Science doesn’t have an answer for that is the favorite saying of the day. My mom is reading ENLIGHTENMENT NOW by Steven Pinker. “This is the book that explains everything,” she said. “I heard about it from your little brother.” I read up on this in the Guardian:
With some deft intellectual moves, [Pinker] manages to position “enlightenment” and “science” on the right side of every argument or conflict, while every horror of the past 200 years is put down to ignorance, irrationality or “counter-enlightenment” trends.
Science has an answer for everything, apparently. According to Mom. Which reminds me of a quote from Douglas Adams’ Life the Universe and Everything, where Zaphod Beeblebrox reads the brochure on the Starship Heart of Gold and says: “it’s more of that ‘the universe can be yours’ stuff.” Or of my husband, when I ask him a vexing question, and he slips into a parody of some 50’s TV actor and says “Science doesn’t have an answer for that, Johnny.”
Despite my husband’s parody, the claim that science has all the answers is rampant, particularly in the New York Times, these days. Philosophy has never had it so bad. And all this in the face of the inability of science, not just to halt the COVID crisis, but even to conclusively decide what we should do about it as a nation. Witness: the dilly-dallying about students teachers going back to in-person school.
After this conversation, during which I described evolution as a well-researched theory and my mother said it was a proven fact, and cited THE BEAK OF THE FINCH (which on Amazon is described as “a compelling masterpiece of theory”) I decided to just let her have her point. I don’t care about evolution one way or another, actually. And arguing with octogenarians can be really frustrating.
What I do care about is staying healthy, living long, and fresh food. Science doesn’t have an answer for that, how to live forever, but it does make a few constructive suggestions. This brings me from the most abstract (evolution) to the most concrete (juicing.) And thus, to making Mean Green Juice.
Recipe: How to Make Mean Green Juice
I decided it was time to make Mean Green juice from the kale and cucumbers that I am rapidly harvesting from the garden. Mean Green is a juice which allows you to get the vitamins from kale without having to cook it. It’s not as tasty as mango pineapple juice, but it does have one excellent property: it suppresses your appetite. And gives you iron.
Mean Green was made famous in the movie FAT, SICK AND NEARLY DEAD, about juice fasting, and which was totally worth seeing. My recipe is:
- 6 kale leaves
- 1 cucumber
- 2 celery
- 1 small lemon or 1/2 a large lemon
- A 2 tbsp size piece of ginger
- 1 or 2 granny smith apples
You cut up the fruits and vegetables into pieces that can fit into your juicer, then press them through. This is the juice we used to use for dinner when we did the juice fast. Of course, I only made it 6 days on the juice fast. After that, fearing I would lose my mind if I went without bread carbs for another hour, I went and got a sandwich.
My juicer is a powerhouse, a Cuisinart CJE-1000, and I’ve had it for three years now. This juicer will mash through everything you put in it. And it’s pretty easy to clean up. If it has a fault, it’s that it leaves a little bit of juice in the pulp. But after our old juicer, which was very efficient with spinning all the juice out of the pulp, but was unbalanced, so one person had to hold it down as it tried to dance off the counter while the other person fed in the juice materials, I’ll take the Cuisinart.
Science doesn’t have an answer that, and not for everything, apparently. Not only can it truly prove evolution, it’s can’t even get me a juicer without a drawback.