D ANA P HILLIPS

Slimy Beastly Life: Thoreau on Food and Farming

Nature Must Be Overcome

In the essay that lends his book Sick of Nature its title, David Gessner complains about the straitjacket of nature writing. Being a nature writer, he says, forces one to censor oneself, to hold forth about the natural world without ever using the word shit (3). As an advocate of wildness in literature, Gessner feels compelled to abandon the piety and sobriety that are hallmarks of the American nature writing tradition. He is not mistaken to feel this compulsion. On the dialectical principle that a tradition's strengths, thanks to the ineluctable workings of irony, provide the most reliable clues to its weaknesses, piety and sobriety can be regarded as two of American nature writing's greatest limitationsperhaps as the very arms of the straightjacket in which our nature writers must garb themselves. Because Gessner wishes to be impious and inebriate, he muses on shit and on the several pleasures of pissing outdoors, which he nds especially intense after he has pounded down a few beers. The author of Sick of Nature is onto something that needs pursuing, though perhaps it were best not pursued any further by Gessner himself. He cashes out his plea for wildness by treating his topic in an antic fashion and by posturing as a wild man, though he gives the impression of beingthough only on occasionno more than a willfully bad boy. Committed rebels do not spend their free time playing Ultimate Frisbee, as Gessner does (he writes about the sport, and the bros with whom he plays it, at length). So his reader
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.3 (Summer 2012) Advance Access publication September 5, 2012 doi:10.1093/isle/iss063 The Author(s) 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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soon realizes that Gessner does not take wildness, much less shit and piss, seriously. He only wants to puncture the self-regard of his fellow nature writers, while simultaneously foiling the expectations of his readers. To be fair, neither is an unworthy thing for him to try to do, and yet both are things he can do just once or twice without raising questions about his approach to his own subjectivity and subject matter. In another essay with an in-your-face title (Bigger than Shakespeare), Gessner goes further down the back alley he explores in Sick of Nature when he exclaims, Fuck Thoreau. Let's party! (17). Again, Gessner is onto something, however unpersuasive his rhetoric becomes once his reader grows accustomedwhich doesn't take longto his calculated outrageousness and his willingness to use four-letter words like fuck and shit. (As regards the latter: Dave Praeger, the author of Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product, has noted, Poop's use in a fortiori argument is pervasive [144], and to argue a fortiori is to bluster.) That Thoreau was reticent about partying, and about using the word shit, should be evident to anyone who has read Higher Laws, the most costive chapter of Walden. Higher Laws is also the most nervous and strained chapter of what is for the most part a fortifying book, even if it is always a contrarian and on occasion a contradictory one. In Higher Laws, Thoreau writes, If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tid-bits, the ne lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking (218). That the full stop is placed where it is here, just after eating and drinking, is telling: we all know what ought to come next. So does Thoreau. How could he not? Yet he cannot bring himself to name these things plainly and in the vernacular. He is more interested, at this point, in condemning the hunter and the ne lady, along with you and I, than in frank talk about the universal fate of mud-turtles and calf's foot jellies once these savage tid-bits and delicacies have been tasted, swallowed, and digested. A few pages further on in Higher Laws, Thoreau does express his admiration for the Hindoo lawgiver, who teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, though he adds that by doing so, the lawgiver elevates what is mean (221). That meanness needs to be elevated is, unsurprisingly, the central point Thoreau makes in Higher Laws, though he makes it with unexpected vigor. His vigor is owing to his conviction, expressed in

