Farm Share number... 8?

I picked up our farm share at Kickass Cupcakes on the 26th. We got three Japanese eggplants, an heirloom tomato, and two cipollini onions for the first time. Cipollini onions are small in size, but they have a great oniony flavor. Japanese eggplants are now the only eggplants that I'll eat. I've had eggplant in a few dishes, but it's not fit for human consumption unless it's passed through a blender. Grilled or baked the consistency is just disgusting. Japanese eggplants are completely different. D tried a bite of one raw and said it reminded her of a flavorless apple. We grilled them with our green pepper, cipollini onions, and zucchini on Thursday. Luke and Anne brought BBC and steaks, so while the veggies from our farm share are good, we got the way better deal. Steaks > Vegetables. Always.

The rest of the stuff we've received quite a few times now. We got arugula, kale, cilantro, garlic (which looked a little nasty this time), 3 peaches, cucumber, zucchini, and beets. The picture to the right is a close-up shot of the kale. The greens that we get are always fresh and look good too. In Greenfield, I was used to seeing slightly nasty produce at Greenfield Farmer's Market. I thought that when you bought organic, etc; it just had to look like that. Nope. Our stuff always looks good. Not as perfect as the stuff you buy at the grocery store, but when you get used to seeing farm share produce, the stuff at the grocery store looks plastic. Not appetizing, just plastic.

Our farm share sources some of its produce. The peaches, for example, come from a farm in Georgia, and not western Massachusetts. It would be ideal if they didn't have to be trucked 2,000 miles, but they're fresh and taste good. Actually, the peaches that we got this week reminded me of the mangoes in India. When you buy a mango at a supermarket, the consistency is likely to be closer to an apple than a peach, right? The meat of the mango won't be stringy and mushy. At least, in my experience, that's how the mangoes are. The mangoes in India (where they're so good that I would murder a cat to have one right now) are more like peaches. Either way, the peaches were great.

We've told our neighbor upstairs to pick up our farm share next week while we're in Oregon. FYI: D and I are taking a plane to Oregon today. I'll update after we land and do something worth posting about.

Anti-Choice and Pro-Life

My aunt and uncle came down to Boston yesterday and we caught A Comedy of Errors on the Common. All three of us were bored by the performance, but we powered through it and never complained. Over-acting and bawdy low-brow humor were served to all. They even worked in a 'turn your head and cough joke.' Delightful. But it was free and none of us had seen the play before.

The highlight of the night was the conversation. I think this is true of my family generally, but the vapid "how's your job?" and "what have you been up to?" questions quickly turn into political debates. I love it. I'd much prefer to talk about health care and China than my job. There's a reason I'm paid to be there, you know? I think people who love to talk about work are suffering from a mild case of Stockholm syndrome. Anyway, before we had even left the house we were arguing about abortion, and my aunt used the term "anti-choice" to describe people who usually call themselves "pro-life." Pro-life is a term, like anti-abortion, that implies those of us who think a woman (and a man) should choose for herself are anti-life or pro-abortion, which is silly, because who is actually either of those things? I think a woman has the right to choose, but I'm not pro-abortion. I don't steal out into the night and try to convince pregnant woman to have abortions. That's stupid, and pro-lifers can't think that's true.

But I think labeling someone "anti-choice" is the same thing. People who think it's unacceptable to have an abortion aren't anti-choice. I mean, come on, they're not fascists. So all the terms that we currently use to label each other are unacceptable. Plus, aren't all of those labels just a form of name-calling? Can't we all do better than that?

Here's my name-calling free argument in support of a woman's right to have an abortion. Life isn't as sacred as everyone thinks. Yes, I like being alive, but we kill a lot of things every day, including human beings, for a multitude of reasons. We put our pets down, we bomb foreign cities, we put criminals to death, we kill people when we drink and drive, and we kill others when we don't do enough to help them. So why are fetuses so special? Let's call it like it is: human life is cheap. And the jury is out on whether a fetus is even human life. If it's human life at conception then I don't see why sperm isn't considered life. Sure, sperm can't become life on its own, but it's impossible without it. We should start arresting people for masturbating.

If abortions are made illegal, then someone needs to come up with a penalty for mothers who have them. You can't only punish a doctor who is willing to perform them. Should we treat mothers like first-degree murderers? Should we charge them with manslaughter? Or should there just be a fine? And I hope everyone is prepared to have more women dying in back-alley abortion clinics, because making abortions illegal isn't going to stop them. It's illegal to shoot a guy in the face, but I'm under the impression that still happens a lot.

I should delete this post and just write a funny one about actually being pro-abortion. It's not like I'm giving you any new information here.