resistance is fertile

living underground in the real world

what we mean when we say that we’re living in a patriarchy January 31, 2010

Filed under: i heart feminists — lagusta @ 9:11 pm

(Before we get into it: I am feeling 20,000 leagues better. Thanks for all your concern, good energies and sweetnesses! I truly think that internet venting helped. Speaking of….)

Precisely this:

I love my small breasts. My 34As are one of my best assets, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t have to wear those torture devices other women refer to as “bras,” I can run and jump and sleep on my stomach and wear bikini tops and low cut shirts without any risk of my cups randomly spilling over (though they do like to do the occasional pop-out while body boarding. You’ve got to watch out for pop-outs.*). They’re pretty, manageable, appropriate. They serve me well. All good. And because they developed ludicrously early in life, as a teenager I was under the assumption that they were actually pretty large for my frame (ok, once in junior high a boy said to me: “For a skinny kid, you’ve got pretty big tits, you know that?”). When my arms and torso lengthened and they stayed put, I began to see that they were probably on the smallish side, but I’ve never felt weird about it or anything.

But today, in bed, hanging out, watching the snow [I wrote this last week], thinking about Howard Zinn and going to Kajitsu tonight and lazily checking the news on my phone, I came across this on the Huffington Post. I’ve become increasingly fed up with HuffPo, a site I only read because I have the handy iPhone app for it and get most of my news via morning iPhone reading. The entertainment section is your standard, mainstream, woman-hating, fat-shaming, “look at the pretty shoes Michelle Obombs is wearing!” fluff. But today there was actual fucking porn, and I can’t get past it.

Just two words about porn: 99.99% of it is misogynist trash. There is a teeny sliver of sexy great porn made by women, and hooray for that. I personally prefer words and even good porn just makes me want to laugh, but because there is that small sliver I can’t call myself an anti-porn feminist. (As usual, I am merely against the way that 99.99% of a certain thing is practiced in our culture, thus saving me from complete and utter misanthropy.)

So I’m thumbing through the ludicrous thing, and, unbidden, a thought swims up from my primordial brain: “Hey, that lady’s tits are not much bigger than mine…and she’s in a naked calendar!”

.

.

.

That, my friends, is the very definition of what feminists mean when we say that we breathe in the air of patriarchy and breathe out misogyny.

I deleted the stupid app from my phone. Done.

.

*Does anyone get that awesome reference? Here’s a hint.

 

a perfect day for NOTHING (well, a nice NYC dinner will help, maybe) January 28, 2010

Filed under: book reports and the like,culture and its discontents — lagusta @ 3:23 pm

Argh ugh.

If Nader and Chomsky die soon there will officially be no good white dudes left. (Except mine.)

I have four posts percolating away for you, all about:

1) feeling better

2) Boobs

3) Howard Zinn, natch

4) JDS and how insanely insanely insanely obsessed I was with him as a kiddo, to the extent that I still have the entire first page of TCitR memorized and own literally 10 copies or so or every one of his books, because I can’t seem to not buy every edition.

But right now I am off to Kajitsu! Then work work work work forever more, so for this moment I will just say:

All I really know for certain is that I had something happy and exciting to tell you–and on just one side of the paper, double spaced–and I knew when I got home that it was mostly gone or all gone and there was nothing left to do but go through the motions. How messy, how funny and how Seymour himself would have smiled and smiled–and probably assured me, and all of us, not to worry about it.

- J. D. Salinger

 

ugh meh ick bleg blah January 26, 2010

Filed under: self-titled,small (business) is all — lagusta @ 11:38 pm

Is it possible to miss yourself?

Dudicals, I’m in a funk. Work is kicking my ass, and I don’t want to subject you to it.

Meh.

Here’s my issue, via Facebook status update:

Wow, nothing like vacation to show you how completely unsustainable, irrational and insane your work life is. Changes: you will be made. I won’t trade my body (my 3 am feet, how quickly you return) for a job without compromise any longer. Lagusta! Listen to your 3 am deepest-self! If everything is perfect but you’re miserable, everything is not perfect!!!

And more, after some good comments from good friends (is my sketchy FB/blog creep creepy?):

Here’s the question I don’t think I want to hear the answer to: is it possible to run a food business, where margins are already ridiculously tight, where you don’t skimp on buying quality ingredients, don’t skimp on your commitment to really putting in the time to make things from scratch that taste good, and don’t charge people so much that no one can afford it except for people so rich you can’t stand to even communicate via email with them? I’ve found a way to make it work, but only by killing myself with work. That works really well, everyone is happy (but me) and I make enough $ to live, but what if I don’t want to kill myself anymore? Change any variable and I’m unhappy and don’t feel ethical, hire someone else to cook and the system breaks down because of labor costs. I wish people ordered enough chocolates so I didn’t have to cook…but I love cooking. But not this much. Sorry for the public venting. I feel sad.

