Writing the Weather

There are certain difficulties when conveying the experience of climate change to folks who haven't felt the extremes.

“The dread of doing something wrong paralyzes us, like we are perpetually kindergarteners. If you are told you are always not good enough, that aids in the exploitation of your labor.” from Tone by Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar

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Editors usually want very specific stories about hurricanes, very specific stories about the weather and climate change’s effects on the disasters we can only barely call natural any longer. They want very specific stories about life in a U.S. colony. They want to know that buildings are crumbling, that roofs are caving in, that chaos is about to break out. A photographer on assignment once asked me, “Do you know any really poor families whose groceries I could photograph?”

The last time I cried about an editor’s callous response to what it means to experience hurricane season in the Caribbean was just a few weeks ago. Our power was out for three days before tropical storm Ernesto had even made landfall. The water had gone out for hours, too, on a day I’d set aside for a deep clean of the bathroom. These types of interruptions can feel minor until you start to wonder whether you will ever be able to plan for your comfort again. I feel ridiculous to be upset about things that are viscerally upsetting. Where did I get the idea that I should be capable of putting up with anything and everything?

“I am without power and WiFi in my house and there’s a storm imminent,” I let the editor know. This is not a news piece; it is an essay, one that was already published and anthologized now being reprinted, so I assumed these were style adjustments for conformity with the rest of the publication. I couldn’t access the document but I could access my email—could they send their queries in the body? They obliged. One of the queries read, “I would like to suggest that we add ‘the potential of’ or ‘the possibility of’ to the mention of natural disasters statement. Without this addition, it comes across slightly as fear mongering, ofc natural disasters do happen but we can’t predict the future…”

We can’t predict the future, I read, while I’m without power, waiting for a storm to hit and maybe become a hurricane because the ocean temperature is so hot that it might whip the system into a frenzy. Am I not in a real place? Am I not on this earth? To whom are the increasing number and severity of weather-related disasters simply possible and not imminent? Do they matter more than me and where I am? I refused to add the “context” of my writing from the Caribbean. There is no reason to make people comfortable, to feel assured and pacified by the disaster being elsewhere. The pacification is the problem.

As Derek Walcott wrote, “…the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized. ‘No people there’, to quote Froude, ‘in the true sense of the word’. No people. Fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken.” I think these well-educated, well-meaning editors forget or do not realize that I am not just a visitor to Puerto Rico but a child of its diaspora. I think they forget or do not realize that they’re insulting me, erasing me and everyone else for whom climate change’s effects are no longer distant “potential” or “possibility” from the record of “real people.” They are here.

Below is a culture diary I was assigned and wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona in 2022. It was set to run in October 2022 before being cut down, and edits were made that felt diminishing to the situation broadly. (That was the last time I cried while feeling dismissively misunderstood.)

Yet what is chronicled here is the experience of a best-case scenario—one that includes op-eds in major papers and photo shoots, wine bars and dinner out—which I think is still important to document. It shouldn’t be normal that the power constantly goes out, that the tap runs dry, that an inordinate amount of logistical maneuvering must be done in order to keep doing the work that pays the bills. It was the case in 2022, and it’s been the case in the summer of 2024.

We all deserve better than this best-case scenario. We need to write the weather—to “jot down what we see among the ruins,” to paraphrase Kafka—in order to know how it has changed.

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Saturday 9/17/22

Tropical Storm Fiona has been upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane during its slow move across the Caribbean. We’re savoring what could be our last hours of electricity for an undetermined amount of time by watching Seinfeld and trying to get ahead on work while all of our devices and backup batteries charge. I just sent in revisions on my forthcoming book and hadn’t been following the weather news at all, so I knew a storm was coming the old-fashioned way: by looking at the ocean, the waves bigger, whiter, and louder every day. Nevertheless, my mind was elsewhere, so we’re lucky that we had already stockpiled food, a backup water supply, and plenty of candles. I found myself laughing uproariously at the “independent George” story line: he worries that his marriage to Susan would result in all his friendships coming undone. Elaine, meanwhile, has birth control woes when they take the sponge off the market. Married now and almost 37, maybe I’m at the best possible age for watching this show, which I’ve seen over and over since childhood.

