Hi Bitches! I have a fun food story I think you'll like.
So I recently discovered there's a produce rescue in my state that purchases unsold wholesale produce at the border to prevent it from being tossed in the landfill. They then sell it off at hella cheap prices. You don't get to pick what's in your box, but, uh. It's 70 pounds of produce for $15, you get what you get and if you're like me you will figure out what to do with it rather than let it go to waste.
Anyway, my last box included an absolutely insane number of Persian cucumbers. So I decided I'd try something I've wanted to try for years, because if I wrecked one or two in the process it wasn't as big a disaster as if I'd tried it with expensive store bought ones, and...
I can make my own glatt kosher dill pickles now, and holy crap, Vlasic can eat its heart out. Mine are crunchier, more flavorful, better-cut and kept perfectly good food from being thrown away, doing them with my produce box meant they were about 1/8 the price, and also pickling is very easy but people think you're amazing and fancy if you pickle your own stuff.
Also if anyone is in Arizona and wants in on this action, it's called Borderlands P.O.W.W.O.W. (Produce On Wheels WithOut Waste) and you can find them here. Here's what my last box looked like:
I should note that's what's left after I split the box half and half with a friend.
HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHITBALLS THIS IS AMAZING!!! Thank you so much for sharing this extremely frugal win AND telling the rest of us how to get in on it. With grocery prices the way they are, this is sure to keep a lot of people from going hungry or missing out on necessary nutrition. I encourage everyone outside of Arizona to look for similar programs in your state! (Though I suspect it's mostly only applicable to border states.)
Also, drop that super crunchy pickle recipe, baby.
Here's more advice:
How to Shop for Groceries like a Boss
You Should Learn To Cook. Here's Why.
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not to quote rent at you like the millennial queer i am, but the opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation.
make art. make music. make literature. make poetry. make clothing. make a birdhouse. make a meal. make a little guy. make a journey. make friendships. make community. make connections. make someone smile. make someone laugh. make someone burn bright with the assurance that they are loved. make a home.
your job on this earth is to care for yourself and be a blessing to those around you. we create a better world right here, where we stand, starting with us.
Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free
Hey, it’s ok to not be a “productive member of society.”
Some people are housebound. Bed bound. Some people physically can’t eat, shower, or use the toilet without the assistance of a caretaker. Some people don’t have the spoons to get out of bed in the morning, let alone work a 9-5 job in this capitalist hellhole.
You’re not lazy. You’re not less than.
And this is coming from a disabled person with chronic pain who can leave the house and walk (with some pain) without mobility aids.
You deserve to take up space. You deserve to cost money. You deserve to be here without feeling guilty just because you can’t give back in the traditional way.
You’re worth it, hun. 🫶🏼
Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.
I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.
And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.
It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!
Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.
We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.
And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.
We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.
Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.
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