PHOTO BY DENNY CULBERT
I grew up in a family where it was tradition for my parents to eat red beans and rice every Monday. This is a tradition of New Orleans, where my parents are from. The meat left over from Sunday’s dinner was thrown in a pot of red beans and set to simmer for hours for dinner Monday evening. My mother, upon moving north to Chicago — where she worked first as a high school gym teacher and then a dean of students – brought her food traditions with her. While my brother and I may not have had red beans and rice every Monday, it was in the rotation of our meals enough that it became a staple of my diet, my palate, and eventually my cooking repertoire.
When I left Chicago at 18 to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee, I distinctly remember craving red beans and rice on fried chicken day in my dorm’s cafeteria. However, that wasn’t the side the cooks prepared, and I only had a microwave in my room, which lent itself to reheating fast-food leftovers or warming a bowl of chicken-flavored ramen. I was desperate for a familiar meal, and my grandmother obliged. She sent me a few cans of Blue Runner red beans in the mail; the closest, she said, I could get to what tasted like homemade beans. Upon receiving my gift, I immediately took the bus to the grocery store and picked up some Minute Rice and turkey smoked sausage I could heat in the microwave. With my ingredients stocked in my room, all I had to do was bide my time until the next fried chicken day. When it came around weeks later, I scurried out of the café, ran up to my room on the fourth floor, and got to work. Rice, beans, and meat were all warmed in the microwave, I carried it down to the café, got in line, and heaped a crispy, fried leg and a thigh on my plate, went to the table where my roommate sat, and ate. The first bite was home. I savored it on my tongue. Even though I was far away from my mother and my grandmother, I had them — albeit underseasoned — on my plate.
My love for red beans and rice has never wavered. I doctored the dish in my dorm, I cooked it for the first time on a stove in my college off-campus apartment, and perfected my technique when I moved to Amarillo, Texas. I worked my first news job and met my husband there. The first meal I ever made for him was red beans and rice. In our 10 years together I’ve made them often, not every Monday often, but often enough that I never miss them, I never crave them.
Then one day he said, “All we have is beans and rice?”
“Yes, what’s wrong with that?” I asked.
He calmly responded, “That’s like, poor-people food.” Read more
There is no need to construct a world where we have to choose between systems and the communal path. There are limitations to localism, just as there are benefits to systems. The point is to overcome our isolation … 
New York Times journalist Jesse Wegman says “The way the Electoral College operates today is not carved in stone,” he says. “The winner-take-all rule is really just a state invention. There’s nothing keeping us from changing it to a different method.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.