"You Smell Like Dinner"

Your blood tastes like freedom, Sookie; like sunshine in a pretty blond bottle.
                                                                            ~Eric Northman

As I sit here nursing a ginger ale on the rocks, I wonder if maybe it isn't high time for Sookie to start wearing a different eu de toilette. I mean, after all, Eric isn't the only one who has "complimented" her on her scent, in a more-menacing-than-admiring kind of way. You haven't forgotten Liam's "Man, she smells fuckin' sweet!" (S1E3 Mine), have you? I doubt Sookie has, either.

Thing is, there's no lotion, potion, body splash, perfume, or other such fragrance-emitting product that's responsible for the way Sookie smells.

In Season 3 Sookie began to struggle with her identity and self-worth after discovering that it's her blood - and its scent and taste; the delicate bouquet (in S4E3 If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'? Eric sniffs the air, catching her perfume which he can only describe as being "Like wheat, honey and sunlight") and exquisite flavor of it that has drawn Bill, and perhaps others as well, to her. She starts to think that it's not her - not who she is, but how she tastes; how her blood can service others - that matters. She's just the [pretty] packaging. 

And everyone, meaning every supe, has noticed. Her special palate, that is - although perhaps one might be sensitive to her growing sense of self-doubt, too.

Lorena may have hated Sookie, but she sure didn't mind her taste: "No wonder Bill was drawn to you. You're delicious.” (S3E7 Hitting the Ground).

While Bill insisted to Sookie, "it is not your blood I love. I love you. Your heart, your mind, your soul... you have brought light back into my life", he did admit that hers was, "the most delicious blood I've ever tasted" (S3E10 I Smell A Rat).

Last season, upon meeting Sookie - decked out in a lacy white top and cute denim mini; looking as much the fish out of water at Lou Pines as anyone likely could - Alcide's werewolf bouncer buddy eyed her up and down and quipped, "you look like dinner". In the next scene, if you recall, she was nearly sexually assaulted.

Even good 'ol Sam's thoughts echoed this "you smell good enough to eat" theme when Sookie listened in on him during their G-rated Season 1 canoodle in his office. Is that really any wonder, though, since his go-to shift is a collie, and we all know that man's best friend's nose is a mighty powerful organ! Even still, knowing that her smell is probably a big part of what caused her sexy boss to pine over her for so long has got to be quite a blow for Sookie. 

And the list goes on. The cavalcade of vamps, weres, and shifters itching to get a taste of Sookie seems virtually never ending.

We may well be onto something here, as if the episode's title alone wasn't enough of a hint. In her essay, "The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle" Sofia Sanchez-Grant points out society's view that the (patriarchally encoded) female body is consumable.

And not just Sookie's body.

Other women are consumable commodities, too.

Now, of course, I know men are fed on as well, I do watch the show; but I think the sociocultural meaning of some of the examples I've pulled out here makes the consumption of females a little different.

Remember how Eric paid a "blood hooker" so that he could feed on her - and he seemed to prefer that she struggle and pretend that she didn't want it?

And when he consumed Hadley against her will as leverage to get her paramour the Queen to reveal  information about Sookie, he rated the other Stackhouse girl's taste like he was reviewing a take-out joint for the local paper: "Mmm-mmm. I 'd give her three stars." (S3E7 Hitting the Ground).

Speaking of take-out joints, perhaps you'll recall how Russell and Lorena deliberated before commanding Bill to procure a woman from a strip club for their dining pleasure, just like they were ordering off a Chinese food menu:

Russell: In the mood for anything in particular?
Lorena: Someone smoky. Not too fatty.
Russell: See, I was thinking... ethnic.
Lorena: Mm.
(S3E4 9 Crimes)

Once procured, they feasted on this "disposable sex worker" with relish - her blood running out of their limo and onto the ground like a perverse chocolate fountain.

Russell's appetite for "something ethnic" calls to mind the language of "gastronomic sexuality" Raquel Z. Rivera (2003, p. 129) describes as being part of the hip-hop lexicon when it comes to the "sweet, thick, pretty, round and various shades of brown...blackberry molasses to butta pecan" women that populate many rap music videos.

