SuperWeed

Ecofeminist Greta Gaard’s remarkable essay “Explosion,” which I quoted a few posts ago, is now available in free full text online. I’m so happy to be able to share it!

Two paragraphs into my first reading of that essay, I bolted out of my chair and bounded around the house exclaiming, “This is so good! I don’t know what to do with myself!”

Two pages later, I was pacing and outbursting again: “This is so beautiful! How can somebody write something so beautiful?”

After several such energetic interruptions, one of which sent me outside to scatter treats for chickens and another of which sent me out to the back porch to calm down, I finally finished reading the piece. “I need to tell somebody about this,” I said while pacing up and down the hall, “How can I tell everybody about this?”

Answer to myself, days later: “Um, that’s why you have a blog.”

But then I hesitated, for fear that — since I know and love Greta — folks might think I was just trying to get them to buy the new book in which the essay had been reprinted. Now that it’s online for everybody, I can feel free to say: “Go read it now.” Seriously, besides modeling an ecofeminist understanding of the interconnectedness of all things and the intersection of oppressions, the essay is just an extraordinarily skilled piece of writing. It made me wish I were teaching writing rather than speech so that I could assign it to students.

Speaking of which, it’s back to school for me soon. More on that another day. Go. Read. Rather than hotlinking to the pdf, let me send you to Greta’s new website. Click on “essays and articles” and you’ll find that one along with a history of vegetarian ecofeminism, a theory of queer ecofeminism, and an analysis of the dynamics of cross-cultural feminist ethics.

I think of that slogan almost every time I make cucumber salad, as I often do and as I am doing right now. (Can’t stand squishy supermarket cucumbers but love them fresh off the vine or, in case of acute cucumber deficiency, from the Farmer’s Market.)

According to the Daily Bleed online calendar of radical history, the slogan dates to 30 May 1980 in Switzerland:

Beginning of the “movement of the discontented,” youth rebellion in Zurich, spreading throughout the country, involving thousands — young & not so young — in demonstrations & confrontations with police, demanding places where they would be free to meet & share counter-cultural experiences. Escalated into broader demands, one being “No Leaders!,” & another being: “Make Cucumber Salad Out of the State!”

The slogan went on to inspire the 1982 Cucumber Salad Calendar published by Left Bank Books as well as countless creative uses of food in anarchist actions. So, the next time you’re planning one of those subversive vegan potlucks, give a nod to the street-fighting Swiss — never thought you’d see that phrase, did you? — by including cucumber salad on the menu.

It’s stir-fry season in the garden. In between the flush of springtime crops like lettuce and peas and the lush summer season of cuke, zuke, and tomato fruits comes a lull wherein what’s available for dinner often turns out to be (as it was for me last night) two string beans, a handful of mustard greens, a bunch of arugula now too sharp to eat raw, one small yellow squash, the peas from five pods, and… some radish seedpods. The only thing to do is make a stir-fry or (my favorite) cook up some spaghetti, let the heat of the pasta wilt the greens, saute everything else along with some basil and garlic greens (also from the garden) and mix it all up.

I had the radish pods because I’m letting a couple of plants go to seed so that I can save the seeds for next year. If you’ve ever seen the sprawling mess of a radish (or turnip or broccoli) plant flowering, then you understand the origin of such colloquial phrases as “seedy hotel” or “she let herself go to seed.” On the upside, the two radish plants that have taken over my little lettuce/mustard/onion patch are providing plenty of midday shade to keep the lettuce from bolting (suddenly growing a stalk, becoming bitterly inedible in the process).

I *still* haven’t got a new battery for my camera, so we’ll have to make do with images from elsewhere. Here, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons, is what a radish plant looks like if you let it flower:

Flower of Wild Radish (Raphanus raphinistrum, Brassicaceae). Photographed 17th August 2005 in the Presidio, San Francisco by Stephen Lea.

After the flowers come the seed pods, which are bright green and about the size and shape of cayenne peppers, with about the same variety in size and shape as such peppers, ranging from short and plump to long and skinny. You can see pictures of radish pods here and here.

I consider radish pods one of the little luxuries of gardening, “gourmet” food that you can get only by grubbing in the dirt. I suppose somebody probably sells them somewhere, but I’ve never encountered them outside of my own garden.

Radishes themselves were among the first sweet surprises of gardening for me. I first started gardening in 1993 as a result of LGBT “Pride” weekend in Michigan. My friends who ran a feminist bookstore needed to spend the weekend at the festivities and I agreed to cover the store for the whole weekend, which was dead because most of the usual customers were also celebrating elsewhere. Killing time, I picked up a basic how-to gardening book and soon found myself absorbed, reading every word of the details of how to plant carrots or make your own trellis. “Tomatoes,” I thought dreamily, “truly sweet corn.” The next weekend, I dug up part of the backyard, thanking my lucky stars for having a landlord who lived in another country. Before long, I learned what the word “grounded” really means.

