“Restaurant” salsa is a happy place for scads of us. In fact, we often choose restaurants for the salsa. Like Earth’s gravitational pull, certain salsas (and thus restaurants) keep us in close orbit. We come back for more. We obsess. We might even go home and attempt to make the salsa. Chances are, we’ll come up short.
Chef insiders note that our national obsession with “restaurant” salsa, both literally and figuratively, boils down to the tomatoes. A good tomato is ripe and flavorful. But our cheap facsimile attempts begin in grocery store produce sections where we hold weighty tomatoes. Dejected, we mirror what’s in our hands, internally emoting watery-laden and tasteless tears. The ultimate outcome? A homemade numbing-out salsa that echoes the old expression: “You are what you eat.”
This grocery store snapshot and the resulting sub-par salsa are Kiss the Ground moments. We know that our paltry tomato selections are a result of climate change. More specifically, droughts, flooding, chemicals, GMOs, and soil degradation. As we internalize tears, we might even blame anthropogenic meddling. But in that grocery store moment, there’s more surfacing inside us.
Let’s rewind and replay it. Holding lackluster tomatoes entails a knowledge of what could have been as well as what was — even beyond the restaurant. The restaurant salsa benchmark only serves as a memory jogger. It transports us to a time and place where far more tomatoes were good and where there was less gatekeeping on goodness. This goodness also likely existed at or nearer our own homes because soil, water, and air were cleaner.
Circa 1959, C. Wright Mills defined the sociological imagination as the crossroads of personal biography and historical circumstances, famously noting that “[n]either the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” Although Mills’ work was disparaged in those 1959 moments, his words took root and energized the equity and peace protests of the 1960s. Just think of the famous second-wave feminist slogan: “The personal is political.” This and other such protest expressions gave the sociological imagination legs.
Sociologists continue to use the crossroads of personal biography and historical circumstances as a rallying cry and point of convergence. Our societal impressions and explanations are merely expressions of our historical understanding, that which is present, and that which is personal. However, seeing the social world stored up in a tomato can be a leap.
Fast forward to the work of environmental sociologist Michael Bell. Bell encourages us to use the sociological imagination as a springboard for environmental thinking and activism. After all, society shapes and is shaped by natural surroundings. This further incorporation is called the socioecological imagination. According to Bell, we must think of the (human) social world in “larger community” with plants, animals, and the nature. Borrowing from marine biologist Rachel Carson, Bell notes that we must question and understand dialogue, power dynamics, and lived experiences so as to manifest “larger community” thinking.
When we incorporate the larger community, historical, and personal thinking, the tomato takes flavor. It speaks to our relationships, kinships, family traditions, aspirations, material world, and hubris. As Michael Bell would say, it becomes an artifact for the ideal, material, and practice.
It’s essentially a story of what we want, what we have, and what we do. We ingest the tomato, thus making it our present, past, and future. The porosity gives us pause for appreciation, weeping, and imagining a better way forward.
Go back to the grocery store one more time. With that dejecting tomato in hand comes a heightened awareness and a new-found emotion that is unique to this climate degradation era. In holding that tomato, we may feel a longing for home. Home in the sense of comfort, goodness, and an enveloping embrace. The home of folklore, collective memory, and stored up sensory and taste. With eyes closed, there is also a longing for what could have been — in our present world. Missed opportunities. And then a knot in the stomach forms as we try to reconcile history, place, and current circumstances.
In 2003, environmentalist Glenn Albrecht defined this complexity of feelings as “solastalgia.” He noted that this new emotion of “homesickness you have when you are still at home” would become more prevalent due to climate change. Solastalgia mixes imagination, solace, and grief. It is philosophical and increasingly practical. Albrecht studied solastalgia in the contexts of intense anthropogenic-induced climate change such as drought and large-scale coal mining. Today, we are connected to those profound cases of solastalgia because kindred feelings are a part of our lived experiences. Also, the term is arguably more relevant as we grapple with nihilism, numbing out, and climate conversations.
What is the balm for solastalgia? From collective action and protest movements, we know that there is power in naming emotions and dwelling in them. From visual arts, we know that strength is found in emotive characterizations and depictions. When we frame, reframe, and dialogue, emotions are owned. And in personalizing meanings, can that which is personal change the present?
Kirk is a guest blogger at UITAC Publishing. UITAC’s mission is to provide high-quality, affordable, and socially responsible online course materials.
Image used in this blog:
- “Cooked Food” by Anthony Leong is licensed on Pexels. This image has not been altered.
Postscript: Increasingly, restaurants are also grappling with sub-par and costly produce. While they often have better resources for “good” tomatoes, the effects of climate change are universally felt.
Another postscript: As an avid salsa enthusiast, I am always looking for good salsa that defies, embodies, and personifies climate change. Below, is my favorite “restaurant” salsa recipe to date:
(Adapted from Laura Newsom)
~ 28 ounces whole tomatoes with juice
2 cans (10 ounce) Rotel (diced tomatoes with green chiles)
¼ c. chopped onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 whole jalapeno, quartered and sliced thin
¼ tsp. sugar
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. ground cumin
½ c. fresh cilantro
½ whole lime juice
Directions: Stew whole tomatoes removing the skins. Combine whole stewed tomatoes with Rotel, onion, jalapeno, garlic, sugar, salt, cumin, lime juice, and cilantro in a blender or food processor. Pulse until you get the consistency you’d like. I like about 15 pulses. Test seasonings with a tortilla chip and adjust as needed. Refrigerate salsa for at least an hour. Serve with tortilla chips, scrambled eggs, or just about anything. Enjoy!
