Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to AOC, support for environmental policies like the Green New Deal would be stronger if minorities weren’t being subtly coerced into growing colonial cauliflowers in their communal gardens.
Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Colonial’ Cauliflower in Community Gardens Makes Minorities Avoid Environmentalism
By Joshua Caplan 20 May 2019
…
“What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community. It’s so important,” the 29-year-old freshman congresswoman said while filming herself strolling through a community garden in the Bronx.
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“But when you really think about it — when someone says that it’s ‘too hard’ to do a green space that grows Yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something — what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with the colonial lens on them,” she argued.
…
Read more: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/21/ocasio-cortez-colonial-cauliflower-in-community-gardens-makes-minorities-avoid-environmentalism/
What can I say – Alexandria, you’re supposed to eat the cauliflower, not smoke it.
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Apparently they are using all private funds and have done much to improve the city.
Before and after pictures.
https://www.nyrp.org/beforeandafter
I’m pretty sure AOC means well and in this case she is doing well, showcasing gardening in the city.
No one doubts that she means well, but her ideas if implemented would be catastrophic. Stupid, vapid comments like this shows how everything she thinks has to go through her warped prism. She shouldn’t be within a 1000 miles of Congress.
Who pays the taxes and insurance on the land being used for these gardens?
This is for 2017. https://www.nyrp.org/beforeandafter
The heading is for “Gardens and Open Spaces”
The photos show (small) patches of a trashed urban landscape that have been converted to little parks, with picnic tables, flowering plants, and some growing areas. There is a basketball court and a kid’s slide playground.
See the photos for “The Home Depot Children’s Garden” – – with 4 or more birdhouses within 4 feet of each other. {Birds (mostly) will not like that.} This is a fancy little area, but no food plants in sight.
The money:
https://www.nyrp.org/NYRP_FY17_Consolidated_Statement.pdf
Most of the money appears to come from the public purse – and goes for (1) Payroll and benefits, +(2) Professional fees, +(3) Office expense, and +(4) Occupancy {What’s this?}.
It is not that these are not nice areas, but what started as a “clean-up this mess” by a couple of disgusted women, has turned into an $8,000,000 public program that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand as wealth redistribution.
It would never occur to AOC that the climate at different latitudes determines what plants grow where; (and of course that is the same reason melanin differs from Scandinavia, to Puerto Rico, and to Africa).
This has nothing to do with “Colonialism”; people prepare foods at home that their parents and their parents before them prepared.
But Cortez ignores the melting pot concept; over time, Americans have fallen in love with the cuisine of people who make up our country (Mexican, Italian, Chinese, etc)
(OK, besides Fish and Chips who goes to fast food joints for authentic English or Scottish dishes ? – full disclosure: I’m 1/2 from the British Isles.)
AOC’s handlers have overloaded her with divisive concepts that appeal to their useful idiots; she will be a Democrat mainstay in Congress in her district (unless Nancy has too much of her). But those ideas will never fly in a national electoral college election.
@ur momisugly George Daddis
“AOC’s handlers”:
In 2016, Cenk Uygur, Kyle Kulinski, a Young Turks network colleague who hosts “Secular Talk,” and Zack Exley and Saikat Chakrabarti, top Bernie Sanders campaign staffers launched Justice Democrats, a Political Action Committee (PAC) that “aims to recruit and fund a slate of primary challengers under an anti-corporate, progressive banner.
AOC top aide now is Saikat Chakrabarti
To: Kevein A
Yes … and a YouTuber with a channel “Mr. Reagan” lays all this out with video and pics!
At the 1:08 point in the following video the Executive Director of the Social Democrats admit AOC was selected from a “casting call” of 10,000 people.
Why is she so pleased that they have a grill (BBQ) as it appears to be a gas version using one of those deadly fossil fuel she wishes to get rid of.
“Nature is a fundamental right of every New Yorker” also seems out of place if one looks at a map of NY and notes the seeming absence of ‘Nature’ among the buildings and built environment.
A communal garden is hardly ‘Nature’, especially as Nature is not friendly, comforting, life-affirming or easy to live with for most of the planet’s occupants.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/alexandria_ocasiocortezs_socialist_cauliflower_for_brains.html
To be fair, she did lead with “I don’t know” and ended with “or something.”
Seems like she’s got all of her bases, like, covered, you know?
Don’t take it so, like, literal and stuff.
In…umm, I don’t know, like three weeks or something, she’ll like tell us she was like joking.
Yeah you minorities, and you know who you are, quit appropriating my culture’s veggies. I better not see any of you going as a cauliflower on Halloween!
I’m tempted to label her ‘Accidentally Occasionally Coherent”, but that accident hasn’t happened yet
There is a important difference between Yuca and Yucca.
the link below explains.
https://sensiblesurvival.org/2012/01/15/yucca-root-is-not-edible/
Then again maybe she is aware of the issue.
Of course perhaps yucca root is something she is planning to serve to the democratic leadership.
michael
If all the “village idiots” got together and created their very own village, she would be their “village idiot”….
Just think about the cognitive skills of the people thatvoted for this idiot, absolutely mind boggling,.
