A Hippie and Her Food

 

My quest is a smaller footprint. Less waste. Less harm. My desire is to tread lightly in this space I’m borrowing from future generations. Oakland, California made that a touch easier. I drove less. The produce at my grocery store was local )less than 100 miles). Compostable and recyclable materials were so normalized that doing anything else was scandal.

I’m still shocked that Whataburger, a Texas institution, uses styrofoam cups for no discernible reason.

My nieces call me a hippie. They swear they don’t but my sister assures me they hippie do. I’m not offended. Even if the term doesn’t resonate with me, the sentiment it conveys does. I'm pro-tree hugging. Even as I know that individual choices have little bearing against a great tide of industrial waste and pollution I try anyway.

Some days there are compostable successes and other days there are plastic setbacks.

My apartment has a tumbler compost bin; of no interest to many but a definitive selling point for me. I keep a small bowl in my freezer and dump my organic waste into it until it is full and I can (bring it to room temperature to not disrupt the decomposition cycle) add it to the tumbler. It feels...complete. The missing link in a cycle of planting and eating and starting all over again.

Before I get to the compost bin though, I am trying mightily to avoid wasting food.

I cook. A lot.

If I’m in my apartment I’m more likely to cook than grabbing a quick bite from one of a dozen places within 5 minutes of my house. Something about the magic of pulling a meal together without having to put on shoes is so gratifying.

All that cooking leaves my produce bin flush with an array of vegetables and herbs. Right now I have fresh broccoli, cauliflower, kale, zucchini, sweet peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, mint, parsley, and dill in my house. Oh, and cilantro. But I’ll get to the cilantro in a moment.

My newest cooking challenge is to juggle the things in my fridge in such a way that I don’t have to throw anything out. Sometimes that means cooking something I hadn’t planned on cooking, like roasted Japanese eggplant to go with my zucchini lentil fritters. Sometimes it means getting creative with a meal I’d already planned, like using the increasingly sad looking leek staring at me from the recesses of my fridge in my black beans (leeks are in the onion family so why the hell not). In those moments I proclaim victory over my compost bin.

Of course tonight, when I pulled out the cilantro I bought a few days ago, I was reminded that I should

have rinsed and dried it, possibly put it in a glass of water or at least wrapped it loosely in a towel. Instead I tossed it into the crisper still bound at the stems and a little moist. The slimy mess I retrieved when preparing the garnish for my dinner was...disheartening.

A single plantain mocked me from the counter-top. Pitch black, I couldn’t tell if it had gone the way of the cilantro or the leek. Not too soft, not oozy, it would be perfect or it would be disgusting there would be no middle ground. Luckily it aged, not like an avocado but like Ciciley Tyson, and was the final complement to my meal.

Sometimes the rotting of food is a slap to the wallet, specialty items returned to the earth prematurely. But these days, the price isn’t the point. One dollar’s worth of cilantro, a single plantain, won’t break my budget but the waste is no less salient...this was grown, watered, fertilized. Somebody picked this, exposed to the elements, at risk for COVID.

I purchase food to eat. I should eat it.

Plant Murder?

If its yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.

Scoff if you will, but I’m living in the midst of a drought. My car remains unwashed (I finally have a valid reason for that!) and my showers and tooth washing and clothes washing are all responsibly done. But until today, just now, it stopped there. 

I have houseplants. A lot of houseplants. If they were cats I would be “that” person. There wouldn’t be a reason to call the ASPCA but you’d wonder about me. Of course, the good thing about houseplants is that no one really notices them the way you most assuredly notice cats. No one really cares. 

Plants are my compromise. They are a way for me to care for something without having to worry too much about taking a trip, or moving abruptly. If necessary, I can give them away. No one considers you a bad person for abandoning a succulent. When vacationing, I can usually count on a friend to water them; once in a three week period is usually reasonable for both plants and helpful friends. 

Plants seems like such benign things. Only, just tonight, my orchid was dry, which prompted me to make the rounds to the other eight plants in my house, and I realized that I’m wasting water. Sort of.

All over California, debates are raging and folks are making lifestyle changes (or being judged for not making lifestyle changes). People are pulling up their grass and replacing it with a fake substitute or, less strange, with indigenous plants that require less water. 

