Serenity in the Storm

Fettucini Alfredo, Vegan Style

One of the first meals Eric ever made for me when I came out to visit him in Seattle years and years ago was fettucini alfredo. It was a delicious, romantic meal loaded with heavy cream and cheese and whatever else goes into a super-rich dairy-laden alfredo sauce. Of course, as soon as we were finished eating, I immediately started having horrible stomach cramps and spent the whole evening in the bathroom. Needless to say, we got much more familiar with each other that evening with a huge bathroom experience in a one-bedroom apartment than I would have liked. I should have known then that I was destined to become vegan for more reasons than just the animals! Even though that night was a disaster bathroom-wise, I still remember it with fondness because I felt so loved.

I was delighted to see on The Kind Life a recipe for a vegan fettucini alfredo and I decided to make it last night. It was delicious and really rich and so filling. But guess what? No bad stomach reaction! And there’s really nothing so bad for you in it either (especially if you were to make it with a healthier kind of pasta).

The recipe is by Allison Rivers Samson of Allison’s Gourmet and here is the link to THE RECIPE.

I made a few slight alterations. I added a little red pepper for some heat. I blended it twice (once before heating as she suggests and once mid-way through heating because I decided it wasn’t smooth enough). I just have a regular blender (not a VitaMix) and it ended up a little gritty at the end, but the flavor was spot-on. I think next time I make it I will try soaking the cashews overnight the night before to make it creamier and try to eliminate that slight grit.

Have you tried a vegan alfredo recipe that you love? Or have you found a vegan version of something you never thought you’d have again since you became vegan?

Untold Testimony: #1389 at Our Hen House

Morning, readers! At the end of last summer, I went to a number of “livestock” auctions where animals were being auctioned off by the pound for “meat”. I wrote about this experience here on the blog when I had had a little more distance from this one particular auction. But the morning after I attended a “cull market” auction, I wrote this piece for Our Hen House. It’s up today and I welcome you to read it and share your own thoughts about these spaces. This is the third part in a three-part Untold Testimony series. The first was Betsy’s story. And the second was Maizy’s. Feel free to comment with any thoughts and reactions; I think it’s good to have conversations about these spaces of routinized violence. Thanks for reading!

Why Geography?

Earlier this week, Melissa (of the lovely blog, Mending Creation) responded to the Academic Writing and Scholar-Activism post with a question about why I chose Geography as my field/discipline. I’ve been feeling particularly positive about Geography lately, so this is a good time to reflect on the choice to do work in this discipline. Bear with me; this is going to be a long post! If you’re itching for the “Why Geography?” part, just skip on down to that section and skip the part that details (rather long-windedly) my journey to geography…

My Journey to Geography

I was never planning to be a geographer; I was going to be a fiction writer. My whole life up through college was geared toward creative writing. As a kid, I took summer writing workshops and in school, English and creative writing were my favorite subjects. I spent long hours (and many bitter tears) receiving feedback and instruction from my writing professor father. He has a gift with language that I’ve never seen anywhere else — his love of language for the sake of language, the way he can make words come together in a beautifully rendered sentence…it’s extraordinary and, ironically, words can’t describe what a wonderful (if at times, difficult) experience it has been to learn to write from him.

I chose a college (Sarah Lawrence) based on their writing program because I wanted to go somewhere where I could write something really long. When I got to Sarah Lawrence, I signed up for writing workshops and meandered through my time there taking courses that interested me. Sarah Lawrence doesn’t have majors or grades, so it really allows you to explore and follow your interests without worrying about requirements. It was an extraordinary educational experience and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to study there.

Looking back now, I don’t think I was ever a writer of fiction. In my fiction workshops, I wrote the truth. I wrote the world as I saw it and I turned in nonfiction stories, pulled straight from my life (billed as fiction) to my teachers. It’s funny, even though I’ve been writing nonfiction exclusive with no pretense of being fiction for the last five, six, seven years, it was only in the last month that I realized, I am a nonfiction writer. Last month, I read two books on publishing — one on finding a literary agent and one on writing a nonfiction book proposal — and through this reading, I had the realization about nonfiction. Go figure.

