Emily Bowles

Vegan Baking Classics: Delicious, Easy-to-Make Traditional Favorites

mandy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Kelly Rudnicki describes herself as a “busy mother of five young children,” the oldest of whom was “diagnosed with life-threatening food allergies to dairy, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and legumes.” Incorporating material from her blog, Rudnicki’s first book, The Food Allergy Mama’s Baking Book, began as Vegan Baking Classics. Although the title of the book situates it in vegan media culture, I found Rudnicki’s writing style, interests, and recipe descriptions more typical of parenting and food allergy books.

Rudnicki lacks the edgy, almost punk style of some of the best vegan cookbook authors, like Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, or the Sarah Kramer and Tanya Barnard powerhouse duo. Moskowitz and Romero’s Post-Punk Kitchen public access television show and website define the ways in which veganism is a playful way to be an anarchist in the kitchen without hurting anyone. And Moskowitz’s *Vegan with a Vengeance includes an anecdote about feminist potlucks, heightening what I see as a unifying tenant of many cookbooks: a sense that food is part of a larger set of political concomitants.

That is not to disparage Rudnicki. Her desire to feed her son the doughnuts, muffins, cakes, and cookies she remembers from her childhood offers a powerful testament to her mothering. She expresses her own activist interests in the book when she suggests that she wants doctors to find a cure for the allergens that plague her son. Rudnicki is concerned about health, and she offers tips for lowering the fat in baked goods, such as replacing some of the oils with apple sauce.

The recipes in Vegan Baking Classics are just that—classics. They are comfort foods made in a form consumable for vegans, people with food allergies, and anyone who wants to eat a variety of pastries, cookies, cakes, pies, and other delicious sweet treats.

The notes that accompany the recipes tend to be repetitive and, therefore, a little boring. At times, they even make the end result sound unappealing. As someone who eats my fair share of energy bars, I found the description of Rudnicki's Cranberry-Chocolate Drop Cookies, which she says remind her of her “favorite nutrition bars,” a bit off-putting. I have sometimes wished my energy bars tasted more like cookies, but I rarely wish a cookie tasted more like an energy bar.

Overall, Vegan Baking Classics offers a range of delectable and fun recipes that can satisfy a wide range of people whose teeth tend toward the sweet kind. Following Rudnicki’s hints and tips makes baking without dairy, eggs, and common allergens accessible, and every recipe is worth trying… even if her writing isn't as fun to read as the best punk rock vegan cooks out there.

Written by: Emily Bowles, December 12th 2010

Ribbon Hard Hairband

tina — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By CoverYourHair.com

For twenty years now I’ve been going back and forth between growing my bangs out and having them cut. Needless to say, I love hairbands and need them at different phases of this cut and grow cycle. The Ribbon Hard Hairband from CoverYourHair.com is something that I will use to keep my now-longish bangs out of my eyes. It’s simple, cute, and unobtrusive. Plus, for a hard hairband it’s surprisingly comfortable both on my scalp and behind my ears.

That said, the white Ribbon Hard Hairband is a little boring. Also, while not exactly cheaply made, the process of making a ribbon hairband like this is so simple that even non-crafters like myself could easily do it by following easy online instructions.

Yes, the Ribbon Hard Hairband is “simple and elegant” as the website says, but it’s not the most exciting piece of hairware I’ve ever owned. Some of the other products on the CoverYourHair.com are more compelling. With a wide range of hats, bandanas (both tied and untied), hairbands with tails, turbans, and snoods, the site is worth exploring if you’re an inveterate bangs victim; if you just crave some variety when dealing with weather-related hair issues and wispy strands; or if for some godforsaken reason you want to copy Paris Hilton’s hairband look. The site also links to the company’s YouTube station, which features short videos illustrating how to wear a snood. Admittedly, this is something I would have felt too awkward to try without first seeing an example. At six minutes, the video “Five Secret Tricks for Wearing a Bandana” runs a bit long, but it’s informative and fun.

I recommend trying some Bust Magazine-style DIY fashion if you just want a ribbon hairband. At $4.99 the Ribbon Hard Hairband is cheap and easy, but not worth the shipping and handling fees. If, on the other hand, you want to stock up on hairbands and other hair accessories, CoverYourHair.com is a cool, reasonably-priced site.

