coe056_barnes.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast I am Dominic Boyer, I'm here with my co-host Tim anyhow, who has recently undergone acupuncture, so she's going to be talking about that on today's podcast. And also we'll be talking about what else

Speaker2: [00:00:41] I don't know my my rather elitist environmental complaint to New York Times. Ok. And two short dream sequences and requested by Dominic Boyer. My.

Speaker1: [00:00:52] Oh no. Those are totally by popular. That's totally those are mailbag

Speaker2: [00:00:56] Questions, for sure. But after all that excitement, no. Yes. After all that excitement, we're going to have a wonderful conversation with the wonderful Jessica Barnes. Jesse Barnes. She's an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Southern South Carolina, southern Carolinas. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker1: [00:01:16] Oh, that was still Alice unable to remember, even remember the names of.

Speaker2: [00:01:21] I know it was like Southern California or Southern Carolina.

Speaker1: [00:01:26] I think we're I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:01:27] Maybe if they change the name of the state, it could improve its profile. Yeah, maybe it'll become a vacation destination. It may be already. In fact, I think we're going to South Carolina, aren't we?

Speaker1: [00:01:39] I don't know about that. Maybe it's North Carolina. I'm pretty sure we're protesting them for some bathroom bill or something.

Speaker3: [00:01:44] That's yes, they're the bathroom ones.

Speaker1: [00:01:46] So I'll just say that that's great news. We want to talk about water. We wanted to talk about agriculture. And we're talking about both those things, right?

Speaker2: [00:01:53] And Jesse is the author. I should also say of a book that we talk about. It's called Cultivating the Nile. The everyday politics of water in Egypt came out with Duke in twenty fourteen, right? So but, you know, listeners will hear quite a bit about that book.

Speaker1: [00:02:06] And you know what? You know, even though we've talked about what are a couple of times in the podcast, it's pretty much the most important elements last resource that's out there in the world. So it's something we're likely to return to from time to time on the podcast.

Speaker2: [00:02:18] And the topic is very popular. Yes. In terms of downloads, so everyone wants to know more about water and actually speaking of water, while I was laying on the acupuncture table with a bunch of needles in me and not just needles, but electricity pulsing.

Speaker1: [00:02:36] Yeah, see, this is I didn't realize that's kind of freaked me out that I didn't know that they actually used, like they hooked you up to a car battery, basically. Isn't that electroshock treatment? I mean, where does where does acupuncture leave off and torture begin?

Speaker2: [00:02:49] Well, I mean, it definitely has some of the elements of torture. I mean, when the couple of needles that she put in, I was like writhing like terrible pain, like wanted to just rip them out. But I shouldn't scare everyone. I mean, this is only my second time ever in my life doing acupuncture. So it's still very new. But in general, it's not painful. But I think if it hits some of these nerves that are already have already been suffering for a month or

Speaker1: [00:03:14] So and know so was it like the accumulated pain you already had that made it so painful? Or was it kind of like you have this acupuncturist who's either a you look like you're pretty tough? So let's go cowboy on this or be there just a little sadistic?

Speaker2: [00:03:29] She might be. I mean, I think she's very good, but I think she is a little sadistic. Yeah, I haven't had. I've only had one sip of coffee at this point.

Speaker1: [00:03:37] We're going early this morning anyway.

Speaker2: [00:03:40] Yeah. Well, I mean, she could be a little bit of a well-trained torturer because when I told her I was like, Oh, I don't think I can handle like, I can't deal with that, that needle, the one that she just put in, I was like, It's too painful. I can't do it to take it out. And she just kind of sat there and looked at me and she's like, Well, how about now? Is it still hurting? And, you know, she just sort of waited and I was writhing. But eventually it did stop.

Speaker1: [00:04:04] I mean, someone who's sticking electrified needles into people.

Speaker2: [00:04:07] I mean, I put the needles first

Speaker1: [00:04:09] And and they're making you pay for it, too. It's great.

Speaker2: [00:04:11] It's not cheap, either. Anyway, so anyway, but it is helping. It's helping. It's getting a little bit better, she says. She can get me back to 80 or 90 percent, but one hundred percent is harder. But I say I want 100 percent of my leg back. I want 80 percent of a leg

Speaker1: [00:04:25] Being stuck with electrified needles. Kind of reminds me of our present, you know, political situation. And I feel like as a transition to your New York Times complaint, let me just say that, you know, I am getting to the point now where I wake up in the morning and open the news where I'm not immediately plunged into despair. I feel like we have withstood the first flood of, you know, kind of evil executive orders that have come out. Some of them have been turned back. Others are becoming points of resistance. But I feel as though, you know, we're also settling into the realization that this is going to be a really long four years or two years or three months or however long this regime lasts. And the thing that really, of course, upset me most in the past week was the Standing Rock news. And obviously, Standing Rock is going to be again a site of major contention, probably violence as the water protectors try to resist the final push to create this thing now with the full. The federal government against them. Right. So let me just say, well,

Speaker2: [00:05:27] But I know I mean, but the

Speaker1: [00:05:29] New York Times is the enemy, so let's let's turn to that.

Speaker2: [00:05:32] You know, I do like them, but but let me just I mean, yes, I guess we're getting inured to the nightmare in a way. But in fact, many of the things he's done are commensurate in some ways worse than what he promised or proposed on the campaign trail. So that's a little frightening to see what's going to come. And now we're getting all these cabinet appointments that are being pushed through. So all of the evil henchmen are now in charge and you can see them swarming around there. You heard about the four chairs, right, that surround the president's desk,

Speaker1: [00:06:07] And all three of them are three of them are Steve Bannon. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:06:10] Well, right. I guess he gets

Speaker1: [00:06:12] One Steve Bannon and one four

Speaker2: [00:06:13] Is asked to offer his head and one for his right foot. Two of

Speaker1: [00:06:16] His clones

Speaker2: [00:06:17] And two of his clones? Exactly. Yeah. Anyway, no, it's true. And maybe we'll even do another Standing Rock, I think episode. Who knows

Speaker1: [00:06:28] Soon

Speaker2: [00:06:29] That's important. But OK, first of all, here's my it's only slightly elitist, and the reason it's elitist is because it has to do with the recipe section of the New York Times. Ok. Something that I'm sure all of our listeners pore through every morning. Well, it does show up on the front page on the screen, and so you kind of click on it if it looks interesting

Speaker1: [00:06:50] Because most people wake up in this hour. I want to know how to make a really good tea smoked squab today. And that's kind of some squid ink pasta to go with that.

