Food politics

I started reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver this weekend and it's pretty interesting! It's not exactly the soapy, sleepytime fare I normally favor, but a coworker gave me a copy after I told her that Honey Bunny and I try to make at least 60% of our food purchases organic and/or locally grown.

Kingsolver wrote this book with her husband and daughter(s) after they uprooted their lives in Tucson, Arizona, to live in southern Appalachia. They vowed that, for one year, they would make "every attempt to feed themselves animals and vegetables whose provenance they really knew." In addition to reducing their carbon footprint by as much as possible, they wanted to really know where their food came from (who grew it, bartered it, raised it, killed it) or more importantly, to grow and raise as much of it themselves on their own farm.

Color me surprised by her mention of food politics as it relates to fat folks. The ensuing passage follows her explanation of how "the government rewrote the rules on commodity subsidies so these funds did not safeguard farmers, but instead guaranteed a supply of cheap corn and soybeans." These two crops were/are parlayed into not just feeding people, but feeding animals that are being raised for slaughter, "to make high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and thousands of other starch- and oil-based chemicals." The net result is that farmers were/are overproducing those crops just to keep their financial heads above water -- but where does the overage of these crops go? Well, the food industry apparently had some ideas on what to do with it...

No cashier held a gun to our heads and made us supersize it, true enough. But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of this genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually the suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime.*

Worth mentioning (at least to me): Barbara Kingsolver is not fat, nor is her husband or children.

Coincidentally, I read this article by Marion Nestle in the Sunday, June 21st, edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Food section. I have often, myself, wondered, "Aren't organics elitist?" Nestle's response was completely eye-opening and furthers that of Kingsolver's assertion above.

*Kingsolver, Barbara (2007), "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," pg. 15, Harper Perennial.

Awkwardness

Over the weekend, Honey Bunny and I went to a big, big family dinner at his uncle's house. The reason for this particular fete? His cousin from Australia - I'll call him Harry - was in the US for a medical conference last week and decided to pass through San Francisco to see family on his way back.

Harry is a Bariatric surgeon. Yeah. Awkward. I'm far from being the only overweight relative in the bunch, but I don't think anyone else could pass for "obese".

There are lots of doctors and surgeons in HB's family, and the sidebars at family dinners are often about medical topics. Katie will ask why her cholestorol medication makes her face flush, Norman will show how he twisted his knee last night at his baseball game, and Honey Bunny will ask for advice on how to lower his uric acid level. You get the picture.

And, this is not the first time Harry has been in the US for conferences and such. One time he was in the Bay Area for two weeks doing a mini-internship under a supposedly famous Bariatric surgeon. I endured several family and two-on-one dinners with Harry during that time. And, I do mean "endure" as I always felt painfully self-conscious about what I was eating and how much, and what was being discussed at the dinner table and in what depth.

So what made this time different than any other? Firstly, I decided not to bother myself with the usual self-conscious thought routine. All previous occasions when I've spent time with Harry, it was met with hand-wringing for days prior, and a pep talk about how, if the subject of his work came up, I would hammer home my opinions about weight, obesity, and surgery as a means to accomplish weight loss. In other words I spent the days leading up to, and the actual visit, in defensive mode. I have to add that the subject of his work never came up, and so Harry doesn't know jack about my stance on living a fat life.

In fact... Harry doesn't know jack about me in general! I'm not going to out HB's family background, but I will say they come from "the old world". Unfortunately, I have to report that, in this family at least, women are not exactly included in conversations about anything other than cooking and god (and medical advice, as appropriate and necessary). Harry is no exception, and in fact I would say he's one of the worst. He'll talk the ears off any male family member, but where women are concerned there is a polite handshake and "How are you these days?" and that's about it. Point #2: Zaftig Chick needs to lay off the paranoia/narcissism and realize that the distance isn't necessarily about her!