If you remember dancing to Big Pun's hit "Still Not A Player" in the clubs back in the late '90's like I do, you know that blackberry molasses to butta pecan reference above alludes to this song. The line's actually, "I love from butta pecan to blackberry molass' I don't discriminate, I regulate every shade of that ass".

Back in S4E1 the drunkard hanging around the back alley near the cagefighting ring tossed similar language at Tara and Naomi, labeling them for his consuming gaze as: "...some of that chocolate banana swirl...every woman's got a price".

In her essay, "Butta Pecan Mamis: Tropicalized Mamis - 'Chocolate Caliente'" Rivera points out that while the video's camerawork alternating between groups of lighter and comparatively darker-skinned women in order to punctuate the singsong chorus, "Boriqua, Morena" is meant to distinguish between these two groups of women, they come together by virtue of Pun's sexual desire.

According to Rivera, these women are eroticized and exoticized, as Pun lays claim to both Puerto Rican and African American "ghetto brunettes". Boriquas and morenas, "brown" women and "black" women may be distinct, but as he and other artists including Jay Z ("Who You Witt II") and Son Doobie ("XXX Funk") construct them, they are part of a commercialized landscape of desire. Sistas and mamis are "their" women to be consumed.  

Here we have the beginnings of the transcultural reality of the "I-want-them-all" mentality, where women are not real subjects, complex and distinct, but interchangeable; "infinitely substitutable beings" (p. 145).

Tim Ward illustrates this concept clearly. In his book Savage Breast: One Man's Search for the Goddess (2005, p. 28) he recalls a translation of old Tibetan meditations that contained his ultimate sexual fantasy:

The sutra instructed the reader to visualize a Bodhisattva sitting in meditation while he projects 200 emanations of himself, each one appearing to a dakini, a powerful and beautiful female spirit. Immediately the 200 dakinis become sexually magnetized to his 200 emanations, and they couple in passionate embrace. To each feminine spirit, the Bodhisattva appears as if he is the only one, and each of them gives herself completely to him. But the true Bodhisattva, he sits alone in his meditation in perfect detached repose. I realized that this was my fantasy, to have every beautiful woman magnetized to me so I could enjoy them all, while giving myself emotionally to none of them. That's what I wanted with the women I had affairs with. Not that I ever once said that I loved them, ever once tried to fool them. Is that evil? I don't know. I don't think so. Is it shitty? Well, I imagine the dakinis would be pretty pissed off at the Bodhisattva is they knew... 

He wanted them all - all for his consumption.

In the sphere of the commercial consumption of female sexuality, women are "indispensible as members of the collective at the core of male pleasure - females, honeys, hotties, bitches, hoes, freaks, chickenheads, pigeons, chicks - they are branded with the 'mark of the plural' that makes them expendable and easily substitutable as individuals" (Rivera, 2003, p. 147).   

Sookie deflects Eric's characterization of her as being consumable; his leering gaze as he utters the phrase, "Well, aren't you sweet" suggesting that she is, in fact, as Rivera (2003, p. 127) writes of the six chocolate-drenched young women [of color - chocolate caliente] swirling in a cup of hot cocoa on the cover of the 1998 rap album The Rude Awakening "sexily awaiting ingestion". Sookie replies, "Not really." (S1E4 Escape from Dragon House)

So she's seen as consumable alright, even though she's like not to be - but perhaps not so interchangable. There's something different about her that sets her apart, that makes her extra-special-tasty. References to Sookie's "sweetness" are constant; no doubt, they are a marker of her "alignment with the good" which makes her not unlike Dracula's Mina Harker. In the words of the character Abraham Van Helsing, the fictional Mina is:

...one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a Heaven where we can enter, and that its light [emphasis mine, sound familiar?] can be here on earth...so true, so sweet, so noble...(p. 226)

According to Susan Parlour (2009), the text of Dracula is littered with references to Mina's sweetness, who, though she transgressed the role of women in Victorian society to a certain degree, was readmitted to the patriarchal machine due, largely in part, to her sexual reticence and acceptance of the sexual mores and etiquette of the times.

