Reviews and Comments

Repetitious like so many other American "non-fiction" books. They're too talkative, too chatty. Reads like a book-length magazine article. Authors handicapped by their journalistic ethics: Always slightly at a distance to their topic at hand. Perhaps they harbor desires and dreams in their hearts, but they manage to inhibit or repress them mostly, even while ostensibly telling the mandatory Personal Tale ("Why did I get into this weird and fascinating topic in the first place?"), perhaps some genuine excitement slips through here and there, but the overall experience is that the author is weirdly inhibited and de-attached through out. Probably this has everything to with the American publishing industry and at the end of the day, it's the editors that choose the titles and weed out the most idiosyncratic passages from the books. I don't know. But I am bored by this literary genre.

That said, and to finally get to the actual content of the book, the main point IS important and relevant. If you're easily persuaded, like myself, you could read the introduction and the first chapter or so. Then you'll get the point. The rest is mostly telling magazine-stories of the same thing. I'm a stubborn reader, so I read books to the end. But you really don't have to. /Rant over

Priya Krishna is not only an open-minded cook, but also a great writer. This is not just a collection of out-of-context recipes, but an approach to cooking Indian-ish food. The title is a great invention in itself and I can't help fantasize about the exciting cooking literature we would have, if there was also a book of Italian-ish, Mexican-ish, Sichuanese-ish, Ethiopian-ish, Scandinavian-ish food and so on. The book is also partly a declaration of love to her mother. And there's nothing distracting about this. You just want to read on about her mother. This was not what I signed up for, and yet here I am reading on about Priya Krishna's mother. She really does sound like the fucking coolest mother in the world. There's a page on her mother's advice for good hosting. Her mother came up with this ingenious one-page summary of all of Indian-ish cooking. It's like the skeleton key for cooking Indian-ish and tremendously helpful in all it's simplicity (any good structure that's useful is at least somewhat of a reduction of reality. How else to decode reality? You can't decode something as complex as reality with a tool as complex as what you're deciphering itself. I think she did something beautiful finding a hidden pattern in Indian-ish food and generously shared it with all who wish to learn).

Also, this is a microwave-centered cookbook. I would like to see more of them. Contemporary ones. Maybe Krishna really wrote the only two of our day? (The other being Cooking at Home with David Chang). It's so weird with this suspicion about microwaves. (No, they are not dangerous). Why have everyone told me my whole adult cooking life that food in microwave ovens are less good? And more importantly, why did I believe them? I feel humbled. This book teached a great lesson about the tools of the trade, and my daily cooking has been changed for the better dramatically. Oh yeah, as a 95% vegetarian (or whatever, I don't eat meat so often), this takes on the produce I use and eat myself, so very useful. Fun and beautifully made book too!

One of the most fun and exciting cookbooks in a long time. It's so inconsistent. E.g. David Chang professes he wants the vegetables chapter to become the lenghtiest in the book, but then proceeds to spend the first almost 300 pages just on meat and fish. Chang and Krishna also say the book has no recipes, or at least no measurements, but then can't help sneaking some precise measurements in here and there anyway. But it doesn't matter. You get the point. And the point is: Cooking at home should be effortless, improvisational, delicious and with lots of "sandbaggery" as David Chang calls it, when you just wing it, use whatever you have and care less about the "right way" to make an emulsion, cook a potato or even prepare seemingly traditional dishes. It's all mixed together and the cultural influences are so many! I've learned a lot about South-East Asian cuisine, or at least gotten a ton of inspiration to learn more, from reading this book. As a 95% vegetarian, eating only meat occasionally for special occasions, I wish the vegetables, mushrooms, grains, legumes and so on took up the better half of the book, but it's fine. At the end of the day, this book has a few very simple, but actually quite ingenious principles, it hammers in again and again. For one, you can actually use a microwave to cook almost anything you would normally use the stove or oven for. Second principle, many if not most of the culinary rules you've picked up on over the years originated in a highly specific cultural context which is the French regimented haut cuisine restaurant (they don't say this in the book, but almost, and David Chang definitely is tired of French cooking). But what that means is home cooks have gotten this weird idea that they need to somehow do a half-assed version of Michelin-quality dishes on a daily basis. That's insane. No, there actually is no point in peeling all that produce. Except if you want a silky-smooth pommes puré. Which you want occasionally (like once a year when you also dress up and everything is a bit more extraordinary?). But not on a daily basis. So yes, "stop the peeling madness". HAHA. It's so wonderful how all these ideas I've had are just shattered by reading this fun book that almost reads like it was transcribed small-talk between Krishna and Chang (Priya Krishna is a gifted writer by the way and her own book Indian-ish has the same down-to-earth fun but also concise tone). For gods sake, the images throughout the book are like low-quality mobile phone photos. HAHA! Not even kitsch or instagram-like "lo-fi", just bad quality and out of focus. But it's fitting and underscores their cooking ethic very well. There are details I didn't like or would have seen done differently (if I awkwardly imagine myself being the editor, which is the nature of a review I guess?), but it would defeat the point. There's a lot of great parts and bits in the book, really great, but they all serve to drive home a STYLE or an approach you can bring with you to the kitchen. For me it worked, so I can't say much negative about this book. Great shit!