Speaker2: [00:06:58] Yeah, in 20 minutes or less.

Speaker1: [00:07:00] So which of the squab recipes was the one that really so?

Speaker2: [00:07:04] Well, this was a. Because sometimes they even go a little ethnic. And so they had a recipe for a Chinese dish, which you and I ate recently at both Cooking Girl and Pepper Twins. And it's it's scrambled eggs with tomato. And it sounds well to me. It sounds odd on the menu, but it's actually really delicious. So that's what that was. The recipe that the New York Times had today or yesterday or some day. And I was like, Oh, that might be kind of yummy to make. Maybe, you know, could be good. Then I was like, Why do they have a recipe that involves fresh tomatoes that are such an important part of the dish? Cut up fresh tomatoes right in the middle of winter? I mean, you know. Right. And so it's like, where are you going to get decent tomatoes unless they're being, you know, flown in from Honduras or Mexico or Israel? Or, you know, maybe in a hot house? But, you know, knowing that the tomatoes are central ingredient in this dish, they're not covered up in any way. They need to be decent tasting and it's really going to involve a lot of fuel and transport and wasted energy. And so I was thinking that the New York Times should at least try to maybe half of the recipes they do should be seasonally appropriate to North America, at least. I like it. Maybe it doesn't have to be like, Oh, can you get this, you know, in upstate New York or in Southern California, but maybe not that specific, but it should be seasonally appropriate so that you could go to your local farmer's market, let's say, and find most of the ingredients, if not all of them.

Speaker1: [00:08:31] Right? It seems like a very appropriate thing, especially when we're going to be talking on the podcast today about agriculture in Egypt, where the big idea is, let's not worry so much about growing things where the Nile, you know, naturally waters things. Yes. But let's just push out and start growing things in the desert. Like that'll be. Our new plan is to is to create a desert farming. And I know that sounds absurd, but really, that's obviously a big part of California's history, too, is the management of water that allowed, you know, a state that has a lot of desert in it to become our.

Speaker2: [00:09:04] Yeah, I mean, hothouse. Exactly. Well, right, exactly. Yeah. So, so many of the vegetables. And for those listeners who are too young to remember it, Chinatown, a great thing. Oh yeah. I mean, that was what late late seventies,

Speaker1: [00:09:19] Early eighties like seventy three, I think. Really? Yeah. Jack Nicholson was really young.

Speaker2: [00:09:23] Yeah, he was young anyway. That's a great film, and it talks about the politics of water at the beginning of the 20th century in Southern California, but it's instructive and also an interesting mystery. But here's a financial

Speaker1: [00:09:33] Industry that is a constructive no for the New York Times. Are we moving on to dream sequences?

Speaker2: [00:09:37] Yeah. So now you can, because you have studied Dr. Freud extensively. I mean, you're practically a psychoanalyst in your own right.

Speaker1: [00:09:46] I freelance.

Speaker2: [00:09:47] All right. So here these are just two two little glimmers of hope.

Speaker1: [00:09:51] The key thing to bear in mind is wish fulfillment. Whatever is happening in that dream world, you are fulfilling a wish.

Speaker2: [00:09:58] Ok. Well, that's interesting, all right.

Speaker1: [00:10:00] I help you interpret your dream.

Speaker2: [00:10:02] Good. Ok, so this was like a little flash. I I went someplace I don't know if it was a restaurant or an office or something, and everyone was sitting there were like seven to 10 people sitting around and everyone was wearing hats. Ok. They were all different hats like baseball hat, bowler hat, little pork pie hat, sun hat. And I was like, Why are you guys wearing hats? And I didn't. I was kind of baffled by it because I was. How come all of a sudden everyone's wearing hats inside somewhere? Why hats, right? Ok, that one's kind of odd and not that interesting. But maybe this one's more interesting for for you to think about the wish fulfillment. Ok, this was like a little later in the dream where again, it was a room. I think it was a classroom this time and people were sitting down and everyone had a nametag on a rather large nametag. There were only three or four people and they were all named P, R, E, S, E and T present. And I was see this very zen. I think so. Anyway, so I looked at it and I was like, Is that present? Like, I'm present here, I'm I have the physical presence. Is it present or is it present? Like, I'm going to present this present something to the class? Or is it present like I'm a gift? Or think of me as a gift?

Speaker1: [00:11:23] Yeah. Well, I mean. So Dr. Boyer, yeah, the multiplicity. I would have to ask probably a lot more questions than we have time for, but just off the surface of it, I will say the multiplicity of meanings and punning is very much a part of of how dreams work, according to Freud, because he says they're kind of like picture puzzles like Rebus is. And so actually, just what you've decoded from it is probably all three of those things are probably in there somehow. Mm hmm. You mean

Speaker2: [00:11:48] The meaning of

Speaker1: [00:11:49] Presence in all three of those meanings being condensed into this one thing are probably significant. The thing about the hats, I don't know you. You know what you had to do. They for you. They tend to protect you from the Sun because the only time you wear a hat is when you are seeking sun protection for your fair skin.

Speaker2: [00:12:08] So or if I'm wearing my fake fur hat in Iceland, my little fur helmet? Yes, basically, yeah. Sun hat or fur helmet?

Speaker1: [00:12:15] Yeah. Good point. We've been it's been so long since we've been in like a cold environment. I've forgotten that hats do have another purpose, like keeping your head warm. But here it's mostly sun protection. So yeah, I mean, some kind of a protection

Speaker2: [00:12:28] Vulnerability vulnerability because I didn't have a hat. Right?

Speaker1: [00:12:31] Well, you didn't have a hat. So maybe you're looking to be surrounded by people who have protection, protective strength, maybe the presence

Speaker2: [00:12:39] That that sounds like a patriarchal interpretation.

Speaker1: [00:12:41] Well, I didn't say they could all be women and you didn't specify the genders and

Speaker2: [00:12:45] They were mixed.

