Letters to the Editor
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Ceding Control
I have two big problems with this article.
1) Wishing that your choices could be taken from your hands by cruel fate is tempting, sure, but it's just a fear of making a decision for yourself, or a wish that everyone was forced to share your values.
2) Poverty is ugly, miserable and stressful, and while I understand that your tongue was firmly in cheek while writing this, I still think that it's in bad taste. If the economy shrank and the writing jobs vanished, more janitorial jobs wouldn't be created, you would just force someone even less employable out of their job.
I sympathize with your critique of our modern, celebrity-obsessed culture, and (to borrow a phrase from Lily Allen's brand new song) our "weapons of mass consumption." But I think that pining for economic hardship is pretty gross, and insulting to the people who are actually pushing a mop right now, and can't afford organic milk or college.
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OMFG!!!
The world is over. If I were this woman, I'd definitely leave Old Rome and move to New Rome aka China. Oh wait. Don't want to live there I guess. Well, how about India - maybe THAT'S the New Rome. Oh wait. Don't want to live there either. Well, I guess we'll just have to scrape by here as best we can in Old Rome and try to make do with what we can get - like EVERY AVAILABLE FUCKING RESOURCE WE COULD EVER WANT.
Get some fucking perspective here, lady.
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Après moi, le soup de jour
Oh Heather, I know just how you feel. I sit in my garden on a warm, early spring day and I wonder if that rumbling sound in the distance is a tractor-trailer on the highway, or the Visigoths coming down Main Street. I wish I could make you fell better, but I cannot, after the last ten, awful years, I am pretty wrung out myself. Everything feels very fragile as if it could go south very fast and in the blink of an eye, I am not sitting in my little garden but instead picking turnips in some evangelical, re-education work farm. We keep plugging on, but the sense that we’ve screwed the pooch this time is omnipresent. I can’t help you Heather, not with the awful chickens (thought you’d like the reference) that are coming home to roust, but I can help with some hints on bean soups.
I’m not big on recipes, I focus more on process so use whatever step-by-step recipe you like and just throw in variations.
You don’t have to soak your beans all night, just boil them for a few minutes and let em sit on a low heat until tender which should be around an hour. Soaking over night does take out some of the sugars that cause gas, but who cares about farts when western civilization is taking the final taxi right. Oh and don’t salt your beans until near the end, premature salting toughens their little skins and they’ll never soften.
Smoked pork i.e. ham hawks or bacon or even country ham add a lot of flavor and are cheap, also bacon of course, get it going in the pot with a little oil, onion, garlic, cumin, jalapeños, green peppers, cilantro, whatever you have access to.
Consider making you own stocks, veggie stocks are cheap and easy and they make your kitchen smell nice as well. If not (and I know you have a lot of TV to watch), canned stocks are fine, though try the ones with low salt. When the onions et al, are soft add stock, beans, maybe some canned tomatoes, hot sauce, what have you, and cook until it smells very good and the beans are nice and tender, you may have to skim the top a few times, don’t be afraid. Now put half of this mess in a blender or FP and blend, you can also run an emersion blender through it as well and this will thicken it up nicely. You could also blend in left over tortillas, corn meal, hominy, whatever other thickening agents you have at hand. Remember using leftovers is what soup is for here in the twilight days.
This is a good time to sauté a little chorizo or some left over chicken, pork, beef, lamb, or whatever, and add that, also a little cream or milk to taste.
When you serve it, try topping it with some sour cream or guacamole to lighten it further.
As prices go up and food and the energy to cook it become intermittent, feel free to subtract ingredients as you see fit. Remember that mashed up black beans wrapped in day old bread is also a meal of sorts.
Enjoy the Gotterdammerung while it lasts.
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A Good Recipe For Black Bean Soup
The only thing you need to add to black beans to make a great soup is water and garlic. Lots and lots and lots of garlic. Everything else turns purple. A little Crema Salvadorena is nice on top, though.
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cheap food on the shelves not a given
I think that one thing that many posters here are taking for granted is that - there will always be stores down the block stocked with cheap groceries for when times are tough and the budget is tight.
So much of that cheap food has been transported from far away, for one thing... and rising oil prices could affect the network of food we rely on in a lot of ways.
Petroleum is a key ingredient in - heating, cooling, transportation, fertilizers, pesticides...
The glut of "cheap food" currently on the shelves of most American cities is highly correlated to the recent glut of "cheap oil" in decades past.
I know it's a complex world we live in and the oil-food dynamic is not the only one at play, but...it's an important one, with potential consequences which should probably be understood by more people.
Anyway - just pointing out that - many people here just seem to assume that life in America will go on as we know it, just with more budgeting required.
I think that - more profound structural changes are indicated by all the factors at play. I agree with all the posters here who have pointed out - we're going to have to get a lot more local with our food supply.
Only then may food again be "cheap"... and even that will remain a matter of seasonal and annual bounty, as we rely more directly on the graces of Pacha Mama, aka: Mother Nature...
- Melanie