But back to the long and meandering path to Geography. Sarah Lawrence, amazingly, has these year-long classes. I wish more colleges/universities did this, because you really get to dig deeply into a subject. Not like the excruciating 10-week quarter system I’m on now where there’s a sense of desperation to reach the students in the blink of an eye before they’re gone. In my final year at Sarah Lawrence, I took one of these year-long courses entitled “Food, Agriculture, Environment, and Development” by a geographer (Joshua Muldavin) and everything changed for me.

My mom and dad have always been very politically active in the leftist movement and my sister and I grew up with a wonderful community of compassionate and strong women and men working to make the world more just. My mom has always worked in human services and has dedicated her time and energy to providing social services to vulnerable populations. I spent my childhood going to women’s rights and anti-war marches and demonstrations in Washington D.C. One of the first that I can remember was a pro-choice demonstration in D.C. I was pretty little and I remember the speakers were really bashing the president (it must have been Reagan at the time) and I remember feeling so bad for what I imagined was this feeble old man sitting in this white house somewhere. I’ve come along way from there… All this to say that I grew up with a sense that I wanted to work for justice in the world.

When I took Muldavin’s class at Sarah Lawrence, I finally felt like something fell into place. I had been having some uneasiness about pursuing a future in creative writing and food justice made so much sense to me. Uncovering the injustices in the food system brought the values I had been raised with, together with the most basic need for food. This was just before the alternative food movement and the Michael Pollanization of U.S. pop culture had exploded, so taking this class blew my mind and set me on a different course. As I was graduating from college, I went to Joshua Muldavin and said, “what should I do? your course changed my life?” I told him I was headed to Seattle to be with Eric… He said, “why don’t you go to graduate school in geography at the University of Washington?” And that’s precisely what I did. Well, not exactly that directly…I took a few years off and still applied to an MFA in Creative Writing alongside Geography. But ultimately I ended up in Geography.

I went to UW planning to study urban agriculture and alternative urban food systems. But about six months in I met Maria Elena Garcia, who teaches undergrad classes on rethinking human/animal relations in the Comparative History of Ideas Department. We did an independent reading quarter on food politics and she snuck in a book on animal rights/ethics — The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. That book, along with Maria Elena’s gentle guidance, turned me (and Eric) vegan and radically changed the trajectory of my research interests. Prior to this shift, Eric and I were supporters of the alternative meat/dairy movement and had completely bought into the “humane” movement. When I read Singer and Mason’s book (and then many more), I was outraged that this so-called “humane meat” movement was gaining so much momentum as an “alternative” to mainstream agriculture. I decided to change my MA project to one that reconceptualized “humane slaughter.”

When I made this shift in Geography, it was rocky, to say the least. I was told that I didn’t belong in Geography and that I would be better off going to work with Peter Singer. I was told that my work wasn’t Geography. In those early years of grad school, things were rough and I had to fight for my place in the discipline and in the department. I had to get prepared — very quickly — to be able to argue for how my work on animals in the food system was geographical. This was really hard, but eventually, I feel like I’ve finally found my place.

Why Geography?

Geography is not the geography of grade school. Of course, some geographers do physical geography and focus on cartography and a lot of geographers make some pretty amazing maps! But Human Geography is a different thing entirely. I remember hearing a couple of great responses for those times when you’re at a cocktail party (I don’t go to many cocktail parties, FYI) and someone asks, “What’s Geography?!” One response is: “Geography is the why of where.” Thought-provoking, eh? I’ll just let that sit for a minute…

The other cocktail party answer is that geography is like any other social science (anthropology, sociology, etc.), except it emphasizes in a very real and important way, place and space. This might seem obvious, but it’s amazing how much academic work can actually forget that things happen in places and that these places shape, and are shaped by, the processes occurring there. Place matters. Geography also draws special attention to space and geographers do work that explores spaces as broad and far-reaching as the global political economy and spaces as intimate as the body. Adrienne Rich once said that the body is “the geography of the closest in.” I love that.

I sometimes joke that you can study just about anything in Geography because everything happens in a place! And animals in agriculture are no exception. Animals, as a specific topic of study, certainly don’t feature prominently in human geography — it is, after all, human geography. Animal geographies are a fairly tiny subset within the discipline and they are quite varied in the topics and approaches they take. Critical animal geographies/studies — those that work for animal liberation — are an even tinier subset. This makes it a bit lonely at times in the discipline, but there are great things about Geography that make it a wonderful place to work on critical animal studies. I currently have an advisor who is wonderfully supportive and my experience of graduate school has been great!