Speaker1: [00:12:46] Ok, so the presence could be. Now what worries me is that you have this big empty room with just a few people. And so that suggests that this this presence is not necessarily well attended. Maybe you want more people there or I don't know. But usually the dream is, you know, even in the the funny thing with a dream theory is, you know, what do you do with these like nightmare dreams? They can't be wish fulfillment. Nobody wants to be attacked by a dog, right? But I don't know. You know, so there's limits to how it goes. But Freud had these elaborate, and he shared his own dreams and his dreams were basically all about being respected as an academic analyst. So his big anxiety was that no one took him seriously. So in many of his dreams, he was always kind of, you know, becoming a figure who is right and his diagnoses, like all these people who thought he was quacks would turn out to be, in fact, you know, themselves making things up or whatever lying or just fools. And so Freud would always come out the authority figure. But, you know, in the dream, in the dream. And so my question is always been, you know, how much is Freud's dream theory just basically designed to explain Freud's dreams? And how much is it to explain other people's? So maybe wish fulfillment isn't the whole thing. Maybe there is just a kind of hallucinatory quality to it, but I'm going to say the hats are significant and that maybe that's what people want to take away from this moment. Hats get one, get one and come out, you know? And the other thing is, get out and go to a go to a march or rally or protest this week and wear a hat. And and that sign, which says present, maybe instead of putting present on there, just right, right, a slogan on their right, a slogan like, you know,

Speaker2: [00:14:24] Yeah, they were about the size of protest signs.

Speaker1: [00:14:26] There you go. So maybe that's it

Speaker2: [00:14:28] With big lettering.

Speaker1: [00:14:29] So. So maybe let's put yeah, let's get some protest signs out there. Like my favorite one from the L.A. march was Trump's farts. Maybe that's

Speaker2: [00:14:38] That's a good one little girl

Speaker1: [00:14:39] With the trumpets farts. It was the absurdity of it, but the sincerity of it at the same time that made it work anyway, folks. Listen, listen on for the conversation. And in case you don't make it to the end, we have a great chat really late on about elemental anthropology and how people are starting to want to study the elements. Earth, wind, fire and water. We're looking, I guess we're just getting

Speaker2: [00:15:02] Fundamental and farts. That's no. Those are elements. No, it's made up of wind. Oh my God.

Speaker1: [00:15:10] All right. Well, with that,

Speaker2: [00:15:12] You brought up the farts. I really do.

Speaker1: [00:15:14] I didn't do it. I was just trying to celebrate a little girl's political courage. That's all I was trying to do. Ok, folks, go Jesse.

Speaker2: [00:15:21] Go Jesse. Hello, dear cultures of energy listeners, we are really, really glad to be back in your ears and we are also very glad to have Jessica Barnes with us. Hi, Jessica. Welcome.

Speaker3: [00:15:43] Hi, thank you. Welcome.

Speaker2: [00:15:46] Oh, so Dominic, do you have a question?

Speaker1: [00:15:48] I happen to have a question. Oh, great. So, Jessie, I just wanted, first of all, to congratulate you on your book Cultivating the Nile and as a way of getting into that, that book and why it's so interesting and relevant today. I, you know, just wanted to observe that I think the relationship between water and, say, energy and climate is is being considered these days as one of these wicked problems that really will define the course of the 21st century and particularly the availability of water as a resource and as a way of diving into your book. You know, one of the arguments you make is that water is a resource is maybe not as obvious as what we sometimes think it is. It's not just a given, but rather it's something that's already made. Is that a fair way of of jumping off into the deep end?

Speaker3: [00:16:40] Yeah, I think absolutely. That's sort of one of the central arguments I'm trying to make in the book, and I think probably that in itself wouldn't come as much as a surprise to many people. You know, there's been quite a strong literature that looked at kind of the making of resources or complicating water resources. But what I'm trying to do in the book is really try to kind of tease out how it is that the resources made so looking particularly at these two parameters of water, both its quality characteristics and its sort of quantity, how much water there is, how can we trace exactly what are the different kind of everyday practices through which those characteristics are made on the day to day basis?

Speaker1: [00:17:20] Yeah, right. So do you want to go maybe a little bit into some of the critical dimensions of that, the ones that you look at in the book, right?

Speaker2: [00:17:26] Like what does making water look like?

Speaker1: [00:17:28] Basically in Egypt, which I should have mentioned at the beginning,

Speaker2: [00:17:32] The focus making water sounds like urination doesn't. It sounds like a vector that's like a Victorian name for going potty. I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:17:40] It's part of the hydrological.

Speaker2: [00:17:41] I didn't mean it that way. I really meant it in the constructivist way.

Speaker3: [00:17:49] Yeah. Well, I think, you know, if you just took as a starting point, a farmer accessing water from a canal, you know, on the one hand, the reason he or she is able to do that is because that water has fallen as rain over the highlands of the Nile, the highlands of East Africa, where the Nile begins and then flowing down the Nile through a whole set of sort of irrigation infrastructures to arrive at that point. But on the other hand, the reason that that farmer is able to kind of sort of access that particular volume of water and a water of a particular name nature, a particular level of salinity or a particular level of quality is tied to this whole sort of set of decision making practices, sort of infrastructural operations and kind of these these different sort of dynamics upstream of that farmer that have really shaped the nature of that water.

Speaker2: [00:18:44] And some of that, as I understand it has to do with water rights and the dynamics of of irrigation gates and canals and how those operate. And one of the things I was curious about is, you know, I'm aware of some of the irrigation politics in the southwest, United States, in California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico. And there, you know, there's a long political history to who has rights over the water and legacy rights or older rights that have been held for some time have have precedence over newer water rights. And of course, it's incredibly contentious. You know who has access to those? So can you tell us a little bit about the kind of policy structure or the legal structure for obtaining rights in Egypt? Or does it does it look really different? Is this is this completely opposite and from what we know in the southwestern United States?

Speaker3: [00:19:44] Yeah, it's interesting because this is a question I get pretty frequently when I talk about this work with American audiences, and I think it's because, you know, water rights has such a like you say, it has such sort of significance in the United States. It doesn't really translate directly into the Egyptian context under Egyptian law. Every farmer has a right to water, and it's just left kind of rather vague like that. It's not kind of codified in the same way. And in general, people, you know, bureaucrats and policymakers don't talk about it in terms of water rights. You know, that term itself when you start talking about rights becomes very politically contentious in Egypt in terms of the kind of claims made. King, it could potentially generate and really Egyptian policy makers and politicians kind of try and shy away from using that explicit language.

Speaker2: [00:20:40] What are they worried about, do you think?

Speaker3: [00:20:42] Well, you know, farmers do expect to get enough. They do expect to have enough water to irrigate their fields. And if they don't have that water, then they do complain. But if you start to codify that in terms of rights, right, you know, it adds a whole layer of significance of what the government's failing to do if they don't get that water

Speaker2: [00:21:03] Right, right? So it kind of even just having that, that language of lights really right sort of ups the ante in terms of obligation that the government is supposed to fulfill and therefore the ways in which it can fail. Right.

