Category Archives: blather

Adventures in CSA – going off the rails…

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So, I’ve been rubbish about posting on a regular basis. Excuses, excuses, yadda yadda. Let’s just say my motivation has hit somewhat of a low. That has something to do with being at the tail end of two kids with back-to-back bouts of pneumonia (the only fun part being that the medicine they were put on is what we now call PRINCESS SPARKLY MEDS and it IS magical). I’ve also been really busy at work, so by the time I get home, the kids are fed & in bed and the kitchen’s back in order, it’s all I can do just to check twitter & fb and maybe score a few rounds against those egg-stealing pigs before I go face-plant on my bed.

All of this has taken some of the steam out of the whole cooking local effort, since it makes it really hard to plan for heavily locally-sourced meals when you’re just trying to keep your head above water. I know very few people who manage to do a lot of cooking from scratch throughout the week where A) both adults work full-time day jobs out of the house, and B) there’s at least one child living in the house. I have a brontosaurus-sized bone to pick with folks like Anthony Bourdain, who stick their nose up in the air at anything boxed or canned; we don’t all have the luxury of taking hours to make dinner each night. Sometimes, even one hour is more than we can muster. On any given day, I’m home just under 45 minutes from when we want dinner on the table. That doesn’t give a lot of leeway.

That’s why I was really annoyed when I listened to this piece on NPR, because it still missed part of the point. While the chef is preparing a risotto that’s inexpensive to pull together, there’s no mention of how *quickly* it can come together. If a risotto takes no less than 45 minutes (on a good day, and when working with a simple recipe), how on earth is it something that can be managed by an exhausted parent, coming home after the end of a long workday, trying to manage kids while making this inexpensive-yet-not-boxed meal?

So, there’s a part of me that says that this is unrealistic. That’s not to say that I’m giving up. It just means that I’m trying to be realistic about it. We have a food crisis on this planet. For starters, there’s plenty of food, but it’s not being distributed to everybody who needs it. Rich nations get fat, and poor nations are starving. That’s just insane.  Second, we have people who can’t make ends meet in our own neighborhoods – regardless of how “rich” or “poor” your neighborhood is. That’s really horrifyingly insane. [Everybody, go open a new tab in your browser and donate to your local food bank, now, please.] And, in a country where we should really be able to manage things better, we have this concept of a “food desert”, where there’s just crap access to places where you can get affordable, fresh foods. [Feel free to check out the USDA Food Desert Locator, to see how close you live to a food desert…we’re astonishingly close to one – where I’m astonished because we live within a 10 minute drive of four good grocery stores.]

And there’s BPA in canned tomato soup, and there’s arsenic in apple juice, and OMFG it’s time to just go back to an agrarian society because we’re just industrializing ourselves into the grave.

OKAY. TIME TO GET IT TOGETHER AGAIN.

There’s a point at which you kind of have to accept that you can’t be everything to everybody. Similarly, there’s only so much you can buy if you don’t have unlimited sums of cash. And, you can’t do everything you want to do without unlimited time. These are all just truths. It’s just how it is. That doesn’t mean you can’t strive to be a good person in all that you do, that you can’t try to squeeze the best value out of your budget, and that you can’t be efficient with your time so that you can do as many of the things you want as possible. But it DOES mean that some trade-offs are required. For me, that includes knowing that I’m not always doing exactly what I wish I could be doing in my kitchen. We did bake a ton over the long weekend last week – and that was great. But I have squash sitting in my fridge, taking up serious space, plaintively crying out, When will you eat us?! I will get to you my pretties, just give me time.

Patience, in all things. Gotta be better about that myself.

More on week 2 and week 3 of the CSA later. And now…off to take dd to a playdate down the street.

Black Friday BLACKOUT

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Normally, I try not to go out too much on Black Friday – I realize that we’re encouraged to start our holiday season shopping as early as possible, so retailers can drain what’s remaining of our disposable income – but I often end up hitting a sale or two. I’m NOT the one who goes out for the sales that require standing in line at 4am or queuing up endlessly in a sea of hundreds, hoping to shove through the scrum to get to the two laptops that are actually at the price advertised in the sale flyer. Still, I haven’t ever really sworn off Black Friday: until now.

Enter Target – a store where I shop early and often. While I was shocked to see a gigantic sign on the side of a Kohl’s that advertised the store opening at 1am (really people? 1 AM?!), I was horrified to hear that Target was opening at 12:01am. Even worse, other stores are opening even earlier – backing Black Friday up into Thanksgiving day.

It was at this point that I just snapped. I won’t boycott Target; I’d much rather boycott the entire day. Here, you have merchants in an arms race to see who can open earlier and earlier until the Thanksgiving holiday turns into a quick turkey sandwich at 2am before you have to rush out to meet the shoppers who want to get the deals before they watch the Cowboys beat the snot out of some poor, unsuspecting team.

So, I decided to make my own Black Friday special: the Black Friday BLACKOUT.

I want to encourage everyone to skip the stores. Skip the sales. Show merchants that you want them to return to some semblance of sanity and treat their employees like REAL PEOPLE DESERVING OF A HOLIDAY by not shopping. Then, instead of heading to the mall, either pop open your laptop or head to the grocery store. Donate at least $10 to your local food pantry. Why? Well, any time of year is a good time to donate to a food pantry, but winter is a particularly hard time for a lot of families to cope, especially when it’s a choice between food or presents. I don’t know whether I’ll have time to leave the house on Friday, since I’m deliberately skipping the sales and choosing to bake and hang out with the family. If I make it out, I’m only going to the grocery store to get canned and boxed goods to donate. Otherwise, I’ll just donate online. I’m a particular fan of the Greater Boston Food Bank.

