Seminar Week 8

SOS: ComAlt

Seminar Pre-Writing Week 8

23 May 2017

Word Count: 399

Passages:

“’When I first came down here, everyone told me that you can’t do organic In Florida,’ he said. From where I sat in the cab, it was evident that he had proven them wrong.” (Estabrook 2012:154)

“ STUFFED HEART HONKY STYLE: Slit the heart and remove any gristle and fat and other weird-looking vessels of blood. Fill with soul dressing. Sew up. Then salt and pepper the heart and sauté in peanut oil until it is nearly beautiful black and then cover with tomato juice and beef broth mixed together. Simmer in a covered saucepan until it is tender and breaks easily.” (Smart-Grosvenor 2011:113)

“Though the Igbos resisted slavery through death, millions of African descendants resisted slavery through life, ensuring the transference of oom boom ba boom (ancestral knowledge, regenerative ideologies, and agrarian lifeways) to future generations in efforts to repel the permutations of white supremacist capitalism.” (Davy et al. 2016: 2)

News Media Source:

“Well, why not? After all, America is an open society, in which everyone is free to make his or her own choices about where to work and how to live. Everyone, that is, except the 30 million workers now covered by noncompete agreements, who may find themselves all but unemployable if they quit their current jobs; the 52 million Americans with pre-existing conditions who will be effectively unable to buy individual health insurance, and hence stuck with their current employers, if the Freedom Caucus gets its way; and the millions of Americans burdened down by heavy student and other debt.”

Discussion:

The passage from Tomatoland stood out to me because it captures how sometimes going against the odds can work out. Perhaps I latched onto this quote because it was hopeful, whereas much of Tomatoland has been tragic. Change or progress often seems far-fetched but relies on those who try regardless.  I have been thinking about this in terms of what I want to do in life – to make a living but also find joy in what I do.

In Vibration Cooking, Vertamae lays down her friend’s recipe for a stuffed heart. I couldn’t help but laugh at the play on words she uses… I think intentionally. I found it equally witty and disturbing. What does it mean to have a tender heart? Does tender automatically equal fragile?

The passage I chose from this week’s assigned Food First reading is a big one. It speaks of resistance through life and death. What did I feel when I read it? Why did it stand out to me? It is tragic and it is beautiful. The strength that it would take to resist such oppression, regardless of the form that the resistance takes, is something I cannot myself really fully understand. To chose life is to protect and pass on culture and knowledge, or to chose death – an escape, yes, but more than that – the preservation of culture and knowledge in a different way, a way for ideas to live through death. Life and death cannot exist without the other.

My news media piece, about noncompete agreements, picks at the myth that the United States is supposedly a place where all of its citizens have the freedom to choose things such as their job and their surroundings. This one particular trap – noncompete agreements – acts as a metaphor or a template for the other ways in which the freedoms touted are not an accessible reality for so many people.

In some ways, each of these passages feel a bit removed from one another. Connecting them, is the idea of illusion, symbolism and things being different than they may at first appear: fields of organic tomatoes in Florida, looking like a typical conventional set-up and existing despite judgments of others, a recipe for a heart that reads a lot like advice, the meanings of life and death and how depending on what glasses you’re wearing, looking strikingly similar, and the façade of attainable freedom.