Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day." The North Korean government offered a variety of explanations. People were told that the government was stockpiling food to feed the starving South Korean masses on the blessed day of reunification, or that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea. North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice....The foreign press began reporting on North Korean's food shortages in the early nineteen-nineties, and in 1992 the country's news service issued an indignant reply: "All people live a happy life without worries about food in our land. The state supplies the people with food at a cheap price next to nothing so that people do not know how much rice costs. This is the reality of the northern half of Korea."

--Barbara Demick, The Good Cook

The reality of North Korea was that 10% of the population was dying of starvation. This article reminded me of the class I took on the USSR in which I learned how frighteningly easy it is to exercise control over a population. Constructions of reality, ya know?

When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.

--Elizabeth Gilbert, too lazy to look up the source




Upon coming back to Ohio, I have felt literally connected. Plugged in, ya know?

The green revolution was a complicated blend of altruistic and imperial motives, played out through seeds. The notion that humans now had the power to banish the spectre of starvation and famine, which has haunted our species for millennia, was a potent one. The green revolution is estimated to have fed roughly a billion people who might otherwise have starved....But the development and distribution of the superseeds, which was funded by the World Bank, the United States seed trade, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, was also a clever way of planting American-style agrarian capitalism in developing nations that might otherwise be in danger of succumbing to Communism. In Fowler’s 1993 book “Shattering,” written with Pat Mooney, a Canadian activist, he points out that the new hybrids “produced not just crops, but replicas of the agricultural systems that produced them. They came as a package deal and part of the package was a major change in traditional cultures, values, and power relationships both within villages and between them and the outside world.”

--John Seabrook, Sowing for Apocalypse

Also, on a related note [via Boyland :)].

NEWEST LATEST

The earth smelled good today.

Also, yoga makes me feel like a million bucks.

Also, on the wet grass: my head on your knees, your head on his knees, his head on her knees, her head on my knees.

Also, Scrabble in a backyard with my left half getting crispy by the fire.

Also, emergence almost made me cry (the happy, not sadface kind).

Also, I also.