the modernity ward

At Least I Have My Hands Free Now

Well, we heard back from the landlords, who are proposing a grand total of $500 plus security deposit as an incentive. Because of the tax credit, you see.

And the owners of the house we're interested in sent a "final-for-now" counter that's about $5,000 below asking, and about $12,000 above where we want to end up.

I've looked at EVERY house in our price range in three sections of town, and not one is The One. Unless we are talking about The One that Smells Like Sewer Gas and Has Suspicious Paint Bubbling Beneath the Upstairs Toilet, or The One Where Someone Clearly Smoked a Pack of Cigarettes Immediately Before You Arrived at Nine A.M and Every Morning Before For the Last Twelve Years., or The One That Is Not a Duplex But Nonetheless Boasts Two Kitchens (And No, Is Not Kosher).

So all those balls I had in the air are going thunk thunk thunk around me. And frankly all I feel is relief. Well, there's some minor irritation but nothing a soothing ointment won't fix (hey, the tax credit was extended!). So without ado, my recipe for the finest soothing ointment of all:

Cheaper Dairy-Free Vegan Low-Carb Pumpkin Spice Latte

Brew up a cup of coffee, very strong. While it's going, take the following ingredients:

3-4 TB coconut milk (regular or light)

1-2 TB unsweetened vanilla almond milk

2-3 TB canned pumpkin

pumpkin pie spice to taste (clove, cinnamon, ginger)

stevia to taste (I use English Toffee flavor)

...and mix them all up in a giant mug. Heat it in the microwave for 30 seconds or so, and taste it -- should be kind of like pumpkin pie batter.

Pour your extra-dark coffee in there and stir. Sit back, drink it, and count your chickens.

Of course if you want to use cow milk or soy milk or sugar or agave nectar or a nice mild snake venom, it's none of my nevermind.

Someone on the Internet is Wrong

Thanks to xkcd for summing up my life entire in one panel. Ahem.

Two things bugging the shit out of me today. Rather, a selection of two of the things bugging the shit out of me today. Let's be honest.

One: Meat is Murder. Murder of YOU.

When I heard this story on NPR, I was unable to stop myself from sputtering and waving my hands in impotent rage. Who the hell funded this, and why have they no respect for basic statistics? WHY DO THEY LOVE ERROR? Okay, look: red meat = muscle from large ungulates (and it looks like they include pork too? Whatev). Red meat =/= HOT DOGS and HAM and BACON and fucking PASTRAMI. At least not for the purposes of a medical study on diet! Hellooooo, interference!

Even someone utterly unfamiliar with the different vitamin, saturated fat, and fatty acid profiles of grass-fed versus conventional meat should be able to grok that even a conventional hamburger, made of plain ground beef with maybe a little salt and pepper, will have a far different short-term and long-term effect on health than a bacon pastrami dog. Salt, sodium nitrite, nitrate, erythorbate -- so hey! Why not lump them together?

You know what I'll believe? A study that compares people who consume the typical American diet with regard to meat, against people who consume only grass-fed and/or free-range meat. Don't control for fat consumption, just compare one type of meat (exclusively) against the other. That, I'd base a behavior change on.

Harrumph.

Two: Take the Local, or, Yes, Alice Waters Was Being a Dipshit, but Why Tar Organic Food with That Brush?

I love me some Shapely Prose, and a big part of what I love is the comments section. Smart, incisive, observant, challenging. This time the comments are pissing me off royally, like with ermine robes and a scepter and shit. Why? Because we've moved from the calling-out-privilege trope, of which I heartily approve, to the organic-is-silly-local-is-for-chumps trope, of which I do not.

But isn't it true that organic is boutique food for rich people? Well, kind of, these days, yes, barring a backyard garden (and that in itself could be a privilege marker, depending on where you live). Less so than it used to be, but more than it ought to be. I'm not actually disputing that organic often costs more and is more difficult to get. What I'm saying is, it shouldn't be. Organic, sustainable practices ought to be the default in food production, whenever possible -- and without agricultural subsidies artificially deflating conventional food prices, it wouldn't be any more expensive. (In fact, how about we subsidize organic farming, and drop subsidies for anything with a little Monsanto sign in the ditch?)

