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.

Prodigal Writer

I haven't written in so long this feels strange.

I mean I've written. I've done work. But sitting in front of a computer for my own reasons has been something I conveniently avoided. The flux of returning from a year of traveling the world into a home-country ravaged by COVID-19 provided wonderful cover. Who could argue with my sincere explanations of needing space and time to process what had happened, what was and continues to be happening in the world?

Only, things are always happening.

The world is always turning and tragedies, big and small, are always here or on the horizon waiting to make grand entrances. The truth is much more garbled than the eloquence of global tragedy. The truth is lazy and scared and stifled. So today I sit in front of my computer, only a month late to my 2021 plans for myself, to write.

Writing when I travel has always been an easier task than writing at home. Life feels so much bigger when I'm recounting trying to chase a stubborn Jagenda, my chicken, out of the living room where she insisted on laying a single egg on the couch every morning; or having the kids (and adults) laugh at me as I tried to carry the water from the pump on my head like everyone else. But what convenient excuses those expectations of my daily musings set.

No random animal stories? My pen should be still. Not drenched in water and left with only half full bucket? My fingernails should not click against keys.

The last two years have been flush with lessons and realizations and triumph and terror and love...so much love. There have been quiet victories and small stinging tragedies that dwarf in the shadow of death and sickness and houselessness- but they are no less tragic to me.

So this year I want to return to my pen. Return to telling the tiny stories of food and fancy and friendship. Share the warmth I am able to gleam from those I love, the ones who by some magical turn of fate and gift from the heavens, love me too.

Driving While B(l)ack in America

“By yourself?” is the most frequent question I get about my 2019 travels. More than “how much did it cost?” or even “what countries did you visit?” People seem fixated on the alone part. The part I don’t think much about.

It isn’t that I haven’t experienced dangerous situations in my travels, or that nothing bad has happened to me, just that I don’t equate those things with the solitary nature of my travels. Bad things happen every day to people alone and in groups. Misfortune is not tethered to folks walking through life alone. So my worries when I travel, my stresses, are mostly the same as the ones I have in America.

One thing I didn’t worry much about in my travels was interactions with the police. But that was there, this is America and police interactions are a different breed of

Staring at what I thought was a low hanging orange moon in the distance, I ran a stop-sign I've stopped at a million times. When I saw the flashing lights I was genuinely confused. I wasn’t up to speed yet. I had swerved a little wide getting in my lane but that didn’t feel excessive.

Mind racing, I put on my blinker and headed to the curb. I fumbled with my radio, started to reach for my purse, then remembered I’m Black and in America and rolled down my window, turned off the car and put my hands at 10 and 2.

My heart raced.

The last time I was pulled over I was in Oakland and got a $300 ticket for dropping someone off at the bus stop of a BART station (no good deed goes unpunished). The cop was as gracious as anyone handing you a $300 bill can be but that was before the spate of recorded black deaths at the hands of police officers so fear wasn’t at the forefront of my mind at that time. I think it was even before Oscar Grant’s murder was preserved in grainy phone video that was cutting edge at the time.

It has been so long since I’ve bee pulled over that I didn’t anticipate how fearful I would feel when I saw the flashing lights and prepared for what should be a routine interaction. Only it didn’t feel routine. It felt fraught.

To be clear, neither cop was rude to me – but there were two of them. The first approached as I'd expected, the second one walked up a few minutes into the stop, knocked lightly on the passenger window, and asked to lower it so he could inspect my car.

No one yelled at me, asked intrusive questions, and I drove away with only a warning.

Still, my heart raced in my chest as I accelerated away from the curb and merged left to enter the freeway. My mind raced, listing all of the things I forgot to do. I hadn’t put on my hazards, I hadn’t thought to record the interaction. If this had gone differently there was nothing to show how accommodating I was, how quickly I complied with requests, how formal my posture.

Sitting on my bed at 2:15 am, my mind still racing, I can’t believe those are the things I focused on...only I can believe it. And it is the ease with which I have slunk back into this very specific American reality that frightens me.

