Karen Lucero, of Lucero Organic Farms in Lodi, started bringing her Seascape strawberries back to Berkeley Farmer’s Markets in April. (They’re also available at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Market, and Sundays at Temescal.) As Karen’s sometime market helper, I hold out samples by their stems to offer passers-by. Not many refuse a bite of bright ripe berry, but the cognoscenti sometimes will demur: “Oh, save the sample; I know they’re good!”

My opinion’s not unbiased, but Karen’s berries are a well-established market favorite, the preferred shortcake-toppers of Berkeley shoppers and the pastry chefs at Chez Panisse (strawberry soup? ok!). Lucero is a family-run, all-organic farm, which, since strawberries are among the “dirty dozen,” is worth keeping in mind. Most conventional strawberries are high-yield hybrids that owe their bright color and hefty size to heavy doses of fertilizer, water, and pesticide – this often makes them tasteless, too. Lucero’s Seascapes may not produce as much, but Karen and her husband, Ben, prize them for their flavor. The Luceros also minimize watering, which, ecological benefits aside, stresses the plants just enough, Karen says, to concentrate their nutrients and flavor. As a bonus, their distinctive long stems make for easy dipping in chocolate sauce (or a lucky mouth).

So take a break from your seminar papers, walk to the market, and stock up on some strawberries (and look out for cherries, which should show up soon). Not that the fruits of intellectual labor aren’t satisfying, but sometimes they’re not; and a basket of berries will always hit the spot.

“Graduate student” can be a totalizing identity. It can also be a fraught one, depending on your discipline (those of us in Comp Lit, for example, may be said to be “always already in crisis”). But we graduate students do sometimes manage to emerge from the devastating weight of questions like “Can contradiction be redeemed as determinate negation?” and “What am I doing here?!?!” to do other things, and identify in other ways. Lynn Xu, a first-year in the Comparative Literature department, is also a poet, which she sometimes finds at odds with academe. (Her poems have appeared in 1913, Best American Poetry 2008, Tinfish, Octopus, The Walrus, and elsewhere.) But if Lynn is always or ever in crisis, she’s also the kind of person who will, with glee, wish you weeks full of “happiness, humor, and disgust.” I’ve had worse weeks. (And if you’d like any of these things in your week, heavy on the happiness/humor side, you can come hear Lynn read with recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout.)

During the academic year, Lynn may take notes for future poems, but most of her time and mental space is devoted to coursework. That doesn’t mean, though, that her lyrical spirit lies dormant. “Academic (critical) work asks so much from the imagination, but refuses to acknowledge it (the imagination) as an expression of the thought, as a form of expression inherent in the thinking,” she says. I suspect she’s not the only potential PhD who sympathizes with the grumbling so familiar in extramural discourse: a lot of academic writing is deadeningly dry, suppressing the imaginative impulse instead of fleshing it out. Though Lynn believes poetry itself can be a form of critique – and is writing a manifesto on the topic for a methodology course – she finds this mentality meets institutional resistance. “Criticism does not have take the form of the essay. But in school it does.  And a very restricted sense of the essay at that.”

When she’s not walking the rope between academic writing and creative writing, Lynn likes to walk the streets and trails of Berkeley. She also helps run a small press, Canarium Books. Though conscious of complaints about the institutionalization and over-production of poetry (the poets churned out by MFA programs, for example, and the poems they then churn out themselves), Lynn, who received her MFA from Brown, doesn’t think contemporary poetry is consigned to mediocrity. “The solution cannot be: stop writing poetry, or: stop publishing poetry,” she says. “Rather, it must be: to increase the quality of the conversation.  And hopefully our press does this.  All our authors I believe are luminaries in the craft.”

Lynn’s own luminous writing is, I find, peripatetic, peppered with paraprosdokian. Her lines have been described as “equal parts elegance and flippancy while staying all song.” In “Language exists because,” she writes: “Language exists because nothing exists between those / who express themselves. All language is therefore / a language of prayer.” Indeed, trying to write my seminar paper, I can’t help but feel that my language is a performance of prayer – a prayer that the thing will end itself. I don’t think that’s what she means; but I’m glad Lynn and her poems exist.

