Happy Halloween!
Andy and I have started posting on Historicity again. We humbly request that you consider taking a gander when you have a spare moment or two.
Thanks!
If there is one thing that humans do, it is create myths. Humans tell stories not just to explain the natural phenomena they see around them, they do so to create a world out of the nearly infinite number of poorly-understood processes and relationships that surround them. They tell the stories to place themselves--just as mysterious as anything else in the booming, buzzing world of stimuli that surrounds them--into a world that is at least in part understandable, graspable, and livable. By telling stories, they take things that are inherently not graspable--birth, death, justice, love--and create a place for them within the rest of the world, so that even though they are not knowable, at least there is somewhere to put them.
Humans create their worlds through myths by pinning them on certain constants. In the past, one might say that pantheons of gods provided these constants. The world was understood according to the personalities and family relationships between a group of metanatural beings. These beings were dialogically understood by and explicated real personalities and family relationships, which made up the entire social world and through which the natural world was ordered.
Today, humans are still mythmakers, and the pantheon of "gods" to whom we pin our myths (and thus create our world) is known as science. This is not to say that science is no better than the gods at explaining reality, but rather that people use science (or their ideas about science) in the same way that they used the gods in constructing myths and a coherent world. Thus, a worldview based on "science" is not necessarily any more true, "scientific," or rational than one based on the gods.
One of the most fertile fields for mythmaking is evolution. There are a number of reasons for this: evolution, like religion, deals with ultimate things and therefore is an extremely compelling topic for humans. Evolution also has some indications for how humans ought to live their lives, like religion as well as philosophy; and hence is quite tempting to humans who are innate moralizers as much as they are mythmakers. Finally, people really don't understand evolutionary theory, but they think they do: this gives them quite a bit of leeway in adapting what they think evolutionary theory is to whatever point they want to try to make. Watch how people try to explain anything about humans: from psychological illnesses to personal preferences, they will try to link it to evolution somehow, but these links are derived from a feeling that everything about the world must somehow be explained by evolution, rather than a real, demonstrable, explanatory argument. This is storytelling, not science.
Everyone believes in evolution now, everyone. Creation scientists believe in it so strongly that they can't argue against it except in its own terms. The only way anyone can not believe in evolution is if they have a completely false idea about what it is, or if they make a determined effort not to believe something that they know, intellectually, to be true--which is inherently irrational. But even in those cases, the theory is there, concepts from it trickling down from those who do understand it through the filter of those who partially understand it, and thus making up some of the building blocks of how we see the world, whether we know it or not. This is because the scientific method is the dominant paradigm of the age. It has thoroughly colonized our minds so that to reject any of the generally accepted products of it is to deny the efficacy of the way our minds work and how we understand the world to work; so that there is no longer any reason to believe that a baby can't give birth to its own mother or that a television doesn't work by magic--unless one creates a new myth to explain how these things work, and thus ensure intellectually that this is the way they will work.
There is nothing wrong with science, and there is nothing wrong with the fact that it is the way we all see the world. But in order to make sure our worldview is our servant and not our master, we must remember the following:
1. Science is the dominant paradigm, not the Whole Truth. It explains the natural world in a marvelously coherent and consistent way, but does not provide satisfying answers to everything that humans need and want to know about themselves, their relationships with other people, such issues as how to be happy and live a good life, and how to deal with the fact of death.
2. Science is not infallible, because humans are not infallible. Humans will consciously or subconsciously impress their preconceived beliefs and judgements onto the scientific process and scientific outcomes.
3. In order for science to be a good tool, we must use it properly. We must really understand the scientific process and the information and theories it produces before it is of any real use to us. Linking our theories to some scientific fact or theory with vague, unexamined "it must be that this is what happened" kinds of stories is not enough.
Serendipitously, I just came across a good food quotation from The Instructions of Kagemni, who was a a vizier of the 4th dynasty pharaoh Snofru (27th-26th c. BC):
"He who is blameless in matters of food, no word can prevail against him. The shy of face, even impassive of heart, the harsh is kinder to him than to his (own) mother, all people are his servants."
I think he's overstating things, but maybe I'm just jealous because I'm far from blameless in matters of food, as my recent attempt to make Turkish desserts indicates.
We recently got together with some friends for dessert and to show off my Turkey pictures, and I decided to attempt some Turkish desserts. The one I really wanted to make was some interesting stuff I had there, the name of which I can't remember but which we described as "cheese with Shredded Wheat, but sweet." That's exactly what it was like, so you can easily imagine it, but yet again, it's much better than it sounds.
That's the title of my second cookbook, by the way: "Much Better than It Sounds."
