Open Journal
A pa pe r pa rty
Foodhall project November 2017 Issue 3
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poems and art
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story
3 - 4
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poetry
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article
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poetry
‘stan and matt’s 10 word stories’ by stan and matt skinny ‘treehugger’ by miriam schechter ‘reticence’ by adam n.u. 8
‘why pay as you feel?’ by isaac tendler
‘i am disappeared’ by matilda fawley
‘10 things you need to know about your vagina’ by florence
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article
schechter 13 - 14 |
event report
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poems
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photographs
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‘journal! presents sourdough’ poems by evie wilson
‘from the clay workshop’ by jonathan davey poetry
‘she’d like to burrow’ by bethany aylward contributors: joe norman, jake sutcliffe, isaac tendler, sam atkinson, jamie wilde, louis koseda, miriam schechter, adam n.u., matilda fawley, florence schechter, evie wilson, stan skinny, matt skinny, abbie laycock, bethany aylward, henry tufton
this is an open journal: we accept all submissions except in very rare circumstances
*the cafe was closed during october for development purposes so we do not have statistics of how many meals were served
submissions to foodhallopenjournal@gmail.com
monthly deadline is the 25th day of each month
Letter from the editor thank you for picking up issue #3 of the foodhall open journal. it’s been a busy month here at foodhall organising, training, and recruiting new volunteers to help out. we are overwhelmed and full of love for the generosity and kindness of our friends. we started the journal in order to open up a platform for everybody to be heard, because everybody has something to say and deserved a place to say it. the journal is evolving and forming into something really special. we held a fundraiser on the 20th october to raise money for the journal (see pages 13-14) and we raised £1000. we were absolutely elated and so happy by the turnout - I personally was on a high for the next couple days about the money we had raised. with so much money, we have been able to purchase our own printer to print the journal on. we would like to thank the Choriso Studio at La Biblioteka for printing the first two issues of the journal, and wholly recommend
them for any risoprint needs. i’m so happy that i got involved with foodhall, whenever I am there I am in a very happy mood just knowing that everyone is there because they want to be part of a sharing and equal community. It would be nice to thank a few people whilst I have the chance. Isaac, of course, for coming up with the idea for the journal in the first place with me, and his constant help and commitment to everything foodhall. Louise for prompting me to come to help out one thursday after not being at foodhall for a while, sam for the help with indesign, jamie for his idea to have a fundraising night, otis, louis for help with design ideas and advice, nikki for being so friendly when i first came to help in the kitchen, and jake and joe for putting on a banging night which was so fun and raised so much money. happy november everyone x
Stan and Matt’s 10 Word Stories These are 10 word stories, Stan started writing them in 2016 after attending a comedy workshop. They are tiny snippets of life condensed into 10 words. He asked Matt his twin brother to do the pictures and he agreed and started some doodles. Our hopeful plan is that one day they
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are emblazoned on a tea towel and someone cleans out their oven with one. Do get in touch if you like them, and want one. You can also book us to come read them at events, comedy nights. poetry evenings, front rooms and conservatories. facebook.com/10wordstorytime/
Treehugger
the big blue bear couldn’t see the that the tree was stuck onto the back of an all seeing eye. the eye couldn’t see that the big blue bear was picking the hairs off of its back. the tree couldn’t see because the tree has no eyes and nor do a lot of things in the world
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R E T I C E N C E 3
If I had her, I wouldn’t need to go to space I’d have all my constellations right here. I tore down the best thing I never had to Convince myself I could be like her? Too show her I could feel? Naïve self-destruction for the sake of a hopeful fantasy? Hope is evil, But the motivation remains. I know I’m a scientist Because I need to prove these feelings were significant: And the ‘proof is in the pudding’… Her smile could flatten mountains. And her soft gaze could melt a nation A sun As a convict she would be my Mary Magdalene Adam N.U
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Why Pay As You Feel? Rethinking Models of Exchange in Contemporary Consumerism Isaac Tendler In contemporary consumerist society,
there are service users and service providers. In a café, customers come
dispels any notions of trust between service users and service providers
to buy drinks, staff are there to
Foodhall aims to bring everyone
giving the staff a certain amount of
this model of service provision by
make them. Customers get drinks by
money. This set amount of money is then hidden away, secured in cash
drawers that are only accessible
to staff, ensuring the money given remains
secure.