To read Lynn’s poems, go here.

To hear Lynn read, go here:

Rae Armantrout and Lynn Xu (music from Wee Giant)
Friday, May 7th, 7pm
Studio One
365 45th Street (@ Broadway), Oakland (near the MacArthur Bart)

If you’re a Berkeley graduate student invested in the future of your institution, you know all this already. But in all the debate swirling around the lamentable fee increases – most prominently, how best to protest them – another issue is at stake. It’s heresy around here to suggest that anyone who wants and works for it shouldn’t have access to a college education. But does everyone really want a college education?

As San Jose State professor (and Berkeley Ph.D.) Mike Rustigan argued in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, many young Americans are more interested in working with their hands than sitting behind a desk, and to insist that everyone aspire to a four-year degree discounts the value – not to mention national economic necessity – of learning a trade. Caitlin Flanagan’s polemical (and pretty much universally derided) critique of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley serves as the reductio ad absurdum of our unblinking devotion to a liberal arts education at the expense of any practical knowledge. Arguing that school garden programs rob students of valuable time with civics textbooks, Flanagan accuses Alice Waters and her “ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting” acolytes of preventing migrant workers’ kids from getting into college, which is the only way they could possibly escape their fate of diabetes and underemployment. (Waters’ suggestion that working in a garden can prove pedagogically useful is unlikely to breed a permanent underclass of sharecroppers, but if it asks students to write recipes as well as coherent paragraphs about The Crucible – if it produces people who can effectively communicate information rather than haughtily parade their cultural capital in The Atlantic – is that really such a bad thing?)

Faux-populism aside, most school garden advocates would agree with Flanagan that, whether early education is cultivated in vegetable plots or those of Shakespeare, college is the ultimate goal, and the argument that the university isn’t for everyone runs a real risk of elitism. It’s easy for a tenured faculty member, or a first-year graduate student enjoying the first fruits of fellowship, to wax poetic about the art of mechanical production. But, as Rustigan argues, recognizing the abilities of those who show promise in shop class isn’t just empty praise; it might help steer would-be dropouts in a positive direction. Our educational system tends to give short shrift to those with neither the desire nor the skill set to don white collars. If the push for equal education put more emphasis on vocational programs, like the Regional Occupational Training offered in cooperation with the Santa Cruz public school system, we might give otherwise unmotivated teens a reason to stay in school by showing them there are multiple paths to success. Manufacturing may be cheaper in China, but home improvement and electricians’ visits will continue to be made in America, and such expertise comes with a certain job security. As Rustigan quotes a retired plumber, “No one is going to outsource your local repair guy.”

And let’s face it: not all of us in academia have the luxury of condescending to the service sector. Plenty of plumbers make more money than assistant professors, and grad students flush with funding now might not find such a plum situation on the job market – to say nothing of undergraduate humanities majors who try and fail, as I did last year, to score jobs in marketing or magazines and end up waitressing (and earning more than some office-bound peers) instead.

This isn’t meant to suggest that anyone is deciding between a mechanical engineering PhD and a career as a shop mechanic, or to deny the fact that college education can indeed be a powerful force for social change and personal gain. As the current controversy at Berkeley High attests, the misguided assumption that non-white students can’t excel in college-prep courses comes perilously close to proving Flanagan’s point. But it’s about time we realize that learning skills for manual labor, like learning critical thinking, is good for everyone, whether it’s part of a formal curriculum or not, whether as the basis for a vocation or as a supplement to one. The best education would teach how to use all the basic tools: reading, writing, arithmetic, and a hammer.

