On food, feminism and fiction
Oct. 19th, 2007 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirStanley Hall, on the Feast of St. Isaac Jogues and Companions
(Updating by email again.)
I missed the deadline for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide sign-ups. ;_; Well, it's really my fault because technically I had plenty of time, but I've been especially strict with myself about going to sleep before midnight this week, and I didn't have enough uninterrupted time in lab to go through the massive list of fandoms. >_> Well, I guess it's for the best because fifthmus is probably more than enough of a fandom commitment for me.
I haven't been able to make it to kendo practices in several weeks either. The timing of the practices is turning out to be really inconvenient, since I usually get out of lab too late during the week to go to practices regularly. I'm starting to think that I should try to go to Saturday morning practices at the Alameda dojo instead. (It's a sister dojo to the Berkeley one, so the only real wrangle would be figuring out how to get there.) I'm incredibly out-of-shape though. If I could haul myself out of bed early in the morning, I'd try to go running, but despite going to sleep strictly at 11 PM every night this week, I don't think I've managed to pull myself out of bed before 8 AM. I usually wake up a little before 7 AM to glance at the clock and promptly fall back asleep. Is that a function of general fatigue or insufficient motivation to get up until I absolutely have to?
On the other hand, I've solved the Breakfast Conundrum: I bought a box of instant oatmeal. So in the tight thirty-minute interval I give myself before rushing out the door to walk to lab, I can grab a packet and eat breakfast at my leisure once I'm in lab. I've also started using the timer function on my rice cooker again, so I can also bring some rice for lunch. Speaking of which:
In an attempt to have something to eat with the rice, I made a huge pot of spinach miso soup on Sunday and have been eating it for lunch all week. It's actually ridiculously easy to make, despite my general fear of making soups because they require you to "season to taste". I never know what's too salty until I've already made the irrevocable mistake of pouring in too much salt. But luckily spinach miso soup doesn't require salt (unless you want it to).
- Boil water with some dried anchovies to make the broth for the soup. I used about twelve large anchovies for a three-quart pot, I think? In any case, bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and let simmer for about 15 minutes. Then either strain the broth or do it the lazy way and pick out the anchovies.
- Wash your spinach. I bought a bag full of baby spinach leaves from the salad mix section of the grocery store, which turned out to be a great decision because baby spinach is very tender, but of course you can make the soup with fully grown spinach as well.
- Once the broth is done, add miso (or dwenjang), and bring to a boil again. I ended up putting in five or six large spoonfuls, and miraculously it ended up not being too salty. Although you'll probably want to adapt the recipe to your own taste buds. I also added two pinches of hot pepper flakes ( i.e. gochugaru), but that's entirely optional.
- Put in the spinach leaves and boil quickly. (Mother's advice: the key point to this soup is not to let it cook too long.) Stir before serving, since the miso likes to settle to the bottom.
Maybe I should attempt it with seaweed and meat next time!
I also got inspired by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arboretum's recipe for portobello mushrooms and pesto (friends-locked), but of course, I didn't have basil or olive oil so I was forced to (horror of horrors!) improvise.
- Cut the stems off the mushrooms, then slice the caps into thick bite-sized chunks.
- Heat some finely chopped garlic and oil in a pan. Add the mushrooms and stir-fry.
- Add a little honey, sesame seeds, black pepper and chopped green onions. At this point, I found it too bland, so I tried pouring some soy sauce. Of course, I put in too much, but luckily the chunks were thick enough that they didn't absorb too much. The mushrooms turned out too salty but they weren't too bad if eaten with enough rice. I also added a drop of sesame oil before eating.
Took a photo of the meal from Sunday but it's currently still on my camera. Will add it to the post later, once I'm home. Edit: Here's the photo:
jaebi_lit has been making a series of posts on feminism at her Wordpress blog, Pizzadiavola.
