Feeding the City. Production, Representation and Engagement
June 25-26, Siena School for the Liberal Arts
Telling our Stories: Empathy, Slow Violence, and Environmental Memory
Gioia Woods, PhD Northern Arizona University
Do you know Marcovaldo? He is an unskilled laborer at Sbav and Co. An unusually sensitive
and observant man, “he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a
roof-tile…or a fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk”. Marcovaldo is a keen chronicler of the
natural world, but unfortunately, his “eye [is] ill-suited to city life.” Unfortunate indeed, because
he happens to live in an industrialized Italian city which has recently been transformed into a
bustling metropolis by il miracolo economico. Marcovaldo has had a difficult time adjusting his
country habits to urban life. He longs for rural rhythms. One morning, as he is waiting for the
tram, he notices mushrooms, just beginning to sprout around the base of certain trees along a
busy avenue. “To Marcovaldo the gray and wretched world surrounding him seemed suddenly
generous with hidden riches; something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage…
and cost-of-living allowance”. Marcovaldo becomes fixated on the possibility of harvesting
mushrooms in the city—he can think of little else. He enthusiastically explains to his six
children, who did not know about mushrooms, having lived their small lives in the city, about the
beauty of mushrooms, the delicacy of their flavor, the preferred method of cooking. On Saturday,
Marcovaldo spends his afternoon off work guarding the small patch of dirt, and suspiciously
eyeing a nearby street sweeper whom he had long disdained. After an overnight rain, he wakes
Sunday, borrows a basket, and hustles his children to find “the mushrooms, erect on their stems,
their caps high over the still-soaked earth”. Marcovaldo is hurriedly gathering mushrooms when
the street sweeper sidles up. “Then they’re edible? “ He asks “I picked a few, but I wasn’t sure”.
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In a burst of jealousy, or perhaps generosity, Marcovaldo stands up and shouts to each passerby
to bring their open umbrellas and gather mushrooms. Someone suggests a big feast, “But instead
each took his own share and went home”. They saw each other again soon, however. Do you
know where? In the hospital after having their stomachs pumped. The mushrooms were
poisonous, but luckily because of Marcovaldo’s jealousy (or generosity); so many former
contadini had eaten the mushrooms that the share of poison per person was quite small.
Marcovaldo, of course, is the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s short-story collection Marcovaldo
ovvero Le stagioni in città (1963). In the opening story “Mushrooms in the City,” and throughout
the subsequent nineteen stories, Marcovaldo moves through city life like Charlie Chaplin:
haplessly optimistic, comically nostalgic, deeply human, and full of pathos.
In these stories, Calvino makes a world that is fraught with toxicity and peopled with characters
who are challenged by the dystopian setting they find themselves in. The integrity of food and
food systems is a dominant theme in the collection—Marcovaldo fishes in a toxic river; he
liberates a rabbit destined for science, and he wistfully pushes a cart down glittering aisles of a
supermarket bursting with food he cannot afford. How can such stories be important to Feeding
the City? As a humanist scholar, I believe these stories can are critical, for three reasons: 1. they
embody empathy, (the intellectual or imaginative apprehension of another’s condition); 2. These
stories plot the slow violence that characterizes disrupted food systems around the world. 3.
They embed environmental memory, which recuperates lost landscapes and empowers the
marginalized. I would like to talk about each in turn, their relationship to feeding the city, and
finally to suggest their importance to the sustainable humanities.
First, empathy. Empathy is the “intellectual or imaginative apprehension of another’s
condition” (Hogan 1969). Empathy was first introduced into philosophical inquiry in 1909 as a
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way of explaining aesthetic appreciation. I recognize a vibrant sunset or a burgeoning mushroom
as beautiful because the sunset or mushroom triggers in me an internal process that says, I have
had positive experiences with sunsets or mushrooms. I project my positive experience onto the
object and perceive the object to be beautiful. Empathy’s appeal for turn of the century
philosophers was broad, and soon found resonance with philosophers of social and human
sciences. It became an explanation for how we humans connect with other humans: we project
our rational selves onto other rational selves, thereby coming to value other “minded bodies.”
