Media/Diet (November '24)

The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer + impromptu cake to use up applesauce

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MEDIA/DIET NOVEMBER 2024

Thanks for reading my newsletter! This is a monthly edition of Ultracold where I share informal thoughts on media and food that I have consumed recently. A slightly more polished essay will run on the 25th, centering on what I have been calling “cultural production in the age of tiredness” as a shorthand to my very tired self.

MEDIA

Robin Wall Kimmerer, writer, academic, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, hasn’t published a book since 2013 when her gorgeous collection of essays on nature and Indigenous knowledge, Braiding Sweetgrass, established her as an inspiring and necessary voice on how we think about the land that we inhabit and all the creatures that we share it with. So, I was delighted when a promotional email about The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance, which is her new book that will be published on November 19th, landed in my inbox. As a physics reporter who occasionally also covers tech, I am usually sent books about much more technical and much less heartfelt topics, and I knew that reading Wall Kimmerer again stood a good chance of being very different.

The Serviceberry is a short book, basically a single essay interspersed with illustrations, and a quick read. I mostly read it on the train, and Wall Kimmerer’s warm voice, full of conviction but never didactic, was a bit of a balm to the noisiness and fervor of the New York City subway. The writing here is skillful and approachable, and the parallels between the way the titular fruiting tree gives back gifts to the ecosystem, the convenience of “service” being front and center in its name, and what Wall Kimmerer is advocating people should do in relation to their environment are clear and precisely stated. 

If you went into this book cold, with no prior knowledge of Indigenous culture or botany or even “circular economy,” which is a phrase that I am increasingly seeing appear in pages of scientific journals, you could easily follow its arguments. Wall Kimmerer makes the choice of bringing in some traditional, and also less traditional, economists from the academic world too, which is helpful for clearly establishing the ways in which the “gift economy” that she is advocating for differs from what we commonly think of as “economics.” This is a teachable book, one you could certainly assign in a class.

Thematically, this book expands on some of the ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, like The Gift of Strawberries essay, zeroing in on how thinking of exchanging objects as acts of gift giving rather than profit-driven selling and buying could transform what we call the economy. The narrative frame of The Serviceberry is Wall Kimmerer picking said berries from a tree that her farmer neighbors planted and she opens with a powerful statement that signals where the rest of the argument will go:

“This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are.”

This is the first part of what she is advocating for: that there is enough of everything for everyone, that food, air, water, shelter and other necessities¹ do not have to be earned because nature can, and already gifts them to us, that an economy of scarcity is by default an artificial and unnatural one. The second part comes a few pages later:

“Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude - of which you will be reminded.”

If you receive a gift, it is not only material value that you are receiving, but also the seed of a relationship that stands a chance to be mutualistic and life-giving. A gift is rarely out of step with the seasons or with what is naturally available as no-one would gift more than they have - and no-one would ask for gifts from their kin if they are currently lacking in something. 

This is a powerful notion, which Wall Kimmerer constructs partly on Indigenous teachings, and she is at her best when she engages with terms that may seem fuzzy and makes them more clear and sharp. For instance, when she writes about reciprocity of gift-giving:

“When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be dischards with a reciprocal “payment.” I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem.”

She also writes about the Earth with such care and a stern conviction that we are not separate from it, not “consumers” but “ecosystem citizens,” that it is hard to not be moved by her rhetoric. As a resident of a big city where a supermarket of any size and sort is available to me almost at all time, with holidays looming on the horizon and the temptation to have bags of 25 pounds of flour shipped to me from Costco a real temptation, I was particularly struck by paragraphs like this:

“If we think of the Earth as a big warehouse of commodities, as mere objects, we claim a kind of privilege to exploit what we believe we own. In the property mindset, how we consume doesn’t really matter because it’s just stuff and the stuff all belongs to us. There is no moral constraint on consumption. And so, we find ourselves in a time of ecological and spiritual depletion.”

