Obesity – We Shall Overcome

Mother may have had more patience than I do, although I am more patient today than I was some thirteen years ago, my daughter having taught me to slow down and smell the flowers, literally. When I spent those years with her as a mom who didn’t earn income/work outside the home I have vivid memories of her slowly making her way from the house to the car, from the car to the store (any store), to the library, stopping whenever she saw a weed, wildflower, insect or anything else that interested her. Smelling the flowers, picking them, taking them apart, petals, sepals examined, stamen plucked; observing the insects up close, asking questions to which I may or may not have known the answer about what kind of insect it was, was it a grown-up and did it bite.

But, even all my daughter’s on-the-job patience training can go right out the window when I am triggered by something that strikes me as grave social injustice, especially when I can identify with the person who is unjustly treated. I think this strong sense of equity is what Ms. Austin saw in me at five-years-old when she told my mom that despite my mom’s desires for me to be a doctor I was going to be a lawyer. Occasionally, I don’t find myself sympathizing with the oppressed, especially when I see someone (to paraphrase Mother), make they bed and lie in it. Most recently, this happened when I was having lunch last week.

I was walking around the neighborhood near my office looking for somewhere cool and fun to have lunch when I stumbled upon Canto 6 on Washington Street. On “that side of Jamaica Plain” where those afraid of brown people, cowed by the nonsense they hear on the news about “high crime” neighborhoods rarely dare to venture. Me, I’m brown-skinned, I rarely believe what I hear, and we’ve already established on this blog that I live to be adventurous. (Judging by my recipes alone, you should get that sense that I’m curious and daring.)

Canto 6 is a tiny, breakfast, lunch spot with amazing sandwiches with hip names like “Goat in the Road,” “Guac in the Park,” and “Peas on Earth.” The day I was there, I had the Goat in the Road, which had all the fillings/toppings I love (beets, onions, goat cheese, arugula and balsamic vinegar) on top nutty bread. I could eat this on a rubber slipper (flip-flops in the U.S.). While I was waiting for my sandwich (which took way longer than I expected, but was worth the wait) a young man came in. He, likely of Afro-something descent couldn’t have been more than 25 years old, but his truncal obesity made him appear older. Beneath his ball-cap, bill turned skyward, Rocawear shirt and multi-colored Nike high tops, he looked at least 40! I usually don’t care to make these kinds of judgments about people, especially when I am distracted by the wonderfulness of a well-prepared sandwich. But, when he asked about the tuna sandwich and left without buying anything because he said the tuna sandwich wasn’t “regular” (which I imagined meant white bread and mayo-heavy tuna with no vegetables) this really irritated me.

In Trinidad, thicker women with curvy hips and full thighs are (or at least used to be when I was growing up there) revered. Trinidadian children who weren’t lean were better than those who were skinny, something I’ve written about on this blog before. But, over the last three decades, this has not been true in the U.S., in part because childhood obesity rates in the U.S. have tripled. More striking perhaps is that one-half of Black children are overweight or obese. It’s predicted that 1/3 of all children born after 1999 will suffer from diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure or asthma. The First Lady, Michelle Obama, recently unveiled a nation-wide campaign, Let’s Move, to combat the challenge of childhood obesity. Former NBA-player, Will Allen, has been working since 1993 to bring good food, natural food, to those who usually live in what’s called food deserts – where they only have access to packaged, fast food and no fresh fruit and vegetables.

I think my awareness of these social, racial, cultural phenomena is what made me angry with my urban-brother at Canto 6. Here he was in an establishment that provides an oasis in a food desert on that side of the tracks, turning down a delicious, new take on the “regular” tuna sub, that had fruit and vegetables (both, if memory serves) on fresh, baked, whole-grain bread. I was incensed! I’m all for giving people, especially oppressed people, in this case, poor people of color, the benefit of the doubt when it comes to what’s socially constructed and out of their control. But, when I see, hear or have some experience with “my people” and one of them is making bad choices even when good ones are right before them, I have less compassion for him regardless of any institutional/societal oppression. Even though I understand, especially because I work with addicts, that habits are easy to form and hard to break.

At the end of the day (and I fear that I will sound like a Republican when I say this) we are all individually responsible for our choices. Whether it’s choosing a sandwich that’s a healthier version of one that we’re used to or taking the stairs instead of the escalator, taking the initiative to break out of habit is what helps us crack the shell of societal pressure to conform to, in the case of food deserts, what may not usually be in our environment.

