Our Electric Future and Food Sovereignty | GFF '24

Our Electric Future and Food Sovereignty

This post is part of Allie Douma's 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

As someone studying and working in the environmental field, I am constantly thinking about what our future holds. The impending climate crisis seems to creep closer every day. Many of my counterparts at school are focused on the much-needed transition to electric renewable energies and electric vehicles. This transition away from fossil fuels is essential. The fossil fuel economy has been unjust and has left many communities polluted and many of us wondering how we can get out of this difficult mess. Now, as we transition to renewable energies, new communities are faced with the burden of becoming “energy communities” and what that means for them. Many of these communities are not wealthy and now are being burdened with supplying the materials and energy for wealthier folks to maintain their lifestyles.  They see very little of the profit themselves. It seems like we are telling the same story of extraction, but for a new era this time it is covered with a green veil signaling that these energies are clean and endless.

[image_credit] Source: Talon Metals Corp.[/image_credit][image_caption]Location of the Tamarack North Project[/image_caption]

Over the summer I studied this tension by filming a documentary, called “Protecting the Land of Sky-Blue Waters”, about the advocates against a proposed copper nickel mine in Tamarack, MN.[1] Tamarack is in Aitkin County which is around 2 hours north of the twin cities surrounded by bogs, wetlands, agricultural fields, and lakes which are home to wild rice, an essential cultural and food resource for Anishinaabe people. Wild rice, which is called Manoomin or “the good berry,” is the reason that the Anishinaabe walked from the east coast to what is today Minnesota. Their prophets told them to walk where the food grows on water. That food was the Manoomin, and it has been the center of their culture and an essential food resource for generations. Every year Anishinaabe people begin their ricing season with a ceremony to pay respect to those who have come before and to thank the creator for the wild rice. As they rice, they intentionally knock rice back into the lake to reseed the rice for the next season.

The Anishinaabe have been able to maintain their ricing traditions partially due to the 1855 treaty.[2] The 1855 treaty established both the Leech Lake reservation and the Mille Lacs Reservation and granted the Ojibwe of Minnesota their rights to fish, hunt and gather on the lands they ceded to the government. The Talon metals mine may impact the Ojibwe treaty rights by limiting the Ojibwe’s ability to harvest wild rice and fish on their land and by polluting their resources. Wild rice is extremely sensitive to sulfides in the environment and many lakes in the Great Lakes region have already lost their wild rice resources.

 https://www.leechlakenews.com/2018/02/22/day-1855-treaty-signed-united-states-ojibwe-bands/ photo reference

Talon Metals is purporting that this mine is necessary for the domestic production of critical minerals or minerals that are important for electric powered vehicles and other renewable energies. Talon is stating that the world simply needs to mine today so that the next generation does not have to, but they fail to take into account that there is no evidence of a high sulfide mine not polluting in a water rich environment. They fail to understand that mining today could impact a cultural and food resource for future generations. Furthermore, it is projected that there needs to be a 40% increase in the production of copper and nickel to reach the renewable energy goals, but this mine would not get us much closer to that goal. Currently the United States only accounts for 5% of worldwide copper reserves and copper recovered from scrap metal contributed 33% of the U.S. copper supply in 2024. There are also predictions that electric vehicle companies will continue to find ways to use less and less copper, so while the projections for copper currently are high that will continue to change as the technology changes.

There are so many potential issues with the mine—from increased noise and air pollution to the fear that the company may continue to increase their mining site, as has been done in the past. While Talon is saying that this mine will be beneficial for jobs and for the electric future, there are still so many questions to be answered. Community concerns about the potential of pollution from the ore processing led Talon to propose to transport the ore to a processing facility in North Dakota, which has a much drier environment. The company seems to be trying to adapt to the concerns of the citizens, but many of the folks that I spoke to remain concerned. They fear that if something does happen, if there is an increase in sulfides that wild rice resources could be lost in the region forever and in a changing climate, indigenous food sovereignty is already being threatened.

We are in a time of change. Business as usual is not going to solve the problems that the fossil fuel economy created. We must start thinking creatively and listening to Indigenous people who have been living in harmony with their ecosystems for generations. We have to prioritize our food, water, and air. My summer working with these advocates reinforced the power of listening, listening to community members, listening to our environment, and listening to the past to help inform our future. We have the power to choose what the electric future will be and we must center the voices of those who have been harmed by the past to ensure that the future is different.

While I sometimes get overwhelmed with these questions of what the future of our energy system holds this summer also made me hopeful. People reminded me that we have so many solutions already in motion. We have electric resources that we can recycle, we can learn how to use less materials in our batteries, we can create more public transportation to limit our need for personal vehicles and we will continue to create new solutions together.

I want to thank the Tamarack Water Alliance, The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and the Big Sandy Lake Band of Ojibwe for welcoming their land and speaking with me about their work and advocacy. I also want to thank my funders the Global Food Fellowship, The Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Program, and the Franke Public Humanities program for making this possible. My documentary, “Protecting the Land of Sky-Blue Waters” will come out this spring and will highlight these community voices to help us all question what our electric future should look like.

Tree crops for whom? The socio-ecological implications of agroforestry on farmscapes in the Northeast | GFF '24

Tree crops for whom? The socio-ecological implications of agroforestry on farmscapes in the Northeast.

This post is part of Sophia Hampton’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

As I drove between farms in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine this summer there was always one or two of those blueish cardboard pints wedged in my car’s cup holder and filled with varying seasonal riches. In June, mulberries, serviceberries, currants, and goumi berries. In July, blueberries and cherries. Then, sweet peaches and plums, the colors of an August sunset.

ripening plums

Being in a constant state of fruit abundance was a highlight from my summer researching agroforestry (the intentional integration of trees and shrubs on farmland) in the Northeast. It’s also one of the reasons I get so excited about the increasing amounts of trees and shrubs that farmers are planting on their land as agroforestry gains momentum in the US.

Where conventional agriculture prioritizes production over social and environmental values, combining trees and shrubs with annual crops presents an opportunity to address multiple competing values in the climate crisis. Depending on species and design, agroforestry systems can provide timber harvests, carbon sequestration, erosion reduction, flood control, diversified crop harvests, and biodiversity benefits on lacking landscapes. In short, a winning equation: all the good stuff that trees can do +  economic benefits + the delicious and productive benefits of a farm = financially viable farmers, ecologically sound landscapes, and good eating.  

And yet, solutions in a capitalist economy are rarely that straightforward. As US agroforestry grows in popularity, taking on significant investment and institutional backing, I wanted to spend some time critically engaging with agroforestry as a so-called solution. To this end, I spent my summer conducting research on how agroforestry engages with the logic of property law in the Northeast, the place I call home. While these may seem like unrelated spheres, they are anything but. The takeaway of my almost four years of grad school working towards a dual degree in law and environmental science is that property regimes have a foundational impact on the socio-ecological outcomes of land-use decisions.  

Several scholars are making the case that to truly transform agriculture’s negative impact on socio-ecological systems, there needs to be a shift in property relations–a land reform. The big question I carried with me this summer was: can agroforestry without land reform be everything it pitches itself to be?

mulberries from the summer

The history of agriculture in the US is one place to see how property regimes dictate specific results. Before European settlement, Indigenous groups in the eastern parts of Turtle Island participated in what some scholars call landscape-level agroforestry, tending woodlands for chestnuts, hickories, pawpaws, maple syrup, wild game, and countless other food crops and medicinals. They also managed open, fertile floodplains as planting grounds for annual crops in complex planting rotations and patterns. Waterways and the abundance they hold played a significant role, too. A defining feature of this system was kincentric tenure relations, where communities of people managed whole watersheds together while reaping abundant harvests for the collective. The binary between forest and farm I grew up knowing probably wasn’t very relevant. 

When European settlers arrived on the eastern coast, they brought property concepts that disrupted any cohesive land management. Instead, settlers converted land into a speculatable asset that individuals could use for their own wealth accumulation at the collective’s expense. Anchored in this system, settlers carved up the landscape into homesteads, estates, and plantations utilizing a style of agriculture that relied on clearcutting forests, enslaved labor, annual crops, and domesticated livestock.

Central to the conceptual origins of this property system was racial domination. Cheryl I. Harris’s foundational paper, Whiteness as Property, articulates the parallel impact of White supremacist identity formation in converting Black people into property while also extinguishing any property rights for Native Americans. The racialization of property continues today. Of particular relevance here, White people currently own 98 percent of all US farmland.

Agroforestry is a ripe place to engage with ideas of land ownership because a person planting trees is acting on an assumption, or a hope, that the tree will be there for many years. Depending on the species, maybe for hundreds of years. Planting a tree is a statement, an investment in a future that looks a particular way. With my research, I wanted to know what type of future farmers are imagining when they integrate trees into their land. Who is included in this future? When the USDA offers 60 million dollars, paying farmers to plant trees on farmland, whose future on land are they investing in?

The racialized status of farmland ownership today adds another dimension to the growing investment in agroforestry. As one of my interviewees from my summer fieldwork asked, “Who is this solution for?” 

Sophia Joffe Hampton (she/they) is a JD/MESc candidate at Vermont Law School and the Yale School for the Environment.

The Legacy of Scarcity: Soviet Food Practices and Attitudes Toward Waste | GFF '24

The Legacy of Scarcity: Soviet Food Practices and Attitudes Toward Waste

This post is part of Danya Blokh’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

The waitress at Ukrainian East Village Restaurant walked past our table several times over a span of ten minutes. She looked at our plates with evident discomfort. My pelmeni were all devoured, but my friend across from me had only half-eaten her borscht. Finally, the waitress approached our table.

“All done?”

My friend nodded, and the waitress shook her head in palpable disappointment.

“Really?”

When the waitress walked away with our plates, my friend asked, “what was that all about?” To me, the waitress’ reaction was perfectly predictable. It was what I dubbed Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, a condition I’d grown up witnessing at my own kitchen table. If I didn’t finish every last bite of my Russian mother’s potatoes or cabbage soup, it would cause her palpable concern. “Are you feeling alright?” she would ask. “You always used to like this dish.” My Ukrainian father intervened too, though more pedagogically: “you know, Danya, you should never waste food.” The leftovers were never thrown out. They were saved in the fridge for a day, two days, and then, eventually, I would walk into the kitchen to find my mom or dad finishing the scraps on my behalf.

