Dandelions: An Inspiration

For someone wanting to forage wild foods, dandelion greens aren’t a bad place to start.  For one, they’re everywhere.  Some might even call them invasive.  You don’t have to go far to find them and they’re easily identifiable.  You’re looking for the young, tender leaves, best picked before the plant flowers.

They’re super easy to prepare.  While some foraged foods require repeated soaking or boiling with multiple changes of water, dandelion greens cook just like any other green.   Although they taste totally different, they can be substituted for spinach in any recipe.  I’ve seen dandelion green salad, sauteed with bacon and red onions.  I’ve never made it, but dandelion green pesto seems intriguing.  And perhaps you’ll notice my dandelion green calzone in the attached image.  I made it with Italian sausage and feta. The crust was sourdough.  You can make dandelion wine from the flowers.   Just about ready to bottle, I have a batch aging in the cellar.  With some imagination, the possibilities are endless.

Making no absolute health claims myself, dandelions are also reputed to have some medicinal benefits.  Tonics made from dandelions and burdock are made by some in the spring and are said to aid in detoxifying and promoting healthy liver function.  Again, I make no health claims.  Nutritionally, they are full of vitamin A and hold a fair amount of vitamin C.  Respectively, one cup will give you 100% and 30% of your recommended daily allowance.  In his books on Wild Fermentation and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved,  Sandor Ellix Katz mentions dandelions a few times.  Living with AIDS, he holds food and diet as an important part in maintaining his health.  At the very least, they’re a fresh, green vegetable.  They’re something we’d all do well to eat more of.

As an Anarchist, dandelions can’t help but give you some inspiration.  People hate dandelions.  They want them gone.  They want them out of their yards.  Yet they persist.    A multitude of products have been created and marketed to try and eradicate them.  In some homeowner’s associations and in some municipalities, you will be in violation if dandelions aren’t kept in control on your property.  You will risk fines, sanctions, and could possibly lose your home.  The powers that be don’t want dandelions.  They want them gone, yet they’re still here.

It’s all because they’re so prolific.  You’ll probably remember blowing the white, puffy seeds when you were a kid, dispersing them all in one breath to obtain a wish.  You may furthermore recall how many there were, hundreds of them on each plant.  Actually blowing them all took a some lung capacity.  Now, think about it.  Each plant held the seeds for hundreds more just like it.  Their growth was literally exponential.  Hate them all you want.  Pass every law and ordinance you can think of.  Punish people as collaborators for letting them exist.  Use the full force of government to try and eradicate them.  But they’re still here.  They’re just too good at doing their thing.

Ben Stone, The Bad Quaker, talked a little about this.  He’s retired now, but some of his old podcasts are available on iTunes and on badquaker.com.  Talking about marijuana legalization, he once proposed that a strain of marijuana should be engineered that proliferated just like dandelions.  If we could accomplish that, if every pot plant put out hundreds of seeds that scattered with the wind, and if each plant in the next generation did likewise, there would be absolutely no way it could be effectively outlawed.  There just aren’t enough jails.  The drug war, already widely regarded as a failure, would effectively be done.  How can you stop something so widespread and common?

And the real value here is that this particular freedom would then be achieved completely independent of authority.  It’s not begging for freedom.  It’s achieving it.  You see, making no judgement about whether or not it’s wise to consume or smoke it, the fact that marijuana is illegal is an absolute affront to our self ownership.  If we don’t have autonomy in what we consume, we are not free.  Some do advocate going through the legal system to change this.  They say that we should be writing our congressmen and speaking up at town meetings.  We should be petitioning those in authority to reverse their unjust decision.  My lord, please reconsider.  The problem with that is that doing so acknowledges that authority.  It concedes that those in power have the right to make that decision.  People can rightly tell us what to do.  Hogwash.  Malarky.  Nuh uh.

And please don’t get hung up on pot.  How many other nonviolent and victimless crimes could this apply to?  In my state of Maine, switchblades have only recently been legalized.  In the 1950s, after seeing West Side Story and with apparent concern for the horrifying gang violence it depicted, legislators forbid possession of any knife that could be opened one handed.  The law was only repealed last year.  Really, most people didn’t even know it was a crime.  Any number of knives having knobs on the blade or other mechanisms facilitating quick opening were readily available at Walmart.  I had one and so did a lot of my friends.  Actual switchblades could occasionally be found at junk shops.  They were so widespread and innocuous that people just kinda forgot that they were illegal.  Police didn’t waste time on enforcement.  Formally legalizing them was an unnecessary afterthought.

The real way, the only ethical way, to bring about a peaceful and nonviolent society is to just live your life.  Be an example.  Demonstrate that your way is better and more fulfilling.  Be free, and maybe, just maybe, that will catch on.  Maybe others will start being free themselves.  Maybe they’ll inspire still more.  Soon enough, the people who choose violence will be powerless against this freedom.  There’ll just be too much of it.  Stamping it out just won’t be possible.  And maybe the people who fancy themselves in charge will change as well.  Maybe freedom will come, just like dandelion seeds in the wind.

What Can John Frum Teach Us?