Likewise, might Sookie be seen as an avatar of virtuous and virginal [white] womanhood? After all, according to prevailing stereotypes at least, women of color are more primal and sexual but in the world of True Blood the taste of virgin blood is the best of all, second only to baby's blood. When she was a virgin, Sookie's blood was covetted, to be sure...but like butta pecanness, her fairy blood's got an enticing flavor all its own that makes her a highly sought after commodity.       

She does it again, thowing off amnesia Eric's hungry advances in Season 4's 3rd episode, yelling at him, "I'm not your fucking dinner!". Later in the episode, she reminds Eric of how he tasted her against her will; that he basically "fang raped" her. He seemed genuinely taken aback and sorry.

Must we be seen as essentially edible? And if we are, does this essentialism isolate us within our conmumable bodies from other facets of ourselves, i.e. the "masculine" brain and the "feminine" body?

Atwood's character Joan rejects the multi-breasted Diana of Ephesus as a symbol of "the essence of femininity itself"(2003, p. 80).

It is, rather, a "paradigm of the patriarchally controlled female body"  (2003, p. 80):

She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though inflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with sprouts, but several of the breasts were out of order.

I stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, things for myself. 

Sanchez-Grant writes that Joan's assertion is a protest against a society that situates her as a reproductive machine, suggesting as the food imagery and the character's unromantic terms imply - to be endlessly giving, to nourish and sustain others is "simply to be edible" (2003, p. 80).

My conclusion is that woman can be drained, she is not just a font of nourishment for [male] others.

Here's some other references to the edible & the consumable in You Smell Like Dinner:

• When Sookie walked in on Jessica feeding on a man other than Hoyt in the ladies room at Fangtasia, the baby vamp spat, "I can eat who I want"
• Bill's response to Nan Flanagan when in London, 1982, she asks him why he doesn't kill his prey: "They might be dinner but they don't deserve to die"
• The conversation within Sam's new shifter entourage about the ethics of factory egg farming and the bourgeois attitudes of some animal rights activists

What do these themes mean to you? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please share them in the comments space below.

~ Rachel

References

Parlour, S. (2009). Vixens and Virgins in the 19th century Anglo-Irish Novel: Representations of the feminine in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Journal of Dracula Studies, # 11.


Rivera, R. Z. (2003). New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave.


Sanchez-Grant, S. (2008). The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Journal of International Women's Studies, Vol. 9, #2.


Ward, T. (2006). Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess. New York, NY: O Books

Tru Blood Tru World: An (Unlikely) Ecofeminist Philosopher

It's LAST CALL for this idea I distilled at the end of Season 3 but have yet to serve up and the FIRST TASTE of a new element we'll be featuring at the PPT come Season 4; Tru Blood, Tru World: AN (UNLIKELY) ECOFEMINIST PHILOSOPHER.

Driving home from work this past Tuesday, a piece on American Public Media's radio program Marketplace caught my ear. It was called, "Canada fights dirty".

Hmm... intriguing.

After Tess Vigeland's introduction, the report started with Marketplace Sustainability Desk's Scott Tong polling Americans on the street about the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of our neighbor to the north.
 
Predictably, many respondents mentioned the folksy accent (i.e. what are you talking aboot, ay?). Several also upheld common stereotypes like, "it's America-light", "Canadians have a clean and orderly society" and - perhaps the most pervasive - "Canadians are polite, friendly, and nice".

I guess on some level I must buy into that last one, because that's why the piece grabbed my attention. Those nice Canadians are playing political hardball? Really?

Apparently so; according to Marketplace, Tuesday was the last day for the public to comment on a new pipeline to carry Canadian oil to the U.S. We already buy Canadian crude (we actually import more oil from Canada than from any other foreign nation) but whether to pipe in a lot more has become a bitter fight in Washington with deep economic, political and environmental implications.

That's because the product going through the pipe is controversial; it's known as oil sands - literally, it's oil embedded in sand - and it's one of the dirtiest fossil fuels in the world to produce since it requires steam generators and other kinds of heat to get the oil out. This means lots of carbon pollution, and high-carbon fuels are being banned globally.

