Small Bites #5: Tricks and Treats for Halloween
Small Bites #5: Tricks and Treats for Halloween
Issue No. 88
Twice a month, Sunshine + Microbes sends out our full newsletter. During the weeks in between, we share threads, interviews, kitchen tips, and a grab bag of our favorite things from the world of food and environment. Enjoy these Small Bites!
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Things We Like...
1️⃣ Striketober
Striketober is here. Striking fear into the heart of bosses everywhere as employees push back on low pay and dwindling job benefits. Large companies and their CEOs continue to rake in major profits, without giving a bigger slice of that pie to the workers (despite rising inflation). Laborers are fed up — 4.2 million people quit their job in August, likely in search of more fair options, as employers try to fill positions despite low demand. As even Good Morning America notes, “for the first time in a long, long time, workers have the upper hand.”
Organized labor is fighting back in Hollywood, the healthcare industry, and in manufacturing. The food and agriculture industry are not safe either this fall. Already Nabisco and Frito-Lay workers went on strike this year and a Starbucks’ store in Buffalo is trying to become the first one to ever unionize.
Here are three places celebrating Striketober in the food and ag biz:
🚜 Across the midwest, more than 10,000 John Deere employees hit the picket lines two weeks ago. The agricultural equipment and heavy machinery company is projected to earn almost $6 billion this year, yet workers say the company is looking to cut pensions and healthcare while offering minimal wages.
Employees at these John Deere factories last went on strike in 1986. It lasted four months, but since then, the company has slowly chipped away at benefits. One laborer in Ottumwa, Iowa, arrived at the picket line with a sign his father carried at the 1986 strike. The plant itself has existed in that location for 110 years, hiring multiple generations of families over the past century. Now the current strikers are putting their livelihoods on the line for a better future.
🥣 Like John Deere, 1,400 strikers at a Kellogg’s plant in Nebraska are protesting a two-tier wage system where newer hires get contracted at lower wages and are seeing disappearing benefits. In addition, workers frequently work seven days a week, enduring occasional 16 hour shifts. Solidarity on the picket line has kept the strike going strong since October 5. Kellogg’s earned $1.76 billion in profit this year. But laborers — whose families have worked at the plant for generations — have had their pension, wages, and healthcare placed on the cutting block. And it’s now looking like Kellogg’s is ready to renegotiate.
🍟 In a dozen major U.S. cities, McDonald’s workers walked off the job during the lunch rush to protest the fast food giant’s lack of response to women filing sexual harassment complaints with the company.
The protest is supported by local union leaders, and groups like Fight For Fifteen and TIME’S UP. Supporters say it’s the first strike against a specific company over sexual harassment in 100 years. Solidarity forever to all these workers.
Four More Things We Like This Week
2️⃣ Chocolate Peanut Butter Oat Bars 🍫🥜
Last year we organized a Halloween Candy Power Ranking, to determine once and for all the champion of candy. The winner was the well-deserved Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. To celebrate, Jackie created these chocolate peanut butter oat bars, which have mini Resses’s cups smooshed into the middle. They’re one of the recipes we’ve gotten the most positive feedback about, so give them a whirl with any leftover Halloween candy! Dare I say they would still slap with other chocolately mini candy bars in place of the Reese’s?
Makes a 9x9 pan
Ingredients
6 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/3 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon salt + more for sprinkling
3/4 cup peanut butter + 2 tablespoons
1/2 cup chocolate chips
as many mini peanut butter cups as your heart desires (but probably 6)
step-by-step
In a blender, blend oats to a powder, or as fine as the blender will allow.
Melt butter in a pan over medium heat.
Once melted, stir in oats, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and honey. Once combined, stir in 3/4 cup of peanut butter.
Cover bottom and sides of pan with foil or parchment. Spoon peanut butter mixture into pan and smooth to form an even layer that fills pan.
Unwrap peanut butter cups and press them down throughout the mixture.
Melt remaining 2 tablespoons of peanut butter and chocolate to form a smooth mixture. The easiest way to do this is in the microwave, heating for 30 seconds, stirring, and then repeating. Or heat in a double boiler.
Pour chocolate mixture over peanut butter mixture and smooth with the back of a spoon. Sprinkle salt over top.
Place in fridge to harden for at least two hours.
To serve, remove from fridge and cut into squares.
3️⃣ Good News from Matt’s Day Job
Apologies for not putting out a newsletter last week. Matt and Jackie both had their busiest week of the year. Jackie held a lovely pop-up dinner at her home. (photos coming soon!) She hopes it’ll be the first of many events celebrating food and community in a post-pandemic world.
Matt got caught up working on another lawsuit in Texas. What ridiculousness is Texas up to now? Well, a school district has decided they’re going to enforce a rule targeting boys and suspend students who wear long hair — because we’re still living in the 1950s. Luckily, this week we got a bit of good news. yay!
4️⃣ Gruesome or Gourmand?
We can’t decide if we love or hate the Halloween-themed fare below:
Plus the most repulsive Halloween treat of all…
5️⃣ The Broodwich
The Dadaist 15-minute cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force is not for everyone. It’s about a sentient milkshake, carton of french fries, and meatball living in New Jersey who go on misadventures that they barely show interest in.
Episodes can be hit or miss (and some certainly haven’t aged well). But one episode worth a Halloween watch is called “The Broodwich.” The trio, while planting azalea bushes, find a tempting, albeit cursed sandwich in their garden. The Broodwich, which one character read about in Vogue magazine, is:
Forged in darkness from wheat harvested in hell’s half acre, baked by Beelzebub. Slathered with mayonnaise beaten from the evil eggs of dark chicken forces into sauce by the hands of a one-eyed madman. Cheese boiled from the rancid teat of a fanged cow layered with 666 separate meats from an animal which has maggots for blood.
A bite of the best damn sandwich ever transports the characters to a netherworld where they find a demon voiced by H. Jon Benjamin (the smooth-as-silk-voiced of “Archer” and Bob from “Bob’s Burgers”) supporting an axe-wielding friend who’s trying to balance raising a new kid with his murderous day job. The conversation they have is simply legendary surrealist nonsense.
Sure, everything I just wrote might sound like total lunacy to you. But if you’ve got a strange sense of humor, give the Broodwich a try if you dare. The episode has a big enough cult following that the popular cooking YouTube channel Binging with Babish invented his own Broodwich recipe. Plus, how can you not enjoy one of the best lines in the whole series: I haven't paid taxes in six years, and I'm not getting busted by a damn sandwich.”
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla . She runs Otto’s Bread Club and is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications strategist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.