Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Here’s this week’s post, the one for Week 7…a few days late—try asking for a refund?
Note: This post obviously belongs, as Part 3, to a series of posts about my trip from Seattle, where I reside, to British Columbia in Summer 2019.Here’s the completedseries, a USian escapes the bubble: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and (forthcoming) Part 4.
Uh, USians…are missing almost all the world
When I was preparing for my adventure, my acquaintances, much like the border g̶o̶d̶ guard, asked me what I was planning to do. Would I visit the Butchart Gardens? “It is so lovely, and it looks much better during the day than at night, and [on and on].” Years ago, planning for a different adventure, a road trip across half the United States, I was asked my take on whether the route should have us see Nature or cities. “Neither,” I said. “We should see people.”
To learn what likely simpatico people in Victoria were thinking and feeling and doing, and to bring that psychic samizdat back to Seattle, I primarily had in mind, even from the early planning phases, three missions: 1) check out the anarchist bookstore Camas Books & Infoshop; 2) check out and participate with Food Not Bombs Victoria; and 3) check out and participate with whatever alternative mental health stuff might be springing up in the city. Much of my offline activism my first few years in Seattle involved Seattle Food Not Bombs (especially as a driver!) and working with folks in or around, uh, the Seattle chapter of the, uh, Hearing Voices Network, which as you know is the oldest academic honor society in the United States complete with secret handshake, engraved golden key, and notable members including US presidents and Supreme Court justices, Ursula K. Le Guin, Henry Kissinger, and me. Aiming to improve my irl understanding of subject matters like (radical) education, food security, and replacingdumbass psychiatry, I hoped to gain a bit bigger view of the world, to escape the typically reactionary USian default me me me dolla dolla bill lol unrealistic fake newslol me me medolla dolla bill — and also, to just interact with everyday Victoria people hanging out, the ordinary Victoria public transit system, and so on. That seemed far more valuable to me than tourist traps. In Seattle my hands have been nicely dirty with real life, so why would I not want that elsewhere?
So, this post covers those three — successful! — missions, each of which took place on a different day of my adventure. I didn’t take any photos of the missions, however, so throughout this Part 3, I’ll rely on others’ photos or funny images.
Find the real people? I’m not afraid to die! (Source)
Mission one: Camas, anarchist bookstore in Victoria (Wikipedia). They recently sent out this communiqué regarding supporting Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en camps’ resistance against proposed pipelines in the area, (Amnesty; blockades shut railways across Canada), which I unfortunately know little about. I walked to Camas from my hostel, something of a 1̶.̶2̶5̶-̶m̶i̶l̶e̶ 2̶.̶1̶-̶k̶i̶l̶o̶m̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ 2.1-kilometre hike one way. I arrived, looked around inside at several of the same books that already existed on my bookshelves back home, and got into a great conversation with a staffperson there. I told him about the drop in ambient anxiety in Victoria relative to the United States, and how I assumed that was due in part to the universal health insurance and the lack of mass shootings. He said he understood how I would perceive Victoria that way, but from his vantage point, everything seemed too calm. “Unrest,” he said, “is best.”
From the Camas Books & Infoshop websiteAlso from the Camas Books & Infoshop website
Camas is really cool. Relative to other anarchist bookstores I’ve been to in the United States, Camas much more strongly emphasized First Nations or indigenous related material. Were I living in Victoria, or staying for a longer duration, I’d go back to get some different books, meet people, find out about projects, etc. Camas is open daily. Fantastic. Just typing this, I miss it, and wish I were there chilling out in those chairs, reading a book, waiting for an intriguing passerby to inevitably come in and strike up conversation far more interesting than what I usually hear offline.
(In middle school, I drew anarchy signs into my handwritten name and drew them into the steam on the shower door at home. Maybe I saw them first on nineties electric guitars, or maybe on the ANSI art of bulletin board systems. That kid and this adult would get along well.)
Mission two: Food Not Bombs Victoria. Part of the global conspiracy to feed people. Gathering surplus food leftover from restaurants, distributors, and other sources, then cooking it and bringing it to a downtown park, on a shoestring budget, and sharing it with everyone, particularly people who might really need it. All the world has chapters, so if you’re looking to help someone yourself, instead of voting for someone to instruct someone to instruct someone to consider another vote or two or thousand about paying someone to instruct someone to pay someone to instruct someone to pay someone to pay someone to pay someone to maybe help someone someday — or not — and plus you can make friends and participate in your community…why then, go find a Food Not Bombs in your area or start one.
ALERT THE SEATTLE POPULATION IS SHARING FOOD ALERTFood Not Bombs Victoria, from their facebook page
Having FNB-ed quite a while in Seattle, I got in touch with the amazingly welcoming Food Not Bombs Victoria folks, because I was curious how FNB would compare/contrast up there. And I was hungry!
