In Praise of Gnarled Carrots

It should strike anyone who pays passionate attention to vegetables and how they taste as perverse and even cruel for supermarkets and certain governing bodies (formerly the EU, though they've repealed the ban on weird vegetables) to deem countless pounds of produce specimens as not fit for market due to their puny size or irregular, twisty forms.

It's a topic I've griped about before, but I return to it this time to say that this practice is particularly disgraceful when it comes to carrots. While I've been known to pass up a bunch of bananas due to the alarmingly aberrant curvature of one of their members (please do not take this where your mind wants it to go, I beg of you), I can, at the same time, be found lamenting the present state of conventional carrots and wailing when I get to the farmers' market and everyone's bought up all my favorite skinny, twisty carrots. This tends to happen to me mostly in Rio de Janeiro, where the organic farmers' markets occur separately from farmers' markets that offer conventional produce, and the organic markets are so small and intensely frequented that all the tastiest items sell out before I even manage roll out of bed.

For some mysterious reason that might have to do with habit and the benumbing effect of consumer culture, people at the regular supermarkets seem satisfied to purchase bagfuls of these giant, rotund, uniform sticks that are as hard as wood and taste like chewed up paper wads. I can see why supermarkets and mass carrot producers would prefer to ship and stock these invincible wood sticks rather than delicate waifs like the ones pictured above left--these tender tinies are much more likely to swoon and faint under the stress of long-distance trucking. But their crunch is so crisp yet yielding, so subtle in their variations of sweetness, so redolent of spring awakening, that I have taken to going carrotless for weeks rather than compromise on the endlessly disappointing orange batons permanently on offer at the supermarket. The last time I caved and bought these gross carrots to add to a soup or something, I ended up leaving the majority unused in the crisper until they half decayed into the slightly gruesome state you see in the picture to the left. If you live in San Francisco, then you probably can find sweetly gnarled carrots even at the most random of conventional markets, and this post may not even be relevant to you, you lucky brat!

That is all. I end my rant with a side-by-side comparison shot. Of course, what you'd really need is a taste test, but it seems important to note that not only do gnarled carrots taste infinitely better than these orange stubs, they are also waaay more attractive and weird in the most benevolent of ways, as opposed to those wooden abominations that offer us a case study in sinister-weird. Happy carrot hunting!

Experimental Guest Post: Southern Pepper Jelly

Pepper jelly available in red, green, and sunshine color, possibly Amish-made.

A note from Kale Daikon:

My dear veggie friends, today I introduce you to a new feature on WV: the guest post. My high school friend and sophomore year Winter Ball date, veg name Jalapeño Rice, has taken 15 experimental minutes out from his rising career as a skateboarding columnist and writer-at-large to send a dispatch from the outskirts of Nashville calling our attention to the southern phenomenon known as Pepper Jelly. A vegetable in jelly form strikes us San Franciscans as highly unusual, hence its appearance on WV. 

Speaking of the South and strange forms of jelly, you should also check out Vile Jelly Radio, a delightful smorgasbord of music, banter, and folksy advice broadcast live from Columbia, MO every Sunday (and available on the Internet forevermore) by the talented and pee-your-pants-funny Andrew Leland, who claims WV as one of his favorite blogs in this interview! Okay, I hereby leave you to the spicy musings of Mr. Rice.

Reed's Grocery, somewhere outside of Nashville

I am what is the word? The OULIPO movement did this? There is a fancy word for giving yourself a limitation in writing a narrative/story/text but I can’t think of it right now. But the constraint, the self-imposed constraint, I am installing in this anecdote is that I will only compose this for fifteen minutes exactly and I will not use the World Wide Web/ Information Super Highway/ Google or any other resource to aid me in the telling of this tale. I mean this as no disrespect to Weird Vegetables. But on the contrary I will honor Weird Vegetables by my becoming brevity. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and…uh…the other word…maybe the almost right word…he might have said…is the difference between lightning and lightning bug.” But the more germane quote from Mark Twain was, “I was going to write a short letter but I did not have enough time.”

I only have 11 more minutes.

This epistle, as it were, concerns “pepper jelly.” My wife and I live in a surprisingly sophisticated, Cheeveresque enclave just outside Nashville. One afternoon we were going to meet our friends for an early dinner. I found myself at Reed’s Grocery—a small, family owned stand next to an ancient graveyard of the kind common in popular depictions of the Dirty South.

