Human Economics

In America, we are used to speaking about "the economy" as if Commerce is the one and only type of economy that exists. In our minds, the free exchange of goods and services, regulated by government authority, is the one and only way that property and wealth are managed.

In reality, though, there are four different types of economies in which human beings operate: Family, Friendship, Commerce, and War.

On the inside, we have Family. In the economy of the Family, you don't track ownership or debt or obligations. You are loyal to your family, full stop. While you may not own things in common, your property and your time effectively belong to your family, and vice versa. The main economic activity of the Family is Selfless Giving.

A Friendship economy is built on bonds of obligation. The main economic activity between friends is Trading Favors. You can ask each other favors, and do each other favors, but they are not quite as freely given as in a Family economy. An unequal friendship, in which one friend does most of the favors for another and these favors are not reciprocated, is a friendship that will sour. The way a Friendship stays healthy is by keeping a rough balance of favors between friends, but friends are never crass enough to measure these favors by any objective standards.

Objective measurement of debt and obligation, buying, selling, and trading are the proper domain of a Commercial economy. In Commerce, the main economic activity is Trade, and peers trade goods and services with each other, agreeing to contracts and prices with one another, and honoring those agreements. Commerce is the natural state of casual acquaintances and friendly strangers.

Outside the bonds of cordiality is the state of War. In an economy of War, goods and services are not traded - they are taken by main force. In War, you don't abide by rules agreed to by all participants in the economy - you use whatever leverage you can to compete with your adversaries to take what you want. Raids, slavery, and theft are all examples of Coercion, the main economic activity of War.

Sometimes the lines between these economies get blurred. A distant or out-of-favor family member may be treated more like a friend than family, and conversely you may have a few friends who are "like family" and who you would do anything for without counting the cost, even subconsciously.

The lines between Friendship and Commerce can also get blurred. A Facebook friend might offer you his old TV for $50, and a regular customer in your store may become such a part of your life that you stop charging him for coffee, and have him over to your house on Saturdays, where he helps you debug your computer.

Blurred lines between War and Commerce occur when a business associate rips you off, or when enemy nations agree to a hostage exchange.

As you travel inward on the chart, intimacy and trust increase; as you travel outward, hostility and wariness increase. The types of economic activity typical of each economy are also tied to a certain position on the intimacy-hostility spectrum, and you can frequently encourage a different type of economic activity in a relationship by moving the trust level along this spectrum. The reverse is also true: you can increase the amount of intimacy or hostility in a relationship by engaging in economic activities that belong to the type of economy that corresponds to the desired position on the spectrum.

For instance:

• To create distance between family members, keep track of favors done. Family bonds can be dissolved by keeping track of unreciprocated favors and grievances.
• Conversely, to bring a friend into the family circle, remove all traces of obligation from the relationship, and make them fully welcome in your house and your life, with no strings or expectations attached.
• To ruin a friendship, bring business into the equation: loan or borrow money, sign a contract with each other, or become business partners.
• To turn a business associate into a friend, remove formal accounting from the relationship: you may still be keeping track of favors done and trying to ensure there's a rough balance, but this balance will be more a feeling than entries in an actual ledger. Do things for one another that don't get tracked as business transactions.
• To make an enemy of a friendly stranger, commit an act of war against him: steal from or defraud him.
• To turn enmity to wary cordiality, begin making deals: exchange prisoners, buy and sell goods, or hire them to perform a service for you.

I have a few observations about these different types of economies:

First, I observe that most human relations worldwide seem to fall somewhere in between War and Commerce. Truly cordial Commerce is a blessing, genuine Friendship even more so, and Family is (literally) priceless. As relationships degenerate toward the outside of the circle, quality of life goes down. The Ruler of this world, the Evil One, is constantly trying to push relationships outward, while the Living God is constantly encouraging us to move them inward. Remember Jesus' command to turn the other cheek, to give our cloaks and tunics, and to go the extra mile when pressed for one? This is all about moving human hearts and lives toward the center, however minutely or imperceptibly.

Second, I observe that our modern business/political system seems to be designed to keep us all hovering between War and Commerce. We are kept isolated from our neighbors, we lock our doors to make sure they won't break in an steal our stuff, and we are ready to call the cops and shoot intruders. This may all be prudent, but a better place for neighbors is on the line between Friendship and Commerce. Get to know them.

