The Daily: 11 December 2023

I never used to be afraid of the weather. Weather happened. Sometimes it was uncomfortable. Sometimes it could be destructive and scary. I’ve lived through hurricanes and tornados and blizzards and heat waves that set the bosque on fire. For all those things, I made sure to be as prepared as possible. Open the window and head for the basement in a tornado. Keep the hose handy and all structures as wet as possible when the flames are heading your way. Always have a pile of bagged soil to keep the floodwaters out — and then to replenish the garden beds. Make sure the home will have heat and water no matter what breaks down. Have a stock of emergency supplies and plenty of whatever is absolutely necessary to get through house-bound days. Always be ready to leave to avoid the worst. I think half of home-making is being prepared for breakdown, mostly weather-related. But it didn’t used to be a constant source of worry.

For one thing, I was prepared. There was firewood for the days when the power went out. Until recently, there were few days when the water stopped flowing — more often due to frozen pipes than water system breakdown — but I always knew I had enough bottled water to get through a day or so. And when there was system breakdown, I had a filter and more than one way to boil water. I’ve always had a thing for candles, though I don’t much like working by candlelight. But losing the lights is actually a boon in my book. I prefer sleeping in the dark; any excuse to go to bed with the sun is fine by me. I also knew where to go when things became dire. And I had help, people I could rely on. Now, I am the help… And I don’t feel at all equal to the challenge.

I am not prepared. Worse, I don’t know what I have to be prepared for.

I suppose many of the preparatory things are the same, though now I have to worry about cranking up a moody generator to keep the heat going when the power goes down. I also have to worry about the power going down with increasing frequency — and for less and less cause, it seems. Ice storms have always been terrifyingly beautiful, but in the past, they didn’t bring down the power grid with every single storm. Now they do, probably because the grid and the trees and everything else are all on the edge of breakdown all the time. These days it only takes a little ice to blow up a transformer, and one dark transformer can snowball (ha) into system failure. Also… where power lines are down, fire is never far behind…

Same for water. Floods happen; they always have… but now floods will always send sewage and road drainage into the water treatment plants — which are also dependent on the electrical power grid and therefore just as fragile as the heat in my house. More so, usually, because water plants are universally located in flood zones. They have generators for when they are cut off from the grid, I’m sure, but generators are moody… and not terribly reliable in flood conditions.

But these days I am finding that I need to prepare for things that I never knew were things. Water running through the walls of your basement? Yes, my foundation is old, but one might expect solid block walls, even old block walls, to be more or less water tight. Except when the ground is so saturated that the soil around the house is more liquid than solid. I suppose I should be happy that my house stayed on the side of the hill and didn’t flow down to the river like so many other hillsides in Vermont. But I’m not happy, because I didn’t know I had to worry about such things. And I’m pretty sure worrying is all that I can do to “prepare” for such things. You can’t stop the water running, and you can’t be ready for a liquified hillside.

And then there are storms like today. I’m writing this on Sunday in a building crisis. The forecast was for rain — granted, a lot of rain — and temperatures right above freezing until early Monday morning when the precipitation would turn to snow and then taper off. That, in itself, told me to be ready to be home. Fine with me… I don’t go anywhere most Sundays anyway. Too much to do here in this house to keep my life running for me to have a social life on my few waking hours away from wage labor. Ahem… But I digress… In the past, I would have made sure there was food and heat and a snow shovel handy by the back door, and then I’d just go to bed when it got bad. It might have been a bother, but not a big worry.

But right now, I’m scared. It is, indeed, raining heavily. It is also right above freezing. The forecast started out more or less correct. However, it’s only an hour past sunset and there is already snow in the mix. The barometric pressure is plummeting and air flow has completely reversed itself, from a steady south wind to fitful puffs of air from the north and much fog. So it’s not going to be a gentle transition to snow at the end of the storm. There will very likely be ice — maybe a thick layer — and piles of heavy, wet snow of who knows what depth. In fact, I think we could wake up tomorrow to just about any winter conditions except what was predicted.

I think it’s that lack of forecasting accuracy that has me most on edge. This is the third week in a row that will begin with a dangerous winter storm when the predictions were for “maybe a few inches of snow in the mountains”. You can’t be prepared for what you don’t have reason to expect. And it’s one thing to just expect the forecast to be wrong in the worst ways and another thing entirely to always have to be ready for those unpredicted extremities.