Many immigrant diasporas in the US who experienced food insecurity in their home countries are thrifty in their treatment of food, retaining their old rituals of food preservation. Nonetheless, Post-Soviet Food Syndrome has always felt unique to me in its ethical charge. For my post-Soviet family members, throwing food away was not just financially irresponsible, but morally reprehensible, while saving food was not only a means of conserving resources but a moral obligation. My summer research project sought to uncover the underlying causes of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome through academic research accompanied by interviews with immigrants from the USSR.

In my research, I was able to isolate three primary causes of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome. The first, and least surprising, was the memory of food scarcity in the Soviet Union. Grocery stores in the USSR were characterized by unpredictability, frequent shortages, and long queues. One interviewee, who grew up in Moscow, explained that during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, foods like fish and oranges were unreliable, while under Gorbachev even staple items like bread, milk, and cheese were frequently missing. His experience was specific to Moscow, which was better supplied than other cities. An interviewee who grew up in Kharkiv said there was a single store in his hometown where, once a month, residents could purchase cheese. Another interviewee explained that the situation was worst in small towns, that, for instance, people from towns with sausage factories couldn’t buy sausages because they were all sent to Moscow.

This uncertainty regarding the availability of certain products led Soviet citizens to become extremely attentive to the sudden availability of otherwise rare products. Soviet women, who were typically tasked with acquiring food for their households, often carried an avos’ka, an elastic, infinitely expandable string shopping bag which could be used to stock up on any rare commodities they came across. The word avos’ka derives from avos’, or “what if,” as people who carried such a bag had a mindset of “what if I find such-and-such unlikely product?” One interviewee explained to me that so-called meshechniki (bag people) from the provinces would come into Moscow and spend the day going from store to store, collecting food to bring back home. The arrival of massive groups of shoppers into Moscow, coming on buses or trains with their avos’kas at hand to purchase kielbasa at grocery stores, were dubbed kal’basniy disand (kielbasa paratroopers). Soviet citizens also learned strategies to navigate the long queues outside stores. Mothers, for instance, would involve their children in grocery excursions. One interviewee remembered that her mother would leave her to hold a place in line at one store while she ran over to another shop next door. Another recalled bringing her kids to the store because they’d sometimes give her bigger portions. Other parents, recognizing this, would ask if they could borrow her kids when they walked through the line so they could also receive more food.

In summary, Soviet citizens developed a complex set of practices for acquiring food, practices which came to occupy much of their time and attention every day. These routines have remained embedded in the minds of post-Soviet citizens. A person who remembers waiting in line for several hours to buy a piece of meat will likely hesitate to discard some expired sausages in more fortuitous times, even four decades later.

Indeed, some Soviet emigres to other countries reported feeling uncomfortable with the sudden…

This thrifty and utilitarian approach to food intersected in a curious way with the second element of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, that of ideology. In her essay “Cold War in the Kitchen,” Susan E. Reid writes about the great degree to which the global conflict between the US and the USSR was waged in the domestic sphere. In the context of peaceful economic competition,’ Reid writes, “the kitchen and consumption had become a site for power plays on a world scale.” One paradigmatic example is the 1959 Kitchen Debate, a spontaneous discussion between Khrushchev and Nixon at a propagandistic US exhibition in Moscow showing a “typical American kitchen” in order to flaunt American prosperity and technology. Khrushchev’s comments during this debate—for instance, his critique of the unnecessary difficulty of American devices and the overabundance of items in the kitchen—reflect the USSR’s striving to define its proletarian ideology as frugal and rational, in contrast to the indulgent decadence of bourgeois Westerners. Reid writes that “intervention in the forms and practices of daily life was an essential aspect of the way the Khrushchev regime sought to maintain its authority and bring about the transition to communism. Everyday life—as the title of a brochure for agitators proclaimed—is not a private matter." Thus, Soviet citizens internalized an ideological prerogative to exercise caution and thrift in all aspects of their daily lives, including their treatment of food.

The admonition of wastefulness was accompanied by a glorification of labor. Children were taught that food production required labor, and that this labor made the food worthy of respect and admiration—a lesson which many Soviets learned firsthand through mandatory farm service. One interviewee told me, “the way I thought about it, if I built a fence and someone destroyed it, I would be unhappy. So if I expect respect toward my labor, I should respect others’ labor. Even if the person who made that bread never finds out that I threw it away, it’s still wrong to throw it away. I thought about how I would feel if I had made that bread.”

This conception of food and labor was passed down through official ideological channels, such as publications and brochures, as well as educational institutions. One interviewee recalled being forced to eat food in kindergarten. “They gave you bad food, mannaya kasha with clumps, eggs, really bad borscht. Kids didn’t want to eat it, but they forced you. The approach was, nothing should be left on your plate. If you didn’t finish, they would literally kick you out of the classroom. They would take my desk into the hallway and force me to finish it, even if I was gagging and crying.”

Yet the repugnance for waste was not only transmitted in schools, but also unofficially, in the domestic sphere. One interviewee remembered her grandmother, a generally kind and permissive person, becoming very disappointed if she didn’t finish her food. “I didn’t want to eat her soups but she would keep saying, just one little spoon, come on. Is it really so hard for you to finish your food?” Another interviewee explained, “if an adult caught a child throwing food away they would reprimand them and say, that’s labor, someone collected those grains and ground them, that’s all labor and so it’s bad to dispose of it. No one said, eat that bread because I paid fifteen cents for it. They said, eat that bread because it’s labor, it’s saintly, during the time of the war that bread would last someone a whole day.”

            This passing reference to the war underscores the third constituent element of Post Soviet Food Syndrome—inherited wartime trauma. The war had been a time of widespread famine in the Soviet Union. One interviewee’s mother, evacuated to Irkutsk, mostly got by on fried potato skins; another said his parents, who were evacuated to Uzbekistan, ate so many turnips that their stomachs became constantly stretched. Starvation was most acute in Leningrad, where over a million Soviets died during two years of siege by the Germans. Though none of my interviewees had directly experienced the blockade, many were familiar with the national mythos of the “blokadeniks” and their years of famine.Wartime horror stories about hunger abounded in the late Soviet decades, invoked for moral lessons regarding perseverance, self-sacrifice, and, often, food consumption. [insert a bit more here]

            Soviet attitudes toward food were shaped by these three conditions—food insecurity, Soviet ideology, and wartime trauma. What I call Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, however, refers specifically to the persistence of Soviet attitudes beyond the disappearance of these conditions. Like my parents, the Soviet immigrants I spoke to were middle class Americans with reliable access to food sources; most were long disenchanted with Soviet ideology; and few had surviving relatives who still remembered starvation during World War II. Yet the practices shaped by these conditions continued. One interviewee explained that he still used Soviet techniques for saving food, like adding water to oversalted food, or cooking herring in fish to make it less salty. Another continued to preserve the breadcrumbs left on his kitchen table after a meal, a habit passed down from his father. Additionally, several interviewees reported feeling lost and uncomfortable in American grocery stores, overwhelmed by the sudden multitude of options. One told me, “I realized that having less choices made things simpler.”

            As I mentioned earlier, the aversion to food waste is not a uniquely post-Soviet phenomenon; in fact, various people with no direct connection to the former Soviet sphere told me that their own families acted much like my own. Yet what strikes me as unique about the Post-Soviet Food Syndrome is the way its component parts influence and reinforce one another. It is possible that, without the mythology of wartime starvation, the Soviet ideology of frugality and moderation might not have carried the same moral weight; without the direct experience of food shortages, the war stories may have lost their relevance in popular consciousness; and so on. But I believe these three coexisting strands legitimized and strengthened one another. In my conversations with immigrants from the USSR, I not only noticed that these same three topics repeatedly come up, but that they frequently blended into one another. Interviewees quickly departed from relating their experience with food lines to telling me about their parents’ memories of war, or went on a tangent (usually laden with irony) about the ideology they were raised with. These three elements of the Post-Soviet Food Sydrome, though disparate, came together to reinforce the idea that food is sacred and should not be wasted for any reason. In the future, I would love to expand this project by researching other cultures and identifying the constituent elements of their approaches to food waste, thus setting the Post-Soviet case alongside other examples.

Note: the thumbnail photo was taken on the Yale Farm and is not an official contribution from Danya’s fellowship experience.

Contemplation: Rice, Vegetables, Tofu, Soup, Fruit | GFF '24

This post is part of Eli White’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

Rice

Daily memories of the monastery layer over each other in my mind; the patina of a single summer pale and thin in comparison to the lifetimes of the venerable monastics who live in Fo Guang Shan Monastery. Lately, I am thinking of the weight of a bowl of rice. The bowl, small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of a small hand. Before you really begin a meal at the monastery—and there are quite a few things you must do before you begin a meal at the monastery—you're meant to take your bowl of rice and chopsticks and eat three mindful bites. I remember thinking what I was told to contemplate with each bite. With the first, "I vow to practice all goodness." With the second, "I vow to eradicate all evil." And with the third "I vow to liberate all sentient beings." And the act of calling to mind such aspiration, as a genuine dedication of purpose, leaves a person changed. 

A standard meal at the monastery. Photo courtesy Fo Guang Shan. 

Maybe just a seed of disturbance against a selfish habit. Maybe a sprout of an open-minded heart. A rhythm of moving plates, bowls, and chopsticks; shaven heads, brown and black robes; something larger than yourself, of which you cannot be anything but wholly a complete part. Intertwined: history and tradition, Dharma and embodied practice. Food in the monastery—as, in truth, really *all* things in the monastery are—is not a route practice, a simple chore of living, but something that engages the mind, heart, soul, and body. All of it—the words and images of the hall, the people sitting with you, and the rice in your bowl—is a lesson. A lesson that is, in fact, compound and myriad hundreds, if not infinite, lessons. The dining hall is a classroom. 

