CSA: Miami
I've been sharing a CSA account for six weeks now, and it's been enjoyable. It hasn't made me a very adventurous cook yet, since nothing I've gotten so far has been so exotic that I can't just throw it in my steamer, add it to a salad, roast it in the oven, or use it as a substitute for a similar vegetable in a dish I make routinely. So far the most exotic thing I've gotten is a bunch of quelites, but those can be used like spinach. Mine ended up in some burritos and quesadillas.
Besides the decreased food miles that CSA enthusiasts usually point to, I like that you end up with a lot of foods that probably wouldn't make it into supermarkets because of cosmetic problems, like radishes with rough skin or deep pits and carrots that are too crooked or bumpy. A lot of our waste comes from perfectly fresh, edible produce that gets rejected by supermarket purchasing agents who assume consumers will want the most uniform, picture-perfect fruits and vegetables possible. Some of the rejects can be processed into other foods (both human and pet foods), but disposal is still the fate of a considerable amount.
I'm also happy with how fresh a lot of my produce is. It stays palatable a lot longer than supermarket produce that's been wilting away for who knows how long.
While my diet has been a bit more Slow Food lately (not literally, but I've been a fellow traveler to some extent), the rest of my life has been a whirlwind. For the most part the faster tempo has been good, but I realized today that I've been letting my writing slide. Last week I wrote a letter of recommendation for a friend and whipped out an outreach letter to prison libraries for Read Between the Bars, but that kind of writing is too businesslike and devoid of subtlety or insight to count.
It sounds like an excuse (perhaps because it is), but I was hoping Michael Muhammad Knight's new book would inspire me. Instead, it was one of his worst books. I think he even sensed it, since he mentioned more than once in the book that becoming an academic has killed much of the freshness, weirdness, and life that filled his other writings.
The book has its moments, though, like when he compares Islamophobia to antidrug hysteria and finds some suprising parallels between such disparate phenomena. He also uses a Transformers cartoon as an analogy for the way religions have so often appropriated stories and elements from other religions, substituting their own gods, saints, and martyrs so that they can steal the glory from those in the source material:There's another lesson in the "God Gambit" episode, not explicitly stated but rather lurking beyond the text, in the real-world mechanisms of putting this cartoon together. If you look at Astrotrain in this episode--the way the he orders around his fellow Decepticons, his treatment of Starscream, and his eagerness to be worshiped as a god when it serves his interests--it's all a bit out of character. It reads much more like the character of Megatron, and this is one of only two episodes in the entire series in which Megatron does not appear. Serious Transformers-heads have speculated that the script was most likely written with Megatron as the lead antagonist, but because Hasbro had just put out Astrotrain as a new toy, the cartoon writer did a quick switch and inserted Astrotrain to make his toy worth buying. The story was driven by economic factors outside its own fictional universe; if you look close [sic] enough, our religions work the same way. It's all about rearranging the pieces in a story to sell the right action figure at the right moment.
Now I'm reading The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss, which explores similar themes (inter alia). Early Christian persecution stories "refer to theological ideas that didn't exist in the period described in the stories and contain elements borrowed from other ancient sources"; they echo Greek stories "about the deaths of their fallen heroes and the noble deaths of their philosophers," Roman stories about "the self-sacrifice of generals," and Jewish stories about "death before apostasy."
I seem to be doing with my CSA vegetables what religious zealots have done with their heroes: putting new things into old templates. Originality is elusive.
Besides the decreased food miles that CSA enthusiasts usually point to, I like that you end up with a lot of foods that probably wouldn't make it into supermarkets because of cosmetic problems, like radishes with rough skin or deep pits and carrots that are too crooked or bumpy. A lot of our waste comes from perfectly fresh, edible produce that gets rejected by supermarket purchasing agents who assume consumers will want the most uniform, picture-perfect fruits and vegetables possible. Some of the rejects can be processed into other foods (both human and pet foods), but disposal is still the fate of a considerable amount.
I'm also happy with how fresh a lot of my produce is. It stays palatable a lot longer than supermarket produce that's been wilting away for who knows how long.
While my diet has been a bit more Slow Food lately (not literally, but I've been a fellow traveler to some extent), the rest of my life has been a whirlwind. For the most part the faster tempo has been good, but I realized today that I've been letting my writing slide. Last week I wrote a letter of recommendation for a friend and whipped out an outreach letter to prison libraries for Read Between the Bars, but that kind of writing is too businesslike and devoid of subtlety or insight to count.
It sounds like an excuse (perhaps because it is), but I was hoping Michael Muhammad Knight's new book would inspire me. Instead, it was one of his worst books. I think he even sensed it, since he mentioned more than once in the book that becoming an academic has killed much of the freshness, weirdness, and life that filled his other writings.
The book has its moments, though, like when he compares Islamophobia to antidrug hysteria and finds some suprising parallels between such disparate phenomena. He also uses a Transformers cartoon as an analogy for the way religions have so often appropriated stories and elements from other religions, substituting their own gods, saints, and martyrs so that they can steal the glory from those in the source material:There's another lesson in the "God Gambit" episode, not explicitly stated but rather lurking beyond the text, in the real-world mechanisms of putting this cartoon together. If you look at Astrotrain in this episode--the way the he orders around his fellow Decepticons, his treatment of Starscream, and his eagerness to be worshiped as a god when it serves his interests--it's all a bit out of character. It reads much more like the character of Megatron, and this is one of only two episodes in the entire series in which Megatron does not appear. Serious Transformers-heads have speculated that the script was most likely written with Megatron as the lead antagonist, but because Hasbro had just put out Astrotrain as a new toy, the cartoon writer did a quick switch and inserted Astrotrain to make his toy worth buying. The story was driven by economic factors outside its own fictional universe; if you look close [sic] enough, our religions work the same way. It's all about rearranging the pieces in a story to sell the right action figure at the right moment.
Now I'm reading The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss, which explores similar themes (inter alia). Early Christian persecution stories "refer to theological ideas that didn't exist in the period described in the stories and contain elements borrowed from other ancient sources"; they echo Greek stories "about the deaths of their fallen heroes and the noble deaths of their philosophers," Roman stories about "the self-sacrifice of generals," and Jewish stories about "death before apostasy."
I seem to be doing with my CSA vegetables what religious zealots have done with their heroes: putting new things into old templates. Originality is elusive.