These are delicata squash, which my sister oven roasted with butter and garlic. Why do delicata squash, oven roasted with butter and garlic get their own spotlight among my New York memories? Because 1) They are from the CSA share that my sister and I used to split when we both lived in Bed-Stuy and 2) They are one of the food drops my sister and I did from our CSA haul to the Occupy Wall Street folks at Zuccotti Park. A lot of folks will point to the fact that the group was fractured and disorganized, or to the fact that it never became a de facto political force like the Tea Party as signs that the movement was unsuccessful, but I think the opposite is true. The group's decentralization was a feature installed from the very beginning to prevent the exact co-option that the Tea Party has undergone thanks to deep-pocketed donors like the Koch brothers. The fact that the terms "99%" and "income inequality" are important points in the political/media landscape are a testament to the group's success. It got the country to stop talking about austerity, and shared sacrifice - which always means increased sacrifice for the folks that have the least. I never slept at the park, and I never put my body in front of a line of nervous, twitchy cops, but I count what little I was able to do with Occupy - drop off food, occasionally march, spam my social networks, talk peoples' ears off, tweet where cops were staging during marches - as some of my proudest in New York.
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