Search Results for: food

The Collected Crimes of Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Inmates walk as they are moved after being ordered by Maricopa County Sheriff Officer Joe Arpaio to be placed into new housing to open up new beds for maximum security inmates on April 17, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Joshua Lott/Getty Images)

As Texans braced for a storm that would deliver flooding unlike anything the nation’s second-most populous state had ever experienced, President Donald Trump prioritized.

According to Philip Rucker and Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post, the pardon had been months in the making and was “the culmination of a five-year political friendship with roots in the ‘birther’ movement to undermine President Barack Obama.”

While he was convicted of contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order that he stop detaining people on suspicion of being undocumented immigrants, the cruelty of “Sheriff Joe,” as he’s known, has been well-documented for years. Here’s a sampling (many from the Phoenix New Times, a local alt-weekly that diligently kept tabs on Arpaio’s stunning behavior): Read more…

Can Love Sparked at Burning Man Last in Everyday Life?

Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP

Maria Finn | Longreads | August 2017 | 18 minutes (4,403 words)

 

There’s an adage that you should never make major life decisions right after Burning Man. Once back in your “default life,” wait three months before moving in with the man you met atop a giant rubber duck art car, quitting your job in tech to become a trapeze artist, or getting a shark tattoo. This is considered enough time for the exhilaration of spontaneous love, boundless possibilities, and radical self-expression to subside.

I didn’t meet Danny at Burning Man, but I fell in love with him there. We were introduced at a mutual friend’s birthday party the previous spring. My older brother had recently committed suicide, but our friend encouraged me to come and try to take my mind off it. I went, still a stunned, open wound of a person.

I vaguely remembered talking with a nice guy, and when someone went to take a group picture, he flung his arm around my shoulders and for just a moment, I was not adrift in sadness and shock.

Danny had told me that he and a couple of friends were going to Burning Man that year for the first time to celebrate their birthdays. I promised to show them around if I went. I had a ticket, but didn’t know if I could do it.

My older brother, Bill, had lit himself on fire in front of the Veteran’s Hospital where he was being treated for a damaged knee sustained when parachuting in Panama during our “War on Drugs.” He was also being treated for alcoholism, and diagnosed with PTSD. For treatment, the VA mailed him 1,000 pills of Vicodin (actually generic Hydrocodone) each month, whether he finished the previous prescription or not. My brother Steve had called the VA and asked them to stop giving Bill the drugs. Already troubled, Bill crashed. Steve, who had once studied to be an actuary, later noted, “Someone in the military probably ran the numbers and figured out it was cheaper to send the drugs so these guys overdose or kill themselves.”

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Moonshine: The Black Tradition of Distilling ‘White Whiskey’

Culinary appropriation is a thorny phenomenon to pin down. More or less everything we consume came to be through hybrid, murky lineages: people move (whether by choice or by force), communities clash and interact, and tastes evolve. Very few food items have a neat, uncontested origin story. But as Lauren Michele Jackson shows in her Eater essay on the erasure of black influence from artisanal-food culture, some trends are impossible to deny. Black labor and black innovation had been instrumental for many American staples, yet by the time barbecue, beer, or malt liquor resurfaced in recent years as craft items with major cultural cachet, they’d been (and still are being) thoroughly whitewashed. The same goes for what might be the whitest of spirits (in the popular imagination, at least): moonshine.

For now, the public image of what distilling looks like in America remains white, even in the face of more recent history. Moonshine, experiencing a craft renaissance of its own, almost exclusively conjures a certain image of backwoods whiteness and Prohibition-era bootlegging — a product, in part, of the white cultural monopoly on all things “country,” while black people are endlessly “urban” — an image that continues to be burnished by vested interests. “We as a society have created its value and meaning, bound up in images of mountains and overalls and shotguns and the way a man wears his hat. I played my part in this fiction,” admits the writer Matt Bondurant in an essay about his family’s moonshining legacy and his efforts to tell their story.

The rural is as much a domain of black life, and moonshining was a part of it. “I lived in a totally black world,” the artist Jonathan Green said in a recent conversation with the poet Kevin Young about his family’s moonshine production. That world was not an urban jungle but a Southern, rural community of landholders, farmers, hunters, and store owners. “Moonshine was also called a happy drink, it was also a medicinal drink,” Green said. “I only knew of moonshine as a sort of miracle liquid, if you will.” As a child, Green’s grandparents allowed him peeks into moonshining; he recalls the long early morning walks with his grandfather to stills that “were always hidden” deep in the woods, and how family visiting from out of town always left with crates full of moonshine. “I only saw moonshining as a major part of my family history and culture.”