If you’re not familiar with cargo cults, check out the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.  In that film, children surviving a plane crash just after the apocalypse develop a religion.  Complete with the prediction of a messiah, it’s all based on the plane’s wreckage and the few remaining fragments of society that they’re left to ponder.  Old toys and bits of junk become holy relics.

Stuff like that’s happened in real life.  Lacking information and insight, primitive societies have sometimes interpreted technologically advanced cultures as higher powers, building religions on that foundation.  Simple and childlike on their face, some of them have evolved to some really complex doctrines.  A lot of thought has gone into explaining what was for them unexplainable.  It’s fascinating, worth a little study and examination.

Of the cargo cults, The John Frum Cult is probably the most famous.  While often written off as just savages worshipping airplanes, its history and origins are actually a little more profound.  The movement was born out of the colonial era around the turn of the last century in the South Pacific Islands.  Living under the missionaries, life was pretty horrible, to say the least.  Traditional ways of living were outlawed.  Natives were more or less forced to work for the colonial authorities, enduring low wages and horrible conditions.  Life was rotten.  If you want to make parallels to biblical Hebrews, feel free.

Fast forward though to World War II.  One day, out of the blue, Allied GIs suddenly appeared on the scene.   Waging their island hopping campaign and hoping to defeat the Japanese, they needed airfields and they needed them fast.  And they were willing to pay a ton of money for labor, better jobs than the missionaries had ever even considered.  They also had spam, coca-cola, cigarettes, and steel roofing to boot.  They didn’t care how the natives practiced their religion.  They voiced no opinion on what they did on their free time.  They just wanted help building airfields.  They were friendly, generous, technologically advanced men, performing wonders and bestowing great wealth where there had once only been despair.  For the natives of Vanuatu, it was deliverance.

From that came a Christ like figure, John Frum.  After the war, the GIs went home, leaving a lot of their stuff behind.  But according to the legend, a man named John, presumably from somewhere, told the natives that he would one day return.  He instructed them to stop being led by the missionaries and to return to their traditional ways of living.  He also told them that upon his return, he would bring with him planes and cargo filled with more spam and coke and everything that they could ever want in life.  Return to your native roots.  Some day he’d be back.  They just had to remain faithful.  Since then, followers have gathered every year on February 15th, maintaining the airfields and piously mimicking the soldiers in a religious ceremony.  They hold the hope of one day again greeting their savior.

On gods and religion, I have my own opinion.  In my everyday life, I’m pretty athiest and outspoken.  The natives here have clearly fallen for some non sequitur fallacies.  Just because you can’t explain or fully comprehend something doesn’t mean it’s the work of gods.  There are logical and rational explanations for everything they experienced.  Still, I like to get past that every now and then to see exactly what I should take from this.  After all, it’s a legend, and legends are meant to inspire.  So, what exactly should we take from the John Frum legend?

On the surface, it’s a pretty simplistic doctrine.  Believe in him and he’ll give you stuff.  It’s pretty straightforward.  And there are tons and tons of religions that are just as superficial.  People pray for rain and wealth all the time.  John Frum followers aren’t alone here.  And there is something to be said for simply holding hope toward a better tomorrow.  Some people want heaven and an end to suffering.  These guys just want aluminum roofing.  For a lot of people, just having faith that things will work out for the better is enough.  I don’t want to take that away.

But remember that John Frum had primarily told his followers to stop being led by the missionaries.  That was the real meat of his doctrine.  Stop being slaves and begging for scraps.  Go off and build your own life with your own hands.  Be responsible for yourselves.  For the time being at least, stop looking to the missionaries for deliverance.  They are false prophets.  Their promises are empty.  Living for them will not improve your life.  Cut it out.  Really, that’s what John Frum was all about.  That’s the good stuff.

And some scholars have even suggested that, were John Frum to return as promised, accepting his cargo would actually be an act of heresy.  His stuff was, after all, the white man’s stuff.  Coke and Spam are of the civilized world.  Accepting these as gifts, rather than earning them of their own labor as a free individual, would be absolutely antithetical to John Frum’s doctrine.  Anticipating his return from the sky, waiting for him to benevolently bestow gifts to all the faithful, seemingly misses the entire point of his teachings.  He’s meant to lead you from oppression, not bring you presents.  Holding out for the Spam totally misses the big picture.

It’s the difference between Santa Clause and The Sermon on the Mount.  Is your god simply to give gifts, or will he lead you to ultimate freedom and higher understanding?   To me, simplistic though it may be, fallacies and all, the John Frum cult absolutely accomplishes the latter.  If you’re doing what he taught, you’re that much closer to freedom.  Liberty and fulfillment, that’s the John Frum’s path.

An Anarchist Ponders Meat Consumption

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about vegetarianism and veganism.  It’s a topic that I’ve frequently wrestled with, still wrestling with it from time to time.  On the one hand, I eat meat, and I don’t expect to stop soon.  Over the past few months, I’ve seen a big improvement in my health that I don’t think would be possible on a vegan diet.  But, some points are well made regarding the ethics and often make me stop a minute to think.  I believe in non aggression, yet live and thrive due to the expense of others.  It’s definitely a conundrum.  Not foreseeing any radical changes any time soon, here’s where I’m at right now.

