Journal of Sustainability

Beware the Green Shirts: The War of Tatsoi

editors | 25 December, 2009 11:18

By Amrit, Amrit@JournalofSustainability.com

My issue with tatsoi started, as well-intentioned things often do, earnestly and with true commitment. In my neighborhood, for 18 dollars a week I can get a large bag of seasonal organic produce from the local CSA group. I can even go on the internet and look up what Farmer John or Farmer Allison is harvesting up this week, and I can put on my worn leather jacket and trek over there with my nylon Hello Kitty grocery bag. For 18 dollars a week I can contribute to some honest social change. Of course, I have to pay in advance for several months of produce and I get no say in what produce I get. But I figured, that’s how social change works, collectively, and sometimes it’s like being 8 again; you have to eat what they give you.

It’s not like at my mother’s house there was much variety. She had two jobs and two kids and no man around much and we relied mostly on food stamps. So, after the free cheese ran out, we ate a lot of white bread and tomato sauce for dinner. We grew bloated on macaroni and cheese from the carton. Left to her own devices my mother had a way of reducing food to its simplest elements that today’s techno-foodies would have envied.

While she lacked a dehydrator, or even a liquid nitrogen set-up, she did have a spectacular vintage turquoise wall oven. When set at 450 degrees it could vaporize a meatloaf, reducing it to a quarter of its original size in the pan, while creating a moat of viscous grease around it. To accompany the meatloaf we had “special” fries which mother removed from the freezer and dumped into a straight-sided aluminum pan of boiling Wesson oil. Then she went over to the neighbors for a cigarette or to borrow some lunch money. The fries desiccated in the pot and became more and less than fries. They became the outline of fries. The essence of fries. They were the color of cedar and when we bit into them they shattered and were hollow, the insides have gone somewhere else to eat. So as kids, we actually craved salads.

By seventh grade it became apparent that one of us had to learn to cook and that one was me. My mother gladly surrendered the kitchen, the food stamps, and the remaining grocery money, and went over to the neighbors to drink freeze-dried coffee and chain smoke.

Back then I cooked with a passion that lack of funds and hunger supplied. I borrowed cookbooks from the library and read them like novels and I spent a lot of time with other people’s mothers watching them cook. Back then most people still cooked everyday. My great aunts who were holocaust survivors and great hoarders of food taught me to bake. So by ninth grade I was a pretty decent cook. We ate soups and pasta, and stir-fries and, most lovely of all, fresh vegetables and salad nearly every day. Salad that we drowned in Wish-Bone Italian dressing because it was exotic and cheap. And we mopped it all up with three-for-a-dollar loaves of Italian bread that was really just longer fatter white bread with a slick of oil on top, but we were well fed and had some control over what we ate.

Over parts of the next 10 years I would cook for my living, first as a short order chef in a very bad part of town where I actually saw someone’s brains get blown out at close range and then later at a crazy diner in New England where I made the largest Danish pastry known to man. “It’s our trademark!” the insane owner would exhort. “Make “em bigger” as I dumped cheese filling into each helmet-size Danish with an extra large ice cream scoop. I worked that job for two years until exhausted from the night shift and wanting to finish school, I went to work at a hospice where I never went near the kitchen. But for all these years I have cooked passionately for my friends and family and my interest in food, food that tastes like it was meant to, food that was cleaned and cooked with attention and love, has never wavered. I still cook every day.

In 2008, when the CSA came to town I was intrigued. The thought of doing good only outweighed by my insatiable appetite for greens made it seem so inviting, so cool, but still I hesitated. Maybe it’s me, my anti-social tendencies, or maybe it’s because I really didn’t want to join anything at all ever again, after being ejected from the Young Communist League for being an “eclectic cynic” in 1980. I was buying my produce from the local co-op, as I needed it, and it was organic and well priced.

But there was this girl, woman actually, and she sort of seduced me, and then I ended up taking over her share of the CSA when the next enrollment came around since her produce was rotting in her fridge and she felt guilty. She ate mostly cold cereal with milk. I should have seen the end in that. Since I cooked every night, she figured I’d be better off with her share. That way she could eat at my house even more. I wrote her a check and bought her out, after which she was pretty much gone from my life, except for dinner parties and an occasional near suicidal emotional meltdown.

My first week at the CSA was seemingly benign. I came home from work, went for a run, and at 5:30 I walked over to the CSA headquarter and signed in. I had that weird feeling I always get when surrounded by well meaning academics and tarted up vegans, like I need to tell a raunchy joke or eat a big Mac. Everyone looked very lean, scary lean, and even the farmers seemed, well, kind of sophisticated.

