CEP Newsletter - Food & Gardening

Dear Students, We hope very much that this missive finds you healthy, safe, and in good spirits.

We think of each of you all the time and hope you can sense our miles of smiles and positive vibes! We are especially excited to share the news that Jelena has a new addition to her family this July. Baby girl is healthy and the whole family is happy.

We are so glad to send you our third newsletter and a new package of CEP materials. As we wrote in the previous newsletter, we still do not know when we can resume our face-to-face courses. While our newsletters will never replace the work we do together in our CEP classroom, we want to stay connected as a CEP community as much as possible, and so plan on continuing this series.

A small, trusty group of our faculty and volunteers put together this newsletter with the theme of “Food and Gardens.” The group includes: Madison (newsletter designer), Sarah, Luca, Leila, Kim, Ben, and Melinda. We welcome your ideas for future themes! Please send them in with the included stamped envelopes. We’ve included a few new features in this newsletter, including the Artist Spotlight, Student Spotlight, and the Caption Contest.

In the time since we last wrote, the CEP team has been busy as we can be preparing for our return and everything in between. We have directed much of our efforts to networking nationally with other higher education in prison programs, working with potential funders and granting agencies, and planning our February conference. We have also redirected significant attention and resources to re-entry work, as we feel this is a good way to spend time during this hiatus away from you.

Please enjoy the material and know that you are always on our minds.

All best wishes, Andy, Pam, Melinda, and Jelena, and the rest of our energetic team!

Artist SpotLight Gina Beavers

Gina Beavers in her studio

is a contemporary painter born in Athens, Greece and now based in Newark, New Jersey. Her sculptural paintings comment on internet culture and consumption of food, beauty, and media. Beavers sources the imagery for her work from ads and photographs seen on sites like YouTube and Instagram. Many of her pieces are based on stills from makeup tutorials posted to YouTube or wacky nail art she finds on the internet.

Chicken and Waffles, 2012

Kimchi Hot Dogs, 2014

Corn Nails, 2019

When asked about the spread of food photography and why she started making food paintings, Beavers said: “I remember growing up when no one took pictures of their food. It was mostly Japanese tourists who did that, and they were taking pictures of everything. Now it has become completely ubiquitous. It’s something that came with the camera and maybe even the influence of Japanese culture. Along with that, is this idea that food is replacing art among a certain class of creative, urban people: talking about food or meals you’ve had, or visiting the newest restaurant seems more exciting or accessible to many people than going to an art museum.”

When looking at a photograph of Beavers’ paintings, they may seem to simply be realistic depictions of her subject matter. However, when you see them in real life and are able to walk around them, you realize the surface of the paintings is highly built up and textured, like a low-relief sculpture. She uses a variety of materials to build up the surface of her canvases, including paper pulp, which hardens as it dries, and various acrylic mediums.

Gina Beavers’ studio

How to Draw: Positive and Negative Space

Hi everyone! This is Luca, a Studio Art professor at Stetson.

I’m new to CEP and hope to meet you in person soon. For now, I’ll be contributing drawing exercises to the newsletter to introduce you to some basic drawing and observation techniques. Please feel free to send feedback on the exercises (Is the exercise too hard? Is there a particular skill you’d like to learn?), as well as sharing your drawings with us to be featured as a future Student Spotlight.

In the next newsletter, I will introduce you to the principles of contour line drawing.

Try it!

Let’s try making a negative drawing of the image below.

In art, negative space refers to the space around and between the main subject of a drawing, often thought of as the background. Positive space refers to the main subject or area of focus for a drawing. For example, if you were drawing your hand, your fingers, palm, and wrist would be considered positive space, and everything around or between them would be considered negative space. When making a negative drawing, the positive space of a drawing remains white, and the negative space is filled in with black. When most of us draw, we draw positively. That is, we draw the outline of a shape and fill in the details. Drawing negatively means observing the negative space--the space between and around an object--and drawing that, letting the object emerge by defining the space around it, rather than by drawing the object directly.

Remember, you are not trying to actively draw the leaves but instead draw the empty, or negative, space behind them.

1. Begin by drawing a simple grid over your reference image and on your paper. I would draw a line down the middle horizontally and vertically, but you can add more lines if you want. This will help you determine where the shapes start and end. 2. Lightly sketch in the shapes that exist around the leaves, adjusting as you go. Do not worry about getting the proportions exactly right--that’s the nice thing about plants! They come in all shapes and sizes. You will want to go slowly around the edge of the shape, looking back and forth from your paper to the image. Pay attention to the subtle changes in the edge of the shape.

3. Once you are happy with the shapes, darken them with your pencil or a pen.

4.If you drew in pencil, erase any lines in the white positive areas.

