Measurement Driven Engine

On food, bodies and being good

Thanks for reading my newsletter! The breakdown: first a personal essay, some of my recent writing, then some thoughts on the media that I am consuming and finally some vegan food and recipe recommendations. All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. 

If you are here because you like my writing about science or my Instagrams about cooking, you may not be interested in every essay in this space, but please do stick around until I loop back to whatever it is that we have in common.

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MEASUREMENT DRIVEN ENGINE*

It’s Saturday morning, but it is not snowing. Despite all those beware-of-the-weather articles and graphics spreading through my social media feeds, we are not in a snowstorm just yet. A snowstorm would be a big deal because climate change has recently rendered New York subtropical. But since it hasn’t reached us at the moment, we lace up our boots, throw on medium-thick jackets and go pick up our vegetables. 

I miss the farmer’s market from our old neighborhood, but I also love our new ritual of coming to the unassuming communal space where vegetables await in giant boxes. Once my name has been crossed off the list, I can dig in and see what sort of seasonal gems we are receiving this week. As I will say to someone I have just met later that evening, I am a “food person” so this is like Christmas to me. 

“Look at these purple potatoes,” I tell my husband with wide eyes. Then: “Green radish!” Then again: “Look how gorgeous this kale is!” 

He’s told me before that I am reacting to potatoes like a kid may have reacted to baseball cards in a different era. 

We stuff everything into reusable bags and walk to the bagel store, a particularly large leek frond grazing the side of his face as we walk by street vendors that sell ceviche in plastic deli containers and meats right off of smokey grills that are almost certainly illegal. Something about it feels like a singularly potent mix of things that are good about New York, a kind of coexistence of all of us on the same street, likely with myriad disagreements, but all with the makings of a good meal in tow.

I have strong opinions about bagels, but they are also petty opinions about bagels, so they are best spoken out loud and laughed about without being preserved in ink. But the gist is this: a bagel should make you happy with its over-the-top-ness, with the dough that is both fluffy and chewy, the shiny tops that are not too crunchy. It should make you happy with a generous amount of cream cheese separating its two halves, not just a little to wet the bread, but a real tangible layer, like something you’d have to burrow through yet better because it is also fatty and tangy and feels like richness on your tongue and like a memory of richness a second later, on the roof of your mouth. If I am eating a proper New York bagel, I want it to leave me a little drowsy, the same way you may emerge from a really good concert or a movie in a slight haze, the same way touching someone’s skin with your skin can make the world a little blurry for the better. 

***

It’s still Saturday and I have dinner plans and so does the snowstorm. Now, I need my warm pants, my warmer coat, and an umbrella. I speed walk to the M train, then pick up the pace even more when I’m in Chinatown, leaving the Canal Street station with my umbrella leading the way. The snowstorm is taking revenge on me for not having believed in it earlier, so I am now running late. One of my dinner mates was running early so she is eating soup already, which means that it is crucial that I walk fast and not get distracted by increasingly snowy market store fronts and all the folks that are still diligently selling fruit on the street. Spiky white and pink dragon fruits, unruly pyramids of oranges, pomelos as big as your head, wrinkly mangoes the color of golden hour.

My first trip to New York, more than a decade ago, is full of memory gap, but the image of buying mangoes on the street in Chinatown has stuck with me through the years. I don’t remember their taste, but I remember feeling so foreign and small in this crowded city full of flavors and sights I had never experienced before, watching a lanky, effortlessly cool New Yorker friend pick out oblong orange fruits that felt exotic in their newness and luxurious in their exoticism. 

(At a New Year’s Eve party at a dear friend’s home a few days earlier, I met someone who told me that mangoes are what they missed the most from the place they came from, and I immediately thought of my grandfather’s tomatoes, fully understanding that the two are nothing and everything alike.)

My umbrella bumps against a fruit-seller's awning and I am suddenly apologizing. I can barely see anything because the storm is picking up and I am keeping my head low to stop the flurries from hitting my face which is painted bronze, burnt red, and chocolate brown. It is too warm for snow to stick and within a few hours the storm will pass and the ground will be left with the task of soaking in the slush. “It’s really soupy down here,” someone in our dinner party will say as we head out to grab a drink.