Like reading a Wikipedia article on the subject: Encyclopedically descriptive, and so a bit dry mostly, but it does give a quick overview and one from a voice who has much authority in the field. I have much respect for the work Zehr and associates have done and we are probably all richer for it in many ways. We deeply need experiments on this field and much more practice (books are perhaps more of a pastime and in worst cases can create ideas about new quasi-laws, which is part of the problem).

Zehr comes from a tradition that is sympathetic and willing to work directly with the state and representatives of the punitive justice system. In fact, over the years, he has come to understand that the differences between the retributive philosophy of the courts and his own understanding of restorative justice are perhaps not so great. Around the world, there are of course also several examples of restorative justice programs being directly embedded in the criminal justice system. There are degrees of restorative practice (which is true) and however he can help the court, the police or the prisons being more restorative, this will help "make things right", as the overall goal of restorative justice is sometimes also put. (On a sidenote, I'm very curious how the Mennonite tradition has influenced Zehr and other early pioneers, as the expression of making things right, as I understand it, is taken directly from the Bible and the early versions of this particular restorative practice evolved in a Mennonite community. What's theology of justice here? If someone knows, please tell).

Zehr's main difference with the retributive logic is in how to achieve vindication and that administering pain is not very helpful. This is a good bottom-line and defense against punitive approaches (and practices that call themselves "restorative" can no doubt turn punitive themselves, if they believe that causing pain will teach someone a lesson). But there are also similiarities, some of which Zehr points out. One he mentions but doesn't spend much time on is: There seems to be always a victim and an offender for restorative justice to make sense. There obviously are victims and offenders in many cases, but these are statuses to recognize during a proces, not before. He does acknowledge that those cast in the role of offenders sometimes, in fact most of the time, experience themselves as victims. Sometimes this can seem simple, sometimes not. So how to place the roles before each party has been heard? Even those who cause so much harm can have an experience that they are defending a value (something good), or defending themselves against threats to their safety. Zehr must have reflected and probably written about this topic in other places. But from this distillation into 100 pages, the emphasis seems clear. The roles of victim/offender are constitutive to the framework and thus it becomes difficult to even imagine a different process. To even begin, we need to know who's the victim, and who's the offender.

What if we simply started out from the pain? Something must have happened that became so painful - or did so in a way, at a time, or in a place - that the people involved were unable to meet and make themselves understood to each other. Pain and suffering never only affects one person, even if it can seem like that when you feel most isolated or disconnected. There's always a community being affected too. This is not far from the starting point in this book either. Perhaps the parties involved will understand how to place different degrees of victimhood and offense, perhaps other categories will make more sense to them, perhaps identity categories will not feel very appropriate at all. Perhaps, if we found a way to make people assured that they will be listened to even when they don't claim the mantle of victimhood, there will be emerge more effective ways of speaking truth and listening to it, taking responsibility for your actions and finding the willingness to make the necessary actions that we may co-exist or at least make the world around us seem more inhabitable.

There's no grand story here about COVID-19 that you would not be able to tease out from reading a bunch of scientific paper abstracts and going back to the general theory advanced by Rob Wallace & co. for years. That is, the theory of how globalized industrial agriculture has created a veritable breeding ground for hyper-virulent diseases, and how we can only understand this "pandemic age" by understanding the workings of agricultural capital.

What I mean is there is no radically new material in this book that Wallace has not been dealing with before. But with this book we have the most up-to-date material by specialists in their field, doing their best to make it accessible for the lay reader and are independent enough to repeat the stories that make mainstream epidemiology uneasy.

A year into the pandemic, and the general public even in the most literate, overdeveloped countries of the world is still by large ignorant about the structural causes of the virus.

This is probably the best cross-disciplinary literature there is on the pandemic at the moment. In a year or two, perhaps more depending on how research into the origins of the virus will advance, it will possibly be surpassed. In all likelihood by the very same authors, as it seems (and this is part of the book's point) not a lot of other epidemiologists are working on it. Mainstream, well-funded and corporate epidemiology is fully occupied understanding how the fire is spreading through the building, instead of understanding what started the fire. As it is very likely that we will see other new hyper-virulent diseases come on the world stage, as long as the ecological fire walls are so weak and the food industry resembles a veritable petri dish for epidemics, it seems pretty important to do something about this.

This is not an easy read if you're not accustomed to reading some scientific literature, esp. in the biology department. But the way of theorizing is absolutely necessary to understand the big picture: we are lucky to have researchers with a popular ethic synthesizing the political economy of agriculture with technical fields like agroecology and farming, epizoology and evolutionary biology.

Richard Seymour should be most at home in the political economy side of this thing, but it was actually the existential and more speculative parts where his voice shined for me. The chapter on addiction was a kind of literary near-death experience, meaning both terrifying but also enlivening (making me want to do something about the addiction to spend "time on screen", and as the book convincingly shows, most of us by now are addicts). There's something of a bibliographic tone to the book, that some might find distracting. That is, it constantly references other authors, a bit how journalists write and it does make it seem less sincere at times. Ironically, as "more material" to plow through, scavenge for points, turn into productive writing and spit out a new commodity. Books like that tend to get forgotten very fast. I hope this one doesn't and do get a life of its own, spawning better thinking tools to dream something else than viral content for the machine.