Speaker3: [00:21:15] Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker2: [00:21:17] Well, it's interesting, too, because well, recently, not so recently, the United Nations determined that water was a human right. And I haven't read that legislation carefully, and I honestly don't know if it includes agricultural water rights. I always think of it as drinking water or, I guess, cooking water, bathing water, you know, kind of household access to some form of water, you know, maybe not running water, but but some form. And so it's interesting to think about the question of rights and water in terms of agricultural production as well.

Speaker3: [00:21:55] Yeah, I know I think that U.N. legislation, I too haven't read it very carefully, but my understanding is that it would pertain more to kind of domestic sort of domestic uses. You know, obviously for farmers, if you live somewhere as dry as Egypt, then irrigation is a kind of a matter central to your livelihood. On the other hand, I think it will be difficult to really start talking about it in human rights issues just because it's so it's such a sort of high water use use, you know, kind of. That's where a root of most water related problems are coming from is the high water use in agriculture.

Speaker2: [00:22:30] So right? Was it 90 percent of of water that goes to agriculture?

Speaker3: [00:22:37] Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, I think I think worldwide, it's I mean, it's about 75 percent or 80 percent worldwide, I think anyway. So. But yes, in Egypt, it's estimated, you know, if you take these figures with a little bit of a pinch of salt, but it's estimated to be around 90 percent.

Speaker2: [00:22:54] That's remarkable.

Speaker1: [00:22:56] And you also I mean, you also observe in the book just how elaborate the kind of subsurface infrastructure is that that allows water in Egypt to happen. I mean, I can't remember the exact figure because it's out in front of me, but it's a mound of pipes that would wrap around the world many times that go into the making of of water in Egypt. And so, you know, I don't know how typical that is or if it has to do with the this idea in Egypt that the desert is kind of also the future of farming, that they don't need to remain within the Nile delta. But I don't know. It was very striking to me that that the subsurface dimension of this was extremely salient here and I guess pun intended.

Speaker3: [00:23:41] Yes. I mean, just in case other people aren't so familiar with this. But yeah, there's this whole network of what's called covered or subsurface drainage in Egypt, which is a system of basically perforated pipes that underlies the fields in a grid. And what it does is it captures any kind of excess leftover water in the soil and efficiently evaluates it to an irrigation ditch, an open drainage ditch. Sorry. And what that means is the soil doesn't become waterlogged, and as a result, it doesn't become saline and it remains productive. But yes, it's a whole, you know, so when you're looking at kind of how patterns of where the water is flowing and how it's, for example, its salinity has changed along the way, you have to also look at this kind of flow of water down through the soil and into this network of subsurface pipes. It's not an Egyptian specific thing. Parts of the United States have covered drainage. This technology was really pioneered in the Netherlands, which obviously has a lot of drainage issues. And there's actually a very interesting history to the international development agencies that kind of promoted this technology and supported it in Egypt.

Speaker2: [00:24:50] Mm hmm. I mean, one of the other points you make is that, you know, international donors and I guess philanthropists are are interested in sponsoring irrigation related projects. That's what we think of as productive projects, right? And yet they're much less interested in supporting projects for drainage. And yet it really is part of the entire cycle of the, you know, the hydro agricultural process, right? And yet I think intuitively, I don't know. I think intuitively, we think of, you know, water going towards crops and and, you know, sort of adapalene itself across leaves and then. Soaking into the ground and then it's kind of gone, but in fact, what you point out is that the moment that it goes into the ground actually is one of the fundamental transformation, its kind of ontological transformations that the water experiences or one of the dynamics that it that it creates.

Speaker3: [00:25:50] Mm hmm. And that's just what I'm trying to get at by this idea of sort of following the water. You knew that too wasn't something I'd sort of really previously thought about all that much. And then when I was doing my fieldwork and started to see people talking about these different dimensions, I, you know, it became more apparent.

Speaker2: [00:26:07] Right. And I think one of the other interesting things that struck me because Salient will go back to the salient comment is really the importance of of salt marking in these contexts, right? So you talk about this, there's a kind of crusting of salt and this is a marker for the poverty of of that agricultural space, right? That's a danger sign, if you will, is seeing this kind of this. I guess it's like sort of a strip of of salt or a white colored minerals that that you recognizes as making that terrain difficult to farm. Is there a way in which the are there other ways in which the salt kind of operates in semiotic ways among farmers and agriculturalists?

Speaker3: [00:26:57] Yeah. I mean, it's true that you can see this, you can see it very visibly in the fields and farmers will talk about it. And you know, as you said, it's the sort of interesting mark of what's going on, sort of unseen below the surface, a marker of the absence of an efficient drainage system. Mm hmm. You know, farmers, I remember I once asked a farmer something like sort of I was trying to get at different ways of assessing the salt or, you know, knowing your soil and how salt it is. And I once asked one of my close the farmers I worked with quite closely about this, and he just looked to me like I was absolutely crazy. And he said, Well, we just taste it. You know, I think it wasn't. He didn't see it in sort of such. I was trying to make it overly complicated, I think.

Speaker2: [00:27:45] Mm hmm. Yeah. Typical Northerner, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:27:49] Yes. And speaking of the farmers themselves, you know, I'm curious. We've talked or you folks have talked a little bit in anthropology about, you know, water as as as a key principle of citizenship, trying to rethink citizenship through materials and resources so that Nikki Lennon talks a bit about hydraulic citizenship, for example. And I was curious whether, you know, in your work with the farmers who were being incorporated into the process of water management, whether you saw that in fact people were changing the way that they or rather the way they related to the resource, the way they were being asked to relate to the resource was actually changing their sense of identity, subjectivity, anything like that.

Speaker3: [00:28:30] Yeah, I mean, I I think McHale's work is fascinating. I haven't read his, you know, his books just about to come out. I think where he developed some of these ideas of hydraulic citizenship a little bit more. And you know, that's not something that I've written about so much in relation to the water related work, I guess, because the farmers that I worked with weren't articulating their concerns necessarily in that in those terms so much, I actually think it will come up much more in my current works, all about bread and wheat. And in the case of bread that has been really taken up as a kind of in part of sort of as a sort of part of the citizens claims on the state. So I think I'm going to sort of be engaging a lot more with that idea of that kind of citizenry, sort of how you're seeing identifying as a citizen through your resource use, but it didn't actually come up so much. It wasn't sort of a major theme I identified during my fieldwork with farmers.