For dinner we are sharing a steamer basket of dumplings, a large plate of pan fried noodles soaked in a savory brown sauce, fried sesame mochi filled with lotus paste and fluffy buns stuffed with matcha-flavored filling that I cannot identify. We eat not ravenously but with a little extra pep.

“This dumpling looks like it will feel good in my mouth.”

“There is no way to eat noodles with dignity so might as well go for it.”

A steamed bun as light as a cloud, as puffy as if it were a piece of soft sculpture made from cotton, opens up, pushing at the edge of the steamer basket, almost like a flower that just caught the first rays of the morning. Slender fingers soon tear it apart to reveal an orange and brown filling that smells of both salt and sugar. Another pair of hands pulls at a perfectly golden sphere studded with seeds. It buckles, dimples, then breaks into long sticky white strands stretching over a golden paste the color of honey and caramels. The last little bit of noodles slinks over my plate in a pool of gravy, two slices of chewy mushrooms laying at its top, a small piece of broccoli scattered to their side, all crunchy but not flavorless, simple but never boring. 

I have eaten here before and it had made me happy and it is making me happy again right now. No animal had to die for this meal, or relinquish its young, or give up control of its reproductive system and that makes me happy too.

“I don’t believe that individual responsibility and decision making can ever bring about the revolution,” says someone at our table while scarfing down another vegan dumpling. 

“I don’t believe people will ever rally for change unless they feel for it so deeply that they’re willing to practice it in the most personal of ways,” I say. 

We disagree, we argue, we disagree some more. More buns come to the table. We agree on those - their texture is perfect.

***

While I am at boxing class, my husband fries some vegan sausages. When I come home, he wants me to guess the secret ingredient in the sauce we are spooning over the proprietary, tubular blend of proteins and additives. The kitchen is organized to fit my intuition, because I am a little kitchen tyrant king like that, so it is a real power play to have me so stumped over not being able to find an ingredient, even if I am looking for it with my taste buds instead of by opening cabinets.

Eventually, I get it, but it’s the game of getting there that feels good. 

***

On a Sunday morning, I am contemplating a few unfortunately placed bubbles on the otherwise perfectly round tops among a dozen jam-filled buns. Quite frankly, the yeasts have conspired against me to make my dessert offering look like an uneven array of tits. When I share a photo on social media, a friend messages me a single word, “boobs.” It’s funny because it is obscene and it is also not obscene at all because both bodies and food are good. 

I send the picture to someone I love. (I am always sending pictures of food to someone I love.) The reply is appropriate: a close up of a bun followed by “This is a breast. She needs a bra. They look delicious!”

The buns are a treat for a group of science journalists that are coming over to talk about our craft, complain about our industry and, more and more, discuss the means we have to change the shape of it. Everyone tries at least one bun and those who go for seconds are confronted with my somewhat chaotic approach to filling different buns with different jams. At the end, only two buns are left. I package one for a colleague’s girlfriend who also happens to be vegan while the other disappears into me as I shuttle half-filled plates of other snacks from the living room to the kitchen.

Both of my grandmothers, my two nonnas have made these buns throughout my childhood. We’ve used different words for them, sometimes calling them “buhtlići” after the Austrian buchteln, sometimes “saće” which means honeycomb, the shape they sort of make if you cram enough of them into a round cake pan. They call for a simple yeasted dough, somewhere in-between the fluffy, spongy American cinnamon roll and the more crunchy and textured Danish cardamom bun. I have never actually asked either of my nonnas for the recipe and have worked off of what I could glean on the Internet, and what felt right when compared to my memories. Inevitably, my version of the buns is distinctly mine, but I do not mourn that as there is something sweet about letting that childhood memory stand uncontested, committed to legend like deep brown bready hilltops covered in a dusting of powdered sugar finer than any snow.