I felt ready and steady to meet Harry this time around, but it was still awkward in the moment. I asked him what brought him to the states this time, and he very, very awkwardly told me he attended an obesity conference in Dallas, where he learned more about a specific procedure that he likes to perform. Ick. Thankfully the conversation veered quickly to Texas and how hot it is there, and he and HB were off and running. I politely excused myself to get a glass of water. Sometimes awkward conversations about awkward topics with awkward people happen in life, and sometimes you have to endure them. But, sometimes you don't. Harry is family and so I will always find a way to be genuinely polite to him, but there's no reason I should stand there and endure anything more than the routine niceties.

This is something I'm learning in general in life right now. Sometimes you have to take it, and sometimes you don't. And if you don't, then why waste your time with it? I don't mean that in a bitchy way. A waste of time can be as simple as playing one too many games of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, or as complicated as putting effort into a fruitless relationship.

Also, I don't think that the distasteful actions of a person constitutes a reason to hate them. Harry has chosen a profession which is meaningful to him in a way that I don't get, and maybe someday I'll ask him for clarification on that. I've spent a lot of time in life lumping folks into two categories: good or bad. Thankfully I can see a lot of shades of grey now. Afterall, Harry is a terrific backgammon player (beats me and everyone else in the room, every single time) who seems to have a very genuine affinity for Honey Bunny. He has strengths, just like everyone else. He has deficits, just like everyone else. And I'm allowed to have an opinion about him, but I don't know that it need end in stern judgement.

The mental tug-o-war

Last night I got my hair done by my lovely hairdresser Nancy. The last time I saw her, in March, she died my hair a rich reddish brown overall and then dyed over my old blond highlights with hot pink. I was in the mood to do something wild. It didn't seem that wild, though, since my highlights had grown out to the point where my roots were a good 2" or more. In other words, the hot pink had a more peek-a-boo effect.

Last night I was hell-bent on having highlights that went right up to my scalp, as I think it makes my hair and head have more dimension, and therefore look bigger. This has less to do with wanting Texas Hair (which I do love sometimes), and has much more to do with balancing body size. See - my mom, when I was about 15 years old, told me my head looked too small for my body when I wore my hair close to my head. Moms say the darnedest things sometimes!

(Thank goodness for my friend Hyla, who once quelled a crying jag I had about above-referenced Mom comment and what I perceived was very flat hair at the time. She said, "If anything I have always thought your head is freakishly BIG for your body!" My response? "Really?? Thank god!")

At any rate, Nancy bleached out pieces of hair for the highlights while doing my overall burgundy/brown/red color, and then after she washed that all out, she put the hot pink all over my head rather than isolating the bleached out pieces. It was at that point that I started having my usual mental tug-o-war.

On the tip of my brain and tongue was, "Uhhhh... are you sure you wanna do that?" The other, more judgemental, voice in my head butted in and said, "She's a great hairdresser with 15 years experience, I think she knows what she's doing better than YOU do." As usual, the latter voice won and I didn't say a peep. Unfortunately, this is usually what happens because that judgemental voice... it happens to be loud and pushy. You might even want to call it an asshole sometimes.

When she was washing the dye out of my hair, she kept saying, "Wow, your hair really grabbed the pink!" I kept thinking, AWESOME. Yet, imagine my face when she put me in front of the mirror, took the towel off, and a giant ray of sun happened to be beating down on my head. The highlights were FLAMIN' hot pink, while the rest of it was just slightly muted hot pink. The top of my head looked like it was on pink fire. The whole entire thing was just too pink pink pink. There was no reddish brown anything tempering it. I took a deep breath, and, here we go again. Natural Voice says, "Yeah, that's not what you signed up for." Asshole Voice goes, "Well, it's too late now. You're just gonna have to live with it!"