At an apartment, I joined a handful of cooks. Really cool, right, here I am in another country a few days, and already I’m in an apartment with a bunch of friendly local strangers, working on a common cause. And yes, as you might remember from Part 2, everything in this apartment was likewise smaller than the objects would be in the counterpart US apartment. As I recall, even the sink water handles were smaller! The donated food was gathered, I think, primarily from a co-op grocery. With what was then my usual klutzy difficulty, I helped make a salad with sliced cucumber, carrots, a little kale, some sprouts, etc., and another person made a dressing for it with vinegar and various oils. The rest of the food made was similarly standard FNB-style cuisine. We then transported the food from the apartment to the downtown square/park, Centennial Square on the Douglas(!) street side, where the sharing is held every Sunday — also where, years ago, Occupy Victoria encamped.
At the park, the meal was held under a large tree, upon whose branches an FNBer hung an impressively large Food Not Bombs Victoria sign. The black sign had a lot of colorful graphics and words on it (sorry, no photo!). If I recall correctly, Food Not Bombs Victoria also supplied some local literature, zines, etc. About 20 individuals dined on this most scrumptious meal. That included random businesspeople passing by, various park denizens (such as skateboarders), multiple homeless or traveler or otherwise off the radar humans, plus some FNBers who hadn’t cooked with us but wanted to hang out.
FNB Victoria implemented two good ideas others might want to pick up. First, not only did FNB Victoria bring to the park a box of clean, re-usable mugs, cups, bowls, and cutlery, but also, many, perhaps most, of those sharing generally already knew to use those implements and then place them back in the box after eating. These bowls, pieces of cutlery, etc. would later be washed by FNB Victoria and used the next week. Second, the sharers mostly arranged themselves in a lazy circle around the tree. As opposed to FNBers on one side of a table and non-FNBers on the table’s opposing side, FNB Victoria’s organically emerged quasi-circle seating/standing arrangement felt very not us vs. them to me.
Movie Monday in Victoria BC, 25+ years running. Website.
Mission three: Alternative mental health. Before ferrying to Victoria, I pinged my contacts involved in that movement, seeking suggestions for my trip. To my knowledge, Victoria has no Hearing Voices Network chapter, then or now, but someone did point me to Movie Monday. It’s a weekly series of eclectic and thoughtful films, often with presentations and discussions. Free admission, donations encouraged. The 100-seat theater is in the same building as a (now closed down, I believe) psychiatric ward. In 1993, Movie Monday coordinator Bruce Saunders was held at that ward, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Stuck there, he got the idea to show movies at the unused theater, because quality education and entertainment and conversation are as needed as food in life. He continues to coordinate Movie Monday, and it has been going for more than 25 years (listen to this seven-minute MP3 interview with him). The movies aren’t always about mental health topics and aren’t just for audiences interested in that subject. Movie Monday started that way, but has since expanded to other subject matters. When I went, we watched Six Primrose, about a food security project in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
After the movie, a short discussion took place among the audience. I learned about some resources, people, etc. for alternative mental health interests in Vancouver BC. Those I can pursue on my next adventure to British Columbia!
Waiting at the bus stop to return from Movie Monday to the hostel, I got into a conversation with a random Canadian woman also waiting for the transit ride. I tried to ask her questions about Canada, but she easily and repeatedly diverted the conversation back to the United States.
“Why,” she wanted to know, “won’t they fix their country? Or, why don’t they just leave?” (Apparently I myself had temporarily become a nomad, resident of nowhere.)
Although I don’t know all the answers to her questions, perhaps you reading know some of them for yourself. The best I can do for motivation at the moment is to compare my whole adventure to the excitement expressed in the amazing 2015 song “Go!” by the band Public Service Broadcasting, about the spaceflight that put the first humans on the Moon. Listen, and I’ll keep trying to talk USians into traveling with Part 4 of this series next week!
Reading Jonathan Simon’s Code Red or Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting or the Brennan Center for Justice’s “The Machinery of Democracy” impresses upon you the full knowledge that votes in the United States are typically captured (by touchscreen, optical device scanning ballots, or other) and counted (by Dominion, Command Central, or other) in pitch dark: by corporations and contractors running without transparency, with closed source. Often, not even election administrators can audit details.
Unlike Australians, Germans, the Dutch, and others around the world who vote on hand-marked paper ballots hand-counted in public, and who have successfully fought off the recent far-right electoral wave, basically nobody in the United States these days receives any hard evidence at all that their ballot scribbles/tappings mattered. If on Election Day your goal is to change electoral outcomes, rather than to merely perform a civic religion ritual, then of course informed action is required to safeguard election systems, though continuing to replace the whole current governance system itself would be wiser and here’s how that’s already underway.
Exceptions aside, securing elections means securing both vote capture (i.e., how your vote is recorded) and vote counting (i.e., how your vote is added to the totals, nowadays in secretive faraway computer systems) — so that there is hard evidence of both how your vote was captured and how it was counted. Interestingly, and unfortunately, in her tweet today Harris mentions only the vote capture part, and not the vote counting part.
