Structure Factors
The Lamb Self-Sacrifices
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STRUCTURE FACTORS*
First, layer the broad leaves of kale or collards on top of each other, flattening them as much as possible, then roll them all up, tightly. Fleshy green rubbing against fleshy green while you get the knife. Cut perpendicular to the hard rib of the leaf so you get ribbons. A chiffonade, but the middle-aged Ethiopian man does not call it that. His cooking class is advertised as vegan, probably so that all of us would by tickets and come watch him. It’s not really about veganism, he explains, we just cook like this sometimes, we always have.
***
It takes about thirty times the amount of resources to produce a pound of lamb than a pound of beans.
On the big TV screen, too close to the red couch covered in blankets, on some grainy local channel, a chef is making lamb burgers. He adds finely chopped mint, microplanes some lemon zest straight into the bowl, sinks his hands into the pinkish mess of meat to pat it and roll it and shape it. His co-hosts coo and uhhh and ahhh. They’d put the burgers on the grill but there’s salmon on it, so they’ll have to use the oven. They call the salmon sustainable.
Under the blankets, I think about that one time my grandparents bought a lamb from a neighbor. My father brought it to the house in a wheelbarrow, like a crying, pooping piece of wood. Him and my grandfather hung it up under an awning of our make-shift wine cellar and pierced its throat. (How did they deal with the blood?) Us kids were not allowed to leave the house until it bled out, stopped crying, and perished.
Was it Easter? It must have been Easter.
Where I am from, we celebrate the season of re-birth by regaling the family dinner table with a product of slow murder. I guess the Earth has been gifted with a similar fate.
***
I step on the scale and don’t look at the dark gray where numbers are about to appear. I close my eyes and take a deep breath in then a deep breath out, meditatively, calmly, steeling myself for the upcoming revelation. They say prophets get stoned not because they are speaking of the future, but because they reflect the present. The scale blinks secrets at me, whispers the present and future truth of ‘you will not like this’.
At home, after midnight, I eat large globs of peanut butter straight out of the jar. It’s like a ritual: peanut butter, then shame, then deep breaths, then the revelation coded as three digits and a decimal space.
When I finish a jar, I wash it and save it. I take it to bulk bin aisle of my local coop and fill it up with dry beans. I am not here to waste resources.
***
We are in the kitchen, doing dishes or making sandwiches, or pushing our dirty fingers into those tiny, flimsy containers of marinated olives your mom likes so much that they are always stacked into towers on the top fridge shelf.
We’re millennials so we can’t say no to food we did not have to buy. We’re millennials so we laugh at self-deprecating jokes. Somehow it turns serious. Now we’re talking about other millennials and how our generation just might carry some collective trauma because the world is literally burning. Will our children be cursed to carry that trauma on, in their genes? Maybe we shouldn’t even have children. If we don’t destroy their genes, the weather will get to their skin and lungs and eyes and bones, you say. You think it out loud in fewer words than are in my mind, but the sounds that reach me are heavy in a familiar way. We’ve had this conversation before.
I wonder if I should tell you that sometimes it feels like on the inside my body is also filled with some devastating fire. That I have also depleted my resources. That I have also subjected myself to slow murder. That just like the Earth, I have been mistreated and mismanaged and disrespected by the mind that inhabits me.
Later, we venture out to dinner and it is not as cold as it should be but we still bundle-up out of some vestigial concern about the winter. We quickly disqualify the Italian place from our list of options – nothing there is vegan.