I wanted to get something for the couple we were meeting for dinner. I went to the back of the store. My wife was going to meet me across from Reed’s after work.

I walked to the back and saw several jars lining the walls

Ack 8 minutes…!!

Every kind of pepper jelly was in the back there. Like, literally, 9 different kinds of pepper jelly. I had never had it before and never even heard of such a thing. So I asked the proprietress, “How do you eat this? Is it sweet?” She said, “Yes. It’s sweet. It goes with…”

And she mentioned some things.

I picked out the green jar and bought that. I was sort of anxious about my purchase. I had visions of strange and not savory or sweet or delicious foods my Dad would bring home such as a weird form of Indian Ice Cream my wife still contends was soap. And unsweetened chocolate. So I am constantly interrogating myself to see if I am becoming my father? Was this, I wondered, some weird and not tasty/sweet exotic food item that would make the couple uncomfortable? Would they feel compelled to try it?

So nervously, when we arrived at the couple’s house, I brought the pepper jelly out of the paper bag and said something to the effect of, “Here I brought this for you.”

“Pepper Jelly!” she said as though she were greeting an old friend.

Here I had been concerned that “Pepper Jelly” was too out-there, and some weird thing, like unsweetened chocolate or ice cream that tasted like soap. Instead, Pepper Jelly, she explained, was a staple of her childhood and a common delicacy often served in social settings throughout the South.

She dispatched me to the local grocery store to get water crackers and cream cheese. We ate the pepper jelly that afternoon with the aforementioned items and it was delicious, slightly spicy but mostly sweet—a pleasing green color like the cover of Ulysses.

Since that time we have given pepper jelly to my parents and some other people and they like it. Here is where I would write some exposition about the history of pepper jelly and its sociological significance in the Southeastern United States.

—Jalapeño Rice

Some fans of pepper jelly, including the sultry-looking Lee Ann Rimes

Lettuce Dressing For Carnaval!

Look at this delectable lettuce! She's so perky and fresh you wouldn't even know it was 87 degrees out and humid enough to make you bathe entirely in your own sweat at a rate of two slick layers per minute.

Carnaval has just come to a close in Brazil, and it feels like I got hit with an enormous glitter bomb hurled to the soundtrack of a 1000 beating drums and 500 blaring horns. Drunken street parties are just about my worst nightmare, but I braved the crowds in Rio de Janeiro to put on a costume and hear some amazing music a couple times over the course of the four-day festa.

I came across this cheerful human vegetable after escaping the confetti crush of a bloco in the hilly, cobblestoned Santa Teresa neighborhood, where I used to live. A bloco is a street party in which a big band marches through the streets playing popular Carnaval songs, while people in costume follow along singing, dancing and tossing confetti and water and maybe beer on each other. This bloco had started at 8am (yes 8am), so I was feeling a little zombie-faced by the time I decided, a couple hours later, to make my salmon exit, moving determinedly hand-in-hand with my little owl friend (see above photo, left) contra the human tide.

We paused for breath after winding our way out of the thick of things, and that's when she appeared in our path, Alfaçinha, as her friends call her, or Little Lettuce, a nickname earned by her vegetarian ways. Below are more views of this most green of fashions. Extra props go to the coordinated lettuce scrunchy.

She was a welcome salad interlude after a morning full of sweaty meat hunks:

More photos from the bloco Céu Na Terra, which means Heaven on Earth, but for me was more like Sweaty Beer-Soaked Inferno Made Bearable and Even Pleasurable By Brilliant Costumes & Bursts of Joyous Music and Dancing.

UPDATE: And finally, in response to a very woolly, very crafty reader's request, here is my last-minute costume. The inspiration is a 3-in-1 rendition of Princess-Clown-Super Hero. (I hope I get extra props for the biker shortz.)

Veggie Plops.

Veggie plops. That's what I'm calling these. It looks like someone just dropped these cabbages and squash from a high place and they landed into the shape of veggie-hued Hershey kisses. Spotted outside of a dusty old market on an island southeast of Rio de Janeiro called Ilha Grande, home to just four automobiles (firetruck, police car, school bus, and one other car) and a whole pack of happy dogs that have people who love them and feed them but that roam the island freely like cats due to aforementioned lack of cars. Here is the full shot of the market:

I like that these veggies masquerading as giant dim sum dumplings get such primacy of place, the star attraction alongside the brooms meant to lure in potential customers. That pink bike is pretty sweet too.