With the topic of safeguarding elections likely to keep bubbling up throughout this year, it helps to keep in mind writer Jennifer Cohn’s advice that election integrity advocates diligently put the adjective “hand-marked” in front of the noun phrase “paper ballots” because:
Thx! We must now specify “hand marked” bc vendors have expanded the meaning of “paper ballot” to include crappy machine marked printouts w/ barcodes generated by universal use Ballot Marking Devices, (BMDs) that most experts advise against. #HandMarkedPaperBallots 1/ pic.twitter.com/FPA4N9U9p0
Kamala Harris’ tweet reminded me of Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner now behind bars, because in the past few years, public interest in the topic of elections integrity and hand-marked paper ballots (public interest partially required for a major politician to take on any subject) has certainly increased, partly a result of Winner leaking to the media intelligence revealing Russian military hackers executed cyberattacks against US election systems just days before November 2016’s voting. You can learn more about Winner’s case and supporting her clemency petition here or watch this CSPAN video to see how her deed kept Russiagate and elections integrity in the public discourse.
What most of all strikes me about today’s tweet from Kamala Harris is that the Bureau of Prisons, who currently confines Reality Winner, has denied journalists, such as CNN and me, access to interview her in person behind bars — so, who oversees the Bureau of Prisons (part of the Department of Justice) — the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, the latter of which Kamala Harris sits on!
“critical role in providing oversight of the Department of Justice…agencies under” such as the Bureau of Prisons
So with Kamala Harris’ tweet juxtaposed against Reality Winner’s story, we have:
1. US senator Kamala Harris calls for incomplete elections integrity reform
2. While the Bureau of Prisons is silencing the whistleblower who helped make that conversation possible in the first place
3. The senator in question, by virtue of sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is tasked with overseeing the Bureau of Prisons, and hasn’t done anything for Reality Winner (not that I’m aware of)
4. Even though I told the senator face to face about the Bureau of Prisons silencing Reality Winner at Harris’ September 27, 2019 event in Seattle
Underneath the glitzy world where a top senator grabs thousands of retweets by offering an incomplete solution to a problem, without assisting the whistleblower confined in silence for pointing the issue out … a public who knows better daydreaming that the thoughts and prayers of evidence-free voting will somehow victoriously sneak-attack presidential administrations tearing apart everything else, so why would they refuse to further corrupt the vote captures and vote countings …
Even though voting landslides might win elections (by overpowering whatever rigging is done), it’s still completely mandatory that we achieve public, observable vote counting, as WeCountNow offers, insofar as the failed concept of millions trying to come to consensus on topics that often don’t affect them much or at all and that they often don’t know much or anything about, is to continue. Help WeCountNow and/or join others in continuing to implement newconcepts?
There are various organizations ranging from FairFight to NAACP to NEDC to (probably MoveOn) and state-level orgs.
The problem is HOW DO YOU PROTECT IT?? We can fight voter suppression but votecount manipulation is NOT DIRECTLY OBSERVABLE. We do forensics – they shrug and yawn. pic.twitter.com/l5rcu8HBa0
As for Reality Winner: open, participatory governance means none shall be silenced and all must have the right to communicate. Otherwise, not everyone is included, not everyone’s input is available. Since the Bureau of Prisons has blocked journalists from interviewing Reality Winner, preventing the public from hearing her at scale, the current within-the-system remedies remaining are: apply again for interview access (the Bureau of Prisons told me they consider each interview request separately), try the judicial branch (lawsuits etc), or pressure the federal legislature (members of the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee seem the right place to start).
I’ll post more about my efforts toward interviewing Reality Winner in a few weeks. If anyone else makes related efforts, please let me know in the comments!
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, to be self-published every Monday. Here’s today’s, the second of 52.
Note: This post was updated Tuesday 4 February 2020, mostly to incorporate an updated version of my support letter. I changed “unusually severe” to “unduly severe” to better match the clemency consideration standards, I changed the reference to US citizens to US residents, and I added a line about our right to communicate, in order to connect Winner’s case with everyone else’s who’s being silenced anywhere in the world.
Reality Winner climbing a tree in Texas, Christmas 2015. Photo by Brittany Winner, her sister (Source)
Especially in light of current news, you should remember Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner, the Air Force veteran who in 2017 as an employee for a National Security Agency contractor leaked classified intelligence to The Intercept regarding Russian military hackers, in 2016, executing cyberattacks against more than 100 local election officials in the United States and against at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Reality “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.” These cyberattacks also constitute evidence in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s “12 Russians” indictment from 2018 and in his Mueller report from 2019.
For The Public, an online and print news outlet in Buffalo, New York, I reported in person from Reality’s final, August 2018 hearing in Augusta, Georgia where she was sentenced to 63 months in prison, the longest term ever imposed on a federal defendant for a disclosure of national security information to the media. That article of mine tells a great deal of her story and explains the importance of her deed. It quotes human rights activist and author Heather Marsh explaining that evidence in the leak helped generate the public support necessary for the investigation into not just Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election but more broadly into the nature of the world’s democracies today, an investigation that “could have quietly disappeared and the public would never have been any wiser.”
Reality Winner sketch art, from prison, of the Augusta federal courthouse. (Source)
Now, about halfway through her prison term, 28-year-old Reality Winner will very soon be filing a petition for clemency. If granted, clemency would result in her early release from prison, similar to whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s successful clemency petition. Reality is a vegan and is amazingly maintaining that while locked up, in the face of oppression; her release would mean, among other things, that she could once again access healthy food in line with her beliefs. Because there’s a long line of clemency petitions to be considered, and because Reality’s release date is at this point 23 November 2021, it is unclear which president(‘s staff) will consider her petition and when.