The coupling of “spiritual” and “ecological” is poignant here and a respite from so many arguments on how a particular technology or a genetically engineered crop or a correct investment of some obscene amount of money into some convoluted economical plan is all that stands between us and “solving” the climate crisis. What so many of those ideas lack in my view is a shred of humanism and at least some acknowledgement that people do not only do, but also feel, that they are moved by more than a rational economic calculus. The way people eat and consume is intertwined with how they seek community, how they love, how they feel pleasure, and how they wish to be cherished. Wall Kimmerer gets this and the “gift economy” feels like a compelling frame for giving that notion an actionable shape.

Yet, I wouldn’t say that The Serviceberry is a radical text nor would I expect it to radicalize someone who was not already at least somewhat onboard with ideas of abundance, seasonality, reciprocity and investing in local communities. Wall Kimmerer is certainly trying to speak to a broad audience, but I found myself somewhat disappointed in what she seems to assume about the imagination that that audience may have the capacity for, or maybe who she thinks her readers are to begin with. 

For instance, she discusses the “cuddly capitalism” of the Nordic countries where more tax dollars go towards common goods and writes that “such models help us to imagine how we might encourage elements of gift economics within the matrix of capitalism, which is not going away anytime soon.” She returns to the idea of gift economies blossoming locally, in the cracks of capitalism, but seems reluctant to take the next step and consider how blossoms in existing cracks may connect and overgrow their foundations. Why couldn’t capitalism go away? And what are we not seeing when we idealize capitalism that exists in other countries, which still, for example, exploits migrant workers?

When discussing examples of existing gift economies, she spends more time on her neighbors giving out produce for free when their farms produce more than they can sell, or letting people harvest their berries for free and keep them in the hope that they will come back later and do it again for a price², than on mutual aid networks and “free stores” on college campuses which are mentioned as something that young people are doing, almost as an afterthought. 

This asymmetry, as well as the lack of voices of those young people when economists and farmers get quotes, made me think that The Serviceberry is aimed at landowners and other people of means, dare I say Boomers, rather than people like me who had never really known an abundant life, but are more open to building it from scratch rather than within a stifling matrix of existing rules. In the wake of the most recent election, I cannot help but feel that this is indicative of why change is so hard to come by in our time - progressive thinkers worry so much about alienating hypothetical centrists that they leave behind droves of those who do hunger for more radical ideas. In fact, Wall Kimmerer writes that the young people she has spoken to know that their efforts barely make a small dent within the world of capitalism, and I was sort of baffled as to why there was no call or prescription on how to make that dent larger.

When Wall Kimmerer writes: “I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use,” and “Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing,” I was right there with her. The world in which local food is traded, neighbors always help each other, there are plenty of community spaces, and no-one is hoarding anything is the one I also want to live in. I am grateful that Wall Kimmerer invited me to dream about it - I just wish that invitation had been to dream even bigger.

P. S. I previously wrote about Braiding Sweetgrass here:

DIET

Impromptu snack cake brushed with a citrus simple syrup

The weekend before the election, we had a fairly quiet Sunday which meant that my partner watched sports and I wrote, ran, cooked and studied the contents of our fridge and pantry. Before I start any sort of meal planning or anything resembling meal prep I always do an audit of everything we have first, and doing so this time alerted me to the presence of a few small containers of applesauce I had bought for a cake but didn’t fully use up the week prior. Though I do occasionally like applesauce as a snack, probably as a consequence of the time I spent teaching high school at the height of the pandemic when teachers sometimes got free school cafeteria lunches as a supposed perk of the job, because it was the weekend and because I don’t bake without a purpose as often as I used to, and because I was anxious, I decided to make a snack cake. 

In my experience, beginner vegan bakers are often told that applesauce is a great replacement for eggs, but I have long felt that this is bad advice - or at least advice that betrays a shallow understanding of the chemistry of baking³. Eggs’ purpose in a cake is to add lift, to bind, and to add flavor, and applesauce really only does a little of the second and some of the third. 

