"f#@K You, disaster capitalism" porkchops

April 28, 2020

For the third night in a row, I awoke in the small hours in a cold, clammy sweat, fresh from a nightmare. Groggy, I padded downstairs to the bathroom where I keep a thermometer sort of hidden from my spouse, who finds my hypochondriacal tendencies annoying. “You can’t get COVID-19 if you aren’t exposed to it,” he says. “And you haven’t been exposed to it because you stay home. And there are only 40 cases in our town. And all of them are in nursing homes.”

For the third night in a row, I sat on the toilet, stuck the thermometer in my mouth and waited for it to beep. After a minute, it did. Normal. I wiped it down, put it back, went back upstairs, lay awake for two hours. Just like the other nights.

The nightmares change. My subconscious, it seems, has various means of manifesting coronavirus anxiety. This one was rather unimaginative, I thought, self-critical even in the middle of the night in the middle of a pandemic. In the dream, rows and rows and rows of white men in military fatigues shouted, “USA #1! USA#1! USA #1!” Instead of heads, they had that little graphic image of what the virus looks like, the round thing with all the nodes sticking out of it. It was a pathetic mash-up of Nazi demonstrations, alien science fiction and contemporary American rhetoric.

The fact of “USA #1 for COVID-19” has scared and angered me, as it has many people. So quickly we overtook other nations for this dubious and terrifying notoriety. Frustration at the way we’ve handled it as a nation, at inequalities the virus has revealed and our apparent equanimity with those inequalities, at disaster capitalism generally and at the coronavirus marketing campaigns grows exponentially in my belly by the day. Naomi Klein came up with the term disaster capitalism to name the ways “private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises.” I lie awake worrying about it just as much as I worry about COVID-19 coming for me or my loved ones. And the marketing. No, I don’t need a comfy bra, a super-efficient workout app, cocktail mixers delivered by mail or a twenty-first century version of paint-by-numbers embroidery of an onion. (For $49.99 with a frame.) I don’t need a 6-pint delivery of low calorie ice cream and I certainly don’t need usurious mortgage refinancing. This isn’t a stay-cation and I am not going to spend money to pretend that it is. And don't get me started about the bizarrely serious conversations about sacrificing lives to stimulate the economy.

In a critique of disaster capitalism and the myths it sustains about the United States, Julio Vincent Gambuto urged us to take this opportunity to rejig how we do things as citizens. “From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath... and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all.”

I took this seriously. I looked around for something I could do. Something that spoke to both my own memories of community as a verb: checking on people, sharing what we have, taking on each other’s troubles as if they are our own. Something that spoke to the deep traditions of community organizing in the places I’ve lived and the ones I’ve studied. Something that looked like what my friends in Derry, Northern Ireland were doing to respond to the virus -- sewing scrubs, making 3D printing visors, baking for medical professionals, saying rosaries together via Zoom, laughing through Zumba workouts together from their living rooms.

I found a bulletin board called Offers and Needs online through my local newspaper. A man I didn’t know had posted a “need,” asking for someone to cook him some meals. I reached out. We emailed back and forth about allergies and preferences. We made cautious plans for a careful meeting. I made him lots of food -- shells in a red sauce, butternut squash soup, chocolate chip cookies, apple cider and ginger pork chops with wild rice. The pork chops were, he said later, his favorite.

Who will we be when we emerge from our self-isolation? What will we be? I offer these pork chops to you because they represent my small effort to enact values in which I believe. They are a simple reminder that we have to act not on our fears and nightmares; we have to act on our dreams and values. And by doing that, we will produce something healthier, something richer, something more sustaining and meaningful than the American president or the marketing executives could ever even dream of. So fuck you, disaster capitalism. I made pork chops.

This reciepe has been adapted from “Half Baked Harvest Super Simple” by Tieghan Gerard and Carolyn Jung, aka The Food Gal.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 bone-in pork chops

salt and freshly ground pepper

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2 garlic cloves, smashed

1 inch fresh ginger, grated or chopped

2 teaspoons cumin seeds or cumin powder

1/2 cup apple cider

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 to 2 jalapeno, seeded and sliced

4 sprigs of fresh thyme

1 apple, cored and cut into 1/4-inch slices (choose one that is not too sweet, not too tart)

1 cup red grapes

3 tablespoons butter

Preparation

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

In a large cast-iron skillet, heat the olive oil on medium-high heat. Season the pork chops with salt and pepper. When the oil shimmers, add the chops and sear until browned on both sides, 3 to 5 minutes per side. Transfer the chops to a plate.

In the same skillet, combine the onion, garlic, ginger, and cumin seeds and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is fragrant and the cumin seeds are toasted, about 5 minutes. Pour in the cider and vinegar, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Increase the heat to high, bring the cider mixture to a boil, then reduce the heat to low.

Slide the pork chops and any collected juices back into the skillet. Add the jalapeno and thyme and sprinkle the apples and grapes around the pork. Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted horizontally into the center of the meat registers 135 degrees, 10 to 15 minutes.

Remove the skillet from the oven. Add the butter and let it melt over the pork chops.

Let the chops sit 5 minutes, then cut away the bone in each and cut them into 1/4-inch-thick slices. To serve, divide the pork, apples, and grapes among four plates and spoon the pan sauce over the tops.

Serve it with wild rice or quinoa or other hearty grain.

Margo Shea is a Historians Cooking the Past team member. She teaches public history and spends too much time in the kitchen.