Anyhow, I decided to make Mosaic Cake, Creamy Pudding, and Sekerpare. Mosaic Cake was extremely simple, although my ratio of chocolate to tea biscuits (which are basically graham crackers, as it turns out) was much lower than in the picture. Creamy Pudding was also easy to make, tasted good with cinnamon sprinkled on top, and combined nicely with the other two.
I had a little more trouble with Sekerpare. To begin with, I did not know what "semolina" was and couldn't find it at Meijer (fyi, it's Cream of Wheat), so decided to use the recipe in my Turkish Cooking cookbook instead of the online one, as it calls for flour only. However, in addition to having its measurements in European rather than American units, Turkish Cooking also uses some units of measurement unique to it: such as a "soup spoon" or a "glass" of something. Some of these it explains, others it doesn't. So I found an online conversion thingy for the European-style measurements, and used my best guess on the others.
However, I hit a snag. The online conversion thingy indicated that I should use 1 cup of butter and 5 of flour for the cookies, which seemed like way too much flour and was way more than in the online recipe. So I began to triangulate between the book recipe, the online recipe, and the way the dough looked to me as I progressed.
Further, it suddenly hit me as I was in the midst of combining ingredients that even the seemingly clear-cut measurements--"tablespoons" and such--might be different from what I thought. Some googling indicated that indeed, European tablespoons etc. are different from American ones. Now, the Turkish cookbook would certainly use the European versions, but what about the web site? It's Canadian--did it use British or U.S. type tablespoons, and if the former, were British tablespoons American or European sized ones? Here google failed me: some conversion sites opposed European Tbs to British & American, others had European & British vs. American.
So I just put in what seemed like a reasonable amount of different stuff and commenced to cookie-making; then dumped the syrup on the cookies as directed. However, the cookies didn't soak up the syrup as they were supposed to. Upon further reviewing the recipe, I realized I'd made the cookies way too big, and had thus sabotaged their ability to soak up the syrup.
But, they were still good. Sort of good. Well, you could see how they would be good if somebody made them the right way. And, they didn't go to waste...unless you consider my single-handedly consuming half a pound of butter mixed with some flour and sugar to be a waste. I didn't.
If I'm really going to start blogging about food and stuff, I can do no better than to begin with looking at the role of food in Trixie Belden books. There's nothing like a good description of a meal in a novel; it gives the reader not so much a window as a door into the story, the easily imagined and universal multisensory experience of eating makes the reader part of the story. This works best if the food is in fact part of the story: if it's simply an irrelevant detail (though "multiplication of irrelevant details" seems in my opinion to be the dominant literary style currently), it distracts, but if used properly it can establish an atmosphere for the story, and tells you a lot about the characters involved: do they cook for themselves, or does someone else serve them? Do they like eating or is some known or unknown plot point taking away their appetite? Is the food home-grown, ordinary, or gourmet?
Andy's mom recently got me "The Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook"--who even knew there was such a thing? But now that I think about it, there is a heck of a lot of food in those books, and there can be no better example of food used as an integral part of the story than in Strong Poison. But I digress.
Pretty much any Trixie Belden could be recommended for food content. The Bob-Whites eat all the time; in many of the books it seems every meal and snack are lovingly detailed. The very first book in the series, The Secret of the Mansion, dates from what must have been a very delightful time in our nation's past when the health of children and teenagers was considered dependent upon the practically continuous consumption of delicious and incredibly heavy food. The sickly and food-averse Honey is nursed back to health mainly by eating a lot: the produce of her family's cook, the Beldens' home-cooked meals, and the meat Jim hunted himself and cooked outdoors on a spit.
Unlike today's kids, who I guess are fed preprocessed and prepackaged stuff even though we all know it's unhealthy; most of the Belden's food was produced as well as prepared at home. They kept chickens and had an enormous garden which was often the bane of Trixie's life, although the number of times Mrs. Belden is described as stuck in the kitchen canning tomatoes, I'd say she did the lion's share of the work. She also does most of the cooking, though most characters, male as well as female (and sometimes Trixie herself, much to her dismay) get in on the food prep at some point or another.
While most Trixie Belden food consists of generic American items, when the Bob-Whites travel they eat more exotic dishes (well, for exotic for the 40s-60s), such as the delicious Mexican meals they eat in Mystery in Arizona.
Regardless of where or what they're eating, there's a lot of food in the Trixie Belden books, and it serves to help establish the overall themes of the novels: hard work (as in the garden and kitchen), celebration of American and its diversity (from New England baked beans to American Indian and Mexican foods in Arizona), an ideal life of abundance yet simplicity (in love and respect for one's family and friends, as in food), and above all, wholesomeness.
