molly Crabapple
24 BILLIONAIRE BUREAUCRAT
68
64
SCENES Hip-Hop and the Liberation of Women in Kabul
69 PACIFIC STANDARD PICKS The Birth of a Nation 70
SHELF HELP Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel
70 BOOK REVIEWS Printed Pistols and Racial Panic
ON THE COVER The Impossible Burger, styled by Victoria Granof, photographed in Sam Kaplan’s New York studio.
71 SHELF HELP Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures 72 ONE LAST THING Sriracha SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Our Fragile Food System When my job gets a bit overwhelming—usually when we’re shipping an issue, like the one before you—I have a ritual. I trek out to the end of the wharf not far from our offices in California, and I enjoy a couple of beers and a rock crab. Or I did, until I couldn’t anymore. Last year, the California Fish and Game Commission delayed the start of the crabbing season after discovering that the local rock and Dungeness crabs along the coast were contaminated with high levels of domoic acid, a neurotoxin known to cause seizures in sea lions, seabirds, and other animals that rely on the crustaceans for sustenance. In California alone, the crabbing industry nets about $60 million a year, supporting many fishermen across the state, but officials warned that the acid could kill humans or, in lesser amounts, lead to permanent short-term memory loss. Domoic acid, produced by a toxic form of algae that blossomed from Washington all the way down to Santa Barbara County in Southern California last year, could be an even bigger problem in the years to come. “There does appear to be a link between warm water and bigger blooms, so what does this tell us about future years with warmer conditions?” asked Kathi Lefebvre, a research biologist at the federal Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. After its introduction in November, the ban on crabbing was lifted in midFebruary, and I went back to my usual routine. But in the interim I was forced to consider, in a way I often don’t, just how fragile our food system can be. Like electricity or water, food is something we expect to be available whenever we need it. But there are problems with this assumption—and with the related systems—that need to be aggressively confronted. In this issue, we aim to do just that, taking you inside the race to formulate a viable, ethical, edible fake beef; to the Ogallala From left, Pacific Standard aquifer in Nebraska, where large-scale farming and livestock editor-in-chief Nicholas Jackson, staff writer operations have depleted one of our nation’s most important reFrancie Diep, and associate sources for more than a century; above, through the use of aerial editor Max Ufberg in the magazine’s new office. photography, the industrial feedlots that scar the landscape of the Texas Panhandle; and behind the scenes of our byzantine system for determining which foods—like those crabs—are actually edible.
Seven Things You Would Have Learned If You Read PSmag.com 1
The Israel Defense Forces boast low rates of posttraumatic stress disorder.
2
Solar-power installations in the United States have grown 17fold since 2008.
3
Low-income minority women have higher rates of depression than other groups.
4
In some states, crime labs are funded through court-assessed fees payable by defendants upon conviction.
5
The more students are exposed to anti-smoking messages, the more they want to smoke.
Nicholas Jackson Editor-in-Chief
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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Among adolescents, social media use fosters empathetic thoughts.
PHOTO BY TERENCE PATRICK
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Of the 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S., fewer than 7,000 serve people who can’t afford counsel.
PRIMER
TALK TO US LETTERS@PSMAG.COM
THE CONVERSATION
Our Favorite Tweets @newman_chris: Most underreported scandal of the primary: Bernie Sanders has not returned Ralph Nader’s phone calls for 15 years!
Droughtlandia (MAY/JUNE 2016)
It is jarring to see an old picture of your hometown used as ruin porn. Those decrepit buildings in McFarland have been gone for years now, and the rest of the town, while never featured in Home and Garden, never looked that bad. I was once told by someone from Beirut that, in the 1980s, news crews frequently showed up to film around the same bombed-out block, surrounded by normal neighborhoods. I guess I empathize more now. —RICARDO ANGUIANO
“America, You Are Asleep”
PHOTO BY MATT BLACK
(JULY/AUGUST 2016)
We’re increasingly unable to separate fiction and myth from objective fact, and people tend to ensconce themselves in comfortable echo chambers rather than challenge themselves by consuming new ideas. Perhaps this is partially linked to the psychological frailty Ralph Nader referenced. My generation does have skin so thin as to be “blistered by moonbeams.” It’s quite terrifying to imagine how a generation too scared to
talk about controversial issues is going to address the real horrors of the world, the kinds of scenarios that actually cause trauma, not the ego-building safe spaces of college campuses. What does it say about the future of representative government that the electorate is becoming willfully less educated despite historic access to knowledge? Where will we end up when we’ve built a society that values the fragility of one individual’s emotions more than the well-being of an entire society whose needs are predicated on addressing problems, not refusing to talk about them?
@rasemccray: Wow. This LR [“My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward,” January/February 2015] is a deep, poignant look at mental health and marriage. It gets it right. @Laurance_Essak: @BenWilinofsky @PacificStand @theshrillest many emotions run through me reading this [“Slow Poison,” November/ December 2015]. I am now frozen at my desk, at work (Deep sigh)
•••
PS Sighting
—LYNN FREDRICKS
All Bodies, No Selves (PSMAG.COM, APRIL 28)
I have seen many survivors re-tell their stories in exchange for payment so long as their bodies and experiences are on display in some form or another, all while they’re still struggling through their own recovery. It’s almost as if going back to remaining silent is the better alternative, which is horribly sad. My organization has started looking into a more sex-positive avenue as a result of this, but it’s hard to get people on board with such a powerful idea. —COURTNEY MINTZ
The Hidden Costs of Uprooting Your Family
—WILL STATON
(PSMAG.COM, JUNE 7)
How Do We Prevent the Next Brock Turner? (PSMAG.COM, JUNE 21)
There was and is no consistent messaging plan for parents, and as [Harris] suggests, many are clueless. Some parents consistently apply a framework of morality for their children. Others model a “Do as I say, and not as I do” model. And yet others are so self-centered and checked-out that their children have no respect for their parents or themselves,
and then public education receives the blame for not doing the parents’ job. Too many people across multiple generations apparently believe that anything is OK if they can get away with it. That is moral poison. Parents have a deep, irrational love for their children — often even if the children become monsters. Brock Turner’s parents’ statements are not shocking at all and could come from parents of any background.
The July/August issue was recognized by the Society of Publication Designers.
I remember working in an office for the first time and sitting next to the same people every day for six months. I hadn’t felt like I did that day since elementary school. I was dizzy from all the moving around, then changing classes in college, then doing jobs where I was on the road all the time. It affected my emotional and social maturity. It was cathartic, and, for the first time in many years, I felt like I belonged. —RICK MORROW
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
7
Because we need Robert’s
more places where we can dream
We all need places to get outside—to explore, exercise, and recharge. But with America’s open spaces disappearing at a rate of 6,000 acres each day, we’re at risk of losing our most cherished outdoor escapes. Together, we can change that. Join The Trust for Public Land to save the lands we all love—from urban parks to vast wilderness. Since 1972, we’ve worked with communities to protect more than 3 million acres and create more than 5,000 parks and natural places for people to enjoy. Help to keep this land our land.
Share why nature matters to you: tpl.org/ourland
#ourland
THE TRUST FOR PUBLIC LAND
PRIMER
SINCE WE LAST SPOKE
NEW TWISTS ON PAST STORIES
Ivy League Insurgents
The five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader caused an uproar on Twitter with his comments to labor reporter Lydia DePillis about what he sees as political correctness run amok on college campuses (“America, You Are Asleep,” July/August 2016). A few months after the conversation, Nader found himself on the losing end of another charged campus dispute when his campaign for a seat on Harvard University’s Board of Overseers fell short. Nader’s “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” campaign sought universal free tuition and more transparency in undergraduate admissions—at the expense of racial progress, critics said. “[Free Harvard/Fair Harvard] is like a Trojan horse whose real purpose is to harm affirmative action,” argued Betty Hung, a 1993 Harvard graduate, to Politico.
RALPH NADER BY REED YOUNG; LAURA'S LAW BY JOE TORENO
—ELENA GOORAY
Bailing Out Granny For years, the Obama administration seemed poised to accept funding cuts to Social Security in budget negotiations with congressional Republicans. Hence many political observers’ surprise in June, when the president announced a major policy reversal, declaring, “It’s time we finally made Social Security more generous.” Many left-wing writers have long agreed, and are probably sending Champagne bottles to one of their own: Thanks in part to the lonely online crusade of the political blogger Duncan Black, liberal organizations and senators including Elizabeth Warren began speaking out against cuts to the retirement benefit pro-
gram that Barack Obama had included in budget proposals as recently as 2013. David Dayen profiled Black’s efforts for Pacific Standard later that year (“Get Serious,” November/ December 2013). —MICHAEL FITZGERALD
The law gives judges the authority to compel treatment-resistant psychiatric patients to pursue outpatient mental health care. In June, county supervisors in Santa Barbara voted to fund a small Laura’s Law pilot program, in addition
to expanding care, for 10 “frequent fliers” in Santa Barbara County’s mental health care system, the Santa Barbara Independent reported. At least 43 states have passed their own versions of Laura’s Law. —KATE WHEELING
Cracking Down on Crazy Earlier this year for Pacific Standard, Jeneen Interlandi chronicled the controversy surrounding Laura’s Law in California — and the difficulties counties have faced in getting it implemented since it was passed in 2002 (“How Can We Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Before Tragedy Occurs, Instead of After?” January/February 2016). SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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SHANE PARSONS, WOUNDED VETERAN
SOMETIMES THE HARDEST FIGHT COMES AFTER THE BATTLE. Wounded Warrior Project® long-term support programs provide these brave men and women whatever they need to continue their fight for independence. At no cost. For life. Help us help more of these warriors in their new life-long battle. Find out what you can do at findWWP.org. ©2015 WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR
THE SMALL STUFF
PRIMER
QUICK STUDY
Add Steps, Reduce Snacking
THERE’S A NAME FOR THAT
PERSISTENT INJUSTICE EFFECT
EVERY SO OFTEN, some high-profile event serves as a sharp reminder that Amer-
ica’s black and white citizens don’t always see eye to eye on questions of justice. Think Ferguson. Or, a little further back, the O.J. Simpson trial. We review the same evidence—but disagree about the extent to which injustice has occurred. In a clever 1998 study, the management specialists Martin Davidson and Raymond A. Friedman set out to investigate whether this perceptual gap manifests in less publicized, more day-to-day occurrences. Black and white participants were asked to consider a hypothetical case of an employee being treated poorly by his boss, then listen to the boss’ attempt to excuse what he’d done. Black participants who considered race as more central to their identity—and who were more likely to consider themselves personally affected by unfairness—tended to find the boss’ excuse less effective at mitigating their sense of injustice. Overall, black participants evaluating the fate of black employees were the least convinced by the excuse. The study’s authors dubbed these patterns “persistent injustice effect”: the sensitivity demonstrated by historically persecuted or less-powerful groups to potential injustice against one of their own. It’s a simple idea, but one with widespread, highstakes implications. Research has found a similar divergence of perceptions between men and women, and between black and white jurors. What’s more, perceiving workplace injustice correlates with a host of ailments, from depression to heart disease. Davidson and Friedman’s experiment suggests a useful guiding principle: Avoiding these outcomes means figuring out how the world sounds through each other’s ears. Especially if you’re, say, a workplace manager from a relatively privileged background, you just might have to ask.
Many factors contribute to the obesity epidemic, but an overlooked one may be just down the hall from your desk: those donuts, cookies, and chips neatly arrayed in the office break room. Free snacks can boost morale and destroy diets. Happily, recent research published in the journal Appetite suggests a small office re-design could help enormously. A team led by Ernest Baskin of Saint Joseph’s University conducted an on-site study at Google’s New York office. The facility’s “micro-kitchen” featured two sets of refrigerators and coffee machines—one roughly six feet from the snack counter, the other around 17 feet away. Over seven days of observations, researchers found the likelihood of employees’ grabbing something to eat increased dramatically—from 12 to 23 percent for men, and from 13 to 17 percent for women—when they used the beverage station set up closer to the free treats. So if your workers’ waistlines are expanding faster than the company’s product lines, keep those Fritos far from the fridge. —TOM JACOBS
—PETER C. BAKER ILLUSTRATION BY ELIAS STEIN
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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NEWS & NOTES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR
THE SMALL STUFF
PRIMER
RESEARCH GONE WILD
COURAGE IN A BOTTLE? •What Was Said
In a June 2016 cover story, The New Republic hailed the arrival of a “cure for fear.” The story profiled propranolol, a common heart medication that researchers have found also may eliminate certain phobias that can affect roughly 19 million Americans. It even looks like a promising candidate, the magazine reported, for curing—and possibly preventing—debilitating anxiety disorders that affect nearly one in five Americans. Better still, the magazine claimed, propranolol “holds out
the promise of a simple treatment that doesn’t require prolonged therapy sessions or antidepressant medications.” BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and other outlets circulated the article. No wonder: We love medical silver bullets.
•The Problem With That The research is weak on propranolol’s potential for alleviating anxiety disorders. The studies are few and the results mixed, which led a team of scholars to conclude in a 2016 Journal of Psychopharmacology meta-analysis that there isn’t enough evidence to use propranolol for
that purpose. As for prevention, while the New Republic details a 2002 study involving a small number of patients in which propranolol prevented post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when taken shortly after trauma, another 2015 review suggested otherwise: that the pill can blunt some symptoms when taken in the immediate aftermath of trauma, but doesn’t seem to reduce the overall number of trauma diagnoses.
•To Hype or Not to Hype? Propranolol deserves the interest it has generated in its potential as a treatment for phobias and some PTSD symptoms—but not cover-story promotion as an all-around anxiety game-changer. Take five, and call your doctor after a few more years of study.
—ELENA GOORAY
OVERHEARD
IN OUR CULTURE, WE LIKE TO MAKE FUN OF THINGS THAT BEFALL US.”
QUICK STUDY
The Camera Lies—Even When Cops Wear It
More and more police officers are wearing body cameras. But do recordings of violent incidents help clarify whether an officer’s use of fatal force on a suspect was justified? New research suggests not. In a study published in The Yale Law Journal, 246 Americans weighed in on an actual altercation after learning about it in one of four ways: watching a video of the event or reading one of three descriptions—a first-person account by the officer, a depiction by a third party, or a document in which the officer and the citizen provide dueling accounts. The researcher reports participants’ “prior attitudes toward police significantly affected their judgments of the officer’s conduct,” and their interpretation of what happened was no less biased if they watched the incident unfold. Like any other piece of information, we view such videos through the filter of our own biases. —TOM JACOBS
—CARLOS DE LA FUENTE, owner of ABC Party Headquarters in Dallas, Texas, to the
Dallas Morning News in July. His store is selling Donald Trump piñatas in response to the Republican presidential candidate’s remarks about immigrants. Political science research has shown that racially charged immigration ballot propositions in California in the 1990s led to increased naturalization and voter turnout among the state’s Latinos in the following years when compared to Latinos in Texas over the same years. ILLUSTRATION BY ELIAS STEIN
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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KNOW IT ALL
PRIMER
The New American Inequality
For American families, income inequality affects nearly everything else, from academic achievement to long-term health. Here’s how the problems work together— and how we can solve them. BY VANESSA HUA
INCOME INEQUALITY—the
earnings gap between the rich and poor—has been growing in the United States since the 1970s. As of 2014, the average income of someone in the nation’s top 0.1 percent was over 184 times the average income of someone in the bottom 90 percent. People care about inequality because individuals tend to evaluate their economic well-being relative to that of others. Today, Americans agree that inequality has grown, but they remain divided on the cause: 20 percent blame Congress and loopholes in the tax system. About 4 percent attribute it to a subpar work ethic among the poor. Income inequality is not a simple or standalone metric: It plays a role in the health gap, the income achievement gap, and the gender wage gap, among other inequities, all of them related. Here’s what you need to know about each. INCOME ACHIEVEMENT GAP
As income inequality in the U.S. skyrocketed, so did the income achievement gap, which measures the discrepancy in test scores between children from highincome families and children from low-income families. For students born between the mid-1970s and 2000, that gap grew by 40 percent. The association between income and achievement has grown rapidly—income is now almost as strong as parental education in predicting a child’s achievement. And while it’s true that highly educated, higher-income parents spend more time and money on their children to improve the cognitive and academic skills measured by standardized tests, income inequality alone may not be driving the testing gap. During that same period (the 1970s to the present), income inequality grew more pronounced at the bottom of the scale—that is to say, the incomes of poor families stagnated or declined, while the incomes of middle-class and wealthy families grew. Meanwhile,
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016
40%
The amount the income achievement gap grew between the mid-1970s and 2000.
the income achievement gap grew more pronounced mainly at the top—the test scores of children from high-income families pulled away from those in low- and middle-income families, in a period coinciding with a weakening safety net and the growing segregation of neighborhoods and schools by income. In a comparison of math and reading scores and household income, the U.S. has one of the largest income achievement gaps for both elementary and secondary schools among 20 developed countries, according to a study by sociologists Anna Katyn Chmielewski and Sean F. Reardon. Studies suggest that countries can focus on policies that improve early childhood experiences for low-income children, such as preschool programs and public spending on families. In research that focuses on kindergarten school readiness, the income achievement gap shrank in recent years (1998–2010), a period that also saw increases in low-income children’s preschool enrollment rate, parental time and money investment, and health insurance coverage. It’s unclear whether these improvements will hold steady as children get older.
GENDER WAGE GAP
With the decades-long stagnation of hourly wages, and especially since Bill Clinton-era welfare reform, more women have entered the labor market to support their families, particularly at the middle- and lowerincome levels. Women now hold more than half of the country’s jobs in professional and managerial occupations. Yet the gender wage gap persists, with women working full-time making only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men. Families in which women are the sole or primary source of income—that’s 40 percent of households with children under the age of 18—are hit especially hard, with
Women now hold more than half of the country’s jobs in professional and managerial occupations.
THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUR MOST IMPORTANT STORIES
the wage gap contributing to income inequality. If the country’s single mothers—10 million of them, according to the latest U.S. Census— earned as much as men in comparable circumstances, their annual family incomes would jump by $6,596 on average, or nearly 21 percent. The poverty rate for such families would drop almost by half, to 16 percent. Half the gender wage gap is due to women working in different kinds of occupations than men, and a new initiative by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research addresses these discrepancies in an effort to lift women out of poverty and reduce income inequality. The initiative encourages women with relevant skills to get training and certification for “middleskill,” higher-paying jobs in advanced manufacturing, information technology, transportation, and logistics. A library assistant, for example—with her skills in working in a database, coding information, and interacting with others— could become a computer PHOTO BY NICK FRANCHER
support-staff worker. At present, women hold just 11 percent of these more lucrative, middle-skill jobs. HEALTH
Pronounced income inequality can increase the risk of mortality, poor health, cardiovascular disease, and other illnesses for everyone, but particularly among lower-income residents. In the U.S., residents of counties with high levels of inequality are more likely to die before they reach 75, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. Men and women are more likely to report poorer health as adults if they experienced income inequality as children. Inequalities in a community accentuate differences in social class and status and serve as a stressor, begetting a loss of trust and of connection. The Wisconsin researchers urged communities to adopt policies that narrow these gaps, such as supporting educational achievement programs from early
Men and women are more likely to report poorer health as adults if they experienced income inequality as children.
childhood to adulthood and investing in workforce development, living wages, and paid sick leave for lowincome earners. Food stamps can be crucial. Economist Hilary Hoynes found that children in counties where food stamps were available from the time they were in utero to age five had significantly decreased risk of metabolic syndrome, as well as improved likelihood of economic self-sufficiency later in life, compared to those living in counties that did not offer this assistance. Money spent on young food-stamp recipients during the 1960s and ’70s is reaping benefits for taxpayers today, Hoynes contends, because former recipients now rely less heavily on the social safety net, with fewer health problems, less welfare use, and higher incomes.
•VANESSA HUA is an
award-winning journalist and writer. Her debut novel, A River of Stars, is forthcoming. @VANESSA_HUA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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PRIMER
BEHAVIORS, RITES & RITUALS
SUBCULTURE
Tulpamancers
Nycto, 31, artist, and his tulpa Siouxsie, 2 ½, Columbus, Ohio (as told to Kate Wheeling) PHOTO BY NICK FANCHER
TULPAMANCERS ARE people who imagine companions,
called tulpas, into being through meditation-like practices. While the word tulpamancer is derived from a Tibetan word for “incarnation,” one ethnographic study found that tulpamancers are mostly young, white men in their late teens and early 20s who congregate on Internet forums like Reddit. They tend to be empathetic, yet socially anxious. Tulpas are not considered a symptom of illness or a disorder, but they may be a coping mechanism for loneliness (or, in some cases, mental illness) for their creators. Many of those creators describe overwhelmingly positive experiences with tulpamancy, and some say the practice has helped ease their depression, anxiety, or obsessive compulsive disorder.
