The Resistance Is Hungry

Thank you for the reminder, Julia, of how it is that fighting for what's right is not always a matter of arguing, anger, or strife. True, it's a struggle, one that we humans have been engaged in through all of our shared paths on earth--in our own hearts not least. But it isn't one that we engage in alone. We can have friendship, alliance, laughter, and love even in a very imperfect world, even as we strive to make it better. These days anger and complaint, insistence and impatience, have so gripped people that it's possible to forget that we're in this together. It's easy to point fingers at those who are not "pure", or those whose ideas may differ from ours. We saw in the last election that unity among those who would oppose cruelty was lacking, and what a price we will have to pay for that. I hope that increased maturity, patience, and discipline will give us the ability to do better in the future. For now, thank you for heartening me in continuing while I can to do what I can, where I am.

I was never an avid home cook but started after the Election. Yes I donate to a variety of environmental and social justice organizations, serve on a committee or two, call my representatives. But I also have started cooking, baking, and seeing. Nurturing my family in a time of confusion. I printed this poem and put it in my kitchen. Nobody really expects God to be a 43-year-old colored lady, Bare footed in the kitchen, Catchin’ up on the ironing. But that’s what I do and that’s who I am. Take it or leave it, sugar. (I advise you to take it!) What it’s about , I’ve found, is catchin’ up on the ironing, is getting a nice pot of soup goin’ on the stove, is pattin’ little children on the head when they pass by, is makin’ sweet boiled custard. I just think my job now is to smooth it all out. Lay clean, ironed sheets on everybody’s little bed, ..and call folks by their heart’s name— call ol’ men “candy” and mean little girls “pudding head.” Give folks a chance to sit and rock and feel peaceful, Lookin’ out on their lives. Hum a little in the evenin’. From “She’s in Her Kitchen, All’s Right with the World” By Phoebe Newman

After the devastating fires in Lake County over 1800 homes destroyed.. Calistoga fairgrounds feed over 3,000 people 3 meals a day for almost 10 days... Karen Cakebread... of the famed Napa valley winery was in charge of feeding the displaced...

Julie, loved this piece! Thank you. Our last long kitchen table conversation was on the topic of civil debate and how, for example, the French are known to sit around the table and debate issues, etc. Spaniards and Latin Americans are the same. Perhaps, we should all invite folks, who have a different point of view to dinner or brunch and talk. I have a dear friend who is very conservative, we recently discussed th Vegas massacre and found out we both agree about outlawing military style weapons.

Ms. Turshen, your essay warmed the cockles of my heart. May your eyes never grow teary when you're chopping onions and may your stock pot shine ever brighter!

During my medical training, I lived in shared housing with a bunch of out-of-state and international grad students. I and a few of my friends would host the occasional dinner: our biggest events were Thanksgiving and around Christmas. 50+ people would attend. Despite being economically poor, people were rich in spirit, bringing food and (homemade!) alcohol and sharing folk songs from around the world. It's hard to hate someone when you're laughing over a game of Taboo. We had Greeks and Turks, Russians and Ukrainians, Indians and Pakistanis, etc. at our dinners. Also, see Make America Dinner Again. http://www.makeamericadinneragain.com/#video

Not much of a cook but I do know how to sew and embroider. Maybe a community stitching group would be a good way to bring people together.

Glad to see that the 'Resistance' has awoken in the US...must have been asleep the last eight years while Obama went on his drone killing spree, ended habeas corpus, jailed whistleblowers, did nothing when Occupy Wall Street movement were brutalized by police, etc. etc. Maybe Trump isn't so bad after all, right? Bon Appétit !

This savory piece reminded me of a quote attributed to Napoleon: "An army marches on its stomach".

Word!! Cooking, listening to more music, seeing plays and musicals, even starting exercising instead of reading the newspaper in the morning. Oh, I still read it, but not as a way to start my waking hours. 2018 and 2020 can’t get here fast enough.

This is the just the sweetest and best perspective on creating change. This is change from the bottom up of the kind that creates a groundswell!

