The Advent Chronicles 1: Peace and White

Here it is, Advent. The holiday season snuck up on me this year.  And winter as well: Friday the first snowflakes arrived, raindrops solidifying mid-morning and swiftly sticking. KA says it has been many years since it snowed this early in Vienna. Once upon a time, during his lifetime, the Danube River froze over enough in winter that you could walk on the ice. We are not there by a long shot, but snow in November is the first step. This morning it snowed again too, though when we took a walk, it decided to turn to sleet, and now the grass is visible once again.

Thanksgiving was simply another work day made more difficult by the COVID booster I had received the day before. As of mid-November, anyone in Vienna over 18 is eligible for a booster four months after their second vaccination. As with the second shot, the main side effect was extreme fatigue that dissipated before 36 hours were up. Work sessions were interspersed with naps. In my fog, I was thankful for KA being there watching out for me – and for being among the privileged who have access to safe and effective vaccines. My wish I expressed last week came true: I was able to curl up in a ball on the couch and reduce my activity to a minimum. Always be careful what you wish for!

Last night I sat down with pen and paper to figure out what Advent is going to be about this year. I like having a focus for the season. The past two years I have yearned for Stille: stillness and silence. The first word that came to me this year was peace. Yes, peace, as in peace on earth, as in give peace a chance. Peace seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I have always been anachronistic, atavistic. Peace as the first step toward freedom: the state of not being a slave to sensations, emotions, or thoughts, of not being affected by what is unpleasant, painful, or unwanted.

The rook couple whose strategy is sharing are back this winter, feeding each other delicacies found on the ground. At least I presume they are feeding each other. Rooks don’t kiss, do they? Austria being an Alpine country, Austrians talk about their Hausberg, their “home” mountain. In Graz, it is Schöckl, and in Vienna, it is Schneeberg. On these same lines, I have identified our Hauskrähe, our home crow. This is the hooded crow with a daub of white feathers over its heart. We see it nearly every day all year round. Our building is clearly located in its territory, but it doesn’t seem to mind sharing it with the rooks – probably because it is so much quicker than them to snatch up any peanuts that happen to fall from the sky.

After observing this particular crow for so long, I decided that it merited a name. Given its white patch of feathers, I chose to call it Bianca. I have no idea if Bianca is male or female, but Bianco is not a typical name, so there you have it: may I present Bianca to you. What is not white: the yarn of the half-knit sweater set aside in October. It was clear to me then that the entire sweater would not fit as I had hoped it would. It took me weeks to admit to myself that the best way forward was not to tweak the pattern but to find a different one. Yesterday the pattern made itself known. I will have a new pullover by Christmas.

May you have a peaceful week!

Lockdown 4.0, Austrian Style

I have always been an avid supporter of hibernation: slowing down, reducing my activity to a minimum, exhaling, curling up in a ball, waiting for the light to return. How convenient that the latest lockdown in Austria coincides with hibernation season! I am referring to the lockdown that started this morning, not the lockdown that started last Monday morning for the unvaccinated. The lockdown for the unvaccinated was doomed to fail because the schools remained open. The pandemic is currently driven by children under 12 who are not fully vaccinated: the 7-day incidence rate of children 5-14 is 2,215. They get sick at school and bring the virus home to their parents and siblings. Yet this latest lockdown may also prove to be ineffective because the education minister insists that the schools remain open. Parents have the choice of sending their kids to school or keeping them at home, but distance learning will not be offered. The only hope is that all schoolchildren must now wear masks, which was not the case for elementary school children as of last week. I suspect in another week or two, the schools will be shut down after all, but by then, the damage will have been done and the Durchseuchung der Kinder (spread of disease among children) sadly propagated by certain people in power (and highly unethical in my book) will have advanced dramatically.

Yes, it is likely that the situation in parts of Austria will soon resemble those in Italy in spring 2020. In the federal states (Bundesländer) Salzburg and Upper Austria, many hospitals can’t handle the number of COVID patients anymore, and triage teams including lawyers have been set up to decide who should get treatment. The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) interviewed a hospital worker who spoke of corpses being kept in a hallway because they couldn’t be processed quickly enough. Why are the numbers so high in that part of the country? Upper Austria recently had elections and a newly formed anti-vaccination party received enough votes to send representatives to the regional parliament. In October, KA spent a week in Upper Austria working on his car at a friend’s private garage and reported that few people wore masks in supermarkets despite that being the law. The state of Upper Austria is ruled by the conservatives in a coalition goverment with the far right party. The national head of the far right party (who is not vaccinated and currently in quarantine because he has COVID) is also vocal in promoting de-worming medication, has compared vaccination to rape, and responded to the government’s accouncement that vaccination will be mandatory as of February 1 by declaring that Austria is now a dictatorship. This rook knows better than to believe those kind of utterances.

Wien ist anders: Vienna, as the popular saying goes, is different. Vienna is a federal state as well as the capital city. One in four people in Austria live in Vienna, yet we have the lowest 7-day incidence rate in the entire country. When other parts of the country dropped COVID requirements, our Social Democrat mayor maintained stricter COVID ordinances including mandatory masks (currently FFP2) in all shops. PCR testing has become the norm, and the city has its own efficient Alles gurgelt (Everyone gargles) program in which you pick up a free test at a drug store, take it home, make a video of you gargling in front of your phone to provide a sample, return it to a drug store, and receive a result in 12 to 24 hours. Test results are valid for 48 hours. In Vienna, schoolchildren also receive PCR tests at school three times a week. The result is that our 7-day incidence rate of 660 is the best in the country. Vienna has also started to vaccinate 5 to 11 year olds “off label” with BioNTech/Pfizer even though the European Medicines Agency has not officially approved its use yet. The rationale: if it is approved in the U.S., it will be approved here too, so why wait given the high incidence among children under 12?  If our incidence rate does not increase, a greater share of the population becomes vaccinated, and the spread among children is halted by mask wearing or closing the schools, Vienna may be the only state to avoid a hospital meltdown. Fingers crossed.