Thankfully, Nancy kept fussing over the fact that it turned out much differently than she expected and said, "Let me cut it and dry it a bit, and if it's still too bright, we'll fix it." One lovely, soft cut and blow-out later, I stare into the mirror and sigh. "Nancy," I said, "I loves me some pink and I appreciate your hard work but I need something less out-there. I'm sorry." I'm a risk-taking girl when it comes to beauty and my work place cuts us a wide berth to express ourselves, but I don't want to look like a goth teenager (no offense to the population, especially since I used to be one of them). Finally, score 1 for Natural Voice!

She totally fixed it and it's lovely now. By normal person standards, it's still pink and it's still out-there, but to me it looks really cool. It's like that goth teenager in me finally gets to have the hair she always wanted but could never seem to actually attain: pretty with an edge. Yahoo! And, Phew!, Nancy made copious notes in my file to not bleach out hair if doing hot pink highlights again, and not put hot pink over my entire hair.

My friend Krista, who is in a 12-step program, counseled me during a personal crisis a few weeks ago. At one point she asked me how many voices were in my head. I just couldn't imagine how to answer that question. If I said I had voices in my head, I felt I might as well admit that I'm nuts (which I am, everyone is, but you know). And, moreso, I didn't realize that the internal monologue counts as a voice, or many voices, as the case may be.

As I tip-toed around the question, she said, "Well, I'll tell you that when I started the program, I had about 50. Now I've honed that down to five key voices that help inform my world, for better or for worse." She explained them all and the purpose that each serves. It was a very interesting concept to me, so I've been trying to listen to my internal monologue carefully and figure out who is who, and what is what.

I have a lot of thoughts about where Asshole comes from. Could s/he be the amalgam of the really hardcore naysayers throughout my history? And what about Natural? Surely she is the voice that my therapist has been nurturing and trying to bring forward for years. I'm sure there are more voices in there to be identified, but only time will tell.

Happy Birthday, Alicia

Today is my sister Alicia's birthday. She passed away just over 5 years ago at age 42, so she would have been 47 today. I ate mexican food for dinner and played hours worth of cards (Solitaire) - all in memory of her. I gave her a tribute shout out a la Jabbawockeez when I sat down to do the aforementioned. I also told her I missed playing cards with her in a big way because now no one plays with me. (Unless Honey Bunny and I are camping, on vacation or really, really bored at home.)

Alicia and I used to play Rummy 500, Go Fish, Crazy 8's, War, 21 for hours while drinking Malibu Rum & Coke, and often deep into the night. The longer we played the more slap happy and drunk we got, and the verbally abusive teasing and air horn-like laughing got out of hand. At some point, we started wearing our mom's sun visors while we played, to look like old school poker dealers.

The card sessions were usually preceded by a large mexican dinner at Carlos O'Brien's (which is just not the same anymore since it left the Plaza, which also is just not the same anymore). We would always ogle a waiter or two. I went for the scruffy college intellectual types, while she went for anything tall with a bubble butt.

I was 9 when she moved out of the house, as she was 11 years older than me. We only had a couple years together at "home" as adults. She was rescued in 1991 by our parents from poverty and ill health, after her husband left her, from the house she was being evicted from in Texas. They brought her back to California to start a new life. My reign as the only child and sole resident of the three bedroom/one bathroom suite known as the upper level of our house came to an end. It was a little rough having Alicia back in my life daily, and having my space invaded.

And I'm not gonna lie... sometimes she was a social liability. Alicia could be funny, clever and affable, but she was also slightly developmentally delayed. She didn't always have a great sense of personal space, boundaries or social etiquette. Most people complained about her while simultaneously wanting to like her.

A couple years later, the night before I moved up to San Francisco, we had a raging party at our friend Bill's house. Alicia worked for Domino's Pizza and had an extremely hot coworker named Ben that I'd lusted after for months. She joined the party, Ben in tow, when their shift ended at 11pm. She asked Ben and I to come out to the back patio with her, turned to Ben and told him that I was moving to San Francisco and that he should kiss me goodbye, and then she turned and left us to be alone. Awkward. But, sweet, right?