I followed the on the chalkboard at the entrance and I picked up my collard greens, my mustard greens, my potatoes, my green chili, my mizuna, my mixed greens, my onions and a giant Hubbard-y looking squash so big I could barely carry it home. I planned to dice the squash that night and roast it with sea salt and then bag it up and freeze it to use all winter in pasta or soup. Everything looked great.

Then came the last item, something I had never seen before, called tatsoi. It came with an instruction sheet, a bad sign, I thought. Then I walked over to the trade table where you can trade something you don’t want for something else you do want. It was piled neck high with tatsoi. They even offered to let me have some extra, so I took another bunch. It looked like a cross between mustard greens and spinach and I figured, “What the hell? It’s free.”

But tatsoi was like an exercise in going against all your instincts. Like when you meet someone and you just don’t like them or even want to like them but your monkey mind says “You don’t have any reason not to like Jane…I mean other people like her”, but when Jane smiles all you see are bared teeth and you want to run away. That was tatsoi for me. It was Jane without teeth.

I walked home in the dusk feeling self righteous and participatory. Holding my huge Hello Kitty sack of produce and my miraculous squash, I was mildly euphoric. Then, I tried to fit it all in the refrigerator. I left the tatsoi out. We regarded each other in the waning light. I don’t need instructions to cook food. I usually just ‘get’ food with an intuitive knowledge but I had a sneaking feeling, actually a miserable upload of anxiety regarding tatsoi. I just didn’t ‘get’ tatsoi. So I read the instructions. And I cooked the bitch in good olive oil and even so she tasted like something you’d scrape of the hull of a boat.

I love greens: collards, chard, mustard and dandelion. I crave and eat them all the time. But this was something different, not really a green, more like a foaming slime. I poured on some soy and I braved it down. And then quickly it came back up. I tossed the first bunch, literally, and then I went on-line to see where I had gone wrong. It could not be that anything that grew in the ground could be this revolting. I had no previous experience with anything this slimy that was not first blended at high speed.

Week after week, it seemed there was a pile of rejected tatsoi on the trade in table at the CSA and week after week my fellow do-gooders shamefully whispered how nauseating the tatsoi was and wondered why was it so ubiquitous. Finally, one night I wrote to the CSA asking if they would take supporters preferences into account before they planted next year’s crop given that like the parsley in that old joke, nobody actually ate tatsoi. It seemed a shame to see huge piles of it going to waste each week.

The next morning there was a reply in my email box from the CSA. I had a bad feeling even before I opened the email. But when I opened it was like watching a bad 1950’s documentary with that stentorian voice-over narration. I could just hear Farmer John who wrote on behalf of the CSA, and whom I assumed was really a tenured professor.

Instead of a reply I had gotten back a lecture on crops and farming. Now, it is notoriously difficult to assess tone in an email, but this one rang with sarcasm and patronage. It was didactic beyond endurance, but even worse, it was smug. Smug in that politically hectoring way that made me want to drive a Hummer over him.

Mr. John informed me that crops actually grow, you know, as in the ground, over time, so the farmer, at the mercy of “mother nature”, (just like a woman), had to actually, you know, plant the tatsoi in advance and so, could not account for the fickle preferences of the supporters and further, we should learn to like tatsoi because tatsoi was environmentally sound and a sustainable desert crop and no one else had complained and maybe, he implied, I needed professional help. Perhaps a hysterectomy.

Foolishly, with the heart and hope of an aging leftist I wrote him back explaining that even though crops actually grow in the ground, you know, that there was always, like next year, you know, and perhaps our preferences could be taken into account since it was like, you know, COMMUNITY supported agriculture, after all.

I attached a picture of the mountain of tatsoi on the reject table that I took with my cell phone. I stopped short of attaching a photo of the last tatsoi I had puked up. I told him that I was nearly 50 years old and that I did not have to boost my “farm cred” by eating swill that no pig would choke down and I resigned from the CSA. I felt relief, no more smug academic pseudo-farmers, no more 25-pound Hubbard squash to dismember, and best of all no more paternalistic lecturing from “Farmer” John.

But I was wrong. In the morning, and for several mornings after, I received hate mail from Farmer John, analyzing my political commitment, my logic, and my future role in the greening of America. He wrote me until I blocked his mail, but not his grinding hectoring voice from my memory.

