summer is so over + how to get free shit
Babes and bots,
Welcome to August. Hope you've kept your appetites up because the end of summer is the time to sweat it out. Salt. Tears. Gender binaries. Other people's problems.
I was back in the swamp state summer, which is why I didn't write you. My favorite animal this summer was the hand that killed mosquitos. I shamefully donned shorts on a regular basis for a fun little thing called immersion therapy: to resist the bite, I must be the bite. It worked until it didn't. You know how it goes.
"trash food"
At some point the students I'm teaching this semester are going to have to read an essay called "Trash Food" by a successful writer named Chris Offutt. The essay confronts class, living in a secondhand economy, and the messages people receive as they enjoy less expensive cultural delicacies like catfish and carp. And then what happens when the wealthy, white elite now wants catfish, too. What I loved about this essay were the commentaries on a mainstream food culture that seem so relevant to my food praxis. For example: In college, robbing a Dunkin Donuts dumpster would have been a great way to spend a Saturday evening. But, of course, there is the other side to this coin: what kinds of free food are public domain? What can, and should, you eat because it is fair? What can, and should, you eat because you're hungry?
It seems to me there is a difference between the secondhand economy my roommates and I, living in a cheap fancy house in a bad fancy alley paid below the poverty line, participate in and the not-for-sale economy that the man who checks our doors for an indoor place to sleep participates in. And what if I were to say, everyone deserves Dunkin Donuts just as much as everyone deserves a new jacket every now and again? Everyone deserves good things, so why not make it so everyone can have them? Is that not the point of a secondhand economy in the first place? Is a secondhand economy not inherently anti-capitalist? I guess it depends on your social status. Is it fair to say millionaires shouldn't dumpster dive? Is it fair to say millionaires shouldn't eat catfish? I wonder what would happen if morality was more about more fair and less fair, a spectrum of decision-making with multiple choices, and less about good vs. evil.
What's more, secondhand food is a hot commodity! Scrolling through Instagram this morning I found an organization called Imperfect Foods that will deliver rejected produce and other discounted grocery items to your door. They market themselves as a new kind of food system to counter food waste and protect the environment. I guess my question is pretty simple: would it not be better for the environment to supply foodbanks and local low-income food co-ops with rejected produce and other grocery items? Would that not support low-income people who are doing most of the social/cultural environmental labor anyways? Perhaps there's something I'm missing.
"trash essay"
This morning I woke u to take out the trash in my new, quirky, overpriced-but-cheap-for-the-area apartment. I just moved here. The can I'm not supposed to be living with hates me. I ran into, or rather saw beyond the fence, a fabulous woman in sweats on an 85 degree morning chucking bread into the dumpster. Her name is Kara and I hope she'll be my friend.
When I was in college I joined an enviornmental co-op of sorts--the kind of place where words like "intentional community" are integral to the shapred language of our house. So I bacame a vegan and stopped buying new clothes and never went to starbucks and rode my bike and learned how to recycle. None of this is particularly mindblowing, but the committment to changing my behaviors was charged, new, extremely satisfying and a selfish ploy to prove my self-worth in what Mary Oliver calls "the family of things." I was so committed that one morning when a housemate dropped an eff on the ground I scooped it up and fried it. The floor was filthy, I was late for class, none of this felt important. My housemate was not surprised.
So ther I was this morning, 5 years from my first ground feeding, wishing my new friend Kara wasn't so nice so I could dive into that dumpster for bread totally guilt-free. I thought of the TikTok about Dunkin Donut dumpsters and the person who got fired for making it. I thought of identifying with catfish or raccoons. I thought of asking Kara to retrieve the loaves. I thought about the internal debate I had about the financial benefit of baking my own bread vs. buying it each week. I thought about my grandmama born in 1929 and her favorite store, Walmart, which is now my favorite store, too. And instead of asking Kara about her life or making a real effort to be friends with this woman, something I already knew the answer to popped out of my mouth: "why do restaurants throw away food?"
I am an idiot.
I'm realizing that my new friend Kara is, under no circumstances, going to toss two loaves of bread over the fence into the garbage can of my body. I'm also realizing I'm not a food insecure person, I do not live in a food-insecure household, and I'm wondering why I think bread in the trash is a high standard. None of that is the point. The point is that I would eat it. The point is, food is never just food. Food is climate, money, job security, dirty, trashed, free, and somehow still illegal to have when it comes from the wrong place. The point is, there is a difference between dumpster diving for enjoyment and dumpster diving for food. But what are the politics of this difference? Am I to assume a hungry person would want dumpster bread? Am I to assume a hungry person wouldn't? What the actual fuck do I know? When we place a value on the secondhand economy for making nice things accessible, the charge of wealthy elite still run the narrative that nice things don't come secondhand, or from dumpsters. The wealthy elite still own the market, even if they don't participate in it. That is to say, people like my mother still own the market. That is to say, people like me still own the market. I must be careful about the way I distinguish myself as I grow up and slightly away from the financial security of my family.
To have food, to have bought or grown it somewhere along the line, and then to "have" in your possession is controversial. Imagine: you walk into someone's back yard and they hold a bag of sugar as thought it were a baby. And you say to them, "may I have some of your sugar?" And, just imagine, they say, "yes." Are they proud? Are they ambivalent? Are they concerned or money-stressed? And what if they said to themselves nothing at all about the sugar? And what if they felt angry, jealous, tinged with guild because you asked so politely and yet they don't want to share? Because it was expensive or reminded them of their grandmama, or the grocery store shelves are empty, r they don't trust that you'll simply take what you need, or they can't wait to share the communal process of buying and eating sugar? My grandmama might have felt proud to have sugar in her pantry. I, on the other hand, feel possessive and strange possessing food.
When does trash become the object of fullness? When does trash cease to be trash? When does it become satiation? Should we just 86 the whole idea of trash food? Should we just call it food, no matter where it comes from? Or does it maybe feel good, in a startling and satisfying way, when you pay for your food? I'm not sure...about anything, really. But I can see how trash starts one place and ends in the sensual pleasure-scape of a body, how it becomes dark and twisted fantasy, or simply a desire to eat and save eating.
something random and colorful for your day
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| Yayoi Kusama sitting in from of her collection, Infinity Mirrors, at the Smithsonian, 2016 Well, that's all for now folks. Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me. xoxo BLT |
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