American Psyche | 'Let's Talk about Food' | Recipe: Chipa
Issue No. 56
Welcome to October! What does Spooky SZN have in store for 2020? 👻
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I love me some ice cream. Top considerations when choosing a pint include: how delicious it will be, how successfully it will soothe whatever emotional ailment I’m experiencing, how much saturated fat and sugar it contains, and how much it will cost me.
If all of my personal desires are fulfilled, I might also factor in the working conditions in the factory where it was produced, the climate impact of the cow farts, or the shady business interests of the multinational conglomerate behind the brand. But between us, I ignore all of those thorny questions far more than I grapple with the external ripple effects of my ice cream choices them. I don’t think that makes me a selfish monster. No one has the energy for that full time.
We live in a nation ruled by an intensely individualistic spirit. This tendency to put ourselves at the center of the narrative is clearly on display in our relationship to food. From where I sit, I see that same fervent dedication to individualism looming large over many aspects of the American psyche, from the mask debate to the tax code.
I was miraculously able to sit through the entirety of the first presidential debate. (“Sit” isn’t the right word. I physically trembled through it.) Since it was completely devoid of substance, the sound of old men incoherently yelling put me in a sort of dark trance. I spent the 90 minutes swimming in a sea of feelings and fears about the future of our nation. Being ruthlessly self-centered seems to be en vogue, and that scares me.
It is quintessentially American to celebrate how the choices I make have positively contributed to my station in life. Nothing collectively turns people on like the mythical self-made man. At the same time, many scoff at the idea that our actions, directly or indirectly, might cause harm to other people or the planet, as if we all live in hermetically sealed bubbles of our own creation.
But of course, it’s fantasy to think that our actions don’t have consequences. Everything is connected, even if it’s really hard for our brains to compute that. My solution to that challenge is not to stick my head in the sand, but to try and stretch the limits of my compassion, hitting the empathy gym whenever I can.
2020 has been, in the words of Jake Tapper describing the presidential debate, “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.” My hope is that the collective chaos and suffering will not further silo people away from one another, but push us to take collective responsibility, from how we speak to each other to what we consume to how we vote. Voting is the first and most basic step in how we can take care of each other and the planet. From there, we can go further, actively holding our systems to account and transforming them when they do not serve the collective good.
With that in mind, the deadline to register to vote in the state of Florida is October 5 (and it’s not the only state), also known as Monday, also known as 30 days before the election. You can register online in about three minutes at www.registertovoteflorida.gov.
love,
Jackie
Hit the empathy gym by ummm sharing this newsletter with your friends? Thanks! 💪
Virtual Workshops
“Let’s Talk about Food” series at UF
Artists, scholars, farmers and other community members reflect on food consumption and production in these challenging times at the “Let’s Talk about Food” virtual workshop series, hosted by the University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
The event invites participants to listen to and share stories about food and how it helps shape who we are. Topics range from fruit and climate change to cookbooks and oral histories. Alexandra Cenatus (Matt’s friend from grad school!) is running the series, and she let us share one of the recipes from the upcoming “Food Memories of Latin America” panel for this week’s Main Course.
Register for any of the free events below.
WORKSHOPS
Food Memories of Latin America | Saturday, October 3 at 1 p.m. ET | Sign up for eventSuppressed Narratives: Oral History, Cookbooks, And Museums | Sunday, October 20 at 6:30 p.m. ET | Sign up for event
Food Access: Race, Class and the Environment | Tuesday, November10 at 6:30p.m. ET | Sign up for event
-matt
Fresh Links
🌬️🔥🍷‘It’s like God has no sympathy.’ Wine Country residents shaken by relentless onslaught of wildfires | SF Chronicle
Experts have long predicted that climate change will upend the wine regions of the world. That threat feels turbocharged as the country’s most famous wine region — in Sonoma and Napa counties in California — has been devastated by wildfires in recent months and over and over again in past years. Several wineries, including the famed Chateau Boswell Winery in Napa Valley, have been destroyed by the flames.
Warming temperatures presents all types of problems for wine growers and connoisseurs: more disease pressure, unpredictable growing seasons and more expensive supply chains. But the fires feel like a whole other level of disaster. Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin keeps seeing the nightmare replay, feeling like “God has no sympathy, no empathy for Sonoma County.”
