Orange Season: On Food Seasonality

In the past in the UK, fruit and vegetables were seasonal*. They still are as far as the farmers/gatherers go. As far as the modern shopper goes, very few planty items are seasonal** because the food comes from all over the world.

This means the old idea of having an orange for Christmas doesn't mean a whole lot. You can have oranges any time of year. You can have most kinds of fruit at Christmas, even if it's something that was only previously available in summer.

Some fruit and veg has survived tradition. Dried fruit and nuts are still more popular at Christmas, despite being available all year and not so essential (they made sense at a time when most fresh fruit wouldn't last that long... now, not so much).

But deep down, I think people like seasonal food. Even in areas without seasons, a traditional community wouldn't have the same food available every day. People just aren't built to keep eating the same meal.

Food companies have realised this too. Sweets, cakes and tasty treats have taken over the seasonal throne. My family have chocolate oranges for Christmas, because that's when they're mainly available. Some sorts of cake only become available in the winter (yule logs, stollen and matured fruit cakes/fruit puddings).

Outside of the winter holiday connections, some chocolate bars are released for a limited time every-now-and-then.

So in a blow for food seasonality, I baked some things for the family's winter*** present. I made rocks cakes, lemon slices and date slices****. Admire my not very elegant (yet practical) presentation of the edibles:



They lasted about two days. That's a short food season indeed.


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* This post could also apply to other places with seasons, a winter season and a holiday in winter. And perhaps beyond that. I don't know though, because I don't live in those places. So feel free to share your similar tales of foody seasonality (or sporadicness of availability, if you live somewhere without seasons).

** A few exceptions are things where one area produces the best. The UK has a very good climate for strawberries. You can get non-UK strawberries here all year round, but they don't compare to those produced during the British strawberry season.

There are also some varieties of things that are a bit niche. Some apple varieties are only grown on a small scale, so you do rely on the seasons.

*** We're mixed-religion. Which leads to me wishing people a merry winter. I get some looks at that, but if Christmas can be merry, so can winter.

**** A few baking notes for the cooks out there:

Rock Cakes: Are the 'rich rock buns' recipe in Cookery in Colour: A Picture Encyclopedia for Every Occasion***** edited by Marguerite Patten. Only with glace cherries instead of candied peel. This is a recipe the family has used for ages, but it's the first time I've cooked them.

Lemon and Date Slices: Are 'lemon bars' and 'sticky date bars' from 500 Cookies by Philippa Vanstone. This is a new book and the first time I've used it. I'd say the recipes need slightly larger quantities for the tin size and needed longer cooking times. Overall, they worked well though. Only 498 recipes to go...

***** They don't make titles like that anymore. This was published in 1960, when being in colour was a major feature (and most of the pictures were black and white anyway).

The Hidden Costs of TrueTwit

This post is about a new Twitter service, but the principles can apply to other social networks.

TrueTwit is a Twitter tool that messages anyone who follows you. It asks them to click a link and prove they're a person (via a CAPTCHA system). The claim is it cuts down on the number of bots following.

When I'm hit with one of these, I do the obvious thing - I unfollow the person again.

Why? A number of reasons:

1. Auto-DMs (direct messages) are impersonal. I'd rather get no message. No message is real. It means you're a busy person, or you're shy or you don't like to say anything when you have nothing to say. All of those are fine. I'm a quiet person too. Automated spam? Not fine.
2. Links are suspect. Twitter has a lot of hacking going on from clicking on links sent in tweets or DMs. I'm cautious of all links sent via DM. No exceptions (especially not for links sent by a bot).
3. You're using a bot to send me a message to check if I'm a bot. I don't want to follow a bot either. I followed you because I thought you were a real person, not a person who'd send me automated bot messages.
4. I'm dyslexic. I'm good at reading and writing words in context, but my letter recognition skills are poor when it isn't in context. CAPTCHA tests would say I'm a bot, because I consistently fail them.
5. You're not going to visit my profile and see what sort of person I am. You're relying on the bot test. Considering I checked out your profile before I added you, this isn't exactly an equal relationship. I might as well shrug my shoulders and move on now.