Photo by brianwallace

L.A. has a reputation for being a cultural and intellectual wasteland, but at the 8^th Annual West Coast Law and Literature Conference, held January 13 by USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and Department of Comparative Literature, I found a welcome oasis. I came across it by accident; I happened to be in town, I knew one of the professors participating, and parking was provided (probably the deciding factor). Since the papers were accessible online, I already knew that the panelists – Bernadette Meyler of Cornell Law School, Julia Lupton of UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn – would be presenting work on topics ranging from England’s 1660 Act of Oblivion to joint-stools, Hannah Arendt, and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. I was anxious to find out just how all this (most pressingly, the joint-stools) could be connected under the proclaimed theme of “Early Modern/Post-Modern: Inventing the Political Subject.”

For some, the field of Law and Literature is symptomatic of the American university’s fetishization of interdisciplinarity, geared more towards marketing appeal than genuine intellectual inquiry. Depending on your perspective, it’s a way to make literature more relevant by relating it to the outside world, or a way to pretend to be engaging with the outside world while still remaining comfortably ensconced in academia. Debates over intellectual jurisdiction often ensue.

To my relief, the presenters at the one-day, single-panel conference didn’t waste time making the case for Law & Lit, opting instead to close-read and cross-examine each other’s arguments. All three panelists questioned the emphasis placed on “historicism” – briefly, the idea that texts should be understood in their historical contexts – and what the over-determined and often undermined term even meant. At one point, Kahn wondered whether “thinking with Shakespeare,” the project proposed in Lupton’s book of the same name, could really be called “historicist,” or if it could better be called simply “thinking.”

The relevance of this particular disciplinary intersection – between early modern law and literature and post-modern law and literature – was perhaps most aptly articulated by Kahn, who, in discussing her paper on “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza and Arendt,” posited that because early modern texts created the conditions for modernity, looking back on these texts can help us diagnose contemporary problems and give rise to alternative modes of thinking about the present. We might not be so flummoxed by current crises of political theology, from Islamic jihadism to Christian fundamentalism, if we paid better attention to how influential writings on the topic have been read and misread in the past.

The event’s format deviated from the norm of scholars reading their papers and fielding audience questions. Each of the three papers, copies of which were available at the conference, was introduced by another panelist’s commentary, to which the author could then respond; additional comments from other legal and literary scholars followed before the forum was opened up for questions. While feedback was delivered mostly as prepared remarks, the proceedings were enlivened by a spirit of collaborative openness. Kahn’s discussion of Lupton’s paper noted the early modern simultaneity of common law – in which the wife was considered her husband’s property – and canon law, under which a suitor must earn a woman’s consent through courtship. Using this legal lens, Kahn proposed, could lead to an alternative conception of Kate’s personhood in The Taming of the Shrew. Lupton said she found this idea useful, but pointed out that canon law didn’t necessarily endow women with any real agency: a “woman’s consent” to marriage often had little to do with the woman herself, but was instead used as a rhetorical strategy by men (like when Capulet waxed moralistic about his daughter’s consent in Romeo and Juliet).

I didn’t quite follow all this, and I’ve probably grossly misrendered whatever problematic was being (re-)problematized. But I did get the impression that the attendees were really, for the most part, engaging with each other. As someone new to the conference circuit and still at sea in my own field, I found the conversational, mutual-presentation format extremely conducive to, well, not zoning out during talks. No matter how eminently readable, the most riveting arguments can be difficult to follow when recited in monotone; by the time a paper is deemed worthy of sharing, I’ve sensed, the author is already weary of it. Having someone else explain, or question, what the papers were about kept things fresh for both the authors and the audience. For those who hadn’t read the material beforehand, the co-panelists’ commentary – which included both summary and critique – helped both focus the articles’ salient aspects and make them accessible to a diverse audience. I study French and English literature, and I attended the conference with my mother, a recent American History PhD and recovering lawyer, and we both came away invigorated by fresh ideas – this despite her wariness of Comp Lit jargon and my usual response of catatonia when confronted with legalese.

I hope to attend more conferences that work like this: interactive and well-organized, interdisciplinary but intellectually focused on the timely and the timeless, putting literature in conversation with politics without putting it on trial. Though I admit, I never quite figured out how the joint-stools fit in.