I dunno. I’ve been doing this job since freaking 2002, but lately everything seems so hard. Costs just keep skyrocketing, but my clients can’t afford the service if I keep raising my prices accordingly. It was such a small dream, my dream of making ethical food without compromises for people who would appreciate and understand it. Most of my clients are so rad, and really do appreciate it, but the 5% who are childish and irrational and ugh to the power of douche are just bringing me down so, so low.

On the other hand, I feel nourished by the chocolates business, so that’s something.

Ugh with my oversharey TMI self, I know. I’ve got this beautiful beautiful little handmade appropriately-sized first world life, I know. And a lovely tan for another week or so, I know. And how can I complain, coming off my fun-in-the-sun annual sabbatical? I know. But: what do you do when you know, and it doesn’t help?

Again: meh. I’ll be back to the internet when I have something to say besides “everything sucks.”

 

 

fiction and food January 18, 2010

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),culture and its discontents,new paltz,New Yorker whiteboy watch,self-titled — lagusta @ 5:32 pm

I spent a good deal of time yesterday reading Jennifer Egan’s beautiful fiction in last week’s New Yorker. I read it at the beach while Jacob was surfing, then I read it in the car driving to get an ice cream, then I read it while eating the ice cream, (I briefly put it down while we drove down the street from the ice cream shop to the bird sanctuary at the lighthouse where we usually see dolphins and whales) then I read it while we were driving home.

Then I sat and looked at the sun setting on our last night on vacation and let the story sink into my heart. There were some weird, unsettling parallels between it and my life that sort of shook me up: I also went on an African safari when I was a pre-teen, my father was also a misogynist druggie, I also have a complicated relationship with a troubled brother. Apart from all that, it was just super beautiful and touching and well done. I’ve read one of her books, The Invisible Circus, and adored it. I guess I should check out the rest.

(The safari? It was really weird. My mom’s childhood best friend, Harriet, worked at the Chicago Tribune and was assigned to do a story about family-friendly African safaris. Having no children of her own, she brought me along. The safari was exactly, precisely as Egan described it: weirdly luxurious, filled with white people, scary and thrilling and with lots of racial and class subtexts that I felt even as a kid. I hated all the richie kids on the trip [and they hated me: they called me "rat girl" because I had shaved off my bangs about a month before in a desperate attempt to look less like Winnie Cooper, (actually...that doesn't really explain why they called me rat girl. I was sort of a late bloomer, OK? Not a pretty kid.). I spent most of my time puking on the long drives and chatting with a thrilling National Geographic explorer couple who shared exotic teas and told me stories of their travels and, quietly, promised me that this weird, awkward and (they could feel the fear and uneasiness that every day life created in me, I could tell) slightly horrible phase in my life would come to an end. And it did! So fuck you, richie kids who are all probably cokehead investment bankers now: FUCK YOU!)

*     *    *

As I write this paragraph, Jacob just handed me a glass of ice-cold freshly squeezed orange and tangerine juice, made to use up the last of our giant stash of farmer's market Hawaii fruit---and all of the sudden one of those weird things happened where a memory comes to you so forcefully that it sort of stabs your heart. On the plane from New York (the only time I'd ever been in New York prior to moving there for the rest of my life when I was 18 was that hour layover in JFK when I was 13) to Amsterdam on the way to Tanzania, Harriet got us bumped up to business class. She might have just paid for the upgrade, I don't know, but I was beyond amazed by the riches of business class. I still have the little pouch of goodies (eye mask, shoe horn [WTF], earplugs, thin socks, tiny toothbrush and toothpaste) from that flight somewhere in the garage, but what impressed me the most was the champagne glass (not plastic cup!) of freshly-squeezed orange juice they handed me before we even took off! I’d flown to Chicago every summer with my mother and brother, so I was used to flying and always looked forward, like kids do, to the drink cart. But this oj was a whole other level. The idea that you could get sparkling cold, fresh orange juice (I was a fruit fiend as a kid—I still am) in a champagne glass…I don’t know. It’s possible I’d never actually had fresh orange juice, though the hellscape I grew up in was rich with oranges. We were an oj concentrate sort of family. For about a decade after that (and, apparently, for almost another decade after that), fresh orange juice has been a pleasure that speaks to me of achieving a certain sort of a life: an appreciation of quality, a calm knowledge that you’ve figured things out.

Is it classist, what orange juice does to me? It was one of the first cannon fires in what has become my all-consuming passion for eating quality food. And, maybe even more important, it was the first sign on a trip full of signs that not everyone lived the way my family lived—in good (we were not living in abject poverty in Africa) and bad (not everyone was terrified of their ragey fathers and lived in squalor) ways. Since then I’ve been a striver. Not for money, but for a better way of being. When Jacob gave me the pint glass full to the brim with orange juice today, he said: “Both these glasses cost about $1.50 worth of oranges!” Living well doesn’t necessarily take money—just imagination, ingenuity, and a certain sort of freedom. It’s entirely fair to say that a glass of oj on a business class flight almost twenty years ago set that desire in motion.