Want to join me? It’s easy.

Here’s what you do:

1. Agree not to take part in Black Friday madness – vote with your feet!

2. Promise to donate either food or $$ (min. $10, if you can manage it) to your local food pantry. Note that many houses of worship also run food pantries, and they can direct you to others as well. Otherwise, just hit up Google Maps and search on “food pantry near” your town.

I’m not saying don’t shop for holiday gifts. I’m not saying that you should snub local merchants, either. My point is that these retailers are freaking out and forcing people to work insane hours in the service of greed, not the “holiday season”. If enough of us choose NOT to participate in Black Friday madness, maybe they’ll change their minds. I’ve worked plenty of retail in my day, and the thought of having to skip Thanksgiving with my family because it’s either that or lose my job…well, that’s just crap, and I refuse to support anyone doing that to their employees.

Who’s with me?

{divergence} Why I won’t apologize for liking Twilight

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Yes, I’m over the age of 14. In fact, many of the book’s readers who are lined up for the midnight showings of Breaking Dawn tonight aren’t 14 anymore, either. But I still have an inner 14-year-old girl, and she likes reading about sparkly vamps.

But that’s not all I like to read.

I read Neil Gaiman A LOT. I cherish Neal Stephenson (even when his Baroque Cycle took me THREE attempts to get started). I collect graphic novels and out of print comic book compendiums. I think Erik Larson is a genius writer. DH and I have somewhere north of 1,000 books in the house, most of which are crammed into Ikea Billy bookshelves in the room we’ve designated as the house library – where I even went to the trouble of finding bookshelf tag systems so that we could easily show where the biography books are shelved (just above the shelf with the erotica). In other words, I read. We all read – a lot.

So why in the blue hell am I constantly being bombarded with tweets, FB posts and other words or imagery that place reading “Twilight” books somewhere below the literary equivalent of a trashy tabloid mag?

It seems that if you read books from the “Twilight” series, then you’re a moron, yet if you read “Harry Potter” books, you’re a genius. What if you read both? (I not only believe it’s possible, but I encourage it – and we own full sets of BOTH series…strangely not having been hit by lightning yet, I think that means it’s okay to have both.)

I remember arguing a key point of “Breaking Dawn” with a friend who had his nose high in the air when mentioning “Twilight”, and he was sure that a key plot point (which I shant mention, in case there are 5 people who read this who want to remain unspoiled) was complete nonsense. When I countered with a valid, point-by-point argument that led him right to where I wanted him, when even HE admitted that Stephenie Meyer was well within her right to have written that plot point as she did and that it could be perfectly rational and reasonable to assume it possible in that ‘verse, he STILL thought “Twilight” was crap. Why? Because it’s hip to do so.

Now, is it the best writing I’ve ever read? Not all the time. There are certainly some stretches of “New Moon” where I was thinking that her editor could’ve exercised some better judgment, but if we need to point fingers at female authors given too much license, can we ever take JK Rowling to task for a few hundred too many pages in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”? C’mon, let’s be fair.

So, why is it that I like “Twilight”? It’s easy: it speaks to my romantic side by showing a couple that’s willing to die to be together, where love is so strong that you can’t breathe without it. It’s fantasy, and I know that, but I embrace fantasy writing (as I did seemingly a thousand years ago, when I picked up my first Piers Anthony “Xanth” book). It’s escapist. It’s a breathless beach read or a book that makes me inadvertently stay up well past my bedtime, booklight blazing away while DH sleeps next to me. It’s hopeful about romance and happiness, when the world I see outside of the book – in my reality – has a 24hr news cycle filled with pain and poverty, death and divorce, inequity and power politics. Sometimes, I just don’t want to think about all of that stuff. Sometimes, I just want to escape into a book. So why do I have to apologize TO ANYONE for wanting that book to be from the “Twilight” series?

Lastly, and most importantly: it’s a book. My first job – ever – when I was just about 14 years old, was as a page at a library near my house. I wasn’t allowed to help patrons (though I often did, on the sly); I was just supposed to shelve the books and organize the magazines. I did it with zest, loving finding out about new books, new authors, new magazines, new sources of reading material. I’m both stunned and incredibly pleased that dd was reading before she turned 5, and I beam with pride to see ds constantly want to be read to. Their appetite for books continues to grow, and I think that’s brilliant.

Literacy is a gift, and it’s one of the most important gifts there is out there. The ability to read is a skill that reaps incredible rewards; I can’t imagine going through life with only a barely functioning level of reading. You’d miss so much. And I’m a reader with a voracious appetite – I love devouring 800pp novels. Once I got sucked in by Stephenson’s Baroque cycle, I couldn’t stop, even though it took a few months of reading at night and it was something near 3,000pp. So, if I choose to read a “Twilight” book…if I choose to be literate…whose business is it to say that my reading material is of less value than whatever they think is so much better?

So, here’s the thing: the biggest difference between JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer (aside from their net worths) is that one’s English and the other’s American. They both got people reading more. This is a good thing. They both created fantastical worlds with their own rules and their own spin on “reality”. Again, this is a good thing. Let’s hoist these creative ladies up together and stop bashing.

No one should have to apologize for liking to read, so I’m not about to start.