Neverending Cacophonies

I just found this great resource for kitchen witches that tells you what produce is in season in your region. It’s called Seasonal Food Guide! You can use the website, OR they have both Apple and Android apps.

After looking through it briefly, I really love how clean, easy to navigate, and informative SFG is. You can browse all the produce in season now in your region, or you can search by specific foods/seasons. 

It gives you a quick blurb about each food item and a chart showing its seasonality. The best part is that you can click the “Learn & Cook” button that brings you to a page with information on each food’s history, characteristics, cooking and gardening tips, etc. (In the app, you can also set a shopping reminder!)

I really like that it doesn’t overwhelm you with information right away, but its all at your fingertips if you just click a button.

Beyond the fact that I know how to use both a phone book and a rotary phone and can read cursive (as long as it’s not too horrifically messy), I think it was the attitude of “Oh no, we’ve got you because you couldn’t possibly figure out how to use something that’s new to you” that really made me snort. But I think that’s the key to this and similar memes that I’ve seen.

They don’t think we could figure out how to use something new to us, because they can’t do it. 

Like, if you presented a millennial with a rotary phone or a phone book and they had never, ever used one or seen one used before, I can guarantee pretty much any millennial could figure out how to use it. Because that’s what we do: we adapt. We’ve been through so many variations of technology and seen so many new forms of technology emerge that we’ve had to learn to adapt swiftly and fluidly. It’s second nature to us.

Put a boomer in a room with a smartphone, laptop, and tablet however, and well…different story.

You know, the recent popular trend in participatory entertainment in which thousands of millennials literally go out and pay money to voluntarily be locked in a room where they have to solve puzzles under a time pressure, often using antiquated or analog technology, secret codes, and mechanisms they don’t yet understand, all without using their phones/the internet. For fun.

For many of us, that’s not panic-inducing, that’s just our idea of an enjoyable Saturday night out with some friends!

I just found this great resource for kitchen witches that tells you what produce is in season in your region. It’s called Seasonal Food Guide! You can use the website, OR they have both Apple and Android apps.

After looking through it briefly, I really love how clean, easy to navigate, and informative SFG is. You can browse all the produce in season now in your region, or you can search by specific foods/seasons. 

It gives you a quick blurb about each food item and a chart showing its seasonality. The best part is that you can click the “Learn & Cook” button that brings you to a page with information on each food’s history, characteristics, cooking and gardening tips, etc. (In the app, you can also set a shopping reminder!)

I really like that it doesn’t overwhelm you with information right away, but its all at your fingertips if you just click a button.

When I was little more than a boy I sent a book I had written to Roald Dahl, hoping he would read it and tell me if I was any good or not. He never replied. As an elderly overworked writer, my sympathies are all with Roald Dahl. And I think, what if he’d said no? Would that have been so discouraging that I would have stopped? And if he’d said yes, what then?

Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.

Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.

However.