Quick Link (Food Politics, Race, Privilege)

I'm having a Lazy Intellectual Sunday where I just read intelligent blog posts and sit on the couch. I've been Reading New Model Minority, and she has a great post called Race, Class, Food, and the Future of the City: A Manifesto. She also has a fantastic article on Global Gated Communities that started out talking about vegetables. Check it.

Sorry this blog has been so inactive. I'll get back on it once I get my laptop up and running. I'm borrowing my roommate's for now.

Feminism, Domesticity, and Self-Reliance

My computer has decided to be nice today. I hope this lasts.

This train of thought began, strangely enough, in a linguistics blog. Language Log featured a brief entry about the word "femivore" as one of the extensions of the suffix "-vore" as created in a New York Times article. A good portion of the comments are devoted to discussion of the prefix "femi-" and the suffix "-vore", but a few strayed into the political implications of this small but noticeable movement in food politics.

This is something I've been considering for a long time. Starting a garden, keeping chickens, and generally being fairly self-sufficient with what I consume is incredibly appealing. The feminist implications are still a little iffy for me, as a woman still coming to terms with the possibility of domesticity as a form of feminism. I've been told both that I am "the most domestic of [a friend's] friends but the least likely to be a domestic" and that "whether [I] marry a man or a woman [I'll] be the one in the apron." Coming to terms with being a feminist domestic scares me.

This is because "difference feminism" (as I've heard it called) has often sounded like keeping the traditional place of women in the private sphere and men in the public sphere, with too little emphasis on the work that goes into maintaining a domestic space and almost no discussion about the possibility of a "house-husband" or "male domestic"*. I've seen a number of my moderate-to-radical friends in relationships act out the "men make houses, women make homes" (or even traditional gender roles being assigned to partners in same-sex relationships) model way too often for my taste.

Is "femivore" more related to the prefix "femi-" or the suffix "-vore"? Is this movement focused more on gender or food politics? I see it as a wonderful food politics movement with strong influence on gender politics, but the article is more focused on the feminist aspect of this movement in an almost condescending manner. The last paragraph seems like the author is trying to justify how negatively she views this aberrant lifestyle, but instead of encouraging men to participate more in domestic matters, ends up sounding dismissive of the whole thing. I would love to have garden and own chickens in a sustainable, eco-friendly way, but whoever I was living with (roommate, partner, whatever) would have to give equal effort to domestic affairs. Instead of talking about the negatives, about how this movement can be interpreted as both feminist and anti-feminist, we should talk about how to make them equal. More direct symbiosis, less parasitism.**


On a considerably less academic note, the word "femivorism" is one of the ugliest I've encountered in a good while. I hope it doesn't catch on.

The Femivore's Dilemma (via New York Times)
Vaguely related, Why Making Healthful Foods Cheaper Isn't Enough (via NPR)

*note the marked gender of these phrases
**related to The Vegetarian Myth, which will probably be the focus of my next entry, provided my computer stays on long enough for me to compose a coherent entry

Computer Asplosion/Large Quantities of Cupcakes and Shellfish

Lack of updates due to computer only occasionally wanting to start up, and the fan getting extremely angry after an hour to an hour and a half of being alive.

This week, I have baked 8 batches of cupcakes, with recipes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (which is the best cupcake book you could ever buy.) 4 of them were tiramisu, one batch of carrot cupcakes, one batch of pineapple upside down, one batch of blueberry lemon creme, and one batch of chocolate stout. Most of these were given away or for a bake sale. I may make one more batch of blueberry lemon creme cupcakes, as I have extra lemon frosting and blueberry filling.

Last night the upstairs neighbors had a crawfish boil in the back yard. It sounds like it went pretty okay, but they started around 9 and didn't prepare as well as they could have. Not that I know shit about having a crawfish boil, mind you. They left a huge bag of them out all night, but miraculously quite a few are still alive. The still-living leftovers have been gifted to the 4 of us living downstairs, as 2 out of 3 of the upstairs neighbors keep kosher and there are only so many crawfish one man can eat.


I also got a new friend. His name is Klaus the Crawfish. We will probably eat him, too.

I fucking love avocados.

Taking a page from my friend Max's book, I'm gonna preface this with "Oh man you guys, I had the best sandwich for lunch."

Toasted whole wheat bread. Sliced avocado. Tomatoes. Mozarella cheese. Vegenaise (vegan mayo, which was cheaper than real mayo). Swedish-style mustard. Romaine lettuce. Yellow onions. If I still ate meat or had bacon, this would be the perfect BLT+. I ate it too fast to take a picture.

Vegetable Soup Stock

AKA "throw a bunch of vegetable scraps in a pot and boil the hell out of it." Also, look everyone I got batteries for my camera! Here's the "before" picture.

I keep the odds and ends of veggies used in other recipes in a freezer bag to use for soup stock. This one's made of bits of green onions, red onions, yellow onions, one small potato, maybe 3 celery stalks, part of a tomato (which I'm finding makes stocks slightly bitter), 2 small carrots, and a heap of pre-chopped garlic. The house buys pre-chopped garlic in bulk, so I don't use fresh-chopped as much as I'd like. There are some spices in there, like salt, pepper, and a bay leaf. I don't remember everything I smelled in the cupboard and thought "this'll be nice," then threw in. I'm precise in my cooking, I know.

As a basic veggie soup stock recipe, you can gather
1 onion
2 carrots
3 celery stalks
1 head garlic (which is what gives it more flavor)
1 bay leaf
and as much salt and pepper as you like

Quarter onion. Peel garlic. Cut carrots and celery into... chunks about 1-2 inches long. Throw all ingredients in the largest pot you own. Add enough water to fill your large pot. Bring water to a boil, then let simmer for 1-2 hours. Strain veggie bits out, wait for the stock to cool, and refrigerate or freeze for later deliciousness.

Here we have the "after."

I spent a decade exoticising the otter

I find that the webcomic Cat and Girl too often describes my life or my thoughts.

A Few Good Links

GOOD gets in on the food politics posts. This one's about disposable dinnerware.

Avocado salad I could probably eat for a week straight (PGEW)


Happy Mardi Gras everyone. I'm gonna go try to find some delicious paczki.