Meanwhile, in my house, plants abound and most aren’t indigenous and easy on their water intake. My apartment has little direct sunlight, despite my many windows, and succulents don’t really thrive in here. So, instead of a terrarium full of glossy plump leaves that fancy desert-like environments, I have a hodge podge of gifted and purchased plants that I water weekly or so. 

I can’t even eat any of them. 

Struck by the idea that I’m wasting water, I quickly searched the internet. Google has an answer to every other question, why not this? While I found all kinds of interesting information (which plants clean the air the best and how to use graywater) nothing stated whether I should murder my plants and turn them to compost.

I’ve decided to let them live. Newly inspired to use my shower runoff in a number of ways, my guilt is sated for the moment.

Stuff for Stuff's Sake

The back of my car. 

My reality for many years was that I could fit everything I own in the back of my car. Well, the back and front and whatever free space my dad (a former loadmaster for the military) could find. It was first, a reality, and second, a badge of honor. I wasn’t beholden to stuff. 

Partly it was my nomadic lifestyle; I moved every two to four years (hell, that is still true as I approach 40). Partly it was a meager budget (that I have done amazing things with). And at least some part of it is that I’ve spent so much time in places with people that don’t have an abundance of material goods. It is difficult to feel justified in buying a new plate set when all of the plates are unbroken and have the added luxury of matching when people I work with cook with warped pots and cut with battered knives.

My first stint in the Bay my apartment was pretty big and replete with storage space. “Don’t worry, you’ll buy stuff to fill this space,” a friend assured me as she opened and closed empty cabinets. I didn’t have a retort because her words were like a foreign language– actually they were more foreign than any language I’d ever heard. I didn’t realize there were people in the world who thought your belongings should be greater than or equal to the space you had to house them. That wasn’t my perspective.

Seven years later and I’m not in search of “things” but my tendency toward minimalism – before the term was trending and had websites dedicated to the concept – is beginning to conflict with a desire to acquire things. All of a sudden I want new plates because the old ones are ugly and I’ve had them since college (I purchased them after much handwringing) and I want a food processor because my blender (the cause of hand-wringing a few months before) couldn’t handle my homemade veggie burger recipe.

The desire started small. I remember fretting over buying cutting boards, “I cut on plates in South Africa, I don’t really need boards,” I rationalized. Ess, in Nigeria, told me to buy a damn cutting board. And I did. But it hasn’t stopped with cutting boards…now I’m looking at tiered racks to organize my spices and a pot the same size of a pot I already have so that I can cook two different things at the same time (novel, I know). 

I haven’t purchased those things. I keep stopping myself. The more things I acquire (a carry-on suitcase to trade-off with my travel backpack when traveling for work, a throw pillow for my purely utilitarian couch, the ruffle so you can’t see under my bed) the more I feel…wasteful, extravagant? Not to mention less mobile. A food processor takes up a sizeable amount of space. 

My minimalist ways appear to be fading even as minimalism is a lifestyle choice is on the rise. I am intrigued by the varied reasons people become minimalists – the different ways it translates in the ways they live. My sister pointed out a host of reasons for the shift some people are making:

•       Spend less money 
•       Avoid consumerism
•       Take up less space
•       The environment

 I’d never really considered some of these other potential benefits. Although I know that the making (and buying) of stuff is inherently waste-filled, I never really considered how a certain type of minimalist lifestyle could combat that. Buying used items instead of new ones, buying quality items instead of cheap ones. My sister pointed out that the Le Creuset pot she inherited from her mother-in-law lasted a literal lifetime and outlasted the nice pots she had purchased. When it finally broke, the company replaced it. 

That pot addressed two schools of minimalism: fewer resources used to continue to replace an object and the money saved from not having to do so. Of course those pots are expensive and not an option for everyone, but…the reality is that sometimes we go cheap (not inexpensive) for the short-term gain and lose out on long-term benefits.

I never manage to stay put long enough to warrant purchasing high-end items; I haven’t made a habit of keeping most things long enough for it to matter since I shed my life every few years and start over somewhere else – often in a new country. 

But slowly, things of quality have found me: the cast iron skillet my mother seasoned and then passed on to me, the pot and knife I inherited from my friend. These are things that I wrap up carefully and put aside when I move. 

