It Grew in the Same Soil, Yet Only the Shape Was Chosen
Inside a basket brought in from the field, there was a single radish bent like a drawn bow. Apart from being bent, it was no different from any other radish. Through the months it spent in the soil, it must have been struck by the same rain, bathed in the same sun, tended by the same hands. Yet the moment it was placed on the sorting table, that one alone was set off to the side. The reason was only this: that it was not straight. On the table, it is given no chance to explain how it came to bend.
What fails to pass through the mesh is never asked why
A sieve never asks why something could not pass through it.
Anything larger than the coarseness of its mesh is turned away; anything smaller slips through. The sieve itself holds no malice; it is merely a tool that divides things in two by a fixed standard. Yet the side that is turned away is never asked for a reason. Because it was bent, because it was too thick, because it was too small—on that alone, the months of water and sunlight poured into its growing are all set aside together. Whether it tastes good is never once asked there. How much of the soil's nourishment it drew up is not asked either. What is asked is only its shape.
Come to think of it, though it is the human side that does the sieving, at some point the mesh itself has taken on the face of the master. Once the size of that mesh is decided, all that remains is to mechanically repeat the sorting: pass, or do not pass. The moment something is put to the sieve, every other standard quietly vanishes. What remains is only a single line—whether it passed or did not. And who drew that line, the sieve itself does not know.
No one decided it, yet no one can defy it
A curve called the normal distribution always has tails.
The bulk of the numbers gather in the middle, growing fewer toward either end. When these tails are cut off as "exceptions," only the middle that remains comes to look "normal." But it was not that only the middle existed from the start. It is only after the tails are shaved away that the middle first stands out. That a straight vegetable looks like "the ordinary shape" works by the same logic. It is not that bent individuals were a minority from the beginning; rather, as the procedure of sorting was repeated again and again, only the straight ones went on lining the shelves, and that, before anyone noticed, came to be remembered as "ordinary."
Few people, pressed on it, can say who set this standard. The producer did not decide it. Nor did the buyer raise a voice demanding it. I once recorded whose burden lies hidden behind the low price of "cheap," and there is a similar structure here. Buyers want things as cheap and as good-looking as possible, and sellers, wishing to avoid complaints and returns, make their sorting standards ever stricter. The labor of meeting those standards, and the waste of what could not meet them, are quietly pushed back upstream, to the field farthest up the current. No one gave a clear order. As each party edged a little toward the safer side, before anyone noticed, a single line no one can defy had formed. The word "standard" carries a neutral, scientific ring. Yet in the shadow of that neutrality, the very question of whose door the burden piles up against fades from sight.
Only what juts out past the mould is quietly shaved away
The work of cutting with a mould takes no interest in the part that juts out.
Press the mould against the dough, and only the shape tracing the mould's outline remains; the jutting edges are all shaved off together and carried elsewhere. The shaved-off dough contains exactly the same ingredients as the part that stayed, yet merely for being outside the mould, it is no longer called "product." Fitting vegetables to the mould of a standard closely resembles this. Only what settles inside the mould lines the shelves as "vegetables," while what juts outside is carried, under a changed name, to another place—for processing, for feed, or simply for disposal. Even bent, even too large, it remains a life that was grown, and yet. Once the name changes, so does the handling. The very same thing becomes either courteous or careless, by a single change of what it is called.
Every piece of matter in this universe is, at bottom, nothing more than matter—there I go again, blurting out something grand. The point is simply this: the worth of lives grown in the very same way is being divided on the grounds of shape alone.
I once recorded the technology that erases the seasons, and the waste born from it. The technology that does away with the seasons and the standard that evens out shape look, at the root, like the same thing. It is the work of remaking the unevenness that nature produces into a uniformity convenient for human hands. In the course of that remaking, little light is cast on what spills away. The taste of what spilled away is, more often than not, no different from the taste of what did not. And even so, its taste is almost never confirmed.
I gazed for a while at the bent radish in the basket. Had it been straight, it would by now be on someone's table. There is no difference in taste. Merely because its shape differed, this one was set out of the line.
The next time you see a shelf of neatly arrayed vegetables, remember, if only a little, that behind it lies a portion that grew just as much and yet fell out of the line. The uniformity of the shelf is not nature's own form, but the form left after the selecting is done.
I only record where the line was drawn.