My mother’s Easter table from a few years ago
***
I wrote this piece last winter with an intention of submitting it to a literary magazine whose mission involves sustainability and the environment. I was thinking about my having become vegan a few years ago, rather than remaining vegetarian, mainly for environmental reasons and about my fairly consistent struggle with body image and what it means to keep healthy and fit. The tension between the macro – being vegan out of concern and compassion for the Earth and animals – and the micro – being critical about my body and how I maintain it – made me uncomfortable. I wanted to sit with that discomfort and try to give it words. Beyond just myself I had been wondering about why wellness and self-care became such buzzwords and such a huge, often misleading or somewhat exploitative, industry exactly in a time when focusing on improving each of us as individuals will certainly not save the environment we all have to share and that controls so much of our health. Combating climate change, making our overall time on this planet more sustainable, kind and viable in the long-term feels like it needs to be an act of community care, like it really has little to do with all of us being taught which mushroom powders to add to our adaptogenic lattes or how many layers of serum and moisturizer will make our skin glow like an Instagram filter. The memory of Easter and my family’s murder of our neighbor’s lambs, year after year, fell out of the writing and I kept it as both being vegan and being skinny or fit or healthy bring about strong connotations of sacrifice in most people. Easter is also a holiday or re-birth and renewal. Our environment could certainly use something like a refresh. I am also, being very much a micro-scale problem compared to the planet, always trying to re-start and ditch so much of the negativity I seem to carry within me.
Since the time I wrote this piece, everything changed on that macro scale. I am spending Easter with my family for the first time in a decade because the coronavirus pandemic has us staying at home together. The magazine I meant to submit to is taking an indeterminately long hiatus. No-one is really talking about climate change anymore because there is a different threat in our environment, and it is so much more imminent and so much more immediate. It would be overly cynical to compare those among us that did not take the pandemic seriously until someone they knew got ill with those that don’t take climate change seriously because it is hard to think about danger when it is not just about to hit you and do so to exactly you. The lack of our collective intuition for long-term thinking has always been a huge hurdle when nudging everyone to change their habits to more environmentally-friendly ones. But we are all scared of the environment now, and we are staying away from nature just enough for Tweets about increased animal sightings and overgrown flowers to emerge among all the two-hundred-and-eighty-character bad news. It is possible that staying inside will make us appreciate the outside more once we are allowed to relish in it again. It is possible that having to stay inside for the sake of our own well-being as well as our concern for others’ safety will make us more compassionate, more community-oriented, more likely to re-frame something that looks like sacrifice as a kindness instead. It is possible that after this is all over, we will stop underestimating big vague threats to the point where they become razors sharp and piercingly deadly.
Among all of that, I still feel like I am waging war against my body and staying at home and being so much more sedentary is not helping. I have written before about how growing up I never felt like I really owned my body or was really supposed to find strength in it. My father talked about how I should wear my hair and when I should shave my legs. My mom wrapped herself in saran wrap before going for power-walks because she didn’t like her thighs. The fact that I was clumsy and sort of bad at sports was turned into a joke amongst family and I never questioned it. In the same way, I never questioned the way everyone around me spoke about women’s bodies while I was young. I’ve also written about re-claiming some sense of strength within my body and learning to be more aware of it, to actually feel its motions and precise mechanical balances, through running and doing yoga. During my time in graduate school I became the kind of person that is comfortable at the gym (maybe even the kind of near-jerk that is comfortable taking their shirt off and sweating profusely in just a sports bra), that’s a regular at a yoga studio, that will sometimes sign up for a long race just for kicks. However, discovering that I can do things with my body inevitably led into pushing the edge of how many things and how strenuously I can do them, and comparing myself to those that seemed better at all or any of them. There’s a competitive streak in me that’s susceptible to this, and there is a part of me that carries just enough guilt and shame to make it all feel really emotionally fraught. For a few years I semi-regularly counted calories, first because I wanted to make sure I was really sustaining myself well on a vegan diet, later because I learned enough about the numbers to know how to “break even” or “run a deficit”. I stopped trying to do this but I can still tell you that fourteen almonds is about a hundred calories and I can eyeball a five-hundred calorie meal and tell you that eating four of those a day but running five miles probably means that you can still lose about a pound each week. I hate that I know this, and I hate that the pandemic is bringing it to the top of my mind again.
