What Bodies can Do
Physical power and precarity, and how we navigate it
After a rewarding conference week, I took a few days to catch up with my favorite city and some of my favorite people, stuffing in as much theatre, good food, and general culture as I wanted. My favorite thing to do in New York is to walk as much as possible—after my first year in the city, I finally moved to Brooklyn and reconciled myself to subways and an inter-borough life . Yet my flâneur tendencies continued—I would often take the train to West 125th St and not get back on until I had gone as far down the island as my legs would take me. I liked the idea that my body could propel me across the entirety of Manhattan, my feet barely registering how many blocks, miles I had gone because of how many things and people I had encountered. That perambulating was how I celebrated my first job, how I met my husband, how I learned to navigate New York on my own terms.
This week was different—not only because I set out with a mask in hand (as I have done for the last 3 years), but because I found myself needing it far more than I imagined, especially while walking. While I spent three hours enjoying (and notetaking) in the refuge of the research rooms at the New York Public Library, the sky outside turned what aesthetes would call burnt sienna and what I would call the color of Joan Didion’s abandoned silk curtains. The air shifted from its natural aroma of marinating asphalt, Sabrett’s hot dogs, and striving humanity to a more noxious, inescapable fragrance, like the interior of a cigar box from the days when New York above 14th street belonged exclusively to those who knew what humidors were. I felt like I had briefly returned to an era when bodies had to be protected from the elements of industrialization, when women in particular were expected to stay indoors, away from the noxious elements of urban life. I ducked into cafes, clothing stores, gallery spaces for sanctuary wherever I could, feeling—in a profoundly nineteenth-century way—like I was going to faint.
Yet this week, I was also staying with friends expecting their first child, and as such, I got a helpful reminder that bodies are anything but frail—in fact, they are profoundly powerful and resilient, if given the right resources for protection and support. My pregnant friend referred to themselves as a “vessel,” capable of not only providing life but of adapting to life’s circumstances. This reminded me of something I felt while pregnant, particularly while eating while pregnant—that my appetites were not only not shameful or problematic, but worth honoring. Before I was pregnant, I ate with the scrutiny of others in mind—what I liked, what I disdained, what was healthy and what was a “treat”. But while pregnant I suddenly felt compelled to eat on behalf of someone else—enthusiastically, expansively, with as much inclusivity as I could muster. Every bite of spicy papaya salad, fried chicken, barbecue, sweet potato biscuit felt like it could give her a sense of the world’s possibilities. I relished the cross-populating of my gut because suddenly my palate had a purpose: to seed the tastes of someone else. Even now that my kid picks her own food (and exclaims, often with delight, that she likes something she didn’t anticipating liking), I still feel it’s my job to model not just healthy eating, but pleasurable eating… a relationship to food that isn’t governed by fat anxiety or nutritional self-policing, but one that embraces both the organic asparagus and the fun-size candy bar. I want her to trust her body, to understand that the body is powerful and resilient and capable of making the most of whatever it is given. I also want her to know that protecting her body doesn’t mean hiding from the elements that would cause it harm, but knowing what resources she has to stay safe and to live her life to the fullest.
The ethics of having children during the age of climate catastrophe makes this an impossible equation, and I don’t want to minimize the very real harm that conditions such as the wildfires create—the more than 1 million people in New York City who struggle with asthma and other breathing conditions would readily attest to that. I also don’t want to suggest that conditions such as what we experienced last week are a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon—if anything, data suggests that wildfires will become more common and more intense as we proceed into the climate crisis era. But I do think that moments in which we are reminded of, and are forced to recalibrate, or our own sense of physical precarity are also opportunities to remember and reaffirm our capacity for physical resilience. Caring for one’s body is crucial…but so is, especially in an age of climate uncertainty, the opportunity to revel in and celebrate one’s body, senses, and freedom to breathe.
After a day of ducking toxic air, I made it safely back to my host and removed my mask, and my friend and I enjoyed a dinner of take-out Greek food in the clean air of their apartment. Suddenly out of the humidor of midtown Manhattan, the smell of the just-baked pita bread felt more luxurious, the snap of the loukaniko more pleasurable, the dash of hot sauce on my plate sharper and brighter than I had imagined. It took a contrast of conditions to make me sit up, take notice, and enjoy my meal the way I was supposed to. I’m hoping that my friends’ respite from wildfire season lasts for as long as possible… and I also know that we’ll all come out of it taking deeper, fresher, more appreciative breaths than we had before.
Recommendation: Future post to come on this, but I finally started reading Rebecca May Johnson’s extraordinary book Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, and ho boy, it will take some major restraint on my part not to use quotes from this book as epigraphs in every chapter of my dissertation. If you have a critical eye on food with a particular interest in the ups and downs of domestic labor, you MUST pick this up. Watch this space for more.
The Perfect Bite: I had two great bites in NYC: on Tuesday, the impossibly crispy okra at Tatiana (an accidental kitchen misfire that benefited my table) and the impossibly delicious focaccia at Librae Bakery near Astor Place. The latter was topped with a barely runny egg, chunks of roasted eggplant, and a generous drizzle of tahini and amba, a mango-based sauce that I would put on pretty much everything if I could. This slab of bread was basically a non-pocketed sabich sandwich (a mainstay of Middle Eastern breakfasts), so it was exactly what I, a lover of savory breakfasts, wanted on my last day in town. The haze parted just long enough that I could eat it outside, and it was stupendous.
Cooked & Consumed: Not a ton of home-cooking was done this week, but tonight’s dinner of various grilled meats and veg was deeply satisfying. Best on the roster, some grilled slabs of sourdough (the ends of a loaf from Parisi Bakery) brushed with olive oil and sea salt, and some long slices of purple Japanese sweet potato. I tend to forget about whatever root veg or potatoes are bouncing around in our pantry, and so only one potato was salvageable, but we still made it worthwhile, cooked slow to get a crispy skin on the outside and spoonable purple flesh on the inside. Delicious.