The Culture of Radishes, Dandelions and People

...what's it take for people to really thrive?

Photo courtesy Mary A. Scholz

A few days ago I dug a large bunch of dandelions out of the garden and was on my way in with them when I happened to see Mary pulling into the driveway coming home from work. I waited for her. As she pulled up next to where I stood, she rolled down the car window, looked at the dandelions I was holding and said, “Dinner!”

I smiled. Indeed, that was the plan — we were having dandelion greens sautéed with onions as our vegetable that night for dinner. Then as I came inside to wash them, I thought: Where else in my local world might such an exchange be plausible? It occurred to me that I was living in a pretty narrow subculture, one where Mary’s seeing dinner in a handful of dirty dandelions would be perfectly intelligible to both of us.

I’ve been thinking about culture a lot since my last posting here on Substack. People like me who are big into growing plants often refer to a plant’s “culture conditions”. It’s like: Ferns usually like it shady and moist. Cacti prefer dry and sunny. These are their preferred culture conditions. Ditto, food plants have their preferred culture conditions, too. What’s the ideal culture of a radish? Sun, water, soil, enough space between the plants, enough potassium, enough micronutrients to build up their immunity to pests, and so on. As a gardener, I try to provide these things. I do what I can to make sure my radishes have what they need to thrive.

Lately, however, the question on my mind has been: What about us? What about people? How’s our culture doing? Is it helping people thrive the way that loose, rich soil and a sunny spot with ample water, space and nutrients helps radishes or leeks to fully express their genetic potential?

I think it’s an important question. To get a better handle on this, different kinds metrics from health stats to psychological surveys and data on economics, crime and addiction rates can be helpful. Each of these is a proxy measure for human well-being, each one a lens on how well we’re doing as a culture. I mean, think of it — like, with the opioid epidemic, people will always use these substances, that’s true. But c’mon now: How crappy does life have to be that being under the influence of these drugs seems like an improvement to large numbers of people? Let’s get real here. Something is off.

And I’m not dismissing in any way that these are painful individual tragedies. Each and every one. I’m saying the prevalence of this country’s manifold problem with addiction, addictions of all kinds, reflects a culture problem. Addiction statistics can be read as a cultural report card.

And what about the young ones? How are they doing? There, too, stats I’m looking at are alarming. Asthma, gastrointestinal issues, rising incidence of diabetes, not to mention suicide — the chronic health problems run the gamut and according to what I’ve read, they’re rising steeply. For example, my understanding is that teenagers are now being diagnosed with bowel disorders that used to be uncommon even among the elderly. Why isn’t the declining health of our children front-page news and at the top of the national agenda? For a mammalian species to care so little for the well-being of its young is itself an indicator of cultural health. And not a good one. Trends like this represent a giant “Wrong Way” sign, and as a culture, looks to me like rather than course correct, we’re hitting the gas, Thelma and Louise-style.

Back to the garden, if my radishes are not healthy and naturally pest-free, that’s on me. I’m in charge of their culture conditions. So when I had problems with the radishes, as I once did here – flea beetles and root maggots, both – it took me a while but eventually I figured out what was wrong. I provided what they needed. And since then they have been much healthier radishes. And that’s a good thing because only healthy plants – plants with the strength to naturally fend off pests and disease and the inherent vitality needed to manifest good color, lovely form, and viable progeny – will help us do the same.

Likewise with human culture: on aggregate, all the indicators of well-being like strength, health, pro-social behavior and mental acuity reflect our culture conditions. Every time. And that’s particularly true if there’s a consistent pattern over broader sweeps of the population. And for better or for worse, it can also involve intergenerational, inheritable trends.

If I plant a radish in thin dry soil in the shade of a shrub it will probably attempt to grow. It may even succeed in flowering and setting seed if left to mature there. But I guarantee it won’t look like a healthy radish. It might not even look like a radish at all. And I also guarantee that the seed from a weaker plant will be smaller, weaker, less vigorous and less viable.

With humans, when I look at culture conditions, what I mainly focus on are the quality and adequacy of nutrition and water, ambient and local levels of environmental toxicity, the strength of human relationships, and then, also very important, patterns of language, thought, socialization and the physical infrastructure of a given society.

And the challenge there is, these culture conditions tend to become invisible to us as they are normalized, whatever they are. Let’s start with something very basic: In the broader culture here in the U.S., people sit in chairs. We don’t think about it. We also tend have a lot of back, pelvic and lower body trouble and range-of-motion issues. We don’t make the connection. Or we do make the connection, but then we pay to drive and sit on the floor of a yoga studio. I mean, don’t get me wrong: yoga is great. What I’m suggesting is that a big part of the reason it’s so needed is because it’s a cultural antidote to some of the damage we do to ourselves through cultural norms like chair-sitting. So yes, do yoga. But I also want to say, we can sit on the floor more, at any time. We don’t need a teacher’s permission, we don’t need special clothes, and we don’t need to drive anywhere to do it. Also, we can play with the children on the floor. They’re flexible. They’re growing. We can imitate them.