I wrote a letter in support of Reality’s clemency petition. Below, I’ve embedded my one-page, signed letter as a PDF. Further below, I’ve put the body of my letter with links added. The embedded PDF of my letter doesn’t include links, and it isn’t possible to clipboard-copy text from it, so if you want either, please refer to the further below section of this post where the body of my letter is repeated. Reading my letter will give you more information about her case and why I think clemency is justified. Also I describe briefly how Federal Medical Center Carswell, the prison in Fort Worth, Texas where she is housed, has blocked my efforts (and CNN’s) to interview Reality in person behind bars.
Best of all, you can write a letter in support of Reality’s clemency petition. On 11 January 2020, her team had 4,206 letters of support, a little more than 84% of the way to their goal of getting 5,000 letters. Reality was the subject of Chris Hayes’ weekly podcast on 7 January 2020, which hopefully should assist with getting her more letters.
We have 4206 letters signed so far! Can we make it to 5k before #RealityWinner's attorney @alisongrinter files her clemency petition?
You can either quickly sign online a pre-provided letter at the StandWithReality.org website by giving your name and email address, plus your county and state, or you can write your own letter and email it in to Liz Miner. Instructions and more information about both options are available here: StandWithReality.org: Letter of Support for Clemency. To share that webpage quickly, you can use this shortened URL, which leads there: Bit.ly/RWSupportLetter.
In her 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin describes a utopia built on the suffering of a single imprisoned person, and utopia residents who must confront that suffering only once and then decide whether to keep living in the wonderful city or leave. To a large extent, the Russiagate investigation is likewise built on a single individual now imprisoned. There remains an ethical imperative that this person, upon whose shoulders so much has rested, not continue to be ignored by so many and silenced and caged by the Bureau of Prisons.
I write in support of the clemency petition of Reality Leigh Winner, a Bureau of Prisons inmate, register number 22056-021. For The Public, a news outlet in Buffalo, New York, I reported in person from Ms. Winner’s August 23, 2018 hearing in Augusta, Georgia where Chief District Judge J. Randal Hall imposed a 63-month prison term on Ms. Winner. Department of Justice attorney Bobby L. Christine described the punishment as the longest sentence ever imposed on a federal defendant for a disclosure of national defense information to the media. This unduly severe punishment resulted from Ms. Winner, an Air Force veteran and intelligence contractor with no prior criminal record, sending to the media classified intelligence describing cyberattacks by Russian military hackers against over 100 local election officials in the United States and at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. The cyberattacks took place just days before the 2016 U.S. elections. With great idealism, Ms. Winner gave everyone information required for self-governance, gave everyone necessary knowledge otherwise unavailable. That includes any voting vendor staff who, without clearances, would not have been able to access such protective classified information unless it appeared in the public discourse. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his personal website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Ms. Winner “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.”
Ms. Winner’s unduly severe sentence and unfair treatment behind bars is unjust to her and indeed, to all. She has a long, admirable history of public service: donating to poor families, volunteering for Athletes Serving Athletes, and more. Her ongoing confinement blocks her from continuing this service to the wider world. She is unjustly denied broad communication with the public by Carswell Federal Medical Center staff, including Warden Michael Carr. The staff has forbidden journalists, such as CNN and me, from interviewing her in person. They have provided no meaningful explanation for her isolation from the mass media. For months, my requests for meaningful details, and my requests for negotiations to meet any Carswell Federal Medical Center concerns, were ignored or subjected to run-around. In her allocution, Ms. Winner demonstrated her intelligence and perceptiveness. Caging her incommunicado harms her and deprives the public of her gifts. Everyone globally, in prisons or whatever other cages, must have the right to communicate, including to appeal for help from the world, as directly as possible.
Ms. Winner took responsibility for her action’s criminality at her final hearing. While sentencing her, Judge Hall indicated he saw no evidence she will become a repeat offender: “the Court has no sense […] that there is a need to protect the public from any further crimes of the defendant.” As an inmate, Ms. Winner has pursued studies toward her college degree and has worked several jobs within the Carswell Federal Medical Center system. She has served roughly half of her 63-month sentence already, and she has not had a single infraction.
I firmly believe a commutation of Ms. Winner’s sentence is in the best interest of the United States, U.S. residents, and justice. She and her loved ones suffer each day she is kept locked up. I ask you to grant Reality Leigh Winner’s clemency petition and her immediate release from prison.
Note 1: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, to be self-published every Monday. The first, today’s, is a day late, but you get the idea. :)
Note 2: Until now, I haven’t experimented with this new WordPress “Bebo” version and its Gutenberg block-editor, so there may be formatting / appearance / ux issues at the start of this 2020 series. Please bear with. :)
Note 3: I don’t receive any compensation whatsoever from the ingredients peeps or from the restaurants, stores, etc. that I’m linking. They’re here as examples, and I use all of them myself and recommend them except where otherwise specified.