Human bodies don’t do very well in constant states of high alert, especially high alert for unpredictable dangers. Most humans are like me. We can deal with just about any kind of emergency as long as it is somewhat foreseen and finite. But we freeze in the face of unknown threats. We don’t cope with surprises, especially not a continual, bewildering stream of surprises that cause pain. We want to know that we are prepared for the worst because we know what that worst will be. We want to know that preparedness is possible, that there are things we can do to be ready. And when I say “want”, I really mean “need”. We don’t function when we don’t get what we “want”… We also want to be reasonably assured that the worst is a temporary affliction, not a permanent state, not the new normal.

But I’m afraid this is the new normal. Fear is the new normal. Preparedness is not a thing. Normal is not a thing. Prediction, based as it is on past normalcy, is not a thing.

It’s not just the weather, though maybe all of it can be traced to increased stress from the weather and other symptoms of systemic biophysical breakdown. There are quite a number of Black Swan disasters that are nominally caused just by humans. For example, we’re all learning to fear seemingly random mass shootings, anywhere, anytime, for no reason at all other than some asshole showed up with a gun. (And there are a lot of assholes and guns these days…) But perhaps the increase in human-caused disaster is itself due to increasing biophysical stress on humans, setting their body chemistry into permanent fight-or-flight mode, impairing their judgement and clouding their view of the world. Still, it all feeds back into increased bodily stress and a perpetually heightened sense of fear.

What was once a bad weather forecast is now an existential crisis — even when it’s not. Because we don’t know when it’s not until we’ve gotten through it. And that we’ve managed to make it through so far is no longer the guarantee that we’ll come through again that it once was.

All it takes is the wrong tree coming down in an unexpected ice storm…

Think I’ll drink a really strong cuppa chamomile-lavender tea, listen to night music, and read in bed… and try not to lie awake listening to unexpected changes in the weather.

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Meanwhile, here is a repost on being subversive by being at home in the ruins…

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Sunday is cooking day in my house. I am off work and so have a whole day to do the long tasks. Conversely, on workdays it’s very difficult to make time for much of anything in the kitchen beyond heating up something. So I bake my bread, ferment my yogurt, make hummus if I want that, and create a pot of something. Then, I eat this stuff all week. This makes for a relaxing Sunday doing things in the kitchen — and also getting the house-cleaning and most of my writing done. I sometimes go to concerts or plays, but most Sundays are spent being a homebody.

This makes all the kitchen work much easier. I spend much less time on cooking — and clean-up, which is the biggest time-sink in the kitchen — than I would if I had to cook something for dinner every day. It is also the easiest way to use local, real food that doesn’t involve a lot of meat. I doubt you will ever find a cookbook advising you to cook like me, but that is because cookbooks all want to sell you something — at least the book — and this way of managing food is not very effective marketing.

I don’t spend much money on ingredients. I grow quite a lot of veg and herbs myself. I buy fruit and veg in bulk when things are in season, and therefore cheap, and then store the produce with what I’ve produced. Nuts and grains and dried beans I buy in the bulk section of my food co-op as needed, though I try to hit the member sale days and buy a lot for storage. I don’t buy meat which, I think you’ll find, is the biggest chunk of the weekly grocery bill for many folks. I know it was for our household when I was cooking for carnivores. Meat also takes up the most time because it mostly has to be done daily and because it makes a mess.

But the second biggest food budget item was stuff that came from elsewhere or that required quite a lot of energy inputs to grow locally. So, fresh tomatoes in winter. Strawberries for Valentine’s Day — really, any berry in winter. Avocados and mangoes any time of the year. Bananas ought to cost more, except we subsidize them heavily — and have since the 19th century. All these things are ridiculously expensive for what you get. Which is, if we’re being honest, not very flavorful or nutritious food. (For most things, taste and nutrition are related, by the way…)

I also don’t spend much on either tools or cooking energy. I don’t have a microwave or a double oven (though there are autumn days when I think the latter would be really useful…). I don’t need a dishwasher. I tend to use one pot for most dinners. And I have a rather religious devotion to my oatmeal pot. I’ve been using it daily for just that for decades; it makes great breakfast every time. I have a large selection of baking pans, but I really use just the sheets and the occasional muffin tin. I do, however, use my Silpat sheets heavily. This saves on clean-up by eliminating sticking, but it also keeps my pans in better shape so I don’t have to replace them and eliminates both the cooking spray (empty calories largely derived from petroleum-soaked corn oil) and the parchment (which, I’ll be frank, I’ve not a clue what that stuff actually is… somehow don’t think it’s actual parchment, which is sheep skin… probably oily wood pulp of some variety…). I don’t get very brown bottoms on my baked goods, but then I don’t often bake things that need crisp, brown bottoms — cookies and so on.

