By far the most accessed article on this website is the post Eggplant Pros & Cons, written during a period when I was consuming an unpresidented amount of eggplant and began to be worried about toxicity.  As an article, it is boring, and I remember very little of the information contained therein.  Nevertheless it receives approximately 17 times more traffic than any other post.  I thought, if I were to give the Internet what it apparently wants, I would stock my site full of cost-benefit analyses of various foodstuffs, stick some clickbait ads on there, and wait for the magic to happen.  Except that this sounds like possibly the most tedious job in the world, and I could probably still make more money waiting tables.

Pros & Cons inspiration did not strike again until the day when I was buying a half-gallon of Silk unsweetened cashew milk for my lactose-intolerant husband, and the bearded stranger in front of me in the Co-op checkout line volunteered that he never eats cashews because of the toxicity.  A public service announcement, I guess.  Even while I felt scornful about his food-paranoia, his warning nagged at me.  I was trying to take care of my husband's health by reducing his obviously inflammatory milk consumption; what if, instead, I was slowly poisoning him with a concentrated brew of expressed cashew toxins?

Two or three months passed during which I continued to buy cashew milk for my husband, did no further research, and witnessed the sudden downfall of our democracy.

​This morning-- a Saturday morning in December, just before the electoral college ratifies the unthinkable-- I sat with my husband, eating a breakfast of bacon & eggs, toast and clementines, and drinking hot chocolate made with cashew milk.  Please be advised: hot chocolate is NOT as good with cashew milk, though I have made it with almond milk and that is fine.  For the first time, I thought to tell my husband of the bearded man's earnest warning.  My husband scoffed.  After all, he smokes, doesn't exercise, and has an unhealthy devotion to cheeseburgers.  Is it really likely that cashew milk will take him down?

I don't know.  So here goes:

​Cashew milk (the unsweetened kind), compared to cow's milk, is low in calories, fat and sugar, but also low in protein.  It also has a lot of Vitamin E.  Raw cashews are unsafe to eat due to a chemical called urushiol-- also found in poison ivy-- which can cause skin rashes and is toxic if ingested.  However, the cashews sold in stores as "raw" cashews are actually steamed, rendering them edible.  Silk cashew milk is made from cashews which are roasted before being ground and used to make "milk," so overdosing on urushiol is a non-issue.

Beyond personal health, however, the exposure to urushiol inherent in cashew harvest and processing means that excessive cashew consumption may have ethical repercussions, as described in The Telegraph:

So there's that.  I can't determine where Silk's cashews are sourced (notably absent from their FAQs, which provide this information re: soybeans and almonds).  I would normally just give up, but in this new age of activism it occurred to me that I could ask them, so I wrote to inquire.  Will let you know if they answer. [UPDATE: Silk says that their cashews come from "Africa, Brazil and Vietnam."]

Now that we have concluded that cashews are safe, if possibly unethical, to eat, I have a few words about another current American dietary trend, our toxic friend Donald J. Trump.

An asshat, yes, you say, but a dietary trend?  What do you mean?

Just what I say.  After the election, we spoke of five stages of grief.  But, as far as I can currently tell, there have been only two stages of eating.  1) 48 hours or so (your experience may vary) of total loss of appetite, during which we had to remind one another to drink water and nobody cared if they had a splitting headache or were subsisting on a couple of handfuls of Ritz crackers.  2) A sustained, not-yet-over period of frantic stress-eating, legitimized widely by Anne Lamott confessing the same on Facebook, but shared by many, characterized by a massive intake of carbs (and sometimes alcohol) and a sudden absence of regard for one's own health or even vanity.

At some point it occurred to me to drink some bourbon, and it was like the best thing I had ever tasted.

The "Trump 10" is apparently a real thing.

And it's not just quantity, it's quality too.  I don't feel like cooking.  While broccoli still tastes great when it magically appears on my plate, I have stopped bothering to serve a salad with my pasta.  Too much trouble, and who cares, really?  We've taken to eating frozen burritos, frozen vegetables, accidentally-vegan macaroni-and-"cheese" out of a box.  I buy candy, and chips, and donuts.  This cannot be good for me, or us, or the world.  Also, I don't want to become a drunk.  

This is true toxicity, this hopelessness and insecurity and downright fear and dread that we feel.  The unhealth of Trump's own food choices has somehow become contagious, even while all his other choices are ones we repudiate.  At this rate, on January 21, the date of the Women's March, a sea of bloated, sad faces will fill the streets of Washington D.C., and we will march uncomfortably in our tight pants.

I have no solution to this.  There are so few ways to make myself feel better these days, so few routes to pleasure-- which is different from happiness, now inaccessible.  Pizza is accessible.