Right now, it feels like all of our bodies are liabilities, that the virus can weaponize them and turn them against if not us then the ones we love. The Washington governor Jay Inslee was blunt about this back in March, addressing people that were dismissive of the COVID-19 crisis: “The penalty is you might be killing your grandad.” Killing him with something that your body can carry, something that is inside your body like The Thing or a bodysnatcher. I think about this as I continue to run every evening. I am conflicted on whether running during a pandemic is dangerous. And I am conflicted on why I am running at all. In one way being able to run reminds me that I can be strong, that even though we are all constantly acting as if the disease is just about to get us, I am not some fragile, helpless collection of soft meats. I’ve been doing lots of push-ups, squats and crunches at home too and I feel like I just might be making some progress. When I take time to work on my yoga practice, looking for my drishti in down-dog I see how strong and steady my legs are. When I change to go to bed at night and walk past the many mirrors in our slightly make-shift basement bedroom I see shadows fall across my stomach unevenly, revealing a suggestion of muscle. At the same time, I know I am working out because I am terrified of getting out of shape, of showing any signs of all the late-night and mid-day snack working from home makes seemingly impossible to resist. I keep a close eye on my Fitbit and make sure I hit all of my activity goals. As I rummage through the pantry and check labels for surprise milk and egg ingredients in some long-forgotten non-perishable, my eyes roam towards the numbers at the top of the label and I do nutrition math in my head while I cook. I love cooking, and I love food, and I cherish time to eat with family so much. But then someone makes a joke about how social-distancing will make us all bigger and wider and pudgier, and the anxiety and fear rise up again. I grab handfuls of crunchy salted almonds while my husband is brushing his teeth before bed and feel ashamed. I make meals for my in-laws and worry that they’ve noticed my second serving of pasta disappearing off of one of their delightfully old-school plates. I remember once crying about my future over video chat and my mom’s concerned face asking me, from the other side of the world, about what it was I was actually afraid of. What am I afraid of now when I think about putting on a few pounds or averaging a few miles or active minutes fewer some weeks? I’m not sure. Loss of control? Failure? Rejection? Change? Probably all of those. And right now, more than ever, they all reside inside my body.
When this is all over, my husband and I are moving-in together. After almost six full years of dating, and living, with a distance between us, we will finally get a chance to create a shared physical space to supplement and complement all the more abstract spaces we have inhabited together in the past. The timing is odd and unsettling, but there is still some excitement we can savor in moments when we get distracted from where we are right now and why. My mother-in-law already picked out the pots and pans from her kitchen that she wants us to have. I am looking forward to eventually getting to pick-out the kitchen in which I will cook for us itself. And then we’ll have to try some new restaurants and decide on favorites. I think I know where I’ll go for yoga classes. I haven’t yet figured out where I will run, but I hope that I will have made progress on the why.
Best,
Karmela
* In solid state physics and crystallography, the structure factor is a quantity that can be obtained from experimental interference patterns. It is used to describe how some material scatters radiation. Most solids are ordered crystals. When a wave is sent towards the crystal, it can bounce off of each of the atoms that make up the crystalline pattern. Consider, for instance, an X-ray which can be thought of as a kind of wave. Waves bouncing off of adjacent atoms travel slightly different lengths before they reach some detector. They interfere when they do. Interference means that the minima and maxima of each wave may be misaligned with respect to the other one, so some partial cancellations and some partial additions happen. The resulting sum of the two waves has a different amplitude, or height, than the waves we started with. Many such interreference events, from scattering off of the many atoms in the crystal, make up an interference pattern – a scattering pattern – that can be mathematically analyzed to infer something about the arrangement of atoms that caused it. The structure factor can be calculated from the scattering pattern as a part of this analysis. It quantifies how the intensity of the wave used in the experiment changes through scattering.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: Though most of my research work has been wrapped up even before I defended my Ph. D., I am still dealing with its aftermath in the sense of writing (in reality mostly re-writing) papers with collaborators. In the past week I spent numerous hours first on video-calls and then alone with my computer and a piece of beloved text editing software, trying to figure out how to best present the work I had contributed to in late stages of graduate school. The art of writing something a journal editor and peer reviewers may respond to well is daunting even after you have a few publications under your belt, and trying to write four pages together with three or four people concerning a work that may have taken a year to complete is really something of an adventure. My future in academia is looking pretty unlikely these days, but even if I do somehow end up sticking with it, I’ll probably never actually fully learn how to write an academic paper painlessly (or exceedingly well). On top of all this writing and editing I am still teaching, still doing some mentoring and organizing work, and still applying to jobs here in New York. It seems like both my husband and I have a bit more of a set schedule now, so work feels a bit more like work and a bit less like an act of last-minute frantic scrambling. The attendance of my classes (now fully on Zoom) has been falling pretty rapidly and I dislike trying to grade on my computer, but teaching three days a week and blocking off other days to prepare and grade is something of an anchor to be held on to now that the passage of time is so amorphous. My organizing work is more enjoyable, and I cherish seeing faces of people I am collaborating with and having little chit-chatty check-ins with them before we dive into agendas for planning virtual conferences, membership meetings and workshops. This is the kind of work that always feels like it is teaching me something, even if it is just how to talk to people whose lives are very different. The job search continues to be unnerving, and the fact that many educational institutions seem to have suspended most to all hiring for the time being doesn’t help, but I am keeping a steady pace of a few applications each week and getting less shy about reaching out to career counselors back in Illinois and strangers on LinkedIn alike. Luckily, even writing cover letters has seemed a bit less painful recently. I hope I’ll still feel this way when I sit down to write more of them in the coming days.