The other thing she did, sober, was keep the party going until about 4am, at which point she turned to me and said, "I guess we ought to go since Dad wants us to leave at 6am for Frisco." As she drove us home and I sipped on my Coors Light, I said to her, "Dad is going to kill me... I've never stayed out all night that he knows about, and I stink like booze." She replied, "Don't you worry about Dad, I'll take care of it. Just go straight upstairs and shower and get ready to leave." I never knew what she told him but he didn't say anything to me. Of course, there wasn't much of a chance since I passed out in the back seat before we turned off our street and slept for the next seven hours. She did too, next to me in the back seat.

In 1994, I returned home for the summer to work as a flower delivery person. Alicia was still working at Domino's as a pizza delivery person. One afternoon I came home from my shift to my mom bustling nervously around the house, putting on her shoes and gathering her purse. I asked what was going on. She said, "Alicia's been in an accident of some sort... I guess she's having problems seeing out of one eye... we have to go to the hospital." I told her to not be so nervous, we would go meet Alicia at the hospital and see what was going on. To this day, I don't know if she knew exactly what was going on and was protecting me from a freak out, or if the hospital hadn't fully explained what happened.

What happened was a broken sternum, four broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and knee, and complete loss of not just vision, but of her entire right eye. She'd fallen asleep at the wheel on her way to work, and the car veered off to hit a concrete street lamp, which then collapsed on the car. When the nurse met us at the door, she brought us immediately back into the emergency room, as Alicia was about to go into surgery. As we followed her brisk pace through the hall, the severity of the situation started to dawn on me. I wasn't prepared to see my sister laying on the table trying desperately to catch her breath, with blood running from her eye down into a pool on the table, crying, saying "I fucked up, I fucked up" over and over again. I will never forget our mom saying to her, "Alicia, don't say 'fuck' in public." I ran out of the room and to a pay phone to call our sister Amy. I was crying so hard I could only choke out "Alicia...", and then Amy started yelling at me to tell her what the hell had happened, panic rising in her voice. It was one of the most heartbreaking and scary moments of my life, at least to that point. Alicia went through a few surgeries to fix her eye, but ultimately it had to be removed and she wore a prosthetic eye from that point on. It took a very long time for her to recover physically from that accident and work again.

Flash forward to the summer of 2003. I was so happy to hear that she was moving to Las Vegas with her boyfriend and his children. By that point, she had lived with my parents for 10 years and about as many years had passed since the accident. She was ready to go live her own life on her own terms. Living with the children, each one of whom had special needs, was hard on her, though. Every time I talked to her, she sounded worn. Her boyfriend was a commercial truck driver and was on the road a lot of the time. The last time I talked to her was on the phone in early January, just after Christmas. They hadn't had the money to come to Riverside for Christmas, so I didn't see her like I normally did over the holidays. She asked me during that call if I thought Honey Bunny was "the one" and I said yes, even though we'd only been dating for four months. She told me her life was not as great as she thought it would be away from home. I noted that she sounded like she had a bad cold. She mentioned that she'd been sick with the flu for two weeks.

Again, I'm not going to lie. We were not close anymore. Our lives went in different directions over the 11 years I lived in San Francisco and she remained at home. Talking to her on the phone was difficult. She would often watch TV during conversations, and would get distracted and stop talking mid-sentence or I would realize mid-tangent that she wasn't actually listening to me. The only thing we really had in common was complaining about our parents... how nuts my mom is and how cold my dad could be. I regret it now, of course. Hindsight is always 20/20. If I'd known she was going to pass away midlife, I would have made a better effort to remain connected to her.