If you had asked me four years ago, when I had just graduated from high school, if I was a "feminist", I probably would have said no. I remember in ninth grade, I was rather indignant about being asked to write a personal essay on how gender roles had affected my life. Now that I look back on it, it wasn't that I hadn't been affected by sexism or cultural constraints on gender roles up to that point, but rather that I willfully refused to think of myself as a gendered individual. I didn't want to be perceived as a girl by my classmates; I wanted to be thought of as a person (and, what's more, a person worthy of respect). I felt I had more or less succeeded in attaining that, and I didn't fully realize that my "success" was only possible because I was attending a liberal high school in a liberal city. I also didn't really acknowledge at the time that this insistence on being a person first and a girl second could only come about as a reaction to gender role expectations that I'd unconsciously perceived.
If I had to write that ninth grade essay over again today, I would probably have a lot more to say.
Take for example, my experience going to a statewide math competition for the first time in eleventh grade. The way NYC teams are usually organized is that there's an "A" team, which has the best students, followed by the "N", "Y" and "C" teams (not necessarily in order of ability, of course). The girls who are at the top of the city rankings are put onto "A" team, and the rest are put onto a separate "G" team, regardless of how they compared with the boys on the other three teams. "G" for girls. I was actually selected as a replacement for someone on "N" team, so I ended up as the only girl on what was supposed to be an all-boys team. From what I understand, the "G" team also usually participates in a lower division as well. Later on the bus coming back from that competition, one of the math team coaches told me jovially, "Girls can't do math."
There's a whole debate over whether girls are less adept at math and science, recently made notorious by former Harvard President Summers, and I'm not going to hash out the details. Yes, there are some very real biological differences in the brain that are correlated with gender. I'm doubtful whether these differences necessarily predispose boys to be better in math and science: I've tutored some boys who are hopelessly inept at fractions and known some girls who had a better grasp of theoretical mathematics than I could ever hope to master. There are many ways of being good at math, and I really doubt that having "superior spatial reasoning" (commonly cited as one of the key biological differences between males and females) is a requirement or even a guarantee of mathematical ability. I think what's important is not what percent of girls versus boys master advanced mathematics, but rather that we don't automatically use the statistics as an excuse to assume that girls aren't capable of it.
It's also interesting how language can insidiously start imposing cultural prejudices as well. I like to claim that my parents were mostly free of the traditional patriarchal attitudes inherited by their generation--and to a certain extent, it's true--but some of those attitudes are built into the language itself. The often-cited example is how your paternal relatives are referred to as naegajok ("inner family") while your maternal relatives are referred to as waegajok ("outside family"). The wae is the same root used in the word for "foreign". I remember how my parents used to praise me as I was growing up: "You're better than a son," or "You're like an eldest son to us." Worthiness, filial piety, and traditional virtue are all measured according to male standards. It's true that I've never felt that my parents would have preferred a son over a daughter (always a sensitive situation when you're an only child and hence the only person carrying on your family line), but they've certainly had their share of unconscious prejudices, which in turn have been passed down to me.
I think what's changed since high school is that college forced me for the first time to confront the fact that many people still hold sexist opinions and make sexist comments, however consciously liberal they consider themselves to be. Which in turn has made me realize that feminism isn't just a political attitude held by resentful women. In a sense, it's only part (albeit an important one) of a fundamental problem in all interpersonal interactions: to recognize the Other as a human being. Sometimes I wonder how capable we are of treating other people as real individuals like ourselves rather than lists of categories and divisions that serve to distinguish them from us. Especially given that we don't always really understand ourselves either--isn't the concept of the unconscious fundamentally the recognition that the Other exists within our boundaries of self as well? And who knows, some would argue that the tension is not only inevitable but also in some part necessary; if we were capable of embracing everyone we encountered with an all-inclusive love, would civilization as we know it have existed in the first place? I'd like to think that the answer is no, but perhaps that's only my idealistic sentiment speaking.
Speaking of feminism, I finished Ursula K. Le Guin's short story collection, The Birthday of the World a few weeks ago. A more detailed reaction probably belongs more to my book blog, but she posits two interesting alien worlds: one with a severe gender imbalance (few males to many females) as well as one where marriages occur between four people (two of each gender and two of each "moiety").