During the 10 weeks I spent at Fo Guang Shan monastery in southern Taiwan this summer, I experienced more than a singular modality of living and engagement with Buddhism. A body in a space does not exist without dynamics of expectation, history, and limitation. I only took Refuges and Precepts to formally become a Buddhist 2 years ago. My proficiency with Mandarin is nothing to write home about. But the goal of this research was not to come back to you with an extensive ethnography that offered a concrete conclusion about what I think, or a highly technical analysis of the carbon inputs and outputs of the monastery that could quantify a carbon footprint. I am mostly only, if you can call me anything at all, a student. 

Photo courtesy Fo Guang Shan.

For a week in July, I had the tremendous opportunity to participate in a short-term monastic retreat. Rather than my normal schedule, which was fairly flexible outside of work hours and had me living with the other international volunteers, the retreat had me living in a smaller part of the monastery under the guidance and discipline of the monastics. I gave up my phone, which had been my lifeline in the previous weeks to everyone I love. I brought essentially no more than a towel and underclothes; they provided a uniform for the week. For the duration of that week, we slept in the dormitories of Tsung–Lin University, the monastery's school for both beginning monastics and lay people who want to seriously learn more about the Dharma. Tsung-Lin is like a heart or a brain of the bigger monastery, always filled with movement and enthusiasm for learning and practice. We went nowhere without the groups–we got up together to the sound of the bell, went to morning prayer, did chores together, ate together.

Receiving Alms Bowls, as part of ordination at the monastic retreat. Alms bowls are an incredible important object of the Buddhist monastic tradition, where monastics originally subsisted only off of begging. While Mahayana Buddhists generally no longer practice this, traditional alms-rounds are still practiced in many countries. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University. 

In the monastic environment, you spend a lot of time lining up—by assigned number—and walking together in two even lines. There is a certain art to moving around the monastery this way, in monastic robes. You have to follow the paths together, know how the collective is going to move, keep your body in flow with the pattern. Post-retreat, I took time to pause and watch as the long line of nuns and students from Tsung-Lin walked past after breakfast, their dark brown and black robes moving like the waves of a peaceful ocean. At retreat, we would line up in the courtyard and chant the name of Amitabha Buddha as we went together to lunch. From Tsung-Lin, you can see the golden-colored great standing Amitabha Buddha that face out towards the highway, bathed in the warm light of the sun. 

​Once everyone is seated in the dining hall, there is still more that happens before we eat. Two monastics strike the guiding bell and the wooden fish, the signals for mealtime. Then the lead chanter intones the offering verse, and collectively the community sings the prayer to offer the food available to all Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and sentient beings. Someone lights incense. Then, and only then, does everyone, seated in long rows of tables, begin to take in their rice and soup bowls and their vegetable plate. Everyone eats in silence–and not just silence of voice, but also as absolutely quiet of body that can be achieved. The discipline master for the retreat would call out the sound of chopsticks clattering against a bowl, or of a chair that was carelessly pushed backwards with a protesting screech. Everyone tries very hard. Mistakes are made, and pointed out, and corrected. 

​There is a correct way to do most things at the monastery. It is very possible to fail. There is a specific order to take in your bowls, and hold them, and put them back to request more. You shouldn't rest on the backrest of your chair at all. Your robes will slip down your shoulder, or drag in your congee, if you aren't very careful. Even if you are, you will still probably fall short of perfect, and someone will call you out on it. *Don't panic.* Be willing to accept the correction. Move on. Pay more attention and, eventually, it gets easier. You remember–three bites of rice to begin, three aspirations. Consider: rice as a teacher of etiquette. 

Tofu

Outside of the retreat, I worked this summer with the International Volunteers at Fo Guang Shan monastery, mostly serving food and cleaning in the Cloud-Dwelling Building (the main dining hall). The International Volunteers is a more fluid group, with some people coming and going and only staying for as little as a week, or less. Most days, my schedule was very easy–with my primary task being helping for second meals. After formal meals, we take the leftovers from various places and line them up in an efficient buffet outside the kitchens. People—monastics, volunteers, anyone with a busy schedule or who was serving for first breakfast/lunch/medicine meal– line up with their reusable containers and move efficiently through the line. 

​Before retreat, keeping up with the schedule of the monastery sometimes weighed on me. I had gotten upsetting news, which I couldn't do much about but wait, and I felt very far away from everyone and very lonely. I was grasping at moments where I could make myself meld into the flow of things, feel happy for where I was. Losing the will to go to morning prayer left me often dragging my feet all day; I didn't want to eat. 

​The dining hall is often also referred to as the hall of Five Contemplations in monastery, because of five phrases that are often displayed on the wall. These are as follows: 

1. Assess the amount of work involved, weigh up the origins of the food.

2. Reflect on one’s own moral conduct, perfect or not, take this offering.

3. Safeguard the mind against all errors, do not give rise to hatred or greed.

4. Regard this food as good medicine, so as to treat the weakened body.

5. In order to accomplish the Way, one deserves to accept this food.

​The monastery asks the individual, not without kindness, to be real and honest about their conduct. The point is always to move forward, do better. Food is a medicine that helps us do that. 

​There's always some kind of protein on your plate at the monastery, and it's most often tofu that's been cooked in one way or another. In its simplest form, it's maybe just tofu with a bit of sauce. It's usually the first thing I clear off my plate into my rice bowl, mixed up with the rice into bites. The exception to this is if it's dry and more sponge-like–then, I save at least one piece until after I eat the vegetables, to get as much juice and sauce off as possible. When eating in the dining hall, one wants to leave their plate as clean as possible, both for the people picking the plates up, and the people in the dish room. 

Preceptors of the monastic retreat walking to visit the Patriarch Shrine. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin University. 

Something I would later be told at retreat is this: you're only here for a short time. Are you focused on the short time, or on being here? Leading up to retreat, and after retreat, I felt a shift coming over me. Discipline, by which I am trying to say *living the kind of life you actually in principle want to live*, happens in the moment. In the breath, in the focus and attention to what's on your plate in front of you Today. 

​The prevalence of tofu in the monastery diet is, of course, because the monastery is vegetarian. The monastery restricts a number of other foods too—the kitchen uses no alliums. Between these restrictions, Fo Guang Shan is also building affinity and joy for vegetarianism with the volunteers who visit. When there were summer camps with kids, we even had soy-meat "chicken" nuggets.

Besides the highly-ritual, specific food environment of the dining hall on the monastery, Fo Guang Shan also had a number of cafes spread out, run by both monastics and lay people. Here they served vegetarian food also, in more casual settings. Sometimes you would even see monastics there for lunch. There’s a coexistence of things at Fo Guang Shan monastery. Old and new, traditions, austerity and joy, people. The name of the cafes are “Water-Drop teahouses,” which the founder of Fo Guang Shan, Venerable Master Hsing Yun, imagined as places for people to gather with feelings of generosity and community. The meaning is to “respond to a water drop of kindness by returning with a gushing spring.” These are places of rest for visitors, amidst all the movement and work. 

​All my life, I mostly thought of the motivations for discipline coming from an external place of fear, pressure, and pain. I had more success when I focused on joy: on what made me joyful, and how I could bring joy to others. 

Vegetables

​When eating a meal, there's a shared language of movement of plates and bowls that helps communicate needs, without creating noise. You can leave your vegetable plate, for example, for several moments until someone comes by to take something off for you. Once you bring in your plate, however, you are obligated to finish whatever is on it. At retreat especially, we were encouraged to accept all the food on our plate as offering. In absence of a good tofu sponge, it's best to reserve a sizable chunk of soft vegetables on your plate for the purpose of cleaning off sauces. 

​The system in the dining hall at the monastery centers around preventing food waste. This is, in part, the principle of wiping your plate as clean as you can—to accept everything, down to the last drop. It was offered for your benefit, that you might continue with the strength to do the most good for the world with your day. The food on your plate is not important simply because it is delicious. To ignore part of it, and simply discard it, would be to throw away something precious. In Fo Guang Shan, we talk about the four acts of giving: Give people confidence, give people joy, give people hope, give people ease. Generosity is talked about as being cultivated in all acts of life–to even walk to work in such a way that others are inspired. 

Dishwashing at Short-Term Monastic Retreat. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin University. 

​Waste creates problems. At the end of meals, the serving team works together to collect the plates and bowls as quickly as possible. Managing the waste—separating out any aluminum containers or paper napkins from fruit peels—is a task. Dealing with any leftover food would be a whole other task, of which there just simply isn't time for. There's more important things to get to. Then the food waste is heavy, and needs to be sorted and disposed of. Gratitude begets joy and ease. The venerable monastics would often tell me—the dining hall is a place of shared equality. There is merit built in the act of service, and merit built in the act of receiving. Finishing the food on our plates is part of building affinity with each other–a collective act of consciously valuing the resources we are provided with. 

​While working in the Cloud-Dwelling building, I occasionally helped in the mornings after breakfast with preparing fruit for lunch. I was working one day counting out grapes for to-go bags, and being very precise about trying to get 10 grapes, with an equal distribution of size, in each bag. This also meant that I was lagging behind, and slowing up the production line we had going. One of the Venerables who works in the dining hall grabbed my baggie to show me how she was doing it—less precise, much faster. She turned to me and said emphatically, "We race time!"

​There is a common perception, perhaps, that the Chan and meditative environment of the monastery lends itself to a slow environment. While the monastery was certainly less hectic than the general world environment for me in many ways, I was also startled by  the quick pace of life. People move around Fo Guang Shan with a certain dedicated energy of purpose. There is a low tolerance for waste here; food in the dining hall is not wasted, time is also not. I have actually several times heard wasting time is likened to breaking the precept against Killing, as “killing time” reduces the meaning of a life.  Sometimes it felt like we were rushing from task to task, behind schedule from the moment we woke up. This is not to say the monastery is not also a place that contains great stillness; the enormity of focused, collective stillness found in morning prayer or lunch mealtime offering verse touches the heart and the soul. But all things here are done with dedication and purpose, an aversion to waste. 

Ceremony during the Short-Term Monastic Retreat. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University.

