Chickens are contained, caged, squished, bred, anti-biotic’d, fed other chickens. They put the word “processed” right on the package. Chickens are turned-out, rendered, butterflied, quartered, fileted and tendered. The genetic acrobatics it took to go from red guinea fowl from Peru to two legs and a breast in your KFC meal is a testament to the human capacity to transform the world to suit us. Chicken suits us all. It’s the number one meat cooked for dinner.
It’s an unassuming flower, the pennyroyal, with its small, pointed, lavender petals cupped by deep green leaves. Pennyroyal flowers grow in kusudama-like clusters that thread a single, delicate stem. A cousin to mint, pennyroyal smells good (if a bit overwhelming) and can help keep fleas and mosquitoes at bay. Ingested as a tea or an oil, pennyroyal can hurry along an annoyingly late period. And in high enough doses, the story goes, pennyroyal can allow…
Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice It becomes abundantly clear after the birth of Mary that things are not going to get better; Mr and Mrs Bennet at last have an overdue conversation about the state of their finances and reluctantly agree that trying again and hoping for a boy is a terrible plan of action. With only one overtly ridiculous relative (Mary's much less dour when she's not trying to distinguish herself from four beautiful sisters), Jane has…
Emily R.'s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
At the start of medical school we all had great aspirations. Vague notions of oncology research, of cracking open chests in the emergency department, saving the day, transplanting hearts. But gradually over four years it became clearer that those things were harder, and less glamorous, than they seemed in the abstract. A month in oncology was emotionally like being hit
Nancy Hale came into my life as a bit of an accident. I had published a tiny review in a literary magazine, of which I was stupidly and inordinately proud, and received, along with the magazine, a copy of a new collection of some of Nancy Hale’s short stories accompanied by new criticism. The subtitle of the collection described the book as “Of the Life & Work of a Lost American Master.”
This post originally appeared on March 4th, 2014. My first day at the clinic, a man commits suicide by jumping off a building across the street. It’s a bright but deceptively cold March morning, the sky an unbroken cornflower blue dome. I don’t see him; I’m trying, futilely, to find a sun-warmed patch of sidewalk for my critically under-socked feet, and my back is turned. Soon, the street fills with first responders, and police officers…
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl,…
Last week, my province made national headlines when it was announced that the Morgentaler clinic, our one and only private abortion provider, will be closing its doors in July due to lack of funding. I live in New Brunswick, a small province on Canada’s East Coast. We have a population of about 750,000, and a Conservative government. Historically though, it hasn’t mattered whether the Liberals or the Conservatives were in power; all of our…
It has recently come to my attention that there is a film featuring Katharine Hepburn as an aviatrix who commits an abortion/suicide by flying into the sun, and I am simply furious with each and every one of you for keeping this from me. "That...that can't possibly be right," I hear you stammer weakly. OHO, CAN'T IT. I present to you the plot summary of Christopher Strong: Kate plays Lady Cynthia Darrington, an aviatrix who…
Previous installments of The Toast’s advice column from two disparate and imperfect persons can be found here. Last time: Advice on Relationship Inertia and Past Badness. In a post-Christmas cleanup effort, I've been trying to rid myself of excess baby stuff, including a huge box of diapers my daughter growth-spurted right past, and a bunch of formula that my OB-GYN pushed on me. I kept it in case breastfeeding didn't work out, but it…
Like many of my millennial, direction-less peers, I was looking for something to do after graduating from college in May 2009. I knew Washington, D.C., my hometown, would be happy to add me to the ranks of early twentysomething, non-profit workers who love love love happy hour, “can’t wait to check out that new burger place,” and totally didn’t join a kickball team to meet guys/girls. But alas, I wanted to hold out for a…
I never know when someone’s on drugs or had plastic surgery, or when a poem is supposed to “really” be about sex even though it’s clearly about plants. I never get metaphors. Everything always has to be explained to me, like Ax in the Animorphs series. I can be counted on not to understand what a song is "really" about unless that meaning is spelled out explicitly; if a song does not contain the word "abortion"…
This is a true story, or at least, as true as a memory can be. All names have been changed, including my own. My mother always said, “You can write anything you want about the family, darling, as you long as you do it under a different name. I want to pretend that’s someone else’s dysfunctional relatives. Did you see where I left my cigarettes?” When I was fourteen, my mother was fired from a…
It was January 29, 2013 at 11 p.m. when the pain started. A dull throbbing ache in my left lower abdomen that could have been indigestion or cramping. It was uncomfortable, but not unbearable, and I thought the best thing to do was go to sleep. I had flown into Austin the day before, I was tired and in a new place and the next day was my birthday; I wanted to be well-rested. But…