My recipe lives as a note in my phone and an old “Veganuary” post in various places where I have chosen to erect small digital mementos for my baking online. I can recall who I was when I wrote it because it contains no sugar and just a quarter cup of maple syrup instead. Though the substitution and the quantity make me scoff almost every time I go about making these buns, I can’t seem to bring myself to change it. 

Baking is chemistry so how you substitute ingredients matters. The buns call for oil instead of butter because that keeps them more tender and less dry for longer on account of oil containing fewer water molecules. Using maple syrup impacts the buns’ flavor and it mixes with liquid ingredients quite differently than sugar crystals, but I was not thinking about that when I decided to use it. I was thinking about being healthy, which is to say that I was thinking about avoiding refined sugar, which is to say that I was thinking about being skinny.

I don’t want to say that there is something chemically, or nutritionally great about sugar, nor do I want to argue that all advocacy in favor of health is exactly equal to advocating for thinness. But it is true that in the American context, ideas about health have historically always been intertwined with white bodies, with thin bodies, with physically able bodies, with bodies that fit within models of purity or, when workers or soldiers were necessary, a kind of nationalism-infused strength. Today, what it means to be healthy depends on health insurance policy and marketing executives as much as it does on medical professionals and scientific research. 

We demonize foods like white sugar to elevate people that have the means to opt out of it, to sell substitutes to whoever can pay for them, and to deny affordable healthcare to people who did not manage, or want, to opt out because now it is plausible to claim that it was all their own fault. If you do well with eliminating refined sugar, you can turn to eliminating seed oils, and if you make it past that too, influencers and marketing specialists will certainly find something else for you to work on. 

I felt good when I followed a stricter definition of healthy food than I do now because I felt like I had so much more control, and so much more worth, than both past versions of me and my peers who did not strictly buy multigrain pasta. When I lost my menstrual cycle because I was under-eating and overexercising, my doctor admitted that I should probably put on a few pounds - but only if I could be comfortable with being bigger. I had learned, from how my family members spoke about fat people when I was young to how American politicians feared out loud that overweight people would use up all the already scarce healthcare resources, that it would be a failure to feel comfortable with being bigger. So, I was not comfortable with being bigger. 

(I am ten pounds heavier now, and I have still never in my life actually been big. I may have never actually been comfortable either.) 

A healthy body does not really exist under capitalism as much as a body that is able to be put to work does. There is an inherent contradiction in how often we work to the point of burnout and physical fatigue or are simply expected to show up to work when ill, and how much we are also constantly reminded of how we are not putting enough personal responsibility in maintaining the ever shifting goal posts of being truly “healthy”. 

You may think you’re healthy but are you sure your gut doesn’t need a reset? That you shouldn’t be strength training? That your skin does not need collagen? That you should not be hacking your metabolism, optimizing your sleep, gamifying your steps, counting your macros, cycling your seeds? That you shouldn’t be in therapy? I think you get it.

I recoil when people call me healthy when they learn that I go to the gym or when they see me eating vegetables. I recoil at the voice in my head still sometimes shrieking about white sugar when I rummage through the freezer looking for ice cream after dinner. I still weigh myself every morning and diligently log my mass in my phone, the same phone that keeps pictures of the dozens of cakes I have made this winter.  The jam-filled bun falls somewhere in the middle of all of this, some fleeting point of equilibrium in between forces of guilt, shame, anger, and craving pulling in all different directions. It’s a stand-in for the little me who worried so much less and it’s a stand-in for the older me who worried so much more. It reflects the skills of my nonnas, and the skills that I developed later. 

Eventually, I will tweak the recipe, and then it will stand in for even more history - and even more joy.  

*** 

At a friend’s house I eat the soup that their people could only make into their own indulgence after overthrowing a regime of slavers and colonizers. Before my friend explains the meaning of the soup for their family and their culture, as they are stirring it on the stove, the soup rebels, bubbles over and lands on my forearm and wrist. Without thinking, I bring my hand to my mouth and taste its richness off of my burning skin. 

“It’s really good,” I say to my friend who is trying to offer me a towel.