Psychologists became interested in empathy related phenomena after WW2; it was seen to have
an important role in interpersonal understanding, cognitive behavior, and prosocial human
decisions and actions. Finally, recent research in neuroscience helps explain empathy even
further. Using the term “mirror neuron,” scientists have explained how another’s gestures or
facial expressions excite in us similar heat, thereby providing us with a cognitive grasp of
another’s actions or emotions. We “transport” ourselves into the point of view of another. We
associate with Marcovaldo, and with others who are affected by the slow violence of toxicity.
Empathy also has implications for the human relationship to the natural world, it is a cornerstone
of sustainable action. Among his other duties at Sbav and Co., Marcovaldo is charged with
watering a plant. One morning, he finds the plant is losing its leaves. Calvino tells us our hero
develops an intense empathy for the plant: “it was a plant, and as such it suffered, because
staying there, between the curtain and the umbrella stand, it lacked light, air, and dew…it wrung
his heart”; “he devoted to it an attention…like the compassion felt for the trouble of a relative…
he recognized a companion in misfortune”. This critical imagining is an exercise in empathy.
Now I’d like to turn to a second theoretical importance of story—Marcovaldo’s stories and
others. I’d like to address Slow Violence and the problem of representation
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We are accustomed to understanding violence as an explosive or spectacular event, immediate in
time and space. In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon
urges us to imagine a different kind of violence: violence that is slow, invisible; that “occurs
gradually and out of sight…that is dispersed across time and space”. Nixon cites climate change,
deforestation, and toxic drift as examples. This kind of violence is difficult to understand because
it occurs outside normal attention spans and often outside human memory. Slow violence is
difficult to act upon, because there is the problem with representation and narrative. How do we
capture species extinction in a headline? What but the most spectacular of environmental
disasters would make the lead story in a 24-hour news loop? “Marcovaldo and street sweeper eat
poisonous mushrooms in a hyper-industrialized city! Human connection to the natural world has
been severed! Stay tuned for the full story, at 11….!!” Environmental disasters, Nixon explains,
“are anonymous and star nobody”.
The challenge of visibility in a spectacle-driven world is above all representational. How do we
represent the kind of invisible violence that denudes food systems and compromises the way we
feed ourselves, the way we feed the city? I argue it is with the stories we tell. It is a project of
narrative.
Nixon explains it this way:
To confront slow violence requires…that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats
whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges
are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic events that are low
in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally entails…
devising…narrative forms that infuse [iconic] symbols with dramatic urgency.
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In other words, think of the Marcovaldo’s mushrooms, what they might represent: a prized
discovery for a keen observer, a secret fruit of the silvipastoral system…an iconic symbol of wild
or liminal spaces. A danger, an unknown quality. In linguistic terms, the mushroom is a
signifier; what it signifies in this instance is wild food and wildness in general: an antidote to
Marcovaldo’s denuded city life. Marcovaldo yearns for this, for a direct relationship to the
natural world, for an unmediated connection to his food. The mushrooms germinating in the
“sterile, encrusted strip of earth” represent his connection to what’s natural, even amongst what
he sees as the corruption of the city. But Calvino takes Marcovaldo’s mushroom and poisons it,
thereby infusing it (as Nixon would have it) “with dramatic urgency.” Or again, in linguistic
terms, Calvino disrupts the relationship between signifier and signified, thereby building a new
and unexpected sign called “mushroom.”
New food signs develop throughout history and especially within the context of cultural contact.
My students and I have often cited bread as an example. In the Roman Republic bread meant
patriotism. It grew to become symbolic of the citizen-soldier; a peasant could not become a
citizen until he became enlisted on the army rolls. Keeping a garden was a necessity; growing
wheat was a sign of inclusion. After the third century BC, however, bread became the central
food of public distribution, and thus to distinguish themselves from the plebs and peasants, many
Romans turned away from bread as an expression of privilege. The sign of bread, as we know,
has come to signify further in several different ways: after the cultural revolution that was
Christianity, bread itself became the reminder of the body of Christ; over the ensuing centuries,
white bread and brown bread have shifted in economic signification: where once refined white
bread was an expression of wealth, now it often signifies poverty. In Fascist Italy, bread became
the costly symbol of self-sufficiency and austerity. In short, bread does not come out of the oven
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with inherent meaning. As Roland Barthes explains, “food sums up and transmits a situation”; it
is a highly structured method of communication.