I CANNOT CONTROL So, I can Let Go of these things If others follow the rules of social distancing

Ode to the Onion

by PabLo Neruda Onion, luminous flask, your beauty formed petal by petal, crystal scales expanded you and in the secrecy of the dark earth your belly grew round with dew.

Under the earth the miracle happened and when your clumsy green stem appeared, and your leaves were born like swords in the garden, the earth heaped up her power showing your naked transparency, and as the remote sea in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite duplicating the magnolia, so did the earth make you, onion clear as a planet and destined to shine, constant constellation, round rose of water, upon the table of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.

I have praised everything that exists, but to me, onion, you are more beautiful than a bird of dazzling feathers, heavenly globe, platinum goblet, unmoving dance of the snowy anemone and the fragrance of the earth lives in your crystalline nature.

The actions of others

How long this will last

I CAN CONTROL So, I wiLL focus on these things.

How I follow CDC recomendations

My positive attitude

Learning about something new

Predicting what will happen

How others react

How much news I consume

My own social distancing

Other people’s motives

My kindness & grace

Sacred Space

By Sensei Morris For those of you who don’t yet know me, I have been coming to TCI as a chapel volunteer since early 2006, leading Buddhist services and facilitating programs like Path of Freedom. One day, as I was preparing to leave after one of our sessions, a chapel clerk approached me. He was being released, and he wanted to say goodbye.

As a clerk, he had been in the room during dozens of our meetings during the past few years. “I wanted to thank you,” he said.

He explained that he had listened to our conversations and had learned from what he heard.

“As you can imagine, a lot of guys in here live in the past or in the future,” he said, reliving good times or carrying the weight of regret; living in fantasy about tomorrow or burdened by worry. “But there’s one thing I learned from you guys—if I want to

be happy, I have to do it now.”

“Also, I learned that my mind is like a garden,” he said. “I have to be careful what I plant in my garden. Because whatever I plant in there, that’s what will grow.”

Gardening is a great analogy for the spiritual life. If we want healthy fruits and vegetables, we have to plant those seeds.

Good gardeners know that healthy fruits and vegetables take proper watering and nutrients. But weeds pop up easily and their roots suck the water and nutrients away from the tomatoes and okra we planted.

If we want peace and happiness, we have to plant the seeds that will ripen into peace and happiness. We have to nurture those seeds carefully. At the same time, we recognize that there are other seeds, ones that we don’t want, already germinating in the soil of our mind. We need to be watchful—to pull up the weeds of corruption when they sprout. To help you with your mental gardening, here’s a practice you can try when you are feeling stress:

1. Take a deep breath.

2. Focus on something coming through the senses. Feel your feet on the floor, for instance. Rest your attention on any sight, sound, smell, feeling or taste. Don’t judge it—just sense it.

3. Let go of any “weeds” from the past or future.

4. If there is something productive you can do, then do it. Otherwise, just take another deep breath and smile.

SeLF-preservation through maintaining personaL space

Student SpotLight Hi everyone! Sarah here to introduce what we hope will be a recurring element of the CEP newsletter, the “Student Spotlight.” While we are excited to share work with you that we have created ourselves/curated for you, we also want to acknowledge and highlight the amazing work produced by CEP students. I have selected an excerpt from student Doc’s recent submission to Gastronomica, “Uncontrolled Movements: An Overview of Abdicated Control In Florida’s Prison Food Spaces,” which clearly connects to this month’s newsletter theme. You will notice that I also have a Gastronomica piece in the newsletter, which is part of a special series for the journal on “food in the time of COVID” (don’t be too impressed, though, unlike Doc’s piece mine did not undergo full peer-review).

Anyway, please enjoy this taste of Doc’s work. Also, please consider submitting work of your own for future inclusion as a spotlight! We welcome your poems, art, essays, fiction, or non-fiction work, and will publish them in upcoming newsletters using your first name or nickname.

When I arrived at my first permanent prison assignment in November 1983, personal power was exerted in the public spaces of the dining hall environs and canteen queues to deter transgressors of your personal space, staff and inmate alike. For example, men who cut into lines demeaned everyone there and it was understood that beating or stabbing those who did so was not only normal, but expected.

Contrary to Bentham’s notion of “selfsurveillance,” (Sibley & van Hoven, 2009 p.199) and careless of whether authority watched or not, it was the emphatic enforcement of communal norms by individuals confident that the authority figures would endorse or ignore even violent corrections of transgressors. Thus, inmates inadvertently cooperated in the orderly operation of the prison by actively maintaining the integrity of their personal spaces. There was an implicit communal norm: we are all waiting together and we all want whatever is offered as soon as we can get it, but no one of us is more important (or dangerous) than the next man. Food is a high-stakes item because many men depend entirely on the State to feed them.