I shouldn’t have run the stop sign, but I shouldn’t fear for my life when being reprimanded for it.

Note: This happened back in early January and I just never posted. This fear hasn't receded.

What it Costs

America is obsessed with time. Obsessed with not “wasting” time. All over the world --in countries America likes to compare itself to in terms of GDP, 9th grade math scores, and life expectancy-- students take a gap year, a time between high school and “what next?”. They travel.

Of course there are financial limitations to this rite of passage but it occurs to me that even among the wealthier in America, those that likely could afford such a luxury, the gap year has never caught on.

You could argue that Americans don’t "gap year" because we don’t travel overseas but I could argue that travel doesn’t have to be international, especially in a county as large as the United States. Maybe we have it reversed and we don’t travel because we don’t do a "gap year".

Whatever the reasoning order I think that logic is wrong, I think the issue is time.

Americans don’t take that year because then we’ll be “behind”. Behind who or what I am uncertain, only that whatever or whoever it is chases Americans throughout our lives. It is the reason people don’t take vacations even when finances allow, the reason we don’t take time between jobs – god forbid we have a gap in our resumes.

I fight the increasing volume of this narrative in my head everyday. A year out of the conventional job market while I traveled the map gorging on food and meeting interesting people, I worry I'm behind.  If I am, does the “lost” time trump the past year?

Fourteen countries this year: Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Japan, Netherlands, Croatia, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Taiwan. A year of experiences. Was that really less valuable than a 9-5 that is really an 8-7?

I don’t think so.

I’m just ending my trip and beginning my job search. In a few weeks, maybe a few months, I'll begin to see if my decision to change up my life for a bit must be weighed not in the joy of the experience that I currently view it in, but instead in the context of loss...such a deficit-approach to living.

No matter what greets me on the other side of this year of living differently, I know that the “loss” Americans fear is double edged. The promotion, the job, the salary, are all potential losses...but I lost my dear friend Shoes, nine years ago. He was there one moment, laughing and drinking and making my life and the world a better place – and then...he wasn’t. Then he was gone. Medical school and studying and all the responsible things he’d done knocked off a motorbike taxi in the middle of Kampala.

Except he was in the middle of Kampala, Uganda; he’d traveled throughout India; he was living the life he wanted to live and not simply following the prescription counselors laid out before him. And so while I still grieve the loss of his unique brand of brilliant beauty in the world, I am also comforted that he hadn’t waited,  hadn't feared lagging behind...hadn’t waited to see or do or experience the world that was taken from him, that he was taken from, so suddenly.

This year has given me grace and laughter and perspective and friendship and challenges and tears and time and distance away from what is expected of me.

Back in America, searching for my "what next", I hope I remember what this year gave me instead of buying into the easy narrative of what it cost.

Kindness of Strangers

“I always depend on the kindness of strangers.”

I don’t but...oh how I benefit. I’d never thought before how the word is kindness, not niceness. Lots of people are nice. And I don’t mean to disparage nice. I am nice. But kindness...kindness is another thing altogether. Kindness is not an affectation for the comfort of self or others. Kindness offers something up of the person offering it. Niceness is smile, a head nod, a greeting, a "have a nice day".

The folks at my Taroko hotel hotel didn’t speak English. So when I clomped down the stairs, both my packs slung across my body, she smiled in the vague way I smile when I don’t understand what people are saying. A smile that says I am friendly and mean no harm but also I cannot participate in this conversation.

I typed out “how can I get to the train station" on Google Translate, and she graciously walked me out of the front door, onto the porch, and pointed across the street to the bus stop.

Google hadn’t mentioned a bus to me earlier when I tried to figure out directions on my own, and since it is Sunday I hadn’t questioned the omission, but now I wondered if this would be Google’s second failure on my trip.

