Random Recollection

When I was in second grade (in Southern Utah), one of the teacher's aides taught us a very important lesson about racial/ethnic discrimination and exclusion. She brought us a plate of wonderful peanut butter cookies. There was one cookie for each of us, and one extra. One of the cookies was burnt black. (Not as in "a little darker than the rest and with an extra-crunchy bottom" burnt but as in "coal black, leaving carbon on your hands if you touch it, hard as a rock, wonder if it actually burst into flame" burnt. I assume that this was to ensure that a) we noticed the difference, and b) nobody chowed down on the central metaphor of her object lesson.) When she was done passing the plate around for each child to choose a cookie, only the charcoal cookie was left. She asked with slight surprise and disapproval, why had we taken all the lighter cookies, but left the black one? Then she lectured us about including people who look different from us, and especially people who have darker skin than us.

Lesson intended: be nice to people of melanin, pinkie.

Lesson received: people with brown skin are damaged goods and nobody in their right mind would WANT to play with them, but if you pretend not to notice and play with them anyway, the grownups will smile fondly at you. The other kids will know you're either full of shit or just plain stupid (because who'd WANT to consume a badly burned cookie), but will feel sorry for you because you're taking one for the team, and will be nice to you out of pity and shame. By the way, you're a bigoted asshole, you little second-grade creep.

I can only wonder what my second grade teacher, who had more melanin than any of us (being of Latino and Native American ancestry) thought of this wonderful object lesson. She didn't eat the blackened cookie.

Cookbook Notes

I'm going to make my recipe-gathering post public and post-date it so that it stays at the top of my LJ until we're ready to print this puppy.

Feel free to refer your own LJ-readership there, either to give or receive recipes, or to give input on the process.

Also, if anyone is willing to "test-kitchen" the recipes posted and make notes on taste, variations, etc, that would be greatly appreciated!

New brainsprinkle: would it be overly ambitious to include some essays about living in poverty, focusing on the "educational (to those who haven't been there) and hope-giving (to those who know way too much about it) without being artificially sweetened" variety?