Bigger thing I’m pointing to here is, culture makes many things invisible. And if we don’t see what habitual chair sitting is doing to us, what else aren’t we noticing? Next thing you know if you watch TV you might even start to take war and chronic ill health as well as blaring admonitions to consume more and more as normal and acceptable. Actually, I think many people are already there.

Cell phones, branded “smart” by clever, manipulative sloganeers, have been part of the culture for decades now. What’s the verdict? Are these things healthy additions to our culture, or do they trend more toward unhealthy addictions? People now get “tech neck” from too much texting, and that’s just for starters. How “smart” is that? Mary told me there are now detox centers for electronic gaming and social media addiction. How “smart” is that? I’ve read that exposure to social media correlates with anxiety and poor mental health in young people. How smart is that?

Okay…time for a break. Lemme tell you a little story. Maybe this’ll help.

As a child, I’d often go to Detroit with my dad to visit my grandparents on a Sunday afternoon. When I was there I would build things with dominoes or play with the U.S. map puzzle my Grampa Scholz bought for himself to better understand U.S. geography. Dad and Grampa would talk, maybe drink a single beer each, maybe watch a Tigers game on TV or play a game of chess, and almost certainly argue about politics and current events, about which they frequently disagreed. Often enough the argument would reach a stage where tempers flared and there would be shouting in German. My grandmother would contribute with the one word a debilitating stroke had left with: Nein! Nein!

This was about the time in the afternoon when, to change the tone, Grampa would serve us some kind of a snack. A couple slices of salami and cheese, sourdough rye from a little bakery on 7 Mile Road a few blocks away — that would be a typical light lunch. In the summer, we’d follow Grampa into his back yard and he’d pull us a few radishes. These would be added to the meal. We dipped the pink, white, and red roots onto the salt that we sprinkled onto our plates. At the conclusion of the meal we would all have coffee and sometimes a singular anise-flavored cookie, one cookie apiece, cookies so hard that we’d have to dip them in our coffee to soften them. All this was a regular thing for me, ages 5-10.

Radishes were a part of my culture. And yes, I was a 5-year-old coffee drinker. My place was set and the coffee was poured into a china cup on a saucer. Coffee was part of the culture, too.

So was my grandfather’s trademark saying, “There’s no such thing as strong coffee, just weak people.”

You can take that any way you like.

As a child I liked sweets, like most kids do. But my palate was also conditioned by this culture to accept pungent and bitter flavors. And obviously, after that, the idea of walking out to the garden to get something to eat wasn’t foreign to me, either.

So today I go out and pick dandelions, wash and eat them. I eat the flowers, too, right off the plants. They are tender and bitter and sweet and wonderful. It’s like eating sunshine. The plants then take in more sunshine and make more flowers, more little miniature suns shining up at me from the earth. And I’m grateful.

Years ago when I took a community ed. cooking class to learn how to make masala dosas, we were taught that in traditional East Indian thought, the most basic way of eating — “The Saintly Way,” in our teacher’s terms — is to pick a plant or a part of a plant and eat it on the spot. I recently asked a friend who studies ayurveda if she’d heard of this. She replied (yes, via text, on a “smart” phone) that eating this way has more prana, the more life energy in it.

It sort of begs the question: What happens to a culture when the “saintly way” of eating, with all of its potent immediacy and intimacy, becomes rare, and people get used to eating processed food out of plastic bags?

As for me, I’m creating my own little subculture here, or maybe it’s a micro-culture. Anyone is welcome but right now it’s Mary, me, friends, family. By living into these forms of reverence, these appreciations and these kinds of valuing, we in effect promote all of this. It just happens. Aliveness is contagious! I don’t have to carry forward everything of my local culture and things I learned growing up, but will also save some of the good stuff. And with gratitude, sometimes I will borrow from other cultures, too, like when I sometimes incorporate dandelion greens into a traditional Tunisian-spiced French lentil soup, as I learned from Khaled at his restaurant in Ann Arbor. Absolutely delicious. So yeah, we can improvise our own culture here, and it’s probably a good idea, given what I can see happening with the heavily promoted foods, ideas, infrastructure and values in the broader culture and what these things are doing to people.

It’s a bit odd, though, to be this out of step with the mainstream; that I admit. But it’s pretty clear now that stepping out in this way by building our own mini-cultures might be just the thing needed to help us gain perspective on the larger culture in which we are enmeshed. We need that perspective, I think. We have some choices to make here. Important ones. Every day. Collectively, and individually. Personally I can tell you that the larger culture doesn’t even look “normal” to me anymore. It certainly doesn’t look healthy. My goal is to create healthier alternatives.