That January morning of 2004, I wore my black rattan slides to work because nothing else went with my outfit. They smelled badly and were particularly uncomfortable that morning. I remember walking into my office, stepping out of the slides and onto the carpet barefoot, sitting down and turning on my computer. It was one of the only days I was on time to work. I was engrossed in a spreadsheet when the phone rang. It was Amy, and she was crying. I said, "Oh no... did Gaia pass away?" Her cat had been sick. She said, "No. Alicia." I sat there for a moment trying to figure out what she meant. "WHAT?", I said. She choked out, "Alicia... she died this morning." She died from congestive heart failure.

If you've ever endured the loss of someone close to you, or from your close family, then you know exactly what I'm about to say. It's like the earth stops rotating. You question whether - and hope - you're in a dream. You become throbbing numb. You ask, "How did this happen?" because it truly seems beyond reality that you will no longer see this person (or pet), talk to her, for the rest of your life (or ever, depending on what you believe). It was unreal. My supervisor managed the situation, as she managed every situation at that time. She ordered my coworker (ex-crush/FB/BFF, Tim, ACK) to drive me home in my car, because she said I was in no condition to drive. I called Honey Bunny before I left the office. I also booked a flight to Riverside online before I left the office. I could have driven home just fine, if you ask me. I was still thinking clearly then. It would be about two weeks until the truly crushing and seemingly permanent numbness and grief set it.

Five years later, I feel like I'm managing my grief well. Alicia is alive and well in my memory without that memory being linked directly to heartbreak. When I meditate, sometimes she and Euglina make an appearance to say hi. I'm planning an Alicia tattoo for the opposite hip as Euglina's tattoo. Together they serve as inspiration and push me forward in life.

Steam rollers & crab apples

Every so often, I get into what Honey Bunny (lovingly) refers to as "steam roller" mode, or what my mom (sigh!) used to call "being a crab apple". Now would be one of those times.

It seems everyone in my path isn't smart enough, fast enough, thorough enough, savvy enough, and so on and so forth. And good lord, why oh WHY does the woman in the cube across from me droopily shuffle around the hallways all day long, stopping and droopily talking to people who so obviously don't want to interface with her for 10 seconds, let alone 10 minutes, about such fascinating topics as the next union luncheon and why handling printer toner cartridges can be bad for your health?

In other words, why can't everyone be like ME??

I'm kind of kidding, of course, and yet... kind of not. Right now it feels like I'm running in full efficiency mode where I can see potential problems coming down the pipeline from a mile away and I address them with frightening determination and resolve. It's uncharacteristic for me to be so out-there about my opinions, and thus, solutions to problems. I generally get pegged as the indecisive one, for fuck's sake! Surely this is a bi-product of having had to slowly tighten the screws on the two people I supervise, and do so in the most mindful, strategic (and sure, okay, slightly Machiavellian) way possible.

It's also, I'm guessing, a bi-product of having read so much Candace Bushnell recently, and specifically Lipstick Jungle. Believe me, I don't at all fancy myself a high powered business woman. If anything, it just underscores the fact that I have really horrible boundaries when it comes to characters in books, and particularly those that I've been following through several books or, say, an accompanying TV show. I see parts of these characters' lives in mine, and vice versa. Creepy, I know. And yet, that's what I consider a satisfying book read. It's the only way to explain that I've read all 12 Gossip Girl books, and con mucho gusto. And maybe all the It Girl books too, but you didn't hear that from me...

Anyhow, back to stupid people. Ahem... I mean, my attitude problem. It's a crazy thing to be in this head space. On one hand, I feel like I'm really high-functioning, but on the other, I think it's quite off-putting to, ehm, pretty much everyone in my personal life - including my hubbie. Why should I, at 7am when we are preparing our breakfasts, be pestering Honey Bunny about the best, freshest, most nutritious dinner that he could prepare for us that night after work? Nice.

I need to back it off a bit and chill out, clearly. A curtain to draw across my cube opening would be a good idea as well. Possibly some noise-cancelling headphones, and we're good to go! And at home, I need to ixnay on the advice-giving and just enjoy my husband and my life for what it is. Sheesh!