Some of the usual cultural prejudices are turned upside down in the first world: the men are not educated, spend most of their lives in violent sport competitions, and live separately from the women in what essentially becomes a sort of breeding farm, where the women pay to have children by the male of her choice. Male children are considered valuable because there are so few of them, but they aren't given a choice on how to live; they must leave their mothers and sisters before the onset of puberty. Le Guin writes also about how this society starts changing after the Ekumen visits them, and there's this poignant moment where they ask one of the "liberated" men what he wants to be, and he says, "I want to be a wife." I.e., he wants a family, a relationship with another human being, a chance to love someone rather than simply give physical pleasure. Interesting twist, isn't it?
The world with the moieties proved to be rather confusing, especially because as far as I could tell, the two moieties, Morning and Evening, showed no physical differentiation. Nonetheless, all the issues that could arise in a relationship between two people are doubled and magnified between four. For example, the story where one couple within the marriage was passionately in love but was socially expected to share the relationship equally with the other two. Also, Le Guin equated a relationship between two individuals of the same moiety to incest, but I don't think that analogy quite makes sense. It would make more sense, I think, to explore the situation where a significant portion of the population was attracted to people of the same moiety: what then? But perhaps she didn't want to draw too obvious a parallel.
Well, I think that's a long enough post to make up for my recent silence. And it's good timing too because I need to start preparing my cell cultures for FACS.
Yours &c.
(Updating by email again.)
I missed the deadline for
yuletide sign-ups. ;_; Well, it's really my fault because technically I had plenty of time, but I've been especially strict with myself about going to sleep before midnight this week, and I didn't have enough uninterrupted time in lab to go through the massive list of fandoms. >_> Well, I guess it's for the best because fifthmus is probably more than enough of a fandom commitment for me.I haven't been able to make it to kendo practices in several weeks either. The timing of the practices is turning out to be really inconvenient, since I usually get out of lab too late during the week to go to practices regularly. I'm starting to think that I should try to go to Saturday morning practices at the Alameda dojo instead. (It's a sister dojo to the Berkeley one, so the only real wrangle would be figuring out how to get there.) I'm incredibly out-of-shape though. If I could haul myself out of bed early in the morning, I'd try to go running, but despite going to sleep strictly at 11 PM every night this week, I don't think I've managed to pull myself out of bed before 8 AM. I usually wake up a little before 7 AM to glance at the clock and promptly fall back asleep. Is that a function of general fatigue or insufficient motivation to get up until I absolutely have to?
On the other hand, I've solved the Breakfast Conundrum: I bought a box of instant oatmeal. So in the tight thirty-minute interval I give myself before rushing out the door to walk to lab, I can grab a packet and eat breakfast at my leisure once I'm in lab. I've also started using the timer function on my rice cooker again, so I can also bring some rice for lunch. Speaking of which:
In an attempt to have something to eat with the rice, I made a huge pot of spinach miso soup on Sunday and have been eating it for lunch all week. It's actually ridiculously easy to make, despite my general fear of making soups because they require you to "season to taste". I never know what's too salty until I've already made the irrevocable mistake of pouring in too much salt. But luckily spinach miso soup doesn't require salt (unless you want it to).
- Boil water with some dried anchovies to make the broth for the soup. I used about twelve large anchovies for a three-quart pot, I think? In any case, bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and let simmer for about 15 minutes. Then either strain the broth or do it the lazy way and pick out the anchovies.
- Wash your spinach. I bought a bag full of baby spinach leaves from the salad mix section of the grocery store, which turned out to be a great decision because baby spinach is very tender, but of course you can make the soup with fully grown spinach as well.
- Once the broth is done, add miso (or dwenjang), and bring to a boil again. I ended up putting in five or six large spoonfuls, and miraculously it ended up not being too salty. Although you'll probably want to adapt the recipe to your own taste buds. I also added two pinches of hot pepper flakes ( i.e. gochugaru), but that's entirely optional.