In our corporate business culture, we're kept from true intimacy with our colleagues by HR regulations, anti-fraternization policies, layoffs, reorganizations, and constant staff turnover, If you can't know your colleagues long enough or well enough to form real bonds of friendship, you'll never be tempted to put those relationships above the company's bottom line. In smaller businesses, ubiquitous petty laws and economic pressures make it difficult to make friends with business associates of any kind. If I can't give away my business' services to a friend without raising red flags with the IRS and prompting discrimination investigations, chances are I won't treat that person as a friend and our relationship will get pushed into the Commercial zone.

Business relationships are also marked less by genuine justice than by leverage. Sure, maybe the work you do for me is immensely valuable, but if I can get away with paying you a pittance for it, well, that's just business. Sure, the phone service I'm selling you costs me a tiny fraction of the price to deliver, but if you don't have any other local options, you should thank your lucky stars I'm not charging even more. In a meeting between equal parties of good will, free unfettered trade can happen, to the enrichment of both parties. But when negotiations are all about leverage and getting the best deal you possibly can, the landscape begins to look less like cordial and just Commerce, and more like a War where the stronger party does as he wishes and the weaker party suffers what he must. Most employer-employee relationships have taken on an adversarial character (although on occasion, the employee has more leverage than the employer.)

Pop culture constantly encourages us to keep track of gifts and favors. Did I get you a more expensive Christmas present than you got me? Does Steve not buy rounds at the bar as often as the rest of us do? Are you always meeting up with Sally at times that are convenient for her, but she never seems willing to meet you halfway? The more consciously and concretely you measure these things, the more your Friendship starts to slip into the realm of Commerce.

Pop culture assaults on the family are vicious. We are encouraged to think of our family members as exploitive and obnoxious, to count grievances against them, and to guard our time and our hearts from incursion by ungrateful family members. It's gotten so bad that many Americans have never known what it's like to live in an actual selfless, loving family that doesn't play guilt games or demand reciprocity.

Third, it occurs to me that this state of affairs has been made possible in part by our wealth and prosperity. Family bonds can only be broken when the family members in question do not rely on one another for daily survival. A wealthy family can afford to be isolated from one another - the poor do not have that "luxury," In this way, the poor really are blessed, and it can be easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to find his way into the heaven of true familiar love.

Peace Be With You

I lived for a couple of years with several insane roommates. Not leaves-dirty-dishes-in-the-sink-and-likes-lousy-music insane. On-medication-and-talking-to-themselves insane. I didn't mind. I liked them. They were, in fact, very nice people.

One of them would occasionally go off his meds because he didn't like how they made him feel. And he would begin to get manic. I'd hear him up all night laughing loudly for hours on end or pacing the floor and preaching to the walls. Sometimes he'd step outside without his shirt or shoes on, and scratch Bible verses into the snow until the neighbors would call the cops.

One day, after a fantastic local hip hop show, I was recuperating in my room. It was around 11 in the morning, my head was pounding, and I was in too much pain to stumble to the bathroom and throw up, so I was cradling my sour stomach and trying not to move or think. It was at this ungodly bright and sunny hour that my roommate (probably recently off his meds) decided to come knocking on my door. I played dead for awhile, but he was more persistent than I was, so I eventually answered the door.

"Come on outside," he told me. "I want to show you something."

I grumbled, got into my weekend lounging-around rags, and followed him out to the porch, where he proceeded to walk up and down on the lawn in front of me, and preach me a sermon. By the time he was done, I had forgotten my hangover, and sat openmouthed. I was, perhaps, not so surprised by what he had to say to me as by the fact that something so blindingly clear and obviously true had never been so much as whispered in my ear.

Here is, more or less, what he said to me:

If you asked someone today whether they believed in spirits, they'd look at you like you were crazy. Back in the ancient world, if you asked someone whether they believed in spirits, they'd look at you like you were crazy, but for exactly the opposite reason. Today everyone knows that spirits don't exist, just like in the ancient world everyone knew that they did. 