Food Rules elaborates and expands Pollan’s pithy food protocol – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” – into 64 “rules.” Pollan’s goal is less to chastise than to serve up advice in bite-sized pieces (“Pay more, eat less”) and offer mnemonic devices (“The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead” – yikes!). Pollan recognizes that the standard American diet, invested by corporate money and government policy with an aura of natural inevitability, is a hard habit to break, and complicated criticisms of the food industry’s fourberie can be difficult to digest. Exposing our diet’s absurdities – and offering appetizing alternatives – makes the case better than just telling us over and over that we really shouldn’t be eating those Cheetos.

Pollan is most convincing when he plays the bricoleur, taking useful tools for thinking about food from both nutritional science and traditional wisdom (which, as he demonstrates, is often eventually backed up by science). He counsels us to “eat our colors” because, as mothers have known for centuries, brightly-colored vegetables are good for you (or because, as scientists have recently found out, they contain polyphenols, flavonoids, and carotenoids). His appeal to simplicity helps counter the notion that only well-educated elites have the time and means to enjoy good, healthful food. Not everyone can afford organic, and busy working moms might scoff at “slow food,” but we can all agree to spend less money on soda and stop obsessing over antioxidants. Pollan wants to suggest that, if we just consult our common sense, we can have our occasional local, grass-fed, organic beef and eat it too.

With its piecemeal approach, Food Rules is more concerned with making eating better easy on an everyday basis than with tackling the deeper issues that make eating well so hard. But Pollan does plant the seeds for how our food choices can help restore ethical and economic balance, on a personal and a societal level. Yes, farmers’ market produce can cost more; but cutting back on meat, restaurant meals, and mindless snacking is good for your body, your bank account, and the planet, and that’s no coincidence. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan outlines how traditional agriculture’s perfect economy – cows eat grass; cow manure fertilizes grass; cows eat grass – has been ruptured on both ends: cows eat processed corn; toxic cow manure requires fiscally and environmentally costly storage. It’s easier to see how absurd, unappetizing, and inefficient our diet is by looking not only at multiple pictures, but also at a single bigger picture, by situating our alimentary attitudes in a larger social, political, and economic context.

Some readers of Food Rules may find it not quite substantial enough to satisfy their hunger for nutritional information. The book’s breezy tone, and its reluctance to address its premises, are understandable: publishers, like snack-food manufacturers, push products that require minimal processing on the consumer’s part; we want things that melt in our mouths, not stick in our teeth or wedge stubbornly in our brains. After all, if you suggest too strongly that the way we eat has everything to do with the way we work, sleep, play, medicate, produce, and consume – in short, with the very fabric of our society –  you’ve far exceeded the bounds of a snack-sized airplane read. But for those whose tastebuds are tantalized by Food Rules, Pollan offers up heartier fare in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, with analysis that, for all its density, is surprisingly easy to swallow (if you’re willing to chew a little first).

Pollan’s philosophy can only become a staple in our cultural cupboard if we abandon the notion that our bodies can be hermetically sealed off from the body politic. Just as we should aim to eat whole foods, not polysyllabic nutrients or numbers of calories, and adopt whole diets (like that of the French) instead of just their most appealing aspects (more red wine, anyone?), we need to live whole lives, choosing diets that make sense in our own social, political, and economic contexts. The fact that “food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies” requires further consideration than the passing acknowledgment Food Rules affords it. Italian cuisine, driven in large part by fresh seasonal produce, may translate better than the Inuit reliance on seal blubber, but even European eating strategies are incompatible with many Americans’ workaday lives. After all, you can only “After lunch, sleep awhile. After dinner, walk a mile,” as rule #54 prescribes, if your schedule allows for siestas.  If Professor Pollan’s students take his advice, he might end up with some sleepy afternoon seminars.