Speaker2: [00:29:31] Mm hmm. I mean, you know, one of the other things that you encountered in your fieldwork in Egypt is the kind of paradox of what you call excess and abundance, and you make a juxtaposition between these, these two different elements of water. And I think it's very interesting because, of course, that parallels many of the discussions that we have about climate change, right? So on the one hand, we have drought and desertification and global warming and all the crisis that accompanies that. And on the other hand, we have sea level rise and flooding, and we have hurricanes and storm surges and an overabundance of water. And so your case study really gets at both of those and you make the argument that in some ways, the crisis isn't always about scarcity, which might be the first place that we gravitate towards, but really can be about an overabundance. This incredible resource called cold water, can you talk a little bit more about the distinctions there between excess and and scarcity and how that kind of works itself out?

Speaker3: [00:30:40] Yeah. Well, and I think it's sort of linked. I mean, what's particularly interesting I think in in this Egyptian case is the overarching context is one of relative scarcity, you could argue. And certainly there's a lot of farmers who don't have enough water. You know, I definitely don't dispute that as one of my sort of motivating interests in doing this work. However, you know what I'm trying to do in some of this sort of work. Looking at drainage is if you sort of zoom in and look at different scales like on the level of a kind of a particular field or a particular a particular area kind of near the drainage ditch, you can actually sort of find these pockets of of excess that can be equally as problematic as the scarcity. So what happens? I'm sort of trying to ask when you have those two kind of so sort of interwoven and interlinked, you know, in another part of that is in the particular area where I worked in Egypt, their irrigation supply because they have because it's a sort of a depression of the Nile Valley. They actually have a problem of where to dispose their drainage water within the depression. So their whole irrigation water supply is limited, sort of based on how much room they have in their drainage lake. So that's a kind of direct example of where sort of the scarcity and the excess are directly linked. The reason they can't get more waters because they have nowhere to drain it to in the end.

Speaker2: [00:32:10] Right? I mean, it's fascinating to to think of these comparative cases, like in the United Arab Emirates, which of course, is a very wealthy nation state. And you know, they have the economic capacity to have major desalination plants and projects and a huge amount of their drinking water. And they're bathing and and household water comes from desalination, which is a very energy intensive practice, which is a very expensive practice. And yet it's the most convenient and practical way to get water in that particularly dry part of the world. And so, you know, it's interesting to see these these differences between the kind of excess at times, as you point out among, you know, farmers and agriculturalists in Egypt versus the kind of UAE consumption that's largely urban, you know, very economically privileged and in fact, a country that uses an incredible amount of water per capita.

Speaker3: [00:33:17] Yes, although some of the Gulf countries have had their fair share of of amazing schemes to try and do agriculture with this, this desalination water or very deep pumped water. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one one of the ways Egypt is interesting within the Middle East because you have, you know, it is a very arid, largely quite an arid region. You know, there's some small areas where you can have rain fed cultivation in the Middle East, but it's largely arid. And then Egypt, you know, you know, with the Nile then is this sort of slight anomaly like it has that aridity, but then it has this sort of source of water that's coming from very far away. So it's sort of an interesting, an interesting case to look at in those terms. And it's interesting, you know, when you start thinking about climate change, you know, has that different sort of dynamic Egypt's part of this kind of Middle Eastern scare concern about rising temperatures and increasing scarcity. And yet actually, it's water sources coming from a very different place where the whole sort of trends in climate change might be quite different.

Speaker1: [00:34:19] Mm hmm. Right. That being sub-Saharan Africa, and I well, I want to talk a little bit more about drought and climate change. But before we go there, I also wanted to recognize that your study is very much attuned to the sort of complex geopolitics that are involved in Egypt. And, you know, the agency of those people you call the donors and their influence over the development of of Egypt's hydro escape. I mean, Egypt is also an interesting place because although most of us know it for its pharaonic civilization, you know, it actually has been a colonized country for most of the past two millennia. And, you know, only very recently has been able to create something of a kind of political independence, but that's been very freighted as we know by, you know, the relationship between the military and civil society and so on. So it's this place where it seems that, you know, external external interests have always played, at least in recent memory, a really outsized influence. And I'm wondering whether that has anything to do with the way in which water has developed. And I mean that in the. Broader sense of is this emphasis upon cultivating Egypt as an agricultural region? How does that fit within the interests, let's say, of the European and North American powers who have who have been spending a lot of time keeping their thumbs on the country?

Speaker3: [00:35:48] Yeah. Well, this is, I think, very much so. This isn't my area of of work, really. There's a couple of historians you've looked at the kind of the last sort of relatively recent history of Egypt and some of the water related issues in that period, but certainly a lot of the irrigation development and some of the early infrastructures that were put in place in the late 19th and early 20th century by the British colonial administrators was directly tied to cotton production for UK interests. So yes, there has been a long history of of sort of investment in water related works for for dual purposes, if you put it that way.

Speaker1: [00:36:33] Sure. Sure.

Speaker2: [00:36:34] Yeah, yeah. I wanted to turn Jessica to to talking about your new work. You mentioned that you're working on wheat. Tell us a little bit about or tell us a lot a bit about that project.

Speaker3: [00:36:48] Yeah. Well, my new project is looking at questions of sort of looking at wheat and bread and sort of similarly to how my water project I kind of use the sort of tried to use the water as my starting point and follow the water. I'm doing something similar for tracing the wheat from both its point of production or its point of import through its processing into different kinds of bread and then its moments of consumption to look at to investigate different ideas around food security and self-sufficiency. So my starting point for thinking about this issue was, you know, some of the political significance around bread. If you think of the 2011 revolution, as the protesters were calling for bread, freedom and social justice, and I sort of became curious. I mean this on top of some other issues as well into exactly kind of why it is that bread holds this political significance and cultural resonance and tracing, you know, what can we do by then looking at not only the bread, but the wheat from it, which it's made?

Speaker2: [00:37:52] Mm hmm. Yeah. And it's it's interesting too, because you point out that that bread or I guess, wheat in the household is an indicator of how sort of sustainable that household is. It's a it's the it's the sort of threshold of development and the ability to sustain one's household unit is whether you have enough bread or not. It's kind of seems to be sort of like the equivalent of corn or tortillas in Mexico or, you know, maybe potatoes in Ireland in the past. But yes, is that?