But Gorin blames the worsening fire threat not on a heavenly cause but rather a human one: climate change. Rising temperatures have dried California’s vegetation even more than normal and made a single spark far more likely to cause ruinous conflagrations like the ones unfolding now. More than 3.6 million acres have burned statewide since Jan. 1 — far more than any other year on record.
🌯🗳️Even Fast-Casual Restaurants Are Telling Me to Vote | The Atlantic
When ordering a meal online or scrolling through Instagram, the brands seem like they want only one thing: for you to vote. Don’t be impressed.
Reporter Amanda Mull notes that these places just want to do the bare minimum while seeming like civic-minded warriors for democracy. These brand messages often only reach “people who are already well acquainted with the electoral process—people wealthier, whiter, and more formally educated than the population at large.” Political scientists say efforts to increase registration and turn out the vote require much more effort than a pop-up ad or email to be effective.
The same corporate feel-good efforts also elide how these places are often impediments to voting. It’s not just Facebook. At least a couple million people in 2016 didn’t have time to vote, and many of them couldn’t get time off because they work in low-wage service jobs and can’t get paid time off. Those workers frequently are “younger, poorer and from minority racial groups.” If your favorite fast-casual restaurant really wanted to promote democracy, they’d make it easier for their own workers to reach the polls.
🎂👽Pandemic Baking Just Got Weirder | NY Times
The Year of Covid-19 has also inspired a spring/summer/fall of baking. Flour has been a part of so many moments in 2020. Sourdough. Bakers Against Racism. Everything is cake. But also there are bakers who are just getting plain kooky with it — artists and amateur bakers who are focused more on the avant-garde.
They make cakes that “draw on the absurdist Jell-O mold tradition of 1950s homemakers and revel in gross-out palettes, reflect ideas about gender, power and respectability.” One professor referred to these creations as a continuation of anarchist femme baking traditions. The cakes also reject the need to look refined and photogenic on Instagram. They’re frequently “intentionally imperfect” with psychedelic colors, or use random leftovers found around the kitchen. Said one member of the weird cake-making online community Agatha Monasterios-Ramirez:
“It’s a style of baking that I can see myself more in than others,” they said. “In the queer and trans community there’s so much history of feeling left out of the narrative. Part of the appeal with these cakes is valuing those offbeat combinations of colors and flavors that not everyone will ‘get.’” This style of cake-making, they said, “is chaotic but also sensual and beautiful — it feels especially relevant to this moment.”
Chipa Paraguaia
Recipe, photo and story from UF graduate student Mariana Meriqui Rodrigues. Reprinted with permission by Alexandra Cenatus, assistant director for programming and public engagement at the University of Florida. Listen to Mariana and Alexandra share their most meaningful food memories at their virtual workshop on Saturday.
The full name of this bread is Chipa Paraguaia, but at home we only called it Chipa. My grandparents were Guaranis from the border between Brazil and Paraguay. Although my grandparents are Brazilians, many of the homemade meals that we ate as a family were a mixture of the two cultures. I believe that this is representative of Brazil. This recipe reminds me of my childhood with my grandmother.
Every week she prepared large quantities of Chipa. Nobody else knew how to do it like her, and the whole family wanted to receive their share of chipa for the week. I remember her preparing it in the afternoon, kneading the dough, molding the bread, baking, and separating into packages that had each aunt or uncle's name. The overpowering smell of the cheese with the tapioca starch still baking is powerful in my memory.
When I miss home, this is the memory that comforts me.
Serves 4-5
Ingredients
2 eggs
400 g or 14 oz of tapioca flour or manioc starch
100 g or 3.5 oz of butter
15 g or 1 tbsp of baking powder
milk
500 g or 18 oz of grated meia cura (half-aged) Minas cheese. In the U.S, it can be replaced by white cheddar or any cheese with a sharp taste. If the cheese isn’t salty enough, add 10 g of salt.
step-by-step
Place the eggs, margarine, baking powder, grated cheese and the starch in a container and mix well. Continue to mix by hand, pouring in small quantities of milk little-by-little until the ingredients come together as a uniform dough. Keep kneading until the dough reaches the point where it no longer sticks to your hands.
Make horseshoe-shaped portions, each chipa should use about 30 g of dough.
Preheat oven to 350ºF. Grease a baking sheet with butter. Bake the chipa dough for 15 to 20 minutes.
Light some🕯️, set a 🛀, and listen to the soothing sounds of a beaver going munch munch munch on some cabbage.
Talk to Us
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the cook and fermentation educator based in Stuart, Fla. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications specialist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.