So what happened? There are four possibilities:

1. Spirits used to exist, but don't anymore. People used to believe in them because they were real, and now they don't because they aren't anymore. This is obvious nonsense, and no one believes it.
2. Spirits have always existed, but the ancients were wiser than us and understood this, and we moderns have lost our way and no longer recognize spiritual realities. This is what many New Agers and religious people of various stripes believe.
3. Spirits have never existed, but the ancients were too foolish and superstitious to understand this. We enlightened modern people apprehend reality better than they do as a result of recent scientific advances, and thus we have put such silly superstitions behind us. Many materialists and atheists believe this.
4. The phenomena called spirits by the ancients are still around today, and we moderns still interact with them, but we no longer think of them the same way. We call them by other names, and what we think the ancients meant by spirits was not exactly what they actually meant. I have met very few people who believe this.

We can rule out #1 without really bothering to give it much thought. If the fundamental nature of reality can change that much in a thousand years, there's really very little point in comparing the present day with the past at all. #2 and #3 can be pretty easily disproved with a rigorous reading of history. Ancient humans were not especially wise or foolish compared to modern humans. People have not really changed much in the last few millennia, in spite of a boatload of technological advances. 

That leaves #4 - the idea that we still interact with the same phenomena that the ancients called "spirits," but we think of them differently. Having eliminated the alternatives, we can assume that this is true. 

So what to make of the idea that a man can be possessed by an evil spirit? Well, we still see that today, don't we? We talk about becoming "obsessed" (actually this term used to have a meaning related to "possession") or "beside ourselves" or "out of our minds" or "temporarily insane," but whatever terminology we want to use, there are sometimes when a man is not himself, or not in control of himself - there is something else controlling him that is not his normal everyday mind. 

Take as an example a man with a bad case of road rage. I've cut him off in traffic, and he's followed me to where I've pulled my car over, and he's getting out of his car, out of his mind with anger. The more poetic among us might say he has been possessed by a spirit of rage, and he's on his way over to me, ready to beat me black and blue. 

Now, how should I respond to this? The man - the flesh and blood - is my brother. The spirit - the rage that's driving his actions right now - is my enemy. If I respond to his attack with anger and violence, I accomplish two things: 

First, I damage the flesh and blood, my brother. 

Second, I nourish the spirit, the rage that is driving him to violence. Worse, I give this spirit a second home in my own heart. This is clearly a bad way to respond. 

So how should I respond? I should respond in the only way that saves my brother and attacks the spirit: I should respond with love. 

That is what St. Paul meant when he wrote that "our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens." It's why Jesus tells us to "offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well." The Christian commission is a spiritual commission - it's about fighting evil, not about fighting people.

As I said, by the time he was done, I was sitting with my mouth hanging open. Why had no one ever told me this before? He proceeded to tell me that God had instructed him to tell me this.

This, my friends, is an example of prophecy. Prophets are another phenomenon that is thought of differently in modern days. In ancient times prophets were alternately admired and reviled, but either way people heard their messages. Today they're alternately medicated and institutionalized. We chemically neutralize their prophetic capabilities, and when this fails we lock them away where no one will have to listen to them.

Were the ancient prophets really like our modern day crazy people? Absolutely. John the Baptist hung out in the desert, wore camel hair shirts, and ate locusts. Compare a prophet like that with this guy here.

That's partly why I try to listen to everyone. (Um. Within reason.) It's pretty much guaranteed that everyone who doesn't know something I do knows something valuable that I don't. It would be a shame to miss out on learning it just because I'm too self-involved and arrogant to listen.

An Ocean of Sorcery

I grew up in a materialist home. I attended schools built of concrete, glass, and chicken wire, full of materialist teachers, where I read insipid materialist pablum from the glossy pages of materialist textbooks. The nation and state in which I live are governed (insincere Christian lip service notwithstanding) by materialist entertainers. And the industrial baronies and fiefdoms in which I and my countrymen labor are built on materialist foundations. All around me, my countrymen speak a toneless and dreary language - a language I myself grew up speaking, but which has always felt awkward and unnatural in my throat. They tell dull, banal stories to explain the desperately hopeless oscillations of life on their streets and highways and shipping lanes.

I may have been born and raised here, but this world of oiled gears and sterile laboratories is not my home. In the midst of a grinding, smoking citadel of stone and steel, I spent uncounted hours and days of my youth submerged in stories of the impossible - books about spaceships, spellbooks, swordfights, and summonings. Perhaps reality was as tedious as everyone around me seemed to believe, but that didn't mean I had to like it - or to spend any more time in it than absolutely necessary. Reality, I decided, was for people who couldn't handle science fiction.