But but! you say (if you are the comments section). Isn't it true that organic food requires a lot more land and other resources for a relatively low yield? Well, no, it isn't, actually. Properly built-up soil, healthy living soil, can be enormously productive of the right crops. If what you want is monoculture, the same kind of corn for millions of acres, then you grow a variety optimized for high yield in a thin matrix of sterile dead soil, dependent on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, not to mention irrigation. Sure, it looks like you're getting more bang for your buck, but you're actually spending far more than you reap, once you factor in the financial costs of all those chemicals (again, subsidies!), the environmental costs of a dead watershed (all those chemicals have to go somewhere) and water rights issues, and the health costs of all that crap being dumped into our water. Oh, and you have to drill the oil and natural gas and refine it and blah blah blah. See what I mean?
So no, it's not actually true that organic requires more resources.

Oh, and but! you may say. Local food is stupid! It's cold here! Or hot! It's a desert, or Vermont! I don't want to live on beef/turnips/nopales half the year. God, local food is d-u-m-b.

Except -- and you knew I was going to say this, right? -- it isn't. Because if you're eating nothing but beef ten months out of the year? UR DOIN IT RONG.

Eating local doesn't mean eating what's locally produced on a mass scale. The way we've optimized and specialized means that all the farms near you might grow nothing but soybeans or feed corn or factory-farmed chickens, but that is not what eating local means. That is, in fact, missing the point entirely. The point of eating locally is to explode that specialization so that there's a great variety of locally adapted food available in any given place. It's not something that's easy to do on your own; it's part of a societal shift. And it also demands a more wholistic way of looking at the food year. If you don't preserve the summer harvest (or whenever your harvest is -- spring and fall in a hot area, maybe), then yes, you'll be living on rutabagas all winter. But that's not how people ate when they ate local out of necessity. Maybe they had rutabagas every night, but they also had different meats, dried beans, canned tomatoes, dried vegetables (all those make an awesome stew!), bread, fruit preserves, all kinds of grains. The list goes on. You can have green peppers all winter, provided you froze them or dried them. And nowadays, aren't we lucky to have the option of freezing food to preserve it, or safe pressure canning? My point is, it's not easy or convenient the way we're used to, but it is possible to get a decent part of your diet locally. (Some things make sense to transport -- grains, pasta, beans, flour, spices, coffee, um, soy sauce.)

Remember: people have lived in all sorts of environments all over the world, all before modern food transportation and homogeneity of diet. There are all kinds of things to eat that will grow in pretty much any climate.

And just to add a pinch of doom: We'd better get back to using those things while it's still a choice, and not a matter of necessity. /doom

As for the class factor, I am never, never going to blame any individual without the income to buy local or organic food, or the time to grow it. Never. Because that's not how societal oppression works. That doesn't mean that you can't eat quality food if you're poor, though. In some places you have options; Philadelphia is one, with community gardens and farmer's markets that accept EBT cards. This isn't the norm, and frankly it's the responsibility of the community as a whole to provide good food options for everyone who lives in it.

It's late and I'm starting to ramble, but there you go. My answer to the internet. 

(Some people are saying the same things I am saying, there. I don't wish to pick on any one commenter, either. It's just that these things keep coming up, in my world, and I finally hit my "lash back" point with the comments there.)

SOS

Dinner last night was creamed chipped beef on toast -- Shit on a Shingle, for those few of my readers who did not serve in the military during World War II. It's always been one of my favorites, and made with local grass-fed chipped beef (thank you Amish people!) it was just amazing.

Of course it looked like creamed vomit. So I expected Sophia would turn it down and stick to the toast, maybe accidentally eat a pea or two. She did wail, "WHY do I have BEANS for dinner?" in an aggrieved tone better suited to the death of one's entire extended family in battle, but she tasted the SOS.

And tasted some more.

And then ate it ALL. GONE.

"I like this, Mama!" she announced. I was too busy cramming my gullet full of the stuff to respond much, but duly noted, sweet girl. I'll make sure to fix it once a week until spring. Stuff has enough animal fat in it to keep the entire Weston A. Price Foundation* convinced of my fitness as a dietitian, so I figure we don't need to buy new winter coats this year.

*A note on the WAPF: While I find some of their ideas compelling, I find others supremely kooky and dubious. So while we will agree to agree on the suitability of rendered animal fat for pretty much any purpose, we part ways when it comes to things like homemade baby formula and the Magic of Cow.

