On Hunger + Avocado and Cucumber Sandwich

"The fed versus the unfed. What else is there in the history of the world?" -Mary Ruefle

 

Poet Mary Ruefle said this rather nonchalantly at the end of a reading I attended in February, but it stuck with me. It's a heavy question. Food, after all, is one of the three essentails—the other two being water and shelter—that we need to survive at the most basic level, and the lack of food has dire consequences on the mind and body.

As a well-fed food blogger, my hunger pains are not severe. Sometimes I forget to bring a snack for the afternoon slump at work, or the lack of reservation at a restaurant forces me to wait longer than I would like for a meal. I have the means, the access, and the ability to make healthy choices for myself and my family without a lot of stress involved. Any stomach grumbling I experience are temporary, and nothing to complain about when 50 million Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from.

When you think about hunger, you might envision a malnourished child in the Horn of Africa. Famines cause great peril and are widely publicized in the media, but it's the everyday hungers that are more common, and go largely unnoticed. That's why it's so important to pull back the veil on this issue and take steps to do something about it.

"Last Bite" by Kyle Potvin + Dark Chocolate Bark

Seasons have a way of getting under our skin.

For T.S. Eliot, it's the "cruellest month." For Robert Frost, "mud season." For Edna St. Vincent Millay, this month "comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers."

The dirt, the flowers, the heat, the ice. Any distinctions that befall the month we're enduring swirl in our consciousness like wind slapping the windows, begging to be let in. Over the years, seasons signify milestones and inspire us to burrow, clean, buy notebooks, travel, and cook the food that grows best in February or May or October, and I find there's something both comforting and unnerving about the consistency of these cravings year after year.

"Black Radish" by Lisa Coffman + Linguini with Radishes and Black Pepper

"They are so other
from what we say they are
they might as well be hidden."

Three lines from today's poem precisely describe the plight of the radish. The poor, invisible radish. Some are lucky, pulled from the stem, dipped in salted butter, and eaten while sitting under the shade of a willow tree, preferably by a river. These are the most adored of all radishes. But most are forced raw into our salads as something of an afterthought, greens hastily discarded to the garbage bin before they have a chance to scream, wait, I'm useful!

So it goes.