Pop-Up Pizza and A Few Other Connections
My downstairs neighbors recently created a pop-up kitchen. They sold pizza out their own kitchen window — had hand-drawn menus, a healthy heaping of typical pizzeria accoutrements scattered about (a red pepper flakes shaker, a red-and-white checkered plastic tablecloth, etc.), and a lot of people showed up. At the end of the night, amongst melted down candles and yet-to-be-cleaned cans of cheap beer, we joked about the conspiratorial dimensions of the ‘Got Milk?’ ad campaigns that were ubiquitous in the 1990’s, the grad students who were studying agricultural policy occasionally chiming in with wonk-tinged zingers of their own.
It’s great to be able to walk out your front door, turn to the window on your immediate left, and joke that thank goodness you were able to find a spot in the line. It’s great that you can tease a neighbor for looking like he just watched Moonstruck — only to find out that he literally did, hours ago, and that that was the inspiration for the outfit you saw before you. (“Ordinerai o cosa?”)
And it’s great they’re living downstairs. The idea of having a Jafflechute-like experience recreated with pizzas — what I would imagine would happen if our locations were reversed — is horrifying in that way that a cheap movie monster might be horrifying. People would scream and run, but why would we be screaming? Why would we be running? People would try and figure out a system by which one could catch these sauce-covered saucers, but to what end? (Are they secretly being filmed for an American attempt at the television show Taskmaster?)
All this — both the situation being described and the writing itself, however brief — also serves as a reminder that nonsense and surprise are always nice, alternative ways of making connections.
But connections are connections as well. Consider Ross Gay’s “We Kin,” from Inciting Joy —
Among gardeners, I have noticed, there is a new constant (if subtle) chatter, asking what you need, asking for help, asking do you have any, asking could you use this … I bristle at the idea of gardening as an act of self-sufficiency or independence. I get the premise — for instance: gardening makes us less reliant on an industrial food system that is brutal in one thousand ways; growing what you can’t buy is awesome; knowing where your food comes from and how it’s grown is lovely; sticking it to Walmart is fun, etc. — but a garden, a healthy garden anyway, shows us no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you earn or stash or hoard or bunker up, no matter even your fleet of starships, you will never be self-sufficient or independent. Because nothing living is.
Then pair that with this connection from my friend Alicia’s wonderful first book that is brimming with proof —
Nothing that can be bought will prove a solution to the greenhouse gas emissions caused by a centralized, global food system that prioritizes efficiency yet still leaves 854 million people on the planet undernourished and twenty-five thousand people per day dying of hunger.
My downstairs neighbors recently created a pop-up kitchen. It fed the neighborhood for the evening. That’s a start.