Of the Week: Taking July Off

What I'm reading, writing, and eating

A housekeeping note: I’m taking the month of July off from publishing this newsletter to finish my zine. (Consider preordering! Give me more copies to bind!) One of the reasons I keep my newsletter free is so I can more easily take breaks as needed. The project is intense: Using new skills, combining skills, creating a physical item! Life is also full (of joy and grief). Dedicating July to revising, printing, binding, and generally obsessing over the zine to make it as close to perfect as possible feels like a gift. Perfection is subjective, but knowing I put the time in isn’t. I will still be very much reading newsletters and may experiment with using the chat feature, which I haven’t yet.

Thank you to everyone who has already preordered and/or shared! All the money I make from online orders goes to the Arizona Muslim Alliance’s Gaza Efforts.

See you with new essays in August!

Chocolate Polenta Pudding Cake

PUBLISHED IN JUNE

June 7: A Landfill, A Retired Millionaire Farmer, And Being Chosen (Or Not)

A lot of people in this country labor under the state-sanctioned idea that they need to be good enough to be chosen, and if they aren’t chosen, they aren’t good enough. Similarly, there’s this horrific bind where it seems like it’s impossible to be considered a successful farmer until you have a big farm, but you can’t afford the big farm until you have the money to own land – or fall in line with big agriculture. The country (and the algorithms) continue to choose mostly people who have already been chosen, with millions of dollars being bandied about in some rooms while elsewhere people’s leases are terminated before harvest.

June 14: Of the Week: Fresh, Local, Seasonal — It's Not Hype

OK, but the berries. The smell rising from the carton was so strong I was transported to a strawberry field. Even I, who will always agree that local and seasonal is better, was stopped in my tracks — Wow, these are so quantifiably better than the industrial agriculture strawberries. Anyone quibbling over this would be stopped mid-sentence if I handed them the carton. The berries were a wider range of sizes, and the small, almost round (cherry tomato-like) ones were my favorite. They were without the white ring around the stem and the verging on cardboard taste and texture of the “standard”strawberry. Strawberries from a grocery store often don’t have any smell at all. Or, they smell like the rest of the store — clean nothingness. If I put my nose right up to these other, seasonless, berries I might get a faint whiff of strawberry. But we all deserve more perfume than that.

June 21: The Catastrophe Already Happened

Biosphere 2, at the beginning, was a project that gave sustained attention and respect to one of our biggest fears: What happens when Earth becomes uninhabitable? A lot of times those fears are laughed off or ignored. It's uncomfortable to talk about, to admit the possibility. But the Synergists didn't look away and tried to prepare for what is impossible to prepare for, which – with all their human failings included – is a bold, courageous, and possibly noble aim.

But what about the people for whom life as they knew it ended with white settlers taking ownership of Indigenous land? Koch writes, "Defining when and where the apocalypse occurs is an act of power. In the hands of techno-optimists and visioneers, nightmares of environmental crisis become a valuable commodity and an opportunity. That is, if they could define the apocalypse, they could more easily sell their own solutions to engineer Earth and humanity out of its predicament."

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Reading

I finished Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia by Natalie Koch and The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O'Odham Country by Gary Nabhan, a legendary local ethnobotanist and food justice advocate. I heard Nabhan speak at a local food panel last year and finally got to this book, one of his earlier ones. I want to read Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities next. I’m a few chapters away from finishing The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City by

Kim Foster

, and this book keeps making me cry and fume: “We never made caring for the most vulnerable of our people part of American culture.”

I also really enjoyed, recently, take the paranoid reading pill by

Celine Nguyen

, The Kitchen Tasks in Front of Me by

Teresa Finney

, Are We Asking Too Much As Mothers? by

Beth Berry

, defining canadian cuisine by

dr. sarah duignan

, Maharajji, My Mother, and the Healing Nature of Feeding Everybody by Anna of

TPWSYL

, Day of longest light by

Cameron Steele

, On the Myth of Motherhood as Self-Improvement by

Ines Bellina

, and Research As A Way of Life by

Olga Koutseridi

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Writing

I spoke with Jillian Luft earlier this week about her autofiction novel Scumbag Summer (House of Vlad Press). That conversation will be published in Write or Die Mag later this summer, and it’s a good one. I have a few stories brewing and interviews with local food people which I’m excited about. Also, the zine!

Cooking

I made a chocolate polenta pudding cake to bring to my sister-in-law’s for dinner (recipe from The Miller’s Daughter by Emma Zimmerman.) The cake was light and fudgey at the same time, and the polenta gave a texture I liked that is missing in brownies. Michael made the mistake of calling it ‘stodgy’ and then tried to claim it was a compliment — he said he meant ‘fudgey’ — but as I told him, there’s no universe where those words are synonyms and was not going to back down from that true fact. He relented. I’m annoying (and also correct.)

I got up at 5:45 am last Saturday to pick up a box of produce from a group called Borderlands Produce Rescue which has a monthly event near my house. Twenty dollars for a LOT of food that would have otherwise been thrown out. Watermelon, honeydew, cucumbers, kabocha squash, grapes, onions, tomatoes, mangoes. Some of it was ripening fast and I had to move quickly to not lose it: Cucumber kimchi and dill pickles. A sheet pan of tomatoes roasted, mashed, and frozen. Grapes cleaned and frozen. Kabocha squash in a tofu and miso soup from Tenderheart by

Hetty Lui McKinnon

. Jammy onions from Extra Good Things. Melon and mangoes eaten as they were, perfectly ripe. I plan on writing more about this group’s work to prevent wasting the food grown in the Arizona borderlands, and hopefully rerouting it to the people processing the food. But not right now because, zine!

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The Good Enough Weekly comes out every Friday, alternating an essay with Of the Week. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks. More info here. My zine of adapted Irish fairytales, Desert Pookas, is available for preorder now!