Day: May 22, 2018

screambirdscreaming:

So I just learned something that pisses me off.
Y’know quinoa? The ~magical~ health food that has become so popular in the US that a centuries-long tradition of local, sustainable, multi-crop farming is being uprooted to mass-produce it for the global market? Potentially affecting food stability and definitely effecting environmental stability across the region?

Ok, cool.

Y’know Lamb’s Quarter? A common weed throughout the continental US, tolerant of a wide variety of soil conditions including the nutrient-poor and compacted soils common in cities, to the point where it thrives in empty lots?

These plants are close relatives, and produce extremely similar seeds. Lamb’s quarter could easily be grown across the US, in people’s backyard and community gardens, as a low-cost and local alternative to quinoa with no sketchy geopolitical impacts. You literally don’t have to nurture it at all, it’s a goddamn weed, it’ll be fine. Put it where your lawn was, it’ll probably grow better than the grass did. AND you can eat the leaves – they taste almost exactly like spinach. 

This just… drives home, again, that a huge part of the appeal of “superfoods” is the sense of the exotic. For whatever nutritional benefits quinoa does have, the marketing strategy is still driven by an undercurrent of orientalism. You too could eat this food, grown laboriously by farmers in the remote Andes mountains! You too could grow strong on the staple crop that has sustained them for centuries! And, y’know, destroy that stable food system in the process. Or you could eat this near-identical plant you found in your backyard. 

What makes this even weirder and more frustrating, to quote my commentary on an older post about growing your own quinoa and amaranth? Growing native North American species instead is really not a new idea. Native people have already domesticated and grown these crops extensively, for thousands of years.

Another good option there, if you’re in North America: a native species very similar to quinoa, which will grow well in a much wider variety of climates, from Mexico to Northern Canada. People still grow it in Mexico, and it has been cultivated from the Eastern Agricultural Complex to the Rockies, and beyond. You grow it like the closely related quinoa, but it will literally grow like a weed in such a wide variety of climates. And doesn’t have the potential to turn into an invasive weed like quinoa could. Because it’s probably already growing in the vicinity. In fact, if you are living in an area where it used to be grown extensively, most of the wild plants of it now are probably actually an old larger-seeded domesticated variety. It was that common a crop in many places.

You can easily do a search for seed sources. There are also a number of native North American amaranth species which have a long history of cultivation and domestication in a lot of regions, so you might also want to check those out instead for similar reasons. There is likely at least one native species that will grow better in your area, without the risk of becoming invasive. While being every bit as good to eat as the types imported from South America.

The low value placed on and resulting poor common knowledge about many, many indigenous North American crops has helped drive the destructive demand for nearly identical “exotic” foods from South America. We don’t have to continue these patterns.

star-anise:

ofinfinitespace:

star-anise:

ofinfinitespace:

star-anise:

doomhamster:

star-anise:

Some Person replied to your post “When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the…”

Let’s not kid ourselves by revising traditional storytelling. Traditional stories (Western stories, anyways) depict females as props, at best they become secondary characters. Mostly, though, they are passive and rewards to be won, by males. Yes, of course there are some elements that can be rescued, like the females never allowing the villain to take away their kindness. But it is not empowering. 

Traditional Western stories never depicted women as progagonists, or having agency? Women in traditional Western stories (who were not villains) were always unfailingly kind? What the SHIT?

CAN PEOPLE NOT ACTUALLY CONVERSANT WITH PREMODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ORAL TRADITIONS PLEASE GET THE FUCK OFF MY POST

…has Some Person ever fucking read a storybook?

Hint: the Brothers Grimm and their ilk did not revise stories to make the heroines MORE empowered. And yet somehow we have quite a few stories with women as heroes, even within the most narrow definitions of the Western canon.

I realize part of the point is that agency isn’t as simple as having the ability to enact violence, but in Finette Cendron (1697) by Mme d’Aulnoy, Finette is imprisoned by an ogress and about to be eaten with her sisters. She persuades the ogress that they will do wonderful things for her, including dress her hair and paint her face to make her beautiful. The ogress agrees, and when Finette goes to do her hair, she cuts the ogress’s head off with the enormous scissors provided.

“Unfailingly kind” my ass.

Meanwhile there are entire books about women’s agency in medieval romances.

So like CAN PEOPLE JUST NOT. It is, in fact, possible that I know misogyny was not a recent invention.

@star-anise: if you ever need someone to stand on a mountain and shout: “The story of history is not a straight from conservative to progressive” I’ve got a mega-phone and a bone to pick. 

I especially do not get how a certain type of feminist is literally willing to believe that EVERY woman, from the invention of agriculture until the last two generations, was UNEQUIVOCALLY and IRREDEEMABLY oppressed and unable to do a single goddamn thing to resist that.

And call this attitude “feminist”.

AMEN. 

And also that they some how believe that’s a more useful narrative for recruitment than, let’s look at the ways women have been ingenious and resourceful and ADAPTED TO THEIR TIMES in order to subvert patriarchy and make livable lives for themselves. 

I wrote my senior undergrad thesis on Quaker female preachers from 1650 – 1830, a chunk of time when women’s position in the world – particularly publicly – was very much moving backward. In 1650, ecstatic experience was very much a grounds for public speech by women (in the US/England at least), whereas by 1830 motherhood was really the only grounds for authority that a woman could invoke to preach public. Even among Quakers who were relatively relaxed about this sort of thing. 

But I swear to God, the entire process was basically standing up in front of the history department and shouting NOT ALL TIMES ARE THE 19th CENTURY. 

The grip that the Victorians have on our historical narratives is hysterical and and also scary/sad.

Victorians invented the idea that Medievals believed in a flat earth (when the only time the flat earth appears in medieval literature it’s to signify that the person who believes in it is a complete numbskull) and now there are literal FLAT EARTH SOCIETIES.

The Victorians got us to the present day, but at what cost.