This
model
of
exchange is problematic as although most people would like a drink, not everyone has enough to meet the
amount needed. It is also problematic as
the
interaction
is
inherently
isolating. Customers are kept divided
from baristas by their set roles, and
are not given the opportunity to
learn how to make their own drinks. Customers must rely on the service
providers repeatedly and indefinitely
– every time they want a drink, they must make the same fixed monetary
exchange. Finally, the securitised nature of the exchange, in which
money given is promptly locked away, 5
together.
It
seeks
to
challenge
changing the model of exchange that facilitates it. Rather than providing services (hot drinks, but also food, company, training and skill sharing
workshops, as well as access to various facilities) for a fixed, one off
price, Foodhall’s café serves people
on a ‘pay as you feel’ (PAYF) donation basis. This model, which has become
well-known in recent years thanks to its use by organisations such as
The Real Junk Food Project, asks that people pay what they want for goods
and services, usually either with money or a time commitment, such as volunteering help. The model is used
in Foodhall mostly because it allows the café to be accessible to a range
of visitors, and encourages different
community groups to support each other – those who give support those
who can’t; those who can’t afford to
to give what they can, a difficult thing
PAYF provides a radical alternative
be aware that we use a PAYF model,
pay are under no obligation to do so. to
conventional
consumerism,
exchanges
destabilising
in
the
idea of money as holding a fixed, objective value, and giving members
of disparate economies a chance to
partake in the same exchanges. PAYF
provides an inclusive and accessible method of exchange for those who
get money through informal or formal employment,
through
pensions,
benefits and welfare, through illegal methods such as begging or theft,
and those who have no income at all. The obvious merit of this is that each
person can receive the same services regardless of income.
PAYF may not be perfect. From a cost-
to ensure. Visitors of the café must rather than conventional monetary
exchange, or (as is often the case) that everything in the café is simply
free. Visitors must feel that the café,
and Foodhall as a wider project, is worth donating to, financially or
otherwise. Furthermore, by its very nature, PAYF does seem to place
monetary payment at the forefront
of the exchange, as although one is welcome to ‘pay’ with more than
just money, the phrase ‘pay as you feel’ does not make this explicit.
This of course makes the model feel exclusionary to those who would like
to pay, but do not have the resources to do so.
covering point of view, the model
Perhaps
what they feel like paying, rather
make non-monetary payment more
is risky. Since it asks visitors to pay than what they can, visitors are under no obligation to pay proportionate
to what they could. This can be frustrating, as the café frequently fails to cover costs, with the average
donation per meal served sometimes
falling as low as just 16 pence. Using
a PAYF model means that all who visit the café must be engaged with the
project to the extent where they want
rewording
to
something
like ‘contribute as you feel’ might
welcome, as what is valued is not a one-off payment (in which what is being paid for is viewed as a
provided service), but a contribution, in which the recipient can shape the very service they receive. This then
engenders the blurring of the line between service users and service
providers, ensuring the sustainable development of the project, as those 6
who use the project come to shape
from the café’s pot, which all things
mark a further radical departure
a fairly small loss considering the
it to their needs. This would also
from mainstream exchanges, as the exchange between user and provider
is not viewed as an isolated event (a one-off exchange, to be repeated whenever the user wants the services provided), but a continual process in which users are invited into the
process of service provision itself, whether
through
cooking
food,
serving drinks, cleaning the café, offering skill sharing workshops, or, of course, monetary donation.
Alongside this reconfiguration of the
moment of exchange itself, Foodhall changes the physical handling of what is given in a radical way. Rather than
securing and hiding any money given,
money in Foodhall is donated into a single pot, a large glass jar placed on
the front counter of the café, usually marked with the words ‘pay as you feel’. This pot is not secure. It has no
lid or lock, and is not fastened to the
counter. It is also largely unwatched.