***

Halfway through my Monday, In a short lull in-between frenziedly writing emails and trying to breathe through yet another edit of a time-sensitive story, a friend’s video briefly soaks up all of my attention. It’s a familiar meme format, “tell me you’re Eastern European without telling me you’re Eastern European” my friend says with a big smile then rushes through every item from the region in their kitchen. In one shot, a big jar of Podravka brand ajvar makes an appearance. 

I did not grow up eating Podravka brand ajvar because my nonna made her own, but all Croatian households are beholden to at least one Podravka product. For some it may be creamy plum butter that shares color with chocolate more than the purplish red plum jams made stateside, for some tiny and crisp pickled cucumbers, for some the coarsely ground, fiery orange ajvar. For most, it is Vegeta, an all-purpose seasoning in a blue container adorned by a smiling, chubby-faced, mustachioed chef. 

Podravka developed Vegeta in 1958 while Croatia was part of communist Yugoslavia, but the product made it through the Croatian War of Independence, the incredibly glitchy switch to a market economy and the country’s many subsequent economic crises. In 2021, Nielsen named Vegeta the best-selling universal food seasoning in Europe and it was sold in 40 countries across the world. I have a small package of it in my kitchen in Ridgewood, Queens, more than 4,200 miles away from the kitchen where I watched my dad rub it into thick slices of pork before every family barbecue of my childhood.

It’s hard to describe what Vegeta tastes like other than salty and vaguely vegetal, a little bit like you would imagine a vegetable stock cube tasting purely based on how it smells. Here is the ingredient list: salt, dehydrated carrot, parsnip, onion, potato, celery, and parsley leaves, monosodium glutamate, sugar, cornstarch, black pepper, nutmeg, disodium inosinate, riboflavin. If you look into a container of the seasoning carefully enough you can sometimes see little flakes of what could be orange carrots or green parsley. Though various cooks in my family often denounced it as “just salt” we’d still throw it into soups and marinades rather generously. I’m not beyond that either - when we moved to Queens and I realized I would have a more steady access to it thanks to the abundance of Eastern European immigrants in our new neighborhood, I bought a package that now mockingly sits next to a big jar of fancy bullion in my pantry.

My friend, the one from the video, is Russian, but similarly grew up with Podravka. In fact, we became friends because I was trying to recreate my nonna’s ajvar in my small American kitchen and posting about it breathlessly on social media (I am always posting breathlessly from my American kitchen). 

“I’m perpetually shocked by how many products we share. When you learn history in Croatian schools they go out of their way so much to distance our communist past from the USSR that you emerge thinking we have nothing in common but look at us now,” I message them in response to that jar of ajvar appearing on my screen. I’m tearing up a little at my desk even though what I am feeling is definitely not homesickness.

Both me and my friend are queer, nonbinary people that work in the media and can get away with not hiding very much about who we are. Certainly, we are not hiding everything that we would have to hide about ourselves had we stayed in our respective home countries. My life in New York has been made immensely better by the generosity and love of friends like this, friends who could show me that life is more joyful when you accept who you are and stop worrying about whom that might irk or disappoint. I am immensely grateful for having been able to glimpse a better future for myself in people like this, and then to get a big chunk of the way there with the privilege of their support. 

It is hard for me to imagine any of that ever even being an option in my hometown, maybe even the whole country. Russia just passed its most draconian legislation that targets any LGBTQ+ space or movement as being extremist. It’s a law written vaguely enough to be an extremely effective cudgel against any challenge to traditionalism and conservatism, and to have a strong chilling effect. I wonder whether my friend will ever be able to go home, or for how long a place like that can continue to feel like home. 

Because I am at work I cannot afford to revisit the long-standing issue of where my home truly is either. I know that it is effectively here, in New York, with the people I love and within relationships that we have built together. But why am I then still tearing up at the sight of Podravka ajvar? 