As I said, my health lately has taken a radical change for the better.  I believe that diet is a huge part.  While I was pretty fit in my mid to late twenties, biking centuries and running five miles without thinking too hard, things turned bad in my early thirties.  Working at some stressful and sedentary jobs, raising a new kid, and going through some pretty bad depression, I quickly began putting on weight.  A few years ago, I ballooned out at 285 pounds, constantly plagued by fatigue, insomnia, and incessant heartburn.  Life wasn’t fun.  Luckily, I was able to change jobs, which helped a whole lot.  More importantly, going into fall, I started exercising, lifting weights and duking it out with a punching bag.  And with that, I’ve started eating better, mostly meat and lots of vegetables with just a smattering of carbs.  Dairy has never bothered me, so I also have a glass of milk with breakfast and a cup of cottage cheese just before bed.  Protein shakes help stave off hunger.  All told, I’ve been throwing off the fat, thirty pounds in just a few months, with hardly any loss in muscle tone, common in dieters.  Looking in the mirror, there’s a huge difference.  Feeling better than I can ever remember, I’m keeping it up.

Still, I have to pause for a moment.  Voluntarism is founded on a pretty basic principle, that interactions should be voluntary and free from force, fraud, and coercion.  We all have a right to be left alone, and nobody lives at another’s expense.  It’s not okay to make others do things that they don’t want to do.  But, is this where that concept breaks down?  I am accepting aggression in this instance on the virtue that it benefits my health?  Is that the exception?  And where does that end?  Roads and schools benefit us.  You could make that argument.  Is it now moral to collect taxes in support?  Do the ends justify the means after all?  Is Pandora’s box now open?  Coercion’s okay, if you can justify it?

Now, Murray Rothbard, one of the first to clearly articulate Voluntarism, made it pretty clear that his ethics only applied to humans.  Rights belong to moral agents, including anything that can come to understand morality and that is accountable for its actions.  That covers a pretty broad spectrum.  Unfortunately, animals just don’t qualify.  They can never fully understand rights, and won’t recognize yours.  Of an entirely different nature, they are a resource to be used wisely.

But, isn’t that distinction kind of arbitrary?  Sure, it is eloquently presented, but why is the limit there?  Why not somewhere else?  I could draw another line and be just as right.  Recognizing the value of non-aggression on at least some level, vegans extend their morality to animals.  At least on the surface, they believe that aggressing against another sentient being is wrong, period.  Consequently, they don’t eat meat or use animal products.  And they’re not even the extreme.  Gandhi, for a time, only ate fruit that had fallen from a tree.  He believed in non-aggression so much that he wouldn’t even harm a plant by plucking its leaves or harvesting its root.  To him, any talk of sentience or ability to feel pain was just another arbitrary categorization.  Plants were living things too and were deserving of respect.  Sure, it eventually landed him in the hospital.  But wasn’t he being more intellectually consistent?  Aggression is either wrong, or it isn’t, right?  It would appear then that arguing that it’s okay in some contexts, but not others, would take some mighty fine acrobatics.

This is all understanding though that the liberty movement contains definite degrees in belief.  Any philosophy claimed by Bill Maher, Glenn Beck, and Adam Kokesh clearly covers a broad spectrum.  Minarchists, for example, will allow for a certain amount of aggression.  While opposed to the system as it is, they still believe that fire departments and roads and defensive militaries are probably good things, holding their noses and accepting some coercion to make them happen.  Voluntarists, further down the spectrum, point out that inconsistency.  They believe that coercion is entirely evil and always to be avoided.  Now, I usually consider myself to be a pretty hard core anarchist.  Accepting aggression toward animals, could it be that I’m just not as radical as I’d thought?  Am I actually somewhere in the middle of that spectrum?  And am I okay with that?

When you take it to the absurd, any concept will break down.  But arguing that something applied a hundred times over will be bad doesn’t counter the actual point.  A classic logical fallacy, reducito ad absurdum doesn’t hold water.  As an anarchist, I value voluntary interactions.  But could holding that as true for just humans be enough, or is non-aggression so pure and so right that it must extend to all living things?  Do I want to go down that rabbit hole?  Do I want to drive off that cliff?   Must one who values liberty turn vegetarian?  I don’t know.  But, for dinner, I had roast pork.  It’ll be eggs and sausage for breakfast.  I’ll likely keep eating the way I’m eating.  Still, there’s no harm in pondering while I do.

 

 

The Myth of Cultural Appropriation

I came across this blog post just now.  It’s from Angry Asian Man at blog.angryasianman.com.  Being short, I’ll post it in it’s entirety.

People. Is this a real thing? This can’t be real.

White Girl Asian Food appears to be an actual food trailer operating in Austin, Texas. True to its branding and concept, the proprietor is a white girl serving “Asian food.” Also known as “Com Bun Yeu” (“Rice Noodle Love” in Vietnamese), they claim to “serve up deliciousness from all over Asia.”

You guys, I can’t do this today. The oblivious tone-deaf white privilege here is astounding.

Cultural appropriation is the idea that there is a certain injustice in people from one culture adopting aspects of another.  In this case, the perception is that the owner of this truck has unduly taken ideas belonging people of Asian descent and is wrongfully profiting off them.  That’s not her food.  It belongs to Asians, and she shouldn’t be serving it.

