Hadn’t made any in ages, and I got an urge. So, we have a mess of green beans and potatoes on cooking now. With more pepper to go on the top after it cooks a little while. I really like the distinctive half-steamed potato texture from cooking them on top of the green beans.
(With one recipe for them with potatoes 😅 With less seasoning than we always used, but some people do like them plainer.)
And that’s in Cincinnati, not Greater London 🙄 We do our best.
The good old British runner beans are pretty tasty, and functionally a lot closer to some classic green bean varieties back home. But, we don’t have any; shame I’ve never seen them frozen either. So, tonight it’s more of the frozen thin stringless commercial kind. Plus extra care to add flavor.
My mom almost always just used regular potatoes, peeled and chunked up as required for even cooking. But, I saw some nice-looking new Maris Pipers yesterday, and thought this would be a good thing to do with them.
Just cooking some bratwurst that needed used up to have on the side. Not sure how well that goes together, but it will have to be good enough.
i hate when someone says “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies” and some white 21 year old trying to be ‘woke’ says “haha… go ahead and cry your white tears sweatie (:”
no one thinks it’s a racial issue against white people. that’s not why people say to stop that shit. it’s an issue of classism. because the truth is that the majority of y’all who think you’re amazing activists just REALLY fucking hate appalachian people, and i know that because y’all think it’s funny to say “karma’s a bitch!” when something bad happens to an appalachian state.
you don’t care about the poverty in the appalachia and you don’t care about queer people and/or people of color who live in the appalachia. you don’t care about education in the appalachia and you don’t care that these low rates of education mean higher rates of poverty and child poverty, which persist over the years. rural children are twice as likely to live in areas with persistent poverty. you care that poverty stricken children are statistically less likely to not have timely immunizations, have higher delinquency rates, and have lower academic achievement — but only when we’re talking about urban areas outside of the appalachia.
people in our region die earlier than most. mortality rates are higher in the appalachia, and they’re even higher for people of color that live in the appalachia. suicide rates are higher than anywhere else in the country by 17% — it’s 31% higher in central appalachia, and in rural areas within the appalachia, it’s 27% higher than metro appalachia. cancer morality rate is 10% higher, and it’s 15% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. COPD mortality rate is 27% higher, and 55% higher in rural appalachia than metro appalachia. injury mortality rate is 33% higher, and it’s 47% higher in rural appalachia than in metro appalachia. stroke mortality rate is 14% higher — and you guessed it’s, these rates are higher in rural areas vs metro areas by 8%.
the rate of Years of Potential Life Lost, which measures premmature mortality from all causes of death, is 25% higher in appalachia, and 40% higher in rural vs metro areas.
the appalachia has an opioid epidemic. in 2015, our rate of death with drugs was 65% higher than the national average. 69% of those drug deaths were from opioids. these deaths have a connection to our poverty and education rates. the poorer you are, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to die from an opioid death.
when i say “don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies”, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people (and again — the majority of people who claim this also happen to be white 🙄). i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow “deserve” it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit. like i’m sorry if this comes off as too aggressive but i am sooooo sick of y’all thinking it’s funny that our region is suffering.
and before anyone asks me for resources and links: google exists. i did my research and you can do it too.
a big problem with the people who say stuff like this is they don’t realize just how many “rednecks and hillbillies” are non-white. there are so many appalachian and southern POC that also suffer through these conditions but people like to cling to their idea that the only hicks are white hicks, so they couldnt care less if places like WV or KY just fell off the map, and to hell with who it is that’s actually hurting.
people also act like it’s only appalachian and southern whites that voted for trump and that vote republican and it’s not true – half of all white women voted for trump. the rich ones and the poor ones. it’s not a problem that’s tied specifically to southern and appalachian white people but it’s an easy scapegoat and allows people to not think about what they’re actually saying.
as long as they can say that it’s just them shitty racist white hicks that are suffering, then they don’t have to actually care about them. they can ignore them and not do anything to help them. like another person said in the notes, the teacher strike in WV is a better example of leftist organization than a whole lot of the people saying shit about hillbillies have ever done but they don’t care about that because, well, theyre just white hillbillies so what does it matter?
Because I have gotten a lot of anti-rural life jokes thrown at me. Most people don’t know I’m from a rural area, because I currently live in a big ass concrete city, so like… The concept of rural is super obscure. I told someone where I live, and they thought I meant some place with some farms, so they were like “ugh, rednecks, that must be awful.” Fuck off, because I come from a place with real farms & rural land, and just cause you think we work at a super progressive place, and because you think “rural” folks are all Trump-humpin’ far religious right, LGBT-hatin’, POC hatin’ folks, that’s your problem.