Good news is everywhere. The anarchist daughter of the GOP’s gerrymandering mastermind just dumped all his maps and files online for public use (Vice, NPR, tweet and tweet by her). Correctly losing trust in sociopathic institutions and replacing it with trust in each other as a result of such inspirational stories, more and more folks involved in the peer support movement or on their own are refusing (conventional) psychiatry, slowly and successfully withdrawing off psychotropic pills after decades of Big Pharma occupation, then telling everyone about it, including last week in the Washington Post. There are even opportunities for celebrating and bonding in these new freedoms: after prison time in Russia a few years back for anti-Putin protest, Moscow-based anarchists Pussy Riot recently released their awesome new song “Hangerz” and announced dates for their first US & Canada tour, in March April May, benefiting Planned Parenthood. Especially with the Internet connecting individuals worldwide like never before, it feels as if there’s never been a better time to create networks and supports for prosocial, expansive lives.
Bad news is everywhere. In the words of multiple Holocaust and/or Auschwitz survivors in 2019 (Rene Lichtman, Ruth Bloch, Bernard Marks), ICE is equivalent to the Gestapo, their current ‘detention centers’ are really concentration camps where genocidaires crush minorities, and those at risk should leave the United States or stay to die. Exiting might not be so easy, however, as an example of the challenge from the past weekend shows: according to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, more than sixty US residents, many of them US citizens, attempting to return home from foreign travel (a portion of them after attending a pop concert in British Columbia), were, while entering Washington state, interrogated for hours and hours by border patrol regarding their political views and loyalties; some were denied entry, and one activist says a migra source explains that this is a countrywide directive from above. Though exploring outside The Wall remains absolutely advisable for US residents, the threats are truly global, as a firsthand account Friday from Australia’s fire apocalypse indicates as one example of zillions, reporting that in Sydney and Canberra and elsewhere, people are dead, homeless, burned, frightened, suffocated with smoke, and sleeping in gas masks as their prime minister who’s fighting to criminalize protest against climate change vacations in Hawaii and scientists warn the disaster marks an irreversible tipping point. Finally, Iran just launched ballistic missiles at US forces in Iraq, and in response the bulbous TrumPharma monster (see below), aka the Cheeto in Chief, is bragging about having “the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world,” which like Obomber’s “finest fighting force in the history of the world,” is far beyond idiotic, especially since the US doesn’t control ‘its’ military or spy agencies anyway (private corporations do). From all those loser presidents there are no plans for peace ever, disarmament is an unheard term, and especially with the Internet increasingly clutched by corporations that silo users and capture control redirect and sell their lives like never before, many ‘adults’ seem to feel there’s never been a better time to hide under the bed, escape into corporate TV cartoons and scrolling, and slowly or quickly fade away as ex-humans.
Don’t you want to join Team Good News instead of Team Bad News? Upgrading your life, even to the degree of migrating to another country to avoid let’s say lockups and more tactically defeat them from afar, is not “unrealistic” or “you care too much,” but it is a major challenge, and cooking is a great way to begin replacing weakness with the strength required. Based on conversations and my own experience, those only partially stuck in the mindtrap of conformist, complicit lesser evilism often feel that practical routes to a fully authentic, stick-up-for-yourself-and-others life are nonexistent or nearly so, and thus the only choice is to remain in the comfort zone inert, blah blah blah. Thus, folks probably need straightforward suggestions for goals and the steps to achieve them, plus encouragement to figure out their own goals and steps autonomously.
Here’s a good-news goal for upgrading your life: make and eat this vegan, glutenfree salad bowl of mine by following the instructions in this post. Sounds simple and almost a Rembrandt comic book error: too much effort spent on a subpar theme. But, to take a single example discussed and hyperlinked below, the CDC thinks close to half of US adults alive today will at some point in their lives develop type 2 diabetes, so it’s the standard US diet that’s the real subpar error. Eating trash (not the good dumpster-dived kind!) day in and day out is far more culpable in our failure to address injustices than many of us like to admit.
This post is a guide to a kickass vegan/glutenfree salad bowl you can make regularly, quickly, and easily clean up, for an over 9000 power level. As English speakers have said for almost two centuries, you are what you eat. I find when I apply consistent discipline to diet and exercise and gratitude journaling, a lot of ‘mental problems’ thrown on me by The System simply evaporate.
Look at it this way. Here’s a picture of the amazing (but so far nameless) salad bowl. If you’re eating this and similar every damn day, rather than alcohol sugar caffeine nicotine gluten dairy carcasses etc, you’re obviously well on your way toward firing on all cylinders:
This, my salad bowl, is the objective
Versus if you’re eating like this waste of space, this TrumPharma thing pictured here last January offering White House guests McDonald’s and Burger King, pretty soon you’ll be swarming with invading thoughts telling you you’re no good, life is all about predators and prey, might as well win the victory over yourself and love the war of all against all, can’t beat ’em join ’em, that kind of crap:
Eat like Trump, die by Trump
A quick note regading upgrading your diet: if you’re now eating trash — alcohol sugar caffeine nicotine gluten dairy carcasses — and you tweak it in just one way for just one week — alcohol sugar caffeine nicotine gluten dairy carcasses — and don’t see much improvement, please know that firing on all cylinders really requires a whole bunch of bugfixes over a great deal of time; realize developing healthy strength isn’t a ten-second thing but a lifelong journey.