Malarky.

Like any bit of information, you can not own food as an abstract notion.  I’m sorry, but you just can’t.  Thoughts and information aren’t physical things.  And since knowledge can never be physically possessed, it can never qualify as real property.  It fails that crucial aspect of the definition.  Furthermore, since the concept of cultural appropriation relies on the notion of intellectual property, an absolutely illogical notion, cultural appropriation absolutely fails as a concept.  Ideas can’t be stolen.  They don’t belong to anyone.

And to collectivize this woman, as the author has, is an absolute act of prejudice.   This poor woman wasn’t a sailor on Commodore Perry’s fleet.  I’m sure she never fought in the Opium Wars.  I will go out on a limb and say that she, as an individual, is completely innocent of any wrongdoing in the operation of her business.  It is true that not every exchange is voluntary.  Rights can be violated in obtaining information.  But whatever was done years ago by others, she had no part in it.  She obtained her truck, her food, and all her recipes peacefully, either through her own labor or via voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange.  Yet, the author is holding her individually accountable for the actions of people like her.  That is wrong.

There’s all kinds of wrong here.  Really, what the author is calling for is censorship.  In her cooking, the truck owner is expressing some ideas.  The author has a problem with that and thinks that she shouldn’t be expressing them.  He’s also calling for a monopoly, believing that those ideas should only be expressed by an elite few.  That totally disregards our right to labor and to trade freely.  It’s all really ugly stuff.

And the woman is even saying flat out that she’s white.  You can’t even accuse her of fraud.  Her customers know exactly what they’re getting, Asian food cooked by a white girl.  If you want it cooked by an actual Asian person, go somewhere else.  She’s not misrepresenting herself in the slightest.  I’ll shout it from the rooftops, she is doing nothing wrong in operating her business.

If you really have a problem with her, the thing to do is to outcompete her.  If there are two Asian food trucks, side by side, the food is of equal quality, but one is run by an actual Asian person, I’ll go to the Asian guy every time.  That’s my preference.  I’ll even cut a little slack on the quality of the food.  And, if there are enough people like me, the white lady’s truck will eventually close.  No hard feelings.  That’s just how the market works.  But to flatly say no, you can’t sell your food, violates everything good and right.

Accusations of cultural appropriation are borne out of bigotry and seek to violate rights. You cannot morally halt expression.  You cannot morally hinder exchange.  Attempting to do either seeks to impose your will on others.  Other people are not yours to boss around.

Of Cooking Show Hosts and Great Man Fallacies.

Straight up, I learned a lot of what I know about cooking from old Frugal Gourmet books.  The gumbo recipe I posted earlier was his.  It’s Backwoods Gumbo, taken from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American.  Likewise, my Lentils and Italian Sausage is out of The Frugal Gourmet Cooks With Wine.  Of course, as will happen in any exchange, I modified and tweaked some things.  My recipes are distinct and different from his.  They’re now my own.  But, credit where it’s due, that’s where I really got started.  Without knowing much about the phenomena that was The Frugal Gourmet or how it was all to end, his work was a really big influence.

Now, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, let me talk about The Great Man Theory.  Way, way back, people used to believe that the world as we know it is the result of the actions of Great Men.   The idea was that history and society as we know it are primarily shaped and molded in a large part by certain, influential people.  Examples might be Caesar, Jesus, Genghis Khan, Mohammad, Hitler, Roosevelt, Reagan. . .  You get the idea.  Maybe it was because they had a certain charisma.  Perhaps some were powerful military figures.  It could be anything.  But, by that theory, the world is what it is now because of certain individuals doing their thing.  Great Men made it all happen.  Consequently, looking at the world through that lens, the people who lead us become really, really important.

Of course, most serious historians today don’t subscribe to this.  They’d argue that leaders reflect the society, not the other way around.  Hitler, for example, was the result of a popular political movement.  If he hadn’t come to power, someone else just like him would have instead.  Likewise,  Jesus wasn’t preaching anything much different than others of his time.  Things happened though, and he’s the guy we remember.  The point is that it’s all so much bigger than just one individual.  Great Men are a pretty small factor.

Now, I was too young to remember, but The Frugal Gourmet ended in scandal and disgrace.  Jeff Smith had at one time hosted the number one cooking show on PBS.  He rivaled Julia Child and was on the air for over twenty years.  He was the very definition of an institution.  He was quickly pulled off the air though when he was accused by over twenty men of sexually abusing them as teenagers.  Before his civil suit went to trial, he settled out of court.  Two of his books had made the New York Times Bestseller list.  Now they can be found for a dollar apiece in a thrift store.  He used to be the cooking guy.  Now it’s all gone.

If you read his stuff though, you won’t find anything that’s radical or hateful or destructive.  He talked about simple and humble food.  He advocated sharing meals and dining with your loved ones.  He was constantly delving into anthropology, talking about the origins of different foods, where it all came from, and where we all came from.  You can’t really argue with any of that.  It’s all stuff that we’d all do well to listen to and take to heart.  Still, nobody wants to hear it from him.