Inmates in Confinement have their meals brought to them; religious and medical diets are fed separately. The remaining 75-80% of the population must walk up to ¼ mile across the prison compound from their housing units to the dining hall.

Prior to 1990 this was accomplished by

simply unlocking the exit doors of the dorms at specified times and allowing inmates to find their way to and from the meal, regardless of weather conditions or staff availability. Inmates tended to self-select into three waves: those who felt the need to eat as soon as possible, those wishing to avoid the initial rush, and the stragglers who may have been engaged in other activities (e.g. personal upkeep, watching TV, sleeping, or playing games.) A “Last call!” announcement on the PA system alerted the latter group that the meal time was expiring shortly. Typically, 45 minutes was needed to feed 800 inmates in two dining rooms, one for each side of the compound.

While this organic transit to and from the dorms may have appeared disorganized, certain norms existed to discourage conflicts among inmates going to eat. Simple verbal courtesies defused seemingly mundane slights which could escalate into fights or even homicides, e.g. stepping on others’ feet or jostling them on the sidewalk.

Once the inmate arrived at the dining hall the acceptable competition for precedence was over. Your place in line was established. The act of skipping the line was taboo: any violator would face swift, potentially lethal violence. The more dangerous the level of offender housed at a particular prison, the higher the level of “respect” exchanged among them. Similar norms governed the canteen queues in the high-security adult prisons where I lived between 1983 and 1989.

But see Sibley and van Hoven (Sibley and van Hoven 2009, 199), for a discussion of these spaces producing ‘docile bodies,’ in contrast to this thesis.

2 Administrative or disciplinary confinement, protective custody, Close Management (i.e. long-term lockdown), and mental health crisis treatment units are all grouped under this rubric because they cannot leave their cells at will.

1

F R O M T H E K I T C H E N | Sarah E. Cramer

No Vegetarians in a Pandemic

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“There are no atheists in foxholes and no vegetarians in a pandemic.” This quip was my response when my friend asked why I, a vegetarian of eighteen years, was now eating venison.

He asked this question during our Zoom happy hour on March 17, 2020, four days into our two households’ respective periods of “social distancing.”

Since adolescence, I have had a deep fascination with food preservation and culinary self-sufficiency, which emerged alongside my first reading of The Grapes of Wrath and a corresponding obsession with the Great Depression. As a teenager I taught myself, following the instructions of a grandmother born in the 1930s, to make pickles and jam, and to can peaches, tomatoes, dilly beans, and more. To this day, few things rival the deep sense of satisfaction that comes with hearing the cooling jar lid go “ping!” in the kitchen. (Relatedly, few things trigger immediate disappointment like not hearing that “ping” … and then wondering how I will eat so many jars of unsealed jam quickly enough.)

After taking a brief break during college, my obsession returned in full force in my early twenties. I had my own house for the first time and I filled the yard with vegetable gardens, laying hens, and eventually broilers. My father and I took up beekeeping and built our own hives out of recovered cedar planks from the family land. The shelves of my small pantry filled with Ball jars of preserves, dehydrated produce, and honey, while my fridge overflowed with eggs and my freezer with put-up vegetables.

It was this shared passion for preservation, among other things, that drew me to my now-partner, Leslie. I have previously gushed about Leslie in print (Cramer 2017), and when our households joined we not only became a home with two water bath canners but also a home with two chest freezers.

Unlike me, Leslie is certainly not a vegetarian. She is a deer hunter, has raised and slaughtered heritage hogs, and even

GASTRONOMICA : THE JOURNAL FOR FOOD STUDIES, VOL.

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had a brief roadkill phase… we don’t talk about that one much.

Remember those broilers I raised in my urban backyard? It was Leslie who taught me how to kill and process them, and it was those broilers that first pushed me to question the rigidity of my vegetarian identity. I had raised them from chicks, given them a full, though brief, life free from stress and full of sunshine, clover, and dust baths—didn’t I deserve to eat them, too?

In our “regular” lives, Leslie and I think about food constantly—she now works for an organic certifier and I teach in a university sustainable food systems program. We fill our free time with gardening, cooking, baking, beekeeping, and foraging. In our COVID-19 lives, we have approached these activities, previously relegated to the status of hobby, with an unprecedented fervor. No loose grain in the house is safe from one of my sourdough experimentations. The vegetable garden has never been so well-tended—I hover around the beds for hours every day, fussing over every weed, studying each new sprout, rearranging individual pieces of mulch. While the world around us feels utterly full of despair and chaos, we are relishing this found time to focus on our favorite activities, and soaking up the sense of control and agency the kitchen, garden, and beehive provide at a time when nothing else feels within our control. We are also reaping the benefits of our years of food collecting (I hesitate to say “hoarding” here—a term I used to toss around jokingly to refer to our pantry—given its current, fraught meaning). We have venison to sustain us and enough preserved bounty to share. We can opt-out of the supermarket pandemonium, to an extent, and just. stay. home.