Soup

​With every meal at the monastery, there is some kind of soup. In the morning, it might be warm soy milk or congee. At lunch or dinner, it often is some variety of (local and seasonal) vegetables in a lighter broth. There is a trick to leaving your plate as clean as possible—hot broth poured over the vegetable plate and rice bowl loosen oils, leaving behind something that can be finally wiped even cleaner by a saved piece of greens or tofu. In the morning, the serving team prepares teapots of hot water, which you can request by moving your emptied soup bowl slightly in front of the vegetable plate. 

​Early in the summer, when I was just working for the second lunch, I got assigned to serve soup. There's a fair amount of communication that soup serving requires—how much broth do you want, do you not like this?, how many scoops? just broth?—and the shape of the kitchen ladles felt unwieldy in my hands. People were often putting to-go containers in front of me that I was leaving messy. 

​The first time I helped with formal dinner service, a student from Tsung-Lin showed me how to hold the ladle differently, so the handle braced against my wrist as I moved down the long line of tables serving. Ladles became a source of comfortable familiarity; the tool fit nicely in my hand. The work of serving soup was a joy, even when tiring. Even still–formal meal service is weirdly terrifying. 

​Everything is on a rhythm of life that gives us limited time to do anything. At the dining hall, soup, rice, and vegetable dishes have to all be served in the time it takes to sing the offering verse. It's a matter of giving people ease, hoping that their meal is prepared with the equanimity of the entire environment. Even before ladling soup, we have to set out hundreds of chopsticks in long straight lines. The chopsticks are round and metal, and prone to rolling right off the table. 

​Peaceful is not a state of being that is stagnant. The mind will drift away from the tasks at hand, if we let it. We are so very often elsewhere from our work, boundless in our ability to be led along by our attention spans. We ought to care an awful lot, I think, about the rhythm of life we live within. All rhythms of life leave footsteps upon the earth; a singular want can leave jagged grooves. If I'm left with one thought from soup this summer, it's that the ingredients in the soup shifted over the course of the summer, and I didn't even know enough Mandarin to ask what everything was. 

​ Meals at the monastery are coordinated like something of a very specific dance. Everyone knows their parts, the music is set and specific, and the timing is a coordinated effort. Over the course of the summer, there were days where as many as a thousand people were sitting in that hall. For a big festival, especially Lunar New Year, the monastery feeds even more at once. Sometimes it was visiting volunteers, monastics, sometimes it was many kids for summer camp. The four teams divide the dining hall, and work together to efficiently feed everyone. I was often struck by how much slower I moved, and how lost I fumbled about. After the retreat, and getting to talk a little more with Tsung-Lin students, I thought a lot about the number of places people in that dining hall came from. All of us, floating around in some cosmic soup broth, ladled out in this bowl or the next only by chance. 

Preceptors setting the tables for Lunch at the retreat. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin university.

Fruit

​Every day there is fruit prepared to go with lunch. Local Taiwanese fruit was, simply put, a profound experience for me. Orange, sun-ripe; Mangoes, sweeter and softer than ice cream; Pineapple, soft and yellow-sweet all the way through the core; Lychee, full to their skins with sweet juice; Passionfruit, tangy and bright; Avocado, softer than butter. 

​Snacks were a larger part of life at the monastery than I expected. At the main shrine, we'd usually find ourselves invited to sit down after cleaning with a cup of juice and a packet of crackers in hand. At the dining hall, I almost couldn't make it out of a shift without, between the kitchen aunties and the monastics, my apron pockets bulging with various treats. Fruit, crackers, sticky rice dumplings. Juice boxes, electrolyte packets. Even at monastic retreat, there was a morning after chores they had us sit together for a tea-meditation. And outside of retreat, I was often in the reception center enjoying tea, prepared by myself or by friends. 

​The monastery was an environment of abundance, even as it was an environment of austerity. It was an enormous privilege to get to walk under the walkways shaded by bamboo, my stomach full of food and my tongue still remembering the delight of mango. Less felt like more. Every second, something to be grateful for. 

Great Compassion Shrine. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University. 

There are many ways to live a life, and many ways to live a life that is meaningful. In some ways many lives are lived in ways that are parallel to each other, interconnected, or crisscrossed in strange patterns. I wish I could share with you the morning I felt incredibly lonely and far away from home, and I walked up to the Shrine of Great Practice and ate a mango I had been given. I felt a great, energetic love and joy for life in my bones. My soul felt awake, a flock of swallows rising up, as in the soft evening sky at the monastery. 

View from the terrace outside Tsung-Lin’s dining hall of the standing Ambitabha Buddha that faces the highway, greeting visitors. Photo is my own. 

A Seat at the Table: A Year in Jordan | GFF '23

This post is part of Thalsa-Thiziri Mekaouche’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship.

Dealing With A Crisis

Things do not always go as planned. There are events, outside of our control, that can change our intended course of action. What is in our control however, is how we react to an unexpected change of circumstances.

What I had not planned when I carefully prepared my research agenda was that I would start my internship in Jordan on October 8th, one day after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th. I had prepared to step into a conflict that had been going on for decades but I had not prepared to encounter the ugly face of the most brutal warfare. During the first few weeks of conflict, I anxiously watched the news and deeply felt the distress of those surrounding me, Jordanians, Palestinians and Israelis alike. The research question that had brought me to Jordan in the first place, namely, whether lasting peace could be achieved through environmental cooperation, took a new dimension. Fortunately for me, the organization I worked for, EcoPeace Middle East, withstood the explosion of violence and I interned there from October to May.

EcoPeace Middle East is an environmental peace-building organization founded in 1994 by a group of pioneering Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists. Led by a trilateral leadership based in Amman (Jordan), Tel Aviv (Israel) and Ramallah (Palestine), it seeks to address the ecological collapse of the Jordan Valley, the transformation of the legendary ‘Mighty’ Jordan River into an open sewage and the increasing impacts of climate-driven water scarcity on people and non-humans. In the 2000s, in the context of the second intifada, it became obvious to the organization that transboundary environmental cooperation was not only necessary to reverse the dramatic destruction of their shared ecosystem, but that it could also build bridges between peoples divided by decades of conflict. In the last two decades, EcoPeace Middle East has developed a wide range of programmatic tools to bring about this vision. Throughout my stay, I became convinced that environmental peace-building offers an avenue for conflict resolution in the Middle East. This belief comes from my exchanges with Jordanian youth who explained to me that despite their anger, they consider that climate change threatens all life, regardless of borders. In that sense, they are ready to go beyond usual narratives on conflict to look for ways to build cooperation and understanding.

Environmental Peace-Building in Practice

Jordan EcoPark: Sustainable agroecosystem at the heart of the Jordan Valley

The Jordan EcoPark is one of EcoPeace’s greatest achievements and an illustration of how the organization innovates to rehabilitate ecosystems while offering opportunities for local development through green tourism and sustainable agriculture. In coordination with the Jordan Valley Authority, EcoPeace transformed the northwest hills of Jordan into a tree-filled, ecologically diverse habitat covering 22 hectares of land. The EcoPark allows residents and tourists to access the local biodiversity in a sustainable manner through eco-facilities such as wooden eco-cabins, kitchens and toilets supplied by water obtained from green filter water treatment and the recycling of gray water and solar-powered appliances.

Jordan EcoPark Visitor Center

Green filter water treatment plant at the EcoPark

 Spread across the EcoPark are areas called “learning stations”, which educate visitors on water conservation, organic farming and climate change among other topics.

The two pictures above are the learning stations at the EcoPark. Each poster focuses on an environment-related theme

I went to the Jordan EcoPark twice throughout my stay, which gave me the opportunity to see for myself how agroecosystems and water regeneration offered solutions to some of Jordan’s greatest challenges – water scarcity and the erosion of soils caused by unsustainable farming practices.

Another aspect of the EcoPark that I truly enjoyed was how it put forward the rich Jordanian cuisine. I was lucky that  local chefs, all of them born in the Jordan Valley, took me along the way when they went foraging for the local khobeizah (little mallow), a wild green plant that is widely consumed in the form of chopped salads or as stuffing in pillowy bread and pitas.

Khobeizah at the EcoPark

Climate Diplomacy Training

Among its numerous programs, EcoPeace Middle East developed a Climate Diplomacy training for university students and young professionals. Participants are invited to a first training in their respective countries (Israel, Jordan and Palestine) and those who demonstrate the greatest leadership potential receive higher level training and meet their Jordanian, Palestinian and/or Israeli peers at a regional gathering in the Jordan EcoPark (or in a third country depending on security concerns). I contributed to the development of training materials and delivered a module on the role of international agreements in climate action. These workshops were an opportunity to interact with Jordanian youth and understand their aspirations in the context of a devastating war in neighboring Israel and Palestine. Some of my dearest memories of Jordan are when, at the end of a long workshop day, rich in debates and learning, we would sit under cypresses and eat together ouzi (seasoned rice mixed with peas, onions, and carrots topped with crunchy nuts and aromatic ground beef) or makloubeh (upside-down rice casserole with meat and vegetables), finished off with knafeh (akawi melting cheese topped with shredded filo dough crust and sweetened by flavored syrup and crunchy nuts). When you say the word ‘knafeh’ in Jordan (or in Egypt, or in Palestine, or in Lebanon where some version of this dessert also exists), eyes light up and smiles bloom on people’s faces. Everyone associates knafeh with celebration and sharing.

Knafeh shared at the EcoPark during the Climate Diplomacy training

Knafeh comes in large circular platters, and is divided among guests.

Habiba’s sweets shop, Amman’s institution for knafeh.

School Feeding Programme

While October 7th marked a clear escalation of violence in the region, Jordan has been absorbing the consequences of various conflicts in the Middle East for decades. The country has the second-highest share of refugees per capita in the world. It hosts over 700,000 refugees (for a population of about 11.5 million people), mostly from Syria and has seen its population double in the last two decades. This has put a strain on Jordan’s ability to meet its population needs, including nutritional needs.

