“I read recently that if you were to add up the combined lengths of rootlets and root hairs of a single rye plant, the resulting length could stretch almost from the North to the South Pole (The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird). No wonder whiskey is so intoxicating: It tastes of something deeper than anything we could snatch out of the air. The rye head is the realization of a vastly coordinated underground system, not some rootless gift from the ether. I am not recommending whiskey as liquid muse. I am recommending a prizing of the chthonic, as opposed to the transcendent imagination.”
—Sarah Gridley, author of Green is the Orator (University of California Press, 2010)