Photo by John-Morgan

Since I’ve been home after my first semester as a Comparative Literature graduate student at Berkeley, I’ve spent a lot of time fielding questions from friends and relatives about what, exactly, I’ve been doing. My usual response – “Oh, you know; comparing the literatures, to see which one is the best” – tends to elicit nervous, confused laughter, and only thinly veils what I’ve actually spent all semester doing: wondering what, exactly, I’m doing.

As an undergraduate, I regarded graduate students with a certain baffled admiration. Their language was both idiosyncratic and predictable, as if codified in some dictionary whose existence it was their duty to deny. They all talked with the same calculated haltingness, in the contained cadence of seminar-speak. Where did they all learn to discreetly smirk at Lacan, question whether violence was being effaced on the level of the text, and wonder about the role of “affect”? Where did they learn to speak as if everything was in quotation marks (and/or parentheses)? And where could I learn to do that too? (This is a good place to start.)

As much as I rolled my eyes at this kind of academic posturing, I had an overwhelming desire to crack the code and join the ranks of this secret society. I also really liked reading things and writing about them. So I applied to graduate school, struggling to frame my questions of purpose as statements, awkwardly incorporating snippets of that foreign grad student language and hoping that by the time I got there, I would be problematizing, historicizing, and reifying with the fluency of a native.

Berkeley’s Comp Lit students, however, turned out not to be the jargon-spouting aliens I had feared. Worse: they were human, and spoke English, and were perfectly nice and friendly, and I still didn’t understand what was going on half the time. I felt like there were certain unsaid assumptions shared by everyone else about how to approach texts, assumptions too obvious to put into words and thus impossible to ask about. I became quite sure I didn’t know how to read, and wondered what it was I had been doing to books all these years, since it certainly couldn’t be called reading. The areas I thought I was interested in now seemed like they weren’t “areas” at all. I realized I didn’t know what “area,” or any other remotely abstract word, even meant. After stumbling through my first few seminars, never sure if I was saying what the professor wanted to hear or exactly the opposite, I took some solace in the fact that the rest of my cohort seemed as lost as I was. Second-years, third-years, and even seasoned dissertators assured me that they still didn’t know what they were doing, but I didn’t believe them; their claims of confusion were suspiciously coherent. They dutifully asked me if I had any questions about the program, and if they could offer any guidance, but I was too confused to even know what questions to ask.

Sitting around wallowing in a vortex of self-doubt, and dragging my peers in with me, turned out not to be much help in figuring out what I was doing in graduate school. What did help was actually doing stuff: immersing myself in texts, trying to work through them, tentatively venturing ideas about them. A professor’s advice to consider seminar papers as works in progress, potential springboards for further exploration on a topic, helped quell my anxieties about my general lack of direction. It also reminded me why I wanted to go to graduate school in the first place: I think literary analysis is really fun.

Starting graduate school at Berkeley just as the university was hit with budget cuts and their fallout both amplified and helped refine my existential woes. I started to wonder more and more about the economic value of intellectual labor, especially in the ostensibly insolvent humanities. How do we assign a monetary value to the pricelessness of literature, and why should I be getting paid to study it? (That last one I didn’t want to question too rigorously.) These questions ended up informing my academic interests, and both of my seminar papers touched on the relationship between literature and money. Graduate school, for better or for worse, turned out not to be as isolated from the “real world” as I had imagined.

Though I’ve tried not to think too much about school since I turned in those seminar papers, I do feel like I have a little bit of a better idea of what I’m doing than when I started. I’m starting to understand how my more-experienced peers could express their confusion with such calm countenances, and that a lot of graduate school is realizing that we don’t know what, exactly, we’re doing, but that trying to figure it out – by reading, by writing, by exploring, by interacting – is a worthy and rewarding goal in itself. And if all else fails, I can always say that I’m engendering the linguistic construction of the specular economy with an eye to the historicization of desire.