I’m not trying to redeem or defend him, and whether or not he actually did it is completely irrelevant.  I won’t even get into that, either way.  The point I’m trying to make is that you had a certain ideology that was deeply based on an individual.  Once that individual was compromised, so then was the message.  Anything connected to him was forever tarnished.

And that’s the issue with putting stock in a leader.  Individuals, every one of them, are all fallible.  Somewhere, we all have some kind of weakness.  Nobody’s perfect.  That being the case, any thought or notion that’s completely founded on an individual will die with that individual.  Destroy the man and you’ve destroyed the movement.  Arguments based on authority can all be discredited.

By contrast, good ideas are as strong as the logic behind them.  Ad hominem can’t hurt them.  Sound notions hold their own.  There’s no need to appeal to authority because well founded arguments are powerful by themsleves.  Trying to give weight beyond that is superfluous, detrimental even.  When truth is present, Great Men are thoroughly unnecessary.

Skipping Sin Taxes

Taxes are immoral.  They pay for evil things.  They are the very definition of extortion.  And even if they go toward something you like, perhaps you fancy your schools or fire stations, is the violence really necessary?  Do we need to point guns at people to educate kids?  Are we somehow unable to put out fires peacefully and cooperatively?  No.  Taxes are immoral, and good people try to avoid them.

And in using your vices against you, sin taxes are the worst.  My income tax, I can’t do much about.  They’ve got me.  They’ll find me eventually if I don’t pay it.  Likewise, sales tax is unavoidable to some extent.  On some level, I need stuff and I need to buy it.  The same goes for property taxes.  Really, if I want to participate in society, I’m more or less trapped on all those things.  But sin taxes, taxes on alcohol and cigarettes and the like, take advantage of your addictions.  When you see a police checkpoint, know that the beer you bought earlier funded that.  The same goes for prisons.  They’re attacking us through our weakness in character.  They’re using our flaws against us.

Right now, trying to get in shape, I haven’t been drinking.  But I see nothing inherently wrong with the mere act.  Some of the best experiences I’ve ever had happened when I was drunk.  It’s a social lubricant.  When done right, it makes gatherings merry.  Dammit, sometimes drinking is just downright fun.  Now, some abstain for a whole lot of good reasons, and I absolutely respect that.  But I submit that it is entirely possible to nonviolently enjoy a drink while minimizing your tax footprint.

To that end, I dabble in home brewing.  And it really is a fascinating hobby.  Some people like it because it cuts costs.  $100 worth of equipment will get you started, and ingredients let you make beer for about half the price of buying.  There’s also the science, every batch bringing you back to High School Biology.  I always liked the traditions and histories, learning about old monks and pouring over various recipes from different regions.  There really is something for everyone.

And at this stage of the game, I’m mostly into meads.  To me, while it can certainly be made complicated, mead has the advantage of simplicity.  Unlike beer, where you have to boil your wort for a time and stir and fuss, mead requires nothing done on a stovetop.  Just dump 15 pounds of honey into water to make 5 gallons, pitch your yeast, and just sit and wait.  And you do have to wait.  In about three years it’ll be just about right, bulk aged, racked, and then conditioned in a bottle for a while.  It requires some patience.  But when it’s done, it will be magic.  Most important to me though, Maine State Law requires no sales tax on honey.  Once finished, I can enjoy it with my conscience clear.

Once, at the height of my brewing, I even set out to make a completely nonviolent mead.  I wanted it produced with no government involvement or coercion whatsoever.  Forsaking the use of Federal Reserve Notes, I had planned on somehow bartering for the honey.  My water comes from my own well, so I had that going for me.  I even read up on recycling the yeast from one batch to the next.  Through it all, the big hitch was going to be the roads.  How would I avoid them?  I don’t have my own bees, so I would have had to travel for the honey.  Seemed a long trek, out of the way and through the woods.  The project was eventually abandoned, but it’s still worth taking up one day.  Maybe one day I’ll try it again.

But the point is to always be trying; separate yourself from the system.  You’re not a slave.  You’re not a serf.  Understanding that you are an individual and not a drone, you owe society nothing.  Evil men want to put you down.  They will rob and they will steal.  But even worse is to be cheated.  That beer in the cooler and wine on the shelf really do look good.  But they’re a trap.  Don’t be fooled.  Don’t be tricked.  Don’t be destroyed by your vices.

My Bread Baking Phase

I used to be really into bread.  It was a big part of my life.  It was something I shared with others.  By the end, my bread baking took on an almost spiritual level.  It was part of my routine and a big part of who I was.  Past that now, it’s not a thing for me anymore.  Still, it was important for a long time, and I feel my experience is worthwhile sharing.

I started baking in my mid twenties.  I vaguely remember first seeing a recipe on the side of a King Arthur flour bag and becoming inspired to follow it.  And I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but it turned out pretty decent.  It was better than anything you could buy in the store, and it came together pretty easy too.  I was hooked.  I went on from there.

It wasn’t long then before I got into sourdough.  Now, that’s real bread.  It’s a man’s bread.  It’s the bread of the frontier, what gold miners and fur trappers baked.  Requiring expertise and knowledge, and often just a little luck, it’s bread made complicated.  A skill to master, an individual who can turn out a good loaf of sourdough is an individual with grit, knowledge and determination.  I wanted to be one of those individuals.