I crossed the street near the crosswalk, early in the day and little traffic allowed me to stroll. I passed what appeared to be a storefront church before arriving at the covered bus stop. My eyes glossed over the signage mostly written in Chinese, the few English words not helpful in deciphering my transportation fate.

And then a minivan pulled up, a child of indecipherable age leaning out of the front window. He looked at me and away, a smile sneaking across his lips, a glance as familiar to me in my travels as tourist menus (although I try to avoid these). For a second I forgot I was in Taiwan and flashed back to South Africa and wondered if the Sunday transport was a khumbi (minivan taxi).

But no, the van was parking and an entire family disembarked: the father, driving; the mother, holding a two-month-old girl; the sheepishly smiling 13-years-old, holding his 7-years-old brother.

I smiled, my eyes trailing to the baby because- I do love a baby. And the mom smiled and headed toward me. “Hello,” she offered. I returned her greeting. And then the most universal of travel conversations unfolded. “Where are you from?” “Where are you going?” on their part, “How old are the kids?” on mine.

The Xicheng Taroko train station, she assured me, was a little too far to walk, but off to the side her husband busily looked up the bus schedule and assured me one was four minutes out. We posed, me mom and children, for the picture that is often requested (less often in Taiwan than in China but still more than other places) and they continued on their way...I suspect to the church I'd passed.

I looked curiously up the road, in the direction my bus should arrive and sure enough a bus ambled down the street. The 13-year-old motioned to his dad and his dad walked smiling toward the street, urging me out too. He waved the bus in, had a short conversation with the driver, and then assured me this was the right one.

The doors shut, and I was gone.

I don’t always depend on the kindness of strangers. I depend on technology, and research, my own wits, and blind luck...I don’t always depend on the kindness of strangers, but oh how I benefit just the same.

Culinary Kindreds

My people are greedy.

Well, ALL of my people aren’t greedy. Many of the people dearest to me couldn’t care less about food. But my culinary kindreds, those people love food, those people are greedy.

A few months ago when I traveled to Sicily I visited with old friends from the Bay. We spent a solid week eating. I don’t mean we ate, everyone eats, I mean most of our waking hours were dedicated to eating or the pursuit of food. It was, quite simply, a delight. Here were people that I didn’t have to give a reason for stopping to look at food because they would never question the validity of my appetite based on something as trivial as the fact that we’d just eaten moments ago. These are people who were happy to order a bevy of items to nosh on on our way to a meal because “you have to try this”.

My people are greedy, in the best, most enchanting way.

Hiking the nearest trail in

Taroko (a place where a little research might have served me well), slow and plodding as is my way anytime I'm headed uphill, I stopped for the gazillionth time, Breathing heavily, eyes grazing the green enveloping me, laughing uproariously to Thirst Aid Kit, and watched three men only a few moments apart, scale the stairs I was reluctant to revisit.

The fourth man smiled and greeted me with a hearty hello. He asked me if I was going up or down, and once he confirmed I was (in theory) heading in his direction, he urged me to join him.

“I’m tired and slow,” I waved him off with a sheepish smile. “So am I, it gives me an excuse to rest,” he laughed. And so I got to my feet and began the climb again. Three or seven steps, stop to breathe heavily, seven to 15 steps, stop to breathe heavily. 

In between my panting he peppered me with questions, local trivia, and his own story: how long am I traveling?,Taiwan has mountains 3000 meters – taller than the Rockies, he just returned from Houston. Another man joined our ascent, and we all continued, up and up and up.

At the end of one of the trails the other men I’d watch pass were gathered. One had continued on to the next trail, the others waited for the lagging part of their crew still somewhere below us, and vacillated between continuing uphill or climbing down in pursuit of lunch. Their crew, it turned out, is a Triathlon group. That day’s trail run would be followed by the next day’s 105 km bike ride.

On the surface, these are not my people.

Except...as my Forest Gump running ex taught me, folks who work out seriously have insatiable appetites. They have to, their metabolism burns everything off so quickly. That ex was a compact man, no body fat to be found. People would size him up at restaurants and shrink our orders, assuring us we had more than enough food. We never had enough food. He was, based on appetite and joy of eating, my people!