The advocates of this idea point out it reduces bot followers. That may be, but it also reduces your number of real followers. Bear in mind that it won't put off people using their Twitter account for marketing. The people it'll put off are your average users - the ones who thought you looked like an interesting person.

I hope this kind of system doesn't become a trend. Increasingly elaborate systems to check realness are a barrier to socialising. By using them, you're filtering out the very people you wanted to keep.

Review of Ars Memoriae by Beth Bernobich

This is a book tour post for Ars Memoriae, a novella by Beth Bernobich. In this tour, the book does the travelling, not the author. I looked after it for a bit and you can too, if you meet the following criteria.

1. You have a blog and you're not afraid to use it.
2. You're willing to read the book.
3. You'll photograph* the book somewhere... in your home, on a rollercoaster, by your pet cat. Somewhere.
4. You'll post a review, and your book photograph, to your blog.
5. You send it along to the first person who replies to you, as long as they're willing to review/photograph/pass it on.

Interested? Too late! Fairyhedgehog replied first... but if she changes her mind, it'll go through remaining comments in order.

* * *

Prologue

The book arrived during forty days and forty nights of rain. I wasn't sure we'd get out to see anything, as I didn't want him to get all crinkly. In the meantime, I read him instead.


The Story

The story opens with a man considering the arbitrary nature of time divisions. I'm all for that. He turns out to be a detective in an alternate history setting. One having nasty visions about alternate timelines.

Political hijinks ensue, and he's sent off on a mission for the queen (whilst trying not to be a crazy person with the visions).

And the rest of the plot is secret!

As you might be able to tell, I'd never get a job writing plot summaries on the back of books**. But that aside...

I liked the Victorian feel to the writing, as well as the mystery plot. The interactions between the political factions came across realistically.

I would have liked to know more about the whole time aspect of the story. It felt like there was more going on, given the nature of the differences between the alternate visions and the actual timeline. They were important differences, rather than whether Pickles the cat chose tuna or chicken for his tea (there isn't a cat in the book).

Overall, it was a good book. It also has a nifty cover, as you'll see.


Epilogue

I suggested to the family we ought to take the book to the seaside. It turned out to be a cold and overcast day, so there wasn't a whole lot of sandcastle building. I did take some shots in the town centre (which is right by the sea).

This shot*** shows Victorian shop buildings and the ruins of a Norman castle on the hilltop. The view has some claim to fame as Disney used it in their advertising in 2007 (they showed the street transforming into a Disney place****).



You can't beat statues and chocolate. This is the cricketer statue (if you ever visit Hastings, look around the nearby buildings to find the ball he's hit). In the background, a chocolate shop and Christmas decorations.



All done, I wrapped him back up in the bubblewrap. I resisted popping all the bubbles, which is quite a feat. It wouldn't be quite so paddingish if I had popped them.


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* I should probably note, people are only expected to take one picture. I have more because I do.

** Nor as a book reviewer, but I'll make up for it with photos!

*** The hand is not mine. This was just a hand I borrowed for the occasion.

**** A shot from the Disney campaign is shown here. They had a sunnier day, being Disney. And a less ruiny castle.

Filling the Gaps in Multicultural Writing

I took psychology at A-level, which meant I got to run psychological experiments on people! The downside is there are ethical rules and stuff*. My dreams of being a crazy evil scientist dashed.

Still, I made the best of it. This post is a bit about one of my experiments and why I think it's important to keep in mind for multicultural# writing.


War of the Ghosts meets The Dandelion

I ran an experiment based on the famous 'War of the Ghosts' study**. I used a different story - a tale called 'The Dandelion' - but the principle was the same. The test victim had the story read to them and were asked to retell the story.