And it does require skill.  I talked before about how a lot of cooking is in the quality of the ingredients.  That’s not quite as true with bread.  At its most basic, its just flour, salt, and water, and the cheapest bread flour at Walmart will do.  Bread is all about how you put it together, how you work it, how you time it, and how you cook it.  It’s all in the skill of the baker.  And I sought long and hard to develop that skill.

Bread quickly became my weekly meditation.  Saturday mornings consisted of Tai Chi exercises, sifting flour, and kneading dough.  Buddhist temple music played in the background.  I didn’t use a recipe.  I went completely by feel.  It was a transcendental experience.  I was the bread.

And my friends oohed and aahhed, and it was awesome.  Post pictures of particularly good loaves always got tons of likes and comments.  The fact that I needed to open a bakery was a given.  The name Liberty Bread was thrown around, acknowledging my strong political alignment.  I was the guy you’d bring baking questions to.  I was the bread guy.

My pinnacle moment in baking came the day I baked the most magnificent boule in my dutch oven over a campfire.  It’d been a dream of mine for a while, taking the process to an almost primal level.  It was as complicated and as labor intensive as I could make it.  It was bread at its most primitive and basic.

You see, a lot of bread baking is about timing and control.  You wait until the bread has risen just the right amount, and then you let it proof, and then you heat up your oven. . .  In a kitchen, a more or less stable environment, that’s fine.  You can exercise that control.  On a campfire though, the coals are ready when they’re ready and they will only be ready for so long.  No matter what stage the bread is at, when the fire’s right, get it in the pot and get it cooking.  You can’t hope to control a situation like that.  It turns the baking experience into one of surrender and letting go.  The fire is the master.  You have to trust the bread.  I did, and it turned out beautifully.  I consider it one of my highest achievements.

And then I took up Paleo.  Now, I am not one to say that diet is the absolute direct and only cause of all of life’s suffering.  You lost your job and your dog died and now you feel depressed, so just stop eating grain? No.  That attitude belittles the real challenges and real struggles that people face.  Not everything has a quick and easy fix.  I will say though that I went a month without eating any grains, potatoes, legumes, or dairy, and I felt great.  My sleep was deeper and more restful.  I was overall in a better mood.  I was more sharp and alert in my thinking.  I lost 5 pounds, which isn’t real impressive.  But it’s still a step in the right direction.  On the whole, it was a very positive thing.

Now I don’t eat bread at all.  Anticipating society’s collapse and its unleashing the worst it can offer, I’ve been pretty dedicated to getting in shape.  Lifting weights and duking it out with a punching bag, protein is what I eat.  Bread just isn’t in the equation.  If it comes up that I eat a piece, say a friend has some that I just have to try, I actually get heartburn.  Bread today is painful for me to eat.  Otherwise, I’m fine.  I feel better than I ever have.  So,  guess it’s no bread then.

So yeah, in and out of my life.  That’s the story of me and bread.  Bittersweet?  Maybe.  But so it is with all things.  Don’t let my experience discourage you.  A good loaf of bread is still a thing of beauty.  But for me, it’s come and gone.  I bid it a heartfelt farewell.

A Good, Sharp Knife.

Many of you are probably into knives and own a really nice one.  Maybe, you’re into bushcraft and survival and have just the thing for chopping wood and butchering game.  Perhaps, you’re a martial artist and chose something more tactical.  Star Trek fans out there may have found Worf’s mek’leth too cool to pass up.  Knife geeks exist.  People are really into them.  And that’s all fine.  I have absolutely no wish to take any of that away from you.  Now, do you have a good kitchen knife?

As a knife is basic to the kitchen, I feel that a good one is important.  Anyone who has chopped an onion using a good knife alongside a bad will see an obvious difference.  The good knife will just glide on through.  The bad knife needs some muscle.  The same can be said about slicing and carving meat.  Remember how I said that thin portions are ideal in a stir fry?  A good knife will easily do that.  Meanwhile, that cheap, serrated, made in China piece of crap from the kitchen aisle at Walmart will just make a mess of things.  There’s a whole world of difference between the two.  You want a good knife.

You see, a quality blade wants to cut.  It was made for it.  It’s in its nature.  When you use a good knife, gravity and physics do most of your work for you.  Being in line with the general order of the universe, your part is merely to guide.  A bad knife, on the other hand, requires some force.  You have to make it cut.  You have to impose your will.  It’s not made for or suited to the task.

Using a bad knife is the perfect metaphor for coercion.  Having been forced, that inferior knife becomes dangerous and ineffective.  Cuts won’t go where you want them to.  The knife is apt to injure.  And through abuse, it will grow even more dull, and more dangerous, and more ineffective.  As Anarchists, we understand that force is counterproductive and immoral.  Nothing good was ever accomplished through its use.  Can you see then how a good knife is preferable?

And a good knife just goes far beyond all that.  Find a good knife and you’ll see yin and yang in action.  It’s cosmic harmony expressed and the answer to Crom’s enigma.  You see, steel that’s too soft, bends.  Steel that is too hard is brittle and breaks.  Find the spot in between, and you’ll see virtue.  This concept is seen again in the angle of the grind, once more finding that point where strength through width and keenness through narrowness meet. That point is generally accepted to be 17 degrees.  Like so much in life, a knife maker strives to avoid extremes.  It’s the Taoist concept of Wu Wei.  Good knives illustrate balance and perfection.