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the paragraph following his indictment of the hunter and the ne lady alike, that our whole life is startlingly moral (218). This statement has always marked a point past which I nd myself unable to sympathize with Thoreau, much less agree with him, even if I make due allowance for his habitual extravagance of expression. The proposition that our whole life is startlingly moral is, I suspect, simply false. For if it were true, morality might be a much less contentious and debatable matter than it is, and we would not need philosophers, much less nature writers, to help us sort it out. There would be no question, then, of someone crying out, Fuck Thoreau! Let's party. We each would agree to don the straightjacket, because we would recognize the need to be moral our whole life, and thus forever on the alert, as the author of Walden phrases it in Sounds. In the opening paragraph of that chapter, Thoreau distances himself from the high-minded and rigorous course of study he celebrates in the previous chapter, Reading, and writes: No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. A paragraph later he confesses, I did not read books the rst summer. I hoed beans (111). He shortly admits the whole truth: far from hoeing beans the whole summer, he spent long hours goong off and basking in the sun coming in through his cabin doorway. Moreover, he found the time he passed in this way invigorating: the Protestant work ethic be damned. At this point in Walden, Thoreau appears to be more interested in morale than in morality, and it can be said in his defense that this is often the case elsewhere in the book. It can also be said that for Thoreau, the two are always closely related, and happily so: that he sees morale as the soil, or rather the context, the milieu, in which morality thrives best. However, he seems to lose sight of this relationship in Higher Laws, where he makes morale seem secondary to and dependent upon morality, and expresses a hankering for purity. His claim that our whole life is startlingly moral thus serves to remind us that his transcendentalism, like all New England transcendentalism, is the result of a shotgun wedding between a residual Calvinism and a somewhat tardy Romanticism. If Calvinism was superannuated, Romanticism was also getting to be a bit long in the tooth by the mid-1840s. Thoreau's insistence that our whole life is startlingly moral, while it does acknowledge that the all-pervasive morality of our existence is something of a nasty surprisesomething to be startled by and therefore something inconvenient, taxing, and likely to prevent us from ever nding an occasion to make merry, leads him to maintain, a few pages farther along in Higher Laws, that nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome (221). This claim is itself a

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startling one, since it comes from the pen of the Cupid supposed to be responsible for inspiring the enduring American affection for and identication with the natural world. (Thus, the familiar image of Thoreau that graces the cover of even so disaffected a book as Gessner's. The author may have wanted to fuck Thoreau and party; his publisher knew better.) The statement nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome needs clarifying. I am condent that Thoreau means that we must overcome nature in the sense of stie, suppress, hold in check, or at least manage carefully, and despite his use of the feminine pronoun, not in the sense of dominate, force ourselves upon, ravish, or rape. He is a vigorous thinker, or rather writer, but not so vigorous as to contemplate much less advocate crimes against nature, whatever its gender. Nevertheless, we seem to be faced with the task of circling the square: of smoothing out the contradictions between Thoreau's fondness for, say, huckleberries and ponds on the recto side of the page, and his marked distaste for mundane bodily existencefor this slimy beastly life and the nature which must be overcomeon the verso side of the same sheet. I will return to the pages of Walden for a closer look below. In the meantime, I want to provide some intellectual context that will help us to see more clearly why Thoreau's language, both in the passages from Walden that I have already discussed and in similar ones, deserves fresh scrutiny and reveals surprising things about its author's attitudes toward nature. What makes Thoreau's attitudes important for us to consider is simply that his workas I have remarkedhas so often and for so long been identied as the wellspring not only of American nature writing as a literary tradition, but also of American environmentalism as a cultural and political movement. It seems inconvenient, to put it mildly, that in Higher Laws, Thoreau should have expressed a profound distaste for life itself, and for the eating and drinking that sustains it. Nor does this appear to be merely a case of a crux in his text of the kind that literary critics and scholars tend to assume it is their job to resolve, so I will not try to do anything like thatto circle the square, as I put it a paragraph agohere. Instead, I am going to propose that if Gessner is right to claim that nature writers typically speak about the world without ever using the word shit, and I think he is, and if Thoreau can speak of this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking without catching himself in a contradiction, as I think he should have done, then these are facts which should be of keen interest to ecocritics. The assumption I am going to make as I consider these facts is that the ecocritic's job is to survey all traditions of writing about nature, and

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not only the American one, unsentimentally and dispassionately, and without any of the parochialism nature writing sometimes endorses.