More soon! Carnaval is coming to Rio (oh, the humanity! drunken crowds marching all over my poor beer-soaked, sandy toes!!) and I have a sore throat. Maybe that will keep me home and posting more about weird vegetables.

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Roots. Roots. Roots.

Ahoy!! Here I am, just washed ashore in Rio de Janeiro, where I crawled and then climbed up into the green profusion of its rainforest hills to settle into my hermit hole for awhile. I was off for a couple months of vagabondage and checking in with the proper dissertation authorities and libraries back in California. I had little down time to post, though I've taken lots of pictures of vegetable friends I've met along the way (the WV pantry mountain continues to grow ever higher with yet-to-be consumed future posts). So after traveling over routes --> routes --> routes --> routes of hemispheric and ocean criss-crossings, I'm hoping to sprout some fast and glorious roots --> roots --> roots in my recently reinstated tropical environment in as little time as it took this sweet little potato to spread its slender fuschia root-arms in a great big hula welcome to the world. More roots = more vegetables = more WV posts!

p.s. "Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes." is a phrase that runs through my head every now and then. It's from the English translation of Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade's amazing and confounding "Cannibalist Manifesto," (Manifesto Antropófago), which you can read about here. And here is a pdf of Leslie Bary's translation, which is much better than other versions with cringe-worthy errors that are floating around the web and that shall remain uncited here.

Solid Borscht (or Beet & Carrot Latkes)

Hello from Jerusalem! I've gone to the Holy Land for the holidays to be with some good friends who live here... and am learning a great deal from the intensity of life within a deeply interwoven knot of three major religions and their innumerable sects. A dizzying experience: mingling in with Greek Orthodox, Coptic Christian, Franciscan, and Ethiopian priests, pilgrims singing and kissing relics, and tourists looking bewildered at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, feeling the divine spirit with Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall and feeling out-of-step for not backing away from it, drinking sweet mint tea offered by Muslim vendors in the narrow, curving passageways of the old city and studying the façades of mosques I cannot enter. The vegetable backlog has grown past the top of my head, but here is a special morsel to tide you over through the holidays.

These are beet & carrot latkes, which are perhaps not so very strange, but I had only ever had the Hanukkah treat in its more traditional potato form. And thus, these make it into the pantheon of Weird Vegetables by virtue of their unorthodox chutzpah and extra-ordinary deliciousness. Made with love by my friend Zoe's mom Paula and eaten with generous dollops of applesauce and plain yogurt, these latkes caused one happy eater to exclaim, "Wow, together with the yogurt, it's like solid borscht!" Which, in our vegetable-loving context, is akin to saying "It's like solid gold!", but better because you cannot eat solid gold. The recipe is from The Joy of Cooking.

May you eat well and light some candles of love and merriment over these next few days.

Volunteer Corn

Our weird vegetable field has lain fallow for a spell as your virtual farmer-forager takes a pause from her Brazilian sojourn to touch down in Occupied U.S. territory and witness what's been sprouting in the late North American autumn. Despite this writer's preoccupation with the bruised hands and ribs of her colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the violent peppering of peaceful bodies across this state and country, as well as her fulfillment of non-vegetable-related tasks with non-negotiable deadlines, others have been pitching in to help keep up production. And so, as in the natural world, what seems to be abandoned by human activity, is in fact not forgotten by all. Seeds germinate in the minds of others, photos are snapped and forwarded on behalf of the site, guest posts are written, and long-dormant co-bloggers begin to turn over their fertile plots in preparation for winter crops. Pictured above is the first of a few offerings made by kindred vegetable spirits: volunteer corn.

Yes, what you see is a corn plant that has sprouted in the sewage-soiled cracks of a city gutter. The evidence was forwarded by Bay Area curator-writer Christian Frock (creator of projects both invisible and visible), who spotted it in San Leandro, which she describes as "the wee sleepy suburban village next to Oakland." Of this newly born green guerrilla, Christian writes:

I saw this ambitious little corn growing in the gutter while out for a walk with my kids around the block. We have actually had some volunteer corn spring up in our very inhospitable backyard recently too. It is amazing on two fronts--one, I have no idea where it came from because there are no farms that I know of nearby and two, corn will apparently grow under the most incomprehensible conditions. The corn we saw in the gutter is growing out of a pretty small crack in an otherwise cement-bound area. That photograph makes me wonder at the absolute tenacity of living things, whether or not the world is conducive to their existence.