This is a deliberate exercise designed to foster trust amongst all in the café,
users
and
providers
alike.
Occasionally, money from the pot gets stolen. Since opening in January
2016, around £50 has gone missing 7
considered, isn’t much. It seems like lack of security. The openness of
the pot destabilises the importance given to money as an exchangeable commodity,
whilst
simultaneously
joining the community of users and providers through shared trust and collective responsibility. Models
of
contemporary
exchange cultural
dominate
experience;
in consumerist societies, it is rare
to find mainstream exchanges that do not revolve fixed monetary value, and clear division between users and
providers. Through using PAYF and the
open money pot, Foodhall attempts
to resist such objective, isolating, binary exchanges. Although there is still much more we can do to improve,
bit-by-bit this resistance makes the
process of exchange much more inclusive, and much more accessible.
I am Disappeared
I had listened to the whole playlist twice, When my favourite Live at ten for ten Flooded the empty holes between my ear lobes Your green light Like Daisy’s Reminds me this is not The 1920s You will not scream for my shirts But pick up your own Washed and ironed And say you just can’t bear it. Matilda Fawley
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ten things you need to know about your vagina Florence Schechter
The vagina is just the canal The vagina is the tube that connects the outside to the cervix (ooh sexy). The outside bit with all the flaps is the vulva. The vulva is not the vagina! The vulva contains the fun parts like the external part of the clitoris (the clitoris is like an iceberg, more on this later…) and the vagina is what you put fingers and dildos and penises in and where babies come out, albeit far less frequently. The whole shebang - vulva, vagina, uterus, ovaries, etc - is called the gynaecological system (which I will now abbreviate to gynae anatomy because who’s got time for all those letters). Now you know this, you might be wondering why the Vagina Museum is called that when it really should be 9
called the Gynaecological Museum. I have one question for you. Would you visit the Gynaecological Museum? Sounds like somewhere A level students wanting to get into medical school go just so they can put it on their UCAS form.
Vaginal walls are pressed together unless something is going in or out of it Your vagina sits closed most of the time unless something is inside it. The vagina expands to fit whatever is in there. And when that thing is removed, the vagina collapses behind it. That means nothing can accidentally go up there, nothing can get lost far inside your body and it doesn’t get looser if you have lots of sex.
The clitoris extends way inside you The fun button underneath the clitoral hood where the inner lips meet is only the tip of the iceberg. The clitoris extends way inside and straddles the opening to the vagina. The full anatomy of the clitoris wasn’t discovered until 2005. You read that right. 2005. In the 1980s, an Australian urology surgeon, Helen O’Connell, was studying for her surgical exams when she learnt very little was known about the sweet spot.
In 1998 she discovered the first part of the internal anatomy, and by 2005 she discovered the bulbs. Much better than the time Realdo Colombus said he discovered the clitoris in 1559. So that’s twice the Colombus family claimed to find something half the world already knew about. Oh, and it’s really not that hard to find. If someone tells you that, they’re just lazy.
Medicine has historically avoided the gynae anatomy If you were wondering why it took so long to discover the anatomy of the clitoris, this might give you some insight why. A 1559 edition of Thomas Gemini’s anatomy book “Compediosa Totius Anatomie Delineatio” was found with a page that depicted a dissected female body with a triangle cut out where the vulva would have been. (Image source). Her inner organs are on show - her kidneys, what are presumably her ovaries and uterus - but it was her vulva that was regarded by somebody as so horrifying it had to be removed. But you know, bloody organs are fine. Even in Gray’s Anatomy, the definitive anatomy textbook for hundreds of years, couldn’t bring itself to properly
depict the anatomy. In 1901, there were only a few labels on the diagram of the gynae anatomy, but to their credit, one of them was of the clitoris. By its update in 1948, the clitoris had mysteriously disappeared. They can hardly use the excuse they didn’t know it existed, it was a deliberate erasure of female pleasure. Party poopers.
The G-spot and vaginal orgasms probably don’t exist Sorry. The G-spot has never been proven to exist. It was theorised by Ernst Gräfenberg, inventor of the IUD. Pleasure you feel from ‘stimulating the G-spot’ is probably the internal clitoris having a party. Same with vaginal orgasms. Probably just internal clitoral orgasms. Clitorises really have to have all the fun, don’t they.