My tulpa’s personality and form just popped into my head all at once. It was a flash of inspiration. Siouxsie is female. She’s got four eyes, pointy teeth, a long tail, digitigrade legs, and is about seven feet tall. I haven’t told my friends. Partially because of potential stigma, but also because it’s none of their business. We are both pretty extroverted and have similar taste. She likes old-school punk a little more than I do; I like electro swing more than she does. She’s more brash than I am, but tends to get along with everyone. As far as I can tell, the psychological mechanics of making tulpas follow a similar pattern: make a basic character with personality traits and a form, then disassociate yourself. Imagine trying to keep yourself focused on one thought, throughout the day, no matter what you are doing. At first that will be really hard. If you keep at
it, it becomes easy. After a fashion, it becomes second nature. I got headaches every so often, but eventually those went away. Siouxsie can sometimes be distracting, but it’s never interfered with my life. Imagine the level of trust and companionship that you could get if you could show someone your true self, under the mask of societal pressures and habit, and this person still loved you regardless. The relief, the validation you would feel. I think that people have a bias against people who deviate from mental norms, even if such a thing doesn’t exist. Sure, people will leave comments about how “these people must be losers,” but I think that’s based off of the insecurity people have with mental health rather than a stigma against the actual practice. It’s harmless, and nearly everyone who has done it has had a positive experience with it. Humanity’s greatest and deepest fear is its own mortality—the realization that everyone dies alone. I won’t. I have a companion for life that knows me better than anyone else ever could.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
17
IN THE PICTURE
PRIMER
Cold Deck
Boyle County, Kentucky ACCORDING TO
historians, the emergence and evolution of the suburbs into more than residential annexes from which you
18
could access the city—into selfcontained communities of their own—was made possible almost entirely by gas stations.
THE INFLUENTIAL
20th-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith called gas stations “the most repellent piece of architecture of the last two thousand years.” •••
THE NUMBER
of gas stations peaked in 1994, with more than 202,800 nationwide. Since then,
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
gas stations have been closing at a steady rate. In 2012, there were 156,065, a 23 percent decrease. •••
TO MAKE sur-
rounding establishments appear darker, new and recently refurbished gas stations are installing lights three or four times brighter than a few years
ago, according to the International Dark-Sky Association. The competitive escalation of lighting—one station goes bright, so the other goes brighter, then the first goes even brighter—is called ratcheting. •••
THE HARDCORE
Civil War re-enactor group that the journalist
AN ANNOTATED GUIDE TO SCENES FROM DAILY LIFE
Tony Horwitz joined for a 1998 book found the term “re-enactor” denigrating and referred to it as “the R word.” “Farb” is an even more serious insult to re-enactors, a shorthand—and a re-spelling of the word barf— used to describe “far-be-it-fromauthentic” participants.
THE anthropolo-
gist Matthew Amster found that Civil War re-enactors describe those brief moments when they believe their historical setting immersion is real as “period rush” or “going into the bubble.” •••
CONGRESS im-
posed an excise tax on playing cards in 1862
to provide easy revenue for the government— similar to state lotteries today— after the Civil War ushered in the second major gambling wave in the United States. (It tapered off in the early 20th century; the third wave began in the Great Depression and continues today.)
THE NUMBER of
anti-government militia groups in the U.S. has exploded since 2008, increasing from 42 in 2008 to a peak of 334 in 2011. Between 2014—when the Bundy ranching family gained attention for refusing to let the government remove its cattle from federal land—and January of this
year, the number increased from 202 to 276. •••
A STUDY of male
psychopaths in prison found them more likely than nonpsychopaths to keep playing cards even when the deck is stacked against them, meaning with each draw they are more likely to lose the
game. Researchers were able to reduce this behavior by forcing study participants to wait longer between each hand. Yet a study of white psychopathic women in prison did not find the same self-defeating habit, suggesting women might be less vulnerable. PHOTO BY GREGG SEGAL
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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FIELD NOTES DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY
WELIGAMA, SRI LANKA
Off the southern coast of the small island nation in the Indian Ocean, a group of men fish from wooden stilts. PHOTO BY STEVE MCCURRY
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The Lone Pine
On Christmas Day last year, an hour before the sun slipped behind the hills surrounding Rikuzentakata, in northeastern Japan, Hiroko Funamoto and her teenage son strolled along a narrow path toward a tall, lonesome pine tree at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. In blue jeans and a gray anorak, the small woman walked with the exaggerated, erect posture that one adopts when wearing a kimono. Her son, dressed in chinos and a dark hooded sweatshirt, slouched forward, his hands pulled up into his sleeves to protect against the cool December air. Every few minutes, strong winds blew in off the sea that sustains this small fishing community. Not long ago, a forest of 70,000 pines would have tempered these gusts. But on March 11, 2011, following the biggest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history, a furious tsunami washed them away. The tsunami also killed 7 percent of Rikuzentakata’s residents. When the waters receded, the entire 250-yearold forest went with it—all except for one tree. Known as ippon matsu, or “the lone pine,” the tree stands alone, 89 feet tall, in front of the moldering ruins of a two-story youth hostel. It is considered both a miracle and a monument. “I saw the tsunami from higher ground as it approached,” Funamoto says. “It was 15 meters high, like
a wall, and it just kept coming. It really is a miracle that this tree survived.” Her son had just returned home from Kyoto University, where he studied history, for the winter break. His mother told me she brought him here because she never wants him to forget what happened that day. “It’s a symbol,” he says. “A symbol of Rikuzentakata and of all that was lost.” Twenty minutes after the Funamoto family left, Keita Iwase arrived and asked me to use his iPhone to snap a photograph of him beneath the tree. He’d come all the way from Chiba prefecture, near Tokyo, a four-hour journey by train. Each year, on the anniversary of the earthquake, he’d seen news programs about the “miracle pine” of Rikuzentakata. “For me, it symbolizes the resilience of the Japanese people,” Iwase says. “I had to see it for myself.” WHEN SALTWATER poi-
soned the tree’s roots in September 2012, Internet commenters and newspaper columnists protested the use of public funds for a restoration estimated to cost 150 million yen. A donation campaign helped raise the funds, but the tree could by then only be preserved, not saved. Its roots now sit in a museum just down the road. The pine itself stands with the aid of a metal skeleton inserted beneath its bark. For some outsiders, it’s an abomination. But for the people of Rikuzentakata, it’s real enough: From a distance, its silhouette looks the same; and, up close, its bark feels to me like that of any other pine.
The miracle pine has come to be seen as a kind of totem, a sign of hope in a country still reeling from the disaster and still coming to terms with the fact that another one is inevitable. It is, as the history student says, a place to remember all that was lost. For others, it’s just another reminder of all that they’d like to forget. Few communities were affected by the disaster as deeply as Rikuzentakata, where close to 2,000 people perished, including one-third of its municipal officials. Three years after the disaster, government researchers found that mental illness had taken a serious toll on Rikuzentakata’s survivors. An annual re-construction budget includes nearly a quarter of a million dollars earmarked for costs associated with mental health care. Four years after the disaster, nearly one-third of the tsunami victims still showed signs of clinical depression. A local doctor named Akira Unoura says most of his patients in the years since have suffered from insomnia, headaches, stomach pains, and other symptoms that seem to be related to the stress of survivor’s guilt. He advises counseling. Because of the stigma attached to mental illness, he says, only about half agree to it. In the flat, wide plain just shouting distance from the ocean, rice and vegetable fields stretch all the way to the foot of the surrounding mountains. From the vantage point of the tree-lined hillside community above the empty expanse, the lone pine seems determined
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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FIELD NOTES
Communist Wi-Fi
to remind the lucky of the unlucky. The survivors who witnessed the carnage below witness it still, when they look out upon that single tree. I ATE CHRISTMAS dinner
alone at a sushi restaurant in one of Rikuzentakata’s hillier districts. Between bites of fresh salmon and fatty tuna, I drank sake and traded stories with Ozawasan, the shop’s owner. At the end of the evening, I told the tall, muscular sushi chef that I’d spent my day at ippon matsu. I told him I wanted to understand how the Japanese felt about it. “Well, it would be very strange if you saw someone who wasn’t Japanese down there,” he told me. “Have you been there?” I asked. “No, I’ve never been there,” he said. “And I don’t ever want to go. A lot of people I knew died down there.” I took a taxi down to the bottom of the steep hill, then walked in darkness down the path that leads to the miracle pine. Each night, the tree is illuminated, and I wanted to catch a glimpse of the memorial beneath the lights. The winds had grown stronger, the air much colder. The gusts that whipped through the tall grass lining the path sounded to me like a thousand mouths gasping for air. At the water’s edge, the tree stood as radiant in the moonlight as it had beneath the late afternoon sun. But all around it was darkness, as though the forest that vanished on March 11th, 2011, somehow still cast its shadow over this place.
“
I saw the tsunami from higher ground as it approached. It was 15 meters high, like a wall, and it just kept coming.
”
—JOSHUA HUNT
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The glowing moon forces the corners and curves of the colonial-era fountain to stand out in the darkness. The structure was placed in the center of the cobblestoned plaza decades ago, where it flowed and gargled until, one day, it stopped and no one bothered to fix it. But now its silent dryness goes unnoticed by the surrounding mix of tourists and citizens, who sit crosslegged on the ground, perch on wrought-iron benches, and roam in concentric patterns like penitent monks. They’re distracted by the luminance of their phones and laptops, which hold all the light, and the darkness of the world outside Cuba. Deep in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, the plaza—nestled among shuttered factories, Art Deco apartments, and brick homes that have shed their paint—is one of 17 Wi-Fi hotspots the city established in July 2015. The users are a multinational delegation in all shades, ages, and genders. Tourists dominate, as they have the expendable cash needed for service, but Cuban citizens who splurged for the night lurk as well. An extended family jockeys for space within the frame of a camera lens, like seals fighting over a rock. A middle-aged Cuban couple trades a pair of headphones back and forth to catch snippets of their child’s voice, beamed in from another country. A toddler taps an iPad game while bouncing on her dad’s lap. A European woman smiles, snapping a selfie. A line of men sits silent, scrolling,
DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY
scrolling, scrolling. To participate in this outdoor ritual, every Web surfer must first gain entry through Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A., ever-present as the alphabet soup of ETECSA, the gatekeeper that holds the keys to the country’s Internet access. Only 4.1 percent of Cuban households have Internet access at home. To find the organization’s offices, prospective users stumble upon clusters of people assuming the position—lining the fences outside hotels,
resting on outdoor staircases of office buildings, or gathering at any domain reserved in American society for our now-banished smokers. They rush off hasty inquiries to souls kind enough to spare precious seconds to give directions. The information leads back to a motley line outside the nearest office. People stumble from the sidewalk to the back of it, and they wait. Broken Spanglish is the official language of the queue. New entrants mumble to the person ahead,
hoping they’ll confirm that this, indeed, is the place they’re looking for. A few people in line have passports out, so newbies follow suit. A tall man in a tracksuit and sunglasses weaves through the line, whispering black-market offers for the service ahead, but no one trusts him enough to bite. Eventually, the line snakes past the sharp architecture of communism, through the doors, and into pale fluorescence and linoleum. At the front, a grim clerk flatly asks for identification, types in a
record, and slides cards with login information across the table for the equivalent of two bucks an hour. “Look at the junkies,” one American says outside. “They always need their fix.” She’ll stroll back toward Wi-Fi plaza, eventually passing a row of the connected, who reflect their glow onto her path like faithful bridesmaids. Then, the woman passing judgment will take out her own device and her own scratchoff, and she’ll log on as well. —RICK PAULAS
KOKKREBELLUR, INDIA A flock of birds takes morning flight over a wheat field in the Indian state of Karnataka. PHOTO BY SHUBHODEEP ROY
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FIELD NOTES
PRIPYAT, UKRAINE
More than 30 years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the ghost town’s Palace of Culture still stands, in complete disrepair. PHOTO BY GERD LUDWIG
Billionaire Bureaucrat
For a 30-minute period that feels like it’s dragging for an hour, a man and a woman representing an education software company speak about how great and popular their Web-based aptitude tests are. It’s one week before Christmas, and it is, even to most of the people at this Nevada State Board of Education meeting, the least interesting show in Las Vegas. Almost every educator, bureaucrat, and policy wonk in the sunless second-floor meeting room is checking their phone, shuffling in their seat, or
24
reviewing other paperwork. Everyone, that is, except the billionaire educationboard president at the topcenter of the conferencetable horseshoe. Elaine Pascal Wynn sits attentively, her elegant fingers laced into a hammock for her chin. A large bejeweled Team USA Olympics basketball championship ring reflects light off a finger of her left hand. In a soft chocolate turtleneck under a slate-colored Oscar de la Renta pantsuit, she stares at the speakers with narrowed eyes. A creamy Hermès Birkin handbag sits on the floor. The total value of her wardrobe and acces-
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
sories rivals that of a new teacher’s salary. As the lofty presentation winds down, Wynn is convinced that schools will screw up the rollout of the new tests. “So when is the dress rehearsal?” she asks tartly. A variety of answers bubble up, none specific. So she asks again. And again. She is not rude, but an eye-roll betrays her exasperation. After not receiving an actual answer after repeating the question for the fourth time, she firmly orders: “Let’s load her up and see if it works. Let’s see if it works.” Then, on a sunnier note, she dismisses the testing company people.
“We wish you all good luck,” Wynn says. “You know it’s keeping me up at night.” ELAINE WYNN is 74 and one
of the wealthiest women in the United States. She was so pivotal to her ex-husband Steve Wynn’s success in building their high-end casino-resort empire (the Mirage, Bellagio, and Wynn hotels) that he gave her half of his stake six years ago without a fight because “no one deserves it more.” (The Wynns have since had a public falling out.) Her confidants include the likes of Warren Buffett, Maria Shriver, and Duke University’s Mike Krzyze-
DISPATCHES FROM UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY
wski. She’s on the boards of the Kennedy Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Her two daughters, now adults with their own kids, live in Los Angeles and attended private schools back in the day. She, too, makes Southern California her main residence outside Nevada, and has opulent homes in New York and Sun Valley as well as the apartment she keeps in Vegas. “Many people ask, ‘Why is she doing this?’” says former Nevada Schools Superintendent Dale Erquiaga, now chief strategy officer to Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval. “She really is one of a kind. There is no one else of her stature with both personal and financial means to effect change and who actually rolls up her sleeves and does this kind of work. She could be doing so many other things.” Wynn agreed to an appointment to the board, and then to be its president, after securing a promise from Sandoval, a Republican, that he would actually try to make radical changes to an education system that persistently produces some of the country’s highest dropout rates, lowest test scores, and fewest college-bound graduates. Last year, he did just that—improbably persuading the GOP-controlled legislature to approve $1.5 billion in new taxes to pay for an array of reforms, including all-day kindergarten, vastly expanded English as a Second Language programs, new accountability for schools, and a special statewide school district focused on taking over failing institutions. The splashiest
achievement, though, was a first-in-the-nation schoolchoice program that gives every parent the ability to withdraw their kids from public schools and use the money the state spends on them for alternative educational efforts. “Overnight,” an analyst from the Cato Institute (usually not in the business of praising a state’s largest-ever tax increase) told the Las Vegas ReviewJournal, “Nevada has become the most interesting state for education reform.” (The last component, though, is on hold for now in the state court system.) Wynn, who testified publicly and made many phone calls to encourage reticent lawmakers, was also a major figure in persuading the state’s business community to support the package. When Sandoval announced the outlines of his proposals in his State of the State address, Wynn sat in the front row with other state
“
You may be small, but your voice is loud and so is your energy and you absolutely have got great spirit.
”
leaders before bolting to gather the chairwomen of the Assembly’s and Senate’s education committees for an impromptu 90-minute discussion. “She expressed her confidence and faith in my abilities to do what was right for the children of Nevada,” recalls State Senator Becky Harris, who had just been elected for the first time weeks earlier. “That was just a pretty powerful, empowering thing.” NOW, she knows she’s “the
face of the plan.” It’s down to her and her board to implement many of the pieces of the reform and to ensure the accountability promised by the governor is enforced. This is the gritty, often tedious stuff laden with head-scratching jargon and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make those in the business world cry for mercy. But Wynn appears to relish mucking around in the weeds and insists it is “endlessly fascinating” to listen to school officials discuss their challenges. At one point in the fifth hour of the December meeting, after a 15-minute talk via video conference by an official from a rural school district addressing staffing struggles, Wynn brightly tells the woman, “You may be small, but your voice is loud and so is your energy and you absolutely have got great spirit, so we very much enjoyed that presentation and your passion.” Most people of Wynn’s stature and largesse leave this kind of work to heartier souls and return to lives of writing big checks to their causes and lending their names to do-good philanthropies of national
scope—but Wynn already does those things, most prominently as chair of the country’s largest dropoutprevention program, Communities in Schools. “It’s all related,” she says over pepperoni pizza at a Pieology—her suggestion—after the December meeting. She is due to hop on her private plane to Los Angeles for the holiday week. Doesn’t being a bureaucrat get boring? “Oh, no. If I didn’t have to get to the airport and talk to you, I might have let the meeting go on longer.” The small-fry stuff, it is clear, is how she earns credibility and avoids being labeled a showboating dilettante. It has landed her at a place in education reform that few ever approach. Wynn has helped win the sustained political and financial support to put some big ideas—from controversial public education reformer Michelle Rhee and Yale University child psychiatrist James Comer, among others—into practice. “My philosophy is innovation,” she says. “I am an all-of-the-above person. You’ll get examples everywhere that say extra money for schools helps, and then you’ll get examples of extra money doesn’t help. You’ll get the same argument with charter schools. But we came up with a very elaborate program that was all tied together. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could get broken into bits—because they tried. As long as I’ve lived in Nevada, I never thought I was going to see it happen. And now I have to do my part to see it through or I’m a hypocrite. I can’t be a hypocrite, you know?” —STEVE FRIESS
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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THE FIX
•TOVIN LAPAN is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco. He covers health care, technology, environmental issues, education, and immigration. @TOVINLAPAN
SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM
Fighting Back Against Parkinson’s
Individuals struggling with the mysterious, debilitating disease are finding relief in an unlikely place: the boxing gym, where patients battling uncontrollable tremors are transformed into fighters. BY TOVIN LAPAN
THROUGH THE STRAIN
on Kevin Krejci’s bespectacled, reddening face, a flicker of a smile flashes as glove hits canvas, a spray of sweat punctuating every hit to the heavy bag. There is joy and fury in every swing. Pummeling the bag soothes his stress and frustration. Emotional and physical relief comes with each blow. Thwack! Thwack-thwack! A jab-jabcross combination pecks the bag as the trainer patrols the line, offering pointers. “Keep your hands up!” she yells. “Turn your hips!” Krejci is in a group of boxers that includes women, septuagenarians, and every weight class from fly to heavy.
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
They are all training to fight the same opponent. The bell rings after a three-minute round, and the fighters circle around Kim Woolley. It is here, in the quiet of taking instruction from their trainer, where the signs of disease are easier to spot. Krejci’s left arm hangs stiffly at his side as he walks over. Another boxer’s right hand trembles as he listens. Some have a pronounced hunch, their spines curving just below their shoulders, while others speak haltingly. They all have Parkinson’s disease. “I love hitting the heavy bag. I feel like it’s such a stress relief, and I think the symptoms are often brought on by stress,” Krejci says as he unwinds his yellow hand wraps at the end of another session. “I started seeing noticeable improvements after about three months. My stiffness and walking improved.” Krejci, the father of two young boys, received his diagnosis three years ago, when he was 48, and he immediately wondered what the implications were for his family and future. “Looking back, I probably had symptoms for 10 years, but I ignored
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER BARRETT / WE ARE MYSTERY BOX
them,” he says. “All of the signs were there but I didn’t take my health seriously enough.” The diagnosis shocked Krejci into action. He vowed to be an active participant in his treatment, and do all he could to hold the developing symptoms at bay. He was the first to sign up when Rock Steady Boxing, a non-contact training program designed for Parkinson’s patients, launched a chapter in San Francisco a year after his diagnosis. Krejci joined a growing movement of Parkinson’s patients bucking outdated exercise recommendations. New programs that push Parkinson’s patients to be more active and improve their fitness are popping up around the country and growing steadily. Besides boxing, the new movement therapies incorporate dance, drumming, golf, and tai chi. Not only is some physical therapy not as helpful as previously thought, vigorous, sweaty exercise, which some patients were previously instructed to avoid, can relieve symptoms and perhaps even slow the disease’s progression. Now, Parkinson’s specialists are advocating a shift in therapy guidelines to help patients work toward increasingly intense physical exercise.