To get to specific recommendations. Any of the above would be great choices, but when thinking about Trixie Belden and food, these two stood out in my mind:
First, The Mystery of the Blinking Eye, for what must be the oddest meal in the series, and, perhaps not coincidentally, one produced by the combined efforts of most of the Bob-Whites. Jim and Brian wash lettuce, peel tomatoes, and cut up green onions for a salad. Dan begs off, remarking that "the only thing I could cook would have so much garlic in it that we'd be run out of the apartment," so he and Ned go out for "colas" and popcorn for after dinner. Diana "know[s] how to make Chinese fried rice," while Mart makes mashed potatoes "avec fines herbes." Trixie makes beef stroganoff, incorporating "crisped beef with...half a dozen herbs and spices," which is, by her own declaration, "perfect." She also makes the recipe that's supposed to be for 16 people, but the 11 people present manage to polish it all off.
Beef stroganoff, fried rice, and mashed potatoes--yikes! Not that I'm not all for it, but still. Sour cream, I might add, makes an appearance in not one but two of the recipes: the stroganoff and the mashed potatoes, and I don't know why the Bob-Whites don't weigh 600 pounds apiece. Also in the potatoes, if anyone is interested, are grated cheese, nutmeg, mace, thyme, chives, and lemon juice, with just a taste of sesame seed, dill, and rosemary; whereas the stroganoff incorporates a more generic "spices," onions, and tomatoes.
And the kids did indeed enjoy some colas, and not just popcorn but cheese popcorn later in the evening. Wow.
Second, I'd recommend Mystery at Mead's Mountain, which I've already recommended once as a good summer read. All sorts of delicious foods are served, in "pottery bowls" in the ski lodge dining room (in keeping with the 70s flavor), packed as snacks for the kids while they're out skiiing, and at a very 70s vegetarian restaurant called the Purple Onion.
But the food event that really stands out in my mind from this book is the time Trixie hung around in the dining room after dessert, in order to have a second piece of lemon meringue pie. That's my girl.
What is up with bumper stickers whose words are too small to read on the car in front of you while you're trying to drive? They really annoy me, and I suspect are the cause of a number of fender-benders. Like lidless coffee, as President Palmer was warning me about just the other day.
Anyway, I saw one yesterday, and as best I could make it out read: "I've hunted nearly every day of my life, and every other day has been wasted." At first I thought the second word was "hated," but that doesn't make sense, and I'd really prefer not to get involved in the thought process behind that if it was.
It's not clear whether the guy was bragging or if this was some kind of self-analytical confessional device out there for all the world to see, meant as part of the healing process. Regardless, it got me thinking.
What, if anything, had I done nearly every day for say the past 10 years of my life, besides the typical eating, sleeping, tooth-brushing, etc.? After much soul-searching (well, as much as I could do in the next 3 minutes until I arrived at Meijer), I came up with two things:
1. Praying
2. Drinking Diet Coke
The mind reels. What, if anything, does this say about me? Should I talk to someone about this? Or maybe put it on a bumper sticker? It seems the positive message conveyed by the first item might be a little diluted by the second. Or maybe, just maybe, it would get people thinking about their own religious life. Or soft drink consumption habits. Or something. Never mind.
I read a couple of good posts about emergency contraceptives recently and thought to myself: Here is an issue I don't know anything about and never think about, I think I'll post about it. This is mainly in response to the responses to the first link above. Here goes.
It seems to me there is a confusion of categories covered under the word “society” here. Does “society” = federal law? or is “society” the sum total of what we all as individuals or as parts of groups decide to do? Because something is legal under federal law is not equivalent to society’s approving of it—why? because we don’t legislate morality in this country, or at least we try not to. It's not actually possible to make laws without reference to some code of morality--laws against murder have a practical element to them, but without some kind of basic moral judgement about the dignity of human life, the number of potential exceptions would make such laws completely impotent.
The intent of federal law is not to establish some comprehensive statement of our society's moral code, rather, it is to make the rules by which we can live together as a society while allowing individuals to practise their own beliefs, whatever they may be. Hence, the law can't be seen as restricting a doctor's or pharmacist's freedom of religion or conscience.
This is similar to a common misapprehension about what “censorship” is. Blockbuster not stocking x-rated videos is not “censorship,” but the federal government outlawing x-rated videos would be. Just because something is legal does not mean a private citizen—a dr. or a pharmacy or business owner--can be required to provide it to you. If it were, freedom of religion, of expression, and of conscience would be utterly meaningless.
