basilbias.com

In fewer than 20 days, these will be french breakfast radishes (or so says the packet they came from.)

Already, I think they’re even cuter than their name.

It’s generally a bit embarrassing to admit that I try not to buy food in plastic packaging. It’s as if being vegan wasn’t restrictive[1] enough, as if cutting out all animal products didn’t have enough potential to make other people think I feel superior. Well I don’t. I don’t know why I’m compelled to do these things. “My actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world’s hungry,” writes J.B. MacKinnon in Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet. I’m not naïve enough to think that refusing to eat meat exonerates me from the horrors committed daily on factory farms, or that I’m doing my part to stop global warming by biking to work. I’m all too aware that no matter how conspicuously I wield my glass jars in the bulk section at the Berkeley Bowl, that huge roll of plastic bags will be used up by other shoppers in a matter of hours.[2] The guilt of not doing enough weighs heavily on me no matter how much I give up.

[T]he essential pointlessness of such a gesture [as eating only local foods for a year] is not lost on me[.] I am acutely aware that efforts like the 100-mile diet are readily dismissed as “the new earnestness,” which is currently enjoying a very temporary cool, and I am not deluded enough to feel that I’m making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world. Both of these contemporary platitudes contain kernels of truth, but both are also overwhelmed by stark realities. I have traveled these ethical pathways in one way or another for twenty years now, choosing to ride a bicycle in homicidal traffic, to reuse my tinfoil and plastic bags as though I lived in the Depression, to shop little and buy less. It doesn’t make me feel “good.” It makes me feel like an alien. As I pedal through another midwinter rainfall, virtually every indicator of global ecological health continues to worsen, from biodiversity to energy consumption, and my being has done little to change the world (p. 17).

And yet. The Plastic Trash Challenge long over, coming up on a year of strict veganism, I’m not slowing down. I can’t seem to bring myself to go back to buying tofu in a tub, or yogurt in a carton.[3] After reading Plenty, I’ve even started thinking harder about where my produce comes from. It used to be, if it said ‘California’ (or even ‘Oregon’) and ‘organic’ on it, I was good to go. But California is a big state, and I have no idea where Watsonville is.[4] It sounds nice and local, but it could be 400 miles to the south for all I know. And after reading about Earthbound Farms[5] in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’m wary of even organic produce that seems too corporate.

Which is why I found myself biking the 3.3 miles to the Berkeley Farmers’ market yesterday. It was a beautiful day, the second spring-like day we’ve had in the past week. I hadn’t been to a farmers’ market all winter. I had wiped all the winter grime off my bike, wired my saddlebags to the rack,[6] and set off in sunglasses and a sweatshirt. Plenty had inspired me to shop without a list, to buy whatever the farmers were offering that day, whatever was in season that moment. I tend to think that cooking needs to be complicated and meticulously planned to be good, often forgetting that some of the best meals I’ve made have been thrown together with whatever was on hand.[7] And so I got a bunch of dandelion greens, two chanterelles,[8] two baby butternut squashes, some beets, purple carrots, and rapini. Today for lunch, on my day off when I’m usually loathe to cook,[9] I thought I’d sauté my precious chanterelles with the dandelion greens. But the vegetables demanded more of me. ‘Crêpes,’ they seemed to be saying, ‘we need crêpes to nestle in.’

Et voilà.[10]

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[1] Or irritating for people trying to include me in their dinner plans, either.

[2] In the six months that I’ve been lugging my own jars back and forth to the grocery store, a couple people have remarked at what a good idea it was. But not once have I seen someone else with their own jars.

[3] Though last week, out of desperation on lunch at work one day I did buy a plastic tub of hummus and a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. I was very hungry, Smart Alec’s was closed for repairs, my 30 minutes was running short and I had no cash for a sandwich at (what used to be called ) Intermezzo…

[4] Lots of produce at the Bowl seems to come from Watsonville. Naturally, I Googled it just now, and Watsonville seems to be anywhere from 88 to 104 miles away by car from where I live.

[5]30,000 acres of certified organic industrial farming.

