I am reminded of the danger of become too amazed with our imaginative contrivances.   When first reaching the stockyards of Chicago, new immigrants Jurgis and his family tour the hog-processing plant in amazement.  The reader cringes while Jurgis sees it all as “a wonderful poem” of efficiency.  Sinclair is careful to construct for us the mentality of the newly arrived worker, a person who views the animals without “metaphors of human destiny” and whose mind is still somewhat baffled by the experience of the foreign.  What is large, what is noisy, what has been set up to involve many pieces, requiring the organization and manpower that can only come from having a great number of people gathered together in one place.  These are the things that still have the power to inspire awe (military operations are often impressive in this way, also cities).  So why does the reader cringe, what is there to temper our own self-congratulating pride?  There can be no space to doubt that the machines of The Jungle abuse every bit of life they touch.  The stockyards of The Jungle are marked not only for the intensity and danger of the work performed but also the downright illegality of the work.  The workers have no protection from theft, of their work or their money, nor do they have any authority to appeal to for crimes such as injury, murder or rape.  They are expendable because there are hundreds of other workers outside the gates of the factories.  And indeed, it is in the best interest of the factories to work a person as hard as they can, for when they die, there will be a new worker to replace them.  They are a piece of the machine, and, like a metal part, they will be replaced when they wear out.

The Jungle has a place in contemporary times to be reread.  Perhaps there will be many who say that a novel from a hundred years ago could say little about the modern treatment of workers, that conditions have improved so much in the United States as to render the novel irrelevant.  Maybe in a world of globalization we bear a responsibility for conditions beyond our political borders.  We certainly benefit from the exploitation of millions around the globe.  But even within our country we cannot ignore the legacy of how this country’s economic power was created. The (semi-)fair wages, work hours, ‘safe’ working conditions were not born out of the machine but from the protest of workers who had to demand them.  The political and legal recourse of workers, that is, the very right of workers to receive a paycheck when it was due and to have a way to demand it when it was withheld, is something that had to be fought for.  For those willing to think more abstractly, the novel has much to say about the ‘naturalization’ of power and rights disparities.  Even with my interest in food systems, it is a shame to read the novel merely for the meat.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together.  There are two ways to escape suffering it.  The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.  The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

In the past I have interpreted this in the most abstract sense; applied to everything from the Great Khan’s fear of future infernal cities to the struggles of living in this world.  But I returned to this passage after finishing The Jungle and, primed as I was with the rhetoric of righteous struggle which concludes that text, I was struck by Calvino’s call to arms against the forces of inferno.  The words became an indictment of the colonialism that is at the foundation of the novel; the Great Khan and his empire.  We can accept the forces of the inferno or we can seek out its antagonists, like the energized Socialists whose words fill up the last thirty pages of Upton Sinclair’s novel.  On the inside cover of The Jungle is a short biography of Upton Sinclair which ends with this quote:

My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it.

 

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities.  Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1974.  165

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Originally publ. 1906.

• Roasted Vegetables

Probably the most common use of beets is to roast them with other vegetables and herbs: carrots, parsnips, potatoes, celeriac, onions, fennel, mushrooms, rosemary, etc. Add the garlic toward the end of roasting so it doesn’t burn.  This is so simple and tasty and necessitates the oven that our household lacks.  Sadly, roasted vegetables have not been part of our menu this winter.

• Borscht

Our borscht was really intense.  Not only did it have a very strong beet taste but we also made the broth out of whey left over from cheese making.  I think if you eat it in small amounts rather than trying to subsist off of it solely (as we tried to) then you might enjoy it more.  Also a vegetable broth rather than one that smells intensely like yoghurt might be more appropriate.  Try it as an appetizer to meat and rice dishes.

• Chocolate Beet Cake

I’ll admit that I’ve only had this once back in college.  Once again our lack of an oven at the moment prevents me from testing a recipe out but I do remember that the sweetness of the beets is supposed to stand in for all or part of the sugar normally used in chocolate cake.  It probably would taste great with a sweet cream frosting or ice cream if you want something really dessert-y or baked as muffins for a low-sugar chocolate snack.

• Beet salad

Shredded beet salad is an awesome winter salad.  At a time of year when many traditional salad ingredients are tasteless or non-existent, beets fulfill that need for cool, juicy, raw food.  Lemon juice and/or vinegar are essential to a great beet salad; you can marinate the beets for an hour ahead of time if you want.  Just about anything else can go in this: minced onions (raw or cooked), herbs (mint is pretty awesome), toasted nuts, ginger, apples, shredded carrots and celeriac, etc.  You can also make a beet salad by cooking the beets beforehand but part of me feels like that violates the ‘easy salad’ element of this recipe.  We recently ate fresh beet salad piled on top of tahini and toast – a delicious lunch!

