Detention Youth Go Vegetarian
As many of you know, I work at correctional facility for youth, teaching English, Communications, and Culinary Arts. “If you don’t know well know you know.” (Notorious B.I.G) For the few months we (Ili, Kai and I) have been introducing vegetarianism amongst students, with their quarterly project being the opening of their very own “Vegetarian Restaurant”. We began with juicing, going over the benefits and losses of utilizing a “tastier” option for ingesting the proper amount of vitamins. As one can expect, some of their responses were the following, “Miss -- this taste like shit. I wouldn’t do this outside,” or “Den what miss we supposed to do this and clean em’ up everytime -- f dat,” or my personal favorite, “This looks like Trump’s skin -- this dakine white man’s drink. Lazy.” Okay, the last one may not be expected -- but it was definitely an appropriate analogy for the carrot/cucumber/apple combo.
Based on their responses however, I challenged them to reconsider the way they see the food they’re eating. I introduced Immortal Techinque’s “Philosophy of Poverty” and Jedi Mind Trick’s “One for the Killing”, two underground “conscious” hip-hop artists that discuss the parallelisms between Big Companies, cancer-inducing GMOs and food products, as well as the detrimental nature of eating steroid pumped meat. But how? After the class period ended, I had 15 minutes to plan a poetry workshop based around this idea alone. When they came back, I blasted the room with some hip-hop instrumentals and on the board wrote, Food; Tradition; War. I had the students map out ideas that tied along to those themes and wrote the following, “As long as there is drugs in my hands and spam in my stomach -- we are at war.” With 10 minutes to write, my students went HARD on their papers. Their work was incredible. My students were on some real, philosophical ish son! They spoke on conspiracies linking the Government, Big Pharmaceuticals and Fast Food industries, how that tied to the Welfare system and how the Hawaiian and Asian diets are products of colonialism and war. Impressed? Hell yeah. Shocked? Nah. My students are sociological thugs and we talk about politics often, and how they impact our day-to-day and the lives of People of Color (POC).
So what the hell does this have to do with going vegetarian? Well we’re starting a revolution son! Our students want to do more research into their current diets and spin a vegetarian dish. We started our garden last year and “dem fakkahs is boomin” as my students would say. After discussing what they wanted to eat vs. what they regularly do -- we finalized with Chicken Parmesan with Pasta and a salad. Our twist was an eggplant parmesan with zuchinni noodles.
We separated the modules, one focusing on salad and the other on the eggplant Parmesan. As our kids “removed the foreskin” from the phallic-shaped vegetables (Dorian’s words, not mine.) we talked about the different colors, shapes and “feels” between organic and conventional versions (yes, we cooked both). The organic eggplant shaved clean to a Madagascar gecko green while the gmo version was a Japanese-Empress ivory. Throughout they asked if we were gonna cook both. Some argued we shouldn’t if we don’t want cancer, others said we shouldn’t waste the food, and finally the other teachers chimed in “we already bought em, cannot waste.” Which is understandable but it begged me to question what we are teaching them about power, access, and food and whether or not we could really create this “food revolution”. Then the young men bathed them in the battered peppered-egg mix and pressed them into Italian breadcrumbs. I took this time to talk about when I moved to the South and learned to make fried chicken and how this was similar. As they moved toward the fry pans, popping with a slow sizzle of oils, I told them to “listen for the rain” ask they cook. If it sounds like thunder and lightening, turn the heat down. It should “sound like a steady and gentle rainfall over a metal roof in Kahaluu.” They cooked it to perfection. Then they moved onto making the zucchini noodles using a spiralizer, of course while making comments on the horrifying nature of a female using this same item on their private parts if they ever cheated on them. The creativity they impose on these young girls is hilarious and worrisome. Nonetheless, as the water came to a cauldron like witchcraft boil, we blanched the noodles until they “bent like whisky dick” (their words, not mine) and didn’t “snapped in half like the backs of our enemies” (my words, not theirs). As the noodles bathed themselves to al dente perfection, we drained them in the sink. Using the same pot, we added butter, lemon, minced garlic, salt and pepper and listened to the aroma dance itself out of the pot. We added the noodles and let it bask in the melodic greatness of flavor we created as the eggplants were in the oven awaiting the cheese to melt all over its armored flesh.
The results? Doper than meth and tastier than getting out of jail and into the bed of your lover. Their vote? “Hell ya miss -- I could be vegetarian if it taste laddaht!” Impressed? Yes. Shocked?
Nah.