Eating Ash

Food, Disasters, and Going Forward Together

it always looks like twilight on Mars when your city is burning

I had a whole other piece about food scams planned for today, but I live in LA, and it’s been burning all week. My wife and I are safe but the city will never be the same. My car is covered in ash from other people’s destroyed lives. The flakes are so thick that it looks like snow. My hair smells like smoke despite hiding inside my little home all week, constantly refreshing Watch Duty. I woke up after the first night of fires and didn’t know what to do with myself. I cooked two totally different meals, this peanut sauce and then an updated version of this soup, hoping that I could dull my nerves with comfort food. It didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

I tried to write a new piece all about my experience with fires. The Oakland Hills Firestorm, the Mount Vision Fire, the Cedar Fire, the 2019 fire season, my house fire, my great aunt’s house fire, and all the fires too small to name. I wanted you to believe I knew what I was talking about when I said this is different. That this familiar heartbreak has been magnified by climate change until it became something that none of us recognize. Californians know fire. Catastrophe is our birthright, but this shouldn’t be happening in January. This shouldn’t be happening at all.

We are reaping what other people have sowed. This is the cost that fossil fuel companies, auto manufactures, bottled water companies, plastic manufacturers, and the rest of the capitalist powers are willing to pay for their astronomical profits: all of us and our planet. As

J. P. Hill

wrote in his excellent piece this week “Who Lets the World Burn?” we’re going to need a mass movement to combat this climate crisis. No one is coming to save us when there is still a dollar to be made.

“Car and gas companies killed public transit, and continue to block its implementation whenever possible. The major airlines sometimes pitch in too, like Southwest spending millions to kill rail in Texas, so people would continue flying between Houston and Dallas and San Antonio. We of course know that politicians, beholden to corporate interests, have failed to adequately address the climate crisis, and the attendant infrastructure problem ailing this country.”

We don’t need to get rid of seed oils. We need to get rid of all the billionaires whose lifestyles emit more carbon in 90 MINUTES than the rest of us emit in our entire lifetimes. We need to work together to save ourselves because nothing else is working. You can’t turn a profit on a dead planet, but these robber barons don’t give a shit. Their greed has divorced them from reality.

I recycle, compost, and do my best to live ethically because I believe in the power of small choices to make this world better. It’s why I’m vegan. Our choices matter. I know that we can change everything; we just have to believe in each other. There are millions of us who know that the only way we are surviving is together. We outnumber the people destroying the planet in massive numbers. We need to demand--in every single way possible--that our world and its values change. Now. Everything is already burning. Change is already underway, so we might as well do so in the interest of our planet.

Plumes from the Palisades Fire 45 minutes after it started as seen near my home, far from Pacific Palisades

Our climate and our ability to survive is collapsing. Your day will come. Whether it’s super storms, mega fires, poisoned water and earthquakes from fracking, impossibly flooding, or some other nightmare I can’t imagine, you will be directly affected. Not because you’re poor, or rich, or live in the wrong place, or upset God, or the President, but because you are a person who is alive right now. A hard to attribute quote is making the rounds on social media right now because of how goddamn right it is: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” I’m filming it today. You’ll film it tomorrow. We’ll all film it until we change. This is no way to live.

If you are able, please consider donating to one of these worthwhile organizations working to help the people and animals affected by the fires in LA. I’ll be doing my part.

LA Regional Food Bank

Mutual Aid Network LA

California Community Foundation's Wildfire Recovery Fund

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Spend some time cooking and taking care of yourself this weekend. You deserve it. Tomorrow, paid subscribers are receiving a revamped soup recipe that I recently fell back in love with. Next week we are back on our simmer sauce train with lots of ideas for some simple coconut milk sauce you’ll make right in your blender.

Stay safe, hydrated, and well-fed to the best of your ability. I’ll be thinking about all of you.

Xoxo,

Michelle