Simple Pleasures and Guilt

A lunch of simple pleasures in Chapel Hill began with me taking one of the free city buses (smartest thing ever) into the Carrboro area during the lunch break at my conference to seek food from the Weaver Street Cooperative Market.

Weaver Street is a nice grocery store, but what made it particularly pleasant for me was the large outdoor area that seems to function like a commons for the neighborhood. The outdoor tables and benches were full of people eating, chatting over wine and coffee, working away at laptops, and staring out into the Carolina blue, watching the beautiful day roll by. It was beyond refreshing to sit out in the sunny day under big leafy trees while eating my lunch. My alternative, a sterile, windowless conference building dining hall, had nothing on the experience. Similarly, canned beets and iceberg lettuce from the conference buffet were put to shame by the offerings at Weaver Street.

Though there was an appealing salad bar at Weaver Street, I decided to make a sandwich, since I’d heard that the co-op is known for its bakery. They put out a full schedule of fresh baked breads daily as well as lots of little treats, few of which were vegan. There was a gorgeous vegan chocolate cake though with lots of molded chocolate accents and a rich-looking ganache, but it was a full cake and something on the order of $18, so I figured it would be hard to rationalize buying and eating it all myself for lunch, though I spared a little time to think about the situation before resolving to pass on it.

I picked out a wonderful seeded ciabatta bread. I love the chewy, lightness of ciabatta and always appreciate lots of crunchy seeds in my bread. To go with my little loaf, I got a cold vegan chicken salad. It was a good, though pretty standard mix of textured soy protein, celery and soy mayonnaise, but it had the surprising addition of chopped walnuts, which made it really rich and gave another dimension to the texture of the salad. I’d never thought of such a thing, despite my tendency put nuts in everything.

A steaming soy latte made with organic, fair-trade coffee and lots of cinnamon rounded out my lunch and marked my return to coffee after a break from it for the past couple weeks. I’m a lucky non-addict when it comes to coffee, though I really enjoy it.

Better sense had me leave my drool-session with the Weaver Street chocolate cake empty handed, but couldn’t stop me from indulging the chocolate craving just a little bit. Coffee, I could probably live without, chocolate is a different story. I bought a Dagoba rosehip bar—rich but creamy dark chocolate studded with rosehips and raspberries.

I turned my face to the sun and let the chocolate melt on my tongue. Simple pleasures. I felt every inch a hedonist.

Politically and personally I really struggle with hedonism. At our cores I think most people just want to feel good and seek ways to accomplish moments of pleasure in their lives, and that is perfectly reasonable, but we all too often seek pleasures at the expense of others, the environment, animals, and on and on. Coming into my political self in the punk and activist scenes I learned to be ashamed of indulgences that I craved. I often still experience that shame and fully understand and respect the reasons for it. Why should I have access to these things? (Or more to the point, why, knowing that I have access because of an accident of birth and an inequitably ordered social world, should I accept this access as my due?) Why should I spend my money on fancy coffees when I could be doing something much more beneficial for others with it?

There are many ways of answering these questions, but none are complete enough. I don’t ever want to ignore these questions either, I want to engage them and use them to check in with my choices, but I can’t live immersed in guilt or shame either. I’ve done that. It’s an awful way to live and I think it prevents you from being very useful to other people, or to yourself.

I wonder if the explosion of interest in beautiful and conscious vegan cooking by younger people comes out of all these feelings—this “post-punk” (meaning not Joy Division, but rather a place in the life-course that comes “after” full affiliation with the punk scene) group of people trying to figure out how to be accountable, engaged, and comfortable. Not an easy space to occupy…

I know people who would grab on what I just wrote here and run with it as an indictment, call me a yuppie (or, uh, a punk yuppie, which is to say, ...a puppy), but that's not what I mean to set up. It’s just one more complex thought to fill your head with, and of course, I don’t think the complexity is limited to punks, “post-punks,” activists, etc., it’s pretty much an eternal problem for the privileged and politically-minded.

And though I was immersed in this problem for the rest of the day, I submitted to a second indulgence with my friend Soup at 3 Cups following the final conference session. Stay tuned for more chocolate and coffee from Chapel Hill, which I’ll deliver with less introspection and more pretty pictures.

Ah, but one more photo that fits in nicely for this post before I’m off. I noticed this stencil on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Make total destroy? (I swear those are the lyrics to some Japanese hardcore song, possibly more than one even!) There’s something about this expression, which though totally ridiculous, utterly simplistic, quite frankly unhelpful, and grammatically incorrect, still fills me with a certain amount of joy, especially to see it on the beautiful sunny street full of wholesome looking Southern college students wandering in and out of Starbucks.

I guess I’m not totally "post-punk" afterall.