For the Jedi it is time to eat as well
While Star Treksurely outmatchesStar Wars, the endearing movie line quoted above from Yoyo (or Yoda or whatever) shows that the supposedly mundane matters more than we often give it credit for. Allegedly inspirational youtube videos featuring bodybuilders grunting, retired professional assassins screaming at troubled audiences about making their beds, and embarrassing synthesized symphonies shaking your speakers frame becoming healthy and strong as a miserable toilsome struggle of straining and ex nihilio willpower, rather than as what would be accurate: a daily, almost pastoral problem of diligently reading up to select suitable dressings, remembering the courage to value going to the grocery store/market over the muddled angst regarding the frenemy crush who rarely texts first, and simply getting organized and planning ahead, not to join the grandiose lemmings at some lesser evilism corporate shoutfest, but to instantiate your real authentic values, one step at a time. In short, keep your (not their) objectives in front and take care of the necessary little things to accomplish them, exhilirating piece by exhilirating piece.
One of the tiny tasks for establishing the capability to make this salad regularly was finding bowls to actually put the salad in. I found these gray concave half-spheres with lids at Tarjay for cheap. They hold about eight imperial cups (roughly 2.3 liters), if you don’t go above the rim with overflowing kale or other nutrition-packed ingredients. They are the perfect size for a giant salad bowl giving you genuine, not grandiose fantasy, health and strength.
Unfortunately, the bowls strike me as rather suspect. Probably they’re bad for the environment and health, just on the general premise that if some commodity seems too good to be true, it likely is. What are these rubbery-ish bowls made out of, anyway? If you understand with specificity why these bowls are problematic, please explain in the comments. I will say these bowls are easy to clean, quite convenient, and their noncolor helps keep the visual focus on the food. So yeah, have some bowls…no not the Black Sabbath kind, not like that, I mean food bowls to put salad in:
Suspect but convenient bowls from Tarjay, plural
Suspect but convenient bowl from Tarjay, singular
My salad bowl is based on the Bliss Bowl from Seattle’s excellent Chaco Canyon Cafe. Sadly, this new year, they just stopped making and selling their Bliss Bowl, and possibly their orange turmeric dressing that goes with it, but thankfully we have my and soon your versions. Mine uses all the same ingredients as theirs, except I replace their brown rice ingredient with the healthier, less carb-y and more protein-y quinoa, which I cook in coconut milk with the super-beneficial spice turmeric added (and celtic salt). Oh, and unlike me, Chaco Canyon Cafe knows how to present a visually stunning arrangement of their ingredients. How can the following not look empowering?
Bliss Bowl from Chaco Canyon Cafe
Another shot of the Bliss Bowl from Chaco Canyon Cafe
Here are the nine ingredients to give yourself every advantage possible. Kale, spinach, red cabbage, cucumber, avocado, sesame seeds, dressing, edamame, and either brown rice (in Chaco Canyon Cafe’s Bliss Bowl) or quinoa cooked in coconut milk with turmeric spice added (in my version). Those links are to individual ingredient pages on the fantastic, you-need-it-now website The World’s Healthiest Foods, run by a not-for-profit foundation and George Mateljan. Not only does The World’s Healthiest Foods disseminate quality knowledge on the nutritional benefits of each ingredient, but the webpages advise how to select those ingredients at the grocery store/market, how to store them (refrigerator? countertop?), how to prepare them, recipes, nutritional data, basically everything you need to know. All the webpages list at the bottom references including peer-reviewed scientific studies. (Science! — for those too stuck on those faraway journals and just now learning that peer review is, lol, ghostwritten by contractors, that even the editor in chief of The Lancetworries half of scientific literature is simply false, and that instead of dismissing your and your loved ones’ lives as mere anecdotal evidence, it’s actually great to undo problematic filters and understand your own experience and that of those around you as worthy sources of knowledge.)
Now the rad dressing. Previously I bought the orange turmeric dressing weekly from Chaco Canyon Cafe, but it seems they’ve stopped making it. The ingredients in their orange turmeric dressing were: extra virgin olive oil, safflower oil, orange juice, garlic, turmeric, apple cider vinegar, sesame seeds, salt, mustard powder, agave syrup, and sesame oil. I don’t know the proportions of those ingredients or anything else about their preparation of their dressing. I’ve switched to Lemon Turmeric Vinaigrette & Marinade with Avocado Oil, available at Seattle’s PCC and made by the goofily named Primal Kitchen. Both contain(ed) turmeric and work well with this salad bowl, fuck yeah. Someday I’ll make my own dressing and post here to tell you about it.
Orange turmeric dressing from Chaco Canyon Cafe, nevermore?
PRIMAL SCREAM DRESSING
Let’s get into this
Each salad bowl serves one really hungry person. It’s a good meal to eat early in the day, and then you can go without eating much the rest of the day besides little things like an orange, a bunch of pumpkin seeds, maybe a small dish of lentils and veggies, etc.