This week’s menu challenges us to eat better, eat differently, but using a sort of what they call in the addiction world – a harm reduction model. The menu begins with a chicken salad made with B-vitamin laden tofu, followed by a meaty lamb with vegetables, and a lighter version of a frozen dessert, a rose lime sherbet. In making healthier choices, may we all at least try to modify what we choose to put in our bodies when we can, where we can. Feeding our children and ourselves healthy and well is the next civil rights frontier, I believe. And, I hope that we shall overcome our habits, despite the unfairness of oppression, we shall overcome some day, maybe today, using this menu.

MENU

Tofu “Chicken” Salad

Mediterranean-Style Lamb with Rose-Scented Israeli Cous-Cous

Rose Lime Sherbet

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With a Little Help…

Mother may have had a patisah, as she used to say in patois, which I think strictly translated means having a bias. But, Mother used the word to mean a close companion, or a best friend. My older aunts may know who Mother’s patisah was. But, getting this kind of information out of them is like trying to de-seed a strawberry.

So, I’m left to wonder what Mother’s best friend was like, if she had one. Was she a woman like Mother with kids in the double digits? Was Mother’s best friend from Dominica? Did Mother, like me, have a best friend who was different from her as far as the typical identity markers?

This weekend was my best friend’s (for anonymity’s sake, let’s call him Calvin) birthday. I gave him food presents and prepared an appetizer for his birthday party. The recipes are in the menu below.  But, before we get to the eats, I want to muse out loud, on paper about friendship, about how it has evolved culturally and the role that friends, best friends and close friends have played in shaping who I am.

As my mom and Mother used to say, “Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.”

In the last few years, I’ve had several difficult conversations with my daughter about friends and friendships. She has had a deep longing for a best friend, like a patisah in both Mother’s and the strict definition of that word, someone who’d be partial to her, favor her. She doesn’t yet have a best friend, which can (depending on her mood/hormones – she is twelve after all) cause her much anxiety and pain. When she is at her lowest about this, all I can do is comfort her when she cries, later sharing with her that my own best friend journey has never been a smooth one, that I’ve had several very close friends and my best friend today comes the closest to being the kind of friend I’ve always wanted. (No offense to former friends with whom I had wonderful relationships.)  There are at least two ways in which my friendship today differs from those I’d had in the past. One difference is the level of honesty. Not brutal but gentle honesty, caring enough to deliver our truth in a way that challenges the other person but doesn’t hurt his feelings. And, we spend the face-to-face time it takes to invest in another person’s growth.

Sometimes I wonder if friendships like ours will be extinct in the evolving culture of Facebook and text messaging. In the future, will my daughter and her peers build friendships over chat abbreviations and email? Is her current grief about not having a best friend a symptom of a larger issue – one that calls into question our ability to bond with each other, truly connect because of technology?

But, when I think more deeply about the issue, I realize that maybe technology is only a part of the challenge. For me, pre-IM’ing, friendships have historically been challenging, both building and maintaining them. I remember my best friend when I was nine-years-old, I’ll call her Celia. Often, found huddled together, whispering in each other’s ears, swapping secrets, she and I in our matching uniforms, green apron overalls with white, short-sleeved button-down shirts, our bond as thick as the sweltering heat rising from the asphalt paved play yard.  I don’t remember what happened but one day she just cast me aside, deciding to befriend another girl.  I was not welcome to be friends with the two of them. They made that abundantly clear by shunning me and spreading lies about me to the other girls.

More recently, four years ago, I had a close friend (let’s call her Susan) who burned me similarly in that out of nowhere she stopped talking to me altogether while I was in the throes of my divorce. A friend with whom my daughter and I often spent weekends, cooking up fried rice and steamed lobster with her boyfriend and on weekdays would vent about our jobs over lunch at least four times a week. One afternoon, after what I’d consider a mild disagreement over the telephone, Susan never spoke to me again.

Naturally, Calvin and I have had disagreements in the almost ten years we’ve known each other. But, always we’ve been committed to talking through it to each other’s satisfaction, if not coming to a resolution, agreeing to disagree. A fight no real threat to our continued relationship.

What creates the capacity for this kind of friendship? As I was speculating previously, the larger culture has something to do with it. Another piece has to be who I am and who Calvin is either as a reaction to or against social constructions outside of us.  Calvin and my differences based on typical identity markers don’t matter all that much – that he’s a guy, I’m a woman, he’s White, I’m not, he went to The Roxbury Latin School and I to public school. As far as I can tell, there’s one essential seasoning to our friendship and that’s help. Friendships are one part being there for each other, to helping one another with a heaping dollop of having the desire to help others as a core individual ethic. (Calvin and I are both in helping professions: he’s a teacher and my domestic relations representation is exclusively on behalf of HIV+ clients.)