Have her do a three day hike ( with two overnights) on “The Appalachian Trail is a 2,180+ mile long public footpath that traverses the scenic, wooded, pastoral, wild, and culturally resonant lands of the Appalachian Mountains.”
=====
Then have her report back with her plans to defeat Mother Nature.
Maybe a lot of the minorities moved to America so they wouldn’t have to grow their own food, but be able to buy food at the grocery store.
And what does each carrot or tomato grown in that taxpayer garden cost?
She is always just joking. The people that believe her are, according to her, idiots.
Apparently Oprah didn’t get the memo, she’s peddling pizza with dough made from cauliflower.
Somebody named Cortez should be careful about pontificating about colonialism.
Sky King, I read this story and thought the exact same thing, not only did the Spanish colonise, but also plundered and decimated the local population all for the sake of the wealth of the aristocracy and the worst of the colonists would be a Spaniard named CORTEZ .
Why do people look at a cauliflower and see colonialism??
Who, then, is the real holder of prejudice-colored-lenses?
I think her point is that there are some of us that feel mankind has a RIGHT to modify the environment for our purposes (kinda like “colonizing the Earth” to make it our own.)
I’m guilty! I think that is what the God of heaven has TASKED me to do – although I see that mandate limited more to building a HOUSE to modify a personal portion of the environment, and disagree with her that we are intentionally making whole-scale changes to the planetary climate.
I think this is revealing her categorical thinking that if MAN makes a change, then it’s wrong and should be stopped.
Oh, come on guys (and guyesses!!)
I find her immensely entertaining. Actually, I am starting to warm to her.
So let’s temper our criticisms of her, and keep her around a while longer. She is fun.
fun…?
a society accepts people of other cultures into its midst, helps them, provides them with stuff, recommends the best way to become successful in the new home;
and Ocasio either lies for political gain (and harm to the immigrants), or is so totally ignorant that she thinks the helping the immigrants is akin to colonial suppression.
lies and/or ignorance is not fun when there is harm. Ocasio is harmful. Trying to tie high asthma rates in the Bronx to C02 (for political purposes) harms those children that otherwise could be helped by someone with a clear & honest mind. Or being so stupid that she believes high asthma rates are tied to C02, and being in a position of power, is harmful.
fun…?
So she’s saying that should her Deal be enacted, people would be told by government what vegetables we would be allowed to grow? And that decision would be made by bureaucrats and based on political correctness? Didn’t the Soviet Union try that, and didn’t it fail spectacularly?
This evil climate is so like, ‘colonialist’ … anymone can’t see how to push, like, some sort of a climate reset button, or something like, so that we have again our pre-industrial heaven climate which was so … well … like … dunnow really, like, colder ?
” … and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with the colonial lens on them,” she argued. … ”
>>
oh! world coming to an end!
“Communities of color”? It’s a color thing? Too ‘colonial’ white? Seriously? That’s really how she perceives a white vegetable?
And potato? WUWT?
I’m now wondering if she actually thought this through and scripted it before she did the video.
Just to get some coverage.
Bet she did.
1) the “European Colonial plant” the Cauliflower originated in the eastern Mediterranian (Cyprus to be specific)
2) Yucca are edible but it’s much more like hard work than boiling or braising or currying a cauliflower so those growing for food aren’t going to go a bundle on cultural purity.
3)Here’s an Indian rejecting the cultural pollution of colonial cultivars.
4) Hate them in Ethiopia too…
?itok=cdeiXhVx
5) Is she really this dumb or did she refuse her PR person a pay rise?
Is yucca really edible? I mean Joshua Trees (=Yucca) seem pretty indigestible. I think she meant yuca..
Yuca (Cassava Manihot esculenta) is edible but still harder work than cauliflower, Yucca( Agavoideae Asparagus Yucca various) Has edible parts and is much harder work than a cauli… see https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/foliage/yucca/yucca-plant-as-food.htm
Amongst all the nonsense, she does make a real, and really important, point – that development programmes, ideas and funding, are almost always developed outside the communities for which they are designed, and then dropped on these communities without any consultation. The very costly and enduring failure of ‘development’ aid, all over the world, to achieve its ambitions, is (AFAICS [is that one?]) best attributed, in large part, to this. One of the most scandalous and damaging examples of this is the reluctance of the UN-family of worthy institutions to encourage developing countries to access cheap coal-fired electricity (which has of course been much covered here on WUWT, which was where I first became aware of the issue).
In this light, it would be interesting to look at the planning and funding for community gardens of the kind that AOC is talking about here. My guess is, that if you had told the locals you had a few $m to spend on local projects, community gardens would not have been top of the list, whatever post-colonially appropriate plants you were allowed to grow there. I share the reservations of ‘old engineer’, expressed above, about what that space will look like in five years time (or even five weeks time).
I also think (FWTIW) that ‘dodgy geezer’ has it right, that the door of the climate scare is rotten and crumbling, and that we need good concentrated science and data to break it down, ASAP.
I don’t post often, so will take the opportunity to say thanks to all at WUWT for all that I have learned over the years.
Do you really think some bureaucrat is dictating what vegetables people must grow in their community gardens? That would only happen in communist countries. People grow cauliflower because the like it and it’s possible to grow. Yuca and Yucca don’t grow in colder climates like New York. She is spouting complete nonsense.