Word: millets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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GENETIC MANIPULATION. Botanists have succeeded in mixing plant genes to create some remarkable hybrids, such as the winter wheat and high-yield corns that have helped make the U.S. plains a global granary. Other hybrids are also helping to fight famine around the world. Pearl millet, introduced in 1965, is currently being grown on some 45 million acres in India, Pakistan and Africa; it accounts for 20% of the food increase attributed to the so-called "Green Revolution" in agriculture. Scientists are also seeking, through cell manipulation, to improve the characteristics of plants. Biologists at the USDA laboratory at Beltsville...
...peasants are large. They fill the foreground. They make it uncomfortable to be the traditional audience of salon painting, the middle-class observer. They are also deliberately iconic. Herbert points out that in Millet's Going to Work, 1850, the young peasant couple striding through the fields is based on Masaccio's fresco of Adam and Eve, expelled from Eden and condemned to labor. This resonance is deepened by the potato basket on the wife's head and by the thong she carries like the attribute of a martyr...
...Millet sought an enduring and stoic language based on large shapes, resolute drawing, deep tonal contrasts. The result was a classical gravity, "a Homeric idyll, in patois," as one admirer put it. From such an angle, the decorative side of impressionism would have seemed pointless, and perhaps it is only as the taste for pretties like Renoir recedes that Millet's achievement becomes once more apparent...
Reality Grasped. Millet's sympathies were republican. His whole conception of peasant realism was in tune with, and fortified by, the political experiences of 1848: to grasp plebeian reality was to engage in a revolutionary act. But he was no militant. As Herbert is careful to show, Millet's imagination was fatalistic and conservative: the peasants, in his view, could never escape their cycle of toil but were bound like weary oxen to the mill of earth and seasons. That was the root experience of his own peasant childhood...
...Millet was an artist, not a propagandist; his depth of feeling was as unquestionable as his lack of egotism. "I will swear to you," he wrote to a friend in 1851, "at the risk of seeming even more of a socialist, that it is the human side that touches me most . . . and it is never the joyous side that shows itself to me: I don't know where it is. I have never seen...