This week’s menu embodies friendship in this way in that readymade grocery store products helped me make them. I took a little help from the store, as Rachel Ray is known to say. Plus, in the spirit of friendship, I shared them with Calvin and his friends at a birthday party he threw, and gave some of them to him as presents. The drink, Ponche de Crème was a kind of cultural gift – it being a traditional Trinidadian cocktail (mostly enjoyed during the Christmas season) given to friends, acquaintances, neighbors and strangers, who to Trinidadians are merely those who have not yet been become friends.

MENU

Argentinian-Style “Tacos” (Steak Strips, Fry Bread, and Chimichurri Sauce)

Biscotti with Orange and Nuts

Ponche de Crème (also known as Punch-a-Cream)

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Happy New Year: To Light!

Mother may have said,  “What in the darkness must come to light!”  A Trinidadian saying about things that are eventually uncovered, despite efforts to keep them hidden.

I know my mom said this many times during my adolescence when she suspected I was keeping something from her. Of course, I concealed things from her; I was a teenager so naturally there was stuff I didn’t want my mom to know. Plus, I had much to hide about my family and life at home, generally. Until now, I have kept some of these things secret from you, my readers, but in 2010, I intend to come out about most if not all of them.

Christmas this year, I visited my first and second cousins in New York. I grew up with these first cousins who lived at Mother’s home. My second cousins, their children are all under six. Being with them gave me an opportunity to observe and reflect on the all-too-human desire to be open, to know and be known. For each of them, it was important to be seen as the special little beings they are. Adults too, want similar recognition, that’s one of the reasons I write this blog and enter cooking/writing contests. Wanting their otherwise buried talents to become visible to and credited by others, escaping the fear of being powerful, as author and renowned speaker Marianne Williamson wrote, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

Culturally, in the macro- and micro- sense, meaning outside our homes and inside our families, we are sometimes encouraged to let our light shine, while at other times we’re discouraged from doing so. With my second cousins, two of whom are sisters eighteen months apart, I observed that the older one got much praise because she was eloquent, cerebral and a natural performer, engaging the adults with her charm. Her younger sister was much more emotional, sensitive and less verbal, for which she was scolded. But, another approach could have been to praise her for being in touch with her feelings and expressing herself in a way that her sister didn’t.

Reminded me of one of my sisters (the one three years my junior) and me. I was the one who received many accolades for being me while my sister went mostly unseen.  She was creative, shy and perceptive, able to sense the world and people around her, skills that went unnoticed both at home and at the accomplishment/grade-focused, all-girls Catholic schools we attended. A few years ago, this sister was diagnosed as bipolar and has been in and out of mental health/rehabilitation institutions ever since. My mom is not proud of this fact but, when I reflect on it, my sister admits herself when she feels unstable so another way to view this is to praise her for taking good care of herself by using the institution as an asylum, which by definition is a retreat or safe haven.

The menu I prepared this week to ring in a new year contains at least one dish that Mother may have prepared for New Year’s black-eyed peas and rice. I made it my own partially because I wanted to enter a cooking contest (http://www.foodieblogroll.com/royalfoodiejoust) for which the ingredients that had to be used are champagne, mushrooms and oranges. I challenged myself even more by using all the ingredients in my salad and main courses, and two of the three (oranges and champagne) in my dessert course. Having tried and failed in the past to replicate Mother’s black-eyed peas, I also wanted to see if I could make peas that I’d like as much as Mother’s and I did.  Well, truth be told I liked it nearly as much.  No one can beat Mother’s black-eyed peas, as we say in Trinidad, “in my book, that’s how it is.”

In creating this week’s recipes, I discovered that champagne, mushrooms and oranges are ingredients that are so light in flavor that they can sometimes get lost in a dish. To bring them out, in keeping with what I’ve written above about my little sibling cousins and my sister, I had to use multiple techniques, sometimes using them to perfume the dish as with the rice and the pudding, at other times more boldly flavoring with them, as I did with the chicken. Either way, they tasted delicious!

I also visited the Museum Of Modern Art (MOMA) while I was in New York. There I saw a piece by artist Glenn Ligon, whose work has been acquired by President Obama. Untitled (Stranger in the Village/Hands # 1, see image below, not the piece that the Obamas purchased) considers the failure of words to communicate about race and identity.

To some extent I agree with Ligon, thus, this blog uses food to help us understand culture and identity bringing to light what may be dark to us or to others. In 2010, I promise to continue to write even more deeply and fully about food, culture and identity bringing to light what might otherwise be in the dark recesses of your past and mine, highlighting what is alive and present to you and to me today, thereby forecasting our individual and collective futures.