So now, when I think of tatsoi, I think of all the older men in my life who told me what I want and how I want it. How I should feel and how I should express myself. It’s always “If only you said x, if only you did y, I could hear you”, but the truth is the Farmer Johns can’t hear me anymore than the tatsoi can lying there evilly green and mucosal on the stainless steel table. Proving after all, that there really are some things that you just can’t choke down.

The Voices of Solar: Marlene L. Brown

editors | 25 December, 2009 10:54

By Rose Marie Kern, rmk@swcp.com

”I was surprised by the lack of respect for women in the trade.”

Marlene Brown is an Electrical Engineer and a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Labs. Winner of the 2009 American Solar Energy Society’s “Women in Solar” award, she is a past President of the New Mexico Solar Energy Assn. as well as the New Mexico Solar Energy Industries Association and contributes many hours promoting renewable energy technology as a career choice for women.

Marlene first studied energy systems in an interdisciplinary program at the Evergreen State College in Washington State. After graduating she became an Energy Auditor in Massachusetts. “Unfortunately, I discovered that middle and upper class people didn’t really care about saving energy. “

She moved to Washington, D.C. and began working with low-income families. Here her efforts paid off as she saw her work make a difference in the poorer communities.

But Marlene was restless and wished to continue learning and growing in new directions. On vacation in Jamaica, she met a man who made the field of solar energy come alive, and told her of the Colorado Mountain College in Carbondale, Colorado, where she could study PV.

She took a two-week course there over the summer, liked Colorado and the course so much that she moved there and earned a certificate in Energy Efficient Building Technologies.

She started working in the construction field, but was surprised at the lack of respect she noted for women in the trade. Going to work for Zomeworks in Albuquerque, she went back to school at UNM and TVI (now called CNM), eventually getting her Master’s in Electrical Engineering and her certificate in the electrical trades.

During this time she also began working with the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF)– an international organization that empowers developing countries and arranges for them to use Solar Energy to bring electricity to villages where lights, radios and consistent contact with the outside world have never been available.

In 1993, SELF hired Marlene to go to Vietnam. There she trained members of the Vietnam Women’s Union in the basics of Photovoltaics.

Marlene described the adventure. “I trudged or canoed through the jungle to 4 small villages where I installed 100 PV systems in 5 days.” A glutton for punishment, she repeated this feat two years later in Vietnam and in the Soloman Islands.

Back in New Mexico, Marlene went to work for Sandia Labs. Though previously familiar with NMSEA, the American Solar Energy Society’s ’98 Solar conference in Albuquerque convinced her to work with the local chapter to forward the education of the public.

Marlene teaches coed and women-only classes in photovoltaics several times a year throughout the U.S. She is convinced that this is a viable and important career field for women.

“Renewable Energy technology is further along than ever”, Marlene notes, “and it really has gone mainstream.” She sites the programs in several California cities and other cities in the U.S. that have made a dramatic difference in the local environments. She felt that for a long time, politically we lost ground as the government reduced funding for Renewable energy research and development.

That has significantly changed since the Obama administration has taken over.

“In Europe, RE is automatically rolled into household mortgages. Here we used to struggle just to get people to understand that they have options. She believes that there are now significant options for people that want PV or solar hot water.

“We are finally seeing some significant mechanisms to help finance solar.”

Marlene understands how energy affects people’s lives. She has seen the excitement of the first light bulb ever glowing in remote villages, and she has known the gratitude of people whose every cent counts towards their quality of life.

Language though Occupation

editors | 25 December, 2009 10:50

By Andrés Jennings, drediz2000@gmail.com

There is no risk in saying that almost all literate people in the world have taken some kind of foreign language course. Maybe just in high school, taking a basic Spanish course that was a requirement to graduate, and later remembering only a couple words. Whether or not one is fluent or has just taken a few basic classes in a foreign language, there is no denying that knowing more than one language is useful.

I have been motivated for a few years now to learn new languages. In college I took classes and studied abroad to immerse myself into the places where the languages where spoken. For the last few years, I have been living in South America in various countries to learn the other major languages of the Americas: Spanish, Portuguese and French. Being a native English speaker, I wanted to provide a service to the people I would be living with so learned how to teach English.

Teaching English was my way to make a living abroad, but it also helped me get in touch with my students, and learn their native language. After living in Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil, I managed to come out of South America speaking fluent Spanish and Portuguese. This was by no means an easy feat, but being totally immersed in the language and culture greatly accelerated the process. My willingness to learn was key to my success.

