More Olive Oil, Less Technology

I have just finished Eric Brende’s Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, a account of his time living as part of a group he calls the “Minimites,” who avoid most forms of technology. One back-cover review praised the book in extravagant terms; the reviewer read it slowly, so as to savor it all the longer.

My opinion was the opposite. I thought the writing was unsatisfying and the author clueless, as when he says sexism is a myth because when a man goes into the kitchen where a woman, in her shapeless skin-concealing religion-mandated garment and floppy hat, is doing the women’s work of slicing potatoes, she’s allowed to tell him, “Please make the slices a bit thicker.”

He describes screaming at his wife for not having dinner on the table when he arrives home one late afternoon and happily announces that right after that, she got with the program and started cooking up a storm.

He did offer one insight I thought was worthwhile: That we assume manual labor is for morons because the machines we build to automate tasks do just one thing repeatedly, but if we choose not to use those machines, then in fact we must be quite ingenious and have much and varied knowledge at our disposal.

And of course, his aim of reducing his use of technology to the bare minimum is admirable.

On Saturday, I rode my bike through miles of seeming no-man’s-land—it was a bit eerie—to the opening of a children’s health center in the Bayview district, where I assisted at a bike “road-eo,” which teaches basic cycling skills such as stopping at stop signs, crossing railroad tracks safely, and glancing back over one’s shoulder while rolling forward.

I guided many tiny visitors around the loop over and over. I could tell that one little girl, seven years old, was on the verge of being able to ride by herself. We circled the course several times, but when I tried letting go of the bike, I could see she was going to fall over, and concluded it might be a while longer before she rode by herself.

Then she got going on a very gentle downward slope, and next thing I knew, she rode several feet on her own! It was thrilling. Her mother said, “We’ve been trying to get her to do this for a year!” She called the little girl’s father on her cell phone and announced, “Your daughter is riding a bike!”

Afterwards, I was rather exhausted and had a burrito from El Toro and took a nap.

When I got up, I took Hammett to the vet for a minor procedure. Then I had to wait an hour for a cab, with Hammett in his box beside me, and could hear a couple of the people who work there bantering in the back. One was saying, “Are you saying my dog isn’t cute?”

They decided I would cast the deciding vote and brought out a tiny round dog missing one eye (due to abuse by some human). I agreed with the dog’s owner that she is cute.

Poor Hammett was traumatized, a rigid little clump of cat, by the time he was finally freed from his carrier at home and rushed to hide behind the bathroom sink.

In the evening, Tom and I watched Little Miss Sunshine (spoiler coming up two sentences from now), the ending of which I absolutely loved. I laughed and cried at once. The spectacle of her family willingly making idiots of themselves in solidarity with her was very touching.

I am loving this thing of eating food; I should have started long ago. On Sunday, I made Pasta e Fagioli from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant (David C. assures me that when I say “fag-ee-OH-lee,” I have the pronunciation exactly right and I should hasten into the nearest Italian restaurant and ask for some just that way) and Smoky Black Bean and Tomato Soup from 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains.

I used the largest dried chipotle pepper I had for the latter and the result is quite spicy. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the impulse to use two peppers or it probably would have been inedible. Near the end of the cooking, I said to myself, “Wait a minute, what happened to the part where you sauté something or other in six tablespoons of oil?”

I squinted at the recipe anew and indeed, there was no mention of sautéing anything in oil, nor in fact any mention of oil in any amount, let alone butter. Ach: fat-free! I upended my olive oil bottle over the pot and the soup came out to be very, very good; the Pasta e Fagioli is good, too.

It appears the author of the bean and grain cookbook aspires to fat-free-ness, which is good, because she then has to find other ways to make everything flavorful by other means, so once I add plenty of oil, the results should be extra-yummy.