When making this salad, in the interest of saving time, begin by initiating the prep for the two ingredients that take the longest: the edamame and the quinoa. Throw a saucepan on the stovetop and heat enough water in it to cover eight ounces of shelled edamame that you can pour out of a frozen bag into the saucepan once the water is at a roiling boil. You’ll then turn down the boil to a simmer and keep the heating edamame in there for, oh I don’t know, five or ten minutes or something, turning the temperature up a bit as necessary. The linked edamame is non-gmo soy. Probably not the best food in the world, but not bad at all either as far as I know, and an easy way to put a bunch of good protein into the salad bowl. For the quinoa, similarly throw another saucepan on the stovetop, and fill it with the appropriate amount of coconut milk. 3/4 cup of dry uncooked quinoa, a good amount for one of these salad bowls, needs a little more than twice that amount of coconut milk, say 1.75 or just under 2 cups. You want to bring this coconut milk in the heating saucepan to a roiling boil, then turn down the temperature so it’s simmering rather than making weird boiling evaporating coconut milk. The coconut milk will supply some cream-like taste and, unlike water, some protein. Pour the dry uncooked quinoa in, as well as some celtic salt (more trace minerals than regular salt) and a ton of turmeric spice. Stir, and keep stirring as you work on the other ingredients (below). Adjust temperature as necessary. Quinoa is challenging to make correctly; it takes practice; it requires the right temperature and proportions to get as much fluff/volume as possible without burning or otherwise messing up stuffz. All the turmeric-y, celtic salt-y coconut milk will eventually absorb into the quinoa, or otherwise vanish, leaving you with a basically liquidless saucepan full of yummy fluffy warm quinoa. The chief point of quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah), a very high quality grain-like seed, is that it’s super high in protein (among other nutrients). Keep calm, plants have protein.
Heating up frozen, shelled edamame
Turmeric-y quinoa heating and fluffing up in coconut milk
Turmeric, a colorful yellow spice used for centuries in Ayurvedic medicine and others, will make you STRONG if you consume it daily, enabling you to defeat enemies within and without. Although the nutritionist Dr. Michael Greger is a pro-gluten guy, whereas for me gluten (including the vegan staple seitan) causes GI problems (and the sources I trust say gluten causes problems for pretty much everybody, just in varying degrees), Greger’s videos/transcripts at NutritionFacts.org on turmeric have plenty of Science!-compliant information about the benefits of the spice. Greger recommends daily consumption, as do other experts. Turmeric improves exercise performance, seems promising for fighting Alzheimer’s and risk of Alzheimer’s, aids with anxiety and depression, and provides many more boons that really all you have to do to comprehend is read and experiment and turn off the blaring alarm bells we all (ok, almost all of us) seemingly have programmed in by TrumPharma-style propaganda insisting food is irrelevant, futility is maturity, curl up and die. Don’t listen to that nonsense, move forward with gobbling turmeric daily, and since it has doubled as a dye for centuries, if you get it everywhere like accident-prone me, try baking soda to remove the stains.
Next, with your ever mightier hands, seize the spinach and kale and tear off little pieces of each glorious green leafy vegetable. Then tear those little pieces into even littler pieces, because that’s quite like chewing your food before even putting it in your mouth. Hurried, we tend not to chew enough, which stresses our digestion as this great Seattle webpage on stress and nutrition explains. Put the tiny pieces of spinach and kale into the bowls. When I took the pictures included throughout this post, I was not yet hip to the idea of tearing ingredients into super small pieces, so my images here don’t reflect that kickass strategy…next time!
Spinach and kale are some of the most empowering vegetables you can eat. As the World’s Healthiest Foods website explains (see links above), both are very anti-inflammatory, and of all plant sources, kale is the firstmost, and spinach the secondmost, rich in the nutrient lutein, which protects eye health, a concern for computer types staring at glowing screens for epic stretches. [Note added 3 February 2020: a Seattle-based optometrist told me last month that lutein does not help with screen-induced vision problems, but that it does help with macular degeneration. I’ve no idea what is true in this regard, and the truth might be complicated, but I thought I’d make a note here. You should still get enough lutein!] Eating green leafy vegetables, i.e. kale and spinach, slows cognitive decline and is linked to sharper memory. And holy shit, according to the CDC in 2014, close to half of today’s adults in the United States will eventually develop type 2 diabetes; but, a systematic review and meta-analysis from 2010 suggests “increasing daily intake of green leafy vegetables could significantly reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.” Do you want be conquered, sublated into Team Bad News, victimized by TrumPharma ideology, stuck staring at the wall and mumbling Guess that was my life, or do you want to resist exuberantly by equipping yourself with kale and spinach? Eat kale and spinach, and you’ll turn into a rocket like Popeye. Boom.
