Making a salad
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| Author showing off bottom of rainbow confetti salad design in a glass floral design cube. |
Salads are for sharing
Add more to the salad
Dress it
Keep it complex and interesting
A salad is an entanglement of relations
It starts with getting the best ingredients
Which starts with cultivating the best relations with people who grow food
Make sure they have what they need to thrive
Buy food at the prices they ask
Ask for what you want, tell them what you like
The same advice for intimate relations success: checking in, enthusiastic ongoing affirmative consent, talking about the joy, being expressive of feelings, engage in difficult conversations with confidence that the relation won't be damaged
Being safe and vulnerable at the same time
Being safe and vulnerable at the same time requires TRUST
TRUST
Can you taste trust?
Sometimes I have trusted the wrong people for too long
Sometimes there are forces which cause us to be loyal when we instead should exercise integrity
Forces like having access to work, income, independence of movement, bodily autonomy, due process
Access to air, water, food, shelter, the basic necessities of life
Trust requires repeated interactions which help a person recognize another person's integrity, the way they respond in different situations, what they do consistently
REPEATED INTERACTIONS
Repeated interactions happen in community, when people spontaneously start to expect interactions with neighbors, school families, religious groups, community organizations. Spontaneous interactions sometimes happen in public spaces like Parks and Beaches.
People need to be able to trust each other. People need to behave trustworthily. Those who don't, need to be avoided or corrected, but not indulged as if they have integrity, as if they are trustworthy.
A salad is a love song
It tells the story of people who trust each other
It sings the story of passions, lovemaking bees
reproducing life
enthusiastic life-force bursting forth
A salad is about trust
A salad is about the making of love, making food with love, making love with food
There can be blood, in a salad
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| A beet, a knife, and beet juice on a blue cutting board. |
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| Shredded beet about to be strained through cheese cloth. |
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| Cheese cloth in a strainer, stained with "beet blood". I strain the shredded beets so the "blood" doesn't bleed into other colors in my design. I learned early it is important to hide the bloody messes. Beet juice rinses easily in water. |
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| Whole beet in its bloody cheese cloth. |
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| Beet juice squeezed from shredded beet. They say you can't squeeze blood from a stone or a turnip. But it sure looks like you can squeeze blood from a beet. I used the beet juice to dye my hair and drank the rest. |
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| Containers of shredded veggies, clockwise from top: spinach, beet, cauliflower, carrot. I use the confetti veggies like colored sands in a mandala to "paint" 3D pictures/scupltures in salad. My salad is a love song for friends and family. |
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| Assembling a checkerboard design of shredded veggies in a glass floral design cube. |
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| Checkerboard/rubiks cube design and attempted "heart" design in glass floral design cube. |
This is a beet
But it looks like a bloody mess
Is this an organ?
This feels so...birthy
OR is this an abortion?
An abeetion?
Tell this story out loud
The red tent celebration which is so cringe
And also now we say cringe about second wave feminism
Maybe telling these abeetion stories is necessary
Stories about bloody messes
which are so very cringe
and have also been defined to be cringe because they are about women and reproductive labor and caring about others and being the decision makers
They are about women counting, about their lives and experiences mattering
When people want to avoid the cringiness of things, they want to avoid seeing reality
Reality is that women need to be able to control their lives
Reality is that salads are made with love
And love is messy, not a hallmark card
Someone touches all the messes--cleans them, repairs them, makes them whole
Usually that someone is made invisible because it makes others "cringe" to see the process
Some prefer to just take the final product, wrapped up. Clean. Fresh. Sanitized.
Hide the Intimacy, Secrecy, Blood
Face the bloody mess. Face the cringeworthy. Face the dream of separation. Face the dream of connectedness.
A salad is a love song. An abortion is a love song.
Abortion is healthcare. Abortion is necessary. Abortion is loving.
