The more things change the more they stay the same.

I've moved. If you want to skip everything not food-related, you may.

Frozen Peaches

What does one do with frozen peaches? The underlying question, of course, is what does one do with peaches? There are so many of them, and they go so quickly. Can't have them rotting on the ground and yet if brought home they melt into the counter within a few days. Their already fuzzy skins bloom with white and black. They leave behind a goo, the underside of their ripeness. To capture them ripe without catching the toughness and putrefaction that define the borders of ripe is the passion of autumn, for some.

This passion can take two forms: anxiety and hoarding. These may sound like the same thing. But while the anxious is obsessed with wasted peaches (those on the ground are failures, or if not too rotten yet, rescues) the hoarder has a more generous outlok. The hoarder sees the peach season as an opportunity. Noteably, the anxious has trees in the yard and is tasked with caring for them (i.e. using them), whereas the hoarder rents others'.

The anxious picks as many as possible ripe off the tree and uses them immediately. Uses and not eats beause eating is only one use. Other uses include baking in a crisp and pairing with ice cream. Not so much pleasures as ways to cut losses. One does not so much taste the presence of peaches as the absence of the loss of peaches. One feels less a failure.

The hoarder, having access to far more trees, picks and picks. It's not much work, picking peaches, and so boxes and boxes fill up quickly. Here we return to the second question: what to do with all those peaches? One can't eat them quickly enough, even in a crisp. No matter. The hoarder believes ripeness can be preservered. Peaches can be frozen. Fleeting pleasure can be had throughout the year. As the anxious tastes the mitigation of failure, the hoarder tastes shrewdness in frozen peaches. Having given perishability the slip, one tastes oneself.

Now we come to the first question: What does not do with frozen peaches? Much as one would like to believe they are peaches, they're something else when they thaw. As they thaw, they release their liquid. They divide, much like curdling milk, into liquid and solid. A bowl of thawed peaches is a bowl of sweet, orange soup. One can ignore the soup, cover it with oats, butter, and sugar, and bake it, but the oats turn soggy. The peach-solids boil into near disintegration in the oven. But it is crisp, in it are still technically peaches, and one may still revel in the simulacric bounty of refrigeration.

One may also acknowledge the soup, and treat its two components different. One then pours off the liquid into a pot, covers the solids with oats, butter, and sugar, and bakes them. One boils the liquid with more sugar and spices, down to a thick brown sauce, and pours this over the crisp. This necromantic trickery makes a less soggy crisp, but still, soggy, and the peaches, if indeed they are peaches, sad, deflated, and oddly flavorless without their sauce. Some things cannot be fixed or solved. To solve them is to change what the solution was meant to preserve. It would be smug, however, to suggest that the lack of a solution is a solution. It's not as if the gesture of stepping aside causes the peach to leap forth with its true flavor. On the unyielding terms one lays out, one has never tasted a peach.

Figs & Toilets

Is eating fruit a perversion? If you're bored, it's a cheering thought. While picking figs the other day, I heard it articulated like this: "these trees must be so unhapppy--they spent all this energy putting on fruit, just to have us flush the seeds down our indoor plumbing." The assumption is that trees produce fruit for a purpose: to reproduce. This seems obvious, but it is also untrue.

Evolutionary thought, oddly, seems to undergird this assumption of fruit's purposiveness, in the same way that the tired image of basket weavers and hunters is mobilized to naturalize the most thoughtless gender prescriptions. I do have to assume that fruit evolved because trees that grew fruit begat more reproducing offspring than trees that did not. However, the accidents of evolution--canny as they might be--do not assign or come from any purpose whatsoever. (A tautology--but honestly, do you want to read an argument that evolution is accidental? Suffice to say evolution is a misleading term, because it's not a system.) Fruit just happened.

Besides, if trees are people, then who are we to say they insist on the reproductive use of their fruit? And even if they insist that their detachable flesh only be chewed for the furthering of the race, who is to say they don't enjoy wantonness for exactly the same reason?

I know, I'm reaching. But when I heard it said matter-of-factly that figs are "like balls" the train of thought was inevitable, wasn't it? No, actually--that's my point. I think you'll agree that just because I heard that statement and now I'm writing this post, this post was not its purpose. Yet I am enjoying this particular use. Because it is excessive, or just because?