A conversation I had with my mom last summer flashes through my mind, another kitchen scene where I am alternately running out of Croatian words for my gender and out of patience for the tomato galette that is taking too long in the oven. I can sense that she is starting to get it, but our language, the language I had used to think about myself for more than half of my life, just will not accommodate that nascent understanding. The steady diet of plum butter and ajvar and Vegeta helped me grow into this queer body and now those ingredients are part of me, but a way to describe what they added up to in the culture that grew me is completely missing.

“Dude if I think [about this] too hard my brain breaks,” my friend texts when I run this by them.

“Tell me you’re an immigrant without telling me you’re an immigrant really,” I type. They return a laughing emoji. 

***

A friend splurges on a box of tropical fruits from a different coast. They get high and eat a fresh passionfruit. They say it tastes like something all flavors that manufacturers call fruit are based off of. “It tastes like FRUIT,” they say. Later, without any commentary, a video of glossy, sticky, alien passion fruit seeds lands in the same text thread. 

I am stunned.

***

It’s not quite 7 in the morning on a Thursday, but I am fully dressed, I have water boiling on the stove and I am putting a whole lot of my elbow and my shoulder into cutting a loaf of bread in half. I baked the bread the night before, a round sourdough boule adorned with a pattern meant to be an olive branch that exploded into a central canyon and a few valleys when met by the harsh heat of the oven. No, not a canyon, more like a bready tectonic plate that missed its meeting with another, lifted up a bit incredulously and created space beneath itself in the process.

The crust crackles under my hand as I cut, but the loaf itself has some give, it can be squished because the stretchy strands of gluten inside of are holding big pockets of air hostage. When the loaf finally splits into halves in my hand, I can see where the fermentation process stretched and bent the stringy, holey net that gives it all of its structure. The kitchen now smells a little sour, but the taste of the bread is mild, more of a lack of that sweetness you often inexplicably find in store-bought bread than a full head on collision with the lifecycle of wild yeasts which started with me feeding them water and flour in a transparent deli container and ended with a brutal torching of what they had grown into.

To make a loaf like this, you have to plan about two days in advance. If you don’t leave yourself enough time to feed the yeast culture, the starter, to rest and fold the bread dough where that culture does all its best work for four or five hours at a time, to let it all ferment overnight and to finally bake it in two steps, at just the right heat, you end up with a gummy pancake rather than a puffy ball full of promises of toast. When I was in graduate school and lived alone, only constrained by research work that was simply everpresent and could live alongside a bread proofing basket or two, I thought making sourdough bread was an exercise in patience. I would fold dough in-between completing a few lines of a calculation and bemoan the fact that both my understanding of the physical structure of the world, and the structure of the bread were developing so, so slowly. Now, constrained by an office job, a commute, and a schedule that has to take other people’s needs and wants into account, patience does not seem to be all there is to it. 

To make bread now is to go on a quest for time, to burrow through my schedule and negotiate with both tasks and moments where I’d usually let a minute or two or ten slip away in the service of a meaningless scroll. I am trying to make the linear, straight passage of time more loopy and kinky so that it accommodates the version of time seen by the yeasts. 

I got this starter culture from a bakery owned by a queer man who impulsively quit a career in finance to make bread and French pastries full time. I got the starter impulsively because I was in the bakery to get a vegan pain au chocolat and the transparent container of beige gloop caught my eye. I am trying to be more impulsive this year, as a testament to how safe and good my life has gotten. But you cannot impulsively spend five-plus-twelve-plus-one hours on making, proofing and baking bread when you have a job and a nesting partner.

The longer I have the yeast and the more I feed it, the more volatile it gets. The bread gets more volatile too, tender out of the fridge but fast growing in the oven. The starter and I are both aging in accordance with linear time, but the yeasts are winning at impulsivity and passion.

I make a loaf of bread for a friend and pass it to them on the train, in a plastic bag like some sort of contraband. We are about to spend several hours together, but I want to give them my time in this other form too. They’re going to cut the bread and store it in the freezer so they can have it whenever the need, or desire, strikes. This will stretch out time even more, putting the bread in stasis, but adding weight to my gift. I am grateful to the yeasts for that.