LOSING YOURSELF
Parkinson’s is the cat burglar of ailments, disturbingly effective at pilfering precious possessions through mysterious methods. Approximately one million people in the United States are living with the degenerative disease, and it sneaks up on many of them with initially mild, easily ignored symptoms. It robs them of balance, coordination, speech, and, later on, memories and the most basic, previously routine functions. The cause is unknown, but scientists know it kills off neurons in the substantia nigra, the portion of the brain managing dopamine production, which is needed to control the body’s nerves and muscles. By the time most people are diagnosed, the disease has already disposed of 80 percent of these neurons. A common treatment for Parkinson’s is a class of drugs that help produce dopamine, but after years of use they can cause dyskinesia—involuntary muscle movements. Another treatment, deep brain stimulation, involves a surgical implant in the chest that sends electrical pulses to the brain. Physical therapy is typically prescribed for specific symptoms such as hand tremors.
Patients are condemned to a slow deterioration of their bodies and minds, but never know which of the myriad symptoms will strike. “People with Parkinson’s disease lose a sense of who they are,” says Joyce Johnson, executive director of Rock Steady Boxing. “The tremors and symptoms aren’t who they used to be. They may no longer have control of their appearance, speech, swallowing—even their facial expressions.” Krejci, confronted with such a confounding disease, did not want to be a passive observer to his own physical and mental decline. “When I was first diagnosed I went to the World Parkinson Congress,” he says. “It was very sobering, both depressing and inspiring at the same time, because you see people at different stages and you share notes. You also see that people are trying all types of therapies and treatments.” At the conference, Krejci was inspired by a talk from “e-Patient Dave,” a kidney-cancer patient given six months to live in 2007 who beat the disease and became a well-known advocate of patient engagement and personal health data. Krejci already tracked his sleep, but post-diagnosis he became a devotee of the quantified-
THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT
While much of Parkinson’s research is focused on discovering what causes the degenerative disease and finding a cure, new technologies promise to improve quality of life and patient monitoring. BY TOVIN LAPAN
ŌURA RING This health-monitoring computer packed into a ring tracks sleep, physical activity, heart rate, respiration rate, and temperature, and then analyzes the data and offers tips to improve sleep and performance in an integrated phone application. ouraring.com
GYROGLOVE This lightweight, fingerless glove with a built-in gyroscope helps Parkinson’s patients stabilize hand tremors and perform everyday activities, such as eating with utensils, typing on a smartphone, and holding a pen. gyrogear.co
LIFTWARE This stabilizing handle, which comes with different fork and spoon attachments, is equipped with a small, integrated computer that senses mild to moderate tremors in the user and then directs two motors to counteract them. liftware.com
APPS & WEARABLES Several companies have developed smartphone applications that communicate with wearable sensors to specifically assess the progress or improvement in Parkinson’s symptoms, including gait and voice and balance problems. ucb.com; roche.com
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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THE FIX
BRAIN FERTILIZER
The stories of Rock Steady boxers tend to have a common prologue: Upon diagnosis they muster their positive side and vow to resist the disease head-on via exercise and fitness, only for their doctors to demur. Nearly all of the Parkinson’s patients interviewed for this story say their initial doctors never mentioned exercise as part of their therapy. Fighters in the Rock Steady Boxing class say their physicians worried about falls and injuries, and several of them, including Krejci, switched doctors in order to work with one that supported their fitness goals. After decades of research, though, those attitudes have begun to change. “Twenty years ago they told people with Parkinson’s it’s progressive, not to expect to get better, and gave them a walker,” says Stephanie Combs-Miller, a professor of physical therapy at the University of Indianapolis. “Even 10 years ago the benefits of exercise were not as clear, and the research just wasn’t there yet. But the knowledge has increased five- or 10-fold; it’s amazing how far we’ve come.” In 2003, Parkinson’s researcher Jay Alberts participated in a long-distance Parkinson’s-awareness tandem bike ride with a patient who reported some of her symptoms improved or disappeared altogether during the trip. Intrigued, Alberts, who works at the Cleveland Clinic, launched a trial in which Parkinson’s sufferers climbed on stationary tandem bikes with healthy riders who pushed the pace. This “forced exercise” had already been shown to produce increased neu-
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
From Prosecutor to Pugilist ROCK STEADY BOXING, WHICH NOW HAS DOZENS OF CHAPTERS IN FOUR COUNTRIES, GOT ITS START IN AN APARTMENT BUILDING’S SMALL EXERCISE ROOM AFTER A RISING LEGAL STAR WAS DIAGNOSED WITH EARLY-ONSET PARKINSON’S DISEASE. BY TOVIN LAPAN It’s called pill-rolling, and if you didn’t know what you were looking for you would probably miss it. Scott Newman had seen it before, and he knew the terrifying implication. The twice-elected prosecutor for Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, Newman had previously met former United States Attorney General Janet Reno, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. He noticed she had the tremor, a twitching of the thumb and fingers. During the closing arguments of a big murder trial in 1999, Newman saw his own hand shaking. At first he brushed it off, but the signs kept coming. His arm grew stiff and stopped swaying when he walked. His typing was getting slower and slower. Newman made an appointment with a doctor, where his fear was confirmed. At age 40, the prominent attorney was diagnosed. At the time, Newman was thinking of his burgeoning political career, maybe even a run for mayor. With the diagnosis, his priorities shifted to fighting the disease, and he vowed to get into the best shape of his life. When Newman’s friend Vincent Perez, a cop turned lawyer and former Golden
Gloves boxer, found out Newman had Parkinson’s, he offered to work out with him. After his diagnosis, Newman began training in his apartment building’s limited gym. He had never seen boxing equipment there, but on the first day Perez showed up to train with him there was a heavy bag hanging from the ceiling. “Perez swears he didn’t put it there, so it must have been a coincidence,” Newman says. “But there it was, and, of course, he wanted to use it. That’s how it all started.” Perez held Newman accountable. When Newman skipped out on training to meet the mother of his new girlfriend, he got an irritated call from Perez asking where he was. Newman began to notice a difference after six weeks. His stiffness improved. He also started a support group for young Parkinson’s patients; they were the core of what would become Rock Steady Boxing. A friend with an office complex that had an underused employee
gym offered to let the group train there. “The first thing we did was some light stretching,” Newman says. “After a minute everyone was falling over; they looked like bowling pins.” Rock Steady Boxing grew by word of mouth and incorporated as a non-profit in 2006. It remained a mostly local program for several years, until the organization started offering seminars for trainers to open chapters in new cities in 2012. Today, Rock Steady Boxing has nearly 200 affiliates across the country and chapters in Canada, Australia, and Italy. “The thing I’m most proud of is how Rock Steady Boxing now has a life of its own and is going all over the world,” Newman says. “If there is some measure of enjoyment, some unit of joy, we have put out millions of those units in these clubs. I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve put away murderers, but there is nothing I’m more proud of than having a part in people being happy to get up in the morning.”
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROCK STEADY BOXING
self movement, tracking his heart rate, moods, activity, and other metrics. “There has not been a lot of focus on simply improving quality of life,” Johnson says. “All of the money is spent on researching a cure or the cause, and very little money is spent on programs that help people with Parkinson’s live better lives. Even if they find a cure, it will be another 20 years before they approve it for the general public. We need ways to fight back against the symptoms.”
SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM
roprotective effects in animals over exercise performed at a self-selected pace. Alberts’ work, published in 2011 in the American College of Sports Medicine’s Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews and presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, showed Parkinson’s patients who did the forced exercise exhibited better motor control and other lasting improvements. Combs-Miller started researching Rock Steady Boxing classes nine years ago. She has found those in the noncontact program maintain higher levels of balance, flexibility, and overall enjoyment of life than those in other forms of community exercise. Scientists say any vigorous, sweaty, heart-pumping exercise can have these positive effects. Combs-Miller believes boxing, a total-body workout with both cardiovascular and strength training, provides particularly com-
robust exercise programs. CombsMiller says movement-disorder neurologists, who see Parkinson’s cases regularly, have mostly caught up to the literature and are pushing exercise, but there is still a lag among family physicians and general neurologists. “When a Parkinson’s diagnosis is given, along with the meds they need to be told that exercise is as important as taking the medication,” CombsMiller says. “We know people do better if they regularly exercise.” Krejci found that boxing even helps with fine motor movements. He has, for instance, doubled his typing speed since joining Rock Steady Boxing, and also improved his speech, walking, and stiffness. “My physical therapist told me I could stop coming to treatments because boxing was doing so much for me,” Krejci says. “Now I just check in once a year with them.”
is not as helpful for mild to moderate Parkinson’s sufferers as previously believed. A total of 762 patients from across the United Kingdom were recruited for the randomized controlled trial of routine physical therapy that lasted for more than a year; no meaningful benefits were documented. While targeted physiotherapy for specific symptoms can be beneficial, this paper suggests non-targeted therapy has little impact on quality of life. Ahlskog noted that, among people with Parkinson’s disease, “physical therapy referrals should target specific problems that are likely to benefit, such as inability to initiate walking (i.e., gait freezing).” He also added that “physical therapy practices should begin to incorporate facilitation of ongoing aerobic exercise and fitness.” Considerably more research is needed to determine the most beneficial practices, Parkinson’s experts
Parkinson’s is the cat burglar of ailments, disturbingly effective at pilfering precious possessions through mysterious methods. Approximately one million people in the U.S. are living with the disease, and it sneaks up on them with initially mild, easily ignored symptoms. prehensive benefits. And Rock Steady Boxing includes elements specifically designed for Parkinson’s, such as talking out loud to the group to help with speech problems. “There is a certain social community aspect as well,” Krejci says. “It’s not quite forced exercise, but because the trainers and the fellow boxers motivate you, you do more than you would otherwise.” There are, of course, limitations. The boxing classes are strictly noncontact. Every fighter gets a 90-minute evaluation to determine their level of fitness and function, and those with the worst symptoms are assigned a “cornerman,” a friend, caregiver, or family member who guards against falls and injuries. Parkinson’s patients, specialists in the field, and therapists are in agreement that, in general, the medical community is just starting to pick up on the new research and support more
Yet initiating an aerobic exercise program is still not among the general guidelines for physical therapists treating Parkinson’s patients, according to Dr. J. Eric Ahlskog, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic and author of The New Parkinson’s Disease Treatment Book: Partnering With Your Doctor to Get the Most From Your Medications. “My view is that vigorous exercise may slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease by a direct effect on the brain,” Ahlskog says. “Exercise increases synaptic connections, reduces the normal attrition of brain circuits, and appears to liberate neurotrophic factors, among many other favorable brain influences. Within the brain, these trophic factors are like putting fertilizer on your lawn.” Additionally, a large-scale study from England’s University of Birmingham published in JAMA Neurology in March found general low-dose physiotherapy and occupational therapy
generally agree—specifically, wellconstructed, longitudinal studies over several years that track the progression of the disease and closely monitor exercise programs. For the boxers, the changes in their lives are all the proof they need. One woman with a newborn had too much hand pain to fold her infant’s small clothing, but now does the laundry without issue. One 69-year-old fighter hiked 72 miles on the Continental Divide Trail. For Krejci, boxing has given him more time to hike and play beach soccer with his wife and two young sons, and it means he is holding on to his goal of being able to pick up his grandchildren someday. “I love boxing so much, when I get there I just give it my all. I can hear the Rocky theme playing in my head,” Krejci says. “I’d love to see the day when they prescribe boxing as if it were medicine.”
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THE FIX
•MAX LEIGHTON is a freelance writer and radio producer in Canada. He is based in Toronto after several years reporting in the Yukon, Nunavut, and Winnipeg. @MAX_LEIGHTON
BEFORE SHE died at
The Loss of Language
Thousands of the world’s languages are on the verge of extinction. A small non-profit in one of the most linguistically diverse cities on Earth is documenting them before they disappear. BY MAX LEIGHTON
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103, Grizelda Kristiņa sat down in front of a camera at her home outside Toronto and talked about her life, her family in Latvia, her childhood on the seaside, a teacher who rode his horse to school—and how it all was beginning to disappear. “They are not interested about old times,” she told a translator in Latvian. “The young people do not care anymore. They try to find their place in the city, and, eventually, Livonian language and people vanish.” Kristiņa died two years later, in 2013. While it’s difficult to determine if an individual is the last fully fluent speaker of a language, for Livonian, Kristiņa may have been it. It’s easy to think of old languages like Livonian as obsolete and therefore dispensable, but not if you see them as repositories—of history and other traditional knowledge. And that’s how the Endangered Language Alliance Toronto sees them. A volunteer group documenting languages in the Canadian city, some spoken by just a handful of people in the entire world, ELAT made a video of Kristiņa that survives her. Anastasia Riehl, who launched the non-profit in 2012, is a linguistic researcher and director of the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “We realized that these urban centers, in particular New York and Toronto, they have a lot of these languages represented already,” she says. “So why not do this global mission, but do so in a local context?” According to the City of Toronto’s diversity statistics, the city’s roughly 2.8 million residents come from about 200 distinct ethnic origins and speak more than 140 languages and dialects. Of these, Riehl says, at least a few dozen are endangered and several probably don’t even have proper names.
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER BARRETT / WE ARE MYSTERY BOX
SOLUTIONS, AND THE PEOPLE WORKING TOWARD THEM
WE’RE LIVING in a difficult time for
languages. Of the 6,000 to 7,000 spoken on Earth today, half will be extinct by the end of this century, according to United Nations estimates, and some will disappear due to violence, coercion, and displacement. “In many settlement colonies, you find a harsh intolerance of the original languages,” says Gregory D.S. Anderson, founder of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. First Nations children in the Toronto area and across Canada, for example, endured the loss of their native languages and practices in the 19th and 20th centuries when they were forced to attend residential schools—a trauma the country is only now confronting. More often than not, though, the loss of a language is a gradual process. “It is generally not done on the battlefield,” Anderson says, “but in the classroom or marketplace. The main reason languages are lost is that people internalize the language ideologies that the linguistically dominant group has toward the minority or non-socially dominant groups.” In other words, minority languages are slowly suffocated. This is troubling for several reasons. “Take the sociopolitical perspective,” Anderson says. “There’s a basic human-rights issue. People should be allowed to speak the language they choose and shouldn’t be forced to learn only an official or national language.” When languages vanish, says Anderson, who has worked with speakers of endangered languages from Siberia to India to Papua New Guinea, they can take vital resources with them, such as biomedical knowledge. As words for traditional plants and medicines disappear, so does the ability to use them. “It’s probably the single most fragile knowledge domain in the world,” Anderson says. “Knowledge, interactions with ecosystems, and sustainable stewardship of ecosystems is being lost.” “The more languages that are lost, the more knowledge we’re losing,” Riehl adds. Hence her group’s video interviews—the one featuring Kristiņa and Livonian was ELAT’s first. They often take a couple of hours to film, and usually stick to common themes: How
the speaker came to Toronto, their community in Canada, the history of their language, and whether they’re concerned about its survival. Volunteers ask subjects to finish with a story. Since its inception, ELAT has documented, among others, Bukhori, spoken by Central Asian Bukharian Jews; Harari, a language of Ethiopia; and Ge’ez, and the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. GIANNA DIBIASE grew up speaking
Fossacesiana, a dialect named for her family’s hometown in Italy. These days she lives in the Toronto suburbs, but when she was young, her grandmother’s house in the city was like an extension of Fossacesia. Dibiase was immersed in her grandmother’s dialect. “There is a saying for everything,” she says. “It’s such a lively language.” Her grandmother died years ago, and Dibiase has seen the dialect fade, not only among her generation in Canada but in Italy as well. So when ELAT, looking for speakers of another Italian dialect, contacted her, Dibiase offered to introduce the group to her dad. At 85 years old, Giovanni Dibiase speaks Italian, English, and Fossacesiana, but likes to joke that he doesn’t really speak anything at all. When he sat down for his own interview, he often slipped back into standard Italian. Riehl believes there are probably many families like the Dibiases. “There are dozens and dozens of languages of Italy spoken in Toronto,” she says. “There’s a lot of concern that most are endangered.” And those are just the languages of one country, in one city. In a place as large and linguistically diverse as Toronto, ELAT can’t cover every language, let alone branch out to other regions. But the group’s approach can be applied elsewhere, and other organizations are also finding ways to tackle the challenge of documenting languages before they disappear. New York linguist Daniel Kaufman, for example, started the Endangered Language Alliance of New York City in 2010. It was while working with him in Indonesia that the concept for ELAT came to Riehl, who launched the group four years ago. Kaufman’s group, using
FOR AN EXTENDED VERSION OF THIS STORY, VISIT PSMAG.COM.
methods similar to those of ELAT, has documented speakers of an additional 50 endangered languages. Anderson’s Living Tongues Institute, on the other hand, creates online “talking dictionaries” of languages from a number of countries, from Papua New Guinea to Guatemala. And the Catalogue of Endangered Languages initiated by Google in 2012 includes multimedia entries in over 3,000 languages. Around the world, languages are also being re-claimed by communities themselves, from grassroots attempts to resurrect indigenous languages like Miami-Illinois and Wôpanâak in the United States to national efforts to revive languages like Irish and Welsh. And the Internet is presenting new opportunities for individuals interested in this work. Eddie Avila works with Global Voices, a non-governmental organization focused on citizen media, as the director of its Rising Voices program. “The Internet,” Avila says, “has historically been dominated by a few languages, but more and more we’re seeing a more multilingual Internet. People are tweeting, they’re making videos, they’re recording podcasts, they are contributing to Wikipedia in their languages.” “I think it’s important to engage young people to make it seem a little more cool to speak a language,” Avila, who is based in in Cochabamba, Bolivia, says. “Sometimes the message is these indigenous languages are languages of the past, and only used to talk about culture or folklore. But I think more and more people are using it to talk about football or about movies or politics, so the message is it’s also a language of the present and of the future.” In the end, though, the resources these groups create may be all that remains. Despite the work by volunteers and language communities, many of the world’s endangered languages will lose their native speakers. “We’re getting a snapshot,” Riehl says. “Maybe they could be a postcard in 200 years.” Looking over ELAT’s videos, Dibiase says she recognizes another value: “I see the beauty. There is so much history in what they’re saying. There’s something there.”
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THE BIOGRAPHY OF A
BURGER
ONE MAN’S MISSION TO MAKE MEAT OBSOLETE.
BY ROWAN JACOBSEN PHOTOS BY MCNAIR EVANS
I’M SITTING IN A SILICON VALLEY CONFERENCE ROOM, GAZING AT A BURGER ON A PLATE AND THINKING ABOUT ITS PAST. This sort of speculation has been something of a national pastime since 2002, when Michael Pollan wrote a seminal feature for the New York Times Magazine called “Power Steer.” The essay was, as Pollan put it, “the biography of my cow,” and it traced the journey of No. 534, an eight-monthold steer he had purchased, from its birth on a South Dakota prairie, through branding and castration, weaning from its mother, forced conversion to a diet of corn and antibiotics, confinement in a manure-caked Kansas feedlot, and up to its inevitable end in a slaughterhouse, where it would be stunned, skinned, and eviscerated. “Power Steer” illuminated not just the misery of industrial meat production, but also the extraordinary sums of chemical fertilizer, oil, pharmaceuticals, and land required to keep the system afloat—all of which remained invisible at the meat counter. “What grocery-store item is more silent about its origins than a shrink-wrapped steak?” Pollan asked. “If I was going to continue to eat red meat, then I owed it to myself, as well as to the animals, to take more responsibility for the invisible but crucial transaction between ourselves and the animals we eat.” It’s easy to forget what a radical idea this was, and what 34
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an impact the piece had on American food culture. It must have launched a thousand grass-fed farms and farm-to-table bistros. In a sense, it also helped produce the burger before me, now oozing an ocher jus onto its bottom bun. Because the more attention consumers paid to the realities of feedlot farming, the more they wanted out. But organic, grassfed, and local meat is expensive, and vegetarianism appeals to surprisingly few Americans—just 2 percent, almost all of whom lapse at some point. Meat happens to be incredibly tasty and convenient, and the substitutes we’ve been offered heretofore have done little to help us forget it. But this burger before me, piled with pickles and onions and avocado and looking seriously meaty, may represent the first real solution to Pollan’s dilemma. Which could make this piece a kind of bookend to “Power Steer.” This is the biography of my burger—but it is a radically different story from No. 534’s. Unlike poor 534, my burger actually has a name: It’s called Griffin (which I’ll explain shortly). And if Griffin delivers, then we may be able to close the book on the whole sad, ugly story of industrial meat sooner than anybody realizes, because Griffin happens to be entirely animal-free. Patrick O. Brown, the creative force behind Griffin, likes to tell the story of the 1830 race between Tom Thumb, one of the first steam locomotives, and a draft horse on a newly constructed segment of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The race started, and Tom Thumb began to pull away from the horse, but then it threw a belt and the horse passed it. The takeaway from that story, Brown says, is not that the horse won. It’s that the horse was never going to win again. So what I’m wondering, as the first tendrils of beefiness fill the air of the conference room, is if this race is competitive. If this burger is as good as its inventors say—if it even comes close to tasting like a conventional hamburger—then the cow is never going to win again.