The New Materialism and Posthumanism

One important element of the context in which Thoreau's words in Higher Laws need to be read is provided by ecocriticism itself, where Thoreau has been and will remain a centrally important gure. Yet a few ecocritics are willing to question the terms of his centrality, and in at least one case, to question it on grounds similar to David Gessner's. Thoreau's reluctance to broach the topics of the excremental and the excretoryof shit and pissis, I suspect, one reason Timothy Morton has little patience for him and the American nature writing tradition he is supposed to have begun. Thoreau's need to strain the transcendence even out of the least promising experiencesto elevate what is mean when it comes to eating, drinking, cohabiting, voiding excrement and urine, and the likeis no doubt the other reason Morton distrusts him. In his 2007 book Ecology Without Nature, Morton concludes that the essential problem facing environmentalists, and hence ecocritics, is not the difculty of getting in touch with and becoming aware of nature, as American nature writers have assumed, but the more humbling difculty of knowing what to do with one's slime (one's shit) (159). In reaching this conclusion, Morton is following Sartre and Lacan, for whom slime and shit represent a challenge to consciousness and the ego, one posed by the unconscious and the body. Unlike Morton, I have no desire to follow Sartre and Lacan. I want to sidestep the rabbit holes postulated by psychoanalysis, for one thing, and for another I think the so-called new materialism offers fresher insight into the problemsassuming for the moment that they are problems, in particular problems of the sort that might lead us to ponder higher lawsof eating, drinking, cohabiting, voiding excrement and urine, and the like. A new materialist might suggest that at the heart of Thoreau's difculty in coming to terms with eating and drinking, with defecation and urination, and with the expectoration and regurgitation that must be referenced by the phrase and the like, is the fact that all sustenance is also substance, andcomplicating the matter enormouslyto substance all sustenance will return. I do not want to bandy Latinate words about here, but it is worth noting that while sustenance and substance are not traceable to the same roots by way of Middle English, Old French, and Latin, their roots (sustinere, from sub plus tenere, and substare)

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were at least within shouting distance of one another. Once upon a time, these words occupied adjacent semantic topography. New materialists are especially canny about substance, wishing to dissociate their way of viewing the world from all earlier ontologies that would lend to any given substance the properties of the thing-in-itselfthe properties associated with essence, identity, and immutability. So new materialists do not view substance as a viable candidate for metaphysical bedrock and building block. Yet neither do they view it as endlessly fungible, as indifferent raw material awaiting the impress of human ingenuity and labor, as in the brisk manner of capitalism and modes-of-production-oriented historical materialism, or as in the more elaborate manner posited by theories of social constructivism. New materialists instead see substanceor, to use the term they prefer, matteras vibrant. This is the metaphor, though she does not mean it to be only a metaphor, used by Jane Bennett in the title of her 2010 book, Vibrant Matter, where she writes, The quarantines of matter and life encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations (vii). In the sentence I have just quoted, Bennett adds two more metaphors to the list: matter is not only vibrant, it also has vitality, and its formations possess lively powers, too. Bennett's rhetoric is challenging, intentionally so: she says that the political project of her book is, to put it most ambitiously, to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things (viii). As readers of her book, one of the rst engagements we have to make is with Bennett's choice of terms. She recognizes this, and explains: By vitality, I mean the capacity of thingsedibles, commodities, storms, metalsnot only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own (viii). Here, Bennett is following Bruno Latour, whose notions of the actant and of distributive agency (cited in Bennett ix) shape the case she makes throughout her book for vibrant matter and lively things. She admits, moreover, that to present this case, she must bracket the question of the human and elide the rich and diverse literature on subjectivity (ix). Thus, new materialism offers its own version of posthumanism. This offering should make new materialism of immediate interest to ecocritics eager to lay the ghost of anthropocentrism, for whom it might prove both challenging and instructive. Bennett herself notes that in contrast to some versions of deep ecology, a school of thought with which it might seem to have some connections, new materialism as she develops it posits neither a smooth

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harmony of parts nor a diversity unied by a common spirit, but instead hearkens to the strange logic of turbulence (xi). By turbulence, Bennett means both the turbulence that alters but also informs the operations of all dynamic systems, and more broadly the turbulence that might be caused by any lively thing. Our own digestive tract is both a turbulent system (of a sort) and a lively thing. As a system, it interacts with a number of other systems (with our endocrine system, for instance, but alsoand sometimes just as immediatelywith the healthcare system). As a lively thing, our digestive tract regularly plays host to any number of other things, some very lively indeed (parasites and viruses) and others not so much (the roughage that serves as grist to our internal mills), and some introduced by us deliberately (the roughage again) while others occupy us by stealth (the parasites and viruses again). Bennett offers the example of omega-3 fatty acidsthose wondrous substances whose family name is now emblazoned on packages of axseed, sh oil, and free-range eggs lining the shelves of grocery stores, and which also can be found in some other, less easily obtainable organic sources ranging from Cannabis sativa to krill to kangaroo meat, or so the latest iteration of the entry for omega-3 fatty acids on the Wikipedia web site tells me. These foods (I realize that Cannabis only qualies as a food if you add it to your pot brownies) and others are, according to Bennett, bodies vying alongside and within an other complex body (a person's own body) (38). This is the case precisely because food isand I do regret having to emphasize the obvious in this waywhat we eat, and is thus an actant in Latour's sense of the term: it acts inside and alongside humans, and is an inducerproducer of salient, public effects, such as atulence (a kind of turbulence, after all), or the crisis of obesity (Bennett 39) brought on by eating too much of the less healthful kinds of fat along with too much starch. Lest we launch into a discussion of the social construction of fatness at this juncture, Bennett suggests that as actant, food has a form of agency that may render cultural persuasionsand dissuasions!relatively moot. To eat chips, she writes, is to enter into an assemblage in which the I is not necessarily the most decisive operator (4). Bennett is rifng, I suppose, on the old Frito-Lay advertising slogan Betcha can't eat just one. Given what we now know about the vibrant materiality of potato chips, larded as they are with the saturated fats that stimulate human beings to gorge themselves, so that they become increasingly obese as they snarf down increasing amounts of fat and starch, this slogan has come to seem downright insidious. That fat-laden potato chips are part of what Bennett (again

