Eat Rice, Have Faith in Women

Poring over Carol J. Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat, she reminds us of a beautifully moving poem entitled "Eat rice have faith in women" by Fran Winant. I'm posting it here:

eat rice have faith in women
what I don’t know now
I can still learn
if I am alone now
I will be with them later
if I am weak now
I can become strong
slowly slowly
if I learn I can teach others
if others learn first
I must believe
they will come back and teach me
they will not go away
to the country with their knowledge
and send me a letter sometime
we must study all our lives
women coming from women going to women
trying to do all we can with words
then trying to work with tools
or with our bodies
trying to stand the time it takes
reading books when there are no teachers
or they are too far away
teaching ourselves
imagining others struggling
I must believe we will be together
and build enough concern
so when I have to fight alone
there will be sisters who
would help if they knew
sisters who will come
to support me later

women demanding loyalty
each with our needs
our whole lives torn by
the old society
never given the love or work
or strength or safety or information
we could use
never helped by the institutions
that imprison us
so when we need medical care
we are butchered
when we need police
we are insulted ignored
when we need parents

we find robots
trained to keep us in our places
when we need work we are told
to become part of
the system that destroys us
when we need friends
other women tell us
I have to be selfish
you will have to forgive me
but there is only so much time
energy money concern
to go around
I have to think of myself
because who else will...
I have to save things for myself
because I am not sure you could save me
if our places were reversed
because I suspect
you won’t even be around
to save me when I need you
I am alone on the streets
at 5 in the morning
I am alone cooking my rice

I see you getting knowledge
and having friends I don’t have
I see you already stronger than me
and I don’t see you coming back
to help me
I imagine myself getting old
I imagine I will have to go away
when I am too old to fight my way
down the streets
my friends getting younger and younger
women my age hidden in corners
in the establishment
or curled up with a few friends
isolated at home
or in the madhouse
getting their last shot of
motivation to compete
or grinding out position papers
in the movement
like old commies
waiting to be swept away
by the revolution
or in a hospital
dying of complications
nurse or nun
lesbian in clean clothes
reach out a hand to me
scientists have found
touching is necessary
and the drive to speak our needs
is basic as breath
but there isn’t time
none of my needs has been met
and although I am often comfortable
this situation is painful

slowly we begin
giving back what was taken away
our right to the control of our bodies
knowledge of how to fight and build
food that nourishes
medicine that heals
songs that remind us of ourselves
and make us want to keep on with
what matters to us
lets come out again
joining women coming out
for the first time
knowing this love makes
a good difference in us
affirming a continuing life with women
we must be lovers doctors soldiers
artists mechanics farmers
all our lives
waves of women
trembling with love and anger

singing we must rage
kissing, turn and
break the old society
without becoming the names it praises
the minds it pays

eat rice have faith in women
what I don’t know now
I can still learn
slowly slowly
if I learn I can teach others
if others learn first
I must believe
they will come back and teach me

Copyright: Fran Winant, reprinted in the Lesbian Reader, an Amazon Quarterly anthology

Eating Animals

I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals (albeit much later than I'd hoped to read it) and I cannot stop thinking about kind of cultural "storytelling" that surrounds meat consumption, particularly in the U.S. What kind of new stories can we tell around otherwise tradition-ladden holidays? What kind of cultural rewriting allows us to sustain our connection to heritage? Or do we even need to sustain that kind of tradition? Should our new-found ethics take the precedent over tradition and remind us of the newness of this new kind of ethical tradition we are forging? As a vegan, I love holding the cultural paintbrush right in my grip, and know that culture is a flexible and malleable thing. But reading Foer's book reminds me so much of the positive role that culture and tradition play for so many people.

Unlike many seemingly die-hard vegans and vegetarians (I often fall victim to this), Foer examines the importance of digging deep into the reality of things and then living one's life according to one's values -- something which I respect wholeheartedly. Framing the entire story through the need to choose what kind of life he should create for his son (more specifically, whether his son should eat meat or not), Foer does in-depth research on factory farms, family farms, and activist to pull the veil off of a world that is all too frequently forgotten.

What makes Foer's book so unique is that his story is one of paradox, of seemingly philosophical contradictions-- at the core, a nuanced understanding of how ethics and meat consumption can manifest in this country. As an accomplished writer, he dances through his sentences and hybridizes his space as both a quasi-narrative and quasi-non-fiction scientific literature, using no footnotes for his text chock full of statistics, but leaving all citations arranged by chapter at the end of the book for his readers.

To order a copy, visit Amazon.