So what does Marcovaldo’s mushroom communicate? The mushroom, the very item that
promises to bring Marcovaldo joy, nourishment, and nature, lands him in a hospital ward, toxic
and angry. Instead of bringing him closer to what’s wild, it delivers him to an antiseptic
environment where he is forced to have his stomach pumped. The mushroom, in Calvino’s hand,
becomes emblematic of slow violence, of the invisible effects of industrialization, prosperity,
and progress.
Now, I know some critics argue that Calvino is only satirizing ignorance of city life and
misplaced nostalgia for a sylvan past. But I disagree. The mushroom, although potentially
dangerous, is so powerful a symbol of culinary treasure that it trumps nostalgia. Not convinced?
You think the mushroom too loaded with stories of accidental poisonings, and hallucinogenic
ingestions, to be an effective symbol of slow violence? Ok. Consider this: in story 11, we find
Marcovaldo once again in the hospital. Upon his release, he comically steals a fluffy white rabbit
with a pink triangle nose. What does the rabbit signify, before Calvino deftly transforms it? The
rabbit could signify self-sufficiency, the kind urged at the height of fascist food policies. (In the
1930s many magazines and cookbooks explained how housewives could stretch family food
budgets by launching rabbit-raising projects in the home.) But it is not in service of “domestic
rationalization” that Marcovaldo takes the rabbit. The rabbit gives him the strength, Calvino tells
us, to step out into the foggy, damp nothingness of the city. He brings the rabbit home. His wife
wants to cook it; his children want it as a pet. Each plan is subverted when doctors, police, and
two men from the Red Cross come to Marcovaldo’s house to find the rabbit, because, they tell
him “we’ve injected it with the germs of a terrible disease and it can spread through the whole
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city. I needn’t ask if you’ve eaten it; if you have, you’d be dead and gone by now”. The slow
violence of toxicity again threatens Marcovaldo’s family, community, and city.
There are, as I said, many examples in the Marcovaldo stories relating to food systems and food
integrity. For now let me offer one more. Story 13 opens with a poignant diatribe, which I would
like to quote here at length:
Era un tempo in cui i più semplici cibi racchiudevano minacce insidie e frodi. It was a time
when the simplest foods contained traps, threats, and frauds…cheese was made of plastic,
butter from tallow candles; in fruit and vegetables the arsenic of insecticides was
concentrated in percentages higher than the vitamin content; to fatten chickens they
stuffed them with synthetic pills that could transform the man who ate a drumstick into a
chicken himself….From the tins of oil it was no longer the golden juice of the olive that
flowed, but the fat of old mules, cleverly disguised.
First, take note of the language: “Era un tempo”; “It was a time.” Some of you know that Calvino
was intimately engaged with the form and function of the Italian fable; this opening “era un
tempo” signals the conventions of the fable. In a fable, nothing is as it seems, making this form
ideally suited to representations of slow violence. Calvino often portrays the world we inhabit as
if it were the world of an Italian folk story. Why? It is as if by making the familiar feel somewhat
distant, he is able to engage more directly the moral underpinnings of individual and social
decisions. It is the postwar Italian experience Calvino fabulizes in the Marcovaldo stories. The
miracle of economic growth has dark consequences: environmental pollution and the disruption
of food systems that had nourished Italian contadini for centuries are betrayed. The mushroom,
the rabbit, and the fish are not nourishment, as commonly understood, but have become toxic
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symbols of industrial capitalism. The Marcovaldo stories function to “draw attention to
catastrophic events that are low in spectacle but high in long-term effects.”
I use Marcovaldo as an extended example of the way stories produce meaning, represent that
meaning, and engage the audience to participate in the creation of meaning. Slow violence, the
kind that degrades long-term food systems and threatens the way we feed the city, is made
visible here. Shortly before Calvino died in 1985 at the age of 62, he was working on a series of
lectures he was due to deliver at Harvard. In the introductory lecture, he wrote “My confidence
in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can
give us, by means specific to it".