I have always loved to cook.After 45 was elected, I threw myself into it. My reading since last November, has mostly been recipes.I try to stay informed, but to stay well during these scary times, I grow as much food as I can, and cook, and share meals.I highly recommend it.

I suppose we need to do whatever we can to get people politically involved - this is, after all, the United States of Apathy.

Kudos, applause, and 21-gun salute to Ms. Turshen. Politicians come and go, revolutions happen and leave in their wake piles of innocent victims, dictators seize power, but hunger and gastronomy live forever.

Yes, at its peak, the kitchen staff of Occupy Wall Street was feeding over 30,000 people per day. The movement of movements needs art music dance comedy satire food, as well as analysis and protest.

Jamie Oliver took his chef talents in another direction with his attempts to improve school nutrition in West Virginia and Los Angeles. Whatever happened to these attempts, which were a unique combination of nourishing young people, political activism, and marketing? I would guess that his food revolution fizzled out.

Thank you for your humble humane empathetic service and wisdom. Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. never made it to his last supper in Memphis at the home of a local minister on April 4, 1968.

I am pleased that Navi gives a dollar to Destiny, but at $12 for a serving of Mac and Cheese, Tikka Masala or not, most of us can''t afford to eat there.

I had to hold back a sob as I finished reading this article. How are many gifts are shared to improve our human condition, and bring about change! So touching, so worthwhile. The article touched me just when I needed it most. Thank you.

Thank you for an inspiring essay! I work with one of many groups doing this in Troy, NY, both for the activists and for the community. It looks like you and I both do our work in food deserts, where this work is often more needed. I appreciate that you illustrate how cooking can be used to support the core group but it's also a great way to reach out within the community and beyond. Also appreciate that you start this piece in Puerto Rico -- where many civic-minded cooks wish we could be right now -- and ended it in our own communities, where we're all still needed. Thank you for what you do!

This is an essay to remember for anyone involved in group organization. People are more likely to attend meetings when there will be food. Even just home-baked cookies relax the atmosphere, making it more welcoming, like family. It's been true since the beginning of life on this planet: sharing food creates bonds.

It's even broader than this fine column suggests. By that I mean one of the ways those opposed to globalization fight its malevolent tendencies (not all are) is by taking back the food chain: farm and garden to table, locally grown, organic, vegan, and perhaps its broadest category, under "Back to the Land."
Food and Water Watch, a national organization, is built on organizing around those two human fundamentals, and what the worst of corporate power has done to them.

Did I mention the life and practices of Wendell Berry? How could I not have? I was led to his great Jefferson Lecture, 2012, the highest award in the American humanities, by a food column right here at the Times. It will go down, given enough perspective, as one of the great American speeches, but the Washington establishment did not like it.
I don't know how far this movement to take back the food chain can re-arrange the economy and feed all the hungry billions. Among some of its most devoted practitioners, I worry that they have so detached from the existing political spectrum that they live in a fantasy land of "depolitization," one that allowed Trump to sweep rural Red State America.
But it is an understandable reaction to just how difficult it is to move the Neoliberal establishment in both parties.
I say continue the local food experiments of all types. A green New Deal will rely in part on them as the foundation to build upon.

And here, in Cleveland, Ohio, we have Edwins Leadership Institute. From Edwin's Mission statement: "EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute is a 501(c)(3) organization that gives formerly incarcerated adults a foundation in the hospitality industry while providing a support network necessary for long-term success. Our mission is to teach a skilled trade in the culinary arts, empower willing minds through passion for the hospitality industry, and prepare students for a successful transition home." Edwins runs a fine French restaurant on Shaker Square. And there is Bloom Bakery on Public Square: "Bloom Artisan Bakery & Cafè, A business with a heart, Bloom Artisan Bakery & Café provides jobs to low income and disadvantaged adults in
Greater Cleveland. Bloom is a benefit corporation owned by Towards Employment, a non-profit organization that has
helped more than 122,000 people prepare for jobs, get jobs, keep jobs, and move up the career ladder." Good ideas spread well.

