Loving and Loathing My Inner Salad Spinner

Oh, but what a clamor you have created!

Ha.

I’ve got another one for you anyway.

I’ve recently become preoccupied with lettuce. Pre-washed, bagged lettuce, to be precise. No need for a salad spinner, or even a knife. Washing lettuce has long been my least favorite kitchen activity, so I’m incredibly happy to give it up. Happy, happy, happy I am, deriving true delight from the simplicity, the ease of bagged, cold-water-washed lettuce.

Then, however, I pick up an Adbusters, and self-doubt coalesces into small bubbles in my bloodstream. A few flips of the page, and it’s clear I’m just a pawn of the bagged lettuce industry. They spy on me late at night with red-eye goggles. They watch me leaning on the kitchen counter, shoulders swaying under the weight of the working girl’s cares. They see me faltering in the face of the complexity of the salad spinner, too tired, giving up. They stalk me to the grocery store the following week, where I stall at the hefty price tag of prewashed lettuce, then remember my late-night exhaustion, and throw the lettuce into my cart. They know me so well! They know how to make my bland heart beat with a neat, small pleasure – efficient lunch preparation. I feel delighted when it’s achieved. But lo, I am not delighted. I am not. I’ve merely been played by agribusiness turned lifestyle product company! When I am happy it is merely an illusion. I am not happy.

Adbusters generally makes me sick to my stomach; the tone is just a constant level of sarcasm I can’t muster, and I can’t really get on board with the whole ironic twisting of images thing. If the problem is the overabundance of branded logos, then how does reproducing them yet again, with a subtle, mocking twist, contribute to their destabilization? I’m ready to go on the record saying that the human mind is not that quick, or that sophisticated. The subtle mocking twist is only noticed way too late, long after the nearly palpable mapping of the graphic onto the well-worn grooves of the mind, grooves that are just waiting for the image to fall softly and neatly into their mold. (It’s kind of like drag…but that’s for another day.)

That was a brief detour. I think the problem with Adbusters and political orientations of similar ilk is that they maintain that we can’t have fun, can’t win, can’t trust our own emotions and desires until the revolution comes. Such an approach does not believe that change and authenticity can happen this very minute, in this very space.

Yesterday I read a statement on the Sylvia Rivera Law Project website that struck me pleasantly, and it is relevant. In a section explaining why they operate as a collective, they write, “We believe that in the struggle for social justice too often change is perceived as a product and not a process. We seek to use a non-hierarchical structure to support work that aims to redistribute power and wealth for a more just society.” For them, it’s not worth having a more common or efficient management structure to hasten liberation day. Instead, small pieces of liberation can happen right now, because SRLP is already structured the way it would be at the post-revolutionary sunset. It’s a process. Even with their conditioned, automatonic brains, some of it can happen every day, as they go along, instead of in one big fell swoop at the very end.

So I don’t need to beat myself up about buying bagged lettuce. I can trust myself to make okay decisions based on authentic feelings, here and now, even with my own conditioned, automatonic brain.

(Do you think SRLP would be angered to hear me co-opt their mission statement to get myself off the hook about bagged lettuce?)

Maybe, actually, bagged lettuce is just the smallest part of life, and I’m the least obvious, and most free, when against all good reason my roommates and I start making our most ambitious of dinners at 10pm, hauling out not only the salad spinner but the blender and the garlic press and mortar and pestle, playing music loudly and talking and talking, just because we like to eat together.

Comments

[airplane]

another beautiful post! Adbusters is really annoying, and I think that in their deep dark revolutionary complexity, they're not sure what they're saying half the time.

And, exactly, there doesn't seem to be any space for the process of change. I don't think they would really be happy unless we all became anarchists.

Going the SRLP way perhaps seems a little quixotic, but I think you're right that they're fighting the good fight daily, not only in their work, but how they do it. The only thing Adbusters proposes that I actually do to make change is to buy non-label converse sneakers. gross!

[maddy]

wait, so what exactly is wrong with bagged lettuce?

[the spinster]

i *love* the excerpt from SLRP.

have you ever read "culture jam," the book by the guy behind adbusters? grrr, it makes me so mad, all of its infatuation with guy debord and the situationists. ironic mock-advertisements will not overthrow capitalism. they are clever little scraps of pop art, but i think kalle lasn and his sidekicks vastly overestimate their revolutionary potential. for them, it's all about levying a critique without advancing a vision of (or building an infrastructure to realize) a different world.

in france, they also have pre-washed bags of edible clover. :)

[the spinster]

also, beccah said everything that i just said, except four days ago. beccah, you are smart.

[michelle]

this piece strikes so close to home. here i am trying to make a decision of whether to join the SRLP collective for their yearly retreat weekend as their cook, and noticing that their philosophy can perhaps be attributed to the extreme length of time it has taken to figure out logistics about this weekend.
perhaps that is a little high falootin...
but still, it is hard to concentrate on this uplifting of the process when the product is what is in mind. or perhaps it is shifting to truly appreciating the moment and living in it. the moment, of course, being when you delightfully and easily pluck a handful of clean, dry lettuce on to your plate and luxuriously eat it without regret.
and if i do cook for the collective as they meet all day to pioneer new frontiers for gender justice, there is clearly no question as to the baggedness of the lettuce.

[bixi chicks]

mich! thank you for commenting! welcome! and thank you for getting it, and demonstrating that there is a connection between bagged lettuce and SRLP (kind of), even when I didn't explain the link very well myself.

Being the cook is a big job. Is SRLP as cool as it sounds, and are they going to help you cook? More dispatches from the gender justice frontlines please!