"Environmentalists around the world are fighting Canada's attempts to export oil from Alberta's oil sands".

So Canada is pushing back.

Canadian diplomats are meeting with like-minded allies, like BP and Shell. Their argument: Canadian oil reduces U.S. dependence on oil exported from unstable and unfriendly Middle Eastern and North African nations. Canada doesn't exploit, oppress and kill anyone to get their oil to market. And, according to Calgary oil analyst Dave Yager, they're "not going to use the profits from tar's oil sands production to build a nuclear bomb and annihilate Israel".

Naturally, what - or who - did I think of while listening to this piece weighing the pros and cons of keeping Canada's dirty oil flowing?

Why, Russell Edgington, of course!

I know, I know, on the surface, at least, it seems odd that a piece broadcast on NPR about, amongst other things, environmental concerns would make me think of the King of Mississippi instead of, lets say...our resident True Blood king of recycling, Bill Compton...

paper products go here, Tru Blood and other glass products go here...bravo, Mr. Compton!

But seriously, let's think about this for just a minute. 

Hearken back, if you will, to the Season 3 scene in which Russell and Eric are riding in the back of a limousine together, on the way to press Queen Sophie Ann into marriage and to challenge the Magister.

Recall how the increasingly agitated king remarked to the scheming Viking: "Throughout history I have aligned myself with or destroyed those humans in power, hoping to make a dent in mankind's race to oblivion. What other creature actively destroys his own habitat?"

Might our duplicitous, power-hungry King Russell also be an (unlikely) ecofeminist philosopher?

"In the case of Russell, he's a power-hungry ancient druid who has a serious concern of the stewardship of the earth". So says a man who looks an awful lot like the King of Mississippi -  Mr. Denis O'Hare himself - in an interview with Brandon Voss of The Advocate. 

And who can forget the infamous spine-ripping scene in which Russell rants about humanity's egotistical overconsumption and violent, polluting ways...

    

Russell - according to Mr. O'Hare, who has reportedly worked out a detailed backstory for his scene-stealing True Blood character - is not of this time. His worldview was shaped during a time when humankind had a far different schema for life on earth, organized around a dramatically different master metaphor. The king's druid brethren were possessed of the ancient wisdom - which, in her essay "The Evolution of an Ecofeminist" Julia Scofield Russell suggests has been lost and refound in modern works like James Locklock's Gaia: A New View of Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press: 1979) - that the earth is a living being.

And that "the law of the circle" (remember, during his confrontation with the Magister, Russell insists that there is only one true law - the law of nature?) - "the fact that the Earth's natural life-support systems are circular. There is no 'out'. Everything is in the system, and everything we put into the system comes back to us, for good or ill" (Scofield Russell, 1990, p. 229) rules.

Everything is in the system. Including we humans. There is no "out". We can't escape the destruction we wreck. You may disagree with his methods (as I certainly do) but can you really blame Russell for trying to stop, as he says,  our "race to oblivion"?    

Imagine how difficult negotiating modernity must be for an ancient vampire such as Russell, whose multimillenia-long undead lifetime has brought him into such clash and conflict with a nearly unrecognizable paradigm; an entire civilization that heaps abuses upon the earth's body:

...toxic wastes, ozone depletion, species extinction, desertification, smog, acid rain, famine, forest death, poverty, cancer, genocide, dead rivers and lakes, nuclear contamination. (Scofield Russell, 1990 p. 225)

Sounds not unlike Russell's shocking televised speech above, huh?

We 21st century denizens may soon be facing what it's like to live through seismic paradigm shift. In fact, it very well may already be underway; many signs point to this truth.

Here's a relevant excerpt from my dissertation:
  

Several transdisciplinary theorists have issued a clarion call for a paradigm shift as an integral and overarching component of systemic social change (Morin & Kern, 1999; Nicolescu, 2002; Plumwood, 1993; Wilshire, 1990).


This a metamorphosis which is nothing short of the birthing of a new vision to replace the old frameworks dominated by dichotomous thinking that form the bedrock of modern society and are fundamental to its many ills.