The vanilla and chocolate cakes I make for pop-ups and bake sales use no egg replacer at all because flour is by itself sticky enough and lift can be achieved by simply using the right amount of leavening agents⁴. For a cake where eggs are beaten and serve as a sort matrix for trapping air bubbles, which makes the cake spongy, I’d always choose to use aquafaba which is also full of proteins that can be stretched into structure through whipping. In enriched doughs, I often replace eggs with just a little extra fat, a stand-in for the egg yolk, and avoid anything like a fruit puree that will certainly affect the flavor of whatever brioche or challah or, in my case, orehnjaca you may be making. The way I think about applesauce then, is not really as a replacement for eggs as much as just another flavoring, and that’s the way I have treated it in this cake.

In fact, I built the whole cake around the idea that I wanted something tender and moist with a bit of a fruity or floral note, maybe even a touch of sourness. I settled on an olive oil cake recipe, because I think olive oil often does give a great floral note, especially if you use olive oil that is good enough to be poured over roasted vegetables too, and included not just applesauce but also apple cider vinegar and some vegan yogurt⁵ among my wet ingredients. My thinking was that the acidity of all three would come through in flavor and also help to make the crumb of the cake more tender. 

The rest of the ingredients were simple: all purpose flour, white sugar, a bit of salt, a bit of turmeric for color, the tiniest bit of vanilla, almond milk, and baking powder. Using a combination of baking powder and baking soda would have probably given me a taller cake, but I did not want it to rise too much in the oven and this proved to be a good instinct as it cracked a little during baking as is. For fun, I baked this cake in a star-shaped pan, let it cool on a wire rack for about ten minutes before inverting it, then brushed it very generously with a citrusy simple syrup. This syrup was another discovery from my fridge audit and another consequence of baking I had done previously. For one of my bake sales this month, I had made a citrus upside down cake, which left me with a bunch of orange, lemon and grapefruit scraps. I threw them in a big jar, covered them with sugar, then watched the two come together in a sticky syrup over the course of the day. 

For a not at all elevated fridge cleaning operation, this cake was nice to eat. In the future, I would be a touch more careful about getting even baking in an oddly shaped pan as the cake was cooked a little more in the “legs” of the star than its middle, but overall this impromptu recipe gave me exactly what I wanted - a slightly floral, slightly fruity, slightly zingy, sticky and sugary, melt-in-your-mouth treat to make a Sunday before an election better. 

Below, I am including the ingredient list and a sketch of how to turn them into a cake, but please do note that I have only made it once, as impulsively as I am describing here, and really cannot guarantee that yours will come out exactly the same. 

¾ cups sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

1 ⅓ cups all purpose flour

¾ teaspoons baking powder

A pinch of turmeric

¼ cup applesauce

⅔ cups + 2 tablespoons olive oil

½ cup vegan yogurt

¼ cup milk

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

A splash of vanilla, to your liking

Preheat the oven to 350 F and prepare your pan. I like to line the bottom with parchment paper and use baking spray or vegan butter on the sides.

In one bowl mix sugar, salt, flour, baking powder and turmeric. In another, thoroughly whisk all the other ingredients.

Add the dry ingredients into the wet and mix until no dry streaks remain (but try to be conscious of overmixing which would make the cake more gummy).

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. (I am a deeply anxious baker and always check about 5 minutes earlier.)

Let cool on a wire rack for about 10 minutes in the pan so you can reap the benefits of residual heat, then invert or otherwise free the cake from the pan. You can brush it with syrup while it’s still warm, if you have some lying around like me, dust it with powdered sugar once it is cool, or serve it with some sort of whipped cream or even a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Yesterday’s fridge and pantry audit and a brainstorm for meals I may cook this week.

1. Wall Kimmerer also quotes another scholar to argue that “thriving depends on more than meeting basic physical needs, and includes goods like a sense of community, mutual support, and equality.”

2. Next to “the currency of relationship can manifest itself as money down the road,” I just wrote “ew.”

3. I wrote about this some for New Scientist here, but it was brief and you may run into a paywall, so please just message me if you have thoughts.

4. This is really a “wacky cake” approach that dates back to the Great Depression.

5. I prefer really fatty and creamy vegan yogurts over those that look gelatinous, especially if I am using them for baking. Cocojune is my favorite.