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following Latour) calls an assemblageone that effectively compounds their agency, while helping to produce itis evidenced both by the fact that fats act on us not only as foods but also as mood-altering drugs, and by their universal presence in vending machines, at sandwich shops, and on television. That an assemblage of this sort can constitute what amounts to a vicious circle, if not a feedback loop (to use an expression that seems richly suited to this discussion), is suggested by the coincidence, if it is one, that potato chips are among the munchies most favored by pot smokers. According to Bennett, foodall food, that is, and not only the snack food on which I have been focusinghas the negative power to resist or obstruct human projects, but it also has the more active power to affect and create effects. She adds: Eating appears as a series of mutual transformations in which the border between inside and outside becomes blurry: my meal both is and is not mine; you both are and are not what you eat (49). Viewed through new materialist lenses, self-image and body image cannot be teased apart, and thus neither can be brought into sharp focus. In the eating encounter, as Bennett makes a point of calling what other folks might call a meal, all bodies are shown to be but temporary congealments of a materiality that is a process of becoming, is hustle and ow punctuated by sedimentation and sustenance (49). In other words (my own this time), all gastronomy is molecular gastronomy, and whether you happen to be the thing eating or the thing being eaten does not materially alter the case.

The Grossest Groceries

The encounter that Jane Bennett describes, the engagement with a hustle and ow punctuated by sedimentation and sustenance, is central to Higher Laws and throughout the rest of Walden, too. It is an encounter and an engagement that more often than not proves irritating to Thoreau, and it occasions some of his prickliest comments. In Economy, for example, he discusses the very natural and pertinent questions that the townsmen of Concord asked him about his life at Walden Pond, and despite the qualiers he applies to them, it is clear that these questions often annoyed him. Some, he writes, have asked what I got to eat (3). This seems to be both a very natural and pertinent question, and an innocent if a somewhat clueless one. (As many townsmen knew, Thoreau took a lot of his meals where he had always taken them: at his mother's table.) Walden was written, in large part, to address everyday but essential questions of this sort, which in a better state of society (as Thoreau might have

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put it) would not need asking, because men (as Thoreau would have put it) who lived in such a society perforce must have answered them long since. Nevertheless, that he perceived his own society to have fallen far short of answering these and other basic questions satisfactorily does not explain the language Thoreau uses when addressing the question of foodand, more broadly, the question of anything having to do with material life. That language is habitually passive-aggressive and dyspeptic, and often turns on metaphors of ingestion even when it does not directly concern what Thoreau had got to eat. On the question of owning property, for instance, Thoreau writes, Man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt (Economy 5). He seems to be rifng on Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Yet Thoreau goes further than Genesis goes, which is going to an extreme: he implies that all we really are required to consume in this life is ourselves, our very lives. This straightened line of reasoning might be called anorexicno fats and carbohydrates allowed!and Thoreau often pursues it with a vigor that verges on the pathological, and is intended precisely to put us off our feed. Pondering what sort of house might be ideal for someone like him, Thoreau declares, They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar (Economy 47). Toting up his expenses for food, he admits, Yes, I did eat $8.74, all toldand in the spreadsheet laying out his expenditures item by item, notes in the margin that the sweet potatoes, the pumpkin, and the watermelon he bought and presumably ate, along with some our, sugar, lard, and apples (fresh and dried), were all experiments which failed (Economy 59). I have been wondering about this marginal notation for years: wondering how sweet potatoes, a pumpkin, and a watermelon might amount to failures in an experimental context, or in any context other than, say, gardening. I have been hoping (and telling my students) that Thoreau is joking, that this account of his grocery bill is a punning and reductive version of the larger account of a life that Walden is meant to be. Why else would Thoreau note his incomes and outgoes down to the half and quarter cent, as he does in Economy? It belies the preference he declares in Sounds for maintaining a broad margin to his life (111). Lately, however, I have begun to think that Thoreau's ippant attitude toward architecture, accounting, and food cannot be sustained after all, the Walden experiment as a whole did prove not to be sustainable for much longer than a couple of years. No doubt this is