Geography has a strong social and environmental justice tradition and there are many geographers who are critically engaged in feminist, Marxist, and radical scholarship. This makes for an, at times, wonderfully critical and self-reflexive environment — one where we can all push ourselves to engage in more critical reflection on issues of gender, race, sexuality, etc. I think animal justice concerns are an extension of this and quite a few people I’ve met in the discipline have been open to thinking critically about human use of animals (even if their work is not focused on this issue). There is some really amazing work being done in Geography and some of this work works as a powerful frame for thinking about animals. Because of how varied the subjects of study are in Geography, the discipline is highly interdisciplinary and meshes nicely with work in other fields — critical animal studies, environmental politics, political science, anthropology, history, sociology, gender, women, and sexuality studies…and more.

There’s certainly more to say about Geography, why it’s great, how animals fit in, etc. but I fear I’ve gone on too long… If you made it to the end, thank you! You deserve a vegan brownie or something else delicious.

Happy Friday! I hope you have something nice and relaxing planned for the weekend!

Grain Bowl How-To

Good morning! We’re coming off of three glorious days of spring sunny weather here in Seattle and when I woke up this morning, the clouds and grey were back like a cozy blanket. I don’t mind the clouds and drizzle, in fact I love it a lot of the time, but this morning it makes me feel like crawling back into bed. Yesterday, Eric and I headed out into the yard to do some manual labor involving digging and cement and hanging out with the chickens. In preparation, I threw together a grain bowl for lunch before heading outside.

I don’t know why I don’t make grain bowls more often. They’re also called hippie bowls and here is one option from the Daily Garnish and a nice deconstructed list of options for hippie or ‘buddha’ bowls from Gluten Free for Good. They’re really easy to make (especially if you keep some cooked grains in the fridge to have on hand) and so nutritious. Plus, grain bowls can be completely customized to your particular tastes and if you live with someone who has different taste preferences, you can each prepare your grain bowl just to your liking. The possibilities are really endless. You can use any kind of grain, any kind of vegetables — cooked or raw — and any kind of protein and sauce (or none!). You can go as simple as you like or go all out and pile that bowl high will all kinds of yummy things. Aside from more standard vegetables, you can add nuts and seeds, sea vegetables, dried or fresh fruit, nut butters, sauerkraut, kimchi or other fermented foods, tofu, tempeh, beans or lentils, etc.

Grain Bowl Sample “Recipe”

Serves 1-2

1-1 1/2 cups cooked grain

raw carrot, thinly sliced

raw daikon, thinly sliced

raw cabbage, thinly sliced

raw kale, chopped

cucumber, thinly sliced,

avocado, sliced

green onion, chopped

lemon

salt and pepper

Use a large soup bowl and put the grain in the bottom. Pile a little handful of each of the vegetables on top. Squeeze a generous helping of lemon juice over the top. Add a little sea salt and fresh ground pepper.

Yesterday, I made a big bowl of this and ate about half of it (I used only half an avocado). When I realized there was no way I was going to eat the whole thing in one sitting, I ate up all the avocado, since it doesn’t keep well, covered the bowl with a plate and stuck it in the fridge for later. Later on, when I got hungry, I pulled out the bowl, cut up the other half an avocado on top and ate the rest. A great tasting, healthy and filling meal that fed me all day long.

What kinds of things would you like to eat in a grain bowl? Any favorite combos or fun ideas?

