No guts in Copenhagen

Another great speech by Mr. Obama as he accepted his Nobel peace prize in Oslo. And yet, something is so glaringly odd about this (besides that he is a "war" president getting a peace prize) made even odder by the BBC et al glossing right over it. A big fermata of analysis. That is if he is, as he says, practically compelled to wage a "just war", to protect America, and if he is, as he says, determined to do so unilaterally if need be, if he can use his office to initiate war, why then is he not able to likewise use his office to sign the treaty on global warming? Is it not also a war against a force that America needs protection from? What more of a "just" cause can there be than doing everything possible to stop further damage to the earth's atmosphere? But he needs the votes of the senate to do this?

Clearly, we cannot wait for them, Obama, whomever, to act. It would probably really help if we had a kind of rationing program, like the U.S.A. had in World War II. People respond to structure and working together towards a goal. So we are left to find self imposed ways of rationing ourselves. Not easy, as we are enmeshed in a system that encourages wasteful and shortsighted acts, but can be a fun challenge to do whatever small thing we can control to reduce carbon emissions.

Lagniappe

I love the concept of a bakers dozen, or a free licorice stick passed over the counter, or that extra layer of giving - packing the moment with pleasure that can come with a gift, a purchase, a performance, or a meal. With my wedding cakes, it is that extra-intense element, perhaps pistachio marzipan leaves or chocolate espresso buttercream rosettes. It is a form of - often unexpected - good will, generosity, courtesy, kindness: it is lagniappe. It is also, if I may be allowed some leeway, what a garden gives back, which is always something more than what we put in. Example: I have blueberries bushes in my back yard that produce about four gallons a year. Wow. Sure, I feed them ashes from my fireplace and primo compost, and I weed, but they  consistently create a second (!) bloom! I pick into mid November; these bushes were planted by Mary Bews, a schoolteacher who lived here long before we did. I worship those bushes, by the way. 

     Strudelwise (i.e. stretched so thin a bible could be read through the dough), lagniappe is that seemingly endless flock of birds that passes overhead before winter - surprising you with its mysterious purposefulness and raucous bird sounds, or the great sunset when you really need it; lagniappe is the thing that good teachers do to let you know you amaze them, what grandparents do all the time, and lagniappe is that intense feeling of joyful privilege at witnessing some small but cosmic thing your child does - smile, cartwheel, gurgle, sleep. 

   This image - a painting by my son, who is an eleven year old visually impaired student at Perkin's School for the Blind - recently was displayed at the Watertown Mall, and perhaps elsewhere.  He says,"I used rough rope and smooth leaves. They felt really different from each other.".  I love lagniappe. 

Root Tapestry

Nancy (France)  Photograph by David Geller, 2009

If I had fabulous wealth and could send one of my many
resourceful and highly skilled retainers on a mission to find
an image that bespoke love of the farmer for what the earth
gives in return for tending the garden, I would be thrilled to
have this sent back from the field. It is a tapestry that delights
not only the eye but stimulates that cooking, tasting, part of
the brain to consider what preparation and menu might
translate these wonders as truly and directly as can be.

Roasting, boiling, grilling, browning, mashing, toasting
seeds, whipping (my Aunt Ruthie, god bless her forever,
used to always express frisson over the whipping/mashing
question), and this is not to even get into wether to peel or
not, the order of serving, and other arcane molecular
gastronomy issues, and the deep relationship of the root
vegetables to human survival (and the deep relationship
of the humans to root vegetable survival perhaps).
Rachel

Small Planet

It was 1968; an intense year. The reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy were murdered. News of the My Lai Massacre was unfolding and other horrors of war in Vietnam were shown on the news each night. The Beatles' White Album had just been released. New shows such as Star Trek, Laugh-In, Green Hornet, and The French Chef were on our television. I was eleven years old - the same age as my son right now. 

Then....in December, NASA's Apollo 8 sent Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders to the far side of the moon and back again, and here came photographs of the Earth taken by Bill Anders from lunar orbit, the most famous of which was called Earthrise. There was optimism expressed by some that these images would hasten world peace. They had to! One extra connection I had was that my father had worked on the Apollo program in some minor way - he was an aircraft engineer whose quality control work from his visits to Cape Canaveral sent his fingerprints into outer space. How exciting for me! 

Although peace did not break out, trajectory, a word used a lot in those days, was something I was feeling concerned about; both my own and that of the earth. I cut out this picture from a magazine, saved it, and was drawn to look at it many times. Others were looking too. One of them, I feel sure, was Frances Moore Lappe.

When Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971 I did not notice. But not long after, while working after school and summers at Tufts University's dining hall kitchens, I inadvertently became exposed to things that changed my trajectory. Oxfam was one of them. I read about it in the student newspaper and got informed (the expression of the time was "turned on") by Tufts students I worked with who were promoting Oxfam America. 

I read Diet for a Small Planet, thought about Oxfam's work for peace, justice and famine relief, practiced making Julia Child's recipes, listened to Captain Kirk explain to a Klingon that earth had ended war and hunger in the last century, attended a lecture by Dick Gregory and began doing short fasts...a bite of a sun warmed tomato from my mom's garden was also probably in the mix. Before long, I was a vegan, buying organic foods, growing sprouts in my closet in gallon jars, and trying to get protein complimentary concepts to work for me. A few years later I was back to eggs and dairy; about a decade later, a slow slide began into eating fish; then poultry; then other meats.

But at the time, my mom was shocked, hurt, could not believe it: at age 15 I was refusing to eat her pot roast! And very tasty pot roast it was, as I hastened to assure her it was nothing personal against her cooking skills. Going out to eat at the Hilltop Steakhouse, waitresses sadly shook their heads while getting confirmation from my mom, in an I - can't - believe - it - either tone of voice, that I was only ordering salad. 

A startling facet of what I was doing was that it was a luxury; being a vegan was something I was going out of my way to do (far, far fewer vegan foods available then); it was something I could do only because of my privileged social status, which my parents had worked their butts off to provide and saw in light of their own experiences growing up in the great depression. I was not being ungrateful, was not trying be spiritually materialistic or better than thou, was not trying to hurt anyone's feelings, and most of all was not "giving up" meat, which is the way my mom described it. I loved vegetables! All I wanted to do was make a small difference, by making choices I believed in, choices that I felt better about the more I learned about food. Perhaps I did.

I later pondered these things while I rode my 1974 burgundy Fuji road bike on long solo trips to places like Long Lake in Littleton or Wingaersheek beach in Gloucester whose focus was the singular experiences of being one with my bike, the water, and the corn and other veggies found at farms along the way. Many of these farms are no longer there. I had that experience called Mono No Aware by the Japanese - I knew I was tasting in the cucumbers and raspberries micro elements of the earth and rains that had fallen on that land that might be, is now, a car dealership.