Nicolescu (2002) discusses the immediacy of action required in terms of bringing about a visionary, transpersonal consciousness nourished by knowledge growth to challenge the threat of our material, biological, and spiritual destruction posed by blind adherence to the logic of utilitarianism that characterizes the dominant paradigm.

Goerner’s (2001) advocacy of the concept of a “great turning” posits that this revolution will result from radical changes in the way we think about our world and our relationship to it. She likens it to a developmental passage, a self-generated metamorphosis similar to that of the butterfly.

As the caterpillar is compelled by forces from within to slough away its DNA to allow for the butterfly with a completely different genetic code than its larval form to emerge, so too does our civilization transform as a result of pressure, pushing from the inside-out.

This process is driven by the interconnected crises of modernity. Goerner (2001) asserts that there are hints all around us that modernity has reached the end of its useful life; its virtuous beginning ushered in the noble notions of liberty, equality, fraternity, and reason but its twilight is delivering silent disaster on an epic scale. The transition from modern to integral age will entail profound global change. It will eventually alter every facet of civilization, and it is happening now, not in one or two countries, but in the entire developed world and in many developing nations.

The “great turning” thesis emphasizes the critical role of changing the assumptions that guide our thinking about the world and our place in it. She suggests that shifting the root metaphor we use to explain how the world works from mechanistic to web and ecosystem metaphors will render modernity as radically different from the coming integral age as our current civilization is from medieval times.  Such a reformulation will depend largely upon the choices we make, and whether we as a society can loosen the assumptions and worldviews to which we cleave to allow new ones to emerge like a butterfly from its chrysalis. (Goerner, 2001).

WOW. Are we ready for such a major, life-altering shift?

In my estimation (and Russell's), something's gotta give.

Remember during that same limousine ride I was talking about above how Russell lamented to Eric, "Do you remember how the air used to smell? How the humans used to smell? How the humans used to taste?" Perhaps Russell's reminiscences about the pre-Industrial world reveals something deeper than his recognition that we are polluted and his simple, animal longing for human blood that tasted better, purer.

Maybe, just maybe, Russell can taste what we are lacking in our very blood - "the loss of soul in modern philosophy" (Cajete, 2000). Anthropologist Michael Harner writes about this kind of spiritual vacancy in his treatment of “soul loss”; in contemporary North American Hispanic communities this phenomenon is known as susto and is considered a common condition in the modern world (Broderick, 2001). 

As grief expert Elizabeth Kubler-Ross noted, “There is no spirituality left. I mean the inner, deep knowing where we come from”(Wilshire, 1990, p. 92). Accordingly, Orthodox theologian David Hart offers a sobering analysis of “metaphysical boredom” and what it means for modern Europe:

A culture - a civilization - is only as good as the religious ideas that animate it; the magnitude of a people's cultural achievement is determined by the height of its spiritual aspirations. One need only turn one’s gaze to the frozen mires and fetid marshes of modern Europe, where once the greatest of human civilizations resided, to grasp how devastating and omnivorous a power metaphysical boredom is. The eye of faith presumes to see something miraculous within the ordinariness of the moment, mysterious hints of an intelligible order calling out for translation into artifacts, but boredom’s disenchantment renders the imagination inert and desire torpid. (Catanzarite, 2007, p. 103).

Canda and Furman (1999) define spirituality as "the universal and fundamental aspect of what it is to be human - to search for a sense of meaning, purpose, and moral frameworks for relating with self, others, and the ultimate reality" (p. 36).

Could it be that the spiritual malaise of contemporary Western society; indeed, our stagnant collective soul, (which Russell perhaps tastes in our blood) might be a function of our estrangement from Earth and from the web of life?

Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence author Gregory Cajete (2000) writes that Henryk Skolimoswski was one of the first to articulate an eco-philosophy for the transformation of thought needed to bring a new ecological consciousness. In his 1981 study, "Eco-philosophy: Designing New Tactics for Living" he states that current political systems threaten to rob us of our highest values and because the current basis for action is no longer deeply rooted in life-serving purposes (echoed by Scofield Russell: "Ecofeminists antifeminine, it is antihuman, antilife", 1990, p. 225) or reverence for nature, we need a new philosophy to inform and guide us.

