Eating Meat at the World's End
plus: in this house we don't gatekeep DC food recs
Somehow, I looked up, and summer is ending. After a lovely season filled with travel, conference presentations, visiting friends, and lots of reading, I am finally preparing to make the move to California and begin my PhD.
In the face of this ineluctable forward march of time, I have been reflecting on some of my favorite memories here in DC. I, like friend-of-the-newsletter Caleigh, am feeling “very pro-DC” lately. I have long-held that DC, despite being maligned as only a suited-up city of politics, has one of the best music + art + scenes in the country currently. In lieu of an actual introduction to this newsletter, please accept this list of some of my favorite DC dishes that you can ingest to mourn my imminent departure (all featuring pandemic-friendly patios unless otherwise noted!).
Beet-cured smoke salmon tartine from Ellē
Any cheese from the Each Peach cheese counter, and also their chicken liver paté
Well-priced margs from El Chucho
A bottle of pet-nat (and maybe a cheeseboard) from St. Vincent’s in the garden
Daikon fritters from Queen’s English
Vegetarian special with palak paneer and chana from Indigo
Chicken fried rice from Chiko (no patio but easy takeout/delivery!)
Salt ‘N Pepper eggplant + an extra dirty gin martini from Copycat
Half-priced oysters from Pearl Dive during happy hour
Build-your-own Italian sub from A. Litteri (no patio technically but you can just eat it outside at Union Market nearby, or, if you are like me and can’t wait, on the parking lot curb right in front)
Vegetarian special with the best miser wot from Ethiopic— make sure to also get the honey wine
Happy hour nigiri from Perry’s on the rooftop
Za’atar-tini from Albi DC (they do have a patio but honestly it is a little greenhouse-y and enclosed so take that as you will).
Please forgive my mostly NW-centric eating habits, and please please enjoy!
In an earlier newsletter, if you remember, I pubbed the Half-Earth Socialism game and book. Since then, the book has been widely read and reviewed on social media, with varying degrees of positivity.
While I enjoyed the book (and truly learned a TON about energy sources from the game), there have been some pretty fair critiques about it— namely, the fact that this “utopian thought experiment has not left space for the imagined futures of the Global South and indigenous societies.”
But today, I want to get into a different critique of Half-Earth Socialism that I have a lot of trouble with: the idea that the notion of “universal mandatory veganism” mentioned in the book is “the most preposterous proposal of all,” as one critic noted without giving any explanation why that is so outlandish.
There are, of course, valid critiques of veganism, mainly stemming from notions of food sovereignty and its insistence on “culturally appropriate food”. But that is not what is happening here. As the recent IPES-Food report (and my entire training as a food historian, to boot) shows, foodways “change regularly and rapidly – and are ultimately a construct of socio-economic factors, values, and norms that are themselves in flux.” Why is our societal taste for meat—which, historians remind us, has been quite literally engineered by governments and big food companies— treated as innate, ingrained, and immovable, even by scholars? Is it really, as geographers have asked, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of industrial meat?
Given our general lack of imagination, the answer might very well be yes (though I certainly hope not). But it is surprising to see that inertia towards the end of meat-eating openly embraced by so-called leftists, people who are allegedly dedicated to fighting much of what currently undergirds society. Veganism, as scholars remind us, is more than just animal-rights-motivated politics (or, for that matter, a “neoliberal ethic of care” that has come to define much of modern day progressivism): it can be understood as part of “broader politics of anti-capitalism and liberation.” While “it is neither obvious nor straightforward that a society can consume its way into social justice or environmental sustainability,” veganism, as Jonathan Dickstein, Jan Dutkiewicz, Jishnu Guha-Majumdar, and Drew Robert Winter have shown us, represents an important part of left praxis as an “effective tactic for eroding capitalism.”
Whether or not you actually believe in the liberatory nature of veganism is one thing. But to write it off vegan mandates—in a book about imagined futures, no less— as “preposterous” is another. To address the current age of climate emergency on any level, we need to at least be able to discuss the immense political, cultural, and economic shifts needed. It may very well be, as Dickstein et. al suggest, “time to start talking seriously and explicitly about the need for veganism as Left praxis.”
Other food-related pieces occupying my mind:
This piece from Sourced on the gendered labor of achaar was beautiful (and reminds me I need to find my copy of Usha’s Pickle Digest to bring on the move).
Friend-of-the-newsletter Jess Eng wrote a stunning and nuanced article on Sherpa cuisine in Colorado, which really made me miss my year spent eating thukpa in Boudha.
As a washed-up former punk DJ, I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for zines, a critical part of riot grrrl history in the 90s and beyond. So of course I loved this article from Eater on the resurgence of indie food zines.
Margo and I went on our last roommate date to Queen’s English last week. It was, unsurprisingly, bittersweet: deeply sad to know it is our last in DC together but so wonderful to spend time with her, and perhaps just as wonderful to finally take advantage of QE’s discounted natural wine hour.
We picked up a bottle of 2020 L’Ecailler from the Loire Valley of France made of Folle Blanche grapes. The most stunning thing about this wine (which doesn’t totally come across in the above picture) is just how crystal clear the wine was— visually, it was almost water-like in its translucence, which I have never seen in a wine before.
The taste was pretty wonderful, too. It had a rich mouthfeel, and tasted kind of like briny salt air with a mix of stone fruit (the menu description listed “oyster shells” as its tasting note, which honestly was spot on). Pair with good company for a lovely evening.
Here is a brief update on some of the food-related work I’ve been engaging in lately:
I’ve been crossing off a number of things before I start at Stanford. Ashley and I recently wrote an article on herbs used as abortifacients in the early modern world for Whetstone Magazine, which you can pick up (in print!) in early 2023.
I also turned in a peer-reviewed article which I co-wrote with some of my colleagues at the Folger Shakespeare Library on the history of early modern condiments like ketchup and chili sauce. That won’t be out for a while, but assuming peer-review goes smoothly, you will be able to read it in a special issue of Global Food History come 2024.
I’ve been getting back into revising my MPhil dissertation for publication, and recently wrote a short blog post about my research for Environmental History Now, which will hopefully be out much sooner than 2024.
Thank you all for reading (and special thanks to Isabel and Rowan, members of my newly formed writing group who motivated me to actually finish this newsletter). Not much cooking on the docket this week, as I am literally moving in three days, but I am very excited to finally be settled in my brand-new home with its brand-new kitchen. I plan to cook lots of goodies from On the Himalayan Trail, a new cookbook I recently acquired from Bold Fork. Send me other cookbook + gadget recs for my new space, and please grab some Chiko in my honor if you are DC-based.
Love, Julia