Mound Diet

The Mound Diet

By John Taylor; 6 November, 2005

Mound developments are a proposed application of Buckminster Fuller's
"comprehensive design science," that designs essential human needs
into the basic structure of our environment. This implies putting
agriculture before every other human pursuit, since by that we derive
all our energy and nourishment from the earth and the sun. Mounds
would therefore give the choicest locations, especially the south
facing slope, to farmers and agriculturalists. Once done the other two
primal professions, medicine and teaching, would have first say in the
overall design and their workplaces would have the ground floor, the
choicest and most central locations within the mound. Today I want to
set aside teaching for the moment and go into more detail on how
farming and public health would contribute to the organization of
mounds.

As the book "Fast Food Nation" and the film "Supersize Me!" make
abundantly clear, the faddish proliferation and ubiquity of fast food
restaurants is chiefly responsible for the epidemic of obesity
afflicting both rich and poor lands over past decades. Yet fast food
restaurants fill a legitimate need. Far too much productive time is
required by food preparation, particularly by women. Mound are
structurally designed to provide the best of both worlds, a maximally
nutritious diet that is quick, economical and places minimal demands
on the time and acumen of consumers. The most salient way that it
would accomplish this is through facilitating local grocery producers.

The present infrastructure of food production, deranged as it is by a
thousand hidden subsidies, actively discourages locally produced food,
though local produce is inherently the cheapest, safest and most
nutritious choice available. As the setup is today, those few who have
attempted to eat only food grown within one hundred miles from where
they live have been presented with some strange dietary choices. One
couple in British Columbia who took rather elementary challenge were
forced to eat only sandwiches with two slices of turnip instead of
bread. ("(100) miles away from a perfect diet," Toronto Star, 10
November, 2005, A3) As a result, some local diet advocates loosen it a
little and suggest a more realistic compromise, to adopt a diet whose
origins average out to come from one hundred miles (or one hundred and
sixty kilometers) away from the point of consumption.

There is no doubt that mound housing in all but rural settings would
be very high density housing; with hundreds of residents under its
roof it would clearly be impossible to provide a full subsistence diet
using only its south-facing slope. The fields, gardens and greenhouses
on the mound itself would instead concentrate only on the most
perishable items, such as tomatoes, lettuce, herbs, celery, cucumbers,
and other "greenies" -- the familiar term for them used at the
Scott-Amundston research station at the South Pole. Researchers at
this remotest of locations, in consultation with NASA, are pioneering
strictly scientific ways supplementing their diet with locally grown
greens that should be applied everywhere else, that would certainly be
central to mound planning.

Local produce is the first step to a scientific diet because it is not
only fresher, cheaper and more nutritious than imported foodstuffs, it
is also superior environmentally, since trains, planes, trucks and
boats all burn fossil fuel. Local nutrition sources also contribute to
security, since in the event of a civil emergency, breakdown in
transportation, crop failure or bio-terror, mass famine would be
staved off. With basic foodstuffs available from local gardens urban
areas would be semi-independent and able to adjust with more
resilience than at present. Comprehensive public supervision in mounds
would permit close monitoring of the food production cycle as a whole,
from crop to sewage disposal, which should make for greater robustness
in both security and public health.

How would all this affect the design of the mound itself? As
mentioned, gardens and greenhouses, as well as glass roofs, would run
up the sunny side of the mound. Either attached to or close by mound
gardens and greenhouses would be a collective kitchen, processing and
preparing the produce just seconds after being picked. These kitchens
in turn would be located near a transportation hub, so that the cost
of delivery of other foodstuffs and the time spent unloading it would
be minimized. Following the local food imperative, most dietary
staples such as grains and starches would be grown in nearby rural
fields and shipped into these nearby semi-collective kitchen
facilities. That way the goal of an average of one hundred miles from
the point of origin to point of consumption would be easily attained,
even should a large proportion of residents take full advantage of the
variety of non-staples and other luxury foods coming in from around
the world.

These gardens and large kitchens would prepare fresh food from
scratch, from seed to salad dish, using both professional and
volunteer labor. Encapsulated tubes would then rapidly deliver
finished dishes directly to the eating place, be it a dining room in a
home or a cafe in a public space. The local kitchen would achieve
greater efficiency of scale by serving both permanent residents and
the local day workers in mound workshops and factories. This would
allow delicious, nutritious meals that are as cheap, efficient and as
quick as fast food, without any of their notorious dangers. Unlike
fast food restaurants currently serving addictive food designed only
with good taste as the sole criterion, the contents of mound foods
would be tailored by computer to present medical needs of each
consumer, who would be under constant biometric monitoring. Swiping a
smart card would both pay for and decide much of the content of the
meal that each client receives.

Generally speaking, agricultural subsidies are rank corruption, an
unwarranted interference in free market food production. They result
from bribes and lobbying and result in abject poverty in poor regions
and epidemic obesity in wealthy countries. Nonetheless there is one
place where subsidies are warranted, not in food production but in its
consumption. That is, meals eaten alone should be made to cost much
more than family and group meals. Eating on the run should be actively
discouraged for health reasons alone, since a litany of studies have
found it harmful. Those who socialize while eating are known to
consume less and avoid obesity more effectively. But the chief
justifications for group meals are psychological and political.

Mealtime through the millennia has been the major civilizing force in
every society. Common meals make mere food consumption into part of a
balanced education. It is a cornerstone of democratic consultation,
since mealtime provides a unique chance during the day for single
people to broaden the variety of their contacts with young and old,
rich and poor, and for family members to engage in free information
exchange. Mealtime intercourse provides information vital to the
functioning of every human institution and should be supported by all
means, even by subsidies.

The layout of the houses under the mound roof would therefore accede
to this design parameter by sporting oversized dining areas and small
to non-existent kitchens. Studies in Sweden have found that domestic
kitchens are not only extremely wasteful -- most were found to throw
out more produce than they actually use (since fresh produce rots so
quickly only the most organized cook can avoid massive spoilage), but
also that cooking itself spews out a surprising amount of volatile
organic compounds. These fumes produced by cooking turn homes into a
toxic breathing environment just when all its members are gathering
around.

A large, permanent collective, shared kitchen serving many homes and
places of business in the mound would have sufficient capital to
invest in the latest equipment to deal safely with problems such as
wastage and noxious effluent. The need for something like this is
already being answered in enterprises being called "meal assembly"
businesses. Certain entrepreneurs in California make a living in this
way: they supply their clients with recipes, food supplies and a well
stocked kitchen in which to spend an evening in group food
preparation. For about 200 dollars and two hours of labor customers go
home with as many as 12 dishes for four to six people. They do the
cutting and dividing of the dishes then freeze the final result. Then,
just before the meal clients can take out a spiced and prepared dish
and cook it. (Time Magazine, "Gourmet Stockpiling," Canadian Edition,
2 May, 2004, "Your Time," p. 61)

There would be other benefits to the intermixed, full service food
preparation facilities of a mound. Having every stage of food
production so near at hand would allow greater contact between farmers
and urban dwellers. People would get used to having a personal farmer
in the same way that we have a personal tutor or doctor. Children
touring the gardens as an integral part of their education would be in
close touch with where food comes from their earliest years. At the
same time women and mothers, who have traditionally taken on the
tremendous burden of time and effort that it takes to put three
balanced meals onto a family's dinner table every day would be freed
to participate as much or as little of this activity as they deem
necessary. Many, especially mothers of young children, may feel that
this is time better spent directly educating their charges during
their most impressionable years. In a word, mound design is the
physical infrastructure that would implement true, full equality
between the sexes.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com