What I Can Cook But Cannot Eat

08 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Work, Youth

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Cooking, Food, IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Life Changes, Omnivore, Remedies, Self-Reflection, Sleeplessness, Stress, Top Chef, Veganism, Work

Haagan-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Milkshake and My GI tract-if-I-drank-one-symbolism, June 8, 2022. (https://www.doordash.com & https://www.charlestonphysicians.com/gastroenterology/managing-ibs/). **Note: Sunday, August 31, 1997 at Union Station in DC was the last time I had one, and it delayed our bus trip back to Pittsburgh for more than two hours.**

My relationship with food has always been one of love, but with a heavy price. Off and on between October 1980 and May 1999, two things defined my time with food: the frequent lack of it, and my ability to cook and manipulate it. Besides having my mom as a guide, I think those 1,900 or so days with little to no food wherever I lived and whomever I lived with heavily influenced my cooking ambitions and chef-esque cooking skills.

While money has been tight at times in the years since, I have not personally confronted food insecurity or food access issues since the end of the twentieth century. Yet my ability to eat whatever I choose has declined from near-Hoover-vacuum levels of anything edible to a Matrix-level diet of rice krispies in water-infused electrolytes. My stomach has always been where stress and sickness decides to manifest. Even in my preteens, a milkshake at the wrong time or in combination with the wrong kind of food became a shitshake. I would sometimes be a few minutes late for class in graduate school (to the chagrin of my racist and ableist white professors) because of my GI (gastrointestinal) tract.

But there was nothing consistent about what I’ve known for more than 20 years to be my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) until the week after my PhD graduation in 1997. After a week of travel, job interviews, graduation, and personal betrayal, my body was burned out along with my mind and spirit. I had stomach pains for four days, and could barely eat. For more than a year afterward, the only dairy I could handle was Lactaid. Nearly anything, including spaghetti with red sauce, could set off a wave of diarrhea, or days of constipation.

Once we moved to the DMV, and especially once I took my assistant director job at New Voices, I finally had a regular doctor at GW Hospital in DC. After a sigmoidoscopy and a colonoscopy in 2001, my internist diagnosed me with IBS. There was a wrinkle, though. There was no physical evidence for why I had IBS. No signs of serious acid reflux, no tapeworms or other parasites, no ulcers or tears in the intestines or colon. “Are you saying that my irritable bowel syndrome is psychosomatic?,” I remember asking. The doctor said, “No. Whatever’s going on, we can’t explain it with the tests we have.”

Stress, work travel, and lack of sleep were constant companions in the ’00s for me. And that meant popping Imodium pills, the occasional acidophilus and other probiotics, and regulating parts of my diet. I did colon cleanses, fruit fasts, full fasting, and tried a shift toward vegetarianism. All results were middling at best.

It took leaving the nonprofit world and becoming a consultant with part-time professoring for my IBS to calm down in 2008 and 2009. Working mostly from home also allowed me more time to cook. Especially to cook meals I hadn’t cooked or eaten since I was a teen, or to cook entirely new dishes and desserts. I learned how to make traditional and Silician-style pizzas, French bread, madeleines, and rabbit ragù. I reverted and started making grits and biscuits, beans and rice, and corned beef from a can. I tried out stew peas with goat and beef, chicken tikka masala, and chicken marsala.

With all this, by 2013, I realized organic foods didn’t mess up my stomach nearly as much. And, that tons of probiotics and acidophilus (at least 7 billion CFU per meal or 30 billion for the whole day) kept me regular and regulated. I was in the best GI tract health of my adult life, and it stayed that way for a while. My flare-ups were maybe a few times a month, and not every day like they had been before. Yay, me!

