Of squirrels and potatos.

Jing Jing wrote in her last blog about artificiality and naturalness of food. This is a very interesting topic, especially, because these days everybody talks about genetically manipulated food and its pros and cons. Most of these discussions miss a very important point, indeed: the question about how much naturalness is left?

One example: the potato spread originally from the Americas to the rest of the world after European colonization in the late 1400s and early 1500s. The Mayas already cultivated the Potato and from there on the Europeans experimented further with this crop to receive bigger and faster growing plants.

The tomato is also originally from Mexico and came with the Spanish in the early 1600s.

Although nobody would consider the potato or the tomato as “exotic” vegetables they once were unknown in the rest of the world.

This artificiality does not only apply to food. Animals were also introduced to other continents, for example the Sciurus carolinensis, better known as the gray squirrel, which nearly extinguished the European (red) squirrel in the UK. Jamie Oliver (who recently launched a successful campaign to make British school meals more healthy), promoted the idea of eating gray squirrels because their rapid population growth has led to the species being classed as a pest.

I do not need to mention the sensitive ecologic balance of the Australian Continent that is even parodied in the Simpsons…

The range of examples is endless and naturalness and reality are always relative and shifting.

Who can say that, for instance, Second Life, the famous social network website is not real? Who can postulate that our daily life is not virtual or artificial?

The meaning of the terms “artificial/ natural” therefore lie in the eye of the beholder. There is not a binary choice between these two terms like “right/wrong” or “black/white”. There is rather a bandwidth or artificialness and naturalness.