On the other hand, I also spent the bulk of my childhood trying to be a good materialist. I learned how to build ethical principles on a foundation of hedonism, how to take comfort in the certainty of personal extinction, and how to appreciate the wonders of the visible and measurable world. None of this eased my revulsion and mounting frustration with the so-called "Real World." So when opportunities to escape began to present themselves, I leapt at them.

Where books left off, roleplaying games picked up. With papers and pencils and rulebooks and dice, I and my friends built imaginary universes where life wasn't safe or sterile or predictable or controlled. Certainly our universes were not as comfortable as a 20th century office building, but they were a hell of a lot more interesting.

In high school I began experimenting with psychedelic drugs and the occult. The drugs were an interesting diversion, but the highlight of my fifteenth year was when I met someone online who claimed to be a witch. Well, there was really no internet to speak of in the 90s; I met her on a BBS. (If you don't know what that is, it's a message server on an individual computer, connected to a modem. Anyone else with a computer and a modem could dial up, read the messages, leave responses, and then sign off. BBSs were pre-internet chat rooms, and were fantastic places to converse anonymously with complete strangers.) Anyway, this lady claimed to be a witch and turned me on to the world of the occult. I bought books and supplies and practiced rituals and put myself into trances.

Ultimately, occultism proved a dead end as well. No matter how exciting it sounded to be able to cast spells and conjure up spirits, the end result turned out to be no different from the goals of the dull gray world outside. A houngan may know how to call up the loas, but when he does, it's for all the same reasons a businessman sits an office all day: money, sex, health, power, influence. I was looking for excitement and adventure. I was looking (if I'd known it at the time) for meaning. And the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn could no more offer me that than the offices of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Perhaps both could offer me the same pay and benefits, but I didn't want pay and benefits. I didn't want to go to college, learn a profession, work until retirement, and wait to die. I wanted... I wasn't quite sure, but that wasn't it.

I had jumped into the pool of occultism, and found it was barely deep enough to wet my socks. However, in my investigations, I did learn a thing or two about ritual magic.

Ritual magic is essentially mind control. Generally, when practiced alone it's about controlling your own mind, but the principles work just as well when applied to the minds of others. The magician creates a circle or sacred space of some sort, and invokes a spirit by means of associated signs and symbols. In the middle ages, apparently, there were grimoires full of lists of spirits, and their associated names, symbols, gestures, fragrances, sounds, and astrological affinities. On the appropriate day, at the appropriate time, wearing the appropriate ceremonial garb, making the appropriate intonations and symbols and gestures, the magician "calls up" the spirit, and the spirit gets to work creating whatever result the magician is looking for.

Now, even after years of experimenting with the occult, I couldn't really have told you whether or not magic worked as advertised. It seemed to... sometimes. On the other hand, if you worked a spell to make you sexier and got more attention from the opposite sex, how would you know whether it was the spell working, a coincidence, or perhaps the placebo effect at work making you more confident (and thus more attractive?) Hard to say. I certainly had some experiences that seemed supernatural, but keep in mind I was taking hallucinogens at the time too. So... hard to say.

So, I walked away from it all, and didn't miss it. I (just barely) graduated from high school, and set out wandering around the country. That, I think, was where I found the adventures I'd been looking for, and the next five years were the most interesting years of my life up till then.

During those wanderings, I moved to another city, got a job, and settled down for a little while. One day, I had an errand to run (I forget what) that took me to City Hall. I walked up the steps, opened the door, and right in front of me was a gigantic stone slab hanging on a wall. It was the seal of the city, and it was covered in various kinds of symbols - sheaves of wheat, gears, eagles, Greek goddesses - that attempted to call up ideas of prosperity and to tie them to the identity of the city itself.

It struck me then that this seal was exactly like the sigils of the spirits and entities that magicians had been inscribing in their grimoires for millennia. This seal was, in fact, part of a larger sorcerous working that brought the city into existence, sustained and fed it. I realized then how many phantom entities we live alongside in our modern world - entities that are not made of flesh and blood, that straddle the line between imagination and physical reality - entities that we summon up and sustain by means of our belief, attention, and thought. Governments, corporations, currencies... all these things are phantoms that are given real weight and power in our world by virtue of human attention and belief. A government in which no one believes is a government that doesn't exist. A corporation that does not have a place in the minds of the public is a corporation that's not in business. A currency that isn't valued by people is a currency with no substance - who would bother to mint it? But when we breathe life into these phantoms, they shake the foundations of the world.

