peanut butter CALAMITY (and PB tasting notes) February 2, 2010

A few weeks ago in Hawaii, when Jacob and I were on our bi-daily (is there a word for every other day?) hike, we spent the entire 20 minutes climbing up Sleeping Giant mountain talking about how weird it is that Europeans can’t understand the American love of peanut butter, particularly pb& j. So weird! It’s one of the few things that makes me proud to be an Amurrikan—at least I know there is quality pb all around me.

Jacob spends most of his nights dipping chunks of chocolate (it’s useful for him to have a girlfriend who buys it by the case) into a private jar of peanut butter so unsanitary I wouldn’t use it for PB cups if it were the last jar on the planet. He prefers this deconstructed peanut butter cup to those that I so laboriously craft, I do believe this, even though he weakly protests that he just doesn’t want to use up mine. A huge spoon of PB, a giant bite of chocolate: it makes me laugh every time.

So. The peanut butter debacle is as follows: My ***beautiful*** organic peanut butter is made by Arrowhead Mills. I taste tested every PB on the market and it (used to) blow every other brand out of the water. Unfortunately now they have changed their formula to use a blend of peanuts, instead of the 100% Valencia peanuts they used to use, and to also mix in the papery skins (which means unpretty brown bits in the jar). All of this adds up to a flavor I do not enjoy. Arguably even worse is that their newly shitty flavor comes in a jar with a metal BLUE CAP. A blue cap? What are you doing to me, Arrowhead Mills? I’ve talked about my yellow-cap PB jar collection again and again, have you not been following my blog??

(And are you ever going to update your website to reflect the change, or are you too ashamed?)

So obviously, it’s a nightmare. I called them up today to talk it over, and they told me all casual and shit that yeah, it’s now a peanut blend and sorry about the caps but no, there’s no way to get any of the old blend with the old caps. When asked why they made such an obviously terrible decision, the rep merely said it was a change the company decided on. And you know, Arrowhead Mills is owned by Hain, which is a part of the whole Celestial group, and I doubt that they are able to autonomously operate with principles other than cheapness at their core, sigh.

So the search begins for a new awesome peanut butter.

Get your water glasses ready, people in my life, because whenever I see you I’ll be offering you peanut butter.

What I know: I have to use a 100% Valencia pb (though my quickie research today seems to suggest that Spanish peanuts are also pretty good—it seems to me that the peanut to avoid is the Virginia peanut.), it has to be organic, and it can’t have the stupid bitterass skins mixed in. Preferably the peanuts should be grown in New Paltz, New York (veganically, of course) and processed in a worker-owned, union-organized, geothermal, LEED-gold standard-certified building, delivered via biodiesel truck by sweet vegans happy with their lives and jobs.

Apart from that, I’m not picky.

Know any great peanut butters? Let me know!

I’ll post the results of my tastings here, so for right now here are some initial thoughts.

Veronica and I pitted the old vs. new AM PB on Saturday, and the results were instant and unanimous:

Old Arrowhead Mills: BEAUTIFUL: creamy to the nth power, roasty-toasty, smooth mouthfeel, clean lovely tan color…oh world, why must you kill everything wonderful?

New Arrowhead Mills: FUCKING SUX: darker, somehow less creamy, bitter undertones, blech. A whole case useless for precious pb cups.

Sigh.

Here is the initial list of brands I’m eying/ruling out:

(Obviously, shitty processed supermarket brands are not listed here)

I got a flier from a PB made in Ithaca at last year’s Fancy Food Show, but now I can’t find it. If you know of it, let me know!

Peanut Butter and Co: not organic, but I’ve had it before and like it.

Once I accidentally bought a 9 lb bucket of Once Again pb and words can’t quite express how vile Veronica and I found it. It was dark and filled with peanut skins and non-Valencia flavors. We used it to make peanut noodles (lots. of. peanut. noodles.) and celebrated the day it was used up.

Marantha: I guess I’ll give it a whirl.

This kind looks good, but what kind of peanuts do you use, and do you use the skins? And why don’t you make an organic one?

Laura Scudder’s? Is this, like, some sort of supermarket brand? Can’t figure out if they use Valencias or not, I will investigate more…

Adams: I know nothing about it. Not Valencia peanuts, I’m sure.

Trader Joe’s??? Random internetting seems to say it’s good, but I can’t quite see how to buy it without going to a TJ, and I need to buy mine in great vats.

Sunland: 100% Valencia, organic! I just ordered 2 jars! Cross your fingers! Have you had it?

This brand, Sweet Ella’s, uses Spanish peanuts and de-skins (God! Why do people make skin-ful pb? Arrrrggghhhh) like any self-respecting pb…hmm, I might order a jar or two.

What’s up with this peanut butter made with palm fruit oil? Hmm. This company, Justin’s, makes those annoying little pb packets you see in health food stores. Ugh.

Not organic, and they admit they use the dreaded Virginia peanuts, but I’ve always been curious about Cream-Nut. Maybe I’ll buy a jar just for kicks. (This is how I get my kicks, yes.)

Santa Cruz organic—they say they use Spanish peanuts too. Hmm.