I also discovered what vegetables really taste like. The juicy sharp-sweet piquancy of fresh radishes were a delightful surprise. Later, I learned how very many varieties of radishes there are.

So, let me go on for a moment to praise the lowly radish. Easiest of all plants to grow, the radish is entirely edible, offering leaves, roots, flowers and seedpods over the course of its life. That means that you can:

1. eat the entire seedling when you thin the plants shortly after sowing, tossing them into salads or just rinsing and popping them into your mouth in the garden
2. harvest a few leaves from each plant as it grows to toss into stir fries, include in batches of mixed greens, or any other use you can think of for a slightly spicy green (I like to chop them finely and cook them down with red lentils)
3. use all of the greens from any plant that doesn’t seem to be forming a good root, perhaps because you didn’t thin or water them enough
4. eat the roots raw or cooked, alone or in concert with other vegetables
5. toss the flowers into salads for color and spice
6. crunch young seedpods right out in the garden or bring in them inside for late-season salads
7. steam or saute older seedpods

Did I mention that they grow so quickly that some varieties mature in as few as 21 days? That means you can plant a crop in the spring, harvest it, and then use the same spot to grow a summer crop of something else.

Anybody can grow radishes! It’s not to late for you to grow them too. While it’s a bit hot to start radishes here in Maryland right now (they’ll bolt — flower before forming good roots) I used to start radishes in Michigan in June. And anybody can wait until late summer to start radishes that will grow in the cooler autumn weather.

I hear they’re celebrating Pride in Minneapolis (where I just was) next weekend. Maybe I’ll join in by crunching on a radish pod while remembering the Pride weekend that inspired me to start gardening.

So, I went a little crazy at the roadside fruit stand and found myself with way too many apricots and some strawberries on the brink of going soft. The answer to my dilemma arrived like a dream from the heavenly blue: Pie! Creamy-fruity pie! Pie, pie, pie. (Can you tell I love pie?)

All I had to do was figure out how to summon up the particular variety of creamy fruitiness (or perhaps fruity creaminess) that was already on the tip of my tongue. I looked up some recipes online but they weren’t very helpful, so I just made it up as I went along. It came out so well that I decided to share the recipe with you. In honor of the FBI’s quest to infiltrate the infamous vegan potluck, I call this my

Vegan Potluck Pie(*)

Ingredients
strawberries and apricots in equal measure (enough to fill half a pie)
1 vacuum-packed container firm Mori-Nu tofu
confectioner’s (powdered) sugar (um, I don’t know exactly how much)
1/4 cup sugar (more to taste)
1 tsp rosewater (**) (more to taste)
baked pie crust of your choice

Instructions

• peel your apricots and rinse your strawberries
• pull out about 1/3 of an apricot and a couple of big strawberries
• chop the pulled out fruit very finely and set aside
• chop the remaining fruit into bite sized pieces
• layer the bite sized pieces in a mixing bowl, sprinkling each layer with 1/4 tsp of rosewater and enough powdered sugar to coat it, stir and refrigerate
• make and bake your pie crust — you can use any basic pie crust recipe, such as the one in Veganomicon(***), or any of the many online
• wait until the pie crust is out of the oven and cooling to go on to the next steps (this might be a good time to do the dishes)
• dump the tofu, the sugar, the finely chopped fruit, and 1/4 tsp rosewater into a blender
• blend
• taste, adding sugar and/or a touch more rosewater until it tastes heavenly to you
• pour the blended mixture into the pie crust
• spread the refrigerated fruit on top
• optional: bake at 400F just until the fruit on top softens
• chill for at least 3 hours, trying not to think about pie the whole time

I ate the whole pie over the course of a weekend and didn’t feel bad about that at all. What could be more healthy than tofu and fruit?

(*) I actually don’t recommend making this pie for vegan potlucks attended by non-vegans as it might be a bit too tofu-y for them. For events attended by non-vegans, I like to make what I call “tropical mini-muffins” made with lots of vegan margarine and packed with shredded coconut and mandarin orange wedges. I’ll share that recipe another day.

(**) “I used to think I invented baking with rosewater,” I told Isa Chandra Moscowitz after finding cookie and cake recipes calling for it in Veganomicon. “You did!” she said. She did too. You won’t find many pastry recipes calling for it. Most are probably by people who, like me, bought some on impulse thinking, “this looks interesting,” and then went with impulse again when baking. (It’s usual use is in Indian cooking.) Where can you get it? I expect you can order it online. I get mine at an Indian/Pakistani grocery in a nearby town. Isa says its often shelved in Bodegas in NYC.

(***) Speaking of Veganomicon, the “Lost Coconut Cream” pie recipe in there is to die for. I make it with less sugar and lime instead of lemon juice, adding more lime juice in lieu of the vanilla extract and topping it off with lime zest, for a refreshing blast of lime-coconut deliciousness.