[6] To deter thieves (or the ones without wire cutters or the patience to unwrap a bit of wire, anyway) from taking them while I shopped. My saddlebags are cute and very functional when hooked to a rack, but too unwieldy and awkward to carry around a farmers’ market.

[7] Of course, so have some of the least edible…But even using a recipe isn’t disaster-proof.

[8] All I could afford. But Michael Pollan’s prose on the subject of chanterelles convinced me that $5 per quarter pound is a steal for these amazing fungi.

[9] I love cooking for other people, but when I’m alone and hungry, it usually seems like too much trouble to spread some peanut butter on a slice of bread.

[10] Vegan crêpes are not only possible, by the way, thanks to the miracle of chickpea flour (which has a protein similar to that of eggs,) but they are also just as delicious as the more traditional dairy-laden kind. See Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch or Veganomicon for a recipe.

A lovely piece on food in America, by Maira Kalman.

These are the stragglers that didn’t seem to be ripening in situ. So I finally decided to pick them and give them a chance to ripen on the kitchen sill. If that fails, there must be something you can do with green tomatoes besides frying them…

It was silly of me to think that I could reread Infinite Jest this summer, continue to avoid plastic and animal products and post regularly about it. It wasn’t just an issue of time: I knew that my attempts at writing about anything would seem too insignificant to bother once I was immersed in the brilliance of David Foster Wallace’s prose. I hung on though, for a while, at the very least posting my plastic trash results (albeit a little later every week, so that by the end I was almost a month behind) in bare-bones list form.

And although I stopped posting, I continued collecting all my plastic until about two weeks ago.

And then came Baby (as we unimaginatively called her, having run out of good names on about the eleventh stray kitten to show up in our yard.)[1] She appeared out of nowhere, with no discernable litter mates, disheveled and sluggish and obviously sick. And so I cleared everything out of my room that could harbor the fleas Baby most certainly had (including my dresser drawers full of clothes and my futon) and it became Baby’s room.

The first pieces of plastic I threw out without recording were the latex gloves I used to give Baby her medicine (we didn’t want what the vet thought at first was feline leukemia to spread to our cats.) It seemed counterproductive to leave them lying around, and besides, why should I include them in my tally when they were a product of my attempt to do a selfless thing?

When I was cooking the next day, it occurred to me I no longer had anywhere to pile my plastic trash.[2] So I left a piece of produce tape on the counter, till I could figure out where to put it, and it got thrown out by one of my roommates.

And then I kinda gave up. I still wasn’t buying any unnecessary plastic, but I was no longer collecting it.

Socializing a kitten takes work, and I was spending more time than I would care to admit cajoling Baby into eating and worrying about finding a home for her. “We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe,” Hal reflects during his breakdown on page 900 of Infinite Jest. Which was the only reason I wasn’t concerned about all the time (and money) I was spending on what was just one of thousands of stray kittens in Oakland. All human pursuits are basically irrational, is one of the themes that comes up again and again in Infinite Jest, but try living without devoting yourself to anything.

This line of thinking is the reason I still don’t have my room back. Baby got better, became a glutton for human affection, and was adopted. So we promptly rescued two more kittens.

And then I had two serious lapses. The first occurred when we ordered take-out Chinese food because I was too busy with[3] the kittens one night to make dinner, and not only did my mu shu turn out to have egg in it, [4] but it came in a styrofoam container. I didn’t know anyone even used styrofoam take-out boxes anymore. Since it was Chinese, I had assumed the food would come in compostable paper containers. The second lapse happened the very next day, when I was driving with my friends to a wedding. We stopped in a tiny town and got food from the only restaurant we could find that would be able to make anything vegan: a taqueria. So the leftovers of a huge burrito wouldn’t be sitting in a hot car for the rest of the day, I just got a taco. I thought it would come in aluminum foil; it came in styrofoam, and when I bit into it, it tasted like… animal.[5] I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that my taco might come with refried beans.

But two styrofoam containers, a serving of eggy vegetarian mu shu, and some probable lard in my beans will not succeed in doing what I have (barely) managed to keep eleven kittens and a 1,000 page masterpiece of American literature[6] from doing this summer. No matter how time-consuming, insignificant, and irrational it is, I am resolved to stay off plastic and animal products. And maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I’ve stopped keeping track: as Joelle points out near the end of Infinite Jest, it’s harder to stay in the air, clearing cars, if you’re counting them.

