{"id":1339,"date":"2018-05-07T06:26:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T06:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/?p=1339"},"modified":"2018-05-07T06:32:16","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T06:32:16","slug":"the-mechanical-and-living-origins-of-stinging-nettle-pesto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/2018\/05\/07\/the-mechanical-and-living-origins-of-stinging-nettle-pesto\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mechanical and Living Origins of Stinging Nettle Pesto (Recipe Attached)"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past several years, I have made cooking and reflecting on eating a mindful practice. When I have time to cook I typically reflect on the process, flavors, smells, and textures. I isolate my perception to what is directly in front of me. Several weeks ago, however, I contemplated a concept introduced in class as I prepared a batch of stinging nettle pesto: the distinction between mechanical and living systems. In front of me were University District farmer\u2019s market nettles, Trader Joe\u2019s pine nuts, Safeway Select olive oil, Lucerne Parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, and garlic cloves. While I could only trace the life cycle of the nettles with any certainty, I envisioned the journey of each ingredient. Perhaps it is this course\u2019s early emphasis on industrialized food, but my initial thoughts lead me to imagine monoculture orchards, industrial dairy farms, hulking processing plants, and I-5 semi-trucks. But as I focused on each step of a mechanized process more clearly, I also saw the interactions of birds, bugs, and microbiota with the plants. I visualized the miraculous growth of garlic shoots, workers hands harvesting, the ripening of an olive trees fruit, and cows mooing. It is funny to think that all of these natural developments likely involved fossil fuel-powered machines or that the nutrients taken up by plants had Haber-Bosch origins. Perhaps the human hands that touched their harvest touched a car\u2019s steering wheel at the end of the day. In my mental visualizations, the mechanical system was truly not so distinct from the living one. As I realized this, I reached the final step of the recipe: blending in the food processor. Each natural ingredient, with its lengthily imagined backstories, was being transformed through a process \u2013 living and mechanical \u2013 and it didn\u2019t seem that strange to me.<\/p>\n

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For the past several years, I have made cooking and reflecting on eating a mindful practice. When I have time to cook I typically reflect on the process, flavors, smells, and textures. I isolate my perception to what is directly in front of me. Several weeks ago, however, I contemplated a concept introduced in class as I prepared a batch… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[148,142,143,145,146,147,144],"class_list":["post-1339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemplative-practices","category-industrialized-food","tag-distinctions","tag-living-system","tag-mechanical-system","tag-nettle","tag-recipe","tag-reflection","tag-stinging-nettle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1339"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1405,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1339\/revisions\/1405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}