• Seed starting set from the discount hardware store: $9
• Mini-greenhouse from the fancy garden catalog: $99
• Starting seeds you saved last year in cut-up salvaged soda bottles lined with pages from back issues of the EarthFirst! Journal: truly priceless

I’ve been offline for what I now realize — from the panicked calls from people wondering if I’m okay — has been something like two weeks rather than the couple of days I originally planned when I shut down the computer to concentrate on midterm grading and getting the garden started. (Thanks for those calls, by the way: It’s nice to know people are looking out for you.) I’m fine. I guess I needed more of a break from words, words, words than I realized. And once I got started on the springtime outdoor chores in the garden and around the sanctuary, I realized how very many such chores there are for me this year here by myself. So, I’ve been digging garden plots, breaking up compacted ground in preparation for reseeding the chicken yards, mending fences, hauling compost from place to place, etc., etc.

Speaking of such chores, Deb and Rich came by last weekend to pitch in at the sanctuary. Deb posted some lovely photos on her blog. Let’s hope she comes back to snap some more shots when it gets a bit greener, because heaven-only-knows when I’ll get around to replacing the worn-out battery in my camera.

I just stepped outside and, amazingly, the chicken yards are already discernibly greener than when Deb took those pictures 7 days ago. Spring really is something.

So, I’m surrounded by springtime cuteness in the form of chubby chicks and nodding daffodils that always look like they’re talking with each other. But not only.

Right now, the air outside smells like feet because they manured the nearby fields earlier this week. On the day they do it, the stench of of the excrement of captive animals is choking. Also earlier this week, the transport trucks were going back and forth all day long as I did my outdoor chores, coming up the road empty and then down the road loaded with young chickens seeing their only snatch of blue sky before being shackled upside down, electrocuted, and cut up into bits. I can’t… quite… describe the feeling of sitting on the front steps with the warm sun on your arms, resting for a moment after a bout of digging in your veganic garden bed, enjoying the company of the anarchistic band of chickens who’ve taken over the front yard… as one of those trucks comes rumbling down the road loaded with confused and terrified young birds who cannot imagine the horror that awaits them at the end of the ride.

I tried to write about that for one of my earliest posts, Beauty and Cruelty Are Having a Fist-Fight in My Front Yard. You might want to check it out if you missed it. And, since it’s garden time, you might want to check out my how-to posts on cruelty-free gardening here and here.

PS — I’m slowly, slowly working through the mountains of spam that accumulated in my inbox while I was outside. If you’re waiting for an answer from me and it doesn’t come quickly enough, please don’t hesitate to write again or give me a call.

Pretty, pretty hybrid solar-wind panels modeled after ivy leaves.

They’re from SMIT’s GROW project, “a hybrid energy delivery device that provides power via the sun and wind, and draws inspiration from ivy growing on a building.” Using both photovoltaic and piezoelectric converters in each “leaf,” the GROW system is designed to be mounted on a stainless steel mesh system originally designed to allow ivy and other plants to easily grow up the walls of buildings.

It looks like this:

Here are just some of the reasons I love this project:

• It uses both wind and solar. For both single buildings and in energy policy, we need to realize that maybe we can’t find the one and only solution because there is no one and only solution. I’m convinced that, in addition to reductions in consumption, we need to deploy a multiplicity of renewable energy technologies in a multiplicity of ways.
• It uses solar, which is the most promising and least developed source of renewable energy.
• It works at the building level. If we want to avoid the environmental hazards of things like wind farms, we need more and better on-site renewable technologies.
• It looks great. For people to really want those technologies, and be willing to spend more for them until we reach the stage where economies of scale and evolving technology make solar and wind power more affordable, they’ve got to be aesthetically pleasing.
• The GROW system itself is made from recycled materials.

So don’t say I never blog about anything happy.

I like to think of veganism as a process rather than a destination. Even organic vegetables are produced using herbicides and trucked to their destinations in insect-spattered, CO2-spewing vehicles. All any of us can do is keep working toward the goal of non-participation in any form of animal exploitation or environmental despoliation, remembering that people are animals and that vegan also means green.

So I’m only half-joking when I say that the recent visit of Isa Chandra Moskowitz to the Eastern Shore Sanctuary made me “even more vegan.”

Here’s how Isa made me more vegan:

1. taught me to love — or, um, like — nutritional yeast
2. discovered vegan butterscotch chips at my local grocery store
3. showed me how to skew chili in the barbecue direction

and, most importantly,

4. gave me some tips that will help me coax the most out of local, in-season produce and the vegetables from my own garden

Isa posted a lovely account of her visit on her blog and also posted some photos on Flickr. If we lean on her a little bit, I bet we can get her to post the second round of photos she took while she was here, which include a series shot at sunset as the roosters and hens who elect to sleep in the trees rather than in the coops were making their way up into the branches.