Speaker3: [00:38:26] I think that's absolutely right. So. And then what does that mean, then to look at different kinds of households, both households in rural areas that grow their own wheat and make their own bread versus households in Cairo that are reliant on government subsidized bread? You know, but for whom bread holds just as much significance? And then what does that also mean on a kind of national level? Because there's a lot of rhetoric in Egypt at the moment, and actually this has a long, a long history, but of talk about self-sufficiency and trying to become more self-sufficient. This goal to try and also be yearning to become more self-sufficient in wheat. This isn't just something that the kind of politicians are talking about, but it's things. It's something that people have talked to me about just in a kind of an everyday conversation have made comments like, Well, we shouldn't import so much wheat. And I think that's really interesting to think about that. And why why is it that why? Why do people have this sort of sense that sort of what is it that makes people feel secure at these different levels, whether you're in a household or if you're thinking through to the national level?

Speaker2: [00:39:31] Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, again, thinking about kill anons work, you know, it's interesting to think about the citizenship, and I think you're are sort of gesturing to this a second ago. And that is, you know, is there a way in which you can have? I don't know. It's not really a wheat citizenship or a starch citizenship or a carbohydrate citizenship. I don't know

Speaker1: [00:39:56] How we're getting into the kinds of citizenship that interests me,

Speaker2: [00:39:59] But I mean, you know, there is I bet you could go around the world and find a different kind of carbohydrate citizenship just about everywhere. I mean, rice, wheat? I don't know. Anyhow, so I think it's it's a very interesting thing to kind of think about the consumption, and it folds right back into some of the anthropology of food and understanding different food items as being representative of of the, you know, the national body in many ways. And so. We're getting kind of a glimmer back into that, but at a time when people are very much taking seriously the qualities of material and and materials of consumption and what they what they do to the body, for example. And I wanted to ask about gluten unless you have a question,

Speaker1: [00:40:46] No one any question about gluten is welcome.

Speaker2: [00:40:49] So one of the I think, you know, in addition to wheat, of course, one of the things that we has, I don't think it produces, I think it has it within its part of its molecular structure is gluten, and I know that Dominic is very curious about gluten because he hears tales that it sort of haunts the body and that it should be avoided. And when he goes to the grocery store, he sees things that say gluten free. And then he and I have had this conversation several times. What is gluten? So Jessica, what what is gluten?

Speaker1: [00:41:25] Enlighten us, please.

Speaker3: [00:41:26] Well, when you look for a kind of definition of it, it says it's a set of proteins found in wheat and other grains. I'm not sure if that really is all that helpful, to be honest, but that is what it is. It's a protein that you find in wheat and in some other grains.

Speaker2: [00:41:40] Mm hmm. Well, I do like the idea of that as a kind of you could eat all the bread you want and call it a high protein diet, and that would be kind of lovely.

Speaker1: [00:41:49] But it's also a texture.

Speaker2: [00:41:51] I think it's a texture. So you can

Speaker3: [00:41:52] You can eat gluten. So I don't know if you've eaten Satan, that is gluten, you know, but but typically, you know, even Satan doesn't have a particularly strong taste. So typically, yeah, I think you sort of see gluten in other ways through the effect that it has on the texture of different kinds of foods and its adhesive properties.

Speaker2: [00:42:14] Right? Yeah. I mean, I've eaten Satan. It's been a while, but I think it always had to come in threes. It was like Satan, Satan, Satan.

Speaker1: [00:42:22] Yeah, always. That's about whole surface. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:42:26] But it is. It's sort of like a chewy tofu in a way. It doesn't have much taste at all, except it is. It has a chewing us.

Speaker1: [00:42:33] But isn't it the state food of California? So Simone grew up in California, so occasionally we have to subject her to some California teasing.

Speaker2: [00:42:43] We try not to masturbate too much in California. So actually, wheatgrass is our state food.

Speaker1: [00:42:49] Basically, they photosynthesize, running off sunlight. I think most yeah,

Speaker2: [00:42:54] That's how green we are.

Speaker1: [00:42:56] But I mean, I do have a question about, I guess, about wheat, which is this. I mean is is wheat? Has wheat always been the staple crop of Egypt? Is that something that was influenced through the kind of this long kind of diverse colonial experience as well, too? I was just wondering how much of the kind of the equation of Egypt and kind of with with bread and national identity is something that's a modern thing. Or is it ancient?

Speaker3: [00:43:23] No, it's an ancient thing, and people will often refer back to that. So Egypt was actually one of the centers of Egypt in the near east is one of the centers of origin of wheat. So it's being cultivated there for thousands of years. And indeed, people do often sort of hark back to the pharaonic heritage when they're talking about things like wheat and bread.

Speaker1: [00:43:46] So it really is. It is something that that has these deep roots, if you will.

Speaker3: [00:43:51] Well, one example of that is sorry to isolate. You interrupted. No, no, please. No, no. But one example of that is that, you know, I don't know if you've found in your fieldwork, but it seems like that often in fieldwork there will be a phrase that people just tell you again and again and again. In Egypt, it was always about something about the Nile, but in when I said I was working on water, but now I say I'm working on bread. There's this phrase that everyone always says to me, they say to me in bread, Jesse in Egypt, Jessie bread is life. And the reason they're saying that is partly because the colloquial term for bread in Egypt is alive, which also means life. And that's the only. Egypt is the only place in the Arabic speaking world where they use that term for bread rather than or hobs, which is the other Arabic term for bread. But I think it's also sort of this interesting refrain that you hear again and again, that's kind of underscoring this this long, long standing sort of very deeply rooted identification between Egypt and bread.

Speaker2: [00:44:53] So I'm just going to I'm going to make a leap here and propose that there's probably not a lot of radical gluten free dieting going on in Egypt, is that is that accurate?

Speaker3: [00:45:06] That is accurate?

Speaker2: [00:45:07] Yes. So so why? Why has there been so much interest, do you think? Or, you know, just from obviously this isn't your the focus of your study, but what's your impression of why gluten has become? I don't know the kind of dietary devil. Over the last five years or so, it's because it's really had a kind of spectacular appearance in the. I don't know the Comesa stable regime of the United States.

Speaker1: [00:45:35] Yeah, I mean, and also this idea that in the social life of wheat, at least from the point of view of the global north, seems very much connected to this idea of the over refinement of the grain. Right. So it's too little. Too much sugar? Right, right? Too much simpler to process and not enough of the chaff as it

Speaker2: [00:45:53] Will too much industrial action that's been taken on the grain. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker3: [00:45:57] Although that's not that's not affecting the gluten. I mean, that's what people would talk about in terms of kind of the more refined flour. You're taking out the chaff and you know, you're taking out the bran layers of the grain. But people are making sort of arguments about that around gluten, sort of. There are some quite common narratives circulating about how perhaps the nature of gluten in wheat has changed since the advent of modern breeding kind of 50 60 years ago. And so that's the argument that some of these sort of like the the author of the Wheat Belly Books, says he uses basically these kind of modern breeding efforts have made the wheat no longer good to eat. No other people kind of dispute that, but I think it's sort of interesting how these narratives sort of take hold. Mm hmm.