Bad Bunny, right on time, has released a hybrid music video for his single “El Apagón,” so we put it on. It intersperses the usual music video tropes—dancing in the streets, a rave in what appears to be a cave—with a documentary by local independent journalist Bianca Graulau on the economic conditions Puerto Ricans suffer, due to a corrupt local government and colonial control by the United States, which work together to displace and disenfranchise locals. The video and song seem to me to enact the experience of living in Puerto Rico, where glasses of wine and nights of dancing are constantly, cruelly interrupted: maldita sea, otro apagón. We are coming up on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria making landfall. As Fiona will prove, nothing has gotten better. Infrastructure is not more resilient; the power grid cannot withstand flooding; the stock of diesel is insufficient to keep necessary services running on generators.

We move on to Chef’s Table: Pizza because I want to write about what’s wrong about this show—its obsession with chef worship and the idea that what happens in restaurants really has a major impact on how most people eat— for my newsletter. My husband loves pizza and so he puts up with it, snickering the entire time as the talking heads declare every chef the one who has changed everything for pizza.

Sunday 9/18/22

We are still awaiting the worst of the storm when we wake up, so I continue to do some work and schedule some emails. I give myself the mental version of a sugar-induced stomachache by scrolling TikTok for a while. 

I tear myself away from the tapping to read Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, which I’m loving for its emotional, occasionally romantic approach to 27 sentences. It’s a luxurious read, encouraging a lush and pleasurable but still rigorous approach to close reading; Dillon is somehow tender and loving in his explanations of diaeresis and the old-fashioned practice of combining commas and em dashes. I’m also reading chef and writer Ilana Regan’s forthcoming Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir because this coming week, storm allowing, I’ll be preparing a mushroom tart for the winter issue of Lux, a fantastic socialist feminist magazine. My headnote will be about how I’ve recently become obsessed with tropical mushrooms and the possibilities of foraging in Puerto Rico. Fungi are everywhere on the planet, but people usually think first of the temperate climate varieties that grow in the northern United States and Italy. Here, though, we have our own oyster, wood-ear, reishi, and chanterelle varieties—even truffles! 

Our power went out at 1 p.m., while I was making a marinara, so I prepare us an array of cheeses and toasted baguette to eat so we don’t have to worry about the Manchego going bad. I’m a vegetarian who writes vegan recipes and generally stays off dairy… but this is a situation that calls for a bit of cheese.

I go to bed early because reading by candlelight is more complicated than I had assumed, requiring a setup of mirrors and enough flames to burn the house down, but I get a little farther into Suppose a Sentence with a martini in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The rain is heavy but not enough to flood our patio; we had assumed we’d spend the night going out to clean the drain intermittently, but we were spared this.

Monday 9/19/22

Our power comes back on at 3 a.m.—extremely lucky. Usually we would wake up to the noise of the restarting appliances, but this time I am so deep in sleep that I open my eyes surprised by a lamp turning on. I start touching my husband’s face to make sure it’s real. I feel like I’m dreaming, because we expected to spend days in darkness. Unfortunately, our running water had disappeared overnight. Our internet followed.

It's still raining when we take the dog out in the morning to survey the situation. Most of Old San Juan is still without power and there are some fallen trees. Later in the day, we bike out to Condado, a very touristy neighborhood, and we can hear the hum of generators the whole way. The bike lane is flooded and filled with debris; we dodge large sticks and almond fruits that had fallen from trees, hoping not to flip over our handlebars.