And this will blow your mind.  The next time you’re testing for sharpness, instead of shaving your arm or cutting some paper, just hold the blade up to the light.  When you look along the cutting edge, you should see nothing.  Both sides should join together perfectly, meeting infinity and vanishing into nothingness.  It’s like a geometric line, a series of points so infinitely small that they all but cease to exist.  Diminishing to the point of absolutely no thickness, your edge becomes nothing.  And nothing is what you’re after.  You absolutely want nothing.  Nothing is key.  When you have nothing, you really have something.  But something is absolutely nothing.  Understanding all this, it’s clear that a good knife is the very embodiment of Zen.  Meditate deeply.

Now, I have a very nice chef’s knife.  It was hand made by a craftsman named Duane Hansen, running a business called Moose River Handcrafts.  The blade is from old scrap steel, perhaps cut out from an old saw blade.  Its handle is a nice, tiger maple.  Without belaboring all the virtues of local crafts produced by skilled artisans, the thing’s one of my prized possessions.  What can I say?  It cuts.  I hope that whoever I one day leave it to appreciates it on the level that I do.  Who knows?  I may choose to be buried with it.

But there are many other options for finding yours.  I recommend a good kitchen store, walking in and telling the attendant what you’re looking for.  He should ask you some questions, determining your what your needs are and how you’ll be using it.  He should then give you options, educating you throughout the process about what he has to offer and how he can best meet your needs.  A good knife is an investment.  It’s a purchase that deserves a little thought.

Throughout this, remember always that a knife is a tool.  It’s a screwdriver.  It’s a hammer.  It serves an ideal purpose, and that purpose is simply to cut.  So many people go out and look for and buy something pretty.  That’s great.  How’s it do hacking up a squash?  Hollow beauty takes a back seat to utility.  Function always, always, always trumps appearance.

As most of your cutting chores happen in the kitchen, a good knife just makes sense.  You’re not out everyday building survival shelters.  If you are, you’re awesome.  But you’re more likely chopping a carrot.  Hell, you could take your tactical bowie and use that if it works.  A good knife is a good knife.  Just please don’t use a bad one.  Good tools foster good food.  You should acquire a good knife.

 

 

 

 

Seeing The Matrix Code In My Dinner

In this installment, I’m going to talk about how authority is clumsy, awkward, restricting, and dangerous.  I’m going to give you a very decent recipe for a rice pilaf.  But I’m also going to explain how you shouldn’t necessarily follow it.

Having visited Russia a few times, I went through a phase of being really into the old Soviet Union and its cuisine.  A while back, I came across this recipe for a Georgian Rice Pilaf.

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup butter
• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 stick celery, diced
• 1/3 cup raisins
• 1/3 cup walnuts
• 1 large tomato, diced
• 2 cups rice
• 4 cups chicken broth
• 1/4 cup parsley
• 1 teaspoon ground sage
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

I cook this on the stovetop in a dutch oven, starting by melting the butter and then browning the onion, carrot, and the celery.  I add the raisins and walnuts, then sautee everything for another minute or two.  Add the tomatoes and the rice, I continue stirring it all until the rice is a golden brown.  Next comes the chicken stock and the spices, simmering for about twenty minutes until the rice is done.  I let it sit another ten before serving.

I’ve made this dozens of times.  It’s always excellent and I’d always been awed by it.  The recipe originally came from a high end restaurant in New York.  That’s gotta make it special, right?  This has to be the pinnacle in rice cooking.  It’s perfection.  Genius.  How could it be improved?

Then I got looking at it.  I started seeing it for its parts.  Sauteed onions, carrots, and celery?  That’s a mirpoix.  In cooking, you see it all the time.  And cooking rice in broth is nothing special.  The spices are different than I’d seen, but they could just as well be any other.  Really, if you swap out a few ingredients, you’re not that far from a Jambalaya or a Paella.  It’s all just variations on a theme.  There is nothing in this recipe that any one of us couldn’t have come up with on our own.

It’s pretty common, when teaching someone how to cook, to start off making a batch of cookies.  And people’s hearts there are in the right place.  Cookies are good and someone making them does get exposed to a lot of technique.  The problem I see though is that it focuses on following a recipe.  Gather these ingredients and follow these steps.  Let the recipe be your guide.  You learn the how.  How many people get past that though and into the why?

And you have to understand that recipes can be situational and only give you what was written down.  My family makes a really good peanut butter fudge, originating from my grandmother.  But anyone following the recipe as written is doomed.  Peanut butter has apparently changed over time and now only certain brands will work.  Likewise, as good as that rice pilaf is, how much better would it be with quality and fresh ingredients?  The recipe I wrote is ambiguous on the matter.  There’s a whole lot more to cooking than just the ingredients and steps.

Historically, some recipes have even been dangerous.  Betty Crocker once famously published a recipe that was explosive as written.  They apparently told readers to add a can of cream of mushroom soup, never saying that it should be opened first.  A bad recipe can get you killed, and yet we give them our complete trust.