One of the things discovered in the original study was how people coped with gaps. Rather than say "I don't know", they filled them in with something that made sense. 'War of the Ghosts' was a Native American story. The details that 'made sense' to a Western listener could easily be wrong. An example is the characters hunting seals by the river... this became fishing***.

My tale produced an interesting result, because the gap filling came down to storytelling conventions. 'The Dandelion' (also based on a Native American story) focuses on the main character, who watches a dandelion from afar. He believes she's a beautiful maiden. One day her hair turns white and a sigh is enough to send her seeds flying.

Most of my victims did one of two things in the retelling.

• Some brought the main character closer to the dandelion, so that he could realistically blow the seeds.
• Others realised he needed to be at a distance to mistake her for a maiden... so instead, something unconnected to the main character would knock off the seeds.

Dandelions are always dandelions. You can't blow the seeds off when you're standing at a distance in any part of the world. The cultural difference isn't based on how dandelions work.

It was a difference in storytelling. Most Western folktales do not personify forces of nature. In 'The Dandelion', the main character is a personification of the wind. If you're able to make this assumption easily, it won't be hard to remember he blew the seeds from a great distance. If you're assuming he must be a normal human, you'll tie it into your schema**** for dandelion clocks - that makes it harder to remember correctly.


Implications for Multicultural Writing

The problem for multicultural writing is clear - you'll fill in the gaps with bits of your own culture without realising it. You may even be convinced that the filler is from the intended culture.

Using bits of your own culture isn't always a bad thing. Assuming you're writing for members of the same culture, it can make the story more accessible (in the case of 'The Dandelion', the retelling could have benefited from emphasising the nature of the main character for a Western audience). But too much, or the wrong details, makes a story lack that authentic feel.

As shown in the studies, you can't rely on your memory to get things right. You need to re-read your cultural sources with the story in front of you, to check you've not filled the gaps with the wrong cultural filling.

You also can't rely on what feels right. A gap filler could feel like the right thing to use, because it fits your cultural view of the world. The right filler may actually feel a bit alien and unusual to you.

One example where I messed up involved elephants. I knew I was writing about a culture where elephants were viewed as graceful. I still managed to use a descriptor which made the elephant sound clumsy*****. I caught it on a culture-checking pass of the story, having missed it when I was editing purely for general story issues.

Which all boils down to having to check yourself when you're writing about other cultures. You're not to be trusted, so you better make sure you're keeping an eye on yourself. This is one time where trusting your gut feelings may not be the best option.


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# I'm defining multicultural writing as writing about many cultures... but not necessarily in the same story.

* One is that people have to remain anonymous. Note my lack of names in the post. Another is you have to debrief them, so they're not mentally scarred for life. Fortunately, my verbal storytelling skills aren't quite that bad, so no humans were harmed during this study.

** Run by Frederick Bartlett, in case you want to look it up. I'm obviously simplifying a bit here.

*** This is all linked in to the idea of schema - a mental structure used to organise bits of the world/life experience. The average Westerner has a schema for fishing (you go down to the river, you get out your fishing rod, you add the bait, you catch a fish). They don't have a schema for seal hunting.

**** See footnote *** for a brief description of schemata.

***** This is a fun example, because both schemata are correct. Elephants can be graceful, precise and delicate. They can also be clumsy, loud and destructive. The difference is not about the elephants. It's about the structures different cultures have created to understand elephants.******

****** As implied in this example, stereotypes are also a form of schema. As well as using the wrong cultural filling, you could end up using stereotypes to fill in the character of someone of a certain race/culture.

On Interviews

There's an interview with me at Every Day Poets today, about my poetry stuff: Interview

I tried to think of something dynamic to say about interviews, but you don't exactly search for inspiration for them. You just get asked questions and say the first thing that pops into your head. Or at least, I do. Some people might want to avoid that, if they don't want to look crazy/stupid.

On the other hand, where would we be without quotes like "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully" from George Bush's Aqua Man phase. Maybe the world would be a funnier place if more people spoke impulsively. Maybe it would be a better place for the fishes too.