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why Thoreau is on the defensive in Economy, as he will be again in Higher Laws. He runs the numbers on the Walden Pond experience to illustrate the failure of those numbers, paltry as they are, to capture the gist of that experience; and to show his indifference, if not his utter imperviousness, to economic forces and, more broadly, to all the things of this lifeto incomes and outgoes alike, and more particularly to olives and wines as well as more humble food and drink. Rhetorically as well as factually, this indifference was a luxury Thoreau could afford, since he lived at Walden for free, as a squatter on Emerson's land, and since he had no one to support while he lived there but himself, and no responsibility for the upkeep of any property that might have been called real. As he told the Irishman John Field, he did not work hard, so he did not have to eat hard, either, and so it cost him but a trie for his food (Baker Farm 205). One imagines that John Field found Thoreau's advice galling: no doubt he did have to work hard to eat at all, and a trie was probably more money than he had to spend most days. This would continue to be the case for John Field for some time to come (as Thoreau predicts), just as it would for other poor Americans living on slender margins and struggling with the difculties raised by their need for sustenance. It is helpful, with the constraints of lives like Field's in mind, to compare the account of a family whose circumstancesgiven the passage of time, and the forward march of progressought to have been remote from those that obtained in mid-century Concord, to Thoreau's thumbnail account of his grocery bill in Economy. In making such a comparison, we will be following Thoreau's advice, so we will be treating him fairly. Near the beginning of Economy, he writes: It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little inuence on the essential laws of man's existence. . . . (1112) I will now do the latter of the two things Thoreau suggests would be some advantage if we want to learn what are the gross necessaries of life, and thus the grossest groceries.

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One of my paternal ancestors farmed near the tiny hamlet of Bartow, Georgia. I have in my les the original ledger pages of this ancestor's account with a storekeeper in Kite, Georgia, a man named M.R. Perkins. What I nd most striking about this account is the evidence it provides of the paltry amount of store-bought rations with which the J.J. Bush family eked out an existence, and of the triing sums that they were unable to muster in cash money. Buying on credit on June 29, 1893, the Bushes took home $0.10 worth of salt, $1.20 worth of our, and $1.00 worth of syrup. On July 10 of the same year, the family obtained a melon and more our, and went $0.70 deeper into debt. (The melon cost a dime, which is ve times more than Thoreau paid for his melon in the 1840s, but of course these gures need to be adjusted for several cycles of ination and deation, and for variations between local markets.) On May 26, 1894, the Bush family obtained from Perkins $0.50 worth of coffee, $0.10 worth of sardines, $0.05 worth of shhooks, $0.25 worth of tobacco, and $0.05 worth of matches, and thus they incurred a debt of $0.95. Apparently, a shing trip was in the ofng, which suggests that the nutritional value of the catch may have offset the costs of the day's ventureeven that the Bushes might have sold their neighbor a mess of sh that evening, and come out a few pennies ahead. That the Bushes ever realized any capital gains, whether from shing or from farming (they cropped cotton and tobacco), seems doubtful. A receipt from ve years laterit is dated July 19, 1898, and was drawn up by M.R. Perkins on the back of a piece of stationary from the Wadley and Mount Vernon Railroad (waste not, want not)acknowledges that Sarah Bush has paid off a mortgage held in his favor. Perkins agrees to return this mortgage to her husband J.J. marked canceled (if Perkins ever nds the note, which he has misplaced). It is hard to tell with any certainty just how well the family fortunes fared, since the record is spotty and much else besides that mortgage note has been lost. To complicate matters, J.J. Bush was illiterate and left no other account of his life. I have the Bush family's papers in my possession owing to the coincidence of the eventual marriage of one of J.J. and Sarah Bush's daughterswho wore shoes purchased from Perkins at the price of $1.25 a pair, which can only mean that the young ladies were not very well turned outto my great-grandfather, James Bareld. His accounts extend the material and economic history begun by the Bush family well into the twentieth century, and illustrate what it meant to be a dirt farmer in the American South in the three decades before World War II.

