Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is back in her community garden.
She made this video.
First of all, composting is not hard. It is literally letting organic matter rot in a pile. I can get a community banning it because it can smell, but I don’t get how “not having the pickups” makes it hard.
Ignoring that ridiculousness for a bit, I wanted to focus on her idea of culturally familiar agriculture.
This is the woke Social Justice version of Lysenkoism.
Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific idea promoted in Stalinist Russia regarding agriculture that resulted in mass starvation and the political imprisonment of actual agronomists.
She is from New York City, representing the 14th district of New York, which is in the Bronx.
Yuca, which I am very familiar with as a Latin American dish growing up in Miami, is the common Latin American name for the root of the Cassava plant.
Cassava is a tropical or sub-tropical plant. The leading nations of the world for Cassava production are near equatorial, Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand, Indonesia, which are all between 5 and 15 degrees latitude north or south.
New York City is at 40 degrees north latitude. It is far from a tropical climate.
Cauliflower is a member of the Brassica family, which includes mustard and cabbage. These are native to central Europe and the northern Mediterranean, which is between 40 and 50 degrees north latitude.
Cassava takes about nine months to be ready for harvest but dies in frost and stops growing at about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So growing Cassava in a northern climate which is frost prone is difficult and will not yield much at harvest time.
Cauliflower is an annual plant with a much faster time from planting to harvest, at about 10-14 weeks.
But…
Fried Yuca (Yuca Frita) is culturally significant to her people while cauliflower is not. So rather than impose your racists, colonial, white European vegetable on her because it readily grows in the climate of New York. Her people are going to have to starve on a paltry, authentic Yuca harvest.
Also, and I just want to comment here. When she says “a lot of us are one or two generations of living off the land” and so are “naturally attuned to live in an environmentally conscious way” that is nothing but racist bullshit.
Just because her grandfather had a farm in Puerto Rico doesn’t mean she knows anything more about agriculture than any other person who grew up in the concrete jungle of NYC, and she seems to know a lot less.
Also, the idea that “communities of color” are naturally attuned to live in an environmentally conscious way” is just some woke version of the noble savage stereotype.
There are a lot of white farmers in South Dakota, Indiana, Nebraska, Illinois, and Alabama, that I know who are a lot more connected to living off the land than she is.
When she gets into the part about white people resisting Plantains and Yuca, she shows her ignorance and negative stereotyping of white people.
Yuca is like a potato. Don’t eat it raw or drink the water you cook it in (it’s poisonous).
Does she think we’re going to stare at these items like we don’t know how to work a cookbook and can’t eat anything that doesn’t contain mayonnaise? Also, what does it say about “people of color” that they can’t learn to eat cauliflower?
This is just a disgusting mess of ignorance and prejudice.
It all revolves around the reality that she doesn’t have the foggiest understanding of agriculture or what grows where.
European cultural foods are the product of northern climate plants and Latin American cultural foods are the product of tropical climate plants.
Thousands of years of trade has diversified cultural palates, but German’s don’t eat Yuca because they are racist. It’s because it doesn’t grow there.
In her push to be culturally sensitive in agriculture, she is going to starve us all to death.
There is 4′ 11″ Gringa in this household that will stab my hands if I get in between her and her yuca frita and her platanos fritos.
But in the other hand, I learned to make cornbread.
PS: Yuca is hard work, Once you plant that thing, it grows if you do not bother it, but you need to know when it is good and big enough to DIG OUT. And it is not a simple pull like a carrot: you need a hoe and labor.
I know, we grew some when I was a kid because my parents (White Spaniards BTW, therefore racists) grew up as farmers and wanted to grow stuff in our land.
Too much work when you had the weekly araber selling good stuff cheap.
I just looked up the price of yuca in my local Walmart: $1.42/pound. You cannot get a 1 pound bag of planting soil for her urban garden at that price.
She is an idiot
I very strongly suspect that she (nor her immediate family) has never ever ever planted any kind of garden or food crops.