Speaker2: [00:46:45] Yeah. I mean, I can see that as well. And you know, there's certainly a lot of conversation about it here in the United States and and I can see that it would also have these analogs in terms of the transformation of plant species right and modifications of various kinds, whether genetic modification or not. And I know that you've written about this different size of of the wheat, the grass, right? I mean, in terms of is that one of the discussions that that the the kind of heritage or the natural form of the plant has actually changed pretty dramatically?

Speaker3: [00:47:23] Well, it has, but it has. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the solution has changed, but that that is the that is the narrative that presented in some of these sources is that since kind of what what is often referred to as scientific breeding, because obviously farmers have been breeding seeds for ever since they've been growing seeds. But since the advent of of scientific breeding, they've developed these varieties of wheat that are shorter in stature so that they can support higher, larger heads of grain. When you apply lots of fertilizer, which has obviously changed the nature of the wheat plant's very much, whether or not it's actually changed the gluten such that then the gluten is not sort of safe to eat is a matter of sort of that's debated in the scientific literature.

Speaker2: [00:48:11] You know, I know that you've written a short essay about the relationship between gluten and the Anthropocene and the dating of the Anthropocene. And one of the things that you suggested is or ask the question What if we understand the Anthropocene as a more recent epoch of unprecedented human intervention in the natural world that goes beyond anthropogenic climate change and actually focuses on gluten as epitomizing the Anthropocene? So what would a kind of gluten esque Anthropocene look like? So what is it that led you to to kind of think about gluten as a as a as a marker, a kind of telltale sign for the Anthropocene?

Speaker3: [00:48:54] Well, I think it was being curious about these, about some of the narratives that are placed by people that are promoted by people who advocate, advocate, gluten free diets and seeing how they were tying a link between gluten sensitivity sort of not sort of advocate. They're advocating of not eating wheat to the rise of modern breeding. And it seemed to me that there seemed to be a parallel there in the in the idea of the Anthropocene. If we understand it as being more about more than climate change, which I think many people would argue then does the fact that we, that sort of breeders have have intervened with this crop that people have been eating for thousands of years, such that some would argue it's no longer safe to eat just that in some way? How kind of epitomize this this sort of destructive epoch of the Anthropocene? I'm not totally sure, to be honest, I think it is sort of more of an open question, but I thought it was an interesting way to think through some of these other dimensions of the Anthropocene.

Speaker2: [00:49:55] Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you know the answer to this, but is we to kind of drought resistant crop, would you say, is it is. I mean, is it one of those grasses that's going to do really well in a in a warmer world?

Speaker3: [00:50:08] I mean, it's not a particularly water intensive crop, you know, it's not nearly as water intensive as rice, for example. However, it's not a particularly drought and a drought resistant crop. So there's certainly people who work on wheat are quite concerned about how high temperatures will affect. I think there's a lot of concern about how it could hamper wheat production.

Speaker1: [00:50:30] Yeah, I know you mentioned earlier that, you know, and pointed out, quite rightly, that, you know, Egypt's water is in some ways determined by the flows of a river that originate many, many miles away in a different biome. But are you hearing from the farmers here working with any sense that they have that their hydro escape is changing? That is that there's more rain, that there's more water, that the floods are stronger, that there's more drought, anything like that? I'm just curious because when we were in Mexico, it was interesting to talk to people about signs of of climate change. You know what counted as a sign of climate change for them, people who have long, long historical knowledge of

Speaker2: [00:51:12] Their region and often farmers are very, very

Speaker1: [00:51:16] Attuned to this.

Speaker3: [00:51:17] Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's some conversations about increasing temperatures, sort of summers being very hot, for example, but it almost doesn't rain in the area where I work. So I don't hear much conversation about changing precipitation patterns because it pretty much doesn't rain by and large. And I think the other sort of dimension of it is that I almost never heard farmers talking about climate change in whatever language. We all know that farmers don't necessarily use that term climate change, but either in that term or in other kind of words that were capturing that. And I think it's because they don't really see their water supply in terms of a climatic event. They see it in terms of this whole set of kind of engineering and infrastructural kind of modifications that really are determining sort of whether they receive water. So they talk a lot about water variability, they talk a lot about their concerns about scarcity. But they link that not so much to concerns about climatic variability as to kind of whether an engineer is giving them is opening up an irrigation gate or whether they're upstream neighbor is growing rice and taking all the water.

Speaker1: [00:52:29] Well, they're growing rice there, too.

Speaker3: [00:52:30] Yeah, some some farmers out, the ones who can or.

Speaker1: [00:52:34] All right. Explain that to us. That sounds kind of crazy on the face of it.

Speaker3: [00:52:39] Yeah. Well, I mean, you could say it's crazy in some ways, but actually, there's an interesting link between the growing of rice and my work on drainage because one of the reasons why farmers grow rice is because you apply so much water to the soil that actually some of the water that's not taken up by the rice filters down through the soil and washes salts out of the soil. And so again, it's this kind of invisible process that many people sort of don't see. And so then you have kind of international donors coming in and saying people shouldn't be growing rice and, you know, government policies to try and limit the amount of rice cultivation. But I would hear farmers saying, you can fine us all you want and we're still going to grow rice because it's our way of washing the fields. So this link between then the water again subsurface flowing through the soil and what farmers are choosing to do on the surface, right?

Speaker2: [00:53:30] Yeah, no. I mean, that's very interesting. So rice growing is almost like a cleansing. You said the washing. Mm hmm. So do they rotate these crops? I mean, do farmers work with weight for a number of years and then decide that they need to kind of purge the ground beneath them and do rice for a year or two in order to to cleanse the soils?

Speaker3: [00:53:52] Well, these. You don't typically sort of trade off quite so much because rice is a summer crop and it is a winter crop in Egypt, but not so much. I mean, I think people eat in terms of wheat. People will trade in perhaps clover Egyptian clover, which is an important fodder crop, but also kind of good for the soil. But I didn't hear really people talk about a kind of formalized rotation. I think it's more I think they're more responding to the kind of immediate sort of market situation in terms of their crop, choice, market and household needs.

