Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Lobsters

I read today (Gourmet Magazine, May issue) that it is now illegal to kill lobsters in Reggio Emilia, Italy, by thrusting them headfirst into a pan of boiling water (a regulation to that effect was passed this March and it holds true for both the home cook and the restauranteur).

I hate cooking lobsters because it is the only food preparation that requires me to actively participate in causing a living thing to cease living under my guidance. I tell myself that the lobsters are living an existence in their tanks that has to be tantamount to hell, but it is a small comfort.

Still, I have long reconciled myself to not being a vegetarian. But I am a meat-fish eating person who wants the food I consume to be treated in a humane manner prior to my consumption of it (absurd? Maybe, but I am absolutely committed to this) and so I eat only free range poultry and meats and I avoid farmed salmon unless I know it’s farmed in ways that are in accordance with principles of sustainable fishery practices.

So where does this put me with lobsters? Do we KNOW that it is less humane to plunge them into the pot headfirst? If so, I will stop doing this immediately (on the rare, rare occasion that I cook lobsters). But what is the more humane alternative? Should I ask the governing officials of Reggio Emilia? Does it matter that they are a landlocked municipality? How is it that they deal with their pork and poultry?

Ah, the Italians! So often they govern with their hearts! Consistencies be damned.

It’s good to move things around every once in a while

Another round of applause for the talented Mr. F who can now do blog template tricks efficiently and well. Redecorating the blog has never been easier. Especially for me, who has done little beyond issuing directives. Sometimes it’s good to know nothing about something.

Conformity

Is it every girl’s wish here to be like the others? I just read a student blog that made me go back to this and think more about the pressure to conform. Because in truth, I do not remember this about my own past. My best recollection is that I was not bothered by my Polishness here (even at the height of the Cold War period and even though it meant that I came from a very poor country), about my years of spunk-verging-on-tom-boyishness, about my non-Catholicism back in Poland, etc. I’m still not particularly bothered by being outside of the mainstream in a number of my daily orbits. It may strike some as odd that I moonlight in a restaurant or write mini-essays in a blog (which does not aspire to be a blawg) or think it cool to clean my own gutters and watch cheesemakers form perfect rounds of Camembert or to hang out with people that are age-wise or otherwise different from me, like, for example students (with whom I have pretty much nothing in common) from the conversation class at the Kanzaki Cultural Center in Japan. I don’t aspire to oddities but I certainly don’t run from them.

Yet, sometimes I wonder if I am completely honest here. Because I do notice differences. For instance, in the last week of first grade (in my Polish elementary school), the girls were told to come to school dressed as fairies and princesses for an end-of-year celebration. My mother was not one to indulge little fantasies of gauze and petticoats and so she told me to just wear my best dress. Let me not count the number of ways in which I stand out in this photo (down to the odd way that I am holding onto my skirt). On the other hand, I do not recall being bothered at the time.



Sometimes I think there is a funny reversal of attitudes toward conformity here and in the Poland of my youth. Here, the preoccupation with individual rights is completely evident at every juncture (whereas in Poland, the collective good was, of course, at the forefront of political discourse). On the other hand, I notice that the vast majority of kids fight individuality and favor conformity all the way through their growing years in the States. To stand out appears to be the kiss of death. Only if you feel yourself to be beyond hope do you then jump ship and begin to intensely accentuate your strangeness.

I can’t say that I remember this to be the case in my Polish environment. It’s as if our collective conscience was saturated and we privately valued independence and uniqueness. Kids (yes, even girls) that stood out in high school because of their smartness or talents or peculiar backgrounds or interests weren’t shunned for it (I’m going to exempt religious diversity from this gross generalization – the specter of anti-Semitism in post-war Poland is a topic I intend to address in a later blog).

Even at the very basic level of appearance, tolerance for the odd was high (for instance, I had several years of skin issues that would cause anyone here angst to the max yet I was extremely socially active; friends had body odor since levels of hygiene were mixed and deodorants were unavailable; others had lousy clothes; one girl was extraordinarily obese for medical reasons yet for a long time she dated one of the hot guys in our class and btw, he was ‘hot’ even though he stuttered).

My high school had some of the more together students as it was right in the city center and many families living there had deep urban roots with an above-average commitment to education. Yet, perhaps at a deeper level, we all understood ourselves to be losers as well (Poland is a country with one huge complex, broken down into a thousand other, smaller complexes) and so our empathy for the tainted trait in another was high.

As for our forays into the world of nonconformity -- perhaps our similarities bored us and our streaks of individuality provided an excitement and a diversion. It was not a bad way to move through adolescence.

This week means graduation for all of Madison’s high school seniors. Such privileged students they are compared to my Polish peers from the class of 1969 (that would be 35 years ago: gulp..)! But really, I can’t say that we had the rougher go of it. We were bonded, down to the last misfit in our class. Is there a better way to survive the school years?