Written by: Emily Bowles, November 22nd 2010

Women Count: A Guide to Changing the World

mandy — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Susan Bulkeley Butler, Bob Keefe

Purdue University Press

As a single mom with two jobs and an interest in finding space for volunteerism and activism, I immediately connected with Susan Bulkeley Butler’s interconnected main points—that the ways we “count” women don’t always count, and that women need to take control of the ways in which they “count” on personal and political levels.

Women Count is divided into four sections: “The New Math,” “The Pioneers,” “Change is Happening,” and “Now It’s Your Turn.” Underscoring each of these sections is a fundamental belief in women’s ability to change the world by taking charge of their own educational, organizational, professional, community-based, and volunteering opportunities. In each section, Butler peppers her succinct chapters with statistics, facts, and affirmative messages; she gives women a sense that they possess unique skills and potentials that, if correctly accessed and valued, might revolutionize the world.

At points, her message becomes bogged down in gender essentialism and binary thinking. I do not entirely believe that women are innately “better communicators, better listeners, and better consensus-builders” than men, and I certainly feel like some of Butler’s points invoke a feminotopia that remains at odds with corporate structures. She discusses female mentoring at great length, and while I have experienced this in academic settings—especially from my dissertation director, who was also active in the Women’s Studies program—I have also noticed that professional women can be as cut-throat, competitive, and monovocal as many professional men. Although women do continue to face issues in the work place that men do not, Butler focuses on highly subjective mental features of gender difference (e.g., women are nicer and more patient) than on biological features (e.g., women might thrive if Fortune 500 companies all provided discrete, comfortable rooms for breast pumps and on-site childcare facilities).

Despite some theoretical differences, though, Butler’s book gave me insight into the invisibility of women in received narratives of history. I was shocked that Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin. Catherine Littlefield Greene did, but she let the young inventor take credit for it since women couldn’t receive patents for ideas and inventions in 1793. She also showcases the oscillating relationship between women, war, and work at several key moments in the book, and she notices the ironies enfolded in the fact that feminists (so often identified with peace) gained agency because of war, for example as part of the “Woman’s Land Army” or farmerettes of World War I.

Butler spotlights the accomplishments of historical women, of recent politically successful women in the United States (including both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin), of female entrepreneurs and businesswomen, and of young girls aspiring toward political ambitions. In her final section, she weaves the inspiring messages her readers could garner from the examples of women from ancient times to the present into a message of hope and, more importantly, manageable action. As soon as I finish making dinner for my daughter and myself, I’ll answer her parting question (“What is the change I want to affect in the world over the next three to five years?”) and write out her steps to success. But like many of the women depicted in Women Count, I still need to spend an hour in the kitchen first.

Written by: Emily Bowles, September 10th 2010

Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Robert Paarlberg

Oxford University Press

As an ethically and environmentally aware feminist vegetarian, I view food and politics as ineluctably joined. Robert Paarlberg’s Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know challenged some of my basic ideas about hunger, famine, and the scope of issues contained by the term food politics, yet the book ignores some of the ways in which food is always simultaneously personal and political.

Food Politics covers a wide range of topics connected to the way we eat as well as to our food’s impact on the world around us at local and global levels. Paarlberg examines population growth, food costs, politics of chronic hunger and famine, farming technologies, food aid, obesity, environmentalism, agribusiness, fast food culture, organic and local food, GMOs, and the overarching structures that govern the world food system. At times Paarlberg oversimplifies complex problems, especially in his chapters “The Politics of Obesity” and “Agriculture, the Environment, and Farm Animals.” Moreover, although he supports his points with statistics and logical arguments, he frequently flattens alternative positions, sometimes inconsistently. For example, he suggests that vegetarianism has little global impact on the food supply in one context yet acknowledges the consumption of less red meat as a better way to reduce the environmental impact of food than eating local produce.