That is, until the second half of 2019, the months going into the pandemic. With me teaching a 60-percent full-time schedule at each of two universities (for 120% FT equivalent) and drafting an article once every two weeks as a freelancer, even working from home became stressful. My IBS became worse, but selectively so. Eggs, brown, organic, free-range, whatever, became problematic. So did spaghetti, as well as hamburgers, anything with pinto beans, kidney beans, any food beyond the mildly spicy (and sometimes that would go through me, too). Snickers in the daytime was bad, but a bar right after dinner and under 75 degrees Fahrenheit was okay. Egg whites from Trader Joe’s led to a fart here or a burp there, but organic liquid egg whites from Whole Foods easily sparked a flare-up. Salads for lunch were now flat-out forbidden, but a tiny one with dinner was fine. Ice cream with a brownie, blondie, or cookies, dairy or dairy-free, was also okay. Most delivered or picked-up food has been an experiment in pain and gas.

This back-and-forth with IBS only got worse with the pandemic. Plus, I am over 50. Not everything I ate in my teens and in my 20s should be in my stomach and intestines now. Some would say I should go completely vegan (keep in mind, about a fifth of my diet is already vegan, and if one cooks for meat eaters, it’s hard for an omnivore to not taste). But after making stew peas last week, even four kidney beans was enough to make my stomach grumble, and vegan or not, all of us (and yours truly, too) need protein.

If my IBS is mostly a combination of environmental factors (e.g., stress internal and external, sleeplessness, travel, work intensity) and my psychological profile, then what do I do now? Go see a hypnotist? Move to another part of the world with millet, sorghum, sugar beets, and other things my stomach can digest? As it stands now, about half the meals I make these days are for my wife, my son, and sometimes my dog, but I can no longer eat or even taste without consequence. And that is more frustrating than the IBS.

Marya’s World

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Admiration, African American History, Afrocentricity, Black Washington DC, Catherine Lugg, Community Space, Dissertation, Earl Lewis, Friendship, Joe William Trotter Jr., Leisure, Marya McQuirter, Multiculturalism, Public Historian, Research, Saab 900 GLE, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Temple University, University of Michigan, Veganism

Marya McQuirter, circa 2011. (http://twitter.com).

The most fun part of grad school for me was once I officially began my dissertation research and writing. Especially when I was on the road, or stuck in at the Library of Congress, or meeting folks at conferences or other events. Otherwise, as I’ve written about here many times, it was a single-minded, often solitary pursuit, with known and unknown enemies either trying to put me in a box or rooting for my failure. Really, if a university as a whole could be any less supportive of their students’ success than Carnegie Mellon University, it’s probably a for-profit institution with a nine (9) percent graduation rate.

That’s how my CMU experience had been even before the Spencer Foundation had awarded me my dissertation fellowship in April ’95. But I did take advantage of one generous dispensation by my department chair Steven Schlossman. My becoming ABD within a year of transferring from Pitt to CMU made me eligible for a one-semester sabbatical from teaching to pursue my dissertation research while still on my $4,000-per-semester stipend, starting in January ’95. I made sure to use it, borrowing $4,000 in student loans for that semester as well, so that I could live in DC without living in a box on a corner for a month or two.

That fall, my advisor through one of his colleagues at the University of Michigan had given me the name of a promising doctoral candidate, one who was from DC and also doing her dissertation research on Black DC. I had first called her in October ’94, to learn that her research was on leisure activities and public history in Black Washington, DC in the first half of the twentieth century. It sounded more interesting than my own research on multiculturalism in Black DC, but there were parallels. So many leisure opportunities for Blacks who lived in Uptown communities like U Street and Le Droit Park included public works on Black history, on the connections between Black history and US history. It meant that our projects were actually more connected than not.

Saab 900 GLE, 1st generation (made between 1983 and 1993), UK, May 3, 2012. (SilkTork via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

So once I came down to DC to work like a monk in archives scattered across the area in February ’95, I contacted her. I’d meet her for the first time about three weeks into my eight-week stay in the area, near the end of February. Between my first few days staying with a former high school classmate and meeting a stranger-peer, I had nearly two-and-a-half weeks of eating, sleeping, and drinking dissertation, with a few moments in a shared kitchen listening to older men talk like we were in a barber shop about exploits and life’s lessons.