At night, I return to what I’ve been reading when I don’t feel like reading anything else: Gary Indiana’s essay collection Fire Season. I can’t stop thinking about this line in “Romanian Notes,” which he wrote in 2013: “And people who never travel tend to imagine, when trouble erupts in a distant country, that its entire landmass has seized into convulsions.” I’m having to repeatedly assure people outside of Puerto Rico that the San Juan metropolitan area was basically untouched, because the news in the States is suggesting that the whole archipelago has flooded and is on the verge of disappearing into the sea. 

It’s only just starting to hit us, as we emerge from our selfish survival mode, that the storm is going to wreak havoc—is still wreaking havoc, according to news reports—on the south and west of the island. It will take so much time and effort to recover in a real way—a way that won’t allow this to happen all over again, in five years’ time. 

Tuesday 9/20/22

There’s still no internet at home, so I’m doing work on Microsoft Word, which I was really angry about having to download for book edits and now am grateful for—though I still think it’s robbery to charge a yearly subscription fee for a word processor. I’m multitasking across all registers—typing up the mushroom and squash tart recipe, while also poorly doing edits on a piece that is ironically about the electricity situation in Puerto Rico, and preparing to interview a maker of hospitality memes. I digitally leaf through Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production edited by Alfie Bown and Dan Bristow, which is blessedly available through my annual JSTOR subscription because I don’t have any institutional access to anything right now. 

We don’t have water still, so I haven’t showered in a couple of days except by pouring water over my head and using a large All-Clad nonstick pot as a basin to wash my face. The conversation everyone has here is whether living without power or water is worse. Most people say water, but as a computer worker with a perpetually stocked fridge who needs perfectly cool air to sleep, I’m always going to say power. We had prepared for lack of power more than we’d prepared for the water outage, though, and I’m finding myself rationing my intake of drinking water in case it stays out for days. 

In the afternoon, a wine bar announces on Instagram that they have WiFi, so we head over there. My husband is in the thick of edits for a New York Times opinion piece on the corruption that has caused our terrible power situation in Puerto Rico. We drink a glass of wine—for me, the skin-contact pet-nat they have by the glass, as I’m a sucker for effervescence—while we organize ourselves and continue to work.

Wednesday 9/21/22

The water comes back late Tuesday night, so I spend this entire day cleaning. We still don’t have internet so I’m working via my cell phone and pretending that I have my life together for anyone who emails me. My husband is at his mom’s apartment because her internet is working. We find out that ours isn’t because the generator that kept it going ran out of diesel fuel.

I have to prep the tart for the photo shoot—a double batch, so I can have one photo-ready and another set of ingredients to play around with in the photos—and also check on a vegan curd recipe I developed last year that is going through recipe testing before being included in someone else’s cookbook. A dirty kitchen upsets me deeply and viscerally, and I’m glad to have water back if only because it means I can do my work in there again. If writing a book has taught me anything, it’s that I can only write if I spend half the day cooking. 

I make a double batch of dough, roast squash for the base purée, and try to figure out my mistakes with the curd recipe so that I can ensure it’s perfect this time without requiring me to go buy more ingredients. It’s always interesting to revisit my own work because I don’t really recognize the thought process of my former self. I immediately know it needs not just oil, but coconut milk to come together properly. One thing I do love to do is to cook in my head—it’s why I read cookbooks often but, unless a recipe is completely out of my wheelhouse, rarely cook from them. 

Thursday 9/22/22

We have internet. I am feeling very frazzled, though, from the back and forth, and don’t feel like making breakfast, so we go to Spiga, a bakery and café here in Old San Juan. I bring my notebook and planner so that I can make a list of all I have to do to try to get myself back on track, as we eat their delicious and tender sourdough cinnamon buns. They’ve been expanding their pastry program and I’m into it; they’re also doing a ridiculously good carrot cake loaf.

Finally calm from the sugar and the list-making, I go home and prepare the full mushroom and squash tart. A professional will be over bright and early on Friday to photograph it, but I can’t resist taking my own shots. I baked it in a white ceramic tart pan that I really need to never use again for this purpose, as it’s really just for show and doesn’t distribute heat well. But again: It looks pretty. 