I have always advocated the gastronomical way to socialism, democracy, life, the universe and something else.

Do you deliver to Massachusetts? I am drooling for food as well as positive change right now.

My hat off to you, a wide open mind and a heart of gold. Can't we all learn from that generosity, and recognize solidarity as the only way forward, and our diversity the richest resource for relevance and vindication as fellow human beings? May this be a lesson for the bigots in our midst, likely feeling miserable in their cocoon of entitlement and an enslaved mind to material wealth. Resistance to an institutionalized violence is the will, and the courage, to do the right thing, to the shame of petty minds personalized in 'our' vulgar bully in chief.

As I read your powerful, helpful, “Ode to Menschlichkeit,” in Jerusalem, on the first day of Sukkot, an ancient Jewish agricultural holiday, your words, values, caringness, brought tears to my eyes. Feeding others-kin, friends, strangers- in our daily, violating WE-THEY world and culture is a gift. An opportunity limited only by what we have. What we know. Chancing the risk of failing to make a much needed difference. Everyone of US can share. As best as we can. In good enough ways. Sating the range of “hungers.” With food. A basic. And for those of us who can, with safe, supportive shelters. During these divisive times in which much healing is needed. And for others of us our shared “foods” may, in addition, be of necessary ideas and energies to overcome human, traditionalized and principle-of-faith-enabled barriers to much needed mutual trust.Respect.Caring. Help when, and as, needed.Foods-to-facilitate reaching out. Creating viable human bridges with open, welcoming hands. Between US. For US. For diverse THEMs. Thank you Julia Turshen. Wherever you are.For your wholesome, tasteful and nutritious thoughts. Ideas.Efforts. Todah; thanks in Hebrew. Shukran; in Arabic. For satiating-sharing.

From a May 6, 2017 NYT piece by John T. edge about "The Radicalization of Southern Food": Mrs. Hamer said that food “allows the sick one a chance for healing, the silent ones a chance to speak, the unlearned ones a chance to learn, and the dying ones a chance to live.” She expressed another idea that I will certainly twist around here, but the gist of it being: Give a person/man a pig and a garden and they'll be free. Food truly has the power to unite or divide us all. It's one of our greatest common denominators. So hats off to Ms. Turshen for shining light on a simple act of engagement, easily performed by so many of us.

In 1972 our United Farm Workers group held our first meeting of citrus pickers in a previously "whites only" hall in Mascotte , Florida. The workers self-segregated into groups of Tejanos, White or Black displaced share- croppers and West Indians. At the end of the meeting, one of the workers suggested that for future meetings, family members should be invited and everyone should bring food.
It didn't take long before Mexican-Americans were eating hog maws, neck bones, and sweet potato pie and the former sharecroppers were eating frijoles refritos or jerk chicken. This was the KKK's worst nightmare- a multi-racial union in their own backyard !

lots of ways to do it and doing it not only feeds people ("first feed the face and then talk right and wrong" says a character in the weill/brecht "threepenny opera") but the activity, cooking and serving is a far more civil matrix for protest...better we cook and share than kneel, scream or throw bricks...cooking, baking and bringing and serving, not to gainsay writing a check or raising a fist, has a social aspect, the engagement, face to face with anyone who needs a meal and others who are helping to provide is positive, proactive and contributive to actually making things better, the first step in "walking the walk" no matter the issue...for example, for all the talk about educational reform, there is all too little done to make sure poor kids are fed (and healthy, while we're at it) before facing the demands of the school day. and of school officials balk at preschool breakfast (several approached hereabouts declined) there has to be a church hall or a mall close by in willing hands.

I remember how good the food tasted after we protested in the Wisconsin winters against Scott Walker.

He tried to damage our souls, but we met at the tables after the snow and cold, maybe our feet were still what we call frozen. There we warmed our bodies, stomachs, minds and friendships. And some of those friendships, new and old still meet at tables - over that Madison cooking.

He won the recall. But he never succeeded in ruining the comraderie.