As you may have guessed, there is.  Frozen banana “ice cream” is a delicious dairy-free, refined-sugar-free treat that will satisfy virtuous vegan and lascivious lactophile alike. And the best part is you can make it at home, without a fancy ice cream maker or any other special kitchen equipment beyond a basic food processor.  All you have to do is chop and freeze a few bananas (two or three make a suitable serving):

Toss them in the food processor:

And blend until creamy, usually about five minutes:

You may need to stop and scrape the blade a few times so it keeps blending smoothly, and if your food processor is like mine (ancient, cheap, or for any other reason reluctant to actually process food), you may want to let the fruit thaw for a few minutes first.

The result is more like soft-serve than traditional ice cream: smooth, sweet, and impossibly creamy.

If this still sounds too much like health food to you – and let’s face it, part of the pleasure of ice cream is that it’s naughty – feel free to vamp it up.  A quarter cup or so of almond milk (or the regular old dairy variety) adds extra creaminess.  For a semi-healthy fudge sauce, mix two parts liquid sweetener (I like agave, but maple syrup would probably work too) with one part plain cocoa powder.  Add a sprinkling of chopped nuts, and you have yourself a deconstructed (or is it reconstructed?) banana split.  You could also intensify the flavor by adding a dash of cinnamon, scraping out half a vanilla bean, or tossing in a small handful of frozen strawberries or raspberries before blending.

So put those neglected, browning bananas on your counter out of their misery and into the freezer.  Then, instead of seeking solace for your writing woes in Chunky Monkey, make your own version: it won’t make you chunky, it’ll save you a chunk of cash, and it might just get you through that paper.

Don’t tell Harold Bloom, but the lyrical feats of rappers like Raekwon have proven eminently worthy of literary analysis. A successful career in hip-hop requires more than an affinity for girls, cash, and cars. Rappers must employ a sharp wit, an acute sense of rhythm, and a highly developed allusive structure. Lil Wayne’s enigmatic “Who dat one dat do dat boy?” has left many a listener rhythmically entranced but utterly unsure of the question, much less the answer. And Cam’ron’s “But la de da de / We like to party” sounds achingly familiar…but is that elusive allusion just an illusion?

RapGenius.com (formerly, with a nominal nod to biblical hermeneutics, RapExegesis.com) delves into the most opaque of rap’s lyrical mysteries. The extensive index of annotated songs, while not quite comprising a critical edition to the complete works of rap, is likely to alleviate any itching textual anxieties; you’ll need no longer fret about the origins of that Cam reference. And unlike an unwieldy multivolume Pléiade, the site isn’t just for devotees (nor will it cost you half your stipend). Offering everything from the iconic Jay-Z to the more obscure Southern group The Clipse, RapGenius invites curious converts without preaching to the choir, guiding neophyte and initiate alike through the semiotic labyrinth of rap. Just click on the hyperlinked text to reveal instant enlightenment: behind “Beef: I hammer mine / When I get my hands on nines” lies “A double entendre: a butcher ‘hammers’ ground beef; Cam’ron settles ‘beef’ – disagreements – with his ‘hammer’ – his (in this case nine millimeter) gun.” If only reading Milton worked like this.

Sites like RapGenius have, however, sparked some controversy. If rap lyrics need to be somehow translated, the contributors to these sites – often white and highly educated – can be seen as amateur ethnographers: without their expertise in the language of the natives, rap would be unintelligible gibberish. Such criticism, recalling the notorious Ebonics debates of the 90s, has surely not escaped the RapGenius scribes. But the assiduousness of the site’s annotations suggests that they take the language of rap, and all its aesthetic, ethical, and political implications, seriously. The genre may in some respects deserve its “bad rap” as a promoter of violence and misogyny, but RapGenius often succeeds in showing how good rap problematizes the power relations between blacks and whites, men and women, rich and poor. Feminist rap fans – and anyone in Gender & Women’s Studies – will appreciate, if not endorse, an analysis of a Lil Kim track in which she exhorts a male listener to perform a sexual act anatomically impossible within the prevailing gender paradigm. And if one aspect of the oft-off-rhymed connection between the “rap game” and the “crack game” is that both rappers and drug dealers get rich selling powerful substances with little concern for how their customers inevitably abuse their overvalued products, we can conclude that Nas doesn’t care if you are effectively “Otherizing” his language; he drives a much, much nicer car than you.