According to Cajete, "The era of the 'eco-individual' is dawning" (1990, p. 59.).

What will this era - and the eponymous "eco-individual" look like? How will we tell when it has dawned, and what can we do to move it forward?

Above, I referenced Lovelock's Gaia theory. Back in Season 1, Amy Burley queried a very overeager-to-do-V Jason, "You know what Gaia is, right? Theory of Gaia?". Amy may have understood Gaia theory intellectually, but despite her hippie persona and her  I'm-an-organic-vegan-and-my-carbon-footprint-is-minuscule pseudo cred...

...believe me, she didn't really get it. Amy Burley was a false prophetess - hollow; a complete sham.  

Her treatment, and eventual staking of vampire Eddie Gauthier shows how little she comprehended the meaning of the Lakota phrase "Mitakuye oyasin", translated as "we are all related" (Cajete, 2000, p. 86).

Eco-philosophy is utterly dependant upon this tenet.

If eco-consciousness is indeed a return to ancient wisdom, perhaps we can glimpse the coming paradigm and eco-individual in the Maya words:

The roots of all living things are tied together. When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. Before you cut down a mahogany, you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission of the keeper of the star. (Cajete, 2000, p. 108)

Euro-western society has much to learn from living indigenous traditions, whose ways and wisdom may seem comfortingly familiar to the pre-Christian Celtic Russell Edgington. For example, native science offers a system for naturalistic observation and knowing which honors and integrates sense, perception, and the metaphoric mind to apprehend reality. Unlike conventional science which leaves out so much, this Indigenous scientific method opens to "the sacredness, the livingness, the soul of the world" (Little Bear, 2000) in a way that can bring us to new and needed vistas.

Ecofeminist Julia Scofield Russell reminds us that while we are all a part of the body politic ("We are its lifeblood, its nerves, its brain") and as such we must continue to engage in the activities of the nation state in order to make a difference, we can also exercise what she calls the "politics of lifestyle", "a distinctly feminine politics in that it is both inner and universal, personal and all-inclusive" (1990, pp. 226-227).

It DOES matter what we choose to do in our personal, everyday lives and at our home and hearth; it matters deeply.

As Scofield Russell writes, the movies we go to see, the food we eat, our relationships, what we throw away and where, our livelihoods - everything - emanates out into the larger system, ultimately impacting the whole living planet.  

Although humanity may be behaving as a cancer on the earth, the answer is not - as Russell thinks - to subjugate and control us so as to force our compliance with his will, despite his (at least ecologically) good intentions.  

If we want to make a difference for the better, we can take our role as consumers seriously and behave as such. We must understand that when we purchase a produce we are supporting the entire system that made it. We can support companies and practices that are sustainable and withdraw our dollars from those that are ecologically and socially damaging. 

There are so many ways we can initiate life-affirming changes in our everyday lives; with our diet and food buying practices, with our relationships, tax resistance, housing, gardening, conservation - as Scofield Russell (1990) writes, it's up to us.  

And yes, Bill Compton, we can recycle.

What do you think? How are you making change; making a difference? We'd love to know! Please share in the comments section below.

Sláinte (an Irish toast to your health) for now...

~ Rachel

References 

Broderick, R. (2001). Leather tramp journal: A 12-mile mountain retreat. Leavenworth, KS: Forest of Peace.

Cajete, G. (2000). Native science: Natural laws of interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers.

Canda, E. R., & Furman, L. D. (1999). Spiritual diversity in social work practice: The heart of helping. New York, NY: Free Press.

Catanzarite, S. (2007). Achtung Baby: Meditations on love in the shadow of the fall. New York, NY: Continuum.

Goerner, S. J. (2001). After the clockwork universe: The emerging science and culture of integral society. Charlotte, NC: Baker & Taylor, Inc.

Little Bear, L. (2000). Forward. In Cajete, G. Native science: Natural laws of interdependence. (pp. ix-xii) Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers.