Tonight my husband and I will go to the bad diner.  This is the one we choose when we're feeling low-energy, like after a long, horrible weekend day at work, or when we are sick or our cat has died.  The food is unreliable and the coffee weak, but there is absolutely no pressure there.  You can eat with your coat on if you're feeling chilled, or hunch over the table with eyes closed; the waitresses know us.  My husband can get a cheeseburger.  

Someday I hope we are well again.

​

As I was preparing this morning to go to my lily-white safe space, that 10 am Friday yoga class that I missed last week due to work, and hence am attending for the first time since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, I thought to myself: "I don't know if I can go on doing this."
 
It's not a safe space because of its whiteness, per se.  It's a safe space because this is the culture of yoga teachers, to surround us with unconditional love and supportiveness, to encourage self-love.  It's a very feminine space.  Today, there were three men present, and they all stuck together in a rear corner.
 
All three men were white.  And all the women there were white.  The teacher was white.
 
I live in one of the most diverse areas of the country.
 
So, in my lily-white safe space, two things make me uncomfortable.  One is the monolithic whiteness, only rarely interrupted.  And the other is the idea of self-love, of self-care.  Who am I, privileged white bitch with an easy life, to give this to myself?  To allow someone else to caress me with soothing words?    What even is this feel-good crap?
 
And yet the breathing, the movements, the resting, even the chanting--about which I still feel awkward-- they do calm me.  It is a conundrum.
 
Do I deserve more calm?  After the election of a racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, xenophobic, tax-dodging billionaire and climate-change-denier, is more calm something to be desired?  If this mode of increasing calm is not available to everyone, is it something of which I should avail myself?
 
All fair questions.  As a white woman at this moment in time, I feel squeezed.  I feel squeezed on one side by white male and other Trump supporters who said, at best, No, white women, it is not your time, and-- at worst-- it will never be your time, you stupid fucking cunts.  I feel squeezed on another side by women of color who point out, over and over, that 53% of white women voted for Trump, that we are, as a demographic, traitorous or duplicitous-- and make it clear that this is what they always expected of us.   They seem disappointed but not surprised.  I feel squeezed by sadness that an eminently qualified woman lost the election, that the small progress we were making on climate change will be reversed, that we will lose progress on LGBT rights, women's rights, health care, criminal justice reform.  I feel squeezed by the conviction that my sadness is selfish, an undeserved luxury, the personal stake I felt in Hillary Clinton's election insignificant compared to the stakes of others.
 
Sometimes it feels as though, squeezed from all these directions, there is nowhere left to inhabit.  Even action, even activism, feels potentially self-serving, is regarded with suspicion from within and without.  Maybe rightly so. 
 
Under the circumstances, what do we do?  Help others, is one answer.  I've been trying to do more of that.  Listen, obviously.  Take care of ourselves?  Do we do that?  Should we do that?  Is yoga OK?  Cups of tea?  Naps?  How about shouting, is that OK?
 
One thing I've learned over the years of being a white woman: we are so self-hating.  Nobody can hate us more than we hate ourselves.  Many of us, if we could shrink down to the size of a pin, if we could disappear altogether, we would do that.
 
But that is a cop-out.  When I'm mad at my husband for doing or saying something sexist, and he retreats into self-hatred, it makes me madder.  By yelling at himself, he is preventing me from yelling at him.  Then I have to turn around and reassure him.  He means well.  It is infuriating.
 
So maybe this answers my question.  White women should engage in self-care, whether or not they think they deserve it, if only so that others-- others who may be even wearier, with even fewer fucks to give at this point-- are not forced to do the caring for them.  Whatever, yoga on your own time.  Go sleep on your couch, just don't tell me about it (and yes, I'm aware of the inherent irony of this piece, squeezing away).  Eat avocadoes, while also bearing in mind the funniest protest sign ever.  Kvetch with friends.  And stop defensively flipping out every time someone points out that you are, like, the living stereotype of a liberal white woman.  That is what you are, own it.  And take care.

This is a bad time. 

President-elect Donald Trump, who did not realize he was going to have to staff the White House and come up with names for so many appointed positions, is busy finding the most ill-qualified and white-supremacist candidates available to supervise the executive branch of our government.

Controversy rages among our high school students, parents, teachers, and superintendent of schools about whether the constant student protests in the past week are worthy, permissible, or safe.  The superintendent, after a few days, puts out this message.