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[1] Against our better judgment, we had started feeding the mother and three kittens we discovered in our backyard at the beginning of the summer.

[2] My roommates put up with enough already without me stashing tempeh wrappers and empty rice milk cartons in a corner of our kitchen.

[3] Or stressed out about, rather. One of them was crying incessantly, and heartbreakingly, at the window, because he could see his friends outside and missed them desperately. (Even though I know this kind of personification of animal behavior is a stretch, I just can’t stop myself from thinking this way…)

[4] Like, the kind of eggy stir-fried egg that would have grossed me out even when I ate eggs.

[5] Or what animal tastes like to vegetarians anyway: wrong.

[6] Or, my FBOAT (Favorite Book of All Time.)

This is decidedly off-topic, having nothing to do with climate change. But when I heard that thousands of people all over the world are reading my favorite novel of all time together this summer, how could I resist? And where better to post my thoughts on the subject than my own blog?

Infinite Summer (also to be found on Facebook and Twitter) bills itself as a guided ‘challenge’ to complete David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in one summer. I couldn’t help but join in, upset as I was over David Foster Wallace’s recent death. (And as luck would have it, I’d recently come across a copy at a thrift store for $2.)[1]

I first encountered Infinite Jest in the spring of 2002 at a library when I was going through the typical high school Kurt Vonnegut phase. I’d already read most of his books and was getting a little sick of them. Not far from ‘Vonnegut, K.’ alphabetically (and hence physically, on the shelf) was ‘Wallace, D.F.’ and a 1000-page-thick bright orange spine[2] does nothing if not effectively catch the eye of the restless library patron. I picked it up and read the back. I don’t recall being intimidated by, or even taking note of, its size at this point.[3] I just knew immediately that I would love this book.

However, the logistics of getting it home by bicycle without a proper bag prevented me from checking it out that day, and I opted instead for Girl with Curious Hair (which I devoured and even remember reading parts of out loud to my somewhat-perplexed mother as she was cooking dinner one night.)

As soon as I finished Girl, I returned to the library better-equipped and checked out Infinite Jest.[4] I spent the summer reading it.

Why do I love Infinite Jest so much? I really can’t explain it. I detest sports, I’ve never been addicted (or even really recreationally used much of) anything, I generally gravitate towards the small and concise rather than the huge and expansive, etc. And yet there is something about Infinite Jest, something about almost every sentence contained therein, that I adore.

One of the Infinite Summer guest posters was saying how he relates to this or that character, and it struck me that I couldn’t pick a character I relate to more than others. I identify with them all, despite that I’ve never been in situations even remotely similar to most of the ones they find themselves in.

Maybe it’s that they’re all riddled with insecurities. Maybe it’s their so-self-aware-they’re-oblivious verbosity. Maybe it’s that they know they’re stuck in narratives too complex and disjointed to fully grasp. Maybe it’s just that they’re human.

When I read Infinite Jest the first time, I had no idea what was going on (I had only just graduated high school after all.) Like its characters, though, I instinctively knew that even if I could understand all the references and sub-sub-plots and allusions and so forth, I still wouldn’t know definitively what was going on. I believe that that is the point.

And but so. To a summer of low-carbon entertainment!

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[1] My other copy never making the trip out to California, since I refused to lug books out that I’d already read, no matter how well loved they were…

[2] Or the hardcover’s spine might actually have been blue, I don’t remember.

[3] After all, as with women, the bigger the book, the more there is to love, right?

[4] The impracticality of getting through a 1000-page book by the time one has to return it to the library didn’t occur to me at the time, and so after I had renewed IJ the maximum amount of times and still hadn’t even reached the halfway point, I finally broke down and bought a paperback copy. Which I found was not as pleasant to read, as the hardcover version’s pages naturally stayed open when placed on a table or other such surface, whereas the paperback’s spine had to be creased (and then re-creased for the footnotes) pretty hard if you wanted it to stay put.