THE BIOGRAPHY of my burger begins in 2009—not on a
ranch but in the mind of a graying, bespectacled, 62-yearold Stanford University professor. In the 1990s, Brown pioneered DNA microarrays, a technology used to measure gene expression and determine an individual gene’s function, which made possible many of the genetic breakthroughs of the past 20 years. In 2000 he co-founded the Public Library of Science, a non-profit publisher of openaccess science journals, as a way of disrupting the pay-perview journal model. At Stanford, he had his own biochemistry lab for mapping the way genes respond to their environment, particularly in relation to cancer cells. In 2009, Brown decided to devote an 18-month sabbatical to eliminating industrial meat production, which he determined at the time to be the world’s largest environmental problem. A staggering one-third of the land on Earth is used to raise livestock and their food. The Midwest is a giant feed trough. Reducing meat consumption, Brown figured, would free up vast amounts of land and water, would greatly mitigate climate change, would alleviate the suffering of billions of animals, would eliminate mountains of chemical fertilizer, and would make people healthier. It seemed like a no-brainer. Such a no-brainer, in fact, that at first Brown assumed all he had to do was a little education. “I started doing the typical misguided academic approach to the problem,” he told me. He organized an A-list 2010 National Research Council workshop in Washington called “The Role of Animal Agriculture in a Sustainable 21st Century Global Food System,” which caused not a ripple. Not long after, he determined that the only real way to impact meat production would be to beat it in the free market. “All you have to do is make a product that the current consumers of meat and dairy prefer to what they’re getting now,” he said. “It’s easier to change people’s behavior than to change their minds.” By the end of his sabbatical, Brown, who has been a vegetarian since the 1970s and a vegan since 2004, had distilled his challenge: He would re-create meat, but with plants. All meat production is environmentally ruinous, but beef is by far the worst offender, so for his initial target, Brown chose ground beef, which accounts for 60 percent of all beef consumption. Various companies have been trying for decades to concoct a veggie burger that is as juicy and toothsome as a fresh-cooked beef burger, but so far no one has come close. Plant stuff just doesn’t act like animal stuff. But Brown thought it could. “I was exceedingly confident that we could make products that compete on an even playing field with anything the animal-farming industry makes,” he told me as we toured Impossible Foods, his start-up. Brown is lean and owlish and very serious. “The food industry is decades behind the times,” he said. “The stuff we’re doing now that’s new to the food system was old news 40 years ago in the biotech world.” Brown knew he could extract certain ingredients from certain plants and make them do things they had never done before. He believed he could create a meat substitute that would act exactly like ground beef. Convinced that the moment was right, Brown began to assemble the expensive equipment and tech-savvy minds needed for his burger moonshot project. And that meant turning to Silicon Valley. “If you live around here,” he told
me, “you can’t walk down the block without tripping over a venture capitalist.” When Brown said this, Alison Davis, the 27-year-old manager of special projects for Impossible Foods, was with us. She immediately laughed and said, “Pat Brown can’t walk down the street without tripping over a venture capitalist.” That’s because they all throw themselves at his feet and beg the Gandalf of Stanford to take their money. Brown regularly utters venture capital catnip like, “Our mission is not to make a decent burger, it’s to make the best burger the world has ever seen.” And as much as Silicon Valley loves Brown, he loves it right back. “There’s this sense that there are all these things that are possible that you can’t imagine,” he told me, “that the world can be very different from the way it is today. Out here, you’re more appreciated if you’re doing something insanely ambitious, even if it doesn’t work. There’s a tolerance for swinging for the fences and striking out.” Brown met with three venture capital firms and came away with three offers. He chose Khosla Ventures because he felt Vinod Khosla best grasped the urgency of the problem, and because Khosla agreed that the company could never be sold to the meat industry, which could have made it disappear for pocket change, eliminating the competition. Suddenly he had $3 million of seed money. And that meant it was time to leave Stanford. “I never imagined that I’d want to leave,” he admitted. “My job description was: Follow your curiosity wherever it leads you and make discoveries. I was not at all looking for a change. But to do this project, I had to.” PICTURE, in your mind, a fat, juicy hamburger hot off the
grill. It’s sizzling, it’s weeping a little grease, and it’s pumping out some outrageously tasty aromas. Now raise it to your mouth and sink your teeth in. Hot, salty juice sprays across your palate, your mouth waters, and your brain is filled with smoky happiness. Humans are hard-wired to go crazy for meat—one of our richest sources of sustenance. Plants are just a few percent protein, but meat is mostly protein, which our bodies use to build brains and biceps and enzymes and more. We crave meat on a visceral level. “One of the first things we needed to do is to have a biochemical understanding of why meat tastes like meat,” Brown told me as we stepped into the Impossible Foods research and development lab. I gazed at the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, a pile of white cabinets and flashing lights that looked as if it had been assembled by a Hollywood set designer. At one end, a lab-coated, safety-goggled guy named Alex was sniffing the end of a glass tube. A GC-MS separates the aroma-carrying molecules in a food and boils them off one by one. Half the flow is directed to the mass spectrometer, which identifies the molecules by mass and charge, while the other half heads for the nose of somebody like Alex, who writes down what he smells. As I peeked over Alex’s shoulder, he wrote: “Chemical. Astringent. Green veg. Sweet. Beef. Sulfur. Cedar bark.” “When you cook ground beef,” Brown explained, “of the thousands of compounds that come through, maybe 150 have a smell that you can detect. None of them smell like meat. They smell like butter, caramel, dust, garbage, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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In recent years, a number of studies have revealed the massive impact of the livestock industry, and a growing list of scientists and activists have called for a movement away from beef. Their main concerns:
FOOD SAFTY
ANIMAL WELFARE Producing cheap beef and dairy requires keeping cows and cattle in filthy feedlots and subjecting them to inhumane diets and slaughter practices.
All ground beef in the U.S. harbors toxic pathogens linked to fecal contamination. Conventional beef cattle and dairy cows are treated with antibiotics and hormones that enter the food chain. Red meat has also been associated with increased risk of cancer and heart disease.
Cows and other ruminants have specialized stomachs filled with microbes capable of breaking down the fibrous plants they eat. But those bacteria also produce prodigious quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas at least 34 times as potent as carbon dioxide. For that reason, a calorie of beef generates 11 times the greenhouse gases of a calorie of grain.
LAND
WATER
160
Beef requires approximately eight times as much irrigation water, per calorie, as wheat, rice, and potatoes. One-third of the overtaxed Colorado River’s entire flow is diverted to livestock production.
FEED CONVERSION
times as much land as producing a calorie of rice, potatoes, or wheat.
Cows need a lot of space, and the feed they eat needs even more. Producing a calorie of beef requires 160 times as much land as producing a calorie of rice, potatoes, or wheat. Grass-fed beef requires even more land than grain-fed.
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Only one of every 36 calories a cow eats gets converted to meat. The rest become energy, heat, manure, or other parts of the cow. Pigs are significantly more efficient at feed conversion, and poultry are far better.
a struck match, lilacs, but not meat. But they become meat”—he tapped his head—“up here.” In fact, the list of flavors and aromas that make up beef is pretty weird. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association primer on the subject lists the expected beefy, meaty, roasted, fatty, savory, and brothy flavors, but also nutty, mushroom, sweet, sour, bitter, dairy, waxy, buttery, green, grassy, musty, fruity, bell pepper, potato, pungent, metallic, earthy, beany, soapy, sulfurous, rancid, sweaty, and, my personal favorite, warmed over. It makes you realize that, when we know we’ve got a hunk of beef on the end of our fork, we’re pretty forgiving about what it actually tastes like. To choose a representative burger flavor to re-create, Impossible Foods sampled widely in the marketplace. “Some of the bad ones are really shitty,” said Celeste Holz-Schietinger, Impossible Foods’ lead flavor scientist. (And that is literally true: When Consumer Reports tested 300 samples of ground beef around the country, all 300 tested positive for fecal contamination.) On the other hand, in taste tests, top grades of beef like Kobe don’t significantly outperform Safeway 80/20 ground beef, which is what Impossible Foods ended up choosing. “It’s the most standard beef out there,” she said. “It’s a good reference point for most people’s experience.” Most key beef aromas are generated through the alchemy of cooking, when heat transforms the proteins, fats, and sugars in raw beef into new compounds. Nailing the perfect raw-beef replacement doesn’t mean mixing a cocktail of the final flavors; it means finding the right precursors. And this is what no veggie burger has ever been able to accomplish. The best try to maximize brothy flavors while suppressing cereal ones, but none has ever gone beyond a savory miso—not bad, but not beef. What’s missing is blood. Beef contains hemoglobin, which, Impossible Foods re-
searchers found, is the secret catalyst that transforms raw flesh into yum. If your blood were a start-up, you might say that its core technology is heme, an iron-containing molecule with the ability to grab oxygen from the lungs and deliver it through the bloodstream to your cells. Oxygen particularly loves to bind with iron (hence rust), and, when this happens, the resulting compound turns red. Heme is why hemoglobin is red, and it’s also what separates red meat from white meat. Ground beef is about 10 parts per million heme, while chicken is only two parts per million heme. Pork is in the middle at three to eight parts per million. Add heme to raw chicken, cook it, and people start to think it tastes like beef. Add too much heme and it tastes like liver. As soon as heme was added to the Impossible Foods formula, the classic beefy scents and tastes emerged. Which made the first challenge obvious: The meatless burger needed blood. I’D ALWAYS assumed the animal kingdom had a lock on
hemoglobin, but it turns out that soy and other nitrogenfixing legumes make it too. Dig up a soy plant and you’ll find red marbles amid the roots. These are root nodules, which capture nitrogen (an essential component of protein) with the help of millions of symbiotic bacteria. Root nodules are red because of the presence of hemoglobin, which the plants use to maintain proper oxygen levels for the under-
When you sink your teeth into a perfectly grilled burger with all your favorite fixings, there’s a momentary sense of being the luckiest organism on Earth.
ground bacteria to do their work. Initially, Impossible Foods hoped to source the heme for its burger from soy root nodules. But harvesting underground soy roots would have entailed developing a new supply chain, and would have released quite a lot of carbon into the atmosphere as well, so the company tried the Silicon Valley approach: taking the snippet of soy DNA that codes for heme and inserting it into a standard yeast strain. Yeasts are the single-celled workhorses of biotechnology, so malleable and undemanding that they can be genetically tweaked to make almost anything: alcohols, oils, proteins. Genetically modified yeasts have been used for years to produce things like pharmaceuticals and the animalfree rennet used in cheesemaking. Impossible Foods has invented a yeast that makes plant blood. Inside the Impossible Foods pilot plant, 24 hours a day, five days a week, stainless steel fermentation tanks filled with this proprietary yeast crank out bright-red heme. If you were to sample it, you’d think you just bit your lip. It runs through tubes, is purified in a series of columns, and then is frozen in ice-cube trays until it’s time to make burgers. (Though most of the yeast is filtered out of the heme—and no GMO crops are used—there are still trace amounts of genetically modified ingredients in the Impossible Burger, which, I suspect, may attract some level of antipathy from the natural foods crowd.) Much of the company’s first year was devoted to developing, patenting, and proving its heme technology. Then it was time to design the rest of the burger. Each significant burger iteration is codenamed after a bird, starting with A; both Anhinga and Blue-Footed Booby tasted more like “rancid polenta,” in Brown’s words, than beef, but he caught a glimpse of the path to success. He had 25 employees and counting, and was well on his way to beating meat. But there was just one problem. He was out of seed mon-
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ey. So he went back to the venture capitalists and raised another $75 million. He’d learned over time how to better frame his pitch. “I kind of hadn’t realized how much businesspeople focus on money,” he admitted to me. “Which sounds incredibly naive. But I’d go in and my pitch would be, ‘This is such a huge problem for the world, and we have a solution.’ And almost as a footnote, I’d say, ‘Oh, and by the way, this is a trillion-dollar industry.’ Over time, the footnote became the headline.” HEME MAY BE the magic that manifests the Beef Experi-
ence, but a burger is mostly just a lump of flesh. All the carcass trimmings that don’t fit neatly into one of the more valuable cuts of beef get dumped into meat grinders and extruded as the pink squiggles we know and love. Most of this tissue is fat and muscle, but there are also blood vessels, nerve tissue, and a lot of connective tissue—the membranes and collagen that hold the animal together. That connective tissue plays an important role in building a burger, contributing the slightly gristly chew that gives the thing its bounce, which is also something no veggie burger has been able to duplicate. Inventing an analog for connective tissue was the job of the Protein Discovery Team. There’s a lot to discover. Every plant species contains 20,000 to 40,000 proteins in its genome, any one of which could have surprising functions once separated from the rest of the plant. “It’s never-ending Christmas for a biochemist like me,” declared Allen Henderson, who was standing at a stainless steel table in the lab, wearing the Impossible Foods lab uniform—white lab coat, plastic gloves, safety goggles. He handed me a rubbery, beige hunk of mystery and said, “I just feel like I’m playing the whole time.” Soft-spoken, with kind eyes and a touch of professorial gray in his beard, Henderson embodies the Impossible Foods vibe. He was a postdoc at the University of California–San Francisco when the company found him. “I’d been building this career toward a professorship,” he recalled.
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“But when I interviewed here, the culture and the scientific questions were so compelling that I actually walked away from everything. I spent a long weekend torturing over it, and the thing that tipped the scales was that I realized this was the one thing I could do as a scientist that would make the biggest impact on the world.” Henderson described what he does as protein speed dating. “I’m learning a lot about how proteins do or don’t play well together.” The rules are turning out to be very different than we thought. “They do things that are completely unexpected. I have over a decade of training as a biochemist, and I’m still like, Why did that just happen?” Impossible Foods has patents in the works for using proteins to bind, emulsify, gel, and stretch in novel ways. The hunk in my hand squeezed and tore like chicken breast, with noticeable muscle fiber striations, but was actually made from soy proteins. For practicality, the Protein Discovery Team limits its experimentation to plants that are already part of the food system and can be sourced relatively inexpensively around the world. The muscle tissue in Griffin comes from select wheat and potato proteins, while the connective tissue comes from soybeans and wheat gluten. The fat is coconut oil, emulsified so that it mimics flecks of beef tallow, which partially melt during cooking. Together, these fats and proteins act like ground beef when heated, searing and cohering into a springy, moist matrix. Griffin’s predecessor, Falcon, chewed like beef and had the bloody savor of beef, but something was still missing. So it was back to the ol’ gas chromatograph, which indicated that Falcon needed a touch of some sweet and fatty aldehydes and ketone molecules, many of which are common in the cucurbit family, which includes cucumbers and melons. Could that really transform Falcon into beef? “A few weeks ago we had a melon party,” Alison Davis told
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
39
535 B.C.E.
SEITAN
Chinese cooks discover that wheat flour can be soaked in water and rinsed until all the starches wash away, leaving a matrix of gluten proteins behind. Much closer to meat in texture than tofu is. CONS: Anathema to the glutensensitive crowd. PROS:
TOFU
First documented mention of the Chinese discovery (possibly as old as 164 B.C.E.) that the coagulated curds of soymilk make an excellent meat substitute.
965 C.E.
PROS: Cheap, healthy, ubiquitous. CONS: Tastes like
1896
soggy cardboard.
NUTTOSE
J.H. Kellogg launches a peanut-based product resembling potted meat, which he describes as a “substitute for flesh food.” Especially popular with the sanitarium crowd. CONS: Peanut butter had already been invented. PROS:
GARDENBURGER
The first commercial veggie burger, made of rice, vegetables, and cheese.
1985
Healthy, convenient, the price is right. CONS: Mushy, tastes like plants, comes frozen.
PROS:
TOFURKY
Soy-based loaf in the shape of a turkey breast. Now vegetarians can have Thanksgiving too! CONS: Synonymous with “loneliness” and “isolation” in many a vegetarian’s memory. PROS:
QUORN
United Kingdom-based Marlow Foods launches a patty made from the fungus Fusarium venenatum in a fermentation process.
1995
PROS: Convincingly
meatlike chew; nice mushroomy flavor; tiny carbon footprint. CONS: Accused by the Center for Science in the Public Interest of triggering allergic reactions in a small percentage of consumers.
2013 BEAST BURGER
Los Angeles start-up Beyond Meat learns to use temperature and pressure to force pea proteins to link into meatlike patties.
2014
IN VITRO BURGER
Dutch researcher Mark Post creates the first laboratory burger made from cultured cow cells, costing just $325,000. PROS: Meat
that wants to be eaten, just like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. CONS: Tastes weird, and has a massive environmental footprint.
PROS: Chews like Salisbury steak! CONS: Tastes like
Salisbury steak!
2016
IMPOSSIBLE BURGER
Silicon Valley’s Impossible Foods launches the first veggie burger that bleeds. PROS: Taste
is meatlike; environmental footprint is small. CONS: Reliance on genetically modified yeast.
40
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
me. “We had four people in the kitchen all day slicing and boiling melons. We had special melon music playing.” They tried mixing each one into the formulation. “Cantaloupe was a no-go for sure,” Celeste Holz-Schietinger recalled with a shudder. “We tried watermelon. We tried some squashes.” All weird. Then they tried honeydew. “It was a yay! We knew right away.” With honeydew in the mix, they decided they were ready to take on beef. BUT I GET to be the judge of that.
After watching a technician mix muscle tissue, connective tissue, heme, and a few flavor compounds into a pink patty, I follow her to the conference room, where she fries a burger on an electric griddle, plates it expertly on a cute bun with avocado, caramelized onions, egg-free dijonnaise, and cornichons, and presents it to me with a basket of chips on the side. And now I lift the burger, and bite, and chew. It is profoundly awkward to be chewing a burger in silence with the eyes of five Impossible Foodies fixed upon me. It’s a tense moment. Their nervousness is palpable. They really, really want me to like this burger. And I really, really want to like it too. I want it to be the best burger I’ve ever eaten. I want Tom Thumb to leave the horse in the dust. I want steer No. 534 to be out of a job. And it’s... Not quite there. It’s a solid burger, better than any veggie burger I’ve tried (and I’ve tried them all), but it’s not a mind-blower. The chew is right. The smell is right. What’s missing is the joy. When you sink your teeth into a perfectly grilled burger with all your favorite fixings, there’s a momentary sense of hitting the jackpot, of being the luckiest organism on Earth. And that, I think, will be hard to replicate. Would I opt for this burger instead of the mind-blower, sacrificing a soupçon of taste for a generous helping of righteousness? Absolutely.