- Put in the spinach leaves and boil quickly. (Mother's advice: the key point to this soup is not to let it cook too long.) Stir before serving, since the miso likes to settle to the bottom.
Maybe I should attempt it with seaweed and meat next time!
I also got inspired by
arboretum's recipe for portobello mushrooms and pesto (friends-locked), but of course, I didn't have basil or olive oil so I was forced to (horror of horrors!) improvise.- Cut the stems off the mushrooms, then slice the caps into thick bite-sized chunks.
- Heat some finely chopped garlic and oil in a pan. Add the mushrooms and stir-fry.
- Add a little honey, sesame seeds, black pepper and chopped green onions. At this point, I found it too bland, so I tried pouring some soy sauce. Of course, I put in too much, but luckily the chunks were thick enough that they didn't absorb too much. The mushrooms turned out too salty but they weren't too bad if eaten with enough rice. I also added a drop of sesame oil before eating.
jaebi_lit has been making a series of posts on feminism at her Wordpress blog, Pizzadiavola.If you had asked me four years ago, when I had just graduated from high school, if I was a "feminist", I probably would have said no. I remember in ninth grade, I was rather indignant about being asked to write a personal essay on how gender roles had affected my life. Now that I look back on it, it wasn't that I hadn't been affected by sexism or cultural constraints on gender roles up to that point, but rather that I willfully refused to think of myself as a gendered individual. I didn't want to be perceived as a girl by my classmates; I wanted to be thought of as a person (and, what's more, a person worthy of respect). I felt I had more or less succeeded in attaining that, and I didn't fully realize that my "success" was only possible because I was attending a liberal high school in a liberal city. I also didn't really acknowledge at the time that this insistence on being a person first and a girl second could only come about as a reaction to gender role expectations that I'd unconsciously perceived.
If I had to write that ninth grade essay over again today, I would probably have a lot more to say.
Take for example, my experience going to a statewide math competition for the first time in eleventh grade. The way NYC teams are usually organized is that there's an "A" team, which has the best students, followed by the "N", "Y" and "C" teams (not necessarily in order of ability, of course). The girls who are at the top of the city rankings are put onto "A" team, and the rest are put onto a separate "G" team, regardless of how they compared with the boys on the other three teams. "G" for girls. I was actually selected as a replacement for someone on "N" team, so I ended up as the only girl on what was supposed to be an all-boys team. From what I understand, the "G" team also usually participates in a lower division as well. Later on the bus coming back from that competition, one of the math team coaches told me jovially, "Girls can't do math."
There's a whole debate over whether girls are less adept at math and science, recently made notorious by former Harvard President Summers, and I'm not going to hash out the details. Yes, there are some very real biological differences in the brain that are correlated with gender. I'm doubtful whether these differences necessarily predispose boys to be better in math and science: I've tutored some boys who are hopelessly inept at fractions and known some girls who had a better grasp of theoretical mathematics than I could ever hope to master. There are many ways of being good at math, and I really doubt that having "superior spatial reasoning" (commonly cited as one of the key biological differences between males and females) is a requirement or even a guarantee of mathematical ability. I think what's important is not what percent of girls versus boys master advanced mathematics, but rather that we don't automatically use the statistics as an excuse to assume that girls aren't capable of it.
It's also interesting how language can insidiously start imposing cultural prejudices as well. I like to claim that my parents were mostly free of the traditional patriarchal attitudes inherited by their generation--and to a certain extent, it's true--but some of those attitudes are built into the language itself. The often-cited example is how your paternal relatives are referred to as naegajok ("inner family") while your maternal relatives are referred to as waegajok ("outside family"). The wae is the same root used in the word for "foreign". I remember how my parents used to praise me as I was growing up: "You're better than a son," or "You're like an eldest son to us." Worthiness, filial piety, and traditional virtue are all measured according to male standards. It's true that I've never felt that my parents would have preferred a son over a daughter (always a sensitive situation when you're an only child and hence the only person carrying on your family line), but they've certainly had their share of unconscious prejudices, which in turn have been passed down to me.