So, anyway! I encourage you to read the story.

To change gears entirely:

I intended to hop online really quick just to mention the story and that my pals Erin & Sam’s CSA is still accepting people for this summer.

If you live in the New Paltz area and are looking for great veggies this summer, check out the details in this letter from them, and email them at secondwindcsa@gmail.com for an application form:

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lentils and rice (mujaddara), but, like, not the shitty health food hippie kind, and also: KOSHARI! January 17, 2010

Filed under: NYC,recipe!,Restaurant rants and raves — lagusta @ 5:26 am

I’m just gonna tell you right now that I’ve had two glasses of wine, and that is about all I can ever handle before I start going a little wild and loopy and happy and, um, what’s that word?

DRUNK.

So let’s see how this recipe goes. I’m going to illustrate it with snaps of weird things you might find in Latina markets. (Also known as “Mexican markets,” “Latino markets,” and “Hispanic markets.” I like ladies, so I say Latina markets. Also the store I shop at is called Casa Latina!)

Thanks to lovely lovely Moom (sister of eternal BFF Than, whom you know) for asking for the recipe and giving me the impetus to post it. She asked me for my recipe and said that hers is similar to that served at Kalustyans. I like everything at Kalustyans, I would marry Kalustyans if it asked me and if we could live in the “50,000 kinds of rice” aisle, but I think their mujaddara is a wee bit on the dry side. Moom mentioned that she was thinking of amping hers up by using shallots instead of onions and here’s a confession (one that I think a Vietnamese cook like Moom just might find slightly horrifying) I hate shallots so much. Not eating them, but cooking with them. Well, not cooking with them, peeling them. I hate peeling them so much that I haven’t touched one in about half a decade. Please downgrade me in your esteem accordingly.

I’ve got no pictures o’ lentils n’ rice, but I have a sneaky feeling you can picture it. Picture it all vibrant and lovely though, laced with shredded greens and topped with paprika and juicy, not dry and hideous (like hippies make it. Did I just say that?).

In addition to lentils and rice, which is also called mujaddara (or mujadara, or mujadarra, and is sort of pronounced like “mu-JAHT-ra”), which if you believe in fairy tales is what Esau sold his birthright as firstborn son to Jacob (not my atheist Jewy Jacob, some other Jewy Jacob) for. What does that even mean? You’ve got me, but then again, I don’t believe in fairy tales, so maybe it’s not for me to know. Point is, peeps have been eating this combo since Jewfros were invented, because it’s tasty.

And as usual, bubbaloo, there are tricks:

  1. USE A SHITLOAD OF OIL. See below. Olive oil is your flavor carrier, and if you don’t use enough it will be dry and dry and sad and tasteless. Have a heavy hand with the evo and you’ll be happier later.
  2. Fry the hell out of the onions. They shouldn’t be clear or “soft” or “translucent,” as you sometimes see cooked onions described in recipes—they should be browned. It should take you a good 20 minutes to cook them. Cook them over super high heat and they could get bitter, but cook them too low and they will never cook. Take the Middle Way.
  3. Use enough salt. As usual, enough is: a lot. Comparatively speaking. (Compared to what hippies would use, that is.)
  4. Use enough paprika. See above (#3). See below.
  5. This is one of those recipes that is simple, but not exactly easy. For example, if you forget to add the spices to the oily onions and just sprinkle them over the top when it’s all done, they will have almost no flavor, because you need to heat them to make the flavor bloom. The directions are the way they are for a reason is what I’m trying to say, does that sound preachy?
  6. Also, it seems to me that this is usually served with some sort of pickle, and that’s a good idea. It livens things up a little bit. I usually eat it with picked pepperoncini peppers. At Kalustyans they give you pickled beets and peppers and all kinds of deliciousnesses. Pickled chipotle peppers would be nice, as would those little tiny red peppers…argh, what are they called? I have a huge box of them in my walk-in at work, thousands of miles away…they are little cherry peppers, pickled in sort of a sweet brine. I’ll think of it, it’ll come to me…………………Update, an hour later: PEPPADEW PEPPERS! They are nice, check ‘em out. (Upstaters, I know Mother Earths carries them)

OK, so after the mujadara, I’m going to give you a special variation which is even better: Koshari. It’s modeled on the koshari at a certain nameless restaurant on Main Street in my town, whose version is so profoundly mediocre that I knew I had to make my own. (Most of my recipes are created out of snobbishness, yes, how did you know?)

Let’s get started, Softer Violet:

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my chili (officially the best) January 16, 2010

Filed under: recipe! — lagusta @ 5:03 am

OK, so. Two people recently asked me for two recipes, so here they are. Today: chili. Tomorrow: mujadara!!!