Would Joe Beef? Not likely. I manage to utter some nice things about the burger, congratulate them on strong work, and, soon after, my visit to Impossible Foods ends. BUT THAT IS not the end of this story. Because in Silicon
Valley there is never an end. There is only a next. Honeydew proved hard to come by in the quantities needed, and so was withdrawn from the formula, while other ingredients were added along the road to refinement. After Griffin came Harpy. And Harpy begat Ibis, which begat Jailbird, which begat Kiwi, which led to Loon. And in May 2016, two little pink shrink-wrapped sliders arrive at my door in a foam box. It had taken some cajoling to convince the company to ship them to me. I even had to agree to a Skype tutorial on how to cook them (the upshot: fry in a little vegetable oil until brown, then flip). The burgers are accompanied by three pages of instructions, their own buns, and tiny containers of chopped cornichons, caramelized onions, and homemade dijonnaise sauce, all of which I immediately discard. My plan is to fry a Loon slider alongside a slider of real ground beef in a separate pan. The raw Loon burger looks unquestionably like ground beef, only slightly paler and more finely grained, and it even smells like raw meat, cool and dank. In the pan, it immediately begins to sizzle as fat melts out, though significantly less fat than the Walmart Special beside it, which is hissing and spitting like a Chinese sparkler. Unlike ground beef, which becomes firmer during the cooking process, the Impossible Burger initially softens, which would make it difficult to grill. But soon I see a firm brown line creeping upward from the bottom of the burger and droplets of “blood” seeping out of the perimeter. I flip. The top has a gorgeous brown crust—much more so than the hamburger, thanks to those potato proteins—and the patty has firmed up nicely. It smells like steak and caramel. I let it cook another minute, then nestle it in a bun with ketchup and tomato, and chomp down while still standing there at the stove. Juice squirts out the back of the burger and hits the hot pan with a hiss. I know that sound, and it doesn’t come from a veggie burger. This time around, my world shifts a little. That semicrispy crust is a savory revelation, even if it’s not entirely hamburger-like. The inside isn’t overly homogenous, as veggie burgers tend to be. It’s chewy without being gristly. It feels clean yet flavorful, and I can already see that any kid raised on the Impossible Burger would likely be repulsed by a greasy hamburger. To that generation, “Power Steer” may be nothing but a historical curiosity, the Jungle of its time. In other words, if you own shares in livestock, it might be a good time to sell. By the time you read this, the Impossible Burger will be making its debut at a handful of upscale burger joints, and the market will begin to decide its fate. But this story doesn’t end with Loon either, of course. “A cow will never get better at being meat,” Brown says, “but we’ll get better and better at understanding meat and using that information. When we get to the point where our burger is just as delicious as the best burger you’ve ever eaten, we don’t have to stop there.” I find myself fantasiz-
ing about Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker and Zebra Finch. Our kids may expect their burgers—and dogs and nuggets—to come in an audacious array of textures and flavors, none of them held back by the physical limitations of meat. To them, the prospect of making burgers out of something as bland as beef may be as appealing as riding from Baltimore to Ohio on a horse. THAT MOMENT IS not yet here. The initial price of the burger
will make it more alluring to sustainability freaks like me than to Joe Beef. But in a few years, once the company has its production plant up and running, the price will start to drop. At that point, Brown and his team will have their sights trained right on Safeway 80/20. Those same economies of scale will reduce the burger’s environmental footprint, which already is a fraction of a hamburger’s. The Impossible Burger uses one-ninth the water and one-twelfth the land and produces one-quarter of the greenhouse gases as a beef burger. “It isn’t that our process is so brilliant or efficient,” Brown says, “it’s that when you’re competing against cows, you’d have to be deliberately trying to fail to be as bad as they are.” The last time I saw Brown, we were hurtling down Highway 101 from South San Francisco, where Brown had inspected (and rejected) a defunct dried-soup facility that he had hoped to lease. Impossible Foods had grown from 25 employees to 125, Brown had a fresh $108 million from investors, and he was scrambling to find new digs before the insatiable Google snapped everything up. (He eventually found an industrial space in Oakland.) It was late in the day, the soup facility had been a bust, and I wondered if saving the world was turning out to be a bit of a grind. Brown was undeterred. He told me that once the burger was launched, he’d be going after other foods. He mentioned bacon, sausage, cheese, and bluefin tuna, which also derives its meaty flavor from heme. That rubbery prototype I’d held in the lab was possibly on its way to being steak. Chicken and fish were also in the works. There were several patents pending. It all sounded so Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, meat was still big business, with tremendous political and economic clout. I told Brown that he was taking on a very big opponent, one that wasn’t going down without a fight, but he waved off my concern. “The livestock industry is intrinsically fragile,” he suggested. “It’s got small margins, it’s got very long planning cycles, and it does not deal well with instability.” His voice had the flat, declarative tones of somebody explaining the law of gravity. “The fundamental economics of it are completely unsuited to 2016,” he said. “And that means it’s not going to exist in several decades.” “You think so?” I asked skeptically. “Absolutely. It’s just a matter of time. Someone else was going to outcompete it, if not us.” Brown shrugged, and, for the first time all day, allowed himself a smile. “But as it happens, it is us.”
•ROWAN JACOBSEN is the author of Fruitless Fall, The Essential Oyster, and other books. His research on plant-based proteins was supported by a fellowship from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism. @ROWANJACOBSEN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
41
UP FED
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MISHKA HENNER
AERIAL VIEWS OF FEEDLOTS ILLUMINATE THEIR TOXIC IMPACT ON THE LAND. Once upon a time, pigs and cows grazed on the same land where crops grew, moving from field to field with each new season. The livestock feasted on the cover crops; the soil, on the livestock’s enriching manure. Then, as demand for meat skyrocketed, a new model emerged: cramming thousands of animals onto muddy or dusty square miles called feedlots, where they are fattened mostly on bushel upon bushel of cheap corn. The high concentration of livestock and its waste releases excessive amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and bacteria into the water and air, but one of the biggest threats comes from elevated levels of ammonia, which can encourage algal blooms and weedy invaders in nearby lakes and streams. The stench—ammonia is the same stuff in smelling salts— could knock a cowboy off his horse. Rust Belt cities downwind of feedlots are breathing this ammonia, along with particulates that can cause respiratory and heart problems. As for the cows, it would be anthropomorphizing to assume that they abhor standing haunch-to-haunch in each other’s manure all day, passing antibiotic-resistant infections to each other while subsisting on a diet they were never meant to eat. But it’s a distinct possibility. In the photographs that follow, photographer Mishka Henner has stitched together satellite imagery to reveal the insidious effects of feedlot farming.
FRIONA FEED YARD
Parmer County, Texas
WRANGLER FEED YARD
Tulia, Texas
44
CORONADO FEEDERS
Dalhart, Texas
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45
TASCOSA FEED YARD
Bushland, Texas
FRIONA FEED YARD
Parmer County, Texas CENTERFIRE FEED YARD
Ulysses, Kansas
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47
Millions of containers, thousands of ships, hundreds of scientists, 30 laws, 15 federal agencies, and we still can’t prevent the next foodborne illness outbreak.
BY
Kathryn Miles
In an apocalyptic landscape, they wait. Trucks— dozens of them—parked outside places like Jim’s #2 Char-Broiled Burgers and Dreams Club, where you can see live nude girls, girls, girls and a special laser teaser on Tuesday nights. They hover around JJ Diesel and Capito’s Used Auto Parts. They idle on run-down side streets, next to overturned dumpsters and trashed shopping carts and the carcasses of dead dogs. It’s a no-man’s land, better suited for the set of a Mad Max movie than the staging grounds for America’s biggest import hub.
14
PERCENT We eat, on average, 14 percent more fruits and vegetables today than we did in 1970.
50
It’s also a landscape of necessity: the unseen backdrop to the 43 miles of congested waterfront and 7,500 glistening onshore acres that make up the Port of Los Angeles. Two million metric tons of food passed through the port last year, shipped by nearly 8,000 importers from over 100 countries—nations as far-flung as Bahrain, Mauritania, Cambodia, and Senegal. Thailand beat out China as the top importer at the port—but barely. Chile, Guatemala, and Vietnam round out the top five, with India close behind. And from these countries come every food imaginable (along with some you’ve probably never considered to be food): grapes and granola, cobra heads and desiccated camel, all destined for an American table. But before it gets there, that food will make its way through a byzantine system of regulations and rules proctored by 15 federal agencies. Those idling 18-wheelers will shuttle most of it to a series of local warehouses, where it will sit while whirring computers and overworked inspectors decide if it warrants scrutiny. Some of it may travel to laboratories as far away as Pittsburgh and New Jersey to be tested. The trucks wait there too, while food scientists pulverize and distill it, looking for pathogens and poisons. Then it’s back to the warehouse, on to a distribution center, and, finally, to a grocery store near you—all part of a process to determine whether this food, which has already traveled thousands of miles and passed through untold numbers of hands, is safe to eat. Making that determination is harder than ever. An estimated 48 million Americans become sick each year because of something they ate. Annually, over 3,000 die because of contaminated food. Both numbers are projected to
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
rise in the coming decade, along with our reliance on imported food. And here’s the irony: A big reason for that increase is that we’ve developed healthier eating habits. On average, we eat 14 percent more fruits and vegetables than we did in 1970. We’re eating beet greens with bee pollen and drinking kale-and-date smoothies. And those foods—which is to say fresh foods—are the very hardest to police, particularly when they come from overseas. The two biggest foodborne illness outbreaks of 2015 were caused by tainted produce (cilantro and cucumbers). The third was from deli items made at a natural food co-op in Idaho. Other large outbreaks were caused by tuna, pork, and salads. “There’s a very slim chance potato chips or snack cakes or any other processed foods are going to make you sick,” says Michael Roberts, executive director of the University of California–Los Angeles’ Resnick Program for Food Law & Policy and author of Food Law in the United States. “The food that causes us the most problems is the food Michael Pollan tells us to eat, like meat and fresh produce.” Most of this food falls under the purview of the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for regulating about 80 percent of what we eat. That includes products like fruits and vegetables, rice and grains, and dairy products. Unless, of course, you’re wondering if a pesticide used on one of those items is safe, in which case you’d have to ask the Environmental Protection Agency. The FDA has oversight of all fish and shellfish, except for catfish, which falls under a branch of the United States Department of Agriculture known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service. Nor does the FDA grade the quality of fish, since that’s the
responsibility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Inspection of meat also falls to FSIS, unless that meat is considered wild or exotic, in which case it is the responsibility of the FDA (although FSIS may also inspect such meats). The FDA inspects shelled eggs and laying hens; responsibility for liquid, frozen, or dried egg products, along with meat birds, however, lies with FSIS. For foods with multiple ingredients, things get even more convoluted. Responsibility for the meat inside sausage falls to FSIS, but the casings must be inspected by the FDA. Foods like ice cream or television dinners may need to be inspected by both agencies at multiple stages. If the food is imported, Customs and Border Protection is responsible for screening the shipment upon arrival, though the FDA or USDA may need to inspect it as well. The standards, protocols, and guidelines at work here were developed in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also bears responsibility for investigating outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. When such an outbreak occurs, the FDA, CDC, and FSIS convene what they call “a multiagency coordination group.” Even the people inside this system agree: It’s a real headache. The Government Accountability Office believes the fragmented nature of the system results in inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination, and inefficient use of resources. “It’s a situation that potentially places public health at risk,” says Steve Morris, director of Food Safety and Agriculture for the GAO. To get inside this juggernaut, I had wanted to trace a single product—like a banana—as it moved through the process. I figured I’d start in Central America, where it was grown and processed, maybe hop a ride on a container ship, then follow the shipment though inspection and into the marketplace. That was before I learned the first rule of food safety: You do not talk about food safety. I made multiple requests to visit one of the FDA’s five foreign inspection offices, which dispatch inspectors to fields and factories in countries like Costa Rica and China. Each one was denied. I asked to visit the FDA’s operations at the Port of Los Angeles. This was also denied. Some of the only journalists granted access to these FDA facilities in recent years were a group of college students funded by an endowed program to advance young journalists. Their story, from 2011, which was picked up by publications including the Washington Post, described unbearable smells, understaffed facilities, and inspectors relying on their noses to determine if food was safe. The staff at the FDA’s office of media affairs told me they didn’t think a visit to the
port facility would add any insight to my story because, they said, finding “jaunty and colorful characters—is unlikely.” So I suggested visits to any of the 13 field labs, 20 district offices, or over 300 ports where FDA inspections take place. Those were rejected as well. In the end, months of requests and a final plea to visit any of the FDA’s food safety operations were all squarely denied. The CDC also denied my requests for interviews, referring me back to the FDA. Most thirdparty inspection labs—facilities that are under contract to test food for the FDA—did the same. Thus began my investigation into food safety: a secretive and labyrinthine process that seems to function with the expediency of a Rube Goldberg machine. I was beginning to think I was going to have to trespass in order to report this story, but, eventually, the Customs and Border Protection agency broke the silence and invited me inside.
BEYOND A LINE of concrete barricades in Carson, California, sits a sprawl-
ing 315,000-square-foot facility equipped with refrigerated warehouses, offices, labs, and inspection rooms. This is one of the first lines of defense for CBP, and a critical cog in the food inspection machine at the Port of Los Angeles. Each day, dozens of those idling trucks collect containers of food from the port and make the 12-mile drive to Carson, where they wait to gain approval to enter the facility. On the other side of a guard shack are 64 extra-large bay doors. There’s hardly ever a vacant one. In an average year, the CBP staff at this facility—one of four “centralized examination stations” serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach—will inspect about 3,300 shipping containers of food commodities sent from at least 15 different countries. Perishables like fruits and other temperature-dependent products are immediately sent to the refrigerated sections. Non-perishable items remain on the floor of the main warehouse, most stacked on pallets and intermingling with an array of non-food items—everything from guitars to flat-screen televisions. Even with all the cardboard and shuffling of goods in and out, the place is beyond immaculate. CBP has its own mandates and laws to enforce, but it also works in close cooperation with the FDA and USDA, referring potential food safety issues along to the appropriate agency. On the day I visited, several staff were hovering over a bag of custard-filled cookies. Because that custard was made of eggs but the cookies themselves contained flour and sugar, the cookies seemingly fell under the purview of both the USDA and FDA, and they appeared to require further inspection. Someone somewhere must have known which agency needed to do what, and in what order. But in the meantime, a single sample pack of cookies sat alone in an enormous industrial refrigerator in an otherwise empty part of the warehouse. The remainder of the shipment might have still been on its container ship. More likely, it was sitting in a bonded warehouse somewhere nearby. To keep importers from releasing food into the market before it’s been cleared, the U.S. government requires them to pay a bond, which can be three times the value of the shipment. The bond is returned only after the food has been cleared by CBP and the FDA. Customs and Border Protection is a relatively new agency—formed in the wake of 9/11 by combining the U.S. Customs Service and U.S. Border Patrol, as well as federal immigration and agricultural inspection services. It’s easy to spot who does what in Carson. The agriculture specialists wear blue CBP uniforms, making it clear you wouldn’t want to mess with them. They spend their days on warehouse floors looking for any insect or fungus that might prove a threat to American crops. One hundred percent of all imported produce is inspected for agricultural pests before it can be released into the marketplace or even handed over to a distributor. Shipments are screened at the point of entry, and SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
51
80
PERCENT Even though the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for ensuring the safety of over 80 percent of the nation’s food supply, it receives barely 40 percent of the nation’s total food safety budget.
2
PERCENT Despite all of the regulations and scientists and facilities involved, the most notable thing about the food safety system in the United States is that only 2 percent of all imported food ever gets examined or tested by the FDA.
52
items selected for closer physical examination are immediately sent to a centralized examination station. A huge shipment of kiwis had just arrived from Italy on the day I visited. Inside a clean room, about a half dozen agriculture specialists were examining them, using magnifying glasses and high-test lights to spot tiny flea beetles the size of the period at the end of this sentence. These bugs are voracious leafeaters with a particular taste for crops like corn and lettuce. Dead ones aren’t a problem—it means the cold-storage shipping method has succeeded in killing any potential threats—but even a single living beetle might be enough to send the shipment back to its country of origin, prompt an enforced fumigation, or result in the shipment’s complete destruction. My tour guide for this portion of the day, chief agriculture specialist Gabriel Padilla, wanted to underscore that the primary aim of his team is protecting domestic agriculture—not consumer safety. The import specialists at the Carson facility are an entirely different breed. They wear suits and wirerimmed glasses and look like really, really smart accountants. Their desks are tidy, and they spend most of their days sitting at them. Instead of probing food samples, their job is one of paperwork forensics—a lot of which involves trying to ferret out whether any given food is what the importer says it is. International trade agreements and domestic incentive programs have created a complex web for importers to negotiate, particularly with regards to anti-dumping laws intended to protect American producers from predatory pricing. A Chinese company, for instance, may be able to produce and import honey for just a fraction of what an American farmer needs to charge, so the Department of Commerce assesses tariffs on imports to protect domestic producers. Importers try to get around the extra fees either by routing the product through a country not affected by the tariffs or by passing off the product as something else (a lot of honey gets smuggled into this country labeled as apple juice). CBP investigators have also found boxes of seafood labeled as seaweed or garlic tucked into containers that are ostensibly carrying tube socks. While I was visiting, a Chinese produce importer tried to pass off a box said to be carrying vegetables but which actually contained electrocardiograph equipment. These sorts of violations are usually discovered via endless paper trails and the intuition of the specialists. “It’s really hard to stay out of the weeds,” says supervisory import specialist Dave Shaw. “All you can do is start with the known, and hope that leads you to the unknown.” When Shaw’s forensic study of invoices and tariff
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
forms raises a red flag, he sends uniformed CBP officers to inspect a shipment, usually at one of the bonded warehouses where it’s waiting to clear customs. If they see something suspicious, they email a photograph for him to review. If he thinks it’s fishy, he will recommend that the FDA inspect it further, in which case a sample will be sent to an FDA lab for testing. If the food is found in violation, the FDA will issue a notice of refusal, and the shipment will either be destroyed or returned. In any given month, thousands of products fail to pass inspection by the FDA. During the month of my visit, items that had been refused by the FDA included “filthy” prunes from Afghanistan, Chinese cookies made with unsafe coloring, Indonesian bay leaves tainted with salmonella, and Ukrainian flaxseed oil containing traces of a prohibited pesticide. Nearly 2,000 products had been refused by the FDA in that month alone. The FDA has oversight of drugs and medical devices as well as food, of course, and though it’s not immediately relevant to this story, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that two of the items refused by the FDA that same month included devices for enhancing “external penile rigidity.” (I’d also be remiss if I didn’t tell you that these devices were rejected because they were mislabeled and did not include sufficient instructions for use.) When the FDA finds a food sample that poses a serious threat to American consumers, Customs and Border Protection will order one of those rigs to deliver the entire shipment to an undisclosed location, where it will be demolished. I asked if I could visit that location, but CBP said no, citing security reasons. They did tell me that the sole purpose of this location is to “render indistinguishable” any food found in violation. CBP officers use a variety of destruction techniques, including incineration and pulverization. My favorite method for achieving the latter is a giant steamroller. (Their public affairs liaison does not love that I am telling you that.)
RIGHT NOW, the FDA’s most reliable means of
determining what foods pose the biggest risk is something called “prior notice,” which arose out of the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. The prior notice policy stipulates that all importers must notify the FDA of what food is coming into the country and when. It’s a narrow window: Food arriving by ship requires an eight-hour advance notice; food arriving by truck requires just two. The data that the importer provides is plugged into a computerized screening tool called PREDICT, which employs an algorithm
to assign a percentile-risk assessment to every item of food entering the country. High-risk foods known to be susceptible to contamination or adulteration automatically get a higher number. So does food from countries or companies with a history of violations. Those cookies that had been detained by CBP were made in China. They could have gotten a high score because of their country of origin (China being, well, China), or because they contained eggs, a notorious carrier of multiple foodborne pathogens, including salmonella. Products with high-risk percentile scores— or even just those that have received moderate scores—are flagged for review. The FDA also may issue import alerts for specific foods that have been found in violation of U.S. requirements. Food products on an import alert’s “red list” are automatically detained at the border. In order for that food to be cleared, the onus is on the importer to demonstrate its safety, which often involves employing an FDA-certified third-party lab like Microbac Laboratories. Located in an unassuming industrial park just outside Pittsburgh, Microbac’s Warrendale, Pennsylvania, facility is housed in two labs—one for food chemistry, another for microbiology—separated in the middle by a large industrial kitchen. The kitchen is where chemists break food down into an analyzable form using any means necessary. Atop the steel countertops sit restaurant-grade mixers, food processers, and blenders. The drawers are filled with cleavers and heavy metal mallets. Hesham Elgaali, the facility’s managing director, holds a Ph.D. in food microbiology from the University of Kentucky and served as Indiana’s supervisor of food and dairy microbiology for six years. These days, it’s not altogether uncommon for him to spend hours standing over a cheese grater. “Food comes in every possible form: hard, soft, gummy, viscous,” he says. “Breaking it down can be really, really challenging.” The week before my visit, Elgaali toiled for the better part of a day trying to figure out how to render a shipment of synthetic bones for dogs into an extractable sample. He ended up driving to Home Depot and buying a sander. It worked. In a storage room next to the kitchen, products detained by the FDA red list wait in plastic milk crates to be similarly digested. The contents of the storage room vary depending upon the time of year. On my visit, it was filled with gallon-sized Whirl-Pak sample bags of oregano and sesame seeds, two high-risk items commonly found to contain salmonella. Nearby, a cart containing 60 or so sauces produced by an Asian company awaited analysis. These two batches of food will make very different circuits through the lab. The sauces
FOOD
FISH
MEAT
SHELLFISH
FRUITS CATFISH
VEGGIES
RICE
GRAINS EGGS DAIRY
LIQUID
SHELLED
PESTICIDES? NO
FROZEN
YES
DRY
EPA
NOAA YES
EXOTIC? NO
FDA EVEN THE PEOPLE INSIDE THE SYSTEM AGREE: IT’S A REAL HEADACHE This is a rough representation of how food oversight should work, but with so many different agencies involved, the process can seem pretty convoluted.