I think what's changed since high school is that college forced me for the first time to confront the fact that many people still hold sexist opinions and make sexist comments, however consciously liberal they consider themselves to be. Which in turn has made me realize that feminism isn't just a political attitude held by resentful women. In a sense, it's only part (albeit an important one) of a fundamental problem in all interpersonal interactions: to recognize the Other as a human being. Sometimes I wonder how capable we are of treating other people as real individuals like ourselves rather than lists of categories and divisions that serve to distinguish them from us. Especially given that we don't always really understand ourselves either--isn't the concept of the unconscious fundamentally the recognition that the Other exists within our boundaries of self as well? And who knows, some would argue that the tension is not only inevitable but also in some part necessary; if we were capable of embracing everyone we encountered with an all-inclusive love, would civilization as we know it have existed in the first place? I'd like to think that the answer is no, but perhaps that's only my idealistic sentiment speaking.
Speaking of feminism, I finished Ursula K. Le Guin's short story collection, The Birthday of the World a few weeks ago. A more detailed reaction probably belongs more to my book blog, but she posits two interesting alien worlds: one with a severe gender imbalance (few males to many females) as well as one where marriages occur between four people (two of each gender and two of each "moiety").
Some of the usual cultural prejudices are turned upside down in the first world: the men are not educated, spend most of their lives in violent sport competitions, and live separately from the women in what essentially becomes a sort of breeding farm, where the women pay to have children by the male of her choice. Male children are considered valuable because there are so few of them, but they aren't given a choice on how to live; they must leave their mothers and sisters before the onset of puberty. Le Guin writes also about how this society starts changing after the Ekumen visits them, and there's this poignant moment where they ask one of the "liberated" men what he wants to be, and he says, "I want to be a wife." I.e., he wants a family, a relationship with another human being, a chance to love someone rather than simply give physical pleasure. Interesting twist, isn't it?
The world with the moieties proved to be rather confusing, especially because as far as I could tell, the two moieties, Morning and Evening, showed no physical differentiation. Nonetheless, all the issues that could arise in a relationship between two people are doubled and magnified between four. For example, the story where one couple within the marriage was passionately in love but was socially expected to share the relationship equally with the other two. Also, Le Guin equated a relationship between two individuals of the same moiety to incest, but I don't think that analogy quite makes sense. It would make more sense, I think, to explore the situation where a significant portion of the population was attracted to people of the same moiety: what then? But perhaps she didn't want to draw too obvious a parallel.
Well, I think that's a long enough post to make up for my recent silence. And it's good timing too because I need to start preparing my cell cultures for FACS.
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-20 12:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-21 11:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-20 01:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-21 11:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-21 11:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-20 09:56 am (UTC)And thanks for the tip. I shall try to find this short story!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-22 12:14 am (UTC)My mother did constantly bemoan how I wasn't "ladylike" but I always took that as a compliment more than anything else. ^_^;;
I really do recommend the short stories! Let me know what you think of them if you find them. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-20 03:17 pm (UTC)You've been very lucky not to have to deal with some of the more obnoxious nonsense. ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-22 12:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-22 12:29 am (UTC)but ultimately i don't think anybody wants to be told what they should or shouldn't be...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-22 04:53 am (UTC)Psst, how was Alumni Weekend? ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-22 10:11 pm (UTC)i guess i'll post more about it soon, if i can get my act together (ha!)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-22 05:52 am (UTC)...that is probably way more than you wanted to know. Er, sorry.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-24 07:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-10-24 09:37 pm (UTC)It's a really interesting concept. Especially the cousins thing...because the allowed cousin (patrilineal or matrilineal, whichever it is,) is often the preferred marriage.
...and I could probably continue being an snthropology dork for a while, so I'll stop now