Costco Cookies & Melamine Milk

Let's break from the news of the Dream World for a moment to look at some headlines in the Awake World.

Two men were sentenced to death by the Chinese government today for producing milk containing melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fire retarders. The milk was fed to young children, resulting in at least six fatalities with some 300,000 more children becoming ill form the tainted milk. The condemned men, Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping, are alleged to have added the melamine to the formula milk to make it appear to have a higher protein content. Another collaborator, Zhang Yanzhang, was also given a sentence of life in prison for her participation in the process, and three others have been handed jail sentences of 5 to 15 years with more awaiting trial.

Makes you angry, doesn't it?  That a group chemical and food manufacturers would come up with a scheme to falsely beef up infant formula to satisfy government nutrition guidelines. What makes me angry is that the same government that created these guidelines is the same government that ran Sanlu Group, the company that produced the milk. They are also the same government that put the Sanlu employees on trial and they are same government that will pull the trigger when it is time for Zhang Yujun and Geng Jiping to die.

Here in the West, we are often quick to criticize China. In this respect the media has had a year of field-days with China's inept handling of the Sichuan earthquake last May, government repression of protests against the country's continued occupation of Tibet leading up to the Summer Olympics, and then there was hubbub around Chinese-made lead-tainted toys just before the holiday shopping season. Now this thing with the milk and we in the West shake our heads. 

But the West is certainly no stranger to messing with milk. There are of course the recent problems with rBGH, Monsanto's genetically engineered hormone that's been banned in Europe but is fed to dairy cows (and, by extension, to people) in the United States. Back in the 1970s there was an uproar against the multinational food giant Nestlé for marketing infant formula to women in developing nations, purporting it to be superior to a mother's own breast milk. The switch to Nestlé's formula resulted in a spike in infant mortality rates all over Africa. A consumer boycott ensued but did little to hold the corporation accountable and three decades later it's still in effect. Nestlé also had its own recent melamine milk scandal in China, which is reported to have sickened over 90,000 people. You can read a Chinese news story about that here.

I'll get to our dream in a sec. I just want to know: what will killing Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping do to rectify the situation? How does killing two men teach China, and the rest us, that killing is wrong? And who will hold the Chinese government—and all the world's governments and the corporations that share their status—accountable for the actions that have killed far more than six infants and poisoned not thousands, but millions of people?

All of this could have been avoided if we humans admitted that we were mammals and actually breast fed our kids like we're supposed to. But enough about milk—let's clear our pallets with some cookies! This dream comes from Paolo in Philadelphia:

I was wandering through a vast warehouse, the size of a Costco, but of a more pallid gray color, and dimmer. Each aisle rack was several stories high, and each shelf was filled with boxes and clear plastic bins of vegan cookies. There were chocolate cookies, hazelnut cookies, vanilla cookies, sugar cookies, big cookies with designated icing packs, frosting kits, add-ons of every sugary candy imaginable, all labeled with their ingredients next to the price. As I struggled to comprehend the sheer volume of cookies, I picked out individual bulk bin cookies and put them in my hand-held shopping basket (red). On the ends of the aisles were pre-made, unrefrigerated vegan pizzas, in pizza display boxes (white cardboard with cellophane cut outs to show texture), and 22oz bottles of dark beer. Various other shoppers came in (most seemed to have some fraternity or sorority affiliation via hoodies, caps, etc) and picked out cookies, pizza, and beer. I checked out, and as I walked out of the store I woke up. I jumped out of bed (for real) and immediately ate 2 cookies. It was good.

Paolo, do you have a utopian dietary vision for society? If you do, then your dream would seem to situate you in a post-utopian future where you have worked hard to fulfill your desires and yet they have been co-opted by consumer culture. Now everyone wants eggless macaroons and dairyless pizza enough to warrant big box stores that carry nothing but the stuff. The ingredient list has changed, but the culture of consuming it (frat boys and beer) is still the same. You seem to be cool with that—less work for you in fighting the vegan revolution, right? I could be wrong. Anyway, when you finally woke up and ate those cookies, I cheered for you. I even went and ate a cookie myself. Was it vegan? You bet! ¡Viva la revolución!

––––– –– ––– –––––

Book of the day: Vive le vegan! Simple, Delectable Recipes For the Everyday Vegan Family. It has recipes for the cookies you want right now.