FSIS
48
MILLION An estimated 48 million Americans become sick each year because of something they ate.
will hang out in the chemistry division, where they can be tested for everything from sodium content to whether or not they are, indeed, gluten-free. The herbs and seeds will undergo microbial testing and analysis using a sophisticated combination of enrichments and incubation to grow the bugs and DNA fingerprinting to identify their genetic code. The results will be sent to the FDA by way of a 300-page report documenting the specific strain of any microbe that might be isolated, along with the precise testing mechanisms used and the name of every analyst who touched the sample. The importer is spared all these details, receiving instead a short memo that says clear or contaminated. Either result will launch its own series of next steps, including either the release of the item to a distributor (more trucks) or the destruction of the shipment (more steamrollers). Most food gets released. A 2011 FDA briefing stated that, of the samples analyzed over the previous year, only 8 percent of the products receiving a 100 percent PREDICT score had been found in violation. The violation rate for products receiving a 50 percent PREDICT score, however, was almost as high. A more recent analysis by the GAO showed improvement in the correlation between PREDICT scores and violation rates. But the fact remains, our very best guess about which foods pose the biggest threat to human health is still just that: a guess.
DESPITE ALL THE regulations and scientists
and facilities involved, the most notable thing about this system is the fact that only about 2 percent of all imported food ever gets examined or tested by the FDA. The FDA knows this food inspection system is vulnerable. In fact, it’s been telling Congress as much for years. And the Government Accountability Office placed federal food safety oversight on its “high risk list” in 2007 (where it has stayed to this day), citing risks to the economy and public health. The following year, over 300,000 Chinese infants and young children became sick after drinking milk tainted with melamine, a chemical that increases the nitrogen in milk and can mask the effects of dilution. Many of those children developed severe kidney damage. Six of them died. That same year, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company, which supplied meat to American schools, initiated the largest meat recall in history after undercover video revealed its torturous treatment of “downer cows”—animals that are too sick or injured to move on their own. Congress responded to these and other food safety concerns by passing the Food Safety Moderniza54
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tion Act in December of 2010—the first real reform to food safety laws in over 70 years. On paper, the FSMA is an indisputably big deal. The FDA now has the authority to require what it calls “prevention-based controls across the food supply.” This includes requiring food processors and manufacturers to demonstrate compliance with protocols and to establish action plans in the event of an outbreak or violation. It also compels importers to provide certified verification that their food is safe. And, for the first time in U.S. history, the FDA can now demand mandatory recalls of any food product (prior to the FSMA’s passage, they could only politely ask). Some key changes mandated by the FSMA are aimed at improving oversight and streamlining inspection processes by conducting more of them where food is produced, rather than when it is made available for consumption. The FSMA does this in part by putting food safety inspectors in foreign field offices and on the floors of processing plants, instead of just nosing through shipping containers and distribution centers. It is also supposed to close loopholes and help prevent microbe outbreaks like the ones at Chipotle this past year, or the cantaloupe tainted with listeria that left 33 people dead in 2011. Randy Phebus, professor of food safety and defense at Kansas State University, is hopeful about the changes American consumers will see as a result of the FSMA. His involvement in food safety dates back to 1993, when over 700 people were infected with E. coli after eating burgers at Jack in the Box. Four kids died. Another 178 people were left with kidney and brain damage. One part kitchen, two parts mad scientist’s lair, Phebus’ Manhattan, Kansas, lab is outfitted to conduct the very kinds of investigations that the FSMA calls for: testing food-handling procedures, rather than the food itself. Special freezers set at -80°C hold vials of salmonella, listeria, and Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli—some of the most pernicious bacteria responsible for foodborne illnesses. Next to the freezers sit utterly average-looking refrigerators, along with stoves and chemical wash stations. One day, Phebus will defrost a vial of E. coli and deliberately infect a batch of spinach with it, then send the spinach through the triple wash touted on the label to see if it really gets rid of the bug. The next day, he’ll mix some of the same strain of E. coli into ground beef and see what happens when you cook a burger rare (hint: Phebus eats his burgers well-done). He also stocks an inventory of surrogates—microbes that behave the same way as the nasty ones, but don’t have any negative effects on humans. Those get deliberately
dispersed inside factories and food processing plants so that Phebus can see if the conditions there cause them to die or thrive. “We’re never going to be in a position when we can test everything that comes off a processing floor, and we also can’t just sit back and hope that everything is right,” Phebus says. “The only hope is using science and engineering to validate the processes.” Phebus may be optimistic about the recent changes, but some believe that the FSMA is taking too long to get off the ground. Part of the legislation included a congressional mandate that the FDA create safety standards within 18 months of the act’s approval. Without those regulations, there would be no means by which to implement the provisions of the act. After the deadline passed and no standards had been finalized, the Center for Food Safety, a national non-profit public interest and environmental advocacy organization, sued the FDA. The FDA filed a motion to dismiss the complaint. The motion was denied, and a U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Center for Food Safety, so the FDA filed a motion to have the case re-considered. That, too, was denied, and so the FDA brought the case to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled against the FDA. Eventually, in 2014, the agency consented to a court-approved agreement that compelled it to establish standards and dates by which they would be met. These rules were finalized in 2015 and 2016, and most will begin to take effect this fall. Some requirements, like the labeling of produce from small farms, won’t be fully in effect until 2020, presuming the rollout stays on schedule. When the FSMA was passed, it also included an ambitious plan to investigate foreign food facilities, beginning with 600 international locations in 2011 and increasing that number each year to at least twice the total inspected the year before. The FDA has lagged behind. In 2015, it should have inspected 2,646 foreign food facilities, but only completed about half that. When questioned by a Government Accountability Office investigative team, FDA officials said that the agency had not met and was not planning to meet the FSMA mandate. According to the GAO report, FDA officials “questioned the usefulness of conducting the number of inspections mandated by FSMA.” That didn’t sit well with the GAO. The FDA cites cost as one reason the agency is not keeping pace with the FSMA mandate for foreign food facility inspections. Jaydee Hanson, senior policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, is not surprised by a lack of transparency and follow-through at the FDA. He points to the agency’s dual mission of food and drug regulation as a major
problem. “The FDA is an organization almost entirely focused on drug research,” Hanson says, “and their culture reflects that. We believe Americans deserve an agency dedicated to food and food safety—and one not driven by the secrecy that pervades drug trials.” To understand how this dual focus affects the agency, consider Domenic Veneziano, the recently retired director of the FDA’s Division of Import Operations. It was Veneziano who, in the wake of 9/11, designed the FDA’s first bioterrorism protocols and established the Prior Notice Center, which the FDA touts as its first around-the-clock operational office. And it’s his office (still lacking a director as this story goes to press) that works with the FDA’s many field offices to decide what food makes it into this country. Yet last year, he spent months in the national spotlight not because of any particular issue or incident regarding food safety, but because it was also his job to prevent states like Arizona and Ohio from obtaining lethal injection drugs from overseas when domestic supplies ran low. To an outside observer, the scales at the FDA do appear to be tilted toward the drug side of things. There is a marked lack of expertise in food science and environmental health among the agency’s leadership. The current commissioner of food and drugs at the FDA, Robert Califf, is a cardiologist who has a deep background in drug trials. His chief scientist is a medical researcher with experience in biodefense and infectious disease. Of the administration’s five deputy commissioners, only one is responsible for food oversight—a position that was established in 2010, and one that oversees all veterinary concerns as well. Funding is another issue. A recent white paper published by the Congressional Research Service reveals a long history of disproportionate funding between the FDA and the inspection arm of the USDA. Even though the FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of over 80 percent of the nation’s food supply, it receives barely 40 percent of the nation’s total food safety budget—a discrepancy born out in staffing levels as well. For years, the USDA has had over twice the dedicated food safety and security staff as the FDA. Staffing issues are particularly severe at the FDA’s overseas branches, where visa issues and international agreements have led to partially filled offices and empty desks. And since the passage of the FSMA, lack of funding has become an even bigger problem for the FDA. When the FSMA was first enacted, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the FDA would require a funding increase on the order of $583 million through fiscal year 2015 to properly implement it, but increases to the FDA budget during that time fell $276 million short of the estimate, which amounts to nearly half. Michael Roberts of UCLA’s Resnick Program for Food Law & Policy thinks changing our perception of food might be the only viable solution. “You can double the FDA’s budget tomorrow and they still won’t have the resources they need to ensure the integrity of our food,” he says. “It’s about risk and degree. How pure do you want your food to be? How much are you willing to pay to make it safe? In the end, as hazards increase, it’s up to us to decide what we are willing to tolerate.” Meanwhile, the food keeps coming. Each month, 100 or so container ships nose into the Port of Los Angeles, carrying hundreds of thousands of shipping containers, 20,000 of which are carrying—or said to be carrying—food. And so the truckers keep schlepping, the inspectors keep inspecting, the scientists keep sampling, while the CDC stands at the ready with its multi-agency protocol for responding to the next foodborne illness outbreak. That there will be one is a statistical certainty. The questions are: From which food? In what way is it compromised? And how many people will get sick or die as a result?
•KATHRYN MILES is the author of Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hur-
ricane Sandy. Her work has appeared in the Best American Essays series, Outside, the New York Times, and others. @KATHRYN_MILES SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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Irrigation Nation
HOW AN ESOTERIC PIECE OF FARM EQUIPMENT CREATED AMERICA’S BREADBASKET—AND THREATENS TO DESTROY IT.
by Ted Genoways
PHOTO BY JIM WARK / GETTY IMAGES
until it locked into place with a hollow clank, and a high-pressure hum filled the air. Across the windswept field, a light started blinking atop a metal contraption that stretched a quarter mile from end to end, adorned with an array of dangling hoses and sprinkler heads. With a humped metal spine and rib-like trusses, it looked like the skeleton of some sort of robotic brontosaurus. Hammond tipped his cowboy hat back with his thumb to get a closer look at the display on the sky-blue control panel emblazoned with the logo for Valley Irrigation. He checked the readouts for speed and pump pressure and then pointed to the flashing light. “That means everything is on. Then you start it walking,” he said. And with the push of a button, the enormous center-pivot irrigation system lumbered to life, the twinned drive wheels under each triangular tower creeping slowly clockwise. “What we’re shooting for on this level of ground is about an inch,” Hammond said over the wind and roar of the pressurizing wellhead. “It won’t run off with an inch. That takes approximately three and a half days.” In a good growing season, he hoped to put just three to four inches of water on this 160-acre field in York County, Nebraska. That doesn’t sound like much, but Hammond showed me the meter. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to the small lettering under the spinning numbers gauge. “Gallons times one hundred. We’re talking millions of gallons of water,” all of it pumped straight from the Ogallala Aquifer. 58
Those millions of gallons are starting to add up. A recent study of United States Geological Survey data compared the depths of more than 32,000 wells nationwide over the last two decades. The results were alarming. Across the country, water levels have fallen in 64 percent of all wells, with an average decline of more than 10 feet. In the Ogallala Aquifer system, which supplies groundwater for crop irrigation to eight states from Texas to South Dakota, the declines are especially pronounced. In much of southwestern Kansas, wells are down to 25 percent of the water that existed when the aquifer was first tapped less than 70 years ago. In the southern High Plains of Texas, near the edge of the Ogallala, water levels have fallen more than 100 feet in places, leaving many farmers without any water at all. Two years ago, the State of Texas published a report on water level changes since groundwater irrigation began on a large scale. “Since the 1940s,” the report stated, “substantial pumping from the Ogallala has drawn the aquifer down more than 300 feet in some areas.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture went on to invest over $70 million in the Ogallala Aquifer region, “to help farmers and ranchers conserve billions of gallons of water.” But the Great Plains was soon plunged into a multi-year drought, and, instead of declining, water usage shot up dramatically. FINDING WATER to grow food has been
the central challenge of life on the Great Plains since the earliest days of white settlement. In its zeal to dis-
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PHOTO BY THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
RICK HAMMOND turned a yellow dial
place Native Americans and “tame” the prairies, the U.S. government passed the first Homestead Act in 1862 and platted a patchwork of one-mile squares, which were then subdivided into quarters of 160 acres each. A “quarter-section” could be claimed by any free citizen of the U.S., man or woman, native-born or immigrant, with just one major catch: You had to live on the land and farm it for at least five years. This not only meant concocting some way of building a home on the treeless prairie, but also finding enough fresh water to sustain crops. On the semi-arid plains of Nebraska, where surface streams often ran dry during the summer months—right when water for irrigation was most needed—farmers had little choice but to dig wells, with nothing more than shovels and picks at their disposal. Soon, windmills were erected, allowing farmers to pump groundwater and divert it to the wide furrows of their fields or into catchment ponds. Life on the hardscrabble plains was arduous, and often hand-to-mouth. Nevertheless, by 1890, the Homestead Act had settled some two million people on nearly 375,000 farms. But in the years that followed, just as cities like St. Louis, Omaha, and Denver were turning into bustling metropolises built on income from livestock and grain exchanges, the entire Great Plains was devastated by drought and blistering heat. By the harvest of 1894, one newspaper reported, nearly 38 percent of acres planted with corn in the middle states were either destroyed or abandoned. In Nebraska, where high temperatures were accompanied by scorching winds, the smell of parched corn filled the air. Many farmers packed up and left, making their escape, according to another paper, “while they had something to do it with.” The drought revealed that raising enough grain for a farm family to thrive would require greater land allocations than the Homestead Act had originally provided—and a lot more water. In western Nebraska, groups of farmers banded together to dig miles of irrigation canals, diverting water from the North Platte River, but they still didn’t have enough to expand their fields and sustain those crops through the summer. So the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers ordered a survey of sites where dams could be built in the foothills of the Rockies, and the USGS simultaneously commissioned a study of groundwater resources on the Great Plains. In 1897, working at a spot west of Ogallala, Nebraska, government geologist N.H. Darton surmised that the abundant wells of southwest Nebraska had tapped a great storehouse of ancient water held in place by an enormous underlying layer of limestone. “Extending from Kansas and Colorado far into Nebraska,” Darton wrote, “there is a calcareous formation of late Tertiary age to which I wish to apply the distinctive name Ogalalla formation.” Unfortunately for the early settlers, there was no efficient way to convey those groundwater resources to the surface. A single windmill could only pump enough water to irrigate five acres or provide for 30 cattle—hardly enough to get farmers through the dry years. In 1928, the Nebraska Agricultural Extension Service lamented
that “the underground water supply is abundant,” but there were insufficient means of “lifting it to the surface and applying it to the land.” As the country struggled through the Dust Bowl and the wartime food rationing that followed, agricultural engineers grew determined to find some way to make use of that untapped resource. DURING WORLD WAR II, companies like
John Deere, Caterpillar, and International Harvester boomed under government contracts, designing and assembling engines for heavy trucks and tanks. After the war, they shifted resources to developing pumps that could finally convey all of that groundwater to the surface. Early irrigation systems, however, were little more than a pump connected to a series of metal pipes that had to be lugged into place and then re-set two or three times a day. It was a mucky and painstaking job, and not a terribly efficient one. A farmer named Frank Zybach thought there had to
be a better way. After attending an Irrigation Field Day in Colorado, where he watched the demonstration crew set the pipes, then tromp through the mud to move them, Zybach began developing a self-propelled system in which the force of water flowing through the irrigation tube would slowly turn the drivetrain of supporting wheels. By anchoring the pipe to a central wellhead, the system turned in a perfect circle, watering the field evenly without any work by the farmer. Zybach’s system became known as “center-pivot irrigation.” Despite their novelty, early center pivots were plagued by malfunctions and were a nightmare to maintain. Farmers, leery of the expense and hassle, were reluctant to buy. In the first two years of production, Zybach told the Lincoln Journal-Star, he and his business partner A.E. Trowbridge sold just 19 center pivots. They decided to license the technology to Robert B. Daugherty, the young owner of a small farm equipment company called Valley Manufacturing, whom
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NONE OF THIS would have been pos-
sible without the Ogallala. But how long can it last? To answer that question, Ann Bleed, a former state hydrologist and director of the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources, says that we first have to understand that the Ogallala Aquifer isn’t one single aquifer but many aquifers, studied and managed as independent parts of the High Plains Aquifer System. When the system began to form over 100 million years ago with the uplifting of the Rocky Mountains, the shallow inland sea that had covered much of North America slowly receded, and rain and snow from the rising craggy peaks ran off, forming rivers that ran east from the mountains to the flatlands. In time, the braided channels filled with silt and gravel, creating spaces that trapped a vast reservoir of freshwater under the alluvial soil. Contrary to popular views, however, an aquifer is not a giant underground lake. It is more complicated than that. In places where rivers once ran, the Ogallala can be quite deep, but in areas where bedrock is high, it may be shallow and cut off from other parts of the system. So some parts of the aquifer, like those in eastern and central Nebraska, can replenish, or “re-charge,” rather quickly, but, for many, it takes hundreds of years. Still others, like the aquifers underlying western Kansas and wide swaths of the Texas Panhandle, re-fill so slowly it’s as if they don’t re-charge at all; geologists call their water “fossil water,” because it is more akin to oil, a finite and non-renewable resource. Bleed emphasizes that aquifers naturally re-charge by the action of surface water slowly percolating down to the more porous layers underneath. Rising temperatures and more frequent droughts mean greater demands on that surface water. Which means less water is available for re-charge at the very times that farmers are already drawing groundwater more rapidly because of the heat. For decades, farmers tried to drill their way out of the problem. When water tables sank and wells failed, they simply dug deeper or dug elsewhere. But now, in some parts of the system, farmers have depleted the groundwater all the way down to the bedrock. And the re-charge rate
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is so slow in some of these places that the aquifer won’t re-fill for thousands of years. For all intents and purposes, that water is never coming back. Don Wilhite, founding director of both the National Drought Mitigation Center and the International Drought Information Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, believes that the effects of this rapid drawdown could be catastrophic. The author of over 150 journal articles, monographs, book chapters, and technical reports on drought and drought management, Wilhite is known in academic and agricultural circles as “Dr. Drought.” In 2013, he garnered public attention by refusing to participate in a state climate-change impact study after the Nebraska legislature passed a bill precluding contributing scientists from addressing the role of human activity. “I couldn’t write a report that would exclude human causes,” Wilhite said at the time. “To be of any use, a climate impact report has to look at the whole picture. The issue is one of science, not politics.” When several other climatologists also declined to join the team, the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln announced that it would conduct its own study, led by Wilhite. (The Nebraska governor, in turn, decided to cancel the government-led investigation.) The IANR released its findings a year later—and its language couldn’t have been more forceful. Not only did it conclude that human activity is implicated in global climate change, it chastened those who sought to create the illusion of scientific disagreement. Wilhite took the message to the local media, insisting that farmers and others dependent on the agricultural industry should set an example by finding ways to mitigate climate change, rather than denying its effects, because they stand to feel the impact of those changes most immediately. He warned that greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, will cause temperatures in Nebraska to increase by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit in less than 50 years. By then, he said, groundwater resources could be so depleted that they won’t be able to rescue farmers from the never-ending drought. At a talk last fall in Lincoln, a capacity crowd squeezed into the sanctu-
PHOTO BY MAISIE PATERSON / GETTY IMAGES
they hoped could improve the design and make the system profitable. In 1953, furnace-like temperatures spread across the Central Plains, pushing hot, dry air across the American breadbasket. The drought that followed held the region relentlessly in its grip. For nearly four years, the middle of the country, from the panhandle of Texas all the way to the Sandhills of Nebraska, experienced low rainfall and stretches where the mercury topped 100 degrees for weeks at a time. The federal government spent $3.3 billion on assistance to farmers, and the beef industry in Texas was nearly destroyed in what became known as the Great Cattle Bust. But farmers in eastern Nebraska were able to weather through on account of their abundant groundwater and the advent of center-pivot irrigation. Other pivot manufacturers soon popped up around eastern Nebraska—Zimmatic in Lindsay, Reinke in Deshler, and Olson Brothers in Atkinson—and then began setting up dealerships across the Great Plains. In the decades that followed, farmers from North Dakota to Texas turned to center-pivot irrigation to provide extra water during key growing times and help them through dry spells. By the end of the 1970s, there were more than 18,000 center pivots operating in Nebraska alone and some 30,000 in other parts of the Great Plains, altogether irrigating more than 20 million acres. The rapid expansion of center-pivot technology allowed farmers to plant on more and more marginal land and to venture into water-intensive crops, leading to dense planting of corn. In just a few short decades, the arid plains were transformed. The changes were so profound that astronauts aboard Skylab reported seeing a checkerboard of round green circles stretching for miles across north-central Nebraska. “Passengers on commercial jet airliners increasingly notice the same sight,” wrote William E. Splinter, chair of the Department of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Nebraska, in an article for Scientific American. “What is being observed is perhaps the most significant mechanical innovation in agriculture since the replacement of draft animals by the tractor.”