On the same outing, as we exerted ourselves jumping to and climbing on branches, I posited the dreariest view of food imaginable by saying that we certainly were not doing this for the calories. Of course not. If you have the chance not to, why do something out of necessity?

So no, eating fruit is not a perversion, flush toilet or no, because there isn't one thing fruit are made for in the first place.

It's not as if anyone is all in a tizzy over orchards (all those "virgin" trees). Then again, isn't this exactly what pastoral beauty is all about--the sublime channeled into production?

The fruit does fall, and I must admit I looked away from the figs smashed into the ground, and I hesitated yet was excited by the squishy give of the overripe. The fallen (that word cannot be an accident) figs stuck unpleasantly to our shoes. Importantly, figs will not sprout in this climate. Whether I think so or not, it appears I'm uncomfortable with flesh not trained to produce or reproduce.

some incredibly sloppy theorizing

It is said that western civilization sprang from wheat. These days, although it remains staff of life to many, it’s often called junk food, or if you’re a paleo dieter, just plain evil. And what is considered junk by the pious is also a comfort, or even more: an indulgence.

This is guaranteed by the degree to which its emptiness is insisted upon. How else could a dry Starbucks scone constitute pleasure than by the reflexive tut-tut that it’s “just empty carbs”? This sense of their substancelessness makes baked goods palatable in unique ways.

Though if 1890s London is as Sarah Waters imagines it, then perhaps bread needn’t be saturated with health-food discourse to go down like nearly nothing. In Tipping the Velvet, bread products are all that its protagonist, Nancy, can handle after a catastrophic breakup. She lays in a dark bedsit for weeks eating nothing but “bagels, brioches, and flat Greek loaves, and buns from the Chinese bakeries” and cups of tea, “which I brewed ferociously strong, in a pot on the hearth, and sweetened with condensed milk.” God, if that ever sounds familiar.

(I have spent weeks alone eating little but toast and tea. When anything substantial is nauseating, toast will do.)

I wrote that Sarah Lund’s diet of mostly bread, butter, and coffee was deeply appealing to me, for similar reasons. Baked goods can be passed off as almost not food at all. Lund is perennially, functionally depressed, and Nancy is suddenly becoming acquainted with depression. The will to live and the will to eat are connected in this way. When I say “will to live,” I do not mean it literally, though the sense does not disinclude that. Nancy’s post-breakup melancholy is the instructive example here: she can’t move on from her former lover, despite (or because of) the fact that she is clearly and acutely gone. Letting anything else in–even a bit of food–is abhorrent because it would mean letting go of this nothingness.

Which sounds self-defeating, and it is. But I do not want to fall into the judgemental prescriptiveness of phrases like “let go” and “move on.” In the pop-psychologic vernacular, these imperatives lie (pun intended) firmly on the side of productivity. They prioritize orienting oneself to the future. But what’s in the future? More moving on. One moves on to float in an endless deferral.

Contemplation is possessive, i.e. depressive. Indeed, depression is to be blocked from acting by the sheer bandwidth of cognition. Writing is thus a bizarre balancing act of thinking and not thinking. Don’t think at all and you’ll have nothing to write; think too much and you’ll never be able to write it down.

One cannot eat a feast and at the same time possess it. But the world–and oneself in it–turns on consumption, and so it is generally thought advantageous to advocate eating.

When this helpful prescription turns sour, there are ways to mitigate the bile–to keep distance from both life and death. To not have to take on the burden of having hope (the backlash from which Nancy suffers), one takes in whatever unwholesomeness is available. Bread, being neither food nor not-food, will do nicely. It is an imperfect antidote to the illness it makes possible–civilization.

What will happen to a civilization that demands productivity from its citizens and also demands that they keep themselves healthy by not eating “empty carbs,” not smoking, not drinking, and absolutely no other vice, save sex, which has been deemed healthy.

Yes, of course all these vices are the opiates on which civilization functions, and some more revolutionary souls would say it’s better to renounce them.

I’m not trying to say that society’s prescriptions ought to self-consciously indulge us. You can’t go back. But rather that there seem to be increasingly fewer blind spots. Which is a bit scary. Everything is a lifestyle choice.

What, are we all going to binge on naughty kale chips?