LISTENING: My podcast listening has remained fairly minimal this past week so I don’t have much to recommend other than maybe all of the programming WNYC’s Death, Sex and Money has done around the pandemic. A lot of their recent episodes have featured listeners’ stories of what their lives look right now and that just feels really meaningful, especially with editorializing from the show’s staff being pretty minimal. On the music front, I have been listening to the Wilma Vritra record Burd and two albums by IDLES named Brutalism and Joy as an Act of Resistance.
The first of these records came to me through one of Spotify’s many recommendation features that has recently been confused by my steady streaming of post- and drone metal staples with some occasional Little Simz or Mereba mixed in. I am not familiar with Odd Future where Pyramid Vritra started nor the English producer and guitar player Wilma Archer, but I like their collaborative effort on Burd. There is something very chill about it and I’ve found it to be great music to just kind of have on. There is a recent episode of the New York Times’ Popcast where the host, music critic John Caramanica, calls a number of other writers to check-in on their pandemic playlists and a many of those conversations boil down to whether his interlocutors want music to pinpoint a specific feeling and intensify it or to just be soothing and comforting and almost forgettably enveloping. Caramanica shares that listening to some of his otherwise favorite records result in too much intensity for this emotionally odd moment. Burd is not that, but is not fully predictable or toothless either.
I checked out IDLES because I read a list-icle on them.com where queer musicians shared records they had been enjoying lately. I was unfamiliar with most musicians and most recommendations from that article, but I picked a few to toss onto my to-listen playlist and IDLES randomly ended up on top. The music they make sounds undoubtedly British, rooted in punk and dealing with themes of working-class anger, domesticity and immigration. It feels like the kind of music I could either love or be utterly annoyed by. For some reason I can’t quite describe, it’s been working for me this past week. I don’t have a favorite between the two records I have been listening to, and they do complement each other well. They are loud and have something to say and the fact that they speak to a slightly different crisis than the one we find ourselves in right now makes that loud something close to energizing and a bit of a good reminder that the world was scary and cruel even before the ‘rona.
Finally, listening to IDLES must have jogged the part of my brain that stores memories of punk-gone-slightly-mainstream type of bands because I have been turning to the Croatian band Hladno Pivo (trans. Cold Beer) for some of my nightly runs. The album I’ve revisited is called Knjiga Zalbe (roughly translated as “Book of complaints”, this is the form or document you’d ask for if you wanted to log an official complaint in some sort of a hospitality business) and it came out when I was just starting high school and Hladno Pivo had just hit their mainstream peak (you know, right before collaborating with rappers and cellists). As such, it sounds exactly what punk-adjacent bands sound like when they achieve radio success, with a bit of Croatian flair. Some of the songs are about late-stage capitalism, some hint at the fact that Croatia had just joined the European Union at that point, and some are just about bad break-ups and getting drunk on the distinctly Croatian combination of beer-on-tap and pelinkovac shots. I don’t think this is particularly good music and though some lyrics certainly are quite clever, I was disappointed to realize how many of the lines that are still available for quick recall in my mind are steeped in sexism. There’s some good running material here and a good punch of nostalgia, but when it comes to Croatian punk-rock I may have to stick to the communist/anti-communist stuff of Rijeka in the 80s.
