On the Messiness of a Mango

If it's not an apple or a banana, I don't know how to cut it.

My partner can do this thing with strawberries where she holds the peering knife and the strawberry in the same hand and thinly slices the fruit over our morning bowls of Cheerios. If I am preparing the fruit, her grandmother's german cutting board is out, stained pink in seconds, seeds dripped onto the floor where our boston terrier laps up the juice.

Because it seems like slicing fruit is always a production, I'm not particularly brave when it comes to the farmer's market or the summer produce section of the bourgie supermarket.

Then, last week, I bought a mango. For a few days, it softened in my fruit bowl as I glanced at it, occasionally poking it with the round end of a spoon. I was intimidated. I wondered if I even had the right kind of knife. I wondered why its skin felt so tough. I wondered how that oval fruit became the earthy lassi that goes so well with paneer.

I worked around the mango each morning, circling it in my morning coffee routine.

Then the time came. As I poked the mango with my spoon, I felt a reverberated squish (do squishes reverberate????) I readied my cutting board, the weathered wood in need of a new coat of vegetable oil,   my dependable cerated knife freshly rinsed of yesterday's peanutbutter.

As I cut into the skin, attempting to peel, juice welled into my palm. The skin, like leather, a sticky, solid pile of debris. I shoo the cat away.

Skinless, I cut slices of fruit into a mixing bowl.

The pit is larger than I anticipated. I think there must be more fruti I can get off.

I lift the pit and bite, juice streaming down my chin.

As I wipe my face with the kitchen cloth and reach for my coffee, I think, this messiness is exactly what summer is about.

"Fork over Knife" and the Neoliberal Agenda

I've been taking a break from the blog, frustrated with myself that I seem to be hovering at the 10 lb weight loss mark. Since I told myself I would stick with the WW program for a year, I'm trying not to obsess about the week I spent in Chicago, eating carnitas tacos, ethiopian shiro, Red Mango. But now that I'm back, I've decided to take the time this week to assess some of my food and lifestyle values.

So, on the encouragement of my two C-Bus besties (after the encouragement they received from another mentor), I watched the documentary "Fork over Knife" the other night. The documentary espouses a "whole foods plant-based diet" and the screen time consists of mostly-white able-bodied male athletes, an important move for the film's agenda, which is de-bunking the myth that you will never get enough protein from plant-based foods. Now, I actually mostly agree with the film on this count: I believe that whole foods are both more filling and better for long-term health. In high school I met a peer-turned-good-friend who actually lived on a working family farm (I was a Massachusetts city kid transplanted to Maine in my mid-teens) and her attitudes toward vegetables actually transformed my food-values world. Carolyn taught me how her family, particularly during the growing season, shapes all of their meals around their vegetable dishes, often having two or three at a meal, the animal-based foods functioning as a cursory. I grew up in a world where a tablespoon of soggy, frozen peas served as my vegetable for the day. As someone turned vegetarian at 12, I struggled to get enough food (eating disorder aside) until I met Carolyn. (As you may have noticed by my Chicago exploits above, I am no longer a vegetarian, mostly because I got lazy after discovering a processed-soy food allergy). So I get it.

I think vegetables can be a center-piece--if you can afford them.

The film rarely addressed cost, though. Not on the day-to-day grocery bill cost. There was a health official in Chicago who spent two minutes talking about food deserts and economic inequalities more generally but I guess this wasn't as sexy as watching the vegan doctor's son-turned-fireman climb the fire pole. Besides the fact that the film itself was kind of an editing hack-job (they alternated a bit of nutritional science history with poorly integrated, contemporary lifestyle transformation stories) with ableist masculine rhetoric, I actually had a more serious problem with the film: it's neoliberal agenda.

If you're in the academy, you know that neoliberal is kind of the sexy, critical framework to justify the importance of all sorts of academic critiques for everything from pop culture to the prison industrial complex (or, if your my brilliant partner, you're integrating the two). And despite the fact that we might be a little bit bored by the buzz-word of it, it's actually a useful framework for understanding the increasingly-privatized and individual-based agenda of the U.S. expansionist project. Blahblahblah.

Here's where it showed up in the film. The other main objective of the film, besides debunking the protein-myth, was to discuss how a whole foods, plant-based diet can serve as treatment for a myriad of diseases, from obesity and diabetes (no surprise) to cancer and hepatitis. The mantra was "get off the meds, take control of your health" and "look at how much money we can save the healthcare system if you stop taking your meds". Now, I'm no fan of Big Pharma. I spend months in my Women's Health class asking my students to interrogate Big Pharma and diagnostic models they produce. And while I fully support eating whole foods as much as possible (insert major asterisk here with footnote caveat), I also don't think chronic health problems and diseases can or should be completely in the hands of "individual responsibility". It's not a surprise that everyone in the film is middle class or wealthier, with the kinds of jobs that afford them vacation and flex time, expendable income for massage, acupuncture, and yoga classes, and the comforts of more than just food. Plant based, whole food diets are expensive and until we transform our industrial agriculture system, work day length and unemployment crisis, child care networks, housing and green space development, and address the chronic stress that comes from daily interactions with  sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism--not mention addressing our actual healthcare model-- we can't expect folks to fix their diseases. My suggestion: a whole foods, plant-based diet, a complete cultural and political revolution, and some compassion.

All of this said, I did re-think last week's carnitas and bought some fresh, spicy arugula and a daikon radish to jazz up my salads this week.