Bloodroot
(with special appearances by my thoughts on everything in the whole world)
i’ve known about bloodroot for a few years because i had one of their cookbooks. just reading through the cookbook inspired me and made me want to learn more about the ideas they discussed in the preface – how food can be a political statement, and how feminist food is vegetarian food.
i learned about the intersections of feminism, ecology, and animal rights in the form of a philosophy called ecofeminism. in college i managed to put some sort of ecofeminist spin on every women’s studies and english paper i wrote, and i did my senior thesis on ecofeminism and the poetry of adrienne rich. when i visited hawaii for the first time i was reading a lot of ecofeminist theory, and it was there i realized that i had to find a way to live these ideas. at the time i was applying to nyu in their individualized study program to study ecofeminism and literary criticism.
i worked very hard on the application and, amazingly, was accepted. but by that time i was planning to go to cooking school anyway, so i deferred nyu for a year.
so, i wrote them a long cheeseball letter asking if i could intern there, and they said yes. i went out to stay with a friend who lived nearby, and immersed myself in the world of a feminist vegetarian collective restaurant. in the span of 5 days i went from working in an infuriatingly corporate art department to a restaurant full of radical feminists making mostly vegan food. i went from filing and answering the phone in midtown to picking blueberries in their garden, baking bread and talking about things like whether the internet is a useful tool for revolution or if it is part of the problem.
now i am back at home, in between both worlds, and i want so badly to carry bloodroot around with me like a talisman, to protect me from the rest of the world and enclose me in the bubble of life as i want to live it. they offered me a job, but what i need now is to pay
so, in an attempt to live in the bloodroot world for just a while longer i am now going to try to explain to everyone why i am so gushy about them.
because i’ve been gone for 2 weeks, i have no food in the house. there are no supermarkets near me, i have no car, and i didn’t feel like going to new york, where i do all my shopping, so i walked to julio’s fruit boutique. julio’s is a 15 minute walk from my house, next to the huge liquor store, terrible pizza place, 3 dry cleaners, and the 2 indian groceries. they have really nice fruit and vegetables, and lots of variety. i feel good about supporting a local business, and they are cute in a kitschy way. i try not to have to go there, though, because nothing is organic. every time i go i ask them if there is anything organic, and they always say no. today i got a few things to tide me over, and as i was paying i asked the woman if they had anything organic that day. "no! we never get anything organic -- organic produce has bugs! we will never get anything organic again, customers don’t want food with bugs in it!" i said i was much more concerned about pesticides,environmental damage, and cancer rather than a few bugs, and she looked at me like i was stupid. "people don’t buy food with bugs! organic doesn’t sell!" i
the day before i had been 2 states over, in a 25 year-old restaurant on long island sound with views of sparkling water and a big garden out front and a vegetable and herb garden out back. one of the women was very excited about a new supplier she had found – an organic farm only a few towns over that employs disadvantaged kids and pays them fair wages, grows an amazing amount of breathtaking produce and, "as if things couldn’t get better – the 2 guys who run it are gay! i am so happy!" over the past few years she has been slowly ordering more and more organic ingredients, and this development was a major step forward. yesterday was the first delivery from the farm. two bearded men delivered the carts of produce, and then they and the three original collective women (now in their 50s and 60s) sat down to talk, over oatmeal-sunflower bread they had made that morning and kukicha tea. when the men left the women gave them a loaf of bread to take home.
i made swiss chard-lentil soup with rainbow swiss chard they had just delivered.
i was happily chiffonading the swiss chard, and as i lined up the leaves a ladybug stumbled from a yellow leaf, dazed, but still alive. she crawled on my finger and i showed her to the woman who was dealing with the farm. she smiled, said "well, that sure is organic. that chard couldn’t have been picked before this morning!" she kissed the ladybug and brought her out to the garden out back. i washed the leaf and added it to the pile i was cutting.
when the woman at julio’s spat out her anti-organic crap today, i thought of this episode, and wanted to sit and cry right there on the curb. where are the priorities of our country, when we would rather have antiseptic, irradiated, cosmetically perfect food stripped of all smell, taste, and soul rather than find an occasional bug in our lettuce?