I realized that an advertising executive is nothing more or less than a modern day sorcerer. He contracts with these phantom entities and makes bargains with them. In return for a share of the attention/souls of millions of TV viewers or passersby on a freeway, he creates powerful spells of invocation for that entity: incantations that are repeated in commercials until the jingle is stuck in your head; logos that are memorable and recognizable and always conjure up the spirit in your mind when you see them; associations that are crafted in your mind so that you are more likely to deal with that entity yourself - to buy its products and services. In return for these spells, the sorcerer is given wealth and influence. That's how sorcery works in business - there is a very similar process at work in government and finance and, in fact, in all areas of social life.

Sorcery has not vanished from our world - far from it. It simply wears different clothes. The shocking truth is that we swim in an ocean of sorcery... and it is every bit as dreary and banal as the stock markets and boardrooms where it is practiced.

Is it truer to say that the ancients understood these psychosocial practices imperfectly, anthropomorphizing impersonal patterns that really aren't alive and superstitiously calling them gods and spirits? Or is it that modern practitioners are blind to the true spiritual realities they're working with? I don't know that I'd say either is true. I'd say that reality far weirder and more wondrous than we think, and that neither the ancients nor the moderns really understand things as well as people are wont to think. What symbolic language you use to speak about these phenomena is more a matter of taste than accuracy.

Flowchart 2: Worrying

How, and when, to worry, get anxious, trip, sweat, or otherwise let fear knock you off your game:

Flowchart 1: Taking Offense

How, and when, to take offense, get indignant, and indulge in righteous anger after someone says something stupid:

Black Beans and Corn Cakes

When I moved out to Colorado Springs (the first time, in '99) I was working an assembly job that paid $7.50 an hour, and living vegan in a very meat-and-potatoes town. It actually wasn't that hard, but I had to learn to do a lot of my own cooking. There was a Safeway about a dozen blocks away from my apartment, where I did just about all my shopping. Pretty convenient, except I was one of the only adults in town without a driver's license, so I got to lug all my shopping bags back through snow in the winter if I wanted to eat. On the plus side, the liquor store and library were right across the street, so I never had to go far for novels and whiskey sours.

Anyway, one of the first dishes I learned to cook myself was beans, rice, and corn, and it is one of the cheaper and more filling meals you can cook. Black beans are full of iron and taste a lot more interesting than pinto beans, in my opinion. A word of warning: this requires some planning to cook (figure two days) and will make your place smell like black beans and garlic. This is a good thing in my book, but I've heard rumors that not everyone feels the same.

Ingredients
Bag of dry black beans (1 lb is good - remember that they will cook up quite a bit)
Bag of brown rice (again, 1 lb is good)
Bag of cornmeal
1 head of garlic
Olive oil
Salt
1 onion (optional)
1 jar green olives (optional)
1 habanero pepper or bottle of hot sauce (optional)

1. Rinse the beans and soak them overnight. Most people will throw out the water the beans have soaked in (rather than cooking them in it) in the belief that this will keep the beans from imparting musical powers. Far be it from me to argue with conventional wisdom, but I've tried it both ways, and I didn't notice any difference in terms of gas. What I did notice was that when I cook the beans in the water they're soaked in, they have a richer flavor.

2. Peel the head of garlic. This is going to make your fingers smell garlicky (again, a good thing in my book.) It's also kind of time-consuming. One way to speed up the process is to crack open the skin of each clove by pressing down on it with the flat of a knife.

3. Put the beans and peeled whole cloves of garlic into a pot with water and a good shake of salt, and cook them on high (for a crockpot) or medium-low (on the stovetop.) You want them simmering for a long time, without boiling over. Give them the occasional stir for fun.

This will probably take a few hours (2-4) and this is where the difference between a crockpot and a pot on the stovetop becomes important. With a crockpot, you can set it and leave it, and I've actually gotten fantastic results setting this to cook all day while I'm out at work. It cooks the beans into a mushy mass, which is perfect for what you're trying to accomplish. On the other hand, cooking them on a stovetop will cook them quicker. Either way, you're pretty much trying to cook off most of the water so that you eventually have a black bean paste. A tasty, garlic-infused black bean paste, with the occasional mushy lump of pure garlic mixed in.