READING: It seems like social distancing has turned everyone into a gorgeous writer or at least a skilled compiler of content, or maybe I’m just paying more attention, so I have been reading more and more newsletters. Here are some I’ve read recently: Drawing Links, LIN, Pome, Social Social Distance Club, Here’s The Thing by Sarah Gailey (not to be confused with the pretty wild but also very insightful relationship advice newsletter Here’s The Thing by Sophia Benoit), channeling, The Main Event, Troublemaking and the Ann Friedman Weekly. I know I should probably be reading more books, and I do have some Warren Ellis comics on me, but if you’d like to recommend me another newsletter, I probably won’t be able to resist clicking on it.
WATCHING: We finished GLOW’s 3rd season and I still have the exact same thoughts about it as I did before I saw that particular finale. If there is a season four I imagine I’ll give in and watch it, but I will not be putting that release date in my calendar. We are also still watching Devs and I am still at least mildly frustrated with its physics-related babble. Yet I somehow can’t give up on the show’s not-so-thick plot. Devs’ creator Alex Garland is definitely making some interesting choices in how the show’s story is doled out, and the episodes are still visually really striking. However, I can’t help but feel like a lot of it is just a little half-baked and could be both pushed further into the unsettling and the weird and also just plainly researched more so that the attempts to explain the science don’t feel so sophomoric and Wikipedia-adjacent while also trying to pack a big philosophical punch. My husband pointed out to me that this is essentially a show about whether determinism is real which effectively makes it into a show about a discussion you might have had in a college gen-ed seminar. The fact that this makes for prestige TV fodder is certainly quite something. Finally, we gave in to the peer-pressure of all of our Netflix streaming friends and watched Tiger King. People smarter than me have criticized this show with more nuance already so I would just like to pretty straight-forwardly say that I hated it. It read so much like a freak side-show with a convoluted story that was portioned in chunks that didn’t always even make narrative sense (so much happens in the last episode and so many characters play important roles with very little proper introduction). Though the filmmakers make some attempts to end the whole thing on a note of concern for the animals, this is very much not a documentary about animal cruelty or animal lovers. It is a documentary that shows no compassion for any of its subjects, does not in any way engage with any systemic or socio-economic factors that land so many of them in awful situations, and generally seems to be aiming for nothing other than shock value. I know this is the kind of thing Netflix documentaries just do now, but can we please just stop celebrating that approach as if it were anything but opportunistic, at times exploitative and definitely shallow.
EATING: My sourdough itch is acting up, so I made some overnight no-knead bread and was almost satisfied with it. I had one thick slice with ajvar, spinach, avocado and a chickpea tahini salad and my in-laws devoured the rest. I made the chickpea salad with the explicit intent of having a sandwich for lunch every day, to delay the food guesswork until dinner, and was mostly successful in that. Both the bread and the salad recipe need just one more round of tweaks before I’ll be fully happy with them though. I tried making buffalo cauliflower roughly following this recipe and we all quite liked it. As another excursion into Indian food, and because we took a long weekend walk and stumbled into an Indian store on our way back, I made this dal makhani alongside some turmeric cumin rice with all the accoutrements. It was a bit of a whole thing to prepare, but it was great once we sat down to eat. Because our favorite Thai take-out place is closed, I made a Thai red curry we had with some peanut marinated tofu. Finally, in a true instance of social distancing cooking I threw together the meal I am sharing here based on this recipe from The First Mess blog, things that had to be used up in our fridge (sad, limp celery and leftover coconut milk from another recipe) and the kind of anxiety that reminds you to slather everything in ginger, garlic, lemon and turmeric in the hope of somehow helping your body. It was surprisingly comforting and enjoyable. Below, I give some more details on how you might eat it, and how to adapt it to whatever is happening in your own social distancing kitchen.