• Fermented Beets

Lastly, if you’ve got all these beets and you don’t know what to do with them, why not stick them in a jar and ignore them for a while longer?  This was our motivation behind fermenting a jar of beets two months ago.  We peeled them, sliced ‘em and, with guidance from Katz’s Wild Fermentation, layered them with salt in a half-gallon jar and covered them with water.  The jar was very active and more than once frothed over with beautiful (and messy) magenta foam.  For those comfortable with the processes and tastes of home fermentation, I would highly recommend these beets.  They were softer than raw beets but still crisp like a good pickle and we refrigerated them at the point when they were sharp tasting but not total ‘zingers’.  A couple of nights ago we ate a few as a side to a lovely early spring New England meal: venison cooked in vinegar and ground pepper, potatoes with thyme and fresh maple sap to drink.

Lastly, if you have a juicer you can imbibe your beets with apples, carrots, or even potatoes…

There are many recipes online for these dishes; the borscht recipe we used was in Bloodroot; Alice Waters has several cooked beet salads in The Art of Simple Food and Chez Panisse Vegetables; and Wild Fermentation is an invaluable resource for experimenting with home fermentation; and of course, making up your own recipes is fun too!

Part of me wants to pack up my FEDCO catalogue and kombucha mothers and flee to Vermont.  The other scorns the idea as cowardly desertion.  New Hampshire is far behind Maine and Vermont in terms of feeding the state locally and what is that but a challenge? New Hampshire may not have as much good land for vegetable farming, but my dear friend in Maine ran a CSA and went to market with 1 acre of land, and farmers down the road from her go to three markets a week in summer and winter off of 3 acres.  We don’t each need 400 acre farms, although it is not just for the food and the timber that we keep that land free from development.  I see in NH an opportunity for animal husbandry on our rocky, forested landscape.  And so perhaps I will stay here for a little while longer, learning how to cook goat and make chevre and trying not to gaze wistfully over the river at Vermont.

I spent my summer (which lasted from April to Thanksgiving) engrossed in the soil.  Even when the soil was very cold and not all soil but mostly mud, I was still in it, trying to bunch kale or cut rosettes of mache.  It is a wonderful feeling to be swallowed totally by a project.  But the real work is what you make of it afterward, trying to build from not just one experience but the totally of your thoughts and desires.  Which is to say:  February, Thinking Time, Month of precarious, slip-sliding and slow-moving adventures…

’til then, peace/

We have

microscopic anatomy

of the whale

this

is

reassuring

- William Carlos Williams

“The New Deal was a Good Idea, We Should Try it This Time,” by Linda Gordon.

There are many arguments against inequality, foremost among them that it often constitutes suffering and injustice, and that too much of it is incompatible with democracy. But the worst consequence of too-extreme inequality is that it becomes not only self-perpetuating but self-augmenting, particularly so with the kind of inequality built into domestic welfare and relief programs. A prime example was the resentment that grew up around what came to be called “welfare”—a resentment that usually rested on the misimpression that welfare recipients lived idle lives on taxpayers’ money, while Social Security pension recipients lived on their own money. The declining levels of social solidarity that result from the unequal, mystified, and even deceptive operation of domestic programs created a downward cycle that ever more disfranchised the poor and empowered the wealthy. As Larry Bartels has shown, the voting records of U.S. senators matched the views of their most affluent constituents and conformed almost never to their poorest constituents’ views.

I use the term fantasy here in a slightly different way as it was used in the NYT article.  I use it as a particular criticism related to how it interacts with individualism, which is perhaps the most celebrated and therefore dangerous value (especially when it is the Number 1 value, as I think one could argue it is in American identity).  I do not think that living in a cabin, tending to a small garden and living a mostly solitary life is something that is so silly or ridiculous that is must be undercut by the term ‘fantasy’, as I feel was done in the article.  Maybe my distinction is blurry but my own separation occurs on the level of motivation.  Naturally, it occurs on the level of narrative.  I don’t think we have to pathologize people who withdraw from the inanity of society but we should be critical of the (societally-supported)  narratives that shape how and why that withdraw occurs.  When it works to further notions of masculine individualism, I think it should be critically received, for that has implications that stretch far beyond the woods or the boundaries of Sutpen’s Hundred.