When we finally met that last Saturday in February, it was a welcome change. It helped that the doctoral candidate had her own car, a used any pretty worn blue-gray, two-door, stick-shift Saab 900 that had seen better days in the 1980s. For her part, despite grad school, the twenty-nine year-old looked younger than my twenty-five years. At five-eight and change, I wouldn’t have to look down at her in order to see the top of her head.

What impressed me the most about Marya, though, was that I could have a conversation with her about my dissertation research without her eyes glazing over, knowing full well that she understood every word coming out of my mouth. Even most of my fellow grad students at CMU and Pitt didn’t really understand my approach to multiculturalism, Black DC and African American history, and education policy. But she got it immediately.

I loved talking to Marya about her research, though. Looking at leisure and the use of space in Black communities for leisure, for everything from reading newspapers and used libraries, to literally how people walked and conversed in public. I found her work, and the way she talked about her work, fascinating. I wondered if I could ever be in love with a topic as much as her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like writing about multiculturalism. I just wasn’t star-crossed over it.

I learned so much not only during my first time hanging out with Marya, but over the next few years. I really didn’t know DC’s neighborhoods and the history of individual neighborhoods until she came along. She introduced me to the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum on local Black DC history. She took me to the Washington Historical Society off Dupont Circle, where I found additional materials on Black activities that were educational but outside the formal structure of Howard University and the segregated DC Public Schools.

Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, SE Washington, DC, February 28, 2016. (http://www.thecapitalnews.com).

She also introduced me to a vegan lifestyle, one that actually seemed sustainable. Matter of fact, when I stayed with Marya for three days in August ’95, I was on a vegan diet. I saw the appeal, but my gastrointestinal tract, well on its way to IBS-land, could only handle but so much in raw fruits and vegetables. Still, Marya introduced me to so many neighborhoods and restaurants, to Ethiopian food in Adams Morgan, to vegan Chinese food in Rockville, to fellow grad students worked on public history dissertations, to young, intellectual DC in general.

Marya also unintentionally helped me see a side of Black thought that I hadn’t seen before. That she survived the Afrocentricity wars at Temple University while earning her master’s there made her tough but also made me weary of discussing my many criticisms of Molefi Asante and his grand entourage of followers. I was so relieved to learn that though she liked some aspects of Afrocentricity, Marya didn’t follow it blindly like so many others I knew in the ’90s. I’d met someone who also marched to the beat of her own drum.

Maybe I would’ve met these folks, made these connections, and gone to these places anyway. Maybe not. But if the former, it would’ve happened much more slowly and cautiously. Marya, for better and for worse, might have been one reason I thought of the DC area as a potential home after more than a decade living and earning degrees in Pittsburgh. Marya McQuirter, though, enriched my life in the years in which I needed it most. I’ve always admired her and her work, and will always see her as a friend.

Tyranny of the Self-Righteous “Liberal”

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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ADM, Agribusiness, Amazonian Rain Forest, Archer Daniels Midland, Climate Change, ConAgra, Decriminalization, Drug Policy, Economic Development, Economic Inequality, Environmental Justice, Environmentalism, Food Justice, Food Policy, Global South, Global Warming, GM, GMOs, Gun Control Debate, Gun Safety, Hypocrisy, Monsanto, Pitt, Saving the Planet, Species Diversity, Third World, Veganism, Vegans, White Liberals

Toni Collette as Fiona, “Ms. Granola Suicide,” in movie About A Boy (2002), screen shot, June 18, 2014. (http://hotmovies.com via Universal). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution picture is personification of topic (self-righteous liberal).

More and more, I’ve tired of folks who proclaim that because they’ve finally “seen the light” on a particular niche or chic liberal issue, that their view is not only the right and only one. Anyone who doesn’t fall in line with their perspective is the enemy, a sap in support of the destructive forces of capitalism, a person whose individual actions will destroy the world.