This afternoon, my husband’s Times piece goes live online and I receive a bounty of magazines in the mail, including the Fall 2022 Foreign Policy, for which I’d written a piece a piece about the potential of mushrooms in Puerto Rico (an obviously ongoing obsession). The chef Maria Mercedes Grubb told me then that she was buying everything local so that the island wouldn’t be caught with its pants down when another hurricane arrived. The timing—we wish we weren’t right about these kinds of things.

I also receive the latest Monocle, which is my favorite magazine for pretending everything in the world is fine; a few New Yorkers, because they always arrive late; the Vogue with the terrifically boring Jennifer Lawrence cover; and Bon Appétit’s “Best New Restaurants” issue. The photos in that issue are a good example of what I’m finding difficult to look at these days, but they are very assertive: extremely bright, with a focus on pink pickled onions and green herb garnishes to deepen the contrasts.

Friday 9/23/22

I’m up early today for the photo shoot and my husband takes the dog out so I can prepare. The photographer, Stephanie Segarra, arrives at our apartment and I’m in my denim apron, ready to play my role. I initially tell her please to not take any photos of my head but eventually it becomes clear I’m having a good hair day, so I relent. When my husband arrives home, I’m throwing flour at the ball of dough and yell that they should put me on Chef’s Table: Pizza—but honestly, throwing flour to get a nice cloud is harder than it looks! I’ve never tried before.

We spend about four hours getting shots right of the tart with various shadows and tropical fauna, as well as photos of me working dough and cutting squash. When I get so hungry that I can’t stand it and we’re almost at the end, I turn squash puree and leftover dough into empanadas and fry them. 

I would like nothing more than to collapse into bed with my magazines after this shoot, but I need to build Monday’s newsletter. I had intended to write about corn, but the hurricane put a damper on this too. Thus, I’m just doing an essay and reading list on the hurricane: Jaquira Diaz’s “Let Puerto Rico Be Free” is the main focus.

After the hectic week, I force my husband to go to dinner at our friends’ restaurant Pío Pío, a tiny but bright spot in Old San Juan that looks over Plaza de Armas. They have had to close for quite a few services owing to the hurricane. Their malanga gnocchi is incredible—a triumph, really, to make this difficult local root vegetable so silky—and it gives us a small breather to go out for dinner after almost two weeks of nonstop work and anxiety. We discuss the timeline of when utilities have returned to different parts of the city, the restaurant’s new in-house programs, and a swiftly deleted Facebook post from the president of local news channel in which he called LUMA, the electric company, “mentirosos”—liars. Conversation flowing, as it does in Puerto Rico, with ease between the mundane and the apocalyptic. In the middle of the night, our water will go out again.

Tomorrow is the September sessions of the Newsletter Workshop. Sign up here for the 11 a.m. or 7 p.m. EST classes. There are sessions scheduled for October and November, as well. If you’d like to gift someone who’s interested in starting a newsletter a workshop, gift cards are available. I’ll be launching a new workshop in the spring, with details forthcoming.

Today, we celebrate the return of the Weekly Salon. I will open up a thread for a paid subscriber chat at 3 p.m. EST this afternoon.

This Friday, there’s the return of From the Desk Recommends… for paid subscribers, a collection of what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching.

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This month, on Friday, September 27, we will have the first part of the Desk Book Club discussion of Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction. We are reading this one in three parts because it’s long, but quite relevant to conversations on writing the weather. For the first session, we’ll read through page 130. Pick it up from Archestratus, the 2024 Desk Book Club partner.

The tart as photographed for Lux by Steph Segarra

News

I wrote about the problems with a slogan-based approached to ideas of “sustainable eating” in the Washington Post.

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The Bittman Project reprinted my FoodPrint piece on breadfruit’s positioning as a savior food.

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My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.

Reading

I’ve read Charlotte Shane’s An Honest Woman and Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place in between book research and writing.