Speaker2: [00:54:27] I see. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:54:29] Oh, go ahead. I just was going to ask you. I mean, we had been talking previously that, you know, the idea for this project first got started with some work you were doing in Syria. And I was curious maybe to hear your thoughts about Syria. But that's a place that people have definitely associated with drought of late and and I can imagine reasons why it was probably would have been difficult or impossible to do this project given what's been happening in Syria of late. But did you get enough into that research to be able to compare what you found in Egypt with what you were looking at there?

Speaker3: [00:55:02] I mean, not really, except except to understand, except to make some sort of similar parallels in terms of the production of scarcity. So the idea that scarcity isn't just sort of a given, but that it's actually kind of produced by different kind of agricultural practices. And I think I definitely saw that in Syria, but I didn't unfortunately have a chance to do sort of that. You know, I did a couple of summers of pre-season fieldwork there, but I didn't really have a chance to do extended engagement to really be able to make a substantive comparison between the two, hopefully in the future one day.

Speaker1: [00:55:43] Yeah. Well, let's hope we're all hoping that that the situation in Syria will improve for so many reasons. So maybe just to end on on a broader note, I mean, we've noticed that there's an awful lot of research coming down the pipeline again, pun intended concerning water these days, not just in anthropology, but I would say in the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Do you have any thoughts about what has what has prompted this turn to water?

Speaker3: [00:56:11] Yeah, I suppose I don't see it necessarily. I mean, I think that there is certainly a sort of really exciting lot of scholarship going on around water. I suppose I don't see it as as so novel. You know, there's been sort of a fair bit of scholarship sort of dating for for quite a while on water, I would say maybe it's coming more from sort of critical geography, human geography. I mean, I think it's just sort of one of those central sort of a resource of such significance that, you know, a lot of people are saying both the significance and also sort of some of the interesting questions that then emerge around it.

Speaker1: [00:56:47] Right? I mean, in a way, you know, it is something that is so fundamental to human existence. You're always surprised you don't haven't heard more about it, but I think there's something in this recent turn, you know, which some gloss is the new materialism, where interest in those more elemental aspects material aspects of human life are becoming more important than, say, you know, the kind of symbolic anthropology that some of us grew up with.

Speaker3: [00:57:16] Yeah. I mean, I think it's certainly a very exciting. I'm really excited to see such a growth of of work sort of adopting some of those sort of approaches.

Speaker2: [00:57:25] Mm hmm. And also, you know, maybe water research just looks not novel to dominant because he hasn't been immersed in it until now.

Speaker1: [00:57:34] I don't like water. Yeah, that's true. I like to swim. I'm not, you know, I'm fine with aquifers, you know, but I can't see them. So that makes me feel more comfortable with no anxiety there.

Speaker2: [00:57:46] You know, feel them rumbling beneath your feet, huh?

Speaker1: [00:57:49] Yeah. But I mean, it is. It is. It is true that I think some of the kinds of research questions that people are asking these days are, you know, leading in the direction that work on water just seems, you know, incredibly relevant. Even if we weren't in the middle of, you know, climate change and fear, afraid of drought and et cetera, et cetera. Right?

Speaker2: [00:58:12] I mean, that's a little hypothetical because we are in the midst of it so that I'm sure that that's part of the impetus for this growing interest as well in all the elemental forms, which is cool. I mean, there's you know, there's a lot of latitude, I think theoretically and in terms of the ways that we can think about these different materials, what their prospects are, how they're prospected, you know, how they're produced, how they're created, how they get distributed in a kind of a supply chain analysis. But beyond that, the kind of, you know, the semiotic or the symbolic elements, the cosmological elements that are contained in water and air and fire, you know, maybe that's a more old fashioned. Kind of reading of it, but I think even the new materialists are taking part of that into their analysis of thinking through the dynamics of water to if even in a in a physical sense, right?

Speaker1: [00:59:08] Well, I was going to say and speaking of elemental anthropology, I definitely think that there has been attraction. I mean, we've seen it through the journal. We've seen all these work on fire. A lot of it

Speaker2: [00:59:16] Fire, yes, but quite

Speaker1: [00:59:17] A bit of fire. We've seen quite a lot on Earth, Earth beings and so forth and soil air. We've been doing that ourselves and our power work. And of course, water. So so Jessie, what would your what would your next favorite element be if it wasn't water? You had to choose between fire, earth and air. What would you what would you be working on?

Speaker3: [00:59:38] Well, I'm actually I'm fascinated by thinking about air, partly because, you know, when I saw, you know, in the book, I sort of tried to think a little bit about the, you know, the the material sort of characteristics of water and thinking about. I mean, I got into thinking about water as a fluid and what that really means to think about fluidity. And, you know, air just raises a whole other set of questions about a different form of fluidity. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:00:06] Yeah, right? The current so maybe this and pressures

Speaker1: [01:00:10] There could be like a water vapor project coming down the road, then

Speaker2: [01:00:13] Someday condensation the life of the condensation

Speaker1: [01:00:17] Job do that. They do that elsewhere. I mean, I think in Morocco, they have those, you know, those water, those kind of generators that are supposed to capture the water out of the air and condense it. Right. What's that process called, though?

Speaker2: [01:00:27] Condensation? Oh, well, I mean, maybe there's a more technical term.

Speaker1: [01:00:31] There's a fancier

Speaker3: [01:00:32] Term for, oh, you mean like vapor distillation?

Speaker1: [01:00:34] Oh, that sounds good.

Speaker2: [01:00:35] Yeah, very good. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:00:37] Oh, that's not really collecting water from the air. That's actually more a treatment process for water. I was just teaching about that. I think got confused.

Speaker2: [01:00:46] Well, I think that's what's his name did on Mars, wasn't it?

Speaker1: [01:00:50] Oh yeah, Matt Damon.

Speaker2: [01:00:51] Matt Damon did that on Mars. So clearly it's the latest technology.

Speaker1: [01:00:56] Well, if they if Matt Damon did in The Martian, that we know it's good science.

Speaker2: [01:01:00] I want to do it too.

Speaker1: [01:01:03] Ok, well, well, Jesse, thank you so much for taking the time to talk again. My pleasure. Since I'm cultivating the Nile, terrific book. And we're looking forward to hearing more about the social life of wheat as this project advances. But already it sounds very, very promising.

Speaker3: [01:01:18] Yes. Great. Thank you so much.

Speaker2: [01:01:20] A nice stickiness to it. I do feel

Speaker1: [01:01:23] So, so gluten and water vapor. Then after that, yeah.

Speaker2: [01:01:26] Great. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you.