There’s a hell of a lot of White Supremacism underlying most woke intersectional theory.
In addition, does Occasional-Cortex’s utter agricultural ignorance remind anyone of Chairman Mao, and his erroneous belief that sparrows should be eradicated?
First of all, effective composting can be a pain in the backside. It is not as simple as leaving it in a pile to rot. (Yes, that will work, but it takes ages for good results). Time, temp, materials that are in the pile, etc… all make a difference.
But, the rest of it… wow…. clueless.
Just because you want to grow something does not mean you can do it in your area. I tried growing jalapenos in my northern state. Waste of time. They would need a green house. On the other hand, I have rhubarb growing naturally all over my yard.
But, being morally right is more important than being factually correct. Who is with me here?
There’s a term for being “factually correct” that also overlaps “morally right”- it’s called “honesty”.
And you can’t have the one without the other.
My mother has always had a compost bin. Start with a bag of topsoil then add all the coffe grounds, egg shells, and vegetable peelings. Stir with a pitchfork. As more layers get added, stir the new stuff partway into the old. The bottom layer is where you get the compost for the garden. It wasn’t that hard, took 30 minutes of work one a week to stir.
Maybe in Maimi where it’s hot and humid year round it’s easier. Also, the bin shouldn’t have a bottom so the worms and bacteria from the soil help break it down.
She has one now that I help with since she moved to Alabama.
How much harder is it up north?
“So, the way to do this right is, you don’t come into a community and impose what you think is right.”
I suppose that would include the stupefying ‘Green New Deal’, and school busing, and government housing (‘the projects’) to name a few.
These silly imbecilic jerks still think FDR’s New Deal was wonderful and FDR is a friggin hero.
I come from a place that has “Famous Potatoes” on the license plate. No, I’m not a farmer, although some of my ancestors were (with varying degrees of success). Potatoes are a stereotypical white guy food item and yet they are native to Andean region of South America. Now they are grown in large areas of the world. Food is like that. If it’s tastes good, and if it can be grown locally, people will grow it and eat it. In today’s world, if it tastes good and can’t be grown locally, we import it. To imply racism because some people have a cultural aversion to certain foods is the height of lunacy. For example I don’t eat dogs, I have nothing against those who do, just not my thing, then again neither is liver. Generally speaking food is much more of a cultural unifier than a dividing factor.
As an aside, according to AOC we’re supposed to believe that urban garden spaces in big cities is the way the Green
NewRaw Deal will feed the world.Remember, if you don’t do something, it’s racism and bad.
But,if you do something, it’s cultural appropriation and bad.
Well, let’s try an experiment.
Under her leadership, let’s see her district survive as a community for a year by itself. So, full containment, isolation protocols, and no imports of food, clothing, fuel, etc. after a month of prep time. (I’ll give them a pass on water for the sake of compassion and because it will take longer that way.)
If more than, let’s say, 10% of the people survive, I’ll be willing to listen to her. Assuming she is one of the 10%, of course; I suspect, however, she wouldn’t be.
First, we have to actually get AOC back into “her” community (she’s actually mostly from Westchester).
Like most good nomenkultura, she dumped that place for her fancy digs in DC in a New York minute.
“White people won’t eat or know what to do with cassava, yuca, plantains…” Betch I live in Central Florida, I eat yuca several times a month, plantanos maduros are one of my favorite desserts/side-dishes, fried yucca is my brother’s favorite side dish to Cuban food, there’s a giant fucking bag of frozen yuca, sweet potatoes, cassava for making soups at the f’ing WalMart.
My Cuban friends would kick my ass if I turned my nose up at their mamá’s or abuela’s recipes.
The only quasi-stereotypical Hispanic root vegetable I can’t get my head or palate around is jicama, there is just something subtly off about the flavor
Someone should inform her of the shorter growing season problem with yucca. She can then solve that problem with legislation mandating a longer one. Or she could just wait a few years after her Green New Deal fails to pass and the situation will take care of itself.