Yet RapGenius will likely remain deeply problematic for graduate students, even those who can in good faith suspend sociological skepticism: not only does it provide yet another internet distraction from coursework and research, it does so while posing as a quasi-intellectual exercise. So what if you spent the last hour trying to achieve a grasp on par with Lil Wayne’s of the exact relationship between a goon and a goblin; at least you weren’t looking at LOLcats. Come to think of it, those pidgin captions would make for a compelling case study of the internet’s impact on language…“LOLcatechism.com,” anyone?

Victory Garden at UC Berkeley

Berkeley is known as a culinary paradise: the food here is not only delicious, but also driven in large part by local, organic, and sustainably-grown ingredients.  In addition to the famous restaurants of the Gourmet Ghetto, the city boasts bustling thrice-weekly farmers’ markets that run the gamut of fresh produce, grass-fed hot dogs, and vegan enchiladas.  But on a graduate student budget, a prix-fixe dinner at Chez Panisse might be a bit out of reach.  Even at the markets, despite the undeniable value of supporting local farmers, a $4/pound price tag can sour even the sweetest organic peach.

So how are we starving students to take a seat at the smorgasbord of Berkeleyan bounty without breaking the bank?  There are plenty of budget-friendly options for grocery shopping and eating out: Berkeley Bowl’s produce is a great value, especially for organic items, and many vendors at the farmers’ markets offer attractive deals near closing time or on less cosmetically perfect specimens.  Vik’s Chaat House is a good bet for quality Indian on the cheap, and The Cheeseboard’s $2.50/slice gourmet pizza is worth the wait in line.  But what kind of fare, dare I ask, can be had for free?

As it turns out, Berkeley abounds in opportunities for free food, and I’m not referring to the stale donuts sitting in your departmental lounge.  One option is to gorge yourself on the free samples of those farmers’ market peaches, though you risk dirty looks and the ensuing guilt-driven purchases that effectively negate your entire free-sample strategy.  (Or, I suppose, you could just endure the dirty looks.)  Instead, I recommend heading over to Memorial Glade and checking out the campus Victory Garden.  It’s a small plot and won’t be feeding any armies, but on most days this time of year you can find a few ripe tomatoes, summer squash complete with their blossoms, and, if you’re lucky, a late-season strawberry or two.  Anyone is welcome to help themselves to the produce; if you don’t eat it, the worms will.  And if you’d like to return the favor to the garden, you can help out with maintenance.

Or, even better, heed Voltaire’s advice and cultivate your own garden.  It’s basically free, beyond the minimal initial overhead, and offers the reward of self-reliance.  Herbs are probably the easiest to grow; put a pot of basil in a sunny window, water regularly, and you’re halfway to pesto.  You can get herbs and pots at farmers markets or any nursery, and at some grocery stores. If you feel like branching out, try dwarf trees (Meyer lemons, sweeter than conventional ones, seem to love the Berkeley climate and produce like mad).  Lettuces and other greens also grow well in pots – and can provide a welcome incentive to eat more salad.

Even if you can’t seem to keep your plants alive, super-local produce isn’t necessarily out of reach.  On my way home from class, I walk by rampant rosemary bushes, grapevines, lemon trees, and aloe plants (useful not only as a skin salve but also as a digestive tea; the brave can drink the sticky juice straight).  Of course, make sure you check with the residents before sampling any fare growing on private property, but chances are they’re having trouble keeping up with all the yield themselves.  Or, if your neighbors weren’t planning on eating the fruits of their labor at all, they might appreciate your help: you’re saving them a messy treefull of rotten fallen apples.

So please: do your patriotic part to harvest the Victory Garden, pick up some herbs (and maybe just a few free samples…) at the farmers market, and scope out your neighborhood flora.  With all the money you’ve saved up, maybe you can finally afford to eat at Chez Panisse.  All you need now is a reservation.