I don’t like these jars, or the labels, or that they don’t say how great their peanuts are, or anything. But I guess I should try all the pbs I can.

OMG DUDES!!!!!!! I just had an idea.

What if I made my own PB?

[thinking

thinking

thinking]

Oh god, that is going to be yet another pain in my ass.

Yet another thing in my life that seems so easy (akin to making tempeh, miso, shoyu, seitan, etc etc) yet ends up adding hours to my already cram-jammed days. But still! Homemade pb! Maybe I should be looking for peanuts…and a cute mill thingie! Vintage!!

OK.

I’m going to leave this where it is for tonight and go get ready to survive the Valentine’s onslaught and will return post-V-day with more thoughts and a dry mouth.

From eating peanut butter, you know.

(Why do I make jokes about being high? Want to know something? I’ve only smoked pot once, and it didn’t even work. But because I have no qualms about pot and rather wish I could figure it out because it seems so fun, I make a lot of weed jokes to myself.)

(I also say “that’s what she said” about 1,000 times a day to myself. I’ve found that if you are a “she,” and your mind is prone to wandering, TWSS easily becomes a weird post-thought to everything I say: “Veronica, could you open the oven door for me?” [that's what she said.] If anyone has a remedy for this disease [pot?], please let me know.)

Final thought: here’s what Chowhounders have to say about PB. I disagree with most of it, but might be worth a read if you’re super into the topic. And what self-respecting vegan isn’t?

Monday Miscellany February 2, 2010

This will have to do until we can take one in which we are wearing the exact same clothes as W&K, because you know I own a sweater and twee collared shirt just like that, and my bangs look just like hers right now, and I rock the “headband with straight-parted hair” look every other day and yes, I actually think Jacob might have a football jacket like that. SERIOUSLY. Which is weird because he doesn’t watch sports. Maybe it’s a soccer thing. Either way, he has stripey shirts like that by the dozen. Twelve years together and we never noticed that we are Winnie and Kevin??

My excuse for the fact that it is actually Tuesday is that my car, in the words of the mechanic, “blew up” yesterday—which has complicated the life of this bad bad environmentalist considerably. Plans are afoot for a new car, and our resolution for our next car to be a hybrid is shortly to be broken, because who has $23,000 to drop on a car right now? Not me, and I’m not willing to take on any more debt. Stay strong, resisters! Not killing yourself with debt is a part of the way we resist crap modern culture! Penury is political! And anyway, used cars are….(I see my argument breaking down even as I write it), like, better than new ones in terms of resource consumption, right? Ugh, not really, I suppose.

Other than car troubbble, here’s what else is interesting in my world this week:

Fabulous Kara of fabulous wintergreens is putting together a fabulous vegan bake sale for Haiti on February 13. I’ll be there with bells on chocolates for sale, so please mark your calendars. I’m excited that the sale is at Zora Dora’s, so I can nibble on paletas (cucumber-sea salt please!) whilst peddling my wares, yum! Randy & Lacey, Brittany, wanna go?

*

I’ve been watching a fair bit of reality TV while I cook these days (the horrrrrrrrrrrrible show Hell’s Kitchen mostly, I do NOT recommend it and would like someone to forcibly stop me from watching it, in truth), and so enjoyed this insight into the world of a woman who’s on a reality show as a performance piece…sort of. Best bit: “Originally, I went on the show to do a wacky performance piece, attempting to play up the ridiculousness that is reality television and the characters it produces, a satire on a genre that is already a satire of itself. I was interested in the way reality television is reproducing female stereotypes at an alarming rate—using “real” people to validate these stereotypes’ existence.”

*

Sous chef Veronica pointed me to this minimalist foodie blog—inspiring and lovely.

*

One zillion people sent this to me, and it is pretty freaking spot-on. (Also: ha ha!) Another pal sent around this wonderful comprehensive list of all unpublished JD Salinger stories—rainy day fun ahead! I actually, dork that I am, have most of these in a file somewhere because in high school I went to the library and copied them all out of the original New Yorkers in which most of them appeared.

Wow, for some reason now I feel like 1000 years old. Photo copier! LIBRARY!* Who does that? Anyway, since the file is in the garage in a box under 50 other boxes, I’m happy to have the link.

*

I kind of want to buy my cute dorky boy one of these lovely sweaters.

*

Our BFF blog pal Brittany, ever industrious, has started a political party and you should join it. Also, about 80 hilarious white dudes plus Brittany are having all kinds of fights over at New Paltz Gadfly. I’m sort of loving it.

*

And finally, something so important it needs all caps: THERE IS A HUGE PROBLEM HAPPENING IN THE WORLD OF PEANUT BUTTER. I don’t want to scare you, but it’s MUCH WORSE THAN SALMONELLA. It involves two very important things: cap color and flavor. Post to come. Investigations are happening. In short, it’s a NIGHTMARE. Be upset in advance!

*I just realized: I suspect I did that because I was quasi-homeless at the time and was sort of living at the library. But that’s a story for another day!

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

(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

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

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 2003, 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

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:

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

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:

my chili (officially the best) January 16, 2010

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.”)

onion rings and four other things January 14, 2010

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

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.