My dry cleaner has to reassure me.  "We will be okay," he says.  "We will organize."  I want to ask him: when?  where?  Is there a meeting in the back among the racks of shirts?  He is there six days a week, twelve hours a day.  
Lacking clear organization, I volunteer for everything at random.  I go to the PTA meeting.  I look up the date of my next city council meeting.  I put my name on lists that other people are organizing.  I write emails to the principal, other parents, the school superintendent.  I sign myself and my kid up for a seminar training women to run for public office.  I agree to sell tickets for my kid's school play.  I volunteer to make dinner for 45 kids, to be served during dress rehearsal.  I drive other teenagers home, give $2 (which is all the cash I have in my wallet) to the guy standing on the median, decide to buy a subscription to the New York Times.

I argue with white Facebook friends about racism.  I argue with Bernie Sanders supporters about Hillary Clinton.  I argue with a cook in my restaurant about whether Islam is an inherently terrorist religion.

Making pasta salad, as well as a green salad, for 45 people turns out to be a lot of work.  It takes about 3 hours, given that I have to boil water for pasta four separate times, blanch broccoli in a giant pot, and do lots of chopping, slicing, and grating.  Plus washing dishes.  In the end, there were four foil trays of pasta and two big bowls of tossed salad.  On the plus side, I managed to make all this food for about $75 in groceries, a good value compared to the catered or pizza dinners that other parents have brought.  That is less than $2 per person, and the food is healthy, with lots of vegetables, a little cheese, pasta and a balsamic-and-olive-oil dressing (plus lemon-and-olive-oil for the green salad).  My kid said that some students complained it was too healthy.  Fortunately for them, due to our current spirit of volunteerism, another parent brought sandwiches as well.

Vive la resistance.

It's over.  Accept it.  Donald Trump won.  Time to move on and heal our divisions.  Time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.  Time to stop talking about politics, which I find boring and divisive anyway.  It's been 36 hours, I mean, come on.  Don't be so melodramatic.

NO I WILL NOT CALM DOWN.

Here are some completely real things that are actual or potential results of this election that will not go away in 36 hours or a week or month or year.  Some of them are forever.  Forever.

1. Once again, we do not have a woman president, and so much of this campaign was rooted in deep sexism, both blatant and subtle, that we women are now painfully aware of just how rigged the system is against us.  Still.  Women of my generation (I'm 45) were brought up by our newly feminist mothers to think we could do anything, be anything.  Not only is that manifestly untrue, but even OUR daughters, 30 years later, now have to doubt it. 
2. My LGBT+ loved ones may lose certain basic rights, such as their right to marry or to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender.
3. Everyone I know or work with who is an undocumented immigrant now has to live with an increased level of fear, and rightfully so.
4. Everyone I know who is a person of color, immigrant, and/or Muslim (screw it, even Jews!  This is so crazy) now has to feel that approximately half the country either hates and fears them, or at the very least cares so little about their rights and well-being that they are willing to casually endanger those things.
5. Women may lose access to abortion.
6. A temperamentally aggressive and impulsive man will be in charge of our extremely sensitive foreign policy.  In addition to being aggressive and impulsive, and having a pathological need to "win" everything, he appears to know no more about the subject matter than I do, possibly less.  And his inability to pay attention to information for more than 3 seconds or listen to the advice of others means that informed counsel will be of limited use.  We could end up in pointless wars over personal affronts, discontinue important alliances, and/or initiate the use of nuclear weapons.
7. We will almost certainly bow out of the Paris climate accords.  We will move backwards on energy and climate policy when it is critical that we move forwards very, very fast, if we are to avoid total disaster.  We will see significantly worse climate change, more severe weather events, lose land to stupid development, lose species at an even faster rate, fail to protect what is fast slipping away.  These effects are forever.  They can't be reversed four years later.  They have permanent planetary impact.
8. The painful, slow, did I mention painful progress that we have been making the past few years in highlighting issues of race, police brutality, and criminal justice reform will likely be erased.
9. Unpredictable worldwide economic effects may change our lives dramatically.  This is a slow-burner one, but still scary in a personal sense.  Last night I pondered whether we should order pizza (because I did not have the heart to cook), or whether we really ought to start carefully hoarding our resources immediately.  (We got the pizza.  I'm not insane.)

I'm sure there are so, so many other things that I would think of over the next two minutes or seven hours or whatever-- I could go on writing this just about forever.  But I think this is enough to convey the point: YES, I AM FREAKING OUT.  IT IS COMPLETELY RATIONAL TO BE FREAKING OUT.  If you are a Trump voter, or a third-party voter, or a disaffected voter, or a low-information voter, or even a Democratic voter who sees this as just another ordinary election that we lost, please don't come along and tell us to settle down or get to work immediately on something positive.  We'll do those positive things once the dust settles and we can identify what the fuck they are.  But for now, there is a real need to grieve, and to do it in an open way such that we can connect with others who are also grieving and freaking out.  Please don't tell us to shut up.  Thank you.
​