Referring to a “small group” of people as “gatekeepers” is another rhetorical strategy. Doctors and to a lesser extent pharmacists are gatekeepers, in a sense, they limit access to potentially dangerous prescription drugs. This seems like a pretty good thing, by and large. If all doctors and pharmacists had entered into some kind of conspiracy to prevent anyone from getting ECs or anything else, you might have a point; but this is far from the case. As far as I know, even those who oppose ECs haven't established this as some kind of common goal. And, at least 50% of the people in this country believe abortion should be legal, I'm guessing those who approve of ECs is even higher. Thus, there must be an awful lot of doctors and pharmacists who prescribe ECs around. And there are planned parenthood locations all over the place. While I don't doubt the word of anyone who says they couldn't get ECs when they wanted them, I find it extremely hard to believe that they are that difficult to get, in general; and as always when only hearing one side of something, wonder if there might be more to the story in at least some cases.
I think one problem with this debate is that both sides are so easy to belittle from the opposite point of view. Not to pick on Brit, but he mentions “moral grounds” as if it were a mere preference, like pizza toppings. The dr. is being asked to do what s/he considers to be killing someone—which is against the Hippocratic oath they have to take as dr.s, aside from being one of the more basic moral beliefs. Just because not everyone agrees that it is killing somebody does not detract from the seriousness of the moral belief. Infant exposure was a common method of birth control in ancient times, let's say that it becomes legal today—does that mean you or I would have to carry the baby out yourself and leave it in a field? If a parent can't find a single person who is willing to ensure the death of his or her baby, is he or she being discriminated against? It's easy to dismiss the beliefs of people who don't believe in ECs if you yourself don't share the belief, but apply it to one of your own deeply-held beliefs, and it's a different matter.
On the other hand, as Kim notes, pregnancy is more than just an "inconvience." In discussing this issue, Andy and I both agreed that it would be pretty terrifying if I got pregnant when we weren't expecting it, and we're married, reasonably financially stable, and actually want children. There's so much to consider: a career to rearrange, financial matters to work out, potential health problems to be considered; and if it were me, I'd immediately start worrying about what medications I'd been taking--even aspirin!--and what I'd been eating, drinking, and doing that might already have harmed the baby.
Pregnancy takes a huge toll on a woman's body, not to mention raising a child; and it's all very well to suggest adoption to an unexpectedly pregnant teen, but what about an adult with a career? And ECs are not all that different in function from birth control pills, so I can see how it would seem outrageous and arbitrary for an adult human being not to be allowed to make that decision.
Ultimately, I agree with Andy's main points: I don't believe that individuals deciding according to their beliefs and conscience not to prescribe or sell ECs amounts to limiting women's rights according to some patriarchal value system, any more than I think my decision not to sell the Satanic Bible while working at a bookstore that carried it amounted to censorship. And, I think that if people are morally fine with ECs and plan to use them if their primary method of BC fails, they need to take into account the fact that ECs aren't okay with everybody and to make a plan beforehand how they are going to get them. In other words, I think people should be more respectful of each others beliefs and situations: don't dismiss other peoples' beliefs as illegitimate, and don't underestimate the problems an unexpectedly pregnant woman is facing.
The end, of my input on this issue.
For a long time now I've thought about doing a series of posts on cooking, cookbooks, and so forth. I've been a little nervous about doing so since many people who are much better cooks than I have been known to read this blog. But today I figured, what the hey?
While I did have plenty of opportunity to get tired of some aspects of Turkish food while in turkey (*cough*pilar*cough*), some of it was quite delicious. The grilled kebaps and fresh pide (pita) were always a treat, and I've mentioned several items that tasted a lot better than they sound, such as lamajun. A couple more such items were börek, pastries with cheese, potato, or meat inside; and ayran, which is a beverage consisting of thinned down, salted plain yogurt. See, the latter doesn't sound good at all, but it actually was, and was quite refreshing on a hot day, as well as being good for you.
I bought a Turkish cookbook (in English) in Turkey, but it didn't have a recipe for the green lentil soup I was craving. So I found a recipe on this site. It was quite good, though I did alter it a bit--and this is the part that will horrify the real cooks in my audience--I didn't have any onions, so didn't put 'em in; and when I tasted it it still tasted a little like lentils so I added more cumin, some garlic powder, and black pepper. Yum!
I also thought I'd try making pita using my bread machine. I used this recipe for whole wheat pitas from Allrecipes.com, but made the dough in the machine. It turned out fine, but wasn't quite the right texture, maybe because of the machine, or more finely-ground flour, or because I forgot the "moist towel" step. But, it was still good.
I'm looking forward to trying some more Turkish food, although I don't know where I'm going to get some of the ingredients--grape leaves, for example. I don't think people in Turkey buy grape leaves, I think they're just there. But, I'm all about creative substitutions!