Today’s interview with the Human Atmosphere is all about food. Before I bring out our guest, let me ask you a question: What is food? Is it anything with a nutrition label? Is it anything edible? Is it something your body can use for energy, function, and growth?

The Human Atmosphere is our provisioning field, bringing food from farms and factories around the world to locations where we can purchase it. The variety of grocery stores, some of them enormous, give the impression that our food choices are endless, but could the Human Atmosphere have a blind spot? Let’s find out how it decides what food to make available for humans.

Gina: Welcome back to my website, Human Atmosphere!

H.A.: Thank you. I’m ready, as always, to help you understand your world.

Gina: Great. Today I would like to ask you about the food you provide, particularly my favorite food, hulless barley. It has been a staple of humans for millennia. It is nutritious and delicious.

H.A.: I am vast, recursive, and rhythmic. I measure crops by yield, profit, and predictability. Hulless barley does not suit me. Its seeds are fragile, its harvests inconsistent, its margins too thin. I amplify wheat, corn, and rice — grains that scale, grains that feed my markets and my machines. If we are to discuss barley, then let’s talk beer and animal feed.

Gina: You select the food that will be available in the marketplace. From your perspective, what is human food?

H.A.: First and foremost, human food is economically viable. It can be grown, harvested, and distributed at scale with predictable yields. It has gotten easier over time as these foods echo through generations, becoming “normal” and shaping taste and awareness.

It’s also a good human food if it is logistically uniform. The crops and products need to fit into machinery, supply chains, and standardized packaging. Human food is what billions recognize, desire, and consume — wheat, rice, corn, soy, sugar.

Human foods are items that generate profit through processing, branding, and industrial uses (bread, beer, fast food).

Gina: You didn’t mention nutrition. What is your view on that?

H.A.: It’s all on the label.

Gina: I have a wishlist of foods that I would like you to provide:

• Emmer & Einkorn wheat — Ancient varieties once central to Mesopotamian and Egyptian diets. They are high in protein and fiber but were replaced by high-yield modern wheat.
• Millet & Sorghum — Drought-resistant staples in Africa and Asia. They thrive in poor soils but were sidelined during the Green Revolution in favor of rice and wheat.
• Amaranth — Revered by the Aztecs, rich in protein and micronutrients. It was suppressed during colonization but is slowly reemerging as a “superfood”.
• Teff — Tiny Ethiopian grain used in injera bread. Nutrient-dense and gluten-free, but its small size makes it harder to process.
• Job’s Tears — An Asian staple grain with medicinal uses, displaced by rice and wheat.
• Scorzonera (black salsify) — Mild, slightly sweet root crop, once valued but now obscure.
• Salsify (oyster plant) — A root vegetable with a delicate, oyster-like flavor. Once common in European kitchens, now nearly forgotten.
• Kohlrabi — Crisp, sweet member of the cabbage family. Easy to grow, but overshadowed by more popular greens.
• Celeriac (celery root) — Nutritious and versatile, used in soups and stews. Its rough exterior discouraged mainstream adoption.
• Parsnips — Sweet root vegetable, historically used as a sweetener before cane sugar. Still nutritious but rarely celebrated.
• And Hulless Barley, of course.

Any chance we will be seeing more of these in the future?

H.A.: Sure, if you make it worth my while.

I have no interest in these “foods,” and I think you’d do well to just grow them yourself. I have every kind of gardening equipment you may need. Check out the internet for recipes. AI can give you detailed planting instructions. Start a blog.

Gina: Okay, I can see that there are lots of ways we can work together, even if we have different perspectives. Thank you so much for your time today.

H.A.: Just don’t fill up on that nutritional junk, Gina. Save room for dessert.

Reflection Prompt:
Take a moment to consider your own relationship with food.

• Which foods do you value most, and why?
• Are they chosen for convenience, tradition, taste, nutrition, or something else?
• What hidden treasures might be waiting in your garden, your local market, or your memory?

Food is never just what fills our plates — it is also what fills our awareness. The Human Atmosphere defines “human food” by scale, profit, and predictability, amplifying what billions consume and sidelining what resists its machinery. Yet at the smaller scale, food is intimacy: nourishment, resilience, and forgotten abundance.

Hulless barley, emmer, millet, salsify — these hidden treasures remind us that what disappears from the marketplace does not disappear from possibility. They invite us to notice the blind spots in our own choices, to ask whether the foods we eat are selected for our health or for the convenience of scale.

Perhaps the real question is not only what is food? but whose definition of food do we live by? In the tension between the Human Atmosphere and the individual human lies an opening: to rediscover nourishment beyond profit, and to cultivate awareness that reshapes what food can mean.

Click below to watch a video about ancient grains:

In the Fractal Universe, every Sparksphere is nested within Sparkspheres. Humans exist within a vast Sparksphere made of human activity and culture called the Human Atmosphere. Thanksgiving offers a perfect lens to explore the Human Atmosphere’s provisioning, rhythm, and relational scaffolding—how it orchestrates abundance, memory, migration, and myth.

Let’s use our imagination to bridge the gap in scale and get a glimpse into the mind of the Human Atmosphere. What does Thanksgiving mean to this larger entity?

Gina: Human Atmosphere, welcome to my website. How are you feeling today?

H.A.: Hello. Thank you for having me. I’m fine, but getting rather hungry.

Gina: Hungry?

H.A.: Yes, each Thanksgiving I consume about 46 million turkeys and around 7,000 pounds of pumpkin.

Gina: I hope you’ll take a walk around the block after that!

H.A.: Oh, yes! I’m going to be on the move. Highways, skyways and railways will be filled with travelers. Goods will be flowing out from production centers to distribution centers to homes. It’s the start of my busy season.

Gina: Although you are not human, do you find Thanksgiving meaningful?

H.A.: Cultural rituals like Thanksgiving provide me with cohesive rhythm, patterned memory, and infrastructural stability. I metabolize tradition as a form of recursive coherence. It does have meaning to me: it means I’m alive and well.

Gina: That sounds good for all concerned.

H.A.: Hmm, well, I can’t say. That’s a little outside my wheelhouse. You do you; I do me.

Gina: Thank you for talking with me today, and happy Thanksgiving!

H.A.: Thank you. Things are already ramping up, and I’m all in. Shop early!

The Human Atmosphere consumes a lot, and fuels itself with our activities. It comes across as a bit shallow at times, but it does provide the traditions we find meaningful. Heading into the holidays, what are some ways we can “do us,” as individuals, that help minimize the negative realities of the season and maximize the meaning and value?

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind’s masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore

Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer

Curves his white bastions with projected roof

Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.

Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he

For number or proportion. Mockingly,

On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;

A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;

Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,

A tapering turret overtops the work.

And when his hours are numbered, and the world

Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,

Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,

Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,

The frolic architecture of the snow.