After this I might be a bit quiet on the internet while I settle back into frigid life in NY, so enjoy cooking!

So here’s my award winning chili recipe! It’s a bit of a to-do and is pretty damned deluxe, but it’s totes worth it. Here’s the basic recipe, but for the competition I changed a few things: First, I stirred in a whole ton of chocolate. It gives chili a really nice brick-red color, and a super deep dark roasty flavor. Just be careful that it doesn’t get near the bottom of the pot, or it can scorch and burn and lend an off flavor to everything. Stir it in when you’re done cooking. (Hey, if you have a cold cup of coffee sitting around, toss that in too. I really like the flavor.) I also put my home-frozen tomatoes through a food mill to get rid of the skins, because I wanted my chili to be all cheffy and smooth. It’s an optional step (and not necessary if you’re using canned tomatoes). And I put in just a little of a ramp pickle I made (made exactly like sauerkraut, but with ramps) because I wanted to bump up the bright, fresh, tart flavor and because it was one more local ingredient and I wanted to win the “most local ingredients” prize (in the end I was stuck in the veggie ghetto and won “Best Vegetarian Chili: Professional Division.”)

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onion rings and four other things January 14, 2010

Filed under: book reports and the like,culture and its discontents,i heart feminists,Monday Miscellany,New Yorker whiteboy watch,recipe! — lagusta @ 2:57 pm

The salad mix we’ve been getting at the Kapa’a farmer’s market has freaking ROSE PETALS in it! And flowering herbs and all kinds of gorgeousness. It’s ridiculously tasty, and is sold by the most insane crazy biodynamic new agey deeply wrinkley slow moving hippie lady you have ever SEEN. I’d love to ask if I could take her photo, but I’m actually too scared to speak to her (Jacob is too scared to even go near her stand). She looks deeply into your eyes for about two full minutes before she will let you buy her stuff, as if she is reading your soul and deciding if you’re worthy of her coddled baby vegetables and rare fruits. Anyway, her produce is INSANE. She must pack the salad mix five minutes before she goes to the market, it’s so fresh and crunchy and…my mouth is watering.

1. A friend of a friend is opening up a vegan bakery in Portland this week! I hear such good things, I can’t wait to visit. Check it out! Dovetail, all my best to you!
2. Lovely Isa had the great idea (one of her millions) to put together vegan bake sales for Haiti. Awesome.

3. Adam Gopnik (of all people, usually he irks me to no end) wrote a beautiful piece on van Gogh vs. Gauguin in last week’s New Yorker,* and it included this line, which has been floating around in my head for days:

The stripping away of conventional decorum that van Gogh’s illness forced upon him made him almost unnaturally present, alert to the world; when his mind went wrong, he became all heart.

That’s the way I want to go, when I go crazy.

4. Oh my god you guys, I hated The Lovely Bones so much. Oh my GOD, I hated it SO MUCH.

Phew. I’ve been wanting to vent about that to someone for like a year. Sorry Brittany, I know you liked it!

Here’s the thing. I listened to the audio book twice. The first time, I thought it was insanely beautiful. And the story moved along at a good clip and painted a fine portrait of some random not-all-that-interesting people in a time period I am rather fond of (the 1970s). Like the store Anthropologie, it irked me, but it was pretty, so I didn’t think too hard about it. The second time around I began to get a little ragey–about God, Christianity, the tone of the whole thing, EVERYTHING. And over time it’s just made me more and more and more mad. So I was happy to read, today, Roger Ebert’s wonderfully scathing review of the movie:

“The Lovely Bones” is a deplorable film with this message: If you’re a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film’s primary effect was to make me squirmy.

Y*E*S. (via Jezebel.) Roger Ebert is pretty universally amazing, no?

4.

And finally, onion rings—in five minutes. I made this the other night in my very skimpy vacation “kitchenette” which lacks pretty much everything you need to put a decent meal on the table. And because I was starving and was wolfishly eating the little fried fuckers the minute they came out of the oil, I forced Jacob into taking pictures of them so quickly that he barely had time to focus—any ideas about stylishly stacking the misshapen rings into a tidy stack or anything were out of the picture. Yours will look prettier if you aren’t cramming the batter into one tiny bowl because you only have one bowl because a gecko is currently inhabiting the other one and you’re too hungry to wash it out.

The substitution of chickpea flour for eggs in batters—are all vegans doing this? I’ve been doing it for a few years, and find more and more and more uses for this little gem of a trick. Bob’s Red Mill makes chickpea flour you can find in most health food stores (check the wheat-free section), but it’s much cheaper at Indian markets, where it’s called besan.