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One of the things it meant, apparently, was keeping every scrap of paper relating to the dirt farmer's nances: in this case, these scraps were kept in an army surplus ammunition can tucked in the back of an old chifforobe it was my pleasure to plunder when I was a child. On July 27, 1914, James Bareld took out a mortgage with the Sam Weichselbaum Company of Dublin, Georgia, in the amount of $20.00 and at the rate of 8% per annum, renouncing all homestead rights both for himself and for his family. His collateral: a red milk cow named Daisy, two red yearling cows, both male, and a light-colored heifer. (Presumably, the yearlings and the heifer were unnamed because they were going to be eaten or sold.) On January 17, 1931, after moving to a farm near Lyons, Georgia, Bareld borrowed $12.00 from the First National Bank, putting up as collateral a black mare mule nine years old named Maud, who weighed a thousand pounds, give or take; the note fell due on March 17 of the same year. Ten years later, on February 1, 1941, he borrowed $26.50 from the Peoples Bank. This time he put up as collateral a dark red mare mule named Sid, who was eleven years old. At a hundred pounds lighter, Sid was more svelte than Maud had been, and she was mortgaged along with a red butthead milk cow whose markings were a swallow fork in her left ear and a square in her right. A month later, Bareld borrowed $25.00 from the same nancial institution, this time putting a mule named Nell up for collateral along with two more milk cows. These mortgages (and many others) were usually taken out so that cottonseed, seed corn, and guano could be bought in time for spring planting. It amuses me to see that my patrimony, merely speculative as it ever was, was squandered in part on purchases of guano: of bird and bat shit, that is, or some simulacrum thereof. (I do not think it matters all that much if the guano, the fertilizer, in question was real or merely synthetic; if it was the latter, then perhaps the pathos of all those mortgage notes is even greater than I assume: imagine having no choice but to go into debt to buy fake bat shit.) Let me be clear: I see the family history I have just related as a narrative (however piecemeal it may be) about both the material circumstances and the very materials that antedated and informed my own existence. Note the complete absence of olives and wines. It accords well with the lack of cellars beneath the pine-board clad houses dirt farmers built for themselves. I have offered a few details of family history so that I might esh out farmers' lives and lifestyles of the sort to which Thoreau opposes his own life and lifestyle in Walden. In Thoreau's defense, I should note that in Walden, he does say that he writes as someone with no interest in the economic arrangements of his day. Whether this pun

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means he was truly disinterested or simply uninterested, or merely had never invested, in those arrangements is the question. In either case, the admission, even if it is meant to disarm potential critics in advance, is revealing. In the uncertain light it sheds, the question I now have to ask is this: would it have mattered to Thoreau, if he could have witnessed their excursion, that the Bush family, when it bought those sardines on May 26, 1894, and ate them on what must have been a shing trip to the Ohoopee River, was combining the crude taste of the hunter for savage tid-bits with the exotic taste of the ne lady? Like the hunter, and despite the purchase of the sardines, they were doing what they could to eat locally and sustainably, which as everyone now realizes is easiest for people with more cash money and more free time at their disposal than the Bushes had. The same reasoning can be applied to the watermelon they bought on July 10, 1893. It must have been eaten for lunch somewhere along the road between Perkins's store and the family farm, and I doubt that the Bushes felt they had the luxury of considering it a failure, even if it did not compare favorably to the watermelons they surely grew in their own vegetable garden at home. In short, Thoreau and the Bushes were both words and worlds apart. What the New Englander called horned pout the Georgians called catsh; what he called hasty pudding they called grits; what he called hoeing they called chopping cotton; and what he called sustenance, and found sustaining, like the Indian bread he ate at Walden, they called cornbreadand eating too much of it probably gave them pellagra. If economy is a story we need to be able to tell ourselves about the sustenance we need, then it matters greatly how this story gets toldand how the materials it references get arranged, both in our imaginations and in the world where we go to obtain them. Thoreau arranged these materials by pushing them to the margins of his narrative in Walden, where they nonetheless proved to have a power with which he struggled to come to terms. How much he struggled has generally been overlooked, though it does seem to be attracting some attention recently. Jane Bennett makes Thoreau the subject of one of her chapters in Vibrant Matter, taking as her inspiration a passage from the opening of Higher Laws that I also nd bracing, though I do have doubts about the claim it makes. Describing the evening of the very same day on which he gave advice to the poor Irishman John Field, Thoreau writes, As I came home through the woods with my string of sh, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for