MENU

Mushroom Mixed Greens Salad with Orange Champagne Vinaigrette

Chicken Breast Roasted with Oranges and Mushrooms

Black Eyed Peas with Orange and Spice-Infused Rice

Quinoa Pudding with Orange Infusion and Chocolate Cinnamon Topping

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For the Children/Happy Hanukkah!

ARE THE KIDS REALLY TO BLAME?

Author: Anonymous (approx. 1969-71)

We read in the paper and hear on the air
Of killing and stealing and crime everywhere;
We sigh and we say, as we notice the trend,
This young generation…where will it all end?
But can we be sure that it’s their fault alone?

That maybe a part of it isn’t our own?

Too much money

Too much idle time
Too many movies of passion and crime
Too many books not fit to be read
Too much evil in what they hear said
Too many kids encouraged to roam
Too many parents who don’t stay at home

Youth don’t make the movies

They don’t write the books;
They don’t paint the pictures of gangsters and crooks.
They don’t make the liquor

They don’t run the bars
They don’t make the laws and they don’t sell the cars.
They don’t peddle the drugs that addle the brain,
That’s all done by older folks, greedy for gain!

“Delinquent teenagers!”

Oh, how we condemn the sins of the nation and blame it on them.

For by the laws of the blameless, the Savior made known, who is there among us to cast the first stone?
For in so many cases, it’s sad but it’s true…
The title, “delinquents” fits older folks, too!

Mother may have been proud of me when I recited the poem above for the second round of competition on a nationally televised children’s talent show in Trinidad, 12 & Under. Or not, she like most Trinidadian adults may have thought me out of place for challenging adults.

In my day job, as a lawyer, most of my practice is domestic relations – divorces, annulments, child custody/visitation, guardianships and the like. I don’t represent children directly but I often advocate for their interests, which frustrates me. I worry that no matter how much I try to secure what (as the legal standard states) is in their best interests, that without their actual voice being heard, I am somehow complicit in perpetuating their oppression.

Children, like people of color, the disabled, and others similarly disempowered because of societal mores, are left out of majority culture. Their concerns silenced, their culture: sub-, beneath and, therefore, not as elevated as those who are perceived as more valuable.

When I was a child, I felt this pretty strongly. In part because of, as I mentioned above, Trinidadian culture. Another reason why I felt this way was less societal and had more to do with me individually. I was what one might call gifted and talented. In class rankings, I was routinely in first place. I was always cast as the lead in school plays and my peers year after year voted me class prefect, the equivalent, as you may have guessed of class president in the U.S. (I don’t share this to be boastful, but merely to describe a formative part of my childhood identity.) Plus, as the oldest child in my family, where my mom was being beaten by my father, and with them separating for significant periods, I shouldered a lot of responsibility at a young age.

For example, in one of my earliest memories, I am maybe four years old stooped down next to my mom, who is seated cross-legged on the floor, my arms are draped over her shoulder.  Mom’s cheeks are wet and smell like freshly fallen rain on asphalt.

I remember comforting her saying, “Don’t cry Mummy.  Everything will be alright.”

My mom was weeping because my dad had beaten her. I don’t remember any details of their fight, only that she was sad and that I consoled her. (Again, I don’t share this story to make people feel sorry for me.) It’s a powerful example, I think, of how children are disempowered by virtue of being less than grown-ups, subject to the environment adults around them create, while also being powerful in their own way by making sense of and growing up in a world over which they have little or no control, a miracle of sorts.

Reminds me of Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem after the Jews’ 165 B.C.E. victory over the Hellenist Syrians. The Jews cleaned and repaired a temple that had been destroyed during the fighting, and when they were finished, they decided to have a dedication celebration, lighting a menorah. They looked everywhere for oil, eventually locating a flask that actually contained only enough oil to light the menorah for one day. Miraculously, the oil lasted for eight days.

This week’s menu celebrates this miracle by offering several dishes cooked with or in oil. It’s also a kid-friendly menu but not one that children may be entirely familiar with, taking foods that kids usually love like fried chicken, potatoes, sweets and applesauce and giving them a twist. Because, while I believe that kids have a right to be heard as children, it’s our responsibility as adults to broaden what they can speak about; so that in the future, their grown-up voices can be as diverse and inclusive as possible.

To my Jewish friends beginning their celebrations later this week:

Happy Hanukkah!

MENU

Oven Fried Onion Chicken

Tempura Fried Okra

Root Vegetable Latkes

Wax Bean Salad with Apple Sauce Dressing

Guava Pie

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