Finally, I’d like to turn to environmental memory. Environmental memory is the personal
and communal recall of plants, animals, weather, and other non-human phenomena in the natural
world. It is not history—but it can provide a crucial counter balance to “official” histories.
Verbal environmental memories in the form of narrative can provide important scientific clues:
Thoreau and plant recall, for instance…
Environmental memory is embedded in the visual arts, too. It is a visual or verbal exploration of
natural phenomena and species. It helps us read the multidisciplinary ways food and food
products signify. Think about the example of the cinta senese entering the city from the
country in Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad government…that image helps us
establish the cinta senese’s history in Tuscany, its relationship to geography, politics, and
economics.
In other words, environmental memory helps us imagine and understand worlds we do not
inhabit.
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In the example of Marcovaldo, environmental memory has a potent place in bringing to life
ecosystems, lifelines, communities that were lost as a result of mass industrialization. In story 13
(the one I referred to a moment ago that begins…”era un tempo”), Marcovaldo evokes the
memory of an intact food system, one that provided nourishment and joy: “when his wife
Domitilla came back from the market, the site of her shopping bag, which had once given him
such joy with its celery and eggplant, the rough, absorbent paper of the packages from the grocer
or delicatessen, now filled him with fear as if hostile presences had infiltrated the walls of his
house”. Empathy, signification and slow violence are invoked here: with the visceral language
of Marcovaldo’s disgust, we transport ourselves to him and willfully understand his ensuing
actions. We see in how short a time food has changed its meaning in the resignification of
Domitilla's shopping bag from joy to fear. Finally, of course, we witness the physical entrance of
toxicity into his house and onto his plate. American ecocritic Lawrence Buell explains that one
facet of environmental memory is the way it can either complement or antagonize official
history: Marcovaldo's memories of food before the economic miracle, provide a powerful
counter narrative to its benefits. It’s a simulated recollection that reinterprets and critiques the
rapid economic expansion that flooded the consumer market with cheap products and changed
Italy from being a poverty-stricken, mostly rural nation to a highly industrialized one.
Environmental memory also situates the reader (or viewer) in a curious position: we are witness
to Marcovaldo's distress over his wife’s shopping bag, but we are also the inheritors of that
shopping bag. We too suffer from the “hostile presences that fill our house,” and we are moved,
like Marcovaldo, to wonder if food degradation is…inevitable. Further, these kinds of mundane
memories—of Thoreau’s favorite berries and their ripening time, of the solid presence of the
cinta sense in 14th
century Siena, or of the joyful celery and eggplant and rough paper packages,
forces us to reconsider the idea of “nature” or “environment” as something out there, apart from
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us. Through environmental memory we come to see the natural world as integral to our
humanity; our food becomes part of our community.
Marcovaldo refuses to stay down for long. After seeing Domitilla’s shopping bag, he vows to
provide his family “with food that hasn’t passed though the treacherous hands of speculators.”
He will cut out the middle men. He decides to go fishing. He borrows boots, bait, poles, nets; he
follows tributaries and streams, searching for “a place…where the water is really water, where
the fish are really fish”. He finds an incredibly blue pool, where the fish good-naturedly throw
themselves into his bucket. After filling his bucket, he moves up the path to his motorbike, only
to meet an official looking man. “If you caught those fish from down below, throw them back
right now! Didn’t you see that factory up there?...You must have at least seen the color of the
water! A paint factory: the river’s poisoned because of that blue, and the fish are poisoned as
well!”
We have to leave Marcovaldo here, on the edge of the bright blue water with his bucket full of
poisoned fish. We have empathy for him and the natural world that nourishes him and us; we
appreciate the slow violence that poisons his (and our) food, we can recall, like him, food that
brought us joy and nourishment. Critically imagining Marcovaldo’s world is the heart of what
many are calling the sustainable humanities, an interdisciplinary, multi-textual inquiry into the
way humans make meaning and value about the natural world. Facets of empathy, an
understanding of slow violence, and an engagement with environmental memory, will sustain us
as we reimagine ways to Feed the City.
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