To recap, this is a 1 week tag for myself, to get into the habit of burning through my backlog one article, one song, at a time, and share one learning/experience (check the day #1 post).
Day 2, and I am already struggling 🙂. But the new me is not going to give up! So without a further ado, let me get into it.
My Read This Day
Yesterday, I picked up The Best American Food and Travel Writing, 2024, edited by Padma Lakshmi. The more piece I’m reading from it, the more the central theme seems to be how food is political, just as it is personal. A fascinating collection already, and I’m not even half-way through it. Today I read Tell Me Why the Watermelon Grows by Jori Lewis (earlier published here).
A passage really hit me:
I was a self-conscious teen. I couldn’t help it. I had landed on the bright side of the tracking machine but there were only ever a couple of other Black kids in the honors and AP classes that formed the rhythm of my life. I often felt on display, singular, strange. I remember once having a conversation with my father about something I was self-conscious about as the only Black person around, although I can’t remember what. Was it someone who wanted me to play basketball? Or to dance? Or to speak like the sassy Black women they saw on TV? Was it a request to do something or wear something or, even, eat something? I think it must have been about food, because my father told me that he used to avoid eating watermelon in front of white people when he was younger. I knew then without knowing firsthand that watermelon was wielded by racists as a cudgel but I never imagined that he might have deprived himself of the juicy melon, not the least because it was ever-present in our house during the summer.
The simple act of eating a juicy watermelon, then, becomes political, because some racists use it to stereotype a whole population.
“For more than a century and a half, the watermelon has been a staple in America’s racist diet,” writes sociologist David Pilgrim in his 2017 book, Watermelons, Nooses, and Straight Razors. “The depiction of black people eating watermelon has been a shorthand way of saying that black people are unclean (the fruit is messy to eat), lazy (it is easy to grow), childish (watermelons are sweet and colorful), overly indulgent (especially with their sexual appetites), and lacking ambition (the watermelon presented as satiating all needs).”
If you’re interested in the intersection of food and politics (I previously wrote about how this plays out in India with vegetarianism and meat eating in my post about the vegetarian takeover of dosa) please read the article (and indeed the anthology)
My Song This Day
This is an indirect Shazam find — found the artist/album via Shazam, but loved this track more. Freedom by Larkin Poe — a sisters band (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) with roots blues/bluegrass origin. This album — Peach — is trying to explore more of rock/alternative blues genres as they try to redefine their music, but still connected to their roots - even covering some well known root blues tracks. While it has its meh tracks, some of the tracks absolutely rip! Like this one, Freedom, which encapsulates the album’s syncretic spirit, giving a node to traditions of root blues/bluegrass/folk that the artists started with.
My Photo Dump This Day
For my evening walk, I again climbed a small (tiny?) hill nearby, and while this part of the world does not have a pronounced spring blossoms, which tend to be more spread out in species, one is still treated these days with some of the blooming trees with striking reds and yellows and purples … These are some of the pics from the hillside.
Indian Coral Tree, Yellow Silk Cotton Tree, Red Silk Cotton Tree, Palash Tree
Not a bad day at all, again, eh?