But why do recipes and cookbooks even exist?  By and large, I submit that it’s because people want them and depend on them.  I’d like such and such for dinner.  Let me find a recipe.  The soup calls for parsley and we’re out.  Guess we can’t make that.  People want to be led.  People need some kind of authority in their lives.  Being told what to do just makes things easier.

But no matter how good, or how well written, or how well intentioned the recipes are, they’ll always be a hinderance.  I have a shelf full of very good cookbooks.  They’re bureaucracy.  They taking up space.  They’re stuff in my way.  They cost me money.  I spent valuable resources and hours of my life to buy them.  But they’re not directly needed for the task at hand.  These days, I mostly do without them.  They are simply unnecessary.

Perhaps these particular arguments aren’t quite valid in the world of the internet and e-readers.  Maybe it’s all not as intrusive or cumbersome as it once was.  Maybe the Transhumanists are actually onto something in that regard.  Technology may streamline bureaucracy.  But wouldn’t it ultimately be better to just know how to cook?

And holding to recipes keeps us stagnant.  That rice pilaf could have been the last one I made.  This is it.  This is perfection.  There shall be no argument or variation.  But every recipe came from somewhere and they are all the result of generations of exchange and adaptation.  That’s the very nature of our existence and what makes humanity great.

You don’t need a recipe.  You don’t need authority.  Learn the tools.  Go on from there.  There’s so much more to life than and cooking just following directions.

That’s Slave Food

With Thanksgiving coming, I was getting ready to write up my Turkey Gumbo recipe, thinking it’s a neat thing to do with leftovers.  It made me think of a documentary I saw the other day on American Soul Food.  Soul Food is traditional African American food, stemming from the days of slavery.  Owners were looking for cheap and nourishing meals for their workforce.  Think of black eyed peas and collared greens.  Gumbo, although multicultural in origin, is a part of that.  Slaves had brought okra with them from Africa.  The movie talked about how members of the Nation of Islam rejected Soul Food.  It was a representation of their past as slaves.

You see similar notions regarding grain among the Anarcho-Primitivists.  I won’t get into the ins and outs of nutrition or other matters here.  But wheat and grains are seen in some circles as a symbol of modern civilization, which led to the oppressive system we know and live in today.  Grain was easily cultivated and stored and was therefore suitable for the serfs, needed to maintain the manor.  If people need to migrate to hunt and gather, you can’t build pyramids.  That’s just one tiny argument among many, but it’s the same sentiment.  Certain foods represent oppression and therefore shouldn’t be eaten.

I can’t help but feel that that’s all coming from a place of anger.  And if you picture the stereotype of either group, you’ll likely picture an angry person.  Sure, we live in a horribly repressive society that’s based on coercion and violence.  Men who would do us harm limit our choices.  I don’t think, however, that an angry, knee jerk and total rejection of anything associated with that can be healthy.

There is a long and beautiful history of people taking supposed low class food and turning it into something special.  Lobster used to be fed to prisoners.  A hard up fisherman might take one home to his family if he hadn’t caught anything else.  Likewise, french bouillabaisse used to be a poor fisherman’s stew, made from odds and ends left over from the catch.  Chicken wings used to be scrap parts and were sold cheap.  They were good for soup stock and still are, but buffalo chicken wings today are a beautiful thing.  And if you visit a website on Ramen Noodles, you’ll see some really creative things done by people in prison.  The downtrodden have done some cool things with food.

And that doesn’t have to be a submission to the system.  Making the most of a grim situation isn’t accepting it as right or just.  To me, it’s saying that your oppressor doesn’t have that power over you.  He can take your food and your property.  He can beat you.  He can kill you.  He’s bigger and stronger than you.  But it takes a special kind of person to say that the system won’t have control over your mind.  Your happiness is your choice and it can’t be taken from you.  It can only be surrendered.

In logic, there’s a fallacy known as the Genetic Fallacy or the Fallacy of Origins.  It’s an argument that something is wrong simply because of where it came from.  An example would be saying that marriage licenses are wrong because they were originally used to prohibit interracial marriage.  They’re wrong for other reasons, but that’s not a valid one.  Another example would be not buying a Volkswagen because Hitler sponsored the Beetle.  Just because something has a dubious past doesn’t mean it’s not valid in the here and now.  Saying that certain foods should not be eaten because of their history is not valid logic.

And it’s ironic that the argument is being made by Muslims.  Recognizing that Islam is an extremely diverse religion, adherents are often very vocal about graven images and their use.  Most are particular to the use of God or prophets, but there’s a bigger concept in play.  Many schools of thought, Islam included, caution against associating an idea with a representation.  The argument is that the representation won’t ever do the idea justice.  That’s not God.  That’s just a picture of him.  That’s not your country.  It’s just a flag.  Primitive individuals echo this concept, asking not to have their picture taken by tourists.  They’re not literally worried about having their soul taken.  It’s just that they’re so much more than the picture.  An idea will always be a whole lot bigger and much more profound than the symbol.  But Soul Food is slavery?

Good food is good food.  Are you really going to miss out over ideology and fallacies?  Please don’t let anger cloud your judgement.