Tell ’em, Popeye
Spinach, meet bowl
Spinach and bowl, meet kale
Moving right along, we have hulled sesame seeds. Often these can be easily purchased in bulk, poured from the bin into a cute container you can keep in the fridge for several weeks at least, before they start smelling rancid and need to be tossed. Sesame seeds provide iron, zinc, magnesium, calcium, and other needed nutrients, which human bodies are often depleted of and begging for, in little convenient seeds you can spread atop meals fast, no sweat. I want to tell you more about sesame seeds, but though it’s rainy and dark and cold here, I gotta get to the gym, not to brag but, if you need it, if you’re bleary-eyed on the couch watching forgettable Family Guy-type animated cartoons screech at you with piercing volume, to impart to you that it’s so thrilling, and endows you with such confidence and productivity, to actually build health and strength by doing fun stuff like going to the gym and eating this salad. Beating yourself up or briefly soaring in your skull using scam inspirational videos ain’t gonna help; pursue the little practical details one step at a time — maybe you need to find that old, unused pair of running shoes in the closet? That could be it for today. Accomplish that, then more tomorrow.
Sesame seeds from PCC
Sesame seeds snowing on kale and spinach
Time to rock and roll — no more pathetic Domino’s, engage the red cabbage and cucumber. Of all types of cabbage, World’s Healthiest Foods (see link above) recommends red cabbage (sometimes appearing purple in color) as the most nutritious. In the grocery store’s produce section, it’s a big sphere, purple-ish in my local place, hard and solid, doubles as a projectile weapon to hurl at opponents. Upping intake of red cabbage improves blood levels of beta-carotene, lutein, and total blood antioxidant capacity, while decreasing total cholesterol, total LDL cholesterol, and total oxidized LDL. Red cabbage’s anthocyanins make the vegetable a standout anti-inflammatory food. Domino’s doesn’t do any of that. Prepping the red cabbage is straightforward. Cut the head in half, and then just tear pieces off the halves with your badass bare hands (not so much the outermost layer, which can be inferior and touched by random environmental dirt grime etc). Smaller and smaller pieces, and then put the pieces in the bowl. And, cucumber. Scientific studies suggest cucumber is anti-diabetes food, according to the World’s Healthiest Website, which you totally would enjoy reading and reading and reading. Wash the cucumber off, put it on your cutting board, slice it up and put the slices in the bowl. You want to be on Team Bad News with the TrumPharma thing? Eat McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. Else, eat cucumber. Simple as that. You are what you eat.
Adding in red cabbage (added more later)
Get in there, cucumber
The above ingredients and the following one, avocado, you can add to the bowl in pretty much any order, but don’t forget to keep an eye on the edamame and quinoa on the stovetop burners. I don’t yet have proportions figured out for the kale, spinach, red cabbage, cucumber, sesame seeds, and dressing. Just put a bunch of each in to fill the bowl, gauging by what seems right. Eventually I’ll figure out nutritional information for the entire salad bowl, such as total number of calories and carbs, macronutrient ratios, etc.
My friend the avocado. You want to put a whole avocado in the salad bowl. And you might consider eating a whole avocado a day. They bring the cardiovascular, anti-inflammatory, phytonutrient, and other benefits. Plus they taste awesome. They’re messy as hell when I try to prep them, though. I attempt the “nick and peel” method, but I still get avocado all over my fingers and hands, and little flakes of avocado skin end up all over the floor and everywhere else. Here’s the nick and peel method, from the page on avocado from World’s Healthiest Foods (see link above), a method World’s Healthiest Foods gets from the California Avocado Commission:
Use a stainless steel knife to cut the avocado in half lengthwise. Gently twist the two halves in opposite direction if you find the flesh clinging to the pit. Remove the pit, either with a spoon or by spearing with the tip of a knife. Next, take each of the avocado halves and slice lengthwise to produce four avocado quarters. The use the California Avocado Commission’s “nick and peel” method to peel the avocado. Just take your thumb and index finger to grip an edge of the avocado skin and peel it away from the flesh, in exactly the same way that you would peel a banana.
Avocado added; blurry photo, dizzy with salubrius joy
Almost finished. Once Operation Quinoa has restored peace to the galaxy by allowing you to starve the TrumPharma types around the planet of their power, i.e., starve them of you, because you’re no longer getting drained by their vampirism and making them grow like giant bulbous monsters, but instead, you’re off doing cool things with all this sacred energy from this vegan, glutenfree, salad bowl — in other words, once the quinoa has finished cooking — scoop the quinoa out of the saucepan and onto some paper towels. Pat it dry with more paper towels. Dump it into the salad bowl. As for the edamame, which I don’t have any additional pictures of, once that’s finished, pour it out into a strainer sitting in the sink, shake the strainer to remove excess water, pat extra dry the strained edamame with paper towels, and then into the salad bowl it goes. Add dressing to taste. Stir the whole thing. Your mission is complete.
Who can disapprove of bold yellow quinoa?
My finished salad bowl from directly above, plus a gutter of kitchen tile on left
Now that you and I have made and chowed down on this amazing (but so far nameless) salad bowl, for great justice, we’re on Team Good News and ready to keep charging. I’m off the gym. One last thing. Since I can’t call my salad bowl a Bliss Bowl, as that’s Chaco Canyon Cafe’s version and not mine, I need some clever new name for my version. If — while you help me and others abolish states and corporations and more importantly replace them with prosocial structures — you come up with a name suggestion, please put it in the comments!
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