During my internship, I took the initiative to assess the state of Jordan’s school feeding system and helped EcoPeace write a proposal for a pilot project on environmentally-sound school feeding in the Jordan Valley. When it comes to fruition, this pilot project will contribute to improving education outcomes for children in one of Jordan’s poorest regions, while also improving the perception of EcoPeace by locals. In fact, one of the greatest challenges faced during my year-long experience in Jordan was the boycott movement against the organization, which denied that transboundary cooperation with Israel was a red line. In multiple instances during my internship, EcoPeace had to adapt or cancel its activities to avoid confrontation with the boycott movement.

This only strengthened my will to advocate for environmental peace-building as a way to focus on what unites us.

Li Amman

When I think of my internship experience in Jordan, I hear Feiruz’ song resonate in my head Li Beirut, which means ‘My Beirut’. In spite of the conflict, or perhaps because of it, Amman and its people, have grown to be very special for me, to the extent that I would attempt to sing Li Amman had I had the talent of the Lebanese legendary singer. While waiting for the sudden ability to sing beautifully, I can at least write this post and conclude on these two last thoughts. First, I have grounds to believe that environmental peace-building can be successful. What is more important now is to develop a clear understanding of the conditions that favor successful outcomes in environmental peace-building and to gather more granular data on similar work elsewhere in the world.

Second, I want to thank everyone I met in Jordan, as well as my EcoPeace Israeli and Palestinian colleagues whom I met via zoom. I have not dwelled on what they taught me, the tough moments we lived through together and the joyful ones too. I also remember spending Eid-al-Fitr among Jordanian friends, learning how to make msakhen (roast chicken, heavily scented with sumac and and a few other warm spices and served with caramelized onion flatbread) and maamouls (shortbread sweets made for the end of Ramadan). Through food, I connected intimately with the people I grew to respect and love there. To all those who read this post, I wish you peace and joy, hoping that better days will come.

At the time of writing, EcoPeace has been nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize and supports humanitarian action in Gaza, while also continuing its programmatic activities on environmental peace-building.

Acknowledgments:

I want to thank EcoPeace Middle East for this unique experience which contributed greatly to my understanding of the region.

This internship would not have been possible without the support of the Global Food Fellowship, the Henry Hart Rice Fellowship and the Libby Rouse and Ganzfried Fellowships. Beyond financing this experience in Jordan, the various people in charge of these fellowships helped me monitor the security situation throughout my stay and provided me with a platform for sharing what I learned. If you would like to learn more about EcoPeace as a case study for environmental peace-building, you can check out this paper, which I wrote with the Jordanian Director of EcoPeace Middle East: From an Inflammable Region to A Resilient Land of Opportunities – A Case Study of EcoPeace Middle East's Approach to Conflict and Environmental Action (here).

Digital Village: Exploring Food and Change in the Mountain Villages of Azerbaijan | GFF '24

This post is part of Stephan Sveshnikov’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

I wrote the initial draft of this post in Khinaliq, a small Caucasian village in Azerbaijan, just south of the Russian border. The entire medieval village, built of stone and perched on a steep hilltop, is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, partly due to the significance of the long transhumance route that runs through the surrounding mountains: thousand-year old footpaths along which men herd sheep and goats on seasonal migrations that last hundreds of miles. In the courtyards of low stone houses, bricks of cow dung and straw were drying to be used as fuel for the winter. A group of renegade goats roamed the streets, and in one paddock a calf was trying hard to eat the flower off a thistle. As a local brochure explained, the “main activity of the Khinalig community is sheep and cattle breeding.” This fact remained unchanged even now, in 2024, despite an asphalt road connecting the village to the regional center of Quba and, perhaps one of the biggest changes of all, high speed internet access (as of 2022).  

The fog had rolled in and thunderstorms were blowing through the mountains, so I put on a yellow parka against the chill and wrote at the guesthouse, looking out the window at a flock of geese that made its way from house to house along the rutted dirt road, eating the tastiest grasses from each yard before moving on with much babble. They had no concern for the rain. In the evening, around 7 o’Clock, the distant lowing of cows signaled the end of daylight. They came down from the mountains, and headed back to their respective homes in small groups. Everyone went out to milk (most of it would be made into cheese). Then we gathered around the table for dinner. On the TV, which had been on all day, the children scrolled through YouTube shorts.  

I did not speak the language of Zaur and his family. It is a Caucasian language (classified as “severely endangered” by UNESCO) native only to this village and one that neighbors it. To communicate, we spoke to each other in short, clipped, sentences through Google Translate.

When dinner was over and the tea had been poured, I asked, through the app: “How has internet changed life in Khinaliq? Is it good, or are there things about it you don’t like?” 

***

I had come to Azerbaijan because I wanted to know how life in remote mountain villages was changing because of the internet. For some time, my friends and I had been coming across YouTube videos that showed villagers cooking in the scenic Caucasus mountains. The videos were usually over an hour long and had titles like “Life and Cooking of the Mountain Village Hermit Family! Traditional Cuisine Far from Civilization” or “Rustic Recipes using Local Products! Life in the Villages.” On screen, weathered villagers milked sheep and cows, made cheese, grilled meat, and baked bread from scratch. Usually all was silent except for the sound of farm animals and the crackling of wood on the fire or water pouring from a pitcher. Most of the videos ran over an hour. I started to get more curious about who was behind the camera, and when I looked into it, I realized that many of the most popular videos were filmed in Azerbaijan.

 So what was this? A form of digital tourism? A way to keep village life afloat in the twenty-first century? Documentary footage? Was it staged? Was it authentic (and what would that mean)? Who in the village benefited?

 After several attempts to get in touch, I finally heard back from a channel called “Sweet Village.” They agreed to an interview, and even promised to take me into the field to watch how they filmed. We agreed that I would stop by their office on Monday, the day after I landed. Thus my first stop in Azerbaijan was at the quiet and well-lit headquarters of SOS Media. Inside, young social media, film, and analytics experts were hard at work editing footage and planning their next trip into the mountains.

I knew very little walking into the office. My contact at the SOS Media, Tukyaz Taliyeva (job title: Project Manager), had told me that her company was responsible for three of the YouTube channels I was interested in. In an interview with Tukyaz and the Executive Director, Lyubov Gladysheva, I learned that this family-owned company had nearly 100 employees. There was a filming schedule, there were script writers, editors, and other experts. Their main target audience was in the United States (since YouTube pays creators based on ad revenue, and ads are the most expensive in the U.S., that is the most lucrative market). Later in the week we would head to the Qəbələ region, where most of their footage was shot, and I would meet the family behind “Sweet Village,” who were relatives of the man who had started the parent channel and the most iconic of them all (almost 6 million subscribers), Wilderness Cooking.

 The road from Baku to Qəbələ climbs out of the desert plains near the Caspian Sea into the green Caucasian Mountains, winding along silty, shallow rivers. By the time you reach the outskirts of Baku, there are herds of cows, goats, and sheep grazing on the roadside. Qəbələ itself is a prosperous market and tourist town. A few tourists come here, mostly from the Arab countries and India, to enjoy hiking, fresh food, mountain views, and waterfalls. It made sense that someone would have come up with the idea to film in this place: it’s a relatively small step from agro-tourism to digital agro-tourism.

 The “Sweet Village” family lived (in their whitewashed stone summer home) on the slopes of the mountains outside Qəbələ, in a small village called Qəmərvan. On the porch, Shamsi, the grandmother and one of the YouTube stars, served me scalding hot tea and the little fried triangles of flaky dough and walnuts called “pakhlava.” The crew set up for filming -- a scene in which Malik (the grandfather’s) and Shamsi’s daughter, Günay, would bake a raspberry pie. One of the younger men — evidently a relative, was getting ready to film on an iPhone. His dream was to direct movies in America — he was interested in the indie movie scene. I told him he might never have as large of an audience there as he has now, on YouTube (736K subscribers on the Sweet Village channel).

Once the filming got going, it went about the way any cooking show would. Lots of stopping and starting. Snatches of soft conversation between cut and action. After about ten minutes, Malik (who was not being filmed that day) got bored. “Do you want to go up into the mountains?” he asked me. Of course I did.

High above the village, Malik recited the poetry of Lermontov and we talked about the seasonal migration of animals from the summer mountain meadows to winter grazing grounds down in the valley. In his younger days he had spent many nights with the sheep up in the mountains. Even now, in his late seventies, he walked fully upright, straight up the mountain slopes, without pausing for breath.

 “Isn’t it strange, I said at one point, “that so many people here want to go to America -- but in America, so many people watch your channel and wish they were here?”

Malik’s face was impassive. “It’s normal,” he said. “Take these mountains, for instance. To you they’re breathtaking, because you’re seeing them for the first time. To me, they’re ordinary. It’s like that.”

 When I had asked Lyubov Gladysheva, the Executive Director at SOS Media, about why people loved these videos so much, she said simply, “people are more or less alike.” In other words, everyone loves to watch the process of cooking good food, and to relax by enjoying beautiful scenery.

As far as I could tell, Malik and Shamsi’s lives had not changed much since they became YouTube stars. To them it was an unremarkable thing. Life for them still centered around their grandchildren, around their livestock, and around the seasonal migration from their village home in the summer down into the valley in the winter.  

***

Back in Khinaliq, heavy rains had washed out the bridge, and I had to take a more mountainous road back to Baku. Morning found me at the general store. Outside, a saddled horse was tied to a telephone pole. Its owner, a shepherd, was inside, stocking up on food before heading back up into the mountains. In the courtyard across the road, Yusif Askerov Bagiroglu, the assistant director of the historical museum, was enjoying the morning sun. He was old enough to remember the summer when professors from Moscow State University traveled out to Khinaliq to document the language and create an alphabet. I asked him, in Russian, about Khinaliq’s future. What would the village look like one hundred years from now?

Yusif shook his head at the question. “One hundred years I cannot say. It is not given to us to see that far. But I can tell you that in twenty years there will be no more livestock raising. Tourism will develop. This process has already begun.” There were already plans for a hotel and a restaurant. The jobs of the future would be in the service industry.
“And how do you feel about this?” I asked.
“How? Well how…this is progress. It is inevitable —” he looked at me searchingly — “isn’t it?”