***

It’s Sunday morning and our fridge is mostly barren, but we have slept in, and we lingered in bed, stuck on each other, after we woke up, and I am now absolutely intent on making breakfast. 

The microwave helps me cheat and make breakfast potatoes in record time. The bowl of slaw leftover from a week’s worth of office-appropriate bento boxes assists with something crunchy and sour. An overripe avocado that a friend brought over just because will be something creamy for us to hastily spread over savory pancakes, and a solid breakfast absolutely requires that something rich be spread over something hearty.

The jar of ajvar provides the ultimate assist, making the meal feel like it is singularly ours, a culture we have accidentally made up through learning how to spend a decade together.

***

It’s Wednesday night and I have a two hour break between finishing work and meeting a friend for yoga, and I should be working on an application for a fellowship, but I am making a cake instead. I am making a cake because I need a treat, but cannot decide whether the treat will be working with my hands or having the finished product sit on my tongue. 

I look up some recipes and improvise a quantity that the recipe writer described vaguely. (I trust myself here.) I chose a pie dish instead of a springform pan because the cake is just for me so it does not have to be pretty. (I trust myself here too.) While it is baking, I make frosting, completely by eye like I always do, and then I make a glaze in the same way, without measurements, just determination. One comes out perfectly, the other is just a little off. (I forgive myself for having been overly trusting of my own judgment.) Right before my partner and I have to run out the door, I set the steaming cake on the windowsill. (The cold air of the suddenly fierce New York winter is the most trustworthy.)

When I assemble it and serve it after dinner later, the middle is still a little lukewarm and the flavors have not fully settled, but I have run out of patience. I’ve satisfied my hands, I’ve tired out my muscles and tendons, and now it’s time to eat. It takes two days for my partner to declare that this cake is actually very good - she needs more time than I can impulsively give her.

The cake batter, spared from the pain packed into eggs and milk, is flavored with dates and studded with chewy rounds of the sweet fruit. My mom loved dates when I was young, but I could not stand them. I was overwhelmed by how they left my hands moist and sticky and how they melted into something like chewy burnt sugar in my mouth. It felt almost obscene to eat them, they were too raw of an indulgence, a too-much-ness that nature just nakedly flaunted on trees. 

A chocolate bar, in all its artificiality and remove from ingredients that had to be ground, burnt and emulsified into it, always felt more manageable. Chocolates came wrapped in a protective layer of foil and plastic that kept the temptation of sugary pleasure out of sight and offered a convenient way to protect your hands from any messiness that may ensue once you give in. As an obnoxiously self-important kid, a kind of prude scared of their own body, I prided myself on not being interested in messes.

But when I decided that I had to be healthy to be good years later, and that I should measure that health and goodness by tallying up foods that I have suddenly rejected, social media influencers and bloggers easily convinced me that dates are “nature’s candy” and that stuffing them with peanut butter and dark chocolate will make me never crave a Snickers bar again. I aspired to be like the skinny, feminine, white women on social media who indulged in this explosion of fat and sugar and flavor and still made it look pure and virtuous. I am just like you, they’d claim, performing a kind of vulnerability that you can monetize, then use a brand of chocolate that would not fit my graduate school budget for a whole six years. 

The cake then, the date cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate glaze, is a way for me to put my hands to work, and to reach across time to the version of me who wanted to be just like those women. You’re good enough, crumbles the deep brown cake beneath my teeth. You were always good enough, the peanut butter coats the tines of my fork. It’s safe to feel good now, the imperfect glaze melts on my tongue.

It takes me and my husband four days to finish the cake and with every passing day it only gets better. Eating it feels like keeping up a practice, and a good one at that.

Best,

Karmela

*In classical physics, an engine typically converts heat into useful mechanical energy, like the combustion engine of a car that uses up fuel to make small explosions that then move rods, cranks and pistons. In the quantum realm, however, sometimes a measurement can do the same thing as an explosion - instead of feeding the engine fuel, you can influence its behavior by exposing it to intense acts of observation. Last year I reported on one such engine made from particles of light, but there are other competing designs, many of which rely on building blocks of quantum computers and would be used in conjunction with such information processing devices. It’s an excitingly odd idea of fueling information processing by simply engaging in enough measurement, questioning and observing.