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that wildness which he represented (210). It is refreshing to see Thoreau acknowledging temptation in this way, even if he does not yield to it. How much woodchuck, one wonders, would he wolf down, if he could bring himself to wolf down just one woodchuck raw? The passage is not without pathos; and part of the pathos is owing to its admission that a woodchuck is what passed in 1840s Concord as representative of wildness. A woodchuck is not so much small game, as it is no game at all. Its esh, however, is gamy, and for me, the other source of the pathos of the opening passage of Higher Laws has always been the fact that woodchucks are not especially good to eat when well done, and never mind what they must be like to eat when raw. In other words, which I will borrow from Thoreau, woodchucks really are the grossest groceries. In his classic book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Euell Gibbons describes some transcendental gastronomic creations (245), including a woodchuck recipe for the true neoprimitive who has a strong stomach and weak prejudices (248). This recipe, Woodchuck in Sour Cream, begins with up to 48 hours of proper dressing and soaking (248) in a saltvinegar solution formulated to draw out of the meat all the rank avor that would otherwise make it nearly inedible, after which Gibbons recommends freezing the meat to further improve its taste. As for cooking it, he recommends boiling the properly dressed and soaked and defrosted woodchuck for three hours, when it is safe to remove it from the potand best to throw the boiling water away, as this stock has been used merely to avor the meat and is going to taste too much of woodchuck to be serviceable in a broth. Only now, when at least 51 hours have passed, is it time to for the assistant chef to step aside so that the executive chef may take over. Using all his skills, he will prepare the Woodchuck in Sour Cream, which entails still more boiling and a further 20 minutes of simmering before the dish is rendered ediblealbeit debatable as a dish still containing actual woodchuck. I have never eaten a woodchuck, and I bet Jane Bennett has never eaten one, either. Bennett admires the opening passage of Higher Laws because she thinks it illustrates Thoreau's awareness of food's materiality, of its capacities as an actant to effect material changes in our bodies while also changing our affections, perhaps even our minds. Wildness, she writes, was a not-quite-human force that addled and altered human and other bodies, and it named an irreducibly strange dimension of matter (23). I am willing to take Bennett's larger point here just as she intends it. However, I doubt that Thoreau would have been willing to do so, even if wildness was his own keyword. Frankly, I think that what Thoreau failed to

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appreciate was precisely food's materiality, something he does not seem to have been able to contemplate with any equanimityin The Ponds, he describes a model farm as a great grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! (196)and thus something he often treats with a remarkable lack of common sense, as when he reports that he sometimes tried to get by on a diet of rice or huckleberries alone. Bennett gives Thoreau too much credit: he was a lot charier of food-actants, and of vibrant matter, than she realizes. In her discussion of his work (see Vibrant Matter 4547), she completely overlooks the passage from Higher Laws that lends a title to this essay. She also ignores, as I too have been doing, the fact that Thoreau did once eat a cooked woodchuck, after he caught it raiding his bean eld, and found that it was infused less with wildness than with the rankness Euell Gibbons urges his reader to avoid. Thoreau's woodchuck, though it had been killed, skinned, and dressed out with his own hands, failed to be a transcendental gastronomic creation once it was plated and served. Thoreau got the recipe for sustenance and sustainability wrong: it turns out that in salt, vinegar, and sour cream, and not in wildness, is the preparation, and likewise the preservation, of the world. His bravado should not mislead us. For him, food is in the main not something to lecture about, but something to lecture against. In Economy, he writes: My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against (78). This is one of Thoreau's better jokes. Yet it is a barbed joke of the kind he likes to make when he want to impale both himself and his reader on the horns of what he perceiveswrongly, I have arguedto be a moral dilemma posed by this beastly slimy life.

WORKS CITED
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Gessner, David. Sick of Nature. Lebanon: UP of New England, 2004. Print. Gibbons, Euell. Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Putney: Alan C. Hood, 1964. Print. Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

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Praeger, Dave. Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product. Los Angeles: Feral, 2007. Print. Thoreau, Henry D. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Print.