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much broader effects. He explained that pumping all of that deep, cold water from the Ogallala and spreading it across many acres has artificially lowered air temperatures and increased humidity. That human-induced microclimate has masked the effects of climate change by forestalling climbing temperatures on a regional level. If we run out of that water, temperatures will rise further. Crippling drought will become the new norm, turning the Central Plains states into a permanent dust bowl. Wilhite’s greatest worry, he told the crowd, is that farmers tend to brush off such dire predictions, insisting that they have lived through many hard times. They say that their grandfathers got through the Dirty Thirties and innovated their way out of the Great Cattle Bust in the 1950s. “Farmers say they’re used to variability,” Wilhite said, “but these projections are way outside the range of anything we’ve ever encountered.” A TOWER FROM one
of Robert Daugherty’s original center-pivot systems
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is on display in the lobby at Valley Irrigation’s manufacturing headquarters in Valley, Nebraska. Matt Ondrejko, vice president for global marketing, told me that the exhibit honors Valley’s central role in averting agricultural disaster in the 1950s and building the large-scale ag economy that followed. Touring the sprawling complex of factories and machine shops bounded by test fields, it’s clear that the folks at Valley recognize how much the future of the company depends on continuing to innovate, particularly in the area of water conservation. “We can’t run a business selling irrigation systems if there’s no groundwater for irrigation,” Ondrejko said. The company is able to tackle the challenge by closely monitoring every step of the construction of its center-pivot units— from the hand assembly of the plastic sprinkler nozzles to a massive crane system that lowers spans of pipe into a gargantuan zinc-and-nickel bath. In recent years, Valley has focused its research and design improvements on two main areas: the sprin-
PHOTO BY SUNSET AVENUE PRODUCTIONS / GETTY IMAGES
ary of the Unitarian Church to hear Wilhite explain the report’s findings. The audience ranged from environmental activists to area farmers who seemed to be taking heed of Wilhite’s warnings. He told the crowd that the projected increase in temperatures means that summertime highs will regularly surpass 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Those extremes falling, as they will, during the peak of the growing season—right before and right after pollination, when even the most cautious and judicious farmers turn on their pivots—will create untenable demands on groundwater. Even if rainfall were to increase, it would not be enough to offset the loss of soil moisture caused by extreme heat. In a hotter climate, it will take more water to generate the same crop yield, even with genetically modified grain hybrids. Unless we change farming and water management, he explained, there simply won’t be enough groundwater to combat such dry conditions. Most importantly, Wilhite said that the loss of groundwater resources would set off a feedback loop with
kler heads and the control mechanisms. By collecting field-moisture data and contrasting yield returns in comparable fields irrigated with different sprinkler heads, engineers are able to “refine the spray patterns and the drop patterns, to reduce loss through evaporation.” The latest design innovations have focused less on fine droplet dispersal and more on getting water all the way to ground level. After all, the goal is watering root systems, not leaving droplets on leaf surfaces where they will be lost. “There’s really precise science in how big the drop is,” Ondrejko said, and “how close we get it to the ground.” Valley has also invested in developing variable-rate irrigation, which allows individual sprinkler heads to be turned on and off in particular parts of the span as it passes over different sections of the field. The goal, Ondrejko said, is being able “to precisely spoon-feed the crop—when it needs it, where it needs it, no more, no less.” Perhaps most important is the development of exact application monitoring, so that farmers can collect precise information on how many acre-inches they are using and where. That’s where technology meets water management efforts in the field. Nebraska is broken into 23 Natural Resources Districts, which were created in 1972 to manage resources at the individual watershed level. Over the years, some NRDs have started requiring metering on new wells, which has helped farmers to track field-by-field usage and encouraged them to reduce their draft. And some, like the Upper Big Blue Natural Resources District (which oversees usage in east-central Nebraska, including most of Rick Hammond’s fields), have undertaken even more ambitious initiatives. The Upper Big Blue, which contains significant acreage classified as “high risk groundwater areas,” launched a study in 2012 comparing crop yields in neighboring fields with identical center-pivot irrigation systems—but with one managed by the farmer and the other managed by the NRD. The farmer applied water according to his own judgment, while the NRD used soil-moisture data collected from a network of monitors inserted into the edges of the field. The NRD achieved a nearly identical
yield—98 percent of what the farmer harvested—while drawing only a third of the water. The latest advancement is a wireless soil-moisture monitoring system that sends data to the farmer electronically. Future improvements will send that data directly to the center pivot, automatically turning the system on when irrigation is needed, and applying water only in the necessary areas. It’s hoped that these new technologies will be able to universally drop usage in these high-risk areas to the point that the aquifer might actually begin to re-charge. WILL IT WORK? David Eigenberg, who
heads the Upper Big Blue NRD, told me that technology has led the way to improved irrigation efficiency, but to really reduce water usage, you have to shift from being a culture that views groundwater irrigation as an individual right to one that sees it as a shared resource. And that means reversing the drawdown is about more than high-tech equipment; it’s about reaching “the guy in the tractor seat.” But even bigger, more sweeping changes may be needed. To address the problem adequately, we may need to re-think what kind of food we grow where, and how much agriculture is feasible in certain landscapes. The center pivot allowed the re-population of many areas that had been vacated during the Dust Bowl—areas that simply couldn’t sustain crops without a new source of water. That new technology, coupled with other advances in agriculture, put more than 100 million acres of marginal land into farm production, much of it for growing water-intensive crops, like corn and soybeans, which today are raised primarily for livestock feed and biofuel, not for human consumption. Farmers have also been encouraged to turn away from more drought-resistant cash crops—such as sugar beets in western Nebraska and sorghum in Oklahoma—in favor of commodity grains that are supported by higher farm subsidies and crop insurance. The Ogallala water boom made it possible for the U.S. to maintain the Cold War balance of power by becoming the world’s granary, but now, as wells run dry in western Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, some agricultural operations are on the move. Instead of
learning from the mistakes of the past, they are simply following the water. After the most recent drought, for example, Cargill, Inc., one of the three biggest beef producers in America, sold its feedlots and shuttered its largest processing facility in the Texas Panhandle, shifting production to its plant in Dodge City, Kansas. Because meat producers prefer to shave margins by concentrating all phases of production, this means that not only are more cattle being watered there, but more corn and soybeans are needed to fatten those cattle for slaughter. A whopping 40 percent of all grain-fed beef in the U.S. is produced using water from the Ogallala. Optimists will point out that there are wide swaths of central and eastern Nebraska where groundwater levels have held steady or even increased in recent decades. York and Hamilton counties, where Rick Hammond raises corn and soybeans, are two of the most intensively farmed and heavily irrigated parts of the state, yet water levels there have only fallen by a depth of about five feet. But Hammond isn’t resting easy. After he was done showing me how his center pivot worked and had shut the system down, he confided that he worried about the long-term future of industrialized agriculture on the Great Plains. “I have seen nature repair itself,” he said, but that process is often slow. “If humans don’t give it a chance, I think it could be bad.” If rainfall patterns keep changing and people don’t conserve groundwater, he said, “there will just be grass in Nebraska.” He grew up in the western part of the state, not far from where archaeological digs have uncovered an ancient ancestor to the Pawnee—people who thrived there for hundreds of years before being displaced. The sites of many of their villages have been found buried under a thick shroud of dust—evidence of a drought that lasted generations, Hammond said. “Could it happen across the Great Plains today?” he asked. “Absolutely.”
•TED GENOWAYS, a contributing
writer at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and OnEarth, is a winner of a National Press Club Award and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. @TEDGENOWAYS
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THE CULTURE PAGES WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE
WAR OF WORDS
FROM NOVELS TO COMIC BOOKS, WRITING FICTION IS HELPING VETERANS OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN PROCESS THE UNSPEAKABLE—THOUGH SOMETIMES THE HORRORS THAT RE-SURFACE ARE ALMOST TOO MUCH TO BEAR. BY ALEXANDER HULS
On many such nights, the war flowed through him. What emerged was the tale of Dutch Shaw, the leader of a special ops team taking out targets in a fictional terrorist organization called Al-Ayeelaa. The protagonist’s wartime experiences—from mundane to traumatic—lead the narrator to observe how Shaw’s “normal was falling apart into something foreign and unknown, like the runoff of a glacier melting into the sea.” After three months, The Knife was finished and Ritchell wasn’t dead. But something he hadn’t expected had begun shifting inside of him during the writing process. “It woke up a bunch of very repressed emotions that, once they came out, it was impossible to ignore,” Ritchell says. “It was the beginning of an awareness that something wasn’t right.” RITCHELL IS one of the 2.7 million
SITTING SAFELY at the computer in his Chicago home, Ross
Ritchell believed he was going to die. The 75th Ranger Regiment veteran didn’t know how or why—he just knew death would come before he could finish The Knife, a war novel influenced by his military experiences during a three-month period between 2007 and 2008. Dying before finishing was unacceptable, so Ritchell wrote like it was an act of survival. “It was almost like I couldn’t write fast enough,” Ritchell says. “It almost felt like I was possessed.” He wrote every day for four to five hours, fueling himself on sensory memories of nighttime operations with his unit; he worked only in the evening, wearing his wartime combat boots, chewing tobacco, and sitting by an open window.
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United States service members, representing less than 1 percent of the nation’s population, who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014. When he finished The Knife (published in 2015 by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House), Ritchell also became a member of a smaller, but growing, group: veterans trading their swords for pens, and using them to write about their wars. Since the mid-2000s, veteran authors—whether Army or Navy, intelligence officer or turret gunner—have been producing a growing catalogue of war fiction. Recent short stories (e.g. Phil Klay’s National Book Award-winning collection Redeployment), novels (Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds), memoirs (Brian Castner’s The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows), satire (David Abrams’ Fobbit), and poetry (Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet) recount what it was like to serve overseas and come back. They do not shy from the uncomfortable questions left in the wake of these conflicts: What was accomplished in the Middle East, and was it worth it? This year brought notable additions to the wave of warrior fiction, including Matt Gallagher’s novel Youngblood and Roy Scranton’s War Porn. But 2016
PHOTO BY TRU STUDIO
also marked an expansion into a different medium: comics. First, Iraq veteran Maximilian Uriarte self-published the graphic novel Terminal Lance: The White Donkey (later picked up and published by Little, Brown and Company), about a vet who battles posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In January, Marvel Comics launched the series Venom: Space Knight, starring Flash Thompson (a former high school bully of, and now friend to, Peter Parker—better known as Spider-Man). In 2008, Thompson lost his legs serving in the military in Iraq; the current series now features him adapting to prosthetics. To ensure authenticity, Marvel hired Dan Nevins, a veteran who lost his own legs in Iraq and an advocate for the Wounded Warrior Project, an organization that helps soldiers who have been injured since 9/11. Though they take a range of styles, the stories being written by veterans all share an urge on the soldiers’ part to both interrogate, as Gallagher writes in Youngblood, “just what the fuck were we doing,” while helping the general population understand what these warriors went through. Still, for many veterans, writing fictionalized versions of their experiences also presents an opportunity for another kind of understanding: a means to deal better with the psychic pain that followed many of them home. The proportion of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who return with PTSD is often cited as being between 10 and 20 percent, but it can be difficult to quantify. Dr. Kathy Platoni, a longtime PTSD expert and clinical psychologist in the Army, believes that number is as high as 50 percent, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has found 48 percent of those who seek their services were diagnosed with mental-health problems. For many of these soldiers, writing has emerged as a therapeutic way to engage with the extreme circumstances they lived through. Those therapeutic benefits come with associated risks though. When you read warrior fiction, which often features violent and traumatic events, it’s hard not to wonder: When is it healthy for veterans to write about their own wars?
WHEN RITCHELL began The Knife,
three years after leaving the service, he didn’t know where he fell on the spectrum of the larger PTSD epidemic. The usual symptoms were there: He had frequent stomach pains and trouble growing his hair. He largely gave up alcohol because he feared he’d start a fight while drunk. Once an outgoing, social person, he now retreated from life and rarely saw friends more than once a year. He struggled to go out because he kept imagining danger everywhere: He believed a restaurant window would shatter from a bomb blast, or an old woman on a train was hiding an explosive. War had changed him— not that he could trace these new anxieties to a source or necessarily know when he was emotionally struggling. In fact, he could barely connect with any of his own feelings. “You’re just so used to hurting, you don’t feel it anymore,” he says. “Part of the reason I didn’t realize that I had PTSD was because it was very easy for me to push the war away whenever I thought about it.” While Ritchell was writing The Knife, the PTSD started to push back. The experiences he drew on to flood his pages began to spill over into waking nightmares. “When I sat down to write for hours on end about the war, it was impossible to escape,” he says. “There’s so much hurt that doesn’t necessarily know how to be confronted or addressed, and when you start writing it just comes out.” He pauses. “Layers of your subconscious start peeling back.” Without knowing it, Ritchell had stumbled upon the therapeutic power of writing, and also its risks. TRAUMA IS chaotic. Memories and
feelings associated with a traumatic event become entangled and formless. Without order, trauma becomes difficult to process. That’s why the goal of many therapeutic approaches is for the patient to confront their trauma, explore it, gain greater control over it, and then accept it with a new perspective, such that it begins to lose its power. To overcome trauma, one must first understand it. “The written form is one of the best ways to come to terms with your expe-
rience, to ... take a long, hard, painful look at it and just de-escalate from your trauma by using something creative to put it into a healthier perspective,” says Platoni, co-editor (with Raymond Monsour Scurfield) of Healing War Trauma: A Handbook of Creative Approaches. The reason writing is so effective for veterans is that it creates order. Accessing a traumatic memory and putting it into words can improve physical and mental health. Writing changes how trauma is organized. Storytelling is especially effective because it’s a fundamental part of how we understand the world. As Travis L. Martin, a veteran and editor of The Journal of Military Experience, told the New York Times in 2013: “If you can put those emotions and the traumatic event in a narrative that makes sense to you, it makes the trauma tangible. If it is tangible, it is malleable. And if it is malleable, you can do something with it.” Once that happens, the brain can re-organize and disarm a traumatic experience. Writing therapy has a specific benefit for veterans: It doesn’t involve talking out loud. “It’s very difficult as a soldier, and as a veteran, to speak about your experiences verbally, because they are often so powerful, and so horrific, it’s hard to verbalize,” Platoni says. She’s right. In 2003 alone, during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, over 90 percent of service members saw dead bodies or were shot at. Over 80 percent knew someone who had been injured or killed. Many veterans also struggle to talk about those experiences because of fear of judgment—so much so that a PTSD-related VA pamphlet called “Returning From the War Zone” anticipates soldiers may be “embarrassed to talk to someone about it” and assures them that “mental health problems are not a sign of weakness.” Still, self-consciousness and shame prevent some from seeking support at the VA, which offers health facilities where those with PTSD can receive counseling and psychotherapy. Even when soldiers do go, they can be at risk of what a 2008 Rand Corporation report called “Invisible Wounds of
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War”: “Roughly half of those who need treatment ... seek it, but only slightly more than half who receive treatment get minimally adequate care.” Which is one reason so many veterans have found help in writing. Not just those who publish their fiction, but also those who fill workshops such as Warrior Writers, or Syracuse University’s Veterans’ Writing Group, or the Veterans Writing Workshop and other such groups, which are appearing nationwide to assist veterans in writing about their experiences. Some organizations place a greater emphasis on writing than on healing. Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Brandon Willitts is the co-founder of War After Words, an organization that aspires to do just that. “It’s much more about channeling our literary voices, and then allowing people to take us as serious artists and as serious thinkers, versus just as veterans,” he says. That’s not to say he doesn’t believe writing can help—though he prefers to stress its abilities to bridge the militarycivilian divide—but he believes it can only do so much. “It takes forever to write a short story or a novel. If we’re balancing our moods on whether or not we have a good writing day, that to me seems risky,” he says. It’s not the only risk. A 2004 article in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association noted some studies that found writing can initially amplify the very symptoms it’s meant to diminish—sometimes for up to three months. “When we start telling a story, what comes out is these images,” says Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, author of The Mind’s Eye: Image and Memory in Writing About Trauma, a retired professor and chair of the writing department at Ithaca College, and currently a visiting professor at University of Massachusetts—Amherst. “When they fall out like that in writing, we feel them again ... almost as if we were there.” For those exploring personal trauma on their own, that task can be perilous because they may not be prepared for, or know what to do with, what gets uncorked. That’s why MacCurdy reinforces Willitts’ point. For all its healing powers, writing alone is not a cure. “You
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Writing therapy has a particular benefit for veterans: It doesn’t involve talking out loud.
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need a therapist to help with how this is going to be integrated into life,” she says. If soldiers and therapists together anticipate these initial complications, and if they couple writing with other treatment, you’re looking at a powerful therapeutic tool for trauma. “They’re in the midst of a process, and in the process it’s difficult,” MacCurdy says of these warriors. “It can feel like you’re in a tornado, you’re flying around all over the place, but you will land, and you will land softly because you’re the one in control of this.” AFTER HE began writing The Knife,
Ritchell’s PTSD got worse. He started having panic attacks, lost 30 pounds, and became more deeply depressed. His worst moment came one evening when he went to check on his sleeping son. His novel includes a scene where his protagonist’s unit kills a child they believe to be a threat. It’s a scene Ritchell wrote by summoning the memory of seeing the body of a young child overseas—the same image that suddenly came to mind as he watched his son sleeping in the same position as the dead body. “That really fucked with my head a lot,” he says. It was one of the moments that made him realize he had PTSD and set him on the path toward help. To borrow a line from The Knife: “He finally admitted to himself that he couldn’t do it anymore, that all the ghosts had finally caught up with him.” In the fall of 2015, nearly eight years after he left the service, Ritchell went to the VA for a psychiatric evaluation. As he sat in the waiting room, nervous
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thoughts ran through his head: “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I don’t have this condition. I don’t want this condition.” Ritchell was assigned the VA’s second-highest PTSD rating category: 70 percent. When I asked him what qualified him for that percentage, he offered to share his symptoms, what he called his “résumé of struggle.” He read the VA’s diagnosis: “suspiciousness, depressed mood, near-continuous depression affecting the ability to function independently, appropriately, or effectively, disturbances of motivation and mood, anxiety, difficulty in establishing and maintaining effective work and social relationships, chronic sleep impairment, near continuous panic affecting the ability to function independently, appropriately, and effectively, occupational and social impairment with reduced reliability and productivity.” When he finished, his voice got low and quiet. “That’s who I am,” he said. It sounded like resignation, but, after a moment, it struck me how much courage the recitation must have required: to read, out loud, a list of every part of himself that he had once denied. It wasn’t resignation. It was acceptance. Ritchell is careful to emphasize the healing powers of writing for other veterans—and its limitations. “It would be difficult to just go ahead and say: ‘Oh, you’re having problems? Why don’t you just write about it and you’ll get better,’” he says. But, he adds, “I think you’re putting yourself into a great position to get better. It’s a step in the right direction. I’ll stake my life on that.” Ritchell still believes he is going to die; that conviction, he discovered, is a symptom of PTSD. But that belief, like a growing number of his symptoms, no longer controls him. He’s becoming free of them. Which prompts the question: Will he continue to write about his war, or is that, like his PTSD, something he’s starting to leave behind? “I think that story is written,” he says. “The book is just like a dream that I woke up from. I don’t need to go back to sleep.”
•ALEXANDER HULS is a writer based in Toronto, Ontario. @ALXHULS
WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE
POET
GUEST PROGRAMMER:
Molly Crabapple
MAHMOUD DARWISH COURTESY OF DON USNER
Through intricate, vibrant illustration and immersive reporting, artist and writer Molly Crabapple has given voice to her generation’s most pressing social problems and the radicals working to end them. In Vice, the Guardian, and others, Crabapple has written on the Syrian Civil War and on Guantánamo Bay. In her paintings, exhibited widely and in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, she has depicted dissidents in Egypt and Greece and on Wall Street. Her illustrated memoir, Drawing Blood, was published last year, and she is currently at work on an account of life under ISIS in Syria, written in collaboration with Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham.