It's at this point that you may want to settle down for a few hours with a whiskey sour and a few chapters from your favorite Octavia Butler novel.

4. Boil or steam the rice. You've probably boiled or steamed rice before, but if you haven't, just throw the rice in a pot with boiling water and a pinch of salt. Stir occasionally so the rice doesn't stick to the bottom. This is not an issue if you're using a steamer, but you'll want to make sure the water doesn't all boil away. When the rice is thoroughly cooked, set it aside.

5. Chop up the onions, olives, and/or habanero pepper. Sautee them lightly in a big pan, and then pour in the beans. Keep stirring on the heat until you have a nice big pan of bean paste. When this is the right consistency, set it aside.

6. Mix some cornmeal and water in a bowl - again, you'll want a paste that isn't too watery and isn't too dry. You'll probably have to add in some meal or water once or twice to get the mixture right, but you'll know it when you see it.

7. Heat some oil in a big pan, and drop in dollops of cornmeal paste - maybe about 2-3 ounces each. Fry them until brown on one side, and then turn them over. When they're nice and crispy, drop them on some folded up paper towels to cool down and dry. One decent-sized bowl will make about a dozen corncakes, which is enough for a hearty dinner and the next day's lunch.

8. Lay out a bed of rice on a plate, and lay about half a dozen corn cakes on top of it. Pour the bean paste over the corn cakes, and season with hot sauce to taste. Garnish with whiskey sour and reruns of the Highlander TV show for an authentic 20-year-old-in-a-strange-town experience.

Stuffed Squash

About a dozen years ago, I went to Thanksgiving dinner at my mom's place, to which my aunt brought some delicious stuffed butternut squash. I asked her for the recipe, and she told me in a couple of sentences. I've since been asked for the recipe myself, and have decided to make it available online, complete with pictures.

This squash is gluten-free, vegan, and pretty darn tasty.

Please forgive the sloppy nature of this recipe. I have a theory that there are two types of cooks in this world: bakers and stovetop cookers. Bakers measure everything precisely, set the oven to an exact number, and set a timer for a specific period of time. Stovetop cookers throw in a pinch of this, a dash of that, and a dollop of the other thing, and are inclined to be comforted by instructions that say things like "cook until brown" and "season to taste." Stovetop cookers cook from the gut rather than from the head, and it is very difficult for us to precisely pin down anything we do, even when we do wind up opening the oven and sticking something in to bake.

Ingredients
2 butternut squash
1 onion
~6 good sized potatoes
1 bag of wanuts
1 bag of dried cranberries
~12 mushrooms
lemon juice
olive oil
cinnamon

Instructions
1. Hollow out the squash by scraping it out with a spoon. You'll want to leave about an inch of meat on the skin. You can make this a little easier by nuking the squash a bit, but it isn't necessary, and I think you get a better flavor by scraping it raw.

2. Chop up the onions, potatoes, and mushrooms into little squares.

3. Chop the walnuts and cranberries up good, but not too fine.

4. Start pan frying the onions until they start sizzling and you can see the skin on them starting to bubble up a little. You don't want them to quite start browning yet, but you do want them to be starting to release some of their juices into the olive oil.

5. Throw in the potatoes, and start cooking them until they begin getting soft. This is going to take a little while.

6. Throw in the mushrooms, and cook them in until everything is starting to brown up a little bit.

7. Throw in the walnuts and cranberries, squirt it all liberally with lemon juice, and keep stirring and frying it all up until the lemon juice is all cooked in to the mix and things are starting to brown and stick to the pan a little.

8. Scoop out what you've been frying up, and load it into the squash you've hollowed out. Put the stuffed squash on a cookie sheet.

9. Preheat the oven to around 350-400 degrees, and shake cinnamon powder all over the squash.

10. When the oven is hot enough, slide the cookie sheet in, and bake the squash until you hear the oil starting to pop on the sheet. This usually takes somewhere between an hour and 90 minutes.

You can eat the whole squash, skin and all, although you can skip the skin if you don't like it - think of it like the skin on a cucumber: optional, but edible.

Enjoy!