 A couple of days prior, Zaur, my host, had answered my question about the internet without hesitation, shaking his head. “The internet is good!” he said. Then he grabbed the TV remote and turned on a black-and-white 1937 film showing Khinaliq in the era of Soviet Collectivization. The road had not yet been built, and electricity was just being set up. There was no television. The oldest man in the village could remember the days of the Russian Empire. Wheat was threshed by hand and water had to be carried every day from wells. We watched in silence, and then the film ended and dinner was over.

I still don’t know what Zaur was trying to say by showing me that film. It was as if he was saying, “is this what you want? To see the village as it was before the internet?” Or maybe he wanted to say: “The internet is good. It allows me to show you how life was before, which is what you want to see. Here it is.” In any case, it was easier to show me than it was to explain anything through the translation app. 

So, what can I say about village life in the Caucasus? Nothing here stands still. On the slopes of one of the mountains outside Khinaliq, I saw a shepherd silhouetted against the sky, head bent over his phone. Young people film their grandparents and post on YouTube. No one uses the old tools, which are relegated to local museums. TV, internet, cars, electric lighting -- it’s all here. So is the plastic garbage clogging the ditches. Some of the problems are very old, and they are different from the problems most of us (at least in New Haven, Connecticut) will encounter in our lives: how to cut enough hay for the winter, how to tell your own sheep apart from your neighbor’s, how to wean a calf from its mother. Some of the problems are new. But in the end it is hard for me to say what role the internet plays. The internet may accelerate some of the processes of change, and retard others. But it does not have much power on its own. The internet will bring tourists to Khinaliq, but only if the government repairs the washed out road. The internet allowed one family in Qəmərvan to create a thriving media company, but most of those new jobs are in the city. Maybe the most crucial thing that access to the internet does is change the lives of children, both by altering the way they spend their free time, and by making them realize very early on that the centers of culture are urban. But on this trip I did not ask about children. 

 One of the newest videos on the “Sweet Village” channel is titled “How Azerbaijani Family Lives in 21st Century? Cooking KFC Fried Chicken Far from Civilization.” The chicken (probably not from the village) is breaded by hand and then fried in cast iron cauldrons over a wood fire. The caption to the video reads:

Life in our azerbaijani home is simple, but full of warmth. Today, my family and i made homemade chicken nuggets using fresh ingredients from our garden. We cooked and laughed together, sharing stories as we prepared the meal. Living in the 21st century has its challenges, but these moments remind us of what truly matters❤️

There is a reason, of course, that these quiet meditations on food preparation are so popular, and this caption captures the crux of it fairly well. If there is anything universal about humans, it is that they like to prepare good food together, tell stories and laugh, and feel warm at heart. Sometimes we are almost embarrassed to say it out loud, because it sounds too simple. And the truth is that many of the people around the world who watch these videos are enthralled because they see something that they want to replicate in their own life. In that way, the YouTube channel “Sweet Village” is as much about the people who watch it as it is about Azerbaijan.

______________________________

Stephan Sveshnikov is a PhD student in the Yale History Department whose research focuses on agriculture and village life in Russia and Eastern Europe. You can read more about his travels in Azerbaijan and elsewhere on his Substack.

Sustainable (Fine) Dining | GFF '23

This post is part of Mao Shiotsu’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from September 2023 here.

Guiding question: How can the fine dining industry best promote food sustainability?

This summer, I wanted to explore how food, and more specifically dining culture, exists in Japan. I had just come out of a year studying cuisine in France, where I began to think about the significant differences between its cuisine and that of my home country. People’s relation to food in Japan seemed uniquely distinct from what I had seen that year, and from my childhood in Southern Europe. The Japanese thought on food, and thus cuisine, appeared inextricably linked to the preservation of nature. I was curious about these differences, especially at the level of fine dining, and wanted to understand how the criteria of “good food” differs. 

This, I thought, may provide hints for how environmental sustainability could fully establish itself as a globally important criterion in fine dining. The past years have seen an energetic movement towards sustainable dining, with the emergence of farm-to-table restaurants and with fine dining shifting towards something lighter, fresher, and local. I was curious to explore how this idea has existed naturally in Japan for centuries. As a Japanese person, I hoped to accurately portray the “heart” of Japanese people regarding food, which is inseparable from native nuances and sensitivities. This knowledge, I believed, could add an illuminating angle to the current movement. 

I talked to chefs, learned about farming from locals, and explored food markets to grasp the essence of Japan’s relation with food deeply enough to be able to explain it to people from foreign cultures. I explored various levels of food, from neighborhood vegetable patches to large supermarkets, and from home cooking to fine dining. I wrote an article for The Japan Times (a Japan-based, English newspaper) from what I learned this summer, on the topic of Japanese fine dining and how it diverges and converges with that of other cuisines.

One way in which I want to continue this project is by compiling recipes of Kyōdo Ryōri, regional Japanese cuisines using local ingredients. These cuisines are rapidly dying, as more people move to large cities and local food production decreases. During my visit to Wakuden no Mori, I got chatting with a local at a cafe, who told me about the Kyōdo Ryōri there— a type of chirashi sushi using canned mackerel. I would like to record such recipes, and create an anthropological recipe collection with stories of the ordinary home cooks, illustrating what sort of space the dishes have occupied in their lives. 

Fine Dining (Kyoto)

A well-respected name with over 150 years of history, Wakuden originally began as a Ryokan (Japanese inn) before opening two Japanese restaurants, Kōdaiji Wakuden and Muromachi Wakuden, which today hold two and one Michelin stars, respectively, and the Green Michelin star for sustainability. 

I had the chance to speak with Head Chef Daisuke Ogawa of Muromachi Wakuden about his values in cooking.

Bonito tataki with an unpictured side of ponzu. (Muromachi Wakuden) 

This visually understated, yet exquisitely perfected dish seemed to me to encapsulate what I was trying to comprehend. 

“What is important in your cooking?”

For Chef Ogawa, the customer’s kimochi (feeling) and the presentation of nature itself in the plates are core pillars of his cooking. Ingredient quality, therefore, is crucial. I went to see Wakuden no Mori in Northern Kyoto, a vast landscape of rebuilt forest where seasonal vegetables and spices for the restaurant are grown. Wakuden’s rice paddies also lie closeby. Restaurant staff help with planting the rice plants at the beginning of the season. 

A wide, wide hill of mulberry plants.

A photo of me taken by the kind lady who showed me around.

Sansho grown here is used to spice this dish of Wagyu in dashi.

Dishes are finished in front of diners at the counter bar.

Please refer to the Japan Times article  for the full piece on this topic.

Farm to table (Nara)

I went to Takatori City in the Nara Countryside to see the small restaurant run by the Yoshinaga couple, serving elevated Japanese household dishes using fresh ingredients. What I discovered there was a natural ecosystem of farm to table. Most households seemed to grow their own vegetables in the backyard, and share them with neighbors and the restaurant. 

Chef Yoshinaga let me help in the kitchen for dinner service. Neighbors had given him fresh vegetables harvested in the morning, with which he whipped up a new dish for that night. 

He also kindly fed me a delicious bowl of eel and egg on rice.

Supermarkets have sections for vegetables locally harvested that morning, labeled with the farmers’ names.

The Yoshinagas’ vegetable farm.

The freshest of vegetables seemed to be abundantly accessible there, naturally creating a farm to table ecosystem. Chef Yoshinaga recounted an interesting lesson someone had once taught him:  “Always boil water before setting out to harvest edamame, to eat the freshest possible.” I don’t actually know the true flavor of edamame, I realized. And I wasn’t even aware that I didn’t know it. 

A restaurant menu idea occurred to me from this story: An edamame bean where each seed is of varying levels of freshness. One is prepared right after harvesting, one after five hours, and one after a day. This could portray what “freshness” is to the modern diner.

One morning, I had the chance to see the production of Umeboshi (pickled Japanese plums). 

The plums, which had been preserved in salt for around a month, were ready to be dried in the sun. 

Chef Yoshinaga explained the timeline of the Japanese plum, from harvesting in late May to June, to the final preservation method. 

It is an age-old routine that truly respects the seasons.

Many households conserved their farm-grown onions by hanging them like this.

A local family kindly showed me their vegetable farm, and gave me these beautiful organic vegetables. 

With the basil they gave me, I made pesto for the kind family.

La Collina (Shiga)

La Collina is the brainchild of Taneya, one of Japan’s biggest sweets companies. It is a dessert store unlike any other— a few shops lie dotted around an enormous green landscape, through which the customers wander, enjoying delicious treats on the way.

The project was borne out of Taneya’s leader’s desire to give back to his native Omi Hachiman City. Ingredients for the sweets are produced here, and on my visit, I saw many people working in the greenery— La Collina  is also a forest-rebuilding project, and thus its final completion is in fact decades into the future.

Their famous Baumkuchen is made on-site, with large windows customers can look through. 

Food Markets (Various cities)

One thing I noticed once I started to think about this topic is that local food markets, or shōtengai, are still common in Japan.  Although they are decreasing rapidly in number, compared to other countries I have lived in, there seems to be a sizable population who continue  to buy produce from individual shops— fruits and vegetables from greengrocers, meat from butchers, and fish from fishmongers. 

Ladies shopping for ready-made side dishes in a Hiroshima shōtengai. 

A Kanazawa fish market (The worker kindly permitted me to take a photograph).

Kuromon Ichiba, a famous market in Osaka where Chef Yoshinaga used to get ingredients for his previous Osaka restaurant.

Fish and Nori (seaweed) stores at Sembayashi Shōtengai, another well-known Osaka market.

This year has been challenging for Nori businesses, as the change in the ocean environment has led to significantly decreased amounts of seaweed.

Nishiki Market in Kyoto is among the most famous of Japanese shōtengai, with a huge variety of shops, for instance,  otsukemon (pickled vegetables) and fresh fish stores. Nowadays, though, the market seems to see more tourists than locals. 

A fish restaurant at Nishiki market.

Nishiki fish store.

A Nishiki cook busily prepares dish after dish.

A fishing auction in Northern Kyoto.

Anchialine Pools in Hawaiʻi | GFF '23

This post is part of Grace Cajski’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship.