Academic Writing and Scholar-Activism

Posts have been a bit more infrequent than usual here on the blog because I’ve been writing up a storm in the world of academics and, quite frankly, I’m pooped! Last week I spent intensively working on getting a draft of the paper for my talk this year at the annual geographer’s conference (AAG). Another project I’m working on is a journal article in collaboration with another geographer (long distance), which is a new and fun experience! And I’m also in this writing class that I’ve mentioned before and we’re working on an article for submission to a geography journal. I’m hoping to submit that one in the next few weeks. The article is about the sexualized violence and gendered commodification of the animal body (both males and females) in the dairy industry. The process of writing the paper, while difficult, has been really fun. Finally, I’m putting into words some of the research I did on the dairy industry, and trying to make sense of it through figuring out an argument. It’s been a great experience so far! Okay, I know I sound like a big dork…”Academic writing is fun!!” I’m sure some of you are thinking, “What?!” But I really do love the writing process. I’ve always liked the process of forming sentences, searching for the right words, trying to get the right rhythm of words and ideas on the page (I get this from my dad). This particular process is also challenging (beyond just the act of writing) because of the complexity of the ideas I’m trying to sort out. The first week of class, the professor teaching the class (Victoria Lawson) said, “In a journal article, you should try to accomplish one thing really well.” In other words, there’s not space to develop a lot of different arguments/ideas in a journal article and so the challenge is to hone the argument to one main theme. There’s something about this process that’s like a puzzle — figuring out what adds to that singular argument and what detracts and then, at the same time, arguing for why this argument is more broadly relevant beyond just the empirical case you’re exploring.

One of the things I’ve been trying to be mindful of through the writing process is making the prose in the article readable. Academic writing can tend to be jargon-heavy, difficult to read, and downright inaccessible. When I got to grad school and started reading a lot of academic writing, I remember thinking, “I have no idea what this is saying! What have I gotten myself into?” In time, I learned a lot of the jargon and it made reading academic writing easier, but I continue to think that academic writing should be made more readable. Really I think it is an ethical issue. Particularly for academics who are doing work related to social, environmental, and animal justice topics, I feel that we have the responsibility as scholar-activists to make the effort to avoid jargon, to explain complex ideas and terms in more accessible language and to make an effort to resist the isolation and elitism of the university structure, even as we may be embedded in it. I am in grad school doing the work I’m doing because I want to change hearts and minds about animals and I want to use this great opportunity of being involved in an academic intellectual community to do it. Lots of academics commit to being scholar-activists and attempt to dissolve this (at times, seemingly impenetrable-yet-somewhat-imaginary) boundary between doing ‘academics’ and doing ‘activism.’ These scholar-activists believe that academia/activism are not mutually exclusive. Scholar-activists teach, they write in academic and public spaces, they give talks and get involved with activist organizations, they do lots of things that cause them to step outside of the so-called Ivory Tower and engage with the world in meaningful ways.

Writing these papers these last couple of months has reminded me of the importance of making the effort to make language accessible and the importance of constantly redefining what is meant by scholar-activism. What do you think?

Walnuts!

You know how sometimes the most basic, boring foods can taste so good? I’ve been feeling that way about raw walnuts lately. I have been in a major food rut these past few months and have not been enjoying eating much, so this love for the walnuts is really saying something. The highlight of this food rut is that I’ve been eating this amazingly good oatmeal every morning topped with walnuts, cinnamon, coconut oil and a little dark brown sugar. Heaven! The raw walnuts are especially good, and I find myself munching on some while I wait for the oatmeal to cook. I don’t know about you, but usually if I’m craving a whole food like raw walnuts or kale or beans, I indulge that craving because I’m guessing that my body needs something from that food. Certainly it would be overboard to eat cups of walnuts everyday, but a handful a day is great!

What’s the deal with walnuts?

In addition to being tasty, raw walnuts are really good for you, too. Thank goodness! They are rich in Omega-3 fatty acids and help to promote heart health. They are also high in B6, B9, and Vitamin E. According to HuffPo, walnuts protect brain function as we age, they lower cholesterol, they may reduce breast and prostate cancer growth, they are loaded with antioxidants… AND if my series on childrearing is actually making you want to have kids, walnuts apparently help to boost semen quality, so grab a handful of walnuts before you jump in the sack!

Do you have a food that you can’t get enough of lately?

Spring Weddings at The Kind Life

Happy Monday, dear readers! I don’t know about your particular part of the world, but here in Seattle, signs of spring are everywhere. The trees are getting tiny buds, the crocuses are blooming, the 50 tulips I planted last fall have sprouted! Lots of exciting signs of spring, despite the fact that we have had quite a few cold, damp days in the last couple of weeks. Speaking of spring, I have a guest fashion post up over at The Kind Life today. Hop on over there to read up on environmentally-friendly, vegan weddings!