Mahmoud Darwish Darwish (1942–2008) was a Palestinian poet who lived in exile from his occupied home country for 26 years and wrote about displacement. Today, his verses are scrawled on the walls of the Aida refugee camp on the West Bank.
Why “In one of his poems—in English it’s called ‘On This Land’—he makes a list of the things that justify life, in his opinion. With so few words, he summons up a world that’s deeply rooted and built on rebellion, humanism, and books.”
Farthest Field Though Indian journalist Raghu Karnad’s 2015 history of the Indian volunteer army in World War II has a large scope, his take is intimate. The book is told through the eyes of three of Karnad’s own family members who died fighting in the war.
Why “Being Jewish, I thought I knew so much about World War II. But this completely changed how I thought about England, and how I thought about who the ‘good guys’ are. It’s one of the most perspective-changing books I’ve ever read.”
Chittaprosad The Indian political artist is perhaps most famous for documenting the Bengal Famine with woodcuts that ran in communist publications. Hungry Bengal, which defied the British occupying government, was burned in his lifetime.
Why “One of the things that attracts me to artists is how they can reject narrow categorization. Chittaprosad’s most famous work is a series of banned pictures. But he did kids’ books, political posters. He did everything.”
Mashrou’ Leila Beirut’s LebaneseAmerican indie-rock band Mashrou’ Leila openly supports religious and sexual freedom, which has limited their ability to perform in the Middle East. But political controversy hasn’t dampened their appeal.
Why “In ‘Fasateen,’ the lyrics are those that someone would sing to a lover who had left them after they had sworn they’d be together. But in the video, the singer wears a dress, which he destroys—along with other symbols of matrimony.”
BOOK
ARTIST
BAND
“With so few words, he summons up a world that’s deeply rooted and built on rebellion, humanism, and books.” VISIT PSMAG.COM FOR MORE OF CRABAPPLE’S RECOMMENDATIONS.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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Hip-Hop and the Liberation of Women in Kabul
The Taliban may no longer control the airwaves, but young women in Afghanistan still face torture and death for performing music. Meet the women who are pushing back—by rapping, singing, even playing the cello. BY WILLIAM HOCHBERG
“TRY TO BE A WOMAN in Afghanistan.” The phrase is a gauntlet, thrown by
a young woman unleashing hip-hop verses into the camera. She’s standing in the dilapidated Darul Aman Palace about 10 miles outside the center of Kabul, wearing distressed jeans and rapping in her native Dari tongue: “You [men] never feel ashamed of your own infidelity, but when I raise my voice, you cut my tongue. Get lost! You did not create me.” It’s Soosan Firooz, perhaps Kabul’s best-known female rapper, and she’s shouting down an abusive lover in a music video for her anthem of Afghan women, “Naqisul Aql.” Firooz says that her brash, unapologetic hip-hop has earned her threats of kidnapping, acid attacks, and death—one of several reasons that her father became her de facto bodyguard. Fans and haters alike comment on her YouTube page. One supporter urges: “Keep on fighting sister even if that involves you dying for your right in your country!!!!!” Graffiti on one of the front walls of the bullet-pocked palace reads “Death to the worldwide infidels”—perhaps scrawled by militias after the fall of the Afghan Marxist regime in 1992. The Taliban went on to outlaw virtually all accompanied music, an arrangement that lasted until a United States-led coalition ousted the extremist group in 2001. Still, as comparatively open as life in Kabul has become under the protection of Afghan and coalition troops, the cultural renaissance following legalized music has been no Summer of Love for the country, and particularly not for Afghan women. Competitors on the reality television talent show Afghan Star have been threatened with death, while women deemed insufficiently submissive are at risk of having their noses cut off, getting acid thrown in their face, enduring severe beatings, or worse. A report from the United Nations Women Afghanistan Country Office
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ranks Afghanistan among the worst places on Earth to be born a woman. Female Afghan musicians say spinning their tunes is safer than it used to be—but only marginally. A young rapper named Sonita Alizadeh says her family considered selling her as a bride when she was 10 and again at 16. She left them and launched a career, recording a rap video called “Daughters for Sale” in which she wears a wedding dress and, on her forehead, a barcode. “In Afghanistan, just being a woman and singing, no matter what you are singing about, is very brave,” Alizadeh says. (She now lives in Utah, thanks to the non-profit Strongheart Group, an advocacy organization that sponsored Alizadeh’s emigration and enrollment at Wasatch Academy, a private secondary school in the state.) Nevertheless, opportunities to learn performance and songwriting are greater than before, and Kabul has slowly blossomed with music. That’s the view of Ahmad Sarmast, an ethnomusicologist and the founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, where young, disenfranchised children come to study music (often with the help of foreign aid workers), including classical, traditional Afghan music, and even pop genres. Between 2013 and 2015, Sarmast saw his enrollment of girls almost double. ANIM currently has around 250 pupils, including 70 girls and an all-female orchestra, Sarmast says. His promotion of co-ed music education, and especially of teaching music to girls, made him a target for the Taliban, and, in 2014, a suicide attack during a performance left him with shrapnel wounds and partial hearing loss. The Taliban’s violent suppression of music applied equally to Bach inventions, Afghan ragas, and indigenous rap with a beat. Holly Bishop, an American music instructor with the Connecticutbased non-governmental organization Cuatro Puntos, tells me about one of her students, an Afghan girl who said she fended off an arranged marriage by threatening to tell the whole village she was studying music in Kabul. “The girl’s mother who was arranging the marriage backed off,” Bishop says, “out
WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE
of fear of punishment from the Taliban and her family for allowing her daughter to learn music.” “Despite the increased security we need nowadays, there’s still a very vibrant and exciting music scene in Kabul,” says Saad Mohseni, the country’s foremost media mogul, whose MOBY Group owns TV and radio stations around the country. Mohseni’s network has aired two Western-style music competitions: Afghan Star and The Voice of Afghanistan. In an early season of Afghan Star, the Taliban threatened the life of a girl who sang and danced too freely, as seen in the 2009 documentary of the same name. Nonetheless, the show, now in its 12th season, is more of a hit than ever, Mohseni says. “These performers are becoming role models, or even superstars, for the new generation of Afghans,” Mohseni says. “I think that encourages people to come forward. Sure, conservative Afghan families are reluctant to have their daughters go out and perform on our shows ... but the fact is they’re coming out in larger numbers than ever.” Massood Sanjer, director of general entertainment for MOBY Group in Kabul, says if you have a TV or radio receiver, the airwaves over Afghanistan today are vibrant and uncensored— though Sanjer still remembers the late 1990s, when the Taliban was in power and exerted stringent control over the country’s radio network. Back then, the Taliban forced Sanjer to read daily propaganda on Voice of Sharia, the Taliban’s state radio organ—exploiting his nearly flawless English, which Sanjer taught himself by watching Western TV shows and films as a boy. While the Taliban used to beat men for listening to music, they “reserved their greatest enthusiasm for punishing women,” writes Rod Nordland in his new book The Lovers, the nonfiction tale of a young couple that elopes and escapes rural Afghanistan for America. Women suspected of “moral crimes” would be “taken to the National Stadium and, in front of a capacity crowd that had been rounded up and ordered to attend, stoned to death, or shot in the head, always pi-
ously covered up by a robin’s-egg-blue burqa as they sat in the dirt waiting for the end,” Nordland writes. The relative cultural freedom of the city-state of Kabul—or the Ka-bubble, as Western expats call it—is fragile. Earlier this year, a Taliban suicide bomber reportedly rammed a TV truck belonging to Mohseni’s network in central Kabul, killing seven and injuring more than 20. Since then, death threats against media workers and personalities, especially against women, have grown more frequent, according to a BBC report. The irony, according to Sarmast, is that the Taliban isn’t fighting against Western culture. What they’re really fighting is Afghanistan’s own rich musical heritage. “It’s a totally uneducated, narrow, and almost illiterate people who are misinterpreting Islamic ideology,” he says. “There is nothing explicitly written against music in the Holy Quran.” Even so, in the wake of Taliban rule, musical culture in Afghanistan is evolving in response to past suppressions, and Afghan women worldwide are taking the lead with performances of inherent rebellion. Take a young woman named Paradise Sorouri, who—uncowed by repeated death threats—continues to rap and sing as part of a duo with her fiancé (he goes by the sobriquet Diverse). Their group is called the 143Band, named for the number of letters in the three words “I love you”—a rebuke to the hatred that greets so many female musicians in Afghanistan: “They think if you are a rapper or singer, then you are a prostitution promoter,” Diverse told me via Facebook chat. In a 2012 video, Sorouri sings the refrain: “Afghanistan is my country name / But is full of pain.” Her performance is all confessional fire: “I was burned in the face in the name of Islam / Disgraced for revenge / Had acid poured all over me ... oh people don’t feel sorry for me / Just send my words to the world.”
• WILLIAM HOCHBERG is a writer
and music business attorney based in Los Angeles. @BILLEETO
Pacific Standard Picks BY ALISSA WILKINSON
THE BIRTH OF A NATION Directors are becoming increasingly bold about telling brutal stories of American slavery from the slaves’ perspective—from Django Unchained to 12 Years a Slave to Roots. What sets Nate Parker’s gritty new film apart is how deeply religion is involved. Parker—the movie’s writer and director—stars as Nat Turner, a slave who led a rebellion in 1831. Turner, who was taught to read by his plantation’s mistress, became a preacher, hired by plantation owners to quash unrest among their slaves. In contrast to the inspiring role the Bible played in last year’s Selma, which cited Exodus as a metaphor for the civil rights movement, Turner’s movie shows how the text can become a tool for oppression. Depending on who’s quoting it, the Bible can alternately encourage complacency among the powerless or spur them to violence: When Turner comes to terms with his complicity in keeping his fellow slaves in check, for instance, he uses his strong moral conviction in part to validate a violent revolt—one that left 250 dead. FOR MORE RECOMMENDATIONS FROM OUR CULTURE WRITERS AND EDITORS, VISIT PSMAG.COM.
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PRINTED PISTOLS AND RACIAL PANIC
WHEN CODY WILSON PIONEERED 3-D PRINTING FOR GUNS, HE CLAIMED THE TECHNOLOGY REPRESENTED A VICTORY FOR LIBERTY. IN WILSON’S NEW BOOK, IT SEEMS “LIBERTY” CAN ALSO MEAN “RACIAL PURITY.”
Shelf Help Exiled in America: Life on the Margins in a Residential Motel • Christopher Dum • Columbia University Press Sociologist Christopher Dum spent a year living in the Boardwalk, a run-down, single-room-occupancy motel populated almost entirely by social outcasts with nowhere else to go. The management knows that most of its tenants— including sex offenders, former prisoners, drug addicts, and the mentally ill—are stuck there, and take this as license to do little but collect rent; the place gets more squalid and unsafe by the day, and the surrounding community wants it gone. This book, Dum’s debut, is a lively evocation of a precarious, misunderstood community’s rhythms, textures, and tools for living together. It also contains a nicely potted history of American motels, once symbols of freedom for car-owning travelers, now disreputable, lastditch options for the transient and marginalized—living monuments to what happens when massive social problems run up against a national desire for Band-Aid solutions.
—PETER C. BAKER
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BY PETER C. BAKER
Cody Wilson was 24 when he decided to design a gun that anyone could make at home with a basic 3-D printer. It was 2012, and he was slogging through law school at the University of Texas–Austin, reading anarchist and anti-state philosophy in his spare time, hungering for a sense of purpose. Almost as soon as he announced his plan for a “wiki weapon” online, it prompted a wave of media attention. In 2013, he uploaded blueprints for a print-at-home rifle receiver that you can combine with factory-made parts to create an unregistered semi-automatic AR-15. More famously, he also uploaded blueprints for the Liberator, a plastic pistol you can print entirely in the privacy of your own garage. The Liberator isn’t much of a gun. Among other problems, it cracks easily and becomes unusable, often after a single shot. Any American looking to shoot someone would have a much easier time buying a standard gun at the nearest gun show. The Liberator’s power lies less in what it can do and more in the world it suggests: a world of Liberator-style guns and file-sharing networks that spring up as quickly as they get shut down. Shortly after Wilson posted the file to his website, Defense Distributed, the Department of State ordered him to remove it. But Wilson’s team claimed that 100,000 people had already downloaded it, and today the file is easily accessible. For his efforts, Wilson has been profiled breathlessly by journalists around the world; invited to speak at the Museum of Modern Art; and named both a “Most Dangerous Man on the Internet” and “Most Dangerous Man in the World” by Wired. The guy makes good copy, in part because his project is a plausible intersection for all manner of
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overlapping, hot-topic trends. Defense Distributed is a gun control story; a free speech story; a WikiLeaks-inflected “Internet dissemination versus The Man” story; and a disruption story. Plus, Wilson is colorful: young, brash, and prone to peppering his speech— and now, in his memoir, Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free, his prose—with allusions to philosophers as disparate as Nietzsche, Foucault, Proudhon, and Baudrillard. The short version of Wilson’s philosophy in Come and Take It: State power is out of control, and we’ve forgotten how to be individuals. This problem, as Wilson sees it, is so totalizing that any belief in piecemeal reforms is delusional. Only a complete rupture with the present will do. Finally: This necessary rupture will be achieved only by Liberator-type projects that break the state’s monopoly on force. Only then will we be transported from the stale present into the clarifying light of true freedom. For all of the attention lavished on Wilson’s projects, very few of his interviewers have asked him to elaborate on what the post-rupture world might look like. At first glance, Come and Take It strikes a similarly vague note. For Wilson, the connection between his project and a better (truer, freer, less coercive) future is self-evident. Instead of trying to prove the case, he instead charts the play-by-play of his transformation from frustrated law student to enfant terrible of the radical gun-deregulation movement. The basic structure and tone will be familiar to anyone who has seen Fight Club or The Matrix: alienated young man, armed with extra-special sensitivity to the petty delusions of his fellow humans, finds his way into an underground network of similarly minded men.
WHERE CULTURE MEETS CONSCIENCE
In prose that oozes alienation, Wilson recalls traveling to California, Switzerland, Austria, and England, making contact with gun enthusiasts, anarchists, hackers, cryptocurrency activists, and the like, all claiming they know how to usher in the revolution, or at least how to prepare for it (or, at the very least, how to get Cody Wilson some money). Along the way, he drops a few hints of a worldview just slightly more specific, and significantly more disturbing, than unregulated guns mean freedom, freedom is good. These hints comprise a very small portion of the book (consolidated, they would take up little more than a single page), but they are its most telling element—the expression of a racial panic, an aspect of Wilson’s ideology curiously absent from coverage of his project to date. The first clue passes so quickly it’s easy to miss. In an airport en route to London, Wilson finds himself overcome by disgust at a security agent, whom he describes as a “slope-backed cretin.” Later, Wilson goes out of his way to recall how, in Austria, he found Slovaks to be a “hideous race,” claiming that “you see it in how they walk, how they carry themselves.” Observing a group of students watching President Barack Obama on television, he quotes every eugenicist’s favorite snippet of Nietzsche: “Too many are born.” Sitting on a bench in Vienna, he whistles “Dixie,” the de facto anthem of the Confederate States of America. (Wilson, who is white, was born and raised in Arkansas.) In California, he talks strategy with “Mencius Moldbug,” the Internet pseudonym of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer and central voice of the “neo-reactionary” right, who has proclaimed (though Wilson doesn’t mention this) that some humans are better suited to slavery than others. On the surface, Wilson’s stated concern is freedom. But scratch that surface and it becomes clear that, while Wilson’s “freedom” might mean, in part, “freedom from the state,” it also means freedom, backed by force, from the “too many”: the conformist sheeple, hideous races, and slopebacked cretins of the world.
Shelf Help Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free • Cody Wilson • Gallery Books
If this sounds like a stretch, I recommend you pull up Wilson’s Twitter feed and scroll back to May 9th, where he affixed the following caption to a photograph of a racially diverse group of Hillary Clinton supporters: “Quick, find one genetically fit person.” Wilson’s project might, as a variety of media observers have speculated, pose deep dilemmas about how to regulate open-source software in an increasingly networked, print-on-demand future. His memoir, though, suggests the existence of much more pressing questions among his sizable audience (Simon & Schuster reportedly paid $250,000 for his book). As media scholar Robbie Fordyce has noted, users of the white supremacist website Stormfront frequently discuss the importance of 3-D printing—and not just of weapons—in the coming of a white utopia. Come and Take It is an especially illuminating read in the Season of Donald Trump—another white preacher who stumbled onto a bigger audience than almost anyone foresaw, and whose nativist appeal the overwhelming majority of politicians, journalists, and pundits were much too slow to understand. Trump promises white America that a “great again” future awaits, and that he knows exactly how to get there. Wilson sings a similar song, but adds a verse: To prepare for greatness, grab (or print) a gun.
Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures • Edited by T.M. Luhrmann & Jocelyn Marrow • University of California Press Numerous international studies have confirmed that, while schizophrenia occurs at the same rate (one person in 100) worldwide, the specifics—who gets the disease, and how it affects their lives—vary from culture to culture. Notably, individuals with schizophrenia do worse in the West than in the developing world. This anthology collects case studies from around the globe, with dispatches from India, Thailand, Ghana, and other locations. The point is less to advance a single, overarching argument and more to demonstrate, through close attention to people’s accounts of their own lives, how inextricable psychosis is from how a society responds to it. As the editors note, people with schizophrenia in Western societies are more likely to lose their place in family and social life, triggering “social defeat”: a debilitating sense of loss, failure, and hopelessness. —PETER C. BAKER
• PETER C. BAKER is a Pacific Standard contributing editor in Illinois.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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THE CULTURE PAGES
ONE LAST THING
Although David Tran invented Sriracha sauce and trademarked its greentopped, rooster-adorned bottle design, he never trademarked the name “Sriracha” itself. Now Tabasco, Kikkoman, and Frank’s Red Hot, among others, market their own Srirachas.
Sr racha PHOTO BY THE VOORHES
If it weren’t so delicious, it would be passé. Americans can now find Huy Fong Foods’ Sriracha sauce everywhere, from French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Michelin-starred restaurants to your local Applebee’s. For children of immigrants who, like me, grew up with the green-capped bottle on the kitchen table, the fuss can feel a little galling. In publicschool lunchrooms across America in the 1980s and ’90s, we got made fun of for our weird and smelly food. Now, as adults, those old bullies rhapsodize about putting Sriracha on everything. I’m not the first to get frustrated at the trendiness of “ethnic” cuisine. In recent years, chefs and immigrants’ sons Eddie Huang and Francis Lam
have taken their pain public, writing in Gilt Taste that it feels like a slight when chefs are celebrated for cooking foods outside their cultures while immigrant restaurant owners, cooking the same dishes, don’t get the same acclaim. Still, Huang acknowledges that folks back in the motherland are constantly re-mixing their cuisines. So how protective should I really be of “rooster sauce”? For one thing, Sriracha was never a purely Southeast Asian food. It’s a Southeast Asian American sauce, its exact recipe created by the ethnically Chinese David Tran after he arrived in the United States from Vietnam. For at least as long as I’ve known how to read, Sriracha’s back label has exhorted users to try the condiment on pasta, pizza, and hot dogs, among other things. It’s likely that Tran is talking to non-Asian Americans here, striving for broader appeal, but I always interpreted the label as Tran telling us we could make this new, alien food—American food—more palatable by applying his sauce too. Whenever I cook the Chinese and Vietnamese dishes my mother taught me to make, I open all of the kitchen windows, turn on two overhead fans, light a scented candle, and close my bedroom door. I feel bad about it, like I’m trying to Yankee Candle Company away my origins, but I also don’t want my clothes to smell the way they did when I was growing up. For America’s immigrant families, figuring out where we fit in is a lifetime’s work. Tran found success and cachet in making a product all his own. The rest of us will have to find our own solutions. —FRANCIE DIEP
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2016 • PSMAG.COM
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And remember to always wear your sunscreen! You won’t be sorry! – DIANE KEATON
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A STAGGERING ONE-THIRD OF THE LAND ON EARTH IS USED TO RAISE LIVESTOCK AND ITS FOOD. REDUCING MEAT CONSUMPTION WOULD FREE UP VAST AMOUNTS OF LAND AND WATER, WOULD GREATLY MITIGATE CLIMATE CHANGE, WOULD ALLEVIATE THE SUFFERING OF BILLIONS OF ANIMALS, WOULD ELIMINATE MOUNTAINS OF CHEMICAL FERTILIZER, AND WOULD MAKE PEOPLE HEALTHIER. P.32