I like to imagine the ways the corn might have gotten there: a child spits out a mealy mouthful just to see the yellow spray splatter against the sidewalk. An ear tumbles out of someone's full bag of farmers' market produce or bounces off the top of a truck's abundant corn bed. A pigeon got too greedy somewhere and landed here to hurl politely into the gutter. The wind got curious about its powers and decided to fling some corn bits along the road.

One thing leads to another and the next thing you know, the city sidewalk finds itself becoming-field without active human intervention. Which leads to another question: what's the difference between a volunteer and a weed? Who determines which is which? A volunteer is "a plant that grows on its own, rather than being deliberately planted by a farmer or gardener," says Wikipedia , the key defining factor being that this plant is desirable and has decided to labor for its own life, while appearing as though a natural gift to the grateful farmer or gardener: "Unlike weeds, which are unwanted plants, a volunteer may be encouraged once it appears, being watered, fertilized, or otherwise cared for." This blog gives an entertaining account of volunteer vegetables as her cream of the crop Garden Army.

A weed, too, is talented at surviving on its own, yet to the displeasure or detriment of the human who plots and pines for its removal. It is "a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth; especially : one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants," according to Merriam-Webster.

At the heart of this volunteer/weed divide is a value judgment applied to occupying space. Which plant deserves to thrive in a determinate patch of ground and which must be pulled up by its roots and disposed of to make way for others? But how are we to judge how to distribute (or redistribute) the soil's riches properly? Is this corn a weed if it disturbs the sidewalk and no human wants to eat it? Is it a volunteer only if it is deemed a vegetable by means of its edibility? Does its conversational value, the pleasure of surprise it gives by springing up unexpectedly from a gutter, make it a volunteer and not a weed?

Perhaps it is a matter of reinventing our definition of a weed. Books have been written in praise of weeds, including Joseph A. Cocannouer's 1950 Weeds: Guardians of the Soil, which broadens the definition of a weed from something unwanted to, "any plant growing out of place," though he immediately complicates the idea of any plant being "out of place" by asking us to take the perspective of the farmer trying to protect his beet crop from a certain weed and then that of the soil that is simultaneously being fertilized and strengthened by this same "weed." He writes: "Nature may at times compel us to discover the value of her wild plants; her weeds," which emphasizes how one inherent value of a weed is its wildness, its spontaneity.

Or perhaps weeds are vagabonds, invasive species that travel and set up camp in open areas or pioneer new systems of life in spaces cleared then abandoned by humans, as French "planetary gardener" Gilles Clément writes in his book Éloge des vagabondes (In Praise of Vagabonds), which devotes whole chapters to vegetable weeds like fennel and Tibetan rhubarb. Readers of French can find more of his writings here.

Clément's defense of invasive species asks us to suspend our opinions about what species "belong" where, challenging the assumed superior value of the local, the indigenous, and the diverse in order to open the doors to the possibilities tracked in by plants that go wandering, even those that threaten to take over an area of their own. Though Clément's writings have been influenced by Marxist philosophies, here his arguments are radical without falling neatly on any defined points along the left-right political spectrum. Here, I leave you with a tiny sampling from poet-ecocritic Jonathan Skinner's translation from In Praise of Vagabonds that appeared in an environmentally-themed issue of the journal Qui Parle that I edited last year. (Issues can be hard to track down and difficult to download if you don't have university library access, but if you email weirdvegetables AT gmail.com I can send you a pdf version of the excerpt.)

A troubled world decries the invasion of life-forms from elsewhere. Strangers, plants, animals, how dare you reach our shores? Articles on the topic abound. We hold conferences, organize world summits on the urgency of the struggle against all that is not indigenous, local, and national. We advise the user to eradicate by any means necessary species not featured on the authorized lists. We pass laws, set up quarantines, insure. Once the system is in place, it damages an extravagant process: that of evolution.

You have no right, you vagabonds, to occupy the land of another. Go away, do not crowd our floral classifications with your abusive and deadly presence. You chase away our species, sometimes you kill them. You are pollution. In the name of national identity we fight you, we protect our citizens, our landscape, our environment. In the name of diversity we wage war on you because we want peace. 

Peace: a human delusion, without biological foundation. Whenever it is at hand, elements erupt. The rest of the time life goes on in its own way. 

That’s how the process goes, and everyone knows it’s accelerating.   

Fantastic.

If anyone else has favorite publications or sites that think about weeds or volunteer vegetables in interesting ways, post them in the comments section.