Being a teacher allowed me to understand what it was like to help people learn. Teaching, I found out, requires a lot more talent and energy than most people think. Being able to speak a language fluently does not necessarily mean you are able to teach it. Beyond understating the technical rules of a language (i.e. Grammar), a teacher has to know how to manage time, prepare and create appropriate lessons, work to understand the individual needs of their students and above all, have a great amount of patience. Teachers are leaders. It was not until I was the teacher standing in front of the classroom that I realized this.

Besides being an international teacher, I have also been an international student. While living in foreign countries, it has been my personal philosophy to learn the language of the country where I am living. When you are immersed, everything turns into an interactive language classroom and I took full advantage of it. South America was amazing. I lived a dream life living and traveling over a four-year period, and learning from the people was easy because they were so open and friendly. I had experienced great challenges and had learned so much that I was beginning to feel that I wanted to just go home to the United States and start my life there again. I had conquered my own hopes of learning more languages and experiencing something different so going home sounded really good.

I did go home, back to New Mexico where I was born and raised. Back home, I started to get very comfortable. New Mexico is a wonderful place to live, and because of its history and people being very rooted in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, my fluency in Spanish was useful. After a year back home though, I started to get that itch to travel again. I still felt that I had more to learn and more to see.

So, to make a somewhat long story short, I am now living I the Czech Republic. I have been living here for the last four months and have a job teaching English. I am living in Prague, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and I once again dived head first into the language pool. The only problem with the Czech language is that the pool is very deep, and there is a current that you have to swim against.

In Europe, there are three main types of Languages: Germanic, Latinic and Slavic. English is a Germanic language, and the other languages of the Americas are all Latinic. The Czech language is a Slavic based language. Other Slavic languages are Russian, Polish, and Slovakian. In the USA there is virtually no exposure to these languages. America speaks European languages, but this branch of the language tree has not grown at all in the American Continent.

You may be asking, as my family did when I decided to come to Prague to learn Czech, why would anyone want to learn Czech? There are only ten million people in the world who speak the Czech language, and there are other Slavic languages that would be more useful to know, like Russian. The answer comes down to wanting to live in the Czech Republic. Although I had never been here, I had a few Czech friends that told me it was a great place to live, I could easily get a job here, and they would help me get me off the ground in the first few months. As an added bonus, the beer in the Czech Republic is some of the best in the world.

My reasoning for learning Czech was that if I know one Slavic language, it would be easier for me to learn another in the future. Taking a look at what Prague had to offer made the move very exciting for me, and I wanted to give it a try. I wasn’t the first American to want to try this.

Coming here with the intent to teach English has been the idea of many Americans nice the 1990s. On November 17^th, 1989 the Czech Republic (then known as Czechoslovakia) had a non-violent revolution. The Velvet Revolution, as it was called, ended Communism that had commanded the territory since 1948. The protests of more than half a million people around the country sent the Soviets packing, and a new democracy was instated. With the fall of Communism came new opportunity for the Czech people, and the world became something they could be a part of. The new world that they became a part of was the Capitalist majority of Europe, and the English language was very useful in that world.

The Czech Republic has been occupied by other countries throughout most of its history, and there has always been another language forced upon them by the occupier. In the last 80 years, the German and Russian languages pushed upon the Czech people, but with the arrival of Democracy to the country, English was not forced upon the Czechs though occupation, but rather by circumstance.

The students I teach in the Czech Republic are not like other students I have had before. First of all, they are all adults. In South America, most of my students were between the ages of 14 and 30. Here in the Czech Republic, all my students are over 30 years of age. The reason for this is because anyone who is under 30 already speaks English pretty well, as it was offered to all Czech students after 1989. Prior to that date, all Czechs were required to learn Russian or German. If anyone learned English before 1989, it was because they worked very hard to learn it and were never guaranteed the chance to ever visit an English speaking country.

It has been 20 years since the Velvet Revolution and the Czech Republic is finally coming into its own. With so much change going on over the one hundred years, it is no wonder that there is a feeling of distance when approaching the Czech people. It is not to say that the Czech people are cruel and prejudice to outsiders. Far from it. The fact is that it is a new thing for the Czech people. Their history has always been tangled in the web of some other nations interests and being free is a new feeling.

The greatest challenge that faces a foreigner in the Czech Republic is to understand the reason for the cold Czech shoulder. They are a people who have been kept in the dark amongst their own people; they have been controlled by other governments and speak a language that only exists in their country. Besides these reasons, the greatest cause for their distance is what I like to call the generation gap.