but i have to find strength in the fact the bloodroot is changing all this.
it is a community of mostly but not entirely lesbian women who have done the impossible: they have created a space in which they can live life on their own terms. three of the original five still come to work every day and often put in 12 hour days, but they will tell you in a second that although the work is grueling it is all worth it.
they make an amazing amount of everything they serve from scratch, and some is grown right in the back yard. the menu is mostly vegan, and the cheese and eggs that they do use are organic and very good quality (most of the collective women are almost vegan, but they say that some of their oldest and most popular items have dairy and they can’t afford to take them off the menu)
they are committed to international cuisine, and they are interested in authenticity enough to do things like go to chinatown every few months to get their fermented black beans, hoisin sauce, and chile paste. they have amazing bread that they bake 2-3 times a week that has benefited from years of perfecting, blueberry pies from
they don’t have waitresses. the dining room is elegant, but you carry your food from the counter on a cafeteria tray and bus your table yourself. you order with a woman sitting at a desk and either knitting homespun yarn (they have become very into knitting and homespun and they teach spinning classes and sell supplies) or chatting with customers about people they know or conferences they have been to or things bush is up to or how to make perfect tofu eggless salad (nutritional yeast and lots of spices) or whether or not the internet is evil. no one talks about television because few people involved with the restaurant own one. ditto for computers. their cookbooks were handwritten and typed up by someone else, because they are luddites, which means that they don’t believe in technology taking over our lives and ruining our attention spans to the point that sitting and knitting or.
so you order with a woman at a desk, bring your order slip up to the counter, and a woman tells you your food will be right up, and to have a seat. behind the counter (actually a window) there are usually 4 other women: one doing the stove, one composing salads, one at the counter and one "running" – doing dishes (no dishwasher!), getting drinks and desserts, and bringing alcoholic drinks to customers (apparently it is illegal to make people pick them up). these jobs rotate often. women start out doing dishes, then running, then move their way all the way up to doing the counter, which is hard because you have to choreograph everyone else to make sure that everything comes out on time. when your food is done your name is called and you pick up your food, homemade bread, and collect your silverware (including chopsticks if you want them, which i have vowed to use from now on) and napkins. the woman at the counter tells you to have a nice meal, and you do.
when you’re done or while you’re waiting you can browse in the bookstore which is stocked with all my dream books, as well as homeopathy kits
if you have to pee you go either to the women’s room or the gentleman’s room, and apparently some people have become very mad at these titles, although i don’t see what the fuss is about. one of the women told me they did it because they want the women who come there to be women and the men to be gentlemen. the women’s room is filled with free menstrual pads, literature on everything from spaying and neutering your pet to activist groups for "senior lesbians and their younger friends." there is a bulletin board with business cards from massage therapists and bumper stickers ("against abortion? have a vasectomy") and all kinds of stuff. the men’s room has some of the same kind of stuff, but not as much.
a surprising number of men do come to bloodroot. one woman told me that her goal when they started is still her goal: "to create a place where women can feel safe and men can come if they behave themselves." at one point we were talking and this 67 year old woman told me that she believes that in an ideal world women would be with women ("everything you can do with a
many of these type of conversations took place while i picked blueberries with this woman. she had put the blueberry bushes in when they first moved in, and now every summer she makes two blueberry pies every few days with what she picks. she told me that unless she had the garden, her spinning and the conversation with her friends who work here and come here, the intense work would have driven her out long ago. the restaurant business is too hard – you need something to sustain you besides just the joy of cooking, because that gets old fast and there is so much to do besides cook. she said that the fact that bloodroot is political has really helped them stay nourished on many levels.
one day a young woman who had only been working there a few weeks cut her finger very badly at home while chopping. her boyfriend immediately drove her to bloodroot, rather than the emergency room, where a collective member treated her with homeopathic remedies and gave her boyfriend a few remedies and detailed instructions on how to care for her. they left,
two months ago another one of the original collective women broke her leg by tripping over the (rotary) phone cord. it was healed with homeopathy and she never took one chemical pill or had a cast. her doctor says the bone is healing remarkably well and quickly. among other things, she applied compresses of comfrey, an herb that they grow on the side of the property which has amazing bone-healing properties. she ate comfrey leaves, drank comfrey tea, and applied comfrey compresses. while i was there i made chickpea salad with comfrey that i picked. it has a nice, subtle, comforting flavor.