I mostly just bake bread and that requires… almost nothing. You want to know the secret to baking really great bread? Ignore it. Put all the things that go into bread in close proximity. Knead them together until the dough is warm enough for the little critters to work their wonders. But then don’t touch it much until it looks like you have a good amount of air in your dough. That air means there has been plenty of flavor-producing fermentation. It also means the dough will have lots of internal surfaces that both distribute heat and facilitate interactions with that heat. Edge effects. But if you’re folding it a lot or constantly moving it around so that the temperature around the dough is variable, you’re just annoying all the critters… making bad bread… Because basically, you aren’t making bread, they are. So make them happy by leaving them alone. (Forgetful people make pretty good bakers… I’m quite sure this is how bread was invented, you know…)

We have all these cookbooks, food television, food websites, food magazine, food promotion whatevers not to help us cook healthy delicious food. All this advice is marketing. It is all telling us to buy as much as we can — from the books and advice to ingredients and tools to the ultimate money-maker, processed and prepared foods. Which are not very food-like…

That’s what annoys me. All this marketing is not meeting our needs for food. We don’t get good food out of our food industry. No, our food industry is focused on making money for someone else. Nobody in a corner office will ever get rich — or even have that corner office — off of local and simple food, prepared with as little effort or energy as possible. And what we get for our excess expenditure and extra efforts is just that — excess expense and extraneous work. Make no mistake, there is no “time-saving” food prep thing that takes up less time, costs less, and produces tastier, healthier food than just spending most Sundays baking bread and cooking up a pot of something for the week. Following the marketing advice makes your life more expensive and less fulfilling, all while usually making more work — for you if you prepare it all yourself, for many others if you eat ready-made stuff.

We’re told that we like variety, that nobody likes to cook, that we want fatty and sugary foods — because those are easily preserved and shipped from elsewhere. But really, how much joy do you find in preparing a fancy meal with lots of fiddly instructions, lots of inconvenient ingredients, lots and lots and lots of clean-up? Do you even get to eat that meal while it’s hot? And for those of you who rely on someone else to cook for you, do you notice the work that goes into your dinner? Do you notice your dinner at all most days? Would it be any different if you had a bowl of good stew every night? Probably not. Because humans actually don’t like change all that much. We are boring creatures. Well, all creatures are. Because boring works. Every time. Reliably. It’s how you meet your needs — whether for nutrition or pleasure — with the least effort and the least chance of things going wrong.

We get enough variety from seasonal changes. We gorge ourselves on tomatoes when they are freshly ripened under the summer sun. And then we get tired of tomatoes and don’t even want to look at them until they’re ripe again next year. Seasonal variance is about as much meal variety as we need or want. We don’t actually like to eat something different each day; we want to repeat what was good yesterday for as long as it’s still good. 

But a freshly roasted potato straight from your garden isn’t making anybody rich — even though it makes you immensely happy when you get to eat it. Every day. For weeks! Our food industry is just like any other industry. It’s not there to make us happy. It’s there to make other people wealthy, usually at the expense of our happiness.

So spend your Sundays cooking simple, local food. It is not only going to make you happy, it’s better for the world. Because, of course, all that excess expense is directly proportional to the energy and resources and transport that go into your food. Food is a hugely extractive industry. How else would it be generating money?

So want to make a difference? Spark some real change? Be a revolutionary? Then cook for yourself! Spending Sundays cooking yummy, nutritious food is the ultimate in subversive acts. You’ll be a radical activist and you’ll never have to leave the house or sit out in the cold and wet. (Never mind chaining yourself to fences or lying on the courthouse steps in body bags… ahem…)

And you get to eat this…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023