That most — but not all, of course — of these people are White liberals isn’t exactly a surprise. This first occurred to me a quarter-century ago, when, as a Pitt undergrad, students active in environmentalism were going around campus asking us to donate time, money and signatures to stop Brazil from tearing down their Amazonian rain forests. Though I understood that we needed to process as much oxygen as our bodies would allow (and pull as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as possible), I also thought, “where the heck do we get off telling Brazil what to do?”

Brazil was and still is a leader in Global South economic development, with massive inequalities to boot. After two and a half centuries of virtually unchecked economic and industrial growth at the expense of the environment, though, where did we as Americans have the right to tell people in other countries to slow or halt their economic development? After exploiting the riches, resources and peoples of the world, where did these do-gooders get off telling other countries that they ‘d have to find a slower way to deal with poverty, or to not exploit their own resources?

An aerial picture of an area of the Amazon Rainforest, Brazil, September 9, 2009. (Felipe Menegaz via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0/GNU.

I would get into the occasional argument about this very White, very un-liberal liberal way of thinking. One where we’d get to keep our modern development while countries like Brazil were supposed to languish in the Third World box we and Europe built for them. Of course, the do-gooders would argue back at me, telling me that I wanted to destroy the environment and make the air unhealthy for our future kids and grandkids to breathe. As far as they were concerned, keeping the Global South poor and exploitable was our only chance at beating back global warming and species destruction.

It’s not any different today with issues like food justice, gun control and safety, and drug policy (and for some, religion). I have a Facebook friend who has become more belligerent about promoting veganism and condemning us so-called meat-eaters (technically, humans are omnivores) over the past half-decade. The issue for him couldn’t just be about agribusinesses and their gross abuse of the land, of crops and of domesticated animals, their control and degradation of much of the world’s food supply. No, it’s about individuals making choices that empower these massive corporations instead of going to an organic farm or farmers market or choosing to turn away from all animal proteins for the sake of their bodies or to curtail climate change.

I have no problems with vegans or veganism (I’ve tried it myself on occasion) or with fighting Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto and ConAgra. I do have a problem with the myopic thinking that people like my Facebook friend have in attacking individuals. It’s such a ’70s liberal way of confronting a huge issue. Not to mention a very White and elitist perspective. Fact is, a truly healthy and well-rounded vegan diet is an expensive one, as the federal government doesn’t subsidize vegan products like it does agribusiness. In a nation like the US, with a shrinking middle class and growing inequality, to expect every individual to stop shopping at Walmart and eating Big Macs in exchange for the organic farm and lentils is arrogant and wholly unrealistic.

There’s no way I’d tell my Facebook friend all this. I’d get argued down as if I were attempting to spread a superflu across the planet. And it wouldn’t be a rational argument either. But then again, it’s okay for White liberals to be irrational in their arguments, especially when it’s in defense of the planet!

ConAgra Foods logo, June 18, 2014. (http://innovate.unl.edu/).

There’s also irony around gun control and safety and drug policy. When it’s so-called Black-on-Black crime, or a drive-by in New York or Chicago, those meet White liberal expectations. When it’s Columbine or Newtown or Santa Barbara, involving White-on-White crime, then it becomes time for more mental health screenings and more gun control. When heroin and crack cocaine found their way into poor Black and Latino communities in the ’70s and ’80s, we needed tougher drug laws to lock away “the animals” and “thugs.” Now that crystal meth and heroin have made their ways into White-middle-class suburbia, it’s now time to decriminalize some drug possessions and legalize marijuana. But no contradictions there!

A big part of the problem with everyday White liberalism is the idea that individuals and their individual decisions will add up to a groundswell of societal change. Yet how can you change the world if you’re not willing to sacrifice the structures that exploit others who aren’t White and middle class, who don’t live in America or in some suburban cul-de-sac? But go ahead, keep on keeping on with your non-GMO, organic vegan tuna salads made of soybeans and carrots while yelling at the rest of us impoverished shlubs to get with the program!