Minimalism has nuance for me now. There are various things for me to consider other than the ability to cram four years (or 40) into my car.

That doesn’t make me any more comfortable with purchasing things I know are not remotely essential. Right now I’m considering a carrot string peeler and a tiered spice rack…I’ll probably get the latter and ignore the former. It isn’t about cost; instead, it is about the amount of use it will get. And while I cook a lot, the ability to see my spices outweighs the novelty of thin strips of root vegetables. 

Whatever changes I’m going through, I am mindful of what I own, what I should acquire, and what I might purge. On the floor in my home right now is a television I never use, a bunch of clothes I never wear, and a hoard of papers vaguely related to past taxes. Their presence makes me at least as anxious as the idea of buying new things but infinitely easier for me to remedy. 

Stuff for stuff’s sake is horrible but all stuff isn’t bad. A minimalist by any other name (and for any number of reasons) I’m still searching for the balance.

Hypocritical Thirst

Hypocrisy is a fierce and greedy beast.

When I lived in rural South Africa I seethed with an intense disgust every time I went to Pretoria and passed the various consulate and international houses that lined some of the streets. They were magnificent houses – I assume. It was hard to tell much from the stone walls latticed with ivy purposefully woven along the front surface. Without fail there would be a small sprinkler system aimed at the roots of that ivy spraying incessantly. The water, having already saturated the roots, continued to trickle, leaving a dark patch of mud meandering into the street. Water puddled. No one seemed to notice.

 But I noticed.

Stepping past puddles of water I would rant to whoever was nearby to hear or simply in my own head, “How dare they water a stone wall? How dare they waste something the women in my village walk for hours to reach?”

But that was Pretoria and I lived in Makushoaneng, only a few hours – if worlds – away. In Makushoaneng it was normal to see women walk beyond the perimeter of the village with jerricans or buckets. Hours later they would return with receptacles sloshing lightly on their head, balanced neatly on the checha (folded cloth that keeps the bucket in place). Potable or contaminated, the state of the water depended on how far they were willing to walk. An open source nearby or further still. The pump at the center of town had been broken since before I arrived. We’d had meetings about fixing it, but when I left, two years later, the pump was still broken. 

I was obsessed with water back then. Obsessed with potable water despite the bore hole I had in my yard. Even when I returned to the land of flushing toilets and long hot showers, I found myself preoccupied with how much I used. How often I turned it on. How other people consumed it. I constantly reminded myself of the women walking for miles in search of that most basic thing…water.

And now I find myself in California. We are in the midst of the longest drought in decades (some say back to 1850). For the most part I am a bay area stereotype (sans the restricted diet), I recycle and buy local as much as possible. When I buy organic it is usually with the farm workers in mind more than myself, and my eggs are cage and hormone free, a mutually beneficial arrangement. 

And I’m an “if its yellow let it mellow” kind of woman. Once again, TMI (too much info) I know. But old American toilets use an insane amount of water and I live alone and so I don’t see a need in sending gallons to the sewer simply because I am well hydrated. 

I’m thinking about mother earth generally. I’m thinking about California specifically.

Only I don’t…think about mother earth that is. Not always. Not when it could really count. 

Last weekend I treated myself to a fancy spa day. I craved the serene space and humid air. I wanted the warm water and time with friends. Harmless enough…

Except the sheer volume of water I used boggles my mind. As soon as I walked in I was assaulted by my own shortsightedness…my own hypocrisy of lifestyle. 

I showered to get into the bath. I lounged in the bath. I walked past the wet sauna, the air so heavy inside that it looked like a cloud outside an airplane window. 

Water water everywhere. 

Outside a much needed rain fell softly on the streets of san Francisco. I emerged from the moist comfort of my spa treatment only mildly sheepish. In my head I’m fast-forwarding my thinking to March when I can return to my favorite local spa, only marginally (if at all) less water-logged.

I haven’t reconciled my hypocrisy yet. I’m sure, given a few quiet moments I can work up a reasonable explanation for my behavior and possibly some convoluted justification for it. But really, the answer is that, as with so many other hypocrisies, I took a time out. A time out from thinking and acting in the way that I swear I believe. 

Hypocrite is a heavy moniker to wear; I hope I put it down soon.