Your vagina might not be a vagina Statistics on the incidence of intersex are hard to pin down (I’ll give you one guess why that might be) but being intersex could be as common as having red hair. One example is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). This is when you have the X and Y sex chromosomes, but your body doesn’t react to the testosterone it’s making. People with AIS normally appear female 10
depending on the degree of AIS. If it is partial AIS, i.e. the body reacts a little to testosterone, this is normally picked up at birth. But in complete AIS, your genitals appear totally female and it isn’t diagnosed until you’re a teenager when you don’t get periods. People with complete AIS have a vagina but it doesn’t end in a cervix, it just sort of stops.
You should always pee after sex People with vaginas are way more likely to get urinary tract infections. After a lot of bump and grind has been going on down there, the bacteria that lives on your skin, in your vagina and in your butt all get mixed up and start having a little explore and some go to visit your urethra. The bacteria that live on and in your body are usually totally harmless - if they stick to where they normally live. You don’t want butt or vagina germs in your urethra, that’s what causes most UTIs. The best way of preventing them take hold is to pee within thirty minutes of having sex (any kind of sex) and the sheer force of the urine exiting your body will wash away any hangers on. (There are so many potential Trump jokes here and I am proud I haven’t made a single one).
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Do your kegels Talking of peeing, you should do your kegel exercises every day, also known as pelvic floor exercises. Your pelvic floor is a group of muscles in your pelvis that stop all your organs falling out of your bottom. The pelvic floor also helps you poo and pee and orgasm. So having a healthy and strong pelvic floor can give you longer and stronger orgasms! (That’s true for men too). And if you are incontinent, pelvic physiotherapy is more effective than medication or surgery and can cure 70-80% of cases. Seriously, do your exercises. Now. You can keep reading the article while you do. Here are some resources on how to do your pelvic floor exercises: (itunes.apple.com/gb/app/squeezy-nhsphysiotherapy/id700740791?mt=8) (nhs.uk/chq/pages/1063. aspx?categoryid=52) (pelvicfloorfirst.org.au/pages/pelvicfloor-first-app.html)
There are five gynaecological cancers Sorry to put it on a downer, but this one is really important. One in five women aged 16-25 years old in Britain can’t name a single symptom of any of the five gynaecological cancers. The five cancers are: ovarian cancer, womb cancer, cervical cancer, vaginal cancer and vulval cancer. The sorts of
things you should be looking out for are abnormal vaginal bleeding (e.g. after the menopause, after having sex or pink discharge), persistent abdominal or pelvic pain and lumps and moles. To read more about the symptoms of gynae cancer, visit here: https://eveappeal.org. uk/gynaecological-cancers/
Vaginas are like wine That last one was a bit sad so let’s end on a happy note. A vagina’s pH should be below 4.5, which is similar to wine. I knew there was a reason I liked it so much.