Morin, E., & Kern, A. B. (1999). Homeland earth: A manifesto for the new millennium.  Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of transdisciplinarity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London, UK: Routledge.

Scofield Russell, J. (1990). The evolution of an ecofeminist. In Diamond, I. & Orenstein, G.F. (Eds.) Reweaving the world : the emergence of ecofeminism. (pp. 223-230). San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Wilshire, B. (1990). The moral collapse of the university: Professionalism, purity, and alienation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Here's to a Happy, Compassionate Thanksgiving!

Tonight I am steeped in tea, robust and bracing English Breakfast tea to be precise, with a splash of skinny caramel macchiato...America may run on Dunkin, but I most certainly run on tea and this evening I have gotten hopped up on several mugs of it brimming with non-dairy liquid sugar and caffeine, as you will no doubt be able to tell since the time stamp on this post will likely say about 4AM once all is said and done, and yes, I'm still awake!

So now that it's official, Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

You may be wondering why I am awake and rambling at this ungodly hour; it's because I've been working on the next post in the "Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity" series. As you know, it's in response to the issue Rebecca has raised in her last few posts, namely; female rivalry and conflict. I hope to continue the discourse (please see my post from 11/23/10 for Part I), and yes, I am taking it very, very seriously. My goal is to have it finished and posted after Thanksgiving weekend.

As I contemplate having to be up and ready for work in about 4 hours, my thoughts turn to what's on my metaphorical plate for after the work day ends: lots of Thanksgiving cooking and baking. Since I've been working on my next blog entry for the past several hours I've got True Blood on the brain, so naturally my mind drifts to thoughts like, "wouldn't it be great to be able to put on a fabulous holiday dinner à la the consummate host, our dearly departed Talbot"?

I miss Talbot because, for one thing, he made sure to serve "cruelty free" meals at his table. Remember how he introduced each course at the lavish feast organized for Russell and the captive Bill, pointing out that all of the dishes were prepared using blood from willing donors? 

What's that you say? Blood - cruelty free or not - isn't on your Thanksgiving menu? That's OK, the principles of ethical eating and conscious cooking can be anyway - and this is relevant since part of our feminist frame involves thinking about how our actions effect the web of life.

Everyone who's close to me knows that although I am a committed vegetarian, I am not an evangelist for the cause. I do however promote using one's own set of values and conscience to make thoughtful, informed decisions about how what they include on their plate and how it is prepared impacts the larger scheme of things. I am also a fan of choices.

Here's one choice my Mom and I (who's also vegetarian) made for this Thanksgiving; since we don't eat turkey; we decided to join in the Turkey Day festivities by "adopting" one:



click here for more info. on the Farm Sanctuary's programs in New York and California that help abused and neglected farm animals across the country - ranging from the Celebration FOR Turkeys in which these intelligent and fun-loving birds get to stuff themselves with cranberry, pumpkin pie & butternut squash (yum!) to advocacy and educational campaigns and ongoing care for cows, pigs, ducks, goats, and more!

This is something everyone can appreciate and participate in, including the meat-eaters in my family, and maybe yours; it's one small but concrete way to make a difference by spreading compassion to the non-human beings in our world (our sanguivore friends would approve of that, too) and I'm sure you can think of others.

Yes, we are a "mixed family"; veggies and omnivores alike gather around our table each holiday and everyday, and there are many ways in which we're all trying to be more conscious about what we eat - for our own health and for the health of the planet - several of which Rebecca and our Mom have employed in their Thanksgiving shopping and food preparation (i.e. a reliable source told me that instead of wasting the [organic, free-range] egg whites that weren't needed in a recipe, they made facial masks with them and took a relaxation break together - nifty and thrifty if I do say so myself!)

We'd love to hear some of the ideas you've got for ethical and sustainable living.

So, maybe you can't put out an elaborate spread like Talbot's, but you CAN find reasons to be thankful and ways to share thankfulness this Thanksgiving after all. 

From both of us here at the Pierced Pomegranate Tavern, Enjoy the Holiday!

~ Rachel