McKelvy
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y'all will circlejerk yourself to the mysticisms of faeries and elves in european countries for centuries and take it as fact but the second native americans ask you to respect our spirituality and culture suddenly you’re all aetheists
Now what would happen if a homeless quilt was made by someone who actually cared about homeless people?
Meet former ad designer Willie Baronet.
Baronet is an artist who talks to homeless people and buys their signs from them for $20 a pop, if they’re willing to sell. He uses the signs in art exhibits to educate the privileged and point them to ways they can help, and to humanize homeless people and tell them they matter.
One sign at a time, Baronet makes a statement to help people with $20 in their hand and a voice that rings across the nation saying “I’m here.”
So not only did they take the small, hand-made signs away from homeless people but instead of just tossing them, they kept them. Not only did they keep them as some kind of homeless trophy, they actually went through the time, energy, and effort (funded by tax dollars) to tape them together, pose for a picture, and post it during the holiday season.
This is why people say that there are no good cops. Because there aren’t.
Y’know Lamb’s Quarter? A common weed throughout the continental US, tolerant of a wide variety of soil conditions including the nutrient-poor and compacted soils common in cities, to the point where it thrives in empty lots?
These plants are close relatives, and produce extremely similar seeds. Lamb’s quarter could easily be grown across the US, in people’s backyard and community gardens, as a low-cost and local alternative to quinoa with no sketchy geopolitical impacts. You literally don’t have to nurture it at all, it’s a goddamn weed, it’ll be fine. Put it where your lawn was, it’ll probably grow better than the grass did. AND you can eat the leaves - they taste almost exactly like spinach.
This just… drives home, again, that a huge part of the appeal of “superfoods” is the sense of the exotic. For whatever nutritional benefits quinoa does have, the marketing strategy is still driven by an undercurrent of orientalism. You too could eat this food, grown laboriously by farmers in the remote Andes mountains! You too could grow strong on the staple crop that has sustained them for centuries! And, y’know, destroy that stable food system in the process. Or you could eat this near-identical plant you found in your backyard.
so true – another example is acai berry, which is just about the same for you as any other berry. +lots of plants we deem weeds or invasives are incredibly hardy and nutritious! look out for dandelion, wood sorrel, and Japanese knotweed
Dandelion is delicious and can be used in many different ways from salads to drinks. All you need for good foraging with a identification book and a bag.
Lambs’ Quarters DO grow across North America in peoples’ back yard and community gardens. And, some of us were taught by our seanchaidhean, our tradition-bearers, not to pull them up but to let them grow. Their leaves are richer in protein than spinach, but they grow over four feet high: virtual spinach “trees” where you can go harvest the leaves for salad or cooked veg over and over again. Grown as a companion-plant with beans or squash they provide stakes that the vines can be trained up (in place of corn, which in my area is vulnerable to local wild herbivores. Lambs’ Quarters will grow up through a thick mat of pine needles, will grow in drought conditions and in the hard-packed dust on the edge of roadways.
And unlike dandelion, which is non-native and is crowding native plants out of their ecological niche, Lambs’ Quarters are a native plant that belongs here. Public service request for responsible gardeners who appreciate and nurture dandelion: please gather the flower heads before they go to seed. Do the same with chamomile, chinese lanterns, blue bells and any other “vigourous free-seeding” non-native that grows on your land.