As an English and Environmental Studies major, I know environmental writing does two important things. Firstly, it creates a record of how humans have interacted with the environment in the past; how they have treated it; how they have conceived of their role in it. Thoreau's Walden, for example. But literature also shapes the way we interact with the external world. It catalyzes action; it proposes new modes of existing within nature; it redefines things. I think of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. 

Anchialine pools in Hawaiʻi Island could benefit from both these aspects. The pools are taken care of by a community whose work, knowledge, and values I find admirable—people we could learn from. And yet, so few people know of these ecosystems, even though they are case studies of the danger of invasive species, human encroachment, groundwater overuse, sedimentation, and so on. A piece of environmental writing about anchialine pools could celebrate the caretakers, record their knowledge and inspire action by bringing the pools into public awareness. 

When I was researching fishponds in Hawaiʻi two summers ago, I learned what anchialine pools are; I even saw some. They are bodies of water that sometimes look like unassuming puddles, but are actually brackish, connected underground to both freshwater and seawater. They are dynamic and resilient ecosystems, culturally and ecologically important (small shrimp native to the pools were often used as bait). They are home to some of the rarest marine species on earth. They provide habitat to endangered damselflies. 

A project to write about anchialine pools for a broad audience that isn’t yet aware of them would be a fitting capstone to my undergraduate studies, I thought: so this is my yearlong senior thesis for Environmental Studies, advised by Alan Burdick. 

I spent three weeks this summer on Hawaiʻi Island. I interviewed caretakers and other stakeholders. I joined the Division of Aquatic Resources for fieldwork. I researched and read. I worked with the Hui Loko, a group of anchialine pool and fishpond caretakers, to produce a StoryMap; now I’m writing the story itself. 

It has been an inspiring, educational, and fun project—one more glimpse into how coastal communities can and are feeding themselves in a changing world. Thank you to the Yale Sustainable Food Program, a community I cherish.  

This project was also funded by the Franke Program, the Yale Law School Law, Ethics, and Animals Program, and the Yale Center for International and Professional Experience.

Explore more through Grace’s ArcGIS Storymap here.

Meals as Sites of Poetic Imagination | GFF '23

This post is part of Kavya Jain’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from October 2023 here.

I spent the summer in New Mexico and New Haven, digging through artist and literary archives and interviewing artists, poets, farmers, and cooks. My research question was about the possibilities of meals as sites of poetic and political imagination, and I studied both artist sociality and the artistic nature of food processes. Functionally, I asked, where did food lie in the creative processes of art makers? 

My project emerged from discovering a relationship between painter Georgia O’Keeffe and poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, both artists in rural New Mexico. Berssenbrugge lives and writes in Abiquiu where she also worked for O’Keeffe, spending weekends at her home sharing meals. My project stemmed from my curiosity about those meals, their contents, and their relations to each artist’s production but specifically poetics. 

In New Mexico, I worked in the Georgia O’Keeffe Archives, reading through O’Keeffe’s cookbooks and understanding her relationship to food. Many are interested in O’Keeffe’s specific domestic order with its custom furniture and features, calling her home her biggest piece of art. She hired staff to cook, garden, and held an interest in nutrition, eating simply, seasonally and peculiarly for her time. Though O’Keeffe has the reputation of being a “maker” she really was just a person with strong preferences, aesthetic sensibility and the ability to pay staff to execute her visions, culinary and otherwise. What were the labor politics of this? 

Meanwhile, in conversation with Bersenbrugge and her literary archives in the Beinecke, food was not discussed as part of the creative process but an inhibitor to it. Berssenbrugge’s papers revealed an incompatibility between writing and food. Her conflicted relationship prevented her from her actual work: poetry. Speaking with Berssenbrugge, I considered her generational and gendered context as a woman tied to the second generation New York School. Perhaps to be taken seriously as a woman writer demanded that one disavow domesticity and prevent a victory of “life” over work. Misogyny dictated the relationship between artistic and domestic labor for many women and perhaps made it difficult for some to see the kitchen as a site of art, transcendence and intellectual rigor.

I then interviewed two creatives from a younger generation, working in both food and art, and organizing experimental gatherings centering both. One was poet and farmer Mallika Singh in Albuquerque and the other, artist and homemaker Tsohil Bhatia from the Red Flower Collective in New York, a food research and eating collective that hosts communal meals in borrowed kitchens. Interested in communal and social art practice, food was central to their conceptions of study, collaboration and politics. 

At the end of all these conversations amidst mesas and over green chile and hours in Beinecke boxes, I tried to situate myself. What conditions enabled me, also a woman and a writer, to see meals as a site of “poetic imagination”, a term I use by way of Robin D. G. Kelley. Kelley likens great poetry to radical politics, naming poetry the effort to see the future in the present and imagine a new society. I came to this project invested in a meal’s ability to do the same, evoking hope, desire and dreams of a more satisfying future. I leave with larger questions about where this orientation itself comes from and who is allowed it. I wonder now, where does poetry come from? Eileen Myles says we write poems from our “metabolism.” Zadie Smith says there is no great difference between writing novels and making banana bread, they are both just things to do. Regardless, food enriches this inquiry. 

We Are What We (Can) Eat? - Exploring Local and Cultural Foodways in Greater New Haven | GFF '23

This post is part of PwintPhyu Nandar’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship.

As I write this, I’m sitting at home in Richmond, California, with my maternal grandmother, who is visiting form Myanmar (Burma). We had spent this morning soaking ocean snails, along with two varieties of seaweed. A few moments ago, we were cleaning the snails to prepare them for tomorrow’s salad. While at home with my grandmother, I’ve helped her pick limes and pea eggplants growing in the front yard. In the back garden, I helped my mom trim back pennywort so it would grow back stronger in its recycling bin home.

Pennywort (above) and pea eggplants (below) from my family’s garden.

These moments are just a few that inspired me to ask how people access their cultural foods in urbanized areas. When I moved away from home to Los Angeles, there were ethnic markets abound, but not ones that carried my favorite vegetable or the correct brand of vermicelli noodles, and especially not ones that were within a few minutes’ drive instead of an hour. In New Haven, I was surprised to live close to Korean, Mexican, and Chinese grocery stores, but unsurprised to see a diverse customer base frequenting them. These experiences helped me formulate my two main questions, serving as the basis of my master’s thesis: (1) what cultural foodways exist in an urban area, specifically Greater New Haven, Connecticut, and (2) how individuals navigate these foodways.

To answer these questions I collected surveys, but most exciting to me, I also asked Greater New Haven residents to take me with them as they make their cultural meal. As such, I’ve visited ethnic markets in the area, such as Indian Farmers Market in Orange, International Market in Bridgeport, G Mart in Milford, and Key Foods (formerly C-Town Town) in Fairhaven. I’ve also visited markets that may seem like they don’t provide cultural foods but do in fact have the necessary ingredients for a cultural meal. These include mainline grocery stores, such as various Stop & Shops, ShopRites, and Aldis, but also organic food stores, such as Edgewood Market in Edgewood (where else, of course?), and Thyme & Season in Hamden. Residents I cooked with showed me their gardens or told me of their families’ garden. When I’m volunteering at the food bank, farmer’s markets, or at an urban farm, fellow volunteers will talk to me about how they share their cultural ingredients and meals with their friends or family.

View of International Farmers Market in Bridgeport from the parking lot.

In this section of International Farmers Market, you can choose the fish you want to buy. My research participant told me to look for fresh fish with round eyes, as opposed to fish with flat eyes.

I’ve also had many a conversation with fellow volunteers and my research participants about how they find themselves at Chinese or Asian grocery stores despite not being Chinese or Asian themselves. I want to make note of these conversations, because it reflects my observations at ethnic markets across Greater New Haven. Whether they may or may not be labeled as catering to a specific population (Indian Farmers Market for example), I’ve noticed these markets serve a diverse clientele, as I and the residents I go with to these stores may not necessarily belong to the population the market supposedly caters to. I’ve gone to the Indian Farmers Market with a Pakistani family. Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for example, are all large continents with a variety of different cultures. So, it’s only fair to say that ethnic markets do not serve monolithic populations, but rather diverse cultures from within the same continent, and across multiple continents. I’ve gone to G-Mart, an Asian market, with a Korean resident, as well as with a Chinese-Vietnamese resident with their Puerto Rican partner. Unsurprisingly, the cultural foodways in Greater New Haven are just as diverse as those who call this metropolitan area their home.

To be literal about my second question regarding how individuals navigate their foodways, there are a variety of ways for Greater New Haven residents to get to their cultural foods and back—driving, biking, taking the bus, or even walking. What I’ve found most important to this navigation and what surprised me the most was access to knowledge. Access to cultural food and access to knowledge are inextricably intertwined. One must know where to go to gather their ingredients (or sometimes who to go to), but more importantly, one must know what ingredients are needed and what to do with them once home from the grocery store, local urban garden, or the farmer’s market. There seems to be a gendered aspect to this knowledge, that I’m excited to delve deeper during my analysis, especially surrounding who passes down the knowledge of how to cook.

Speaking of knowledge, I would not have learned any of this over the summer if it wasn’t for the kindness of Greater New Haven residents. Those I’ve cooked with welcomed a stranger into their homes, let me drive with them to their favorite store, and taught me how to cook a meal that was dear to their heart. They opened up to me, shared stories about their families, and patiently answered my questions over chopping vegetables and spoonfuls of food.

Rolling Roti

The aforementioned Pakistani mother taught me how to shape roti.

Tossing Tostones

 I’m tossing tostones in a bowl with seasoning.

I want to leave off with an anecdote from my first day of volunteering with an urban farm’s wellness program. I walked about two miles to where I thought was the correct location and met a stranger dissembling a structure meant for compost. Not seeing anyone else, I go up to the man to ask where everyone was. He let me know I was probably in the wrong location and after introducing ourselves to each other and telling him about my research, he offered to take me to the right place. Of course, I was hesitant to get into a stranger’s car, but there was a fatherly aura about this man and he seemed more worried about me than anything else. Once in the car, we swap stories about our cultural foods and he stops in front of Key Foods. He insists on buying me ice cream at the little cart called Catch the Flava. The ice cream there is the closest to what he grew up eating in Venezuela, where it was made with a hand-cranked shaved ice machine. “It’s the best ice cream in Connecticut,” he insists. And when I eat it, I’m inclined to believe him. After this stop, it ended up being only a short drive to the correct location. He drops me off, telling me to be careful, and I scamper off with coconut and passionfruit ice cream in hand.