But now that moonshine is a part of craft culture, what’s ultimately left to do is “package the story, feed the legend, make some money,” as Bondurant writes. Only white stories seem to have made it into the package.

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The Lawn is a Lie

Man on a lawnmower on a large swath of grass
Lawnmower Man by dumbonyc via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It broke my heart when I left the heart of the city for the edge of the burbs. I’m a terrible gardener, so I never wanted a house with a yard. Yet that’s where I ended up when city living became too expensive.

My house came with a large swatch of (once) immaculately maintained front lawn — lawn which I ceased watering after the first bill. Now, late summer, it’s a dead brown with patches of dirt where eternal vigilance is not enough to ensure the absence of dandelions. For five months out of the year, I hate my lawn; the rest of the time I’m merely annoyed by it. Some day, when household economics allow, I will hire a landscaper to tear the whole thing out and replace it with xeriscaping — a no-water garden, low maintenance with all native plants, something that allows me mostly to forget about it.

Riddle: considered acre-for-acre, what is the most pesticide-, herbicide-, water-, labor-, and cash-intensive crop grown in the U.S.? Right. Your lawn. In America, turf grasses, which are mostly non-native, cover 21 million acres (think the state of Maine), cost $40 billion per year (more than U.S. foreign aid), consume around 90 million pounds of fertilizer and 80 million pounds of pesticides per year (which sometimes contaminate our groundwater and surface water), and slurp up an inconceivable nine billion gallons of water per day (at least half of all residential water use in the arid West is associated with lawns and landscaping).

All this is before we reckon the colossal time suck that lawns represent. Each year, Americans spend an average of three billion hours pushing or (even worse) riding mowers, most of which pollute at a rate ten times that of our cars. In fact, if a lawn were a car, it would be a Hummer: a resource-intensive, plainly unsustainable luxury item that looks cool but is environmentally destructive. As for biodiversity, forget it. Lawns are exotic, barren monocultures. While they are sometimes referred to as “ecological deserts,” this characterization is an insult to deserts, which are remarkably biodiverse ecosystems. Consider also the unfortunate symbolic connotations of the lawn. As food writer Michael Pollan points out, the American lawn is the ultimate manifestation of our culture’s perverse fantasy of the total control of nature. As Pollan put it so memorably, “A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

On Terrain, Michael P. Branch calculates the time, money, and emotional angst (if you’re me) we invest on tending to our lawns. He mentions Thoreau’s disdain for this bulwark of American landscaping, even while confessing his own emotional attachment to the manicured green spaces of his youth. He rationalizes his own landscaping choices and admits his guilt in its pleasure.

I have a small back lawn too. I kind of love it. Mr. Branch, I feel you.

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Breaking Into China’s Counterfeit Supply Chains

Photo by Matt via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

When tourists buy Gucci purses in Manhattan’s Chinatown, most of them understand that the bags are fakes. That’s why they shop in Chinatown; all the prestige of the brand at a fraction of the price. But scores of other counterfeit items make it into the world economy without any of us consumers knowing it: phones, pharmaceuticals, clothes, car parts, circuit breakers. The bulk of these come from China.

For California Sunday Magazine, reporter Joshua Hunt shadows one of the private detectives that Western corporations pay to protect their intellectual property by cracking down on Chinese counterfeiters. In China, knockoffs are a $400 billion dollar industry. The black- and gray-markets fill domestic stores with fake wine and fake food, and detectives have to be able to distinguish the quality fakes from the cheap ones to do their job well. This detective can, because he used to make his living in the underground market.

On a hot afternoon last summer, Azim led me through the vast under­ground market beneath Shang­hai’s Science and Technology Mu­se­um. His boss, Angelo Krizmanic, joined us, posing as a foreign businessman interested in some luggage for his girlfriend. “Most of these stores cater to Western tourists who come here specifically to buy knock­offs,” Angelo told me. “Tourists don’t know how to spot a quality fake, so the stuff on the shelves in these shops is garbage. But if you know the difference between a shit knockoff and a really shit knockoff, you can get yourself invited into a shop’s backroom. That’s where the real business goes down.”

We approached an upscale shop selling luxury handbags that Angelo visited, undercover, semiregularly. A salesman in shorts and a navy T-shirt named Kevin bounded toward us, gold chains bouncing off his chest. He spoke to Angelo like an old friend. Kevin led us into the store and pushed against a part of the wall that gave way to reveal a hidden room, roughly 8 feet by 10 feet, with deep shelves that overflowed with counterfeit Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton luggage, purses, and wallets.

Kevin said the market gets raided weekly, but he isn’t concerned. “I pay every month, so no trouble.” He used to be able to bribe police with counterfeit Louis Vuitton, but since China’s president, Xi Jinping, intensified anti-corruption measures in 2012, bribes are increasingly cash only.

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Eating the Texas State Fair

People walking the midway past food stands at a State Fair
State Fair Food Stands by George C. Campbell via Wikimedia Commons

The food came in two categories: savory and sweet. He would try them all. He would eat them on sticks, with plastic utensils that would litter the grounds of the park long after he and his descendants had passed, he would pick them up and eat them with his hands.

From the Texas State Fair website, “Each year, State Fair concessionaires fry up tasty and unique foods for a chance to become a finalist in the Big Tex Choice Awards. Everything from Fried Beer to Fried Peaches and Cream have made the cut to become a part of an exclusive club.”

On Texas Monthly, Dan Solomon goes full Hemingway (or is it Faulkner?) describing the finalists.

He started with the Surfin’ Turfin’ Tator Boat. It was a potato. He looked at it, sniffed the air, and stared at the lobster claw sticking straight up from the split in the spud.

“That there sure is a potato,” said the man.

“It sure is. The finest potato you ever did see,” said the woman collecting money for the meal.

“I never seen a potato like that,” said the man.

“You never will again, neither,” she told him.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being Lighter

Image in the public domain

Colin Gillis has lost a tremendous amount of weight, and it changes things — the way he moves around the world, the way people react to him. But as he lives in his smaller body, he finds that there are other, deeper parts of his existence as a person of size that he’s lost along with the weight.

But there was also something attractive and deeply pleasurable about being—and living—large, about cultivating huge appetites and satisfying them with abandon. Eating piles of calorie rich food and guzzling it down with wine is tremendously fun, and I look back on occasions when I did that with fondness, a hint of jealousy, and with only the slightest regret. And my large body was so powerful! I trained until I could deadlift 420 pounds. The rush of excitement doing this gave me, the sense of accomplishment, the physical pleasure of muscles flush with blood, was a palpable sense of strength that I carried with me, in body and in mind.

Removing over thirty percent of my total body mass has entailed losses of pleasures that I once associated with being huge and that remain important for me. These are more than just the pleasures of regular excess in food and drink. I am physically smaller now and less strong than I once was. I may never gain back all of my old strength.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Bee Wilson, Seyward Darby, Wil S. Hylton, Greg Milner, and Annie Dillard.

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Pregnant, then Ruptured

Thomas Northcut/Getty Images

Joanna Petrone | Longreads | August 2017 | 28 minutes (7,729 words)

 

It comes on suddenly as a gas main explosion, the feeling of being grabbed tightly from within and twisted. I am standing at the front of my classroom, at one, almost, with its beige institutional carpeting and faint but pervasive smell of damp paper. I’m instructing sixth-graders — sleepy and vaguely conspiratorial-looking, the way they often are on Fridays in January just after lunch — when that blue flash of pain rips through me. I stop talking. I freeze, hand on belly, and wait to find out if I’ll vomit.

Inside me everything is lightening bolts and banshee wails and chaos. Outside, obedient, slightly bored students print in marble composition notebooks. Not one of my charges says anything — no one has noticed — so I steady my breathing and shuffle next door to find another teacher to cover for me.

On the toilet, I check my underpants. There is no new red blood — only ­ the same smear of tacky rust-colored discharge that’s been soiling my pads for weeks. The bathroom light, set to a motion-sensitive timer, blinks out into darkness while I sit stock still, afraid and in pain, replaying the highlights of the last two weeks: positive pee sticks, phone calls and doctor’s offices, a sequence of blood tests, an ultrasound confirming a mass in my right adnexa (a uterine appendage), and, last night, a duo of cheerful ER nurses sheathed in full-body, bright orange hazmat suits injecting an abortifacient into my backside.

To turn the light back on, I need to move, but I am immobilized by pain so intense I can no longer tell where in my body it is coming from. After a time, the pain quiets enough for me to think over it and will my body into action. I flail my hands to trigger the light, stand up, wash. Maybe this is cramps from the methotrexate working, I think, just very bad cramps, signaling the welcome end of a doomed, rogue pregnancy.

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The White Lies of Craft Culture

Longreads Pick
Source: Eater
Published: Aug 17, 2017
Length: 11 minutes (2,886 words)