Gribenes for You

You know, gribenes! Little bits of yum! Because sometimes you don't need to eat the whole brisket that is the financial collapse or election. (Can you tell I am preparing to get my Rosh Hashanah eat on?)

• Here is an excellent article about fat and why you should go eat some right now. (As always, ignore the letters section of Salon, unless you are suffering from dangerously low blood pressure and need it to go way up in the next two minutes.)
• Yesterday when picking Sophia up from preschool, I heard a squeaking noise coming from above. I looked up to see a hawk with a rat in its talons land on a low area of a church roof (maybe six feet off the ground), reposition its shrieking bounty, and fly off above the dorms. It was the best urban nature sighting EVER, even if it did leave me with some difficult explaining to do. ("Some animals eat other animals!" Sophia now tells me. As far as she knows, this applies to ostriches and pigeons.)
• If you celebrate Rosh Hashanah, if you eat low carb or gluten free, or if you just like recipes, please to check out this recipe for Low Carb Honey Cake. I made a version with xylitol and stevia plus honey last year, and people actually abandoned a chocolate mousse cake to eat it! If you don't low carb, just use the sweetener of your choice. The almond meal makes it less susceptible to weird texture or collapse (as a result of changing the chemistry), so you can play around with it a little more. Anyway, it's a really, really good cake.
• Gribenes. Now THOSE have crack in them.

I Am Just, Like, the Worst Pregnant Lady Ever. Or the Best.

Last time around I was so very careful. I was Model Infertile Pregnant Lady who would clearly Do Anything to protect her Precious Fetus. I went around not drinking coffee and not eating soft cheese and not having lunch meat and taking the expensive prenatals that still allow you to poop when you feel like it might be a good idea; I eschewed nonpasteurized juices and god knows what else, Hair dye. Probably haircuts period. My moisturizer because it had some botanical whoozywhatsis that might possibly be unresearched. Benzoyl peroxide. Of course all the deprivation drove me to self-medicate with Lucky Charms. Serotonin, don't you know.

Nowadays I'm doing everything short of riding helmetless on a Harley: devouring raw eggs with abandon (in the form of batter), mixing and matching vitamin cocktails to approximate a reasonable intake of folic acid, smearing myself with Clearasil and this Burt's Bees serum in turns. Cold lunch meat? Grocery store sushi? I don't fear the listeria. I choke down a half cup of coffee in the morning, not because I like it anymore, but because if I don't I will be collapsed in a migrainish heap by ten a.m. I had to start with iced tea and Coke while the nausea raged, but I'm working my way back to the hard stuff.

And remember that whole Fifth Disease flap a few posts back? You know what I've done about it? Diddly shit, that's what. I don't worry about contracting CMV from preschool either. And I plan to get a blue streak in my hair, once it's a little longer. (Of course the peroxide and dye will not so much as touch my scalp, but still.)

Hindsight being what it is, it is clear to me now that while pregnant and most certainly for at least four months postpartum, I had an undiagnosed (well, technically, unreported) anxiety disorder. And a flare-up of OCD. (I can hear you laughing, Kateri.) It was a lot of fun: paralyzing anxiety over the smallest car trip that often degenerated into my screaming at myself and either slapping or biting myself, intrusive thoughts of many unpleasant flavors, and a whole lot of handwashing.

And remember my plastics freakout? (Which you can find on my old blog, in the left sidebar.) Yeah. That was part of it too. Not that I'm microwaving saran wrap now or anything. But I do own a few "safe" plastic items, and I am actually able to touch them without fear.

Did the craziness of a surprising pregnancy after years of fertility struggles -- coupled with the stress of moving to a new city in my third trimester (to a truly horrible house) -- trigger the attack? Or was it, hormonally speaking, a set-up? I don't know. I thought for a while I was just really high-strung, but this time around I'm not so sure. I can't bring myself to get worked up over much at all, and while that's partially the UNRELENTING FATIGUE, it may also be reflective of generally improved mental health.

I've made arrangements to deal if I have another postpartum meltdown, but the pregnancy itself feels so different. The prospect of actually having a baby in the midst of friends and support network -- why, it's revolutionary! Not moving to a strange city while enormously pregnant? How unusual! Why has no one thought of this before?

I don't know that I can take credit for my relative Zen calm if I'm just too tired/sloppy/busy/lazy to care. But I can certainly enjoy it. With a side of raw fish.

(Hey, there are limits.)