For about 4 servings you will need:
1 tbsp coconut oil (or any other oil such as olive, avocado or canola)
one small onion, diced
3-inch piece of ginger, peeled and chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, very finely minced
2-3 stalks of celery, finely chopped, leaves included
zest of 1 medium lemon
1 tbsp ground turmeric
1.5 tsp ground cumin
sea salt and ground black pepper, to taste
3 cups water + 1 tsp Vegeta or vegetarian bouillon cube (optional)
2/3 to 1 whole 14-oz can coconut milk (full fat is best but substitute light as needed)
1 tsp soy sauce or tamari (to make the broth gluten free)
juice of 1 medium lemon
1-2 tsp sambal oelek or other chili garlic sauce/paste
1/4 cup white miso
2 cups cooked chickpeas (can be from frozen, wash thoroughly if canned)
For serving: rice noodles or thin spaghetti tossed with sesame oil or crisped up potatoes, roasted vegetables or baby spinach, extra lemon wedges for squeezing, extra chili garlic sauce or red pepper flakes, chopped cilantro and/or scallions
Heat the oil in a stock pot or a Dutch oven then add the onions and celery. Add a pinch of salt and patently sauté over medium heat for 5-7 minutes, until the onions are slightly golden and slightly translucent and the whole thing seems to have softened
Add ginger and garlic and sauté for another minute, until you can really smell it
Add lemon zest, turmeric, cumin and juice of half a lemon and let cook for another minute, stirring often to get something like a very coarse paste, making sure it doesn’t all burn
Add coconut milk and stir well, then add the water and the bouillon cube/Vegeta if using. Bring to a boil.
Turn down the heat so that only occasional bubbling happens and simmer for at least 10-15 minutes (or however much time you want to sink into this, maybe do some dishes while the broth is simmering), stirring occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pot
Add chickpeas, sambal oelek or other chili garlic sauce and soy sauce or tamari
In a small bowl combine miso with just enough warm water to cover it then whisk with a fork until you have a thick liquid
Turn off the heat and add the miso mixture to the broth. Stir well then finish with the rest of the lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste
Substitutions: If you don’t have miso just skip it and use a bit more salt or soy sauce, if you don’t have soy sauce skip it and use a bit more salt, if you don’t have lemons use limes, if you don’t have celery just leave it out, if you don’t have any Asian-ish chili garlic sauce just use any hot sauce you like, if you don’t have Vegeta or a bouillon cube use any all-purpose seasoning you like or just leave it out and slightly increase the other spices, if you don’t have chickpeas use any white bean, cubed and baked or fried tofu or if you absolutely have to some roasted or otherwise cooked chicken
Variations: add chopped carrots or bell peppers (or even zucchini) to onions and celery, use curry powder instead of turmeric, use store-bought Thai curry paste (red or green) instead of sambal oelek, add a tablespoon of tahini at the end, use a cup of cashews soaked in water overnight and blended with a cup of (fresh) water to form a thick cream instead of coconut milk, add a tablespoon or two of nutritional yeast, add a potato cut into bite-sized chunk or cauliflower florets after adding coconut milk and cook until they are soft, stir as much baby spinach as you can together with the miso and mix until the residual hit wilts it, add some ground coriander (maybe 1/2 a teaspoon) or smoked paprika (start with 1/4 teaspoon), top with sesame oil or chili oil
Serving suggestions:
a) cook some rice noodles on thin spaghetti and toss them with a bit of sesame oil, toss some cauliflower and broccoli florets with olive oil and salt then roast at 400F for 26 minutes, shaking the pan half-way through, finish of the vegetables with a squeeze of lemon, in each bowl pile some noodles then ladle the broth over them and top with the roasted vegetables, scallions, cilantro and extra lime juice and chili garlic sauce to taste
b) boil of microwave a fee potatoes (pierce with a fork in a few places then microwave on high in two minute increments until it is soft, flipping it each time) then cut them into bite sized pieces and crisp up in a ceramic or cast-iron or non-stick pan with salt and olive oil (or just spray generously with cooking spray), stir baby spinach or steamed kale into your broth around step 8. Serve the soup topped with the potatoes, extra lime wedges for squeezing and sprinkle of red pepper flakes
c) serve the broth over rice or quinoa with roasted vegetables as a side or with a hearty green stirred into the broth. Alternatively sauté the kale with olive oil and chopped garlic and finishing with a squeeze of lemon so that your meal can have three distinct components: broth with chickpeas served over rice with kale as a side