This is the urban garden I was supposed to head to. When I took this picture, later in the summer, it had just rained, so everything is lush and green.

This was one stranger’s kindness, but as I mentioned before, my whole summer was flavored with kindness, week after week. When I do finally draft my thesis, I hope to return the favor by reflecting the care and love I experienced this summer in my writing. 

(I am grateful for the Global Food Fellowship, the Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Summer Student Research Grant, and the Williams Internship Fund for supporting my research. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge and thank the following organizations for having me as a volunteer: CitySeed’s Famer Markets, CitySeed’s Sanctuary Kitchen, Gather New Haven’s Farm-Based Wellness Program, and Loaves & Fishes. Lastly, this research could not have been possible without the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Dorceta Taylor.)

Deconstructing Farmworkers’ Invisibility in the U.S. Food System: A Case Study in the American South | GFF '23

This post is part of Bea Portela’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from November 2023 here.

Farmworkers are an invisible, but essential, part of our food system. 2.4 million farmworkers, 68% of which are foreign-born and 44% of which are undocumented, prop up our $1.2 trillion food and agriculture industry (source). This summer, I hoped to pull back the veil on farmworkers and the realities they face, in the hope of better educating myself and others in the Yale community. 

This summer, I worked as an outreach paralegal at an organization called Southern Migrant Legal Services. Based out of Nashville, we provide free legal services to farmworkers across Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The day-to-day of my work in the office involved communicating with clients, writing memos, and contributing to active litigation. 

The other half of my time was spent doing outreach to farmworkers in their rural communities. I was fortunate enough to spend time in the tomato fields and rice plantations of southern Arkansas; catfish farms of the Mississippi Delta; tree nurseries and squash fields of Tennessee’s Sequatchie Valley; and the tomato and strawberry farms in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. But behind the bucolic country roads was a reality that was anything but romantic. The states we serve are among those with the fewest labor protections for farmworkers. Though the South as a region has fewer farmworkers than some other US regions, this lack of workplace protection is still experienced by over 225,000 people (source). 

Rather than being empirical, my research was experiential. I listened and asked questions to learn from the knowledge of my fellow paralegals and attorneys, some of whom have been in the farmworker law field for decades. I learned by speaking with farmworkers on the ground. My research questions were the following: 

1. What are the sources of farmworker invisibility in the United States? Is it rooted in history, deliberate policy, and/or farmworkers’ own fears? 

2. What are the challenges facing non-profit organizations serving farmworker populations? 

3. What are methods and strategies for farmworkers to feel more empowered? 

I cannot go in depth to answer these questions here, but I do have a few takeaways that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. 

The first is that the law, while it’s an incredibly powerful tool, can often be limited by which laws do or do not exist. Farmworkers have been systematically excluded from many federal labor laws meant to protect workers. For example, farmworkers are excluded from overtime pay provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). On small farms with less than seven workers, they’re not entitled to even the federal minimum wage of $7.25. (source) 

To be sure, states can create their own state laws to establish a higher minimum wage, a right to overtime pay, elevated housing standards, or worker’s compensation if injured on the job. However, few, if any, states in the South have crafted these additional state protections. (source) What this means is that legal service providers have less tools in our toolbox to protect workers. We cannot enforce laws that don’t exist. 

Another takeaway is that there are very large and legitimate barriers that keep farmworkers from speaking out against abuse, whether that be through the legal system or not. From my experience, farmworkers fear that if they call out potential violations, they will be fired and/or not rehired by their employers. This is amplified for the many farmworkers who come to the United States through a recruiter who acts as a middleman between the grower/employer and farmworker. Though it is technically illegal, farmworkers are afraid of being blacklisted by these recruiters. Branded as a troublemaker, this blacklisting could keep a worker from getting hired not just at their previous farm, but any farm, in the United States. For farmworkers desperate to provide for their families back home, this is not a risk they’re willing to take. 

My final takeaway is that though it is challenging, the work of farmworker legal service providers is invaluable. I am immensely grateful for the paralegals and attorneys I’ve learned from, all of whom are tireless advocates. By meeting farmworkers where they are, I hope we can bring more dignity to their work by informing workers that we exist to serve them, that they have rights, and that we will work as hard as possible to ensure they’re upheld. 

Endless tomato fields in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of northeastern Tennessee. 

A tree nursery in Middle Tennessee. The ornamental trees and flowers grown in these nurseries end up in garden centers across the country. 

A trailer park in Tennessee, an example of where farmworkers are often housed. 

Farmworkers' Rights, Marimbas, and Dancing in the Moonlight | knead 2 know ft. Bea Portela '24

There was a fantastic turnout at the Friday workday and all the tasks were completed in record time. Not only did students tidy up multiple different tunnels around the Farm, they also raked fallen leaves, removed hops vines, and turned the compost. All in all, it was a highly productive session and we are super grateful for the wonderful sense of community throughout the day. 

It was then time for Global Food Fellow Bea Portela '24 to present her knead 2 know. Through her summer internship at Southern Migrant Legal Services, Portela immersed herself in the advocating process via direct outreach to farmworkers. “They don’t really know about our services,” says Portela, “so it’s up to us to reach out to them and tell them that we exist.” As part of her outreach, Portela got the opportunity to travel to a lot of beautiful places in the south. However, with various ‘private property’ and ‘no trespassing’ signs around the farms, work was both beautiful and challenging. Portela shared with us that working and living conditions of farmworkers were not ideal. Many homes were left unfinished. Some farmworkers lived in makeshift barracks and cramped conditions. Portela believed that it was important for people to understand the conditions that farmworkers were living with, in order to emphasize the importance of giving farmworkers the support they need and reaching out to them. 

The farmworkers she talked to were not always receptive due to understandable reasons like fear of retaliation and potential for job blacklisting. If a farmer is not efficient in their work, Portela noted, word can get around the recruiters who have contacts with each other, effectively preventing the farmworker from getting hired anywhere in the United States. Portela with the outreach team ultimately tried a new outreach strategy towards the end of her internship that she calls “the tentacle approach”, which essentially meant that the legal aids were  talking not only to farm workers but also people in the community connected with them including family and friends, former employees, community leaders, local immigration advocates, and more. This, while Portela experienced only once, already proved to be very successful and a more effective way to do outreach.

Afterward, the Yale Marimband performed for the first time on the Yale Farm. There was nothing quite like it: attendees got up and danced as fun rhythms rang through the air. Cheers and laughter ended the day on a high note, marking the performance a resounding hit. Intercultural Moonlight Stories the same night was also a success. With s’mores, hot chocolate, tea, and a campfire warming everyone up in the chilly night, we witnessed so much talent from singing to poetry reading to kazoos to group performances and more under the moonlight. The group cheered each other on in a supportive, intimate atmosphere. 

In accordance with daylight savings ending, the next (and last!) knead 2 know of the semester on Friday, November 10th will start at 3:30 PM EST. Lazarus Summer Intern Rebecca Salazar will be talking about her podcast episode titled “The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency”. The event will be in collaboration with the Henry Roe Cloud Conference timed with the 10th year celebration of the Yale Native American Cultural Center. 

Photos by Reese Neal '25 from this past week’s knead 2 know can be found here.

Poetry, Food, and Archives | knead 2 know feat. Kavya Jain '25

“Peanut Butter” by Eileen Myles

Kavya Jain '25 presenting her knead 2 know

Song Writing Collective Member singing

Barley and Yale Hops brew heating up

Song Writing Collective Member singing

Here at the Yale Sustainable Food Program, we like to think we go against the grain — but sometimes, that means working with the grain. On Friday, October 6, students started on a batch of Yale Ale using malted barley and hops from the Old Acre. If all goes according to plan, the mixture will ferment into a delicious brew over the next few weeks (by the time you’re reading this, spoiler alert: it did). While some students stirred the pot inside the propagation house, others sowed heirloom wheat and rye seeds in the fields. The rye will be harvested next July as part of the Yale Summer Session course “Rye: Cultural History and Embodied Practice” (co-taught by farm manager Jeremy Oldfield and Maria Trumpler).

Students then washed their hands and turned their attention to a different carbohydrate: pizza. While they enjoyed the delicious pies topped with apples, eggplant, and everything in between, they listened to a fascinating presentation by Global Food Fellow Kavya Jain '25.

Jain’s fellowship was inspired by a project for the class “Poets and their Papers.” While exploring the archives of poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in the Beinecke Library, Jain found an exhibition guide from the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Jain learned that Berssenbrugge was a friend of O’Keeffe’s and regularly shared meals with her. She set out to explore how meals function as a site of poetic imagination, traveling to rural New Mexico to interview Berssenbrugge directly.

The initial conversation with Berssenbrugge was disappointing for Jain. The poet expressed hostility toward Jain’s project, failing to see the connection between food and art. In many of her papers, too, Berssenbrugge implies that the two are in conflict, expressing anxiety over her body and suggesting that devoting effort to food takes energy away from writing. 

Although Jain found the interview difficult, her further work helped her make sense of the conversation. After reading the book Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions and talking with New Mexican poet and farmer Mallika Singh, Jain saw how gender and generation might have shaped her and Berssenbrugge’s relationship with food in different ways. 

As the summer progressed, Jain also started to reframe her research question. She held a Zoom call with a member of the Red Flower Collective, an art and research collective that explores queer and diasporic identities through home cooking. The conversation led her to ask not only how food exists in poetry archives, but also how poetics might serve to archive food practices. Upon returning to New Haven, she hosted her own archive-making meal, asking friends to respond to the poem “Peanut Butter” by Eileen Myles and to reinterpret the evening’s menu in a way that aspired to abstraction, not perfection. 

Jain ended the presentation with an exhortation to “eat, read poems, and keