Wild

I have wrote before of the nature of design, of how it invades our lives in every way, of how everything right down the clothes you are wearing and the food you eat has been created by design.  One part of our lives where that is most ambiguous is perhaps in the food we eat.  I said it was created by design and it is true, not just of processed foods and food that does not occur naturally, but of the things we don't really associate as being unnatural.

For the sake of this post I define unnatural as being anything that you could not find in the wild.  When you have that definition and you start to take a closer look at the things we eat we start to realise that most of it we would never think of being wild.  Even the products that come from animals, like chicken, we don't imagine being wild.  The image of a wild chicken for example isn't one most people in the UK could picture, the image of chickens that we think of are those on farms, or in battery farms depending on how much you pay for it.  The idea of chickens running through fields is completely alien to us, yet wild chickens do exist, not so much in the UK but in other countries and they are not a case of chickens kept for food escaping - that would be putting the cart before the horse, the chickens we eat after all are descended from chickens that were wild and were caught and kept to provide food.

Go beyond the meats we eat and enter into the realm of vegetables, something we consider wholly more organic and earthy - when was the last time you saw a wild carrot?  Would you even know what a wild carrot looks like or where you would look?  Before writing this post I didn't either.  This whole post came from the thought of growing carrots and thinking I would need seeds then thinking where do carrot seeds come from - carrots of course but I've never seen a carrot with seeds, or even a flower from which to harvest them.  The carrots we eat today are descended from wild carrots.  They would not occur naturally in the wild, not in the form we eat.  The common carrot today is the result of a long and arduous selective breeding process that eventually produced what we eat today.

The word 'wild' inspires visions of feral animals but we forget the fruits and vegetables and all else we eat.  The truth is that there is so much that we survive on that has been designed, even the food we call organic is still the product of human intervention, it may be grown free from additives and preservatives and pesticides et al but they still wouldn't occur in nature in the form we eat so can we really call them organic?