So the place I grew up in? Yes, it tends to vote Republican, but in the current primary? There are folks runnin’ for Republican that very specifically want to support things what we need: there’s a major development that the city side of the state wants to produce, which means it would royally fuck over the rural side–it would destroy environmental reserves, especially, which is what we all survive off of in the rural areas. The Democratic side is literally the “bad” guy in the race. Destroying the natural resources of the area would be terrible for everyone–if you only care about POC, yes, it would screw them over too. Because we all live off the land.
A lot of the redneck types require the land, because remember: it’s cheaper to buy a box of bullets than it is to buy meat for the year. That’s how most folks I know who are poor survive… And this is why I struggle in the city. I’m used to thinking “If I need to, I could always trust the forest & river.” If I need food, it’s there. It’s in the land; I can plant it, or I can hunt, fish, and forage. If I need something, I could… Make it. Because materials… They exist. Somewhere, out there. But the city? I have to fucking buy berries? So I don’t eat them too much. I need wood? I have to fucking buy it, what the hell??? I need leather? I have to buy it; I can’t just ask a friend to barter for it (or maybe pay ‘em, but the leather out here is more pricey). Especially as an artist, this astounds & disgusts me in some way. You can barter, too. I helped out a friend on their family cow farm; they gave me meat & a skull. You can weave and whittle. There’s a sort of backup.
But the city is harsh and expensive. We can’t maintain a garden here. I can’t trust the land to provide. Even suburbia suffers that. So the poorer you are, the less you can live in a city. And its not like it’s all happy & fun in the rural areas. Poverty is shit. But to me, I feel a little safer. Sometimes you barter… (At least its pretty; the city isn’t very peaceful or beautiful.)
And yea??? There are queer folks in rural areas. And a lot of the ones I know find it horrifying, the idea of leaving. I went back early this year & chatted to one woman I know, who is a lesbian, and she was… Sort of disgusted at the idea of leaving and of the hatred that city folk have of rural areas, especially through an LGBT lens. There’s a major communicative disconnect, because what works for LGBT rights in the city doesn’t work for the rural areas, and this ends up drowning out the rural folks’ voices. Which is especially dangerous, because they may not be great support for the issues of rural LGBT folks. This stereotyping or hate of rednecks/hillbillies/rurality is damaging the people ya’ll claim to say you’re trying to help.
I’m going to co-sign all this and also go a step further.
Even if someone IS a white, straight, Trump-supporting Republican redneck, you should still care if they’re suffering due to issues facing rural people. No one should suffer needlessly because of the limited resources, lack of access to education and medical care, or structural poverty in their home. We should always care about those issues no matter who is being afflicted.
^Cosigned.
I live and work in a very rural county, which also happens to contain the (small) capital city of the state. Our county court system, I am learning firsthand, is absolute fucking bullshit at dealing with rural, white, Trump-voting people’s extremely real and pressing legal problems, because they refuse to understand that living on the edge of crushing poverty, even on large pieces of land, with half your “income” coming directly from what you plant, hunt, or barter for yourself, is a legitimate and widespread way people live, and it presents a serious access to justice issue. Our bureaucracies and our systems for providing assistance depend so much on someone being able to provide detailed information about their income. In a tight-knit rural community of exclusively very poor people, where people constantly help each other out of simple economic necessity, using systems of barter and payment dictated by a complex and long-standing social structure and informed by what needs the participants have that specific day, asking someone to provide the kind of close documentation needed in a normal court case is idiotic. And judges won’t believe someone from a rural part of the county who tries to explain that – it’s seen as laziness, as an irritating lack of education about how the system works, and, sometimes, as outright lying.
I listen to one of my white, rural-born, Trump-votin’ clients talk about how they feel walking into any kind of government office or courtroom, and I’m not going to sanctimoniously inform them how much worse people in other places have it, if they’d only ~educate themselves~ and ~care about other people.~ They have every reason to believe this system’s not on their side and the people assigned to deal with their affairs don’t understand them, even on this very local level. And holy shit: That’s not even touching the situation of the many, many South American immigrants living in our rural county, often speaking indigenous languages for which interpretation is not available, connecting with the system only as undocumented persons or criminals. I can’t speak to those issues as closely because we can accommodate maybe 1% of their cases. They’re here, on our farms, in our trailer parks, working the land; we simply don’t see them, because the system has not created a space for them to exist.
The survival issues that rural people in poverty struggle with are incredibly different from those that urban people in poverty struggle with – even when they’re not that far removed from our small city. Even when the rural and urban people you picked off the street to make the comparison were the same race, the same age, etc.
Also, goddamn, cosigned about queer people in rural areas. Here’s a hint: Don’t insult someone’s intelligence or tell them you’re sorry for them when they tell you where they live, ever.
I read this post the other day that said “sometimes people pretend you’re a bad person so they don’t feel guilty for the things they did to you” and boiiii has that one stuck with me
Photo of the Day – The Little Bee-eater (Merops pusillus) is a resident throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. These are fairly tame birds that are quite common within their range. Unlike most bee-eaters, this species is a solitary nester, usually making a tunnel in sandy banks.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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