Florence Schechter is the founder of the
Vagina Museum, the world’s first phycial museum about the vagina, currently
in development. For more information please visit:
vaginamuseum.co.uk
instagram.com/vagina_museum/ twitter.com/vagina_museum facebook.com/vmuseum/
Image by Abbie Laycock
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Journal! presents Sourdough On the 20th October, we held a Friday Late specially for raising money for the journal, and managed to raise a phenomenal £1000, which was totally unexpected. We were packed full of people, so thank you to everyone for coming and we hope you had a bloody good time. Jake and Joe (Sourdough) did a great job DJing the tunes which everyone loved. Follow their facebook page here: facebook.com/ sourdoughsheffield/ where you can look out for their future events and more collaborations with us. We gave out free toast all night, had a reading corner with lots of journals to read, and many people helped to clean up afterwards which was lovely. Thanks to that, we’ve been able to buy our own printer for the journal, which will be a much more costeffective and sustainable way of making the journal happen every month. 13
So, keep an eye out for Jake and Joe, who I’m sure will be headlining somewhere soon, and make sure to follow the Friday Lates facebook page for details of our upcoming events. facebook.com/fridaylates/ “It was amazing that giving people a chance to do what they loved could generate so much support for Foodhall. There’s no better way to raise money that listening to loads of Prince.” - Henry Tufton
Photographs by Isaac Tendler
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Poems by Evie Wilson
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How many spinach leaves until I. AM. A . NEW . WOMAN ?! Until the coal of the last cigarette is a burnt out neverland in the south and pouring landslide? falling as tannin syrup tell-tales of greater depth and body and sulphite baths on the Mexican border, coalescing as it all does - frenzied tug and the magnetise of eyes that drain toward some far off distance. Where, distinct behind the lobes ( of all the) unloved and neglected lies a delicate , delicate, dance And yes, the slightest hand poised to the east like a sun dial or a confused sunflower can make any grown man cry drooping in the night time or in the daylight , in fact no, I/she/he/we, will not accept . This stoic gloss , the glazing honey of all this Numbness laissez fair insurgence supplanting Love Compassion Self awareness hell, a little patience into a steaming pile of ‘Money talks’ don’t cry darling we bought you the new dress The one that goes with the lipstick The one that goes with the new hair
(cont.) And the sad sad Eyes are not windows, they are the house and you are the gate keeper You, are the gate keeper.
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Nothing deplorable could possibly happen in Massechussets or Nebraska since the Welsh only deliver
the saddest with the warmest of chirps, Say, Capitalism is not an illness and my body is not taken to filling like a freight train to push down the aisles until the coal runs out until I’m rusty and nobody loves me No. It is brimful with all that is wholly nutrition(less) but not to matter for the packages are bright and a tummy doesn’t discriminate against the small towns which paper the buses, sound whimsical and I have never heard of this ‘Preston’ it sounds US of A and the bus boys only draw attention because they want us to visit The small town . Do you remember? The one in that French text book, with the swimming pool and the cartons of orange juice only ever came from there and nowhere else, and nobody knew it, now queues serpent from airport stairs to the shopping centre and its hell of a lot better so they say I want to stumble across a path that no one else has ever (Alaska? Too rocky, too far) thought or written something such as this could be mere regurgitation a penguin shuffling into a formation We should take note - All that storing - All that hoarding of love and cuddles in the cold I have spent each metal disc in my bank supply til minus eight hundred, on expensive pastries and books to widen my mind only once extended to a street stepper with the eyes of cracked doe trying with less hot suppers than I have cared for others to satiate until not even satisfied (but with enough to keep it ticking over) - My watch is worth two hundred and fifty pounds and I am never on time.
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In 20 years my senior, and yours in fact when the shuttle, half the speed of light, has reached all seven of those, circlingplanets not unlike ourown except low musky amber skies hang the sixth and the faint trail of lilac streams that seventh ocean midriff We will see how: apposable thumbs / Mudanjiang’s dairy farm / The RDS 220 hydrogen /Burj Kahlifa / Nesquik corporation / every oil spilled blackened feather / and the final cull of the amazon’s palmed t r e e ( c u t i t s l i f e l i n e. w i t h t h e w h i m o f n e w f o u n d g y p s y t e l l e r ) - were all such dirty work. But not in that form of sly which leans into s/u/l/t/r/y but the kind of pitiful brown eyes of the dairy cow rules the roost in planet two and “us” all in cages U V A f o r s u n, a n d a p a c k e t o f p o w d e r b r e a d Had it coming.
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She’d like to burrow.
She’d like to burrow further into the spoons he nightly carves for her and from that place she feels the rumble of his slumbers shielding them from the language of new things that knock knock with bruised fists on the windows of their minds. They fled from the gaze of the steel birds that tower above towers in silent majesty. The eye of the tempest fought by other tempests whose battle cry crackles through radio speakers and she’s angry and it scalds. Bethany Aylward
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Foodhall opening hours: 10am to 3pm thursday, friday 121 eyre street sheffield city centre (near the moor)
foodhallopenjournal@gmail.com foodhallproject.org facebook.com/foodhallproject @foodhallproject foodhallproject@gmail.com