Peel an onion and chop it into nice thick rings. Then get out two bowls:

bowl #1:

some beer

some prepared mustard

if you have a nice sourdough starter, toss in a tablespoon or so for extra deliciousness and stick-to-it-iveness (sourdough is an excellent egg replacer too).

bowl #2:

something like equal parts all-purpose flour and chickpea flour

lots of sea salt

lots of cracked ground pepper

Some nice herb like dried rosemary or thyme or oregano or smoked paprika or five spice powder or ground cumin or aleppo pepper—something yummy.

  1. Dip onion rings in bowl #1, then bowl #2, then fry in hot oil (I used local mac nut oil, but at home I’d use grape seed or coconut).
  2. Drain on paper towels, then eat the fuck out of that fuckin’ shit. With ketchup, of course. YUM.
  3. If you have leftover batter, use it to make crazily wild and delicious banana fritters the next day. Or just fry whatever you have on hand with it, you can’t go wrong. Seitan! Tofu! Eggplant! Sage leaves! DO IT!

*And don’t think we’re not going to hash out the insane Whole Foods dude article in there too. Wait for it…

 

Can chocolate ever be considered ethical? (Part two) January 14, 2010

Filed under: book reports and the like,chocolate — lagusta @ 2:47 am

Hmm. As I was thinking about global poverty and the developed/undeveloped [crappy terms, I know] schism, the earth opened up and a literal schism was created, and now thousands of mostly poor people are dying.

This world, this world.

You probably know this, but aid is sorely needed. Jacob did some research and we decided to each donate, via text message, to Wyclef Jean’s foundation, Yele (text “Yele” to 501501 and $5 will be added to your phone bill) and the Red Cross (Text “Haiti” to 90999 and $10 will be added to your phone bill). (See Ruby’s comment below for more info)

Back to chocolate.

Bitter Chocolate is packed with fascinating insights about the way the chocolate trade functions under globalized capitalism—but it’s also really readable, not boring or dry at all. I really recommend it, and am sort of in awe of the lengths the author, Carol Off (whose voice I know from the CBC radio program “As It Happens”) went to to get the scoop—without a doubt, her life was in danger more than once.

Hand-harvesting wild pink peppercorns for Furious Vulvas

Here are a few random tidbits that especially spoke to me.

Off really goes into the negative consequences boycotts and very tough labeling systems can have on fragile markets. I don’t want to be one of those people who say that we should buy sweatshop shit from China because if we don’t the women who work in the sweatshops won’t have a job at all, but it is important to remember that boycotts without alternative solutions aren’t all that useful.

In describing the many, many perils faced by a rider attached to an ag appropriations bill in 2001 that proposed “a labelling system for chocolate that would proclaim the candy to be ‘slave-free’ if it could be documented that the product hadn’t involved the work of exploited children,” Off describes what happened when a similar bill was proposed in 2002:

The legislation ultimately failed to pass Congress but even the threat of such a boycott sent a chill through industry worldwide and had devastating consequences, particularly in Bangladesh, where the country’s garment manufacturers abruptly dismissed about fifty thousand child workers. Most of the children had been supporting their families and were subsequently forced to turn to other more dangerous and less lucrative employment—some in rock crushing and many others in prostitution. (p. 141)

The rider mentioned above eventually became the Harkin-Engel Protocol. Off does a good job describing the problems with Americans imposing top-down solutions on the problems with cocoa bean harvesting. She touches on what Christy mentioned yesterday—the only real solution that will stick is paying more, lots more, and ensuring that the money trickles all down the line to the actual producers and pickers, etc.

…Almost every critic of the industry has identified the key problem: poverty among the primary producers. [The protocol had many stringent rules for labor standards, but was short on how they could actually feasibly be accomplished]. Farmers seek, and exploit, the cheapest forms of labour possible because of economic necessity….’How effective will the Harkin-Engel Protocol be in the long run when it doesn’t address the direct correlation between low prices paid to farmers for their cocoa beans and the type and quality of labor employed? The Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire had warned cocoa companies when the child trafficking scandal first emerged that the manufacturers would have to pay about ten times more for their cocoa if they really wanted to end forced labor.

So there you have it. You can probably guess what happened then: Big Chocolate wouldn’t allow that to happen, and the Harkin-Engel Protocol gradually lost all teeth.

Extortion, corruption, torture, killing of journalists, kidnappings, beatings, Hershey forcing farmers to plant shitty hybrid varieties of cacao and uproot the tasty and lovely Criollo variety…I don’t have the heart to copy lots more, but there is a very illuminating section about what happened when Green & Blacks entered the stage.

In a nutshell: they wanted to change the industry and make truly ethical chocolate, it seems. They began buying chocolate from Mayans in Belize after Hershey had decimated the area. They brought the concept of fair trade to the UK mainstream and did truly help the Maya in Belize sustainably produce chocolate without forced labor. Children started going to school again. “The farmers were producing the highest-quality cocoa in the region, mostly because the guaranteed price allowed them to develop proper fermenting and drying techniques. Elsewhere in Central America…farmers didn’t bother with quality since it made no difference to the price.” (p. 285) Things were humming along.

