When I tell an Occupier to go occupy the kitchen, they get all mad. But when they say it…
Late last year, Devra Gartenstein saw a Facebook post asking for recipes for a cookbook on the Occupy movement, which had kitchens on site at protests throughout the country. The cookbook was to be “cooking and recipe ideas for the 99%, by the 99%,” as well as “information on hot topics of food injustice” and a look at the early days of the busy Occupy Wall Street kitchen.
Gartenstein, the longest-standing vendor at Seattle farmers markets, seemed well placed to help… She was “a sympathetic outsider” who had donated a stove and surplus food to her local Occupy Kitchen, and she was also the author of two cookbooks and a food history book, the last written through her own “accidental publishing company” focused on quirky books about food…
But the project proved harder than a protest.
It was difficult to figure out whether the book should be inexpensive or a coffee table novelty, how to split profits and whether there should be profits, and how it should be organized…
“The Occupy Cookbook project ran into contradictions at every turn in part because the acts of preparing and serving food are so complicated, bringing so much joy and also carrying so much baggage. Cooking can be an art or a pleasure; it can also be sheer drudgery, a burden and an obligation. We all deserve to be fed but, in order for this to happen, someone has to be enlisted to feed us,” she wrote.
That’s weird. People manage to get it together enough to publish cookbooks all the time. But then, they only do it because they’re greedy or they like cooking or whatever. They need to be “enlisted” to do all that stuff. We need a craft service draft! (Well, first things first. Coming up pretty soon here, we’ll need to start drafting people into medical school…)
Just another glimpse of what the world would look like if Occupiers took over. But lest ye judge Occupy Seattle too harshly, just look at all the good they did yesterday afternoon:
They ended up throwing $5,000 in $1 and $5 bills out a hotel window. Take that, capitalism. Take that, Citizens United. This is what futility looks like!