Poor, put upon soil. It gives us life, but we talk about it like it’s the most repugnant thing ever created. We equate it with shit when we say someone has “soiled their pants”; if we despise someone, they’re dirt, soil’s impoverished cousin; and we’re only slightly less horrible when we fret over our children soiling their clothes when playing outside. The poorest a poor person can be is “dirt” poor and if there’s one thing rich people never do, it’s get their soft, moisturised hands dirty.
Yet come dinner time, humanity scoffs root vegetables as if eating things covered in soil is essential to our survival (which it may well be). In 2020, we chowed down 359 million tonnes of potatoes alone, five million more than the year before. Wikipedia lists another 69 vegetables we can’t get enough of that spend their lives growing fully or partly underground, in amongst the archaea, bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, protozoa, springtails, mites, nematodes, earthworms, ants, and burrowing beasties of every description.
Humanity’s twisted relationship with soil is reflected in the word’s origins. As a verb, it entered English in the early 13th century from Old French soillier, “to splatter with mud, to foul or make dirty”. Old French took it either from the Latin solium, “tub for bathing” or suculus, “little pig”.
I mean, come on.
When it made its way into English, no doubt forgetting to wipe its disgusting boots as it closed the door, soil initially operated only in a figurative sense, meaning “to defile or pollute with sin”. But it didn’t take long for that meaning to extend to the material world. By the late 1300s, people were tending to soiled clothing, tabletops, dishes, and bodies. So it was that an industry dedicated to overpriced, overscented, overrated cleaning products was born.
As a noun, soil’s status is somewhat more refined than the verb’s. While it can mean “filth”, its more common meaning is “ground”. No doubt it’s that second meaning we have in mind as we scrub our potatoes before popping them in the pot. Scrubbing shit off them wouldn’t be nearly so appetitising.
According to etymonline, soil in the sense of “ground” has a messy lineage. Old French had sol (“bottom, ground, soil”), soeul or sueil (“threshold, area, place”), and soil or soille (“a miry place”). Any one of those words is a plausible source of soil the noun in English, and it may be that our noun is a merger of all three.
I find something profoundly satisfying in getting a whiff of soil into my nostrils. When it’s healthy and rich in organic matter, something beyond words happens. No wonder; much of the action takes place in our amygdala, one of the most primitive parts of the brain.
I suspect my upbringing has a lot to do with it. There’s no getting away from smells on a dairy farm. You’ve got soil, cow shit, cow urine, cows’ bodies in wet weather (warm wet weather especially), fertiliser, new-born calves, calf shit, calf feed, anaerobic mud dug out when clearing drains, and a million other things than can exist anywhere on the spectrum between complete foulness (don’t ever let a cow pee near you is great advice) and intrigue (old, slightly musty hay isn’t attractive exactly, but neither is it repellent).
I left home at 17 and became a city boy for the next 45 years. Along the way, I left those smells behind - and a part of me always missed them. When I get a noseful of something rich and organic, I suspect some deeply happy part of my youth gets re-presenced.
Scientists have a phrase for powerful memories being evoked by smell: the Proust Effect, named for a famous paragraph in Marcel Proust’s masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, in which a long-forgotten childhood memory floods into the narrator’s mind as he bites into a madeleine.
Despite my earlier protest, the connection between soil and shit is undeniable. Cattle farmers know that what comes out of their animals’ butts is a critical part of maintaining soil fertility. Peek under a week-old cow pat (make sure it’s dry of course) and you can see this in action for yourself. You’ll find an abundance of critters under it as well as a flush of green grass making the most of this neatly packaged food source. Come back a few months later and the cow pat will now be indistinguishable from the soil.
The fact that western societies look for ways to dispose of our excrement that involve anything but placing them on ground where we produce food seems to me to be one of the greatest lost opportunities on the planet. I get the issues with E. Coli etc, which had America’s Sierra Club grimly state: “Urban sludges are a highly complex, unpredictable, biologically active mixture of organic material and human pathogens ... sludge can contain thousands of industrial chemicals, including dozens of carcinogens, hormone disrupting chemicals, toxic metals, dioxins, radionuclides and other persistent bioaccumulative poisons.” But you know, if we can put a man on the moon, surely, etc.
Earthy smells can come from the most surprising places. Years ago my workplace was treated to a French wine tasting, and I can still recall how, when I shoved my nose into one glass, it was as though I’d just rubbed my face into a barnyard floor. Nothing about it was unpleasant though - it had a down and dirty quality, yes, but it was right and true. In fact, it was one of the most gorgeous experiences of my life which I’ve never been able to replicate with a new world wine. Apparently, it’s to do with a wild yeast called Brettanomyces, and new world winemakers aren’t known for their fondness of wild (and unpredictable) anythings.
Peaty whiskeys also have an earthy, though less dirty, quality, and if you don’t shove your nose deep into the glass before taking a sip, you’re missing out, Jimmy.
I got a similar experience the other day when a local mushroom grower delivered a load of compost to our new home. When I picked up a handful of it and put it to my nose, it filled my head with the smells of organic matter breaking down the way nature intended them to, on their way to creating a foundation for something new and wondrous to grow.
Yet still. When Levon Helm sang Dirt Farmer, the poverty of the protagonist was reflected in the first word of the song’s title. (Why not Poor Farmer? Because Dirt Farmer makes the point way more vividly.) Lou Reed went even further when he recorded Dirt for his underrated album Street Hassle, in which the target of the song is about as low in the singer’s eyes as it’s possible for a person to go. (It may also be the first Lou Reed album where the man showed a sense of humour.)
Perhaps my favourite dirt-related song is Tom Waits’ Dirt in the Ground, in which America’s most unpigeonholeable son gruffly reminds us that “we’re all gonna be in the same place when we die.” This live version, from Glitter and Doom, makes the studio version sound anaemic - no small feat.
Bits and specious
Following last week’s post on faith, Tony Brenton-Rule shared this Wikipedia link of atheist authors.
If you suspect your veges (and the soil adhering to them) are less tasty and nutritious than they used to be, you may be right.
Here’s the Proust passage: “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”
Quote of the week
I am not the type who wants to go back to the land. I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.
Fran Lebowitz