And then Green & Blacks became “a victim of its own success.” As they needed more and more cacao beans to keep up with increased demand for their eco- and people-friendly product, they “started to put the heat on farmers.” (p. 290) Pressure to produce more product faster—you know how that goes. Not well. Off doesn’t go into all that much detail about what “the heat” exactly was, apart from a desire to ramp up production, and we’re left with the impression that the Green & Blacks Mayan enterprise was somewhat of a pyrrhic victory.

Either way, in 2005 Cadbury Schweppes bought a controlling interest in Green & Blacks—Cadbury being, of course, one of the original consumers of and market-drivers of slave chocolate and a vociferous opponent of anything resembling fair labor practices. So now one of the most notorious slave-chocolate makers partially owns one of the founding fair trade chocolate makers. Capitalism sees nothing strange about this arrangement.

Here are some of the uglier sides of the fair trade labeling process Off dredges up (many of these apply, in the US, to the USDA organic certification as process as well, which any organic-growing but not certified-organic farmer can tell you is a fiasco):

  • “While fair trade is, in theory, one of the most ethical movements of our time, in practice it generates a cumbersome bureaucracy.” (p. 292)
  • One problem seems to be that the “international standards for fair trade are enshrined in a series of rules” in Germany, though they are put into action in the developing world. We clearly need solutions created by and for those who actually work in the industry being regulated.
  • One fair trade administrator who works with the Maya growing Green & Blacks cacao beans says: “It’s becoming a hell of a good deal for First World bureaucrats and it’s becoming less of a good deal for producers, and we have to pay for it.” (p. 292)
  • In addition to the paperwork, the levies are “staggering,” particularly for small co-ops already struggling to survive. And, as many of the areas in which cacao is grown are already rife with corruption—you can draw your own conclusions.

So, what can we do? What can I do, as a chocolate artisan? I guess just what I have been doing: refusing to close my eyes, pushing, listening, learning, making hard decisions. Paying a lot for chocolate, asking a lot of questions about it. I hope that, as Christy mentioned, I could someday get to the level where I actually had a hand in making the actual chocolate I use from scratch. (I know how to do it, I just need to do it.) Things are getting better—I have to believe this.

Well, some things. This world, this world.

But! There are wild pink peppercorns out there, still, and we can climb mountains and gather them and carry them home in cute little packets on our hips. It’s not chocolate, but it feels good to take control of one aspect of food production. The power is ours—at least a little of it, still.

 

Can chocolate ever be considered ethical? (Part one) January 13, 2010

Filed under: book reports and the like,chocolate,culture and its discontents — lagusta @ 5:49 am

Peeps. Here’s a tip: don’t read super depressing books on vacation.

Maybe everyone knows this but me, but I never get time to really tear through books like I so love to do. So, on my annual month off from cooking I haul all the books I’ve been hoarding throughout the year to my little vacation paradise (a shack next to Jacob’s dad’s house on Kauai) and read until my eyes burn. Here’s what I’ve devoured so far:

Momofuku by David Chang & Peter Meehan: UTTERLY FASCINATING cookbook. Yes, pretty damn meaty. But really wonderful. More about it later…maybe (see how I’m being so good and not forcing myself to write blog posts on vacation?). I read literally every word and every single recipe—even for things like “Pig’s Head Torchon,” (I got though that one by not looking at the pictures) and I learned something new and interesting on every page.

Celebrate with Chocolate by Marcel Desoulniers: picked up at a thrift store for $1, really lovely.

Bakewise by Shirley Corriher: like Momofuku but even more so: constant firecrackers of ideas and inspiration going off. Truly invaluable.

From A Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i by Haunani-Kay Trask. See below.

The Boss of You: Everything a Woman Needs to Know to Start, Run, and Maintain Her Own Business by Lauren Bacon and Emira Mears: haven’t started it yet, looks great. Update! GREAT! Gave me lots of good ideas for how to inject some zest into my boring businessy inner workings.

Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace by Pun Ngai: heartbreaking, fascinating, heartbreaking, heartbreaking.

My Bread by Jim Lahey: haven’t started yet, very very excited!! Update: AMAZING, LOVED IT, SO MANY GOOD IDEAS! Sorta slim, but all in all a well-crafted, well-edited, curated little collection of ideas and recipes. The dude loves and cares for bread, that’s for sure.

and finally, Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off

Throw in about 20 magazines, and I feel on top of the world of words. An amazing feeling.

But Bitter Chocolate and, to a lesser extent, Made in China and From A Native Daughter, are messing me up more than I’d like to admit.

