Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wild mushrooms, the fresh veggies, the dairy products, the stuff that hangs in the trees, the stuff that grows in the fields in autumn. I walked through western Yunnan in the harvest season in October, and it was glorious. It’s this edible landscape. I’ve said this to my Chinese friends. I don’t think I’ve been through such a physically exhilarating landscape on foot as Yunnan. Yunnan just blew my socks off and made my eyes pop out. It is one of these places that people live in and have worked in for so long — working the land — that there’s this remarkable interaction between people and landscape. We’re talking fields in the hillsides that have been farmed for thousands of years, and they have these rounded slopes, the way human shoulders are rounded. The land itself seems anthropomorphic. To use a new-agey description, there’s this kind of harmony. The landscape in the human-built landscape is still human-scaled. The villages are made of stone, and the roads between them are designed for human bodies that walk or horses that walk. It was remarkable. It was wonderful. The food — I could make a long list. Turkey — incredible garden vegetables in Anatolia, and yogurts. In the Caucasus, khachapuri, and in Central Asia — plov in Uzbekistan. India — I hope people realize, when they go to an Indian restaurant outside of India, that they are being exposed to one fractal of a kaleidoscopic cosmos of flavors that is so diverse, even within small regions of India. I’d never been to India before this project, so it was a revelation to me. And now China — China, as you know, is a nation of foodies. Everybody’s concerned with food here, so it’s been amazing. Yunnan may be my favorite part of the world. Why is India such a good place to walk? Because Indians will certainly tell you that it is. Yes. People are still on foot by the million, whether it’s on pilgrimage or getting to work and back or getting to the fields. I was always in walking company in India. I walked how far? I think close to 3,800 kilometers across India and spent 17 months doing it because it was just so fascinating. I was stopping all the time through northern India, which is its own India, very different from southern India. But yes, there were walkers every day. You could ask somebody — and this is important if you’re walking horizon to horizon — for directions, and the directions would be accurate because the teller of the directions had paced off part of those landscapes. Whereas in motorized societies — and I’ve written about this — it’s pointless to talk to somebody in a car — if you’re on foot — about directions because the scale of their sense of landscape is limited to these strips of asphalt that are a few meters wide that wheeled vehicles can go on. Beyond that, it’s just this moving tableau that’s an abstraction. In India, people can tell you shortcuts. They can tell you where the best tree is to take a break, where the best temple is to sleep at night, where the next jug of water waiting the foot traveler lies ahead. India was marvelous. I felt among a brotherhood and sisterhood of walkers there.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.