Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Digestable began when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the US, and until now has been a place where discussion of the pandemic itself (as opposed to its impacts) has not happened. This was (and is) an ~everything else~ place, but today I’m going to write about COVID.
As you’ll see, Gabriel also took this week to ignore the general parameters of their column.
Today’s ferments:
When I was in college, getting my Very Useful Liberal Arts Degree (vulad?!), there was much discussion of theory versus practice. Generally, practice was more highly valued, but theory was more readily available, and naturally occurring within the confines of school.
Last week, I wrote about the value of writing versus doing, a similar line of questioning. Among other things, I concluded that writing is a vital kind of doing.
This weekend, I tested positive for COVID. I feel relatively okay—and have gotten to put some theory into practice.
When I write about the climate crisis, or any other kind of big-picture disaster, I often emphasize the importance of relationships. Mutual aid networks have kept people fed and housed the last few years. Knowing neighbors saves lives when heat waves or storm surges arrive. Figuring out how to get along, especially when resources are scarce, is crucial to our survival under dire conditions. (See Station 11, an ironic and blessed salve amid the pandemic.)
As I assortedly let people know I was sick, here are some things that happened. One person had soup and momos delivered to my door; someone else dropped off vitamins and gave me a masked hug; a third met me outdoors to hand off a pound of coffee and offer some advice for how to best care for myself. I listened to Gabriel’s album, which is literally called Be Well!, and that helped too. Last night, friends brought me ice cream and sat on the patchy grass outside my home while I rasped at them through a mask.
Too many people have suffered through this pandemic alone; lost loved ones alone; were lost, alone. Too many were cut off from communities facilitated by school and work and other gathering places, and offered only two-dimensional social networks as proxy.
A few days in, three thick shots of Moderna in my bloodstream are certainly helping. And, provided that I am mostly well, the hardest part of being sick for me would have been the loneliness. For a lot of Americans, the pandemic is ‘over,’ but I’m just now experiencing the illness that makes the pandemic a Thing. Reconciling these two distinct realities alone is daunting, but I know I have people at my side (not literally, I am isolating, I promise!).
Back in 2020, everyone was suddenly into birding, and actually looking around at where they live. These are all things Jenny Odell writes about in How to Do Nothing, which also got a lot of airtime in early pandemic days. She talks about attention, how we place it, and the power we can reclaim in doing so.
This is also stuff I write about often, as well as practice, but not as much as I have had to the last few days. Generally, I ride my bike around and bounce from place to place; I like to move fast. Apparently, ‘taking it easy’ means being slow in a way I’m not accustomed to, which has implications for my attention.
Today, I walked down a street I usually ride on, and encountered twenty straight feet of black raspberry bushes. Along the waterfront (also a bike path), I stopped to draw, otherwise at a loss for how to occupy myself outside without moving too much. I noticed a silly mowing pattern that left a circle of wildflowers untended. I looked at the way the planes of my building’s roof join together, instead of just rolling past them on my way inside.
It is reassuring, especially amid broader questions about the value of writing in the face of all that needs to be done, that some of the theory that guides me also holds up in practice.
And then there is a darker side to all this: the unclear medical guidance as variants mutate, the ambiguous timeline on which we stop being a danger to each other. A friend who works at a clinic told me they’ll be waiting until Spring 2023 to receive more lidocaine, one of the most common local anesthetics in use. The things we—and truthfully, we here means people with access to healthcare at all, we means white people for whom systems much more recently started to fail, we means people with class privilege to fill the gap—used to rely on to save us are becoming increasingly less reliable.
It is a great time to support the leadership of people who have been navigating this systems failure for much longer: Black women, Indigenous people, immigrants and refugees. It’s still a good time to invest in deep relationships, and in knowing your home place. It’s worth your time to take a moment to tell Chuck Schumer we still need COVID funding, because this is still a public health emergency.
Keep your eyes open and take care, friends.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
I’ve learned a lot about cucurbit biology from this squash plant I’m raising in our kitchen. It sends out these little tendrils at each leaf node. The tendrils come in threes; short, medium, and long; and even when I try to nudge them to grip the bamboo stake I’ve put in their pot, they curl in their own way, stake be damned. So I’ve concluded that the tendrils must act like a three fingered hand, shooting out in the hopes that something will be there inside their triangular reach that they can curl back into.
Yesterday I noticed that there are these little ducts on the underside of each leaf that excrete tiny little drops of water. They’re more concentrated near the stem and spread out at regular intervals. I’ve learned this process of excreting water droplets is called guttation. It’s how plants get rid of water during the day when it’s too warm or humid for transpiration to work. Some plants only do this in emergencies, when they’re waterlogged they can suck water out of the soil, but from what the internet has taught me veggie plants guttate pretty regularly and their little drops of water can even be helpful sources of hydration for pollinators and other insects.
The internet also taught me about sloth moths. Sloth bodies are their own ecosystem and a particular kind of moth is only found in their fur. When a sloth climbs down from its tree for its weekly poop, the moths lay their eggs in the poop so their larvae have a nice feast. Then when the baby moths grow wings they fly up to find a sloth and hang around eating the algae in its fur. Wiry sloth hair has ridges in it that are great algae homes and when a sloth goes swimming their fur soaks up enough water to keep their algal communities lush and green, allowing the sloth to blend in with the leaves they live among and eat. Because sloths eat only cellulose-heavy leaves, sloths have four stomachs that take about a month to fully digest a meal. The microbiomes of their stomachs can be disrupted when sloths are removed from their normal tree canopies and the diets of carrots and vegetables they are often fed in captivity are difficult for them to digest, leading to early mortality.
I’m trying my hand at brewing ginger beer. I captured some wild yeasts in a jar, fed them with ginger sugar and lemon, and bottled them. When I went to see how the pressure was in the bottles this morning, I noticed a sediment had formed in each of the three bottles, which the internet informed me was yeast and not a reason to dump anything out. I’m used to finding some yeasty sediment in my kombucha, but without the lactobacillus to help turn alcohol to acid, the yeasts in my ginger beer don’t have anything balancing them out and are free to go wild. This is why ginger beer can get decently boozy if you ferment it long enough, while kombucha never really gets very strong. I knew there were yeasts in my ginger beer when I bottled it, ready to gorge on the sugar and turn it into CO2 and alcohol, but seeing them in front of your eyes really feels like a magic trick.
It’s been hot in Ireland and our compost bin is spontaneously generating its annual crop of fruit flies. They’re annoying and a bit gross and having towel-covered containers of sweet fermenting things in my cupboard doesn’t do anything to deter them. So I made a little fruit fly trap, some cider vinegar and a drop of soap in a tiny jar covered in plastic wrap with some holes in it. Maybe it's sadistic, but I enjoy seeing their tiny bodies accumulating in the bottom of my little false-ferment, watching them search for an opening to get in and then, less successfully, to get out. It isn’t their death that intrigues me, like watching the squash plant grow, it’s just watching life happen.
The squash plant is so big. It grows so much faster than any of the herbs or the houseplants we have. It's been six weeks and it's already vined up to the top of our windowsill. It’s a winter squash so it should still be a while, but I’m excited to harvest its flowers. I’ve learned what to look for so I can avoid the female flowers that would generate a squash, if it’s even able to grow a full squash in its little pot. The plant grows so big, so fast so it can push all that accumulated energy into a gigantic fruit. Unlike summer squash, which is best picked young, you mostly harvest winter squash just as its vines are beginning to die, when the plant has moved its water and sugar and strength into its offspring, and the skin is hard under the pressure of all that life.