From A Native Daughter is primarily about why haoles (white people like me) shouldn’t ever go to Hawaii because it was stolen from Hawaiians, etc. It’s pretty devastating in its critique of American imperialism and the horrors capitalism hath wrought. I’m only halfway through it right now, but it’s not actually making me feel more guilty than I already feel about spending so much time on this stolen island—because here’s the thing: if Hawaii wasn’t a state—and I do believe that it should be given back to native Hawaiians tomorrow, make no mistake—I’d love it even more. If tight restrictions where put on where tourists could go (so ancient and sacred sites were protected, for example) and what they could do (if the stupid horrible fake “luaus” and hula shows and things were ended, for example), I’d feel much happier about enjoying this island. Similarly, I’d love to know my tourist dollars were going to local businesses owned by residents and native people rather than American multi-nationals. Hawaii should be a country. That’s the bottom line for me. I have a feeling, however, that Trask still wouldn’t want my white face around, and I’m hoping the rest of the book can help me understand her position a little more. She is filled with a sometimes explosive rage, and as you can imagine that thrills me to no end. She’s one of us! (I sort of want to name a chocolate after her, can you tell? She’s been on my short list for a while.)

So when I’m not reading about how I should be ashamed to be in this place I adore so, I’m reading about how my entire beloved business is built on the backs of poor people halfway across the world. Bitter Chocolate is harsh.

Here’s what I emailed to my friend Randy about it:

…See, I’m reading this book, Bitter Chocolate, all about, well, the chocolate industry. As expected, it’s horrifying. The phrase “death by chocolate” is used, and it doesn’t refer to a decadent cake. And I of course knew all of this, but what the author has to say about fair trade chocolate is predictably terrifying as well. So sad. And the choc I use (Tcho) isn’t fair trade certified [and I'm happy about this, because I increasingly doubt the ability of the too-tidy f/t label to really do what it says and the process of getting certified can actually make things worse for small farmers--more on this in a minute]—they work with small farmer co-ops and they document everything and pay fair wages, blah blah. Their bags are printed with “no slavery” and they talk all about the issues on their site, and I’ve had several really reassuring phone calls about it with them. But here’s the thing: can a product like chocolate–made largely by brown people to be eaten largely by white people (the name of this book could be “Brown People Died To Bring White People Candy”)–ever be ethical?

Argh. I try to make my business my activism, but maybe nothing can be done.

I know I’m saying that now and tomorrow I will know again that some people are buying my choc who would have bought Hershey bars, but…tonight is tonight.

So that’s where I’m at. I feel better today, I’m not about to shut my business down or anything, but I am unsettled about it, for sure. So you can share my discomfort, tomorrow I’ll share some facts I’ve pulled from Bitter Chocolate that particularly struck me. But for now, here’s what Randy wrote back (which I didn’t ask his permission to print—let me know if I should take this down, yo!)

I am glad you are reading your book and using the information to improve your interaction with the world.  That is in itself the right thing to be doing.  I don’t think there will ever be a point when your negative impact on the planet and other people is eliminated.  You will always want to do better, but never hit the zero mark.  That is ok!  You have to be and being makes a mess.  This is not a reason to make as big a mess as you might find convenient, but it is a reason to not beat yourself up for ending up somewhere short of perfect.

Talking things over with Randy, like talking things over with Jacob, always helps. And, like Jacob and so many others in my life, Randy often points out to me the impossibility of achieving perfection. I appreciate it, but it also sort of turns me into a whining child: but I want perfection. It is, in fact, all I’ve ever wanted. And to admit to myself that it’s not possible to achieve it—in this case, to run my business in the absolute most ethical way—terrifies me. Why even try, if you’re not going to try for perfection? You’ll rarely make it, but those tiny times when you do—that feeling is why I’m alive. But, yes, to find a way to fall short without tearing your insides to shreds—there’s the rub.

Enough cheeseballery. Tomorrow: depressing choco facts.

 

endlessly adaptable Vegetable Phyllo Triangles with Dijon Mustard-Lentil Sauce January 9, 2010

Filed under: recipe! — lagusta @ 4:37 pm

Here’s the other phyllo recipe I lean heavily on that I mentioned below. I’m going to give you the basic template, then you can find your own way with it. It’s an easy recipe. Even more so than the fennel-olive triangles, this is a real fridge cleaner-outer. For a nice color and flavor, I almost always add some steamed chopped greens, even though the recipe doesn’t mention it.

The basic formula is:

  • One umami-rich vegetable to anchor the dish. I get great local organic mushrooms pretty cheap, so I almost always use sliced fried-up shiitakes. Caramelized onions are great too. Roasted or sauteéd cremini mushrooms are also good.
  • Root vegetables you roast then make into a paste. You could also steam them, but be sure to let them sit in a colander for an hour or so, otherwise they will be too watery. This paste helps bind the filling into a nice mass.
  • Bursts of flavor: herbs, tempeh bacon, garlic, sea salt.
  • Phyllo to wrap it all up.