after every shift, everyone working sits down to a simple meal. the women who have come to work at bloodroot are of many different social and economic classes, and few of the full- or almost full- time women
anyway, at these meals people sit and talk to each other. it is so rare that anyone ever sits and talks to anyone else these days, and the fact that people at bloodroot spend so much time discussing politics and the like was amazing to me. everyone listens to everyone else, and usually the conversations are interesting because the women working come from wildly different backgrounds. not everyone there chooses not to shave, not everyone is a lesbian, not everyone is vegetarian or vegan (not many of the latter besides me), not nearly everyone is political. but what was vital and dear to me is that the women who are these things are neither apologetic about them nor self-conscious about them.
one day i was looking at the poetry section in the bookstore, and the same woman came over and asked
while i was there i stayed with my friend p. from college and her family. they had all been to bloodroot and were very kind to let me stay with them and p. was so nice about driving me back and forth. p. was a studio arts and women’s studies major in college, and she does a lot of art about the commodification of christianity – she collects kitschy, pop-culturey stuff like jesus nightlights. she has some really powerful work that uses materials such as a velvet painting of the last supper, her own
anyway, maybe needless to say, her family, mother especially, is pretty catholic and kind of mainstreamy. it’s a nice house, but suburban and the kind of place where the tv is always going. when i wasn’t at bloodroot (which was practically never) i was planted in front of the food network which was a treat for me since i barely have a tv at home.
one day p’s mother (whose SUV has an "I’m pro-life and I vote" bumper sticker on it) drove me to bloodroot because p (whose beat up truck has feminist and vegetarian bumper stickers on it, including "keep your laws off my body") was busy. she is a really nice woman, and we were talking about my life, as mothers always want to talk to 23 year old people. p had told me that her mother almost died when her older brother mentioned he might want to move in with his girlfriend, and i know p had told her that i lived with my male partner. one of the first things she asked me was "so, tell me about this boyfriend." then we talked about marriage for a while, her telling me that my relationship could never be all that it could be without getting married. i told her that both of us are half-
i thought of my own wacky, liberated, kooky mother who always says that she wasn't in love with kids until
i escaped from my childhood with a distrust of idealistic beliefs that were not tempered by action. i saw my father’s idealism and intelligence shrivel up and die a slow death caused by both "the green paint" (as he called it to clients and fellow dealers when talking over phone lines that did, in fact, turn out to be bugged) that he grew out back and the more deadly "white paint" that made him shrivel away to almost nothing. the night before her mother drove me in, i had talked to p a little about my childhood, and it felt good to talk about something i usually keep so secret. i told her about police at the door, my father spending my college years in prison, and why i feel that i can’t talk to him anymore. i told her that i always felt loved, but that my childhood was spent watching what drugs can do to people. that doesn’t mean that i’m not more against meat than drugs (i am), or that i have heavy,
i realize that this is why i am so in love with bloodroot. they are idealists who turned their beliefs into action. around the time i was being born, they were taking many of the same beliefs my parents had and using them to create, rather than destroy and decay. i walked in that day and told them about the ride in i had just experienced. they laughed, and reassured me that they knew so many women who had never had children or gotten married. we talked about how children are forced on women, how even now you are seen as some kind of weirdo if you don’t want them, and how some women take a look at the stakes of being a "liberated" woman today – going to school, getting thousands of dollars into debt, taking a job you don’t like just to get out of debt, etc – and some part of them decides that having kids and getting married is easier. it is still powerful to say that you want your life to focus on something that you can bring into the world besides a baby (note: for more on this see _of woman born_, by adrienne rich.). they gave me a mini-loaf of bread to give to p’s family as a thank-you for letting me stay with them, and they told me to tell them that these are the only babies i want, baby loaves of bread. july 2001