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ABOUT ME LATELY

WRITING 

I was briefly worried that my vacation would end and I would suddenly find myself in the New Scientist newsroom with an empty to-do list while researchers around the world take more than a few days to usher in 2024, but this distinctly did not happen. This January I got to discuss two new types of computers, one based on tiny fluctuations in electric currents and one that calculates by building structures from special DNA molecules, the first shopping transaction on a model of the would-be unhackable quantum internet, membranes made from fire ants and a chemical structure so complicated that it has “nightmare” in the name, among many others. I also wrote my first-ever book review, reflecting on Molecular Storms: The physics of stars, cells and the origin of life by Liam Graham, which was both fun and challenging. If these first few weeks of the year are any indication, the remainder of 2024 will in no way be short on science news and I will certainly keep immersed in them.

READING 

I picked up a copy of Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires while wasting time in an indie bookstore with a friend on a rainy day and have not been able to put it down since. My enthusiasm for Johnson’s mashup of literary analysis, feminist theory, cookery and memoir certainly influenced this month’s essay which certainly underlines how new and inspiring the things she is doing in this book is. She invokes philosophers, writers, poets and psychoanalysts, even Homer and the Odyssey, but Small Fires feels intensely personal and self-assured in its exploration and questioning. I’d definitely recommend this work to anyone who loves to think about, or even daydream, about food and making food in equal parts. (I later found out that Alicia Kennedy is facilitating a book club for this work over on her Substack which is also quite exciting given how sharp a voice in the food space Kennedy is herself.)

LISTENING

Recently I have mostly been writing to music of the sludgy, drony variety and my favorites have been Floor’s self-titled LP and Here Come the Waterworks by Big Business. The former is more musically innovative while still being a touch grating, the latter is more likely to make you want to bang your head at your desk, and both are simply very heavy.

Archierophant’s Kingdom & Birds Of Joy and Sorrow has also made it into my rotation, offering an infusion of black metal that feels more cinematic and romantic than raw and jagged like black metal definitionally tends to be. Maybe it’s because I came of age at a time when the word “melodic” was added in front of every more aggressive genre designation, but this is a combination that works for me even when it is somewhat cliche and corny.

I have never been much of a B-52’s fan even though I like to think that I understand what can be good about camp, but I recently took the time to listen to their 1980s record Wild Planet in its entirety and found that I love it. Sure, it’s over the top and it is goofy (just listen to the lyrics to Quiche Lorraine), but this album also has range in terms of mood and intensity and its rock’n’roll bones really show under the fatty layers of garishly coloured fun. 

WATCHING 

It’s awards season so I should be watching movies, but the only thing that has held my attention lately has been Max’s animated series Scavengers Reign. It focuses on a handful of survivors from a spaceship that crashed onto a planet that is not exactly hostile to humans, and certainly teems with life, but still hides many dangers. Portioned into a little over a dozen tight episodes that go by rather quickly, Scavengers Reign offers both great world building in terms of animals and plants, and some classic themes of what survival brings out in people. Here, the ecology and biochemistry of the alien world are as beautiful and as scary as the relationships between people who seem to have lost everything except their resolve to make it through one more day and then another. The ending of the show, or maybe just this season, felt a little too abrupt to me, but that’s probably just a testament to how compelling it was and how much I wanted to keep living with its broken humans and glossy, sticky, deadly aliens.

EATING 

January has been both too busy for me to undertake ambitious cooking projects and too slow to reject indulging in someone else’s food when opportunities arose. So, I’ve been keeping up with my sourdough practice, dipping into quick weeknight meals like this pasta in silken tofu sauce which paired really well with mushrooms in a sweet and salty glaze, or rice porridge with all the accouterments, and enjoying the occasional take out moment or a cozy potluck with friends.