The generation gap is the result of the four generations in the Czech Republic living today that have had totally different experiences growing up in the same country. The oldest generation witnessed the World Wars, German occupation and the destruction of Europe. The next generation saw the arrival of the Soviet occupation and the dawn of communism in their nation. Third generation lived the revolution and were the ones who protested for the freedom of their nation and the change that the final generation has lived their entire lives in. The youngest generation has lived their entire life in the new, capitalist nation the Czech Republic is today. Between these four generations, there is little commonality.

They have all lived different lives in a very small country and all have had to cope with changes that the other generations did not have to. Parents don’t understand their grandparents, neither their children, but family is still a very important part of Czech life. Social life in the Czech republic is very reserved, as a result of people being constantly worried about secret police and public distrust. Though twenty years have passed, older generations are not easily approachable, even if someone is fluent in Czech.

I have learned from my older students that it is not normal for them to meet people in social settings. Many of them find a foreigners approach to social behavior refreshing. As a Czech, if you got out to a typical pub or bar, and try to start a conversation with a complete stranger, there will most likely be a response of curiosity as to why you are trying to speak to them. Social politeness is not as prevalent in Czech society and to behave in such a way, as a Czech would be abnormal.

Young people in the Czech republic are a bit more open to a public social courtesy, but it is usually in response to the initial action taken by a foreigner. Being a young man in Prague, I figured it would be easy to make friends in such a metropolitan city, but it has been harder than in any other country I have been to. I don’t want to make the Czechs seem unapproachable, but it has become apparent to me that there is particular etiquette to approaching Czech people.

Social inconsistency is perhaps the greatest cause of this. In South America, there are many social problems, poverty and misery, but there has been consistency there over the last one hundred years. Czechs have been exposed to so many different ways of life, that the last twenty years has not had too much of an impression. However, the future looks bright here. Czech xenophobia will become a thing of the past as new generations are born here. Though it cannot be pinpointed in a specific way, there is a difference in how the youngest generation is living. So far, the last one hundred years have been very unsustainable in regards to Czech culture and exposure to the rest of the world, but there are changes coming here.

Participating in the 20^th anniversary of the Czech Revolution on November 17^th 2009 was very inspiring. The Czech people were united again, as they were 20 years ago. There was a strong sense of national identity and unity among the different generations that I had not seen before. There was a positive energy and a good sense of community. This lead me to think about what the Czech Republic will look like in 2029. Will these people continue to develop their sense of community and sustain their current direction of openness and diversity that is prevalent in the youngest generation?

The future will tell. There are many ex-patriots living in the Czech Republic and the Czech people are traveling more to other countries and living abroad more and more. International experience is a new thing to the Czechs, but there is a desire for it. As with all things in life, perfection comes with practice and the more Czechs get to travel, the better they will be at it, and at opening up to visitors and new residence to their country. Sustaining their culture will be deeply rooted in their language as the future brings more and more languages to this part of the world.

Of course, knowing the language is key. Unfortunately, learning how to speak Czech feels a bit like wanting to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle. It sounds really exciting and challenging, but even if it is possible, it is a long way to go to get to the other side. There is also no point in stopping half way once one has already taken the jump. The challenge is great, but the rewards seem to be worth the trouble.

It has always been an important part of my philosophy as a language teacher to also be a language student of the host country that I am living in. Prague is the first place I have been to where there I have seen a clear bridge to the other side if the canyon, but the bridge is English. One can live for years in the city and not learn how to speak Czech. Perhaps “live” is not the best word to use in this case, so lets say, “survive” instead. I have come across many English teachers here that I have not learned to speak the native language and they don’t seem the least bit bothered. There are areas in Prague that cater to English, and it is a city where English is in high demand.

If you want to learn Czech living in Prague, it takes a lot of effort. Most young people can speak English and if you start speaking to them in broken Czech, they won’t want to waste their time speaking to you in their language if they can just speak to you in English. They want to practice their English and take advantage of the fact that you are a native speaker. Only the most daring and hard working students can come out on top with the Czech language.

In many ways, learning the Czech language is the best way to explain how Czech people approach anyone who is occupying their country. If you want to be accepted, then you have to earn your place and play by the rules that govern Czech culture. It’s a long and hard process, but once you are in, you are in forever. They have been occupied by different countries, and have had foreign languages forced upon them throughout most of their recent history. When a foreigner makes the effort to learn their language, Czechs are very impressed. Not many people jump over the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle.

Journal of Sustainability

Beware the Green Shirts: The War of Tatsoi

The Voices of Solar: Marlene L. Brown

Language though Occupation

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