Additionally, I draw hope from the many, many friends and colleagues who have reached out asking for advice about starting a garden of their own. Colleagues who have previously shown no more than a casual interest in my field are requesting suggestions of local farmers they can support, and texting questions like “Do you think I should join this CSA?” I worry constantly about the many cracks in our society revealed by

1533-8622. © 2020

BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA . ALL RIGHTS RESERVED . PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION

TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS’ S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE, HTTPS:// WWW.UCPRESS.EDU/JOURNALS/REPRINTS -PERMISSIONS . DOI: HTTPS:// DOI .ORG /10.1525/ GFC .2020.20.3.12.

last, the widespread “reskilling” I have so pushed for personally and professionally? While we wait for answers, I’ll keep canning, fermenting, and nibbling on venison.

REFERENCE

Cramer, Sarah. 2017. “CSA Box Turtle.” Graduate Journal of Food Studies 4, no. 2 (November). https://gradfoodstudies.org/2017/11/ 11/art-essay-csa-box-turtle/.

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this crisis, and the many vulnerable people who will suffer.

However, my stubborn optimism pushes me to look forward to the world we can reimagine together on the other side of this. Will “civic agriculture” and “community food security” become terms with a more tangible meaning to the students in my future classes? Will farmers, farmworkers, and grocery store employees finally be recognized for the absolutely essential work they provide in our communities? Will I see, at long

The author, a vegetarian, enjoying a venison rib in early April.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LESLIE TOUZEAU

© 2020

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What is “Nature”? [for The PhILosophers’ Cocoon bLog]

By ELisa Freschi, Department of PhiLosophy, University of Toronto The first thing which strikes one if one looks for “nature” in, say, Indian thought is that one does not know where to look. prakṛti ‘natura naturans’ (but also ‘verbal root’ or ‘ritual archetype’) is of major importance in Sāṅkhya, and so is svabhāva ‘intrinsic nature’ in Cārvāka philosophy, but there seems to be nothing like the category of nature as elaborated in, e.g., environmentalist ethics. In fact, perhaps “nature” is not at all a “natural” category. Let me elaborate more on this hypothesis.

When we think of “nature” we are likely to think of something like endless landscapes, possibly filled with wild animals and plants. In other words, our idea of nature is opposed to civilisation and embraces animals, plants, and possibly minerals in a human-free environment.

The problem with this sort of associations is that it is heavily culturally influenced, for instance, by Eighteenth c. paintings about “nature” (e.g., the ones by William Turner).

By contrast, this imagery of “nature” just did not exist as such in the West before Romanticism. A conspicuous example is the comparison of the art of gardening in the Renaissance and in the Romanticism: in the first case, architects created well-ordered gardens, with logical and often geometrical structure, which are apparently human-made. By contrast, Romantic gardens aim at looking non-human made, and have stones instead of sculptures, grottoes instead of sculpted pavillons, ponds and water falls instead of fountains, etc. (As paradigmatic example of Renaissance garden architect one may think of Philibert de l’Orme (late 16th. c.) and compare his gardens with, e.g., the Grotto at Bowood, 18th

c.

The same applies to poetry, where “nature’’ plays a similar role, think, e.g., of the following lines by Shelley: Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing Its destined path, or in the mangled soil Branchless and shattered stand: the rocks, drawn down From yon remotest waste, have overthrown The limits of the dead and living world, Never to be reclaimed (Percy B. Shelley, Mont Blanc).

In fact, for contemporary Westerners it is difficult to think of “nature” outside the precincts of the Romantic exaltation of wild flora, fauna and landscapes as opposed to civilization and its flaws.

With these lines I do not mean to say that this concept of “nature” is a new creation of Romanticism. In fact, it has notable anticipations (e.g., the use of labyrinths already hints at “wild’’, “dangerous’’ environments such as a real wood) and could not be thinkable without the preceding history of Western culture, from Lucretius to the king Arthur’s legends. Moreover, Western European Romanticism is most probably not the first time and place where “nature’’ has been conceptualised in this way. Nonetheless, we as Western scholars must be aware of the prejudices we carry with us due to the lasting influence of Romanticism (and its appendixes and antagonists, including Positivism:-)).

Caption This!

Each week, The New Yorker prints a cartoon in need of a caption and solicits reader caption submissions.

Here are two examples of past cartoons and the winning captions. We’ve also included a blank cartoon for you to caption. Send us your caption idea, and we will print the caption contest winner in a future issue.

Vespers

by Louise GLuck

In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants.

I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.

“Knights and Knaves”

SoLutions Puzzles in previous newsletter

“Knights and Knaves”

SoLutions Puzzles in previous newsletter