Having Children, Having a Career…Having it All (Part 3)

To continue the childrearing series, I wanted to think through the subject of how women having children and having a career fit together. If you missed Part 1 and Part two, hop on over and read them and I’d love your comments/thoughts/reactions. There have been a flurry of articles lately claiming that women can’t ‘have it all’ (or at least not all at once). The argument is that while the women’s rights movement made great strides in terms of getting women into the workplace, the structure of the system is such that women are still at a disadvantage, especially if they want to have children. I’m not so interested in trying to answer the question, “Can women have it all?” I don’t actually think this is an answerable question. For one, ‘having it all’ is different for every person — for some, having it all would be being an active primary caregiver type parent and working part time at a job you love. For others, it might be being a full-time parent and not working a second job. For others, it would be parenting, having the high-powered career they’ve dreamed of, and volunteering 10 hours a week at a local women’s shelter….My point is that depending on what “having it all” means to you determines whether or not it’s reasonable to assume that you can have it all.

What the articles on the subject say is that women can’t be active, primary parenting figures and have a high-powered career at the same time. Something has to give if you choose to have both. Either your career success is halted, or your children are in daycare to accommodate your work schedule. For some women, this choice is not a huge point of conflict — some women know that they being a parent is more important to them and others know that career success is more important than being with their kids all day long. But other — and I suspect, most — women feel at least somewhat conflicted about this choice.

To use an example I’m probably most familiar with… the academic career is an interesting site for thinking through this issue. In some ways, an academic career is much more forgiving schedule-wise than other careers in terms of fitting a child into the mix. Teaching schedules are often somewhat flexible in terms of days/times, many academics have the summers off to do research and writing, you rarely have 40+ hours a week of required show-up time (though, most academics seem to work much longer hours than this when it’s all said and done). If you choose to go the tenure route, however, there are all kinds of other pressures that make hefty demands on your time and energy — publishing, teaching, researching, committee meetings and other departmental service, advising, conferences, funding applications, etc. If you choose not to go the tenure route, you risk sacrificing job stability, a living wage, health insurance and other benefits, etc.

There’s been much talk in our department lately about having babies. After a long hiatus, four women in our department have been pregnant in the last year. Traditionally, I think, there’s been a sort of unspoken understanding that the best time to have kids as a woman in the academy is post-tenure. Once you’ve reached that elusive and hard-won career goal, many women decide to have children. This seems to be a trend coming out of the 197os when women became particularly empowered to pursue their own careers, rather than stay at home and have children. This meant that through the 80s, 90s and 2000s, a whole host of women were waiting until later in life to have children (if they had children at all). In the academy, unless you’re some kind of prodigy, tenure usually comes when you’re in your late 30s/early 40s or beyond. Now, there’s a change in the conversation — that maybe a better time to have kids is actually in graduate school. Though graduate school is hugely stressful for work and financial reasons, there is also more flexibility in grad school than in an early academic career. And taking an extra year or two to finish graduate school has less impact on your career than halting progress in a junior faculty position. Some women say “fuck it, my reproductive life is not going to be dictated by the conventions of career advancement.” And others seem very concerned with the “best time” career-wise to have children. Plus, for most of us, we don’t actually get to choose whether or not we work — we have to work and earn a living because we’re unfortunately not all independently wealthy. So how to negotiate this need with the role children play in our lives (if we choose to have them).

I don’t actually have a clear opinion on this subject one way or another — other than to say that it is a complicated issue and that there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution if what you want is a high-powered career at the same time as you want to be home raising a child. Something’s got to give and I imagine for many who are in this position, it is a hugely conflicted choice. The take-away, I think, is that we should be having this conversation because (as the article above says) it’s actually damaging to other women to keep perpetuating this myth that we can ‘have it all’ if we only work hard enough. It seems to me that the conversation we should be having is not how to ‘have it all’, but how to negotiate the compromises we make to try to have both. Or how to negotiate the compromise with ourselves and others when we decide that one or the other is more important to us. Ideally, we would be able to alter the structure of the system to accommodate this tension — to provide more space for parents to be parents in the workplace. But until that can happen, we are stuck with working towards make work/family balance more just and having this conversation.