Against this backdrop, life goes on as usual. Work during the ever decreasing daylight hours (sunrise 7:09 AM, sunset 4:10 PM), then the pleasures of reading Sven Berkert’s Empire of Cotton and watching a documentary series on people and their relationship with volcanoes that features French geologist Arnaud Guérin. Of course long November nights are perfect for knitting: KA has a nifty new cowl, and a pair of soft and warm alpaca mitts are looking for a new home. Next up: finishing the plum-colored yak shawl.

Stay healthy and happy hibernation!

Improving the Cake-to-climate Ratio

The golden leaves of high fall are giving way to the minimalist lines of empty branches. With each gust of the famous Vienna wind, the trees lose a little more of their spectacular foliage and birds have fewer places to hide. The mists of winter have crept back into the morning routine. The time change last weekend was only a minor shock to my circadian rhythm since the past few weeks have already felt like the brake pedal has already been pressed. All body systems are slowing down in anticipation of hibernation. My friends the rooks returned from the distant north two days earlier this year, so spontaneous peanut feeds have resumed. There are not just one but two hooded crows that join in on the action. It is a delight to look out the window and see them again.

In honor of all the various holidays in the past week, I decided to bake an apple and hazelnut cake, a culinary pairing that seemed as if it would be tasty. While the apples were Austrian and organic, the hazelnuts were fancy Protection of Geographical Indication ones from the Italian Piedmont (nocciola Piemonte), an area of intense hazelnut cultivation in Europe. The cake was an improvisation that used up a handful of ingredients that needed to disappear. Did it smell wonderful and taste overwhelmingly of hazelnuts! KA liked it but I found it a tad too dry. This is the first but not the last apple hazelnut cake to come out of the oven this year: In researching recipes that included these two ingredients, I discovered torta meneghina, a traditional apple cake with hazelnuts made in Milan that I would like to try next.

Since I have mentioned cake, I must now talk about climate change – more specifically the impact that what we eat has on the planet. In a recent article, George Monbiot coined the term “cake-to-climate-change ratio.” He cites an analysis of UK TV programs that revealed that cake is mentioned 10 times more frequently than climate change. His interpretation? We refuse to focus on what the impact of climate change means for our future and the future of the other living beings on this planet, preferring to distract ourselves with talk of banana bread and charcuterie boards for dogs (his examples – note that I had not heard of the latter until I read his article). His article whipped me up into a frenzy like I haven’t felt in a long time, and I thought: What can I do? One simple solution within my power is to improve the cake-to-climate-change ratio at this blog.

I learned at an early age that what we eat has an impact on the rest of the world. When I was eleven and a precocious reader, two books crossed my path that made me decide to become a vegetarian: Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden and Francis Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. Thoreau’s famous quote “simplify, simplify” still guides me all these decades later. Then Lappé introduced me to the idea that one could become a vegetarian for environmental reasons. I learned that meat requires many more resources per gram of protein produced than plant-based protein sources like beans or whole grains. By eating lower on the food chain, I could make a difference, protect the environment, and simplify my life. I accepted that I would never enjoy another kosher hot dog at Ella’s Deli in Madison or slice of pepperoni pizza, took the plunge and eliminated all meat from my diet, and never looked back.

This past week, I had a flashback to my early days of being a vegetarian. I experimented with exotic ingredients in those days: seaweed, soy flour, carob powder. Carob powder is made from the ground up seeds from the pods that grow on the carob tree, an evergreen native to the Mediterranean. I remember buying carob chips and using them instead of chocolate chips, but it has been so long since I ate anything with carob that I can’t remember how it tastes. KA and I watched a program on Crete and a young woman who has decided to experiment with traditional recipes using carob from the trees on her family’s land. It made me curious about experimenting with carob again.

Getting back to climate change, if you are concerned about the future and want to do something proactive, I think one of the best decisions an individual can make is to reduce consumption of animal products. If you enjoy eating meat, you do not necessarily need to become a vegetarian, but you can reduce how often you eat meat and choose sources of meat that require less resources to produce (poultry instead of beef, free range instead of factory farmed). If you are a vegetarian, you can try to eat more vegan meals. If you are a vegan, you are not off the hook: you can try to eliminate highly processed foods like many a soy-derived product packaged in plastic and get your protein from unprocessed plant sources. (Food packaging is another issue.) And then there is food waste, which squanders valuable resources and is far too widespread in affluent countries. There is no shortage of material to touch on in future posts to improve my cake-to-climate-change ratio.

Let’s finish off for today with a savory leek risotto: minced leek sautéed in a dab of butter (vegetarian) or splash of olive oil (vegan), three handfuls of rice sautéed until it crackles and makes that I’m-ready-for-liquid noise, a splash of white wine cooked until the liquid has been absorbed, then ladle after ladle of hot water simmered for 18 minutes. Sprinkle a little shredded Grana Padano (vegetarian) or toasted breadcrumbs (vegan) on it, salt and pepper to taste, and you have a simple and nourishing meal.

May you find a simple and tasty way to reduce your consumption of animal products!