Triathletes are hungry too!

The group decided heading down was best – it was getting late and restaurants in the area close-- so we (because now I'd been absorbed a bit into the group) were headed for lunch.

After trying to scare me with descriptions of a possible lunch that would include stinky tofu (so much stinkier in Taiwan than how I remember it in China) and snake (I'm not easily scared by food) we headed to a local spot and I sat down with a barley drink and waited.

Plates started arriving on the Lazy Susan, 10 of us arranged around it. Rice, of course, an omelet-looking dish, chicken, beef, wild boar (a local specialty), squid (we are on the coast- so much of Taiwan is coast), fern, a local dish they described as Chinese chewing gum...then clam soup, large shrimp that would have brought joy to my mother’s heart if it weren’t for the heads still attached, a whole fish, more greens (water spinach maybe), another fish dish (when they showed me the picture of it immediately sent it to my dad because he was the only person I figured could give me the English name- and I was right!), another omelet, more rice, and fruit.

I smiled. I smiled so much.

One of the downsides to traveling alone is ordering. My appetite is substantial but even I have my limits. I can order a few things by myself but at some point it is just wasteful. But sitting there with this group (two more joined us eventually) of athletes, the question wasn’t “is this too much” rather, “is this enough?”.

Between the chewing and the conversations I couldn't understand, we exchanged pleasantries – they were intrigued with my travels this year and I couldn’t get over the fact that one woman had completed 51 marathons in the last five years. FIFTY ONE! She’s run more than 1,300 miles and that doesn’t include the training!

Travel and running aside, we continued to eat. And eat. And eat.

The plates slowly cleared. People picked off the remnants of their favorite dishes, The last man to arrive drank the last of the soup from the serving bowl. We divided up the check, paid, and parted ways.

And I was reminded...again...that my people are greedy. Long live greedy nation.

En Route: Taipei

No plan.

The view after the first leg: SFO

It occurred to me an hour into my flight. Hurtling through the sky swaddled in every layer of clothing I’d packed to ward against the cold I assumed I'd face on the plane, and still somehow inadequately equipped for despite my layers, it occurred to me that I had no plan.

I arranged this flight less than 12 hours before its scheduled departure, packed eight hours later, and at no point had I even paid attention to anything beyond the likelihood I’d make my connection in SFO.

So accustomed to the generosity of my cousin’s flight pass and my own whimsy, to eating the cookies while I bake them, it has only just now, 30,000 feet above the rest of the world, occurred to me that I don’t know where I'll stay in Taipei, or even how long I'll be there. A friend of a friend gave me suggestions, scrolling screens of foods and neighborhoods, national parks and lesser known cities, but aside from a list of tings I could do I have no real ideas about what I will do.

That realization doesn’t terrify me even as I feel a certain recklessness in it. Reckless not because I haven’t shown up to a place with no plan, this last year has mostly involved plan-less journeys into countries I've never visited, but reckless in some way I sense but cannot name.

Maybe it is the near routine of the last year, my new normal of not knowing what my days will look like. Maybe it is me settling into the liminal space between my chosen uncertainty that awaits me once 2019 counts itself into a new decade and my search for employment kicks into a more urgent gear.

Whatever the reason or rationale, the reality is me sitting in a freezing airplane cabin, blessed with three seats to myself to stretch out on and no idea where I might stay or how bustling Taipei will be at almost 9pm when I will be cleared through customs and released into a foreign city.

I haven’t even looked at pictures.

I imagine Taipei looks like Tokyo, a city I appreciate for its ease and abundance but dislike for its constant demands for my attention. Smaller, but as frenetic and thronged – and as safe. And if it is nothing like that? If it is nothing like that I will manage. I will manage and meld myself into whatever curves or angles the city offers and follow a path, or forge my own, for this final adventure of my year of living freely.