Note: I want to point out that in some ways this post is coming from an extreme place of privilege. For many women, there is little choice to have children or not, to work or not, to seek a high-powered career or not. For others, there simply isn’t time or space to have these conversations because of the demands of making a living and raising a child (or children) at the same time under difficult circumstances. Just having this conversation is a privilege.

What do you think?

Saoirse on Valentine’s Day

Maizy’s testimony this week reminded me that it’s been a while since I’ve given an update on how things are going with Saoirse. If you’re new to the blog, Saoirse (pronounced SEER-SHA) is a beagle we adopted from a research lab this past fall where she was used for blood draws/transfusions in medical research. When she came to us, she had never been outside before — she’d never seen the grass or the sky or a cat or a couch. If you missed the first posts on her story, you can read more here, here and here.

After 4+ months with us, Saoirse is more at home than ever. Each day it seems like her personality comes out a little more. And let me just say that this little dog is funny! Every morning, while we’re getting ready for the day, she runs to our dirty laundry pile and, piece by piece, drags all of our dirty clothes into the living room and makes a nest for herself on one of the dog beds or on the couch. She piles up all the dirty laundry and then rolls around in it. Throughout the day, the laundry gets dragged and strewn around the living room so that by the afternoon there are dirty socks, underwear, t-shirts, sweatshirts, and jeans everywhere! She’s really a tiny dog, so some of the clothes, like jeans, are heavy and hard to drag, but she is very determined and is extremely proud of herself when she makes it to the couch with a particularly large article of clothing.

She also continues to learn a little more each day about how to play with Maizy and she’s taken to trying to play with Eden (one of the cats). She and Eden are about the same size and Eden regularly gets a little rambunctious and bounds around the house. Saoirse tries to play with him. They’ve begun chasing each other a bit, and though at first Eden was pretty freaked, he actually seems to enjoy it now.

Saoirse is still pretty afraid of most people (other than us) and she really found her voice during my dad’s visit over the holiday. It got so bad while he was here that any time he moved or came into the room or made weird noises, Saoirse would start howling and growling at him. Now, she does that with most people we see on the street during our walks.

I’d be lying if I said things have been easy with helping Saoirse adapt to life in a house. She is not housetrained and that has been a really hard thing for her to learn as an adult dog. As we’ve been trying to help her learn not to pee/poop in the house, there have been A LOT of accidents. Last weekend we had to clean the two rooms that have carpets with a steam cleaner. We went over them 7 times and they still smell like pee (they’ll have to be replaced). A week or so ago, I started on a more rigorous regimen of housetraining. We go out every hour on the hour to the exact same spot in the yard. We stand there until she pees. Those first couple of days, I was spending more time in the yard waiting for her to pee than I was spending in the house working. When she pees or poops, I praise her lavishly and give her a treat while she’s in the act. Any accidents in the house are ignored and cleaned up without comment. Now, she’s got a pretty good routine and she’ll pee in the yard immediately when I take her out. Eric is now on break from work, so he’ll have time to get this system down with her, too. Every few hours, we go on a real walk around the neighborhood.

In spite of the frustrating walk/accidents thing, things are going so much better than we expected. She is such a sweetheart and she is probably one of the most loving animals (human or nonhuman) I’ve ever met. She still sleeps snuggled under the covers between us in bed and loves to snuggle on the couch in front of the TV. Anytime we sit down, she leaps onto our laps and showers us with kisses.

So there it is — a quick Saoirse update! Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way!

Guest Posts at The Kind Life and Our Hen House

Good morning, Monday readers! Today I’ve got two guest posts up elsewhere that I’d like to nudge you on over to read. The first, is a nice follow-up to yesterday’s post on chocolatey Valentine’s day treats. Head on over to The Kind Life to read about Food Empowerment Project’s work to educate about the worst forms of child labor in the chocolate industry. Such an important issue and if you haven’t already signed the Clif Bar petition, please consider doing so!

The other guest post is over at Our Hen House — a testimony of someone near and dear to my heart: Maizy! Maizy changed my life in radical and important ways and she has taught me so much about love and human/animal relationships.

Have a good Monday and I’ll see you soon for another post!