Take Me Black Where I Belong

The second of the 31 Dreamers is Kim who currently lives in Okinawa, Japan. Kim's dream:

So I was trying to get home to my dad's house, AKA what used to be my parents' house before my mom died and what is now owned by someone else because my dad lost the house. Foreclosure cit-ay! But the long country road my parents' house was on was instead Naha's own Kokusai (AKA "international") Street, which is cheesy and horrible like Haight St. [San Francisco] or South St. in Philly. And so the Tennessee road was lined with karaoke and snack bars and shit, but the people on the street were American frat boys who kept making fun of me and I couldn't figure out why. I blacked out on the walk home and starting running barefoot, kept trying to get there but the road never ended. I found a bathroom and went in and was in a stall and a Japanese girl in a kimono was in there, speaking to me in Japanese, and kept picking up pieces of shit off the floor (that were mine) and her face was also covered in my own shit. When I was leaving the bathroom I saw that I was wearing a leopard print skirt and my face was made up in the Japanese "ganguro" style. Insane! I never made it home.

Kim, some years back I read an article by Joe Wood in Harvard's African diasporic journal Transition entitled "The Yellow Negro," about the subset of ganguro (Japanese for "blackface") who specifically parrot African-American styles of appearance and culture. Transition's byline for the article: 

Like their white American counterparts, Japanese kids dig hip-hop, graffiti, and break dancing. In the clubs of Tokyo’s Roppongi district, however, what separates the real from the poser is blackface: darkened skin and curls. Joe Wood wonders whether the Japanese minstrels are trying to be Janet Jackson . . . or Al Jolson.

Then there are the ganguro who darken their skin but lighten their hair (see picture) giving the appearance not of Japanese girls who are trying to look black, but either as Japanese girls who are trying to look like white girls who are trying to look black (e.g. the "orange" tan job prevalent on American college campuses), or as Japanese girls who are trying to look like black girls who are trying to look white (e.g. straight and/or blond "not natural" hair that all the hair salons and dollar stores in my neighborhood specialize in). With the painful complexities and history of race and racism in the U.S., this has been an all but taboo subject outside of academia, a trend that's likely to change as we see more and more people with a visibly "trans-racial" identity (cf: transgender issues were far more invisible a decade ago than they are today). In Japan—a country without a history of Europeans enslaving Africans, and whose social and popular culture is both hyper-accelerated and über-homogenous—is it little wonder that ganguro is what it is? Well, yes, it is a wonder. Now that that's explained, let's move on to your dream:

Clearly Kim, there are places that you want to go back to that are no longer there: a house that doesn't belong to your family anymore; a parent who has left the world of the living; a country road that's been swallowed by commercial sprawl. You want to reconnect with the history that you desire—your feet are bare, making contact with the earth under which bygone things are buried. You are running but you cannot achieve your goal because what's gone is gone forever. 

At the same time you are conflicted in your own role and identity in these matters. Remember when that Tennessee country road seemed so blasé and the idea of Haight Street or South Streets seemed so cool? A lot of alienated young people had the same idea, and so the Haight Streets and Kokusai Streets of the world were created by and for all the people who just didn't fit in to where they came from. These places were probably pretty great before the subcultures that birthed them reached critical mass and were co-opted to become the marketing schemes that they are today. And in the eyes of many, these places are still great—look at how many people flock to South Street in Philadelphia on a Saturday night! But they are not your people, and this is a past that you disavow.

And now your dream has you in Japan, and one of the locals is picking up your own fecal matter and showing it to you—reflecting it back at you like a mirror. And then you see yourself as someone who has bought into the vicious cycle of identity consumerism: a European-American, trying to be a Japanese person, trying to look like an African-American, who might be trying to become . . . European-American.

The dream's imagery is a bit fatalistic, but the message is positive. You obviously recognize the pitfalls of this cycle and so eschew participation in it. You are surrounded by people who bombard you with a fratboyesque cluelessness, yet you stay strong. You know where your roots are and celebrate their strength. It is true that the shortest path homeward is to never leave the house in the first place. But you are wise to travel—to see the world and experience different ways of doing things, and for this reason you perceive the changes in the places that you've left and are more critical of them. You are also more critical of your own changes and the person who you once were—you want to reclaim the desireble parts while shedding the detritus. You want to find that perfect place, free from bogusness and cacophony of karoke bars and fast food. And so you keep running, non-stop, to find your beloved Tennessee country road.