bombs in bottles
"There's no such thing as a free lunch."
Maybe you've heard that one too. I have. Maybe, like me, you heard it most often from people trying to dissuade you from believing that we, as a society, can have nice things. Maybe, like me, you heard it most from people who wanted to short-circuit your thought process about social services.
I am taking a break from Kitchen Things to ask: Oh really?
"Kitchen Things," this morning, consist of two main tasks: make broth and clean greens.
"Make broth" involves me pulling a half-dozen roast chicken carcasses out of the freezer, along with a bag of vegetable scraps, and throwing it all in my pressure cooker. Set for two hours, walk away, voila: A couple gallons of chicken broth, ready to be eaten, cooked into other meals, or frozen. (I see no reason I couldn't pressure-can broth; I simply haven't tried it yet.)
My broth is made entirely of the parts of the chicken and vegetables most people toss in the trash. It's bones, cartilage, carrot ends, onion peels, apple cores, wilted celery leaves, herb stems. When it's done, I'll strain out any remaining solids, which will go directly on the compost heap. I can do this because any animal matter that might otherwise putrefy gets leached out in the boiling process; all that comes out is bone, which is a good source of minerals for my garden.
"Clean greens," today, mostly means cleaning lambs' quarters, aka white goosefoot, aka Chenopodium album. It's a prolific weed here. It's entirely edible. It's slightly more of a pain to clean than most garden greens, but it beats anything you'll buy in a supermarket for flavor.
I don't buy lambs' quarters seeds. I'm not sure anyone sells them. The plant comes up without my doing anything; it re-seeds itself prolifically, and local birds drop off plenty in my garden each year. I have seen this stuff grow out of piles of bulldozed gravel on construction sites. I am convinced Chenopodium album, like the cockroach, will out-survive us.
The end of lambs' quarters season is the beginning of purslane season, a creeping succulent-esque plant that is also delicious sauteed with a bit of pepper.
I do not categorically disagree that "no free lunch" exists. I certainly did some work to prep these greens (though, again, less than it would have taken me to drive to a grocery store and buy spinach shipped to me from California). The pressure cooker runs on electricity. Resources go into finding, harvesting, preparing, and cooking food. Obviously.
But I categorically disagree with the implication that scarcity and greed are immutable facts of existence. Nature, in my experience, is generous. There are more lambs' quarters in my yard than I can possibly eat in a given year, for which I do absolutely nothing. The plants come up each spring as a gift. It is not incumbent upon me to hoard them; it is incumbent upon me not to waste them. Nature's generosity calls upon me to be generous too.
Nature isn't the bottleneck; our stingy policies are. For decades, the United States Postal Service has shipped day-old chicks from hatcheries to farms and backyards all over the United States. A batch of such chicks left a hatchery in Ohio at 6:22 a.m. today, headed for me.
Hens are amazing birds. They lay, on average, one egg every 25 hours for 3-4 years, sometimes more. Along the way, they turn gardens, perform pest control, and produce nitrogen-rich fertilizer. When they get too old to lay, they perform vital social functions like training young birds to be good flock members, watching for danger, and alerting the laying hens to the location of particularly tasty foods.
If one insists on eating one's post-menopausal hens, their bodies provide multiple meals; the remaining carcass boils down to broth and bone. (They are also hilarious; no one needs cable when they have Backyard Chicken TV.)
As a public service, the USPS has played a vital role in human-hen generosity relationships for at least a century. Yet this is the first year I've ever worried that my chicks won't get here in time. Not because hens cannot be trusted, but because the USPS cannot be. Our government is hell-bent on bleeding our national postal service dry in favor of private companies - who, let's be real, are no less likely to kill the chicks.
The hens are generous. It's humans who are cruel.
I work in my county's most impoverished school district. We have the county's highest rates of homeless students (20 percent), students on free/reduced lunch (90 percent), and students with IEPs/504 plans (40 percent). "There's no such thing as a free lunch" so often gets leveled at people like my students. The national consensus is that my students and their families are "lazy" and "demanding," that they "want a free ride."
Yet nothing in life is free for my students. Nobody I have met has a more complete conviction that nothing in this world, not even a chicken egg, will simply be handed to them.
They didn't even believe me that their school library did not involve fees, fines, or subscriptions. "You mean I can just check out a book and read it?" they asked me, again and again.
"Yes," I said. "All you have to do is bring it back by the due date."
"But that's it? I don't gotta pay you or nothing?"
"Nope. Just turn it in by the due date. I'll send you an email on your school account if you forget."
What absolutely not one of them ever asked me was "so the library is free?" Poor kids know: for them, nothing is free. "Free stuff" is reserved for people who already have more than they could possibly need.
Which is why "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is such a pernicious statement. First, it's proclaimed by a class of people who get free lunches, daily. Second, it obscures the fact that public services are not "free"; they are *pre-paid.* Our collective taxes already paid for that library, that road, that medical research, that mail delivery, that dairy plant inspection, whether you use them or not. We pay for these things because we want to live in a society, and a society has nice things.
I can eat weeds deposited by birds because I'm the only one who needs to eat them. Multiply me by 300 million, and we need some kind of society.
Maybe, on a societal level, there is "no such thing as a free lunch." But there sure as hell could be prepaid lunches for everyone.
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