Paarlberg recognizes the significance of women’s labor in third-world farming systems. He addresses the political disenfranchisement of women in these economies when he depicts the problem of chronic undernutrition in “poor and hungry communities” where women are prevented from political action because they are, first, overextended by their duties as farmers and as caregivers for the children and elderly and, second, their socially marginalized status. Feminists doubtless know this and would like to see Paarlberg push his points further, as I wanted him to, but his attention to the gendered politics of undernutrition is significant.

Paarlberg considers the work of Rachel Carson and Frances Moore Lappé in dialogue with Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, but he dismisses Frances Moore Lappé’s as a “young countercultural food activist.” Although Lappé was young when she published Diet for a Small Planet, she has created The Small Planet Institute and established a rich, innovative series of books, videos, teaching aids, and other resources about the politics and environmental impact of food. Although he supports some of Lappé’s points, he does so in a way that shifts their focus—he implies that her actions are good, but not for the reasons upon which she bases them, which is a partial, uneven, and reductive way to treat an argument.

The greatest flaw of Food Politics is Paarlberg’s oversimplification of other groups’ and individual’s claims. He provides useful and even groundbreaking information but only by suspending these fundamental components of food politics in a way that does not allow for the inextricability of belief or ideology from the way we eat.

Written by: Emily Bowles, August 7th 2010

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Pattie McCarthy

Apogee Press

Recently, as I was pushing my daughter in her stroller up a hill, a guy in a pickup truck whistled. Pattie McCarthy’s poem “spaltklang: is good broken music” reminded me of this moment. McCarthy describes a new mother who finds her body meaning has been overwritten with a new set of signs:

it’s the stroller, she said, it renders one
invisible, no one will ever look
at me like that again, she said, not
_even him. _

Table Alphabetical of Hard Words tells the story of how we want to believe in the simplicity of signs, even as these signs slip away from us and are ultimately irreducible to their dictionary definitions. Her poems show that “the stroller” does not make “one/invisible,” just as diacritical marks do not always tell us precisely what part of a word matters most.

While reading Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, I found myself drawn by two incongruous impulses: to join McCarthy in an archive outside of our time and to relish in the shape, the feel, the complexity of early modern language and to try to piece together the fragments she had drawn together. The first of these impulses fits neatly with the material project of the collection.

The cover of Table Alphabetical of Hard Words is a repeating yet off-center set of identically bound archival documents, their contents listed but hard to read on the bindings. McCarthy makes her reader enter the archive with her, where she provides etymologies and connections between words while also sending readers outside the text with annotations like “(see usage notes)”. She identifies twenty-first century language as something difficult and tricky, in a different way than the “Hard Words” comprising early word lists and dictionaries: "I don’t understand your euphemistic emoticons, please stop saying important things in code.” We do not have a word list, a key for our own linguistic shortcuts, she suggests in frustration, yet Table Alphabetical of Hard Words also tells the story of what is not said, and McCarthy unpacks only some of her shorthand in her list of sources. Her readers must think outside this text, following traces of allusions and shades of influence.

McCarthy’s language echoes modernists including Virginia Woolf, H. D., Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and especially Gertrude Stein. She draws on Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts,” and she jarringly blends Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Heaney, and Jenn McCreary’s poems with Old English sources, contemporary references to television shows like NYPD Blue, trial records, and other fragments of language that she pieces together with sometimes playful and always visceral effects. For instance, she notes that Webster’s original dictionary used the long s for bloodsucker, making the word look like bloodfucker. Her first poem, “askew: latelye done to deathe” echoes Howe’s The Europe of Trusts, in which Jonathan Swift’s Stella (Esther Johnson) blends with Shakespeare’s Cordelia: she is given a voice, but still obliterated by her lover.

McCarthy forces her reader to question this search for allusions and origins. If our own markings are so illegible, so meaningless, and misleading to us, how can we read break down words we have lost? If a mother’s body may or may not be read differently because of the diacritical mark of a stroller, how do we know what and how to read on and about the bodies that surround us? Table Alphabetical of Hard Words explodes the one-to-one relationship between words and meanings that are so basic to daily life while demonstrating that bodies and words are both hard to interpret, meaningful in their matter, but tricky, mutable, and often unintelligible.

Written by: Emily Bowles, July 25th 2010