Cruelty-Free Cooking! From ChooseVeg

Baking Substitutes for One Egg

1 tsp. Baking Soda + 1 Tbls Vinegar (household vinegar or apple cider)

1 Tbls. Ground Flax seeds + 3 Tbls water

• Let sit until mixture becomes gelatinous.
• Great way to get your Omega-3 Fatty Acids
• Note that this adds slight nutty flavor to recipe

¼ cup Silken Tofu

• not the tofu from coolers, which are less creamy
• adds moistness & denseness

¼ cup soy yogurt

• adds moistness & denseness

½ banana, mashed well

• note that this does add a banana flavor to your dish

¼ cup unsweetened Applesauce

• adds moisture

Ener-G Egg Replacer (potato starch & tapioca flour)

• can be found in most health food store
• Mix 1.5 tsp Ener-G + 1 Tbls water

For more information, visit ChooseVegBlog.com

Cartoon Source: http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/v/vegan.asp

Easy Vegan Pancakes (Lauren's Subversive Pancakes)

Ingredients You Should be Needing:

2 cup subversive flour (all-purpose should do. Go crazy with quinoa flour. Or whole wheat.)

2 cup subversive milk (any kind of vegan milk will do)

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. baking powder

2 Tbls oil (canola will do)

1/2 tsp cinnamon

pinch of ground nutmeg

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp almond extract

1/4 tsp salt

2 large bananas (mashed well)

handful of chopped pecans or walnuts

An extra banana for topping (optional)

Directions To Make This Baby Happen:

Mash bananas with a fork. Mix wet ingredients and sugar into a smaller bowl. Mix together dry ingredients (except sugar) in a large bowl. Pour wet into dry and mix ingredients. Fold in the walnuts or pecans. Bake with love on a non-stick skillet. Cut up any remaining bananas in your kitchen into tiny bits to top your pancakes. Drizzle in syrup. Ba-bam.

An Era of Loss

I've been denying it, but now it just seems too unreal. Everyone is dying.

My good friend's father died this semester.
My sister nearly died in a car accident this March.
My grandfather died of Alzheimers this April.
My friend Dylan committed suicide this August.
The day before his mother's birthday.
I learned that an old high school classmate killed himself last year.
A girl at my high school died of a mysterious brain inflammation last week.
A teacher's son from my high school is suffering from his second bout of leukemia.
My close friend just had a miscarriage today, after 4 months.

When everything is fleeting, what can we cling to? Maybe to making subversive pancakes, to flowers growing out of the cracks, to meaningful sidewalk art, to a stranger's smile, but fuck. There's so much loss. It hurts.

Canvas By Dylan Ravenfox

An old girlfriend would always write on my skin,
in blue or black ink. We both knew she was destined
to be a tattoo artist, though she never would admit it.
Little yin-yangs, tulips, messages like why
are you so nervous, or decisive, or spontaneous.
I let her write a poem down my spine
with a sharp black ball point,
and never found out what it said. It used to tickle
so much that she would get mad at me
for ruining the shapes. I got used to it though,
when the skin art became our ritual of afterplay,
and we kept a pen on the table beside the bed.
When she drew a stick figure angel
in between two little clouds on my thigh,
I took the pen from her and scribbled
“Don’t fake orgasms”
on her rib cage.
Eventually we broke up
because the ink was soaking in and poisoning
the whims, revealing that we didn’t really love
each other. Years later I walked into her tattoo
parlor, on a side street in Chicago.
She smiled to see that I had tracked her down,
but put a finger to my lips. She sat me down
without a word and began stabbing my forearm
with her little machine. When she was done
there was an intricate human heart, that
you could almost see beating,
colorless and real. It hurt more than I’d expected.
“Don’t worry about the girls,” she said,
“Anyone who can’t understand that
doesn’t deserve you.

From "We Are What We See" http://www.thisispush.com/read/excerpt_whereweare.htm

ShoutOut

This is a shout out to animal rights activists, who see so much pain around them, but are forced to bite their tongues in seemingly banal social settings, who are ‘not offended by the sight of meat’ when prompted -- the raw flesh of another living being, the scent almost carrying the image of slaughterhouse slashing down upon their genetically mutated bodies. But oh no, we don’t mind. We’re mainstreaming the movement, after all.

We lost a vegan voice in the movement last week: Dylan Ravenfox was an eloquent and intelligent voice for the animals. He reminded me how much we, too, are animals and how important it is to recognize our own animality. He reminded me of the importance of language and the intricacy of its structure to understanding the world we live in. The interconnectedness of social movements, and above all, the importance of art in social movements. With his loss, I feel compelled to tell you that we need to step it up a notch. He was a force to be reckoned with, and he’s gone.

Knowing that he was someone who struggled with depression for much of his life, I want to shout out to you animal advocates. The sadness that lingers behind the corners for us is real, and if you need a helping hand, I’d be happy to support you. As activists in a damaged world, we need to help each other along the path to healthiness. To healing. So that we can change this world of which we are so critical.

I feel much joy as an activist—I see the change in the world that I’m trying to create. Even though social change is slow, I see it, I see us making a difference, and it’s beautiful, invigorating, and always rejuvenating. I just wanted to take a moment to examine the shadow of this brightness – that depression is a real and serious illness and that you, me, we all must take it very seriously. Even if you’re just stumbling upon this blog, feel free to email me if you need anything at all. Sometimes having a little extra support is all we need.

Love,

Lauren

laolaughlin@vassar.edu