As long as you stick to that formula, you can plug in almost anything you’ve got. If you have marinated artichokes, use them instead of some of the tempeh bacon for a burst of flavor. If you have excess eggplant in the garden, sauté up a whole bunch and use it instead of the mushrooms.

Here’s the recipe I use as a starting point. I have down that it makes about 20-24 triangles.


Vegetable Phyllo Triangles with Dijon Mustard-French Lentil Sauce

1 lb. assorted mushrooms, chopped into medium pieces or caramelized onions (or any umami-rich, roasty-toasty vegetable)

2 parsnips, diced, or any creamy similar root vegetable

1 small butternut squash, peeled and diced (or any type squash that isn’t watery)

1 celery root, peeled and diced

lots of fresh or dried sage and/or thyme (you could also do rosemary)

2 packages tempeh bacon (absolutely necessary—fakin’ bacon is, to me, the only palatable veggie bacon)

Grape seed or other tasteless, high-heat-stable oil

2 ts. sea salt

8 cloves garlic, minced (a head or two or five of roasted garlic is even better)

1 package thawed phyllo (it’s best to buy 2 in case one has been defrosted a million times and is all ripped and makes you crazy to use it – it will keep months in the freezer)

olive oil for brushing phyllo

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F.
  2. Toss mushrooms with extra virgin olive oil and herbs and sea salt and roast. OR caramelize onions, adding lots of garlic at the end.
  3. Separately, roast all root vegs, tossed with extra virgin olive oil, lots of dried herbs (if using fresh, add the later), a little apple juice if you have it, and salt.
  4. Purée all roasted vegs (smash them with a potato masher, purée them in the food processor or stand mixer, etc. If you have roasted any potatoes, don’t put them in the food processor though, they will get gluey and awful. Taters aren’t the best for this recipe, actually.)
  5. Fry tempeh bacon until crispy, adding garlic at end and cooking for 1 minute.
  6. Turn oven to 350° or so F.
  7. Combine vegetable purées, mushrooms or onions, fresh herbs (if using), sea salt to taste, and tempeh bacon and garlic. Cool to room temperature.
  8. Make phyllo triangles: oil 1 layer of phyllo and layer another on top. Repeat until you have 3 layers (note that these are both thicker and wider than the other triangles—these are more of a dinner triangle, those are more like appetizers). Cut phyllo into 3 equal strips and place 3 tablespoons of filling on each. Fold like a flag, oiling phyllo if it looks dry, to make triangles. (If you have pretty fresh herbs like sage, do that trick where you put a few on the top (first) sheet of phyllo like I mention in the recipe below for the fennel tops!)
  9. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake 20-30 minutes, until golden brown, turning each triangle over halfway through.
  10. Serve with sauce…or not!

Dijon Mustard-Lentil Sauce

To be honest, these don’t really need a sauce. But if you want to really gild the lily, serve them with either the Miso Gravy in the Bloodroot book, or with this adaptation of Milennium’s Dijon Mustard-French Lentil Sauce. I’ve made a whole lot of changes to this recipe (mostly taking out what I feel are useless elements) because, like all Milennium recipes, I think it’s a great idea executed fairly poorly. (Kevin from Vegan Brew made it recently with one of his homemade beers, go check that out too.) Here’s how I do it. I have that it makes about 3 cups. I’d double it and freeze some—this freezes really well (as do the triangles).

This sauce seems really weird, doesn’t it? I think it’s good-weird.

½ c French lentils (you know the ones—the pretty, small, speckled ones. Also called Lentilles de Puy.)

2 large onions, finely chopped

A few good glugs extra virgin olive oil

1 (12 oz) bottle of beer, the more bitter and stouty the better

1 ½ c apple juice

½ c-¾ c Dijon mustard

3  Tb. sherry or white wine (or more beer)

¼ c fresh thyme leaves or 2 Tb. dried

½ ts. freshly ground black pepper

2 ts. sea salt

  1. Cook lentils.
  2. In a saucepan over medium heat, cook the onion in extra virgin olive oil until the onions are lightly caramelized.
  3. Add beer, apple juice, mustard, and 2 1/2 cups water. Simmer until reduced by 1/3, about 30 minutes. (The easiest way to do this is to stick a toothpick or skewer into the mixture, mark off with a marker what level the liquid came to, and keep sticking it back in until it’s 1/3 less than what it was before.)
  4. Add sherry, lentils, thyme, freshly ground black pepper, and sea salt, and bring to a boil. Simmer 5 more minutes.
  5. Taste and adjust flavors. Sometimes I blend 1/2 this sauce for a minute, or I just stick the immersion blender in and get it a little less chunky. The original recipe called for a cornstarch slurry which worked to hold it all together a bit, but I prefer the clean flavor of blending part of it instead. (I sort of hate slurries, actually. If I can avoid them, I always do. I feel like they always contribute a muddy flavor to a dish. You can almost always avoid a slurry by puréeing part of anything, you know?)
 

 
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