i am (re)taking the raads-r autism test and the unclear unnuanced wording of some of these questions combined with the all-or-nothing answer options is setting my teeth on edge. they should have let me design this quiz
There is no “after the revolution.” No “ideal world.” I don’t care how much progress we make, we will always fail someone, hurt someone, and the best thing we can do is accept that, and keep striving to make it better as we go.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t say this to discourage anyone from trying to make that ideal world. Quite the opposite.
I feel like it’s very naive to continue to approach these big changes we want to make in the world as if there’s an “after it’s all over” when we don’t have to worry about it anymore.
We should always be striving to make life better, even when life seems pretty damn good.
Honestly, people generally don’t want much… They want to eat their favorite food. They want to go to the seaside and smell the fresh air. They want to nap on the grass and listen to music. They want to hold their loved ones in their arms, and be held in return. They want warm clothes, be occupied with a profession/a hobby that does not smother them. They want to feel safe and unafraid. Mostly, they want to live without being ridiculed, manipulated or being forced. And this is why capitalism/modern life overall is so upsetting, depressing and even destructive. Because thinking about how small and simple things you yearn for & how hard it is to even be able to have them really wears you off
you know how which animals we think are for food is mostly cultural? Well, which plants we think are for food is mostly cultural too. But we don’t talk about that one as much
What are some examples of that? Like I feel like at worst I’d go “I didn’t know that was edible” rather than like, be surprised someone was eating a plant I already knew was edible.
Acorns. You can boil or soak the tannins out and turn them into flour.
Amaranth AKA pigweed. It’s the USA’s worst agricultural weed, but for Native Americans it was a crop and for some fucking reason it hasn’t occurred to us to just…eat the stuff. It makes high protein, gluten free flour.
A lot of people know dandelions are edible, so I think that one’s starting to change.
Crabgrass was brought to the USA by enslaved people as food iirc.
Cattails are edible (the roots if I remember right)
Every part of Kudzu is edible and it was once the main plant used to make clothing in China.
Virginia springbeauty has underground tubers that are like tiny potatoes and can be eaten similarly.
Acorns. You can boil
or soak the tannins out and
turn them into flour.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
you’d think this sort of thing would pop up more in apocalyptic fiction
I’m trying, but writing a book takes a long time.
To be fair, when people write this stuff into their books, slick little assholes insist it is Actually Bad.
There was a whole extreme backlash to foraging of native edible plants in The Hunger Games, for example.
Wasn’t aware of that, will probably not be aware of it in the future
Colonizers specifically slandered many Native foods and perpetuate(d) myths that they were not edible. This is both to set many foraged foods as ‘unfit for human consumption’ in order to reassert racist class notions, and to commit further cultural genocide. Some small part of it is also that colonizers are notoriously bad at feeding themselves but unfortunately a lot of this is intentional erasure and insult.
Doubtful that it was the acidity, since plenty of other foods are also acidic.
If I was to guess, the reason Europeans were convinced that tomatoes were poison is that they belong to the same genus as deadly nightshades, which will kill you if you eat them. The resemblance between nightshade and tomato is striking—they’re very, very closely related! I mean if we want to be technical about it, tomatoes *are* nightshades.
*small correction: the species most commonly called “deadly nightshade” is a different genus, but plants in genus Solanum are also often toxic and some can kill you, and all belong to the nightshade family
Milkweed is also edible when cooked. A bit like broccoli. Apparently the silks inside the immature seedpods, when cooked, are like cheese.
angel in space who falls in love with an astronaut floating out in the void, not realizing they’ve been dead for years out there nor comprehending what death even is. is that anything
the angel starts leading them back to earth cuz they think that’s what’ll make them feel better, finally talk back to them, open up. it takes lightyears to get back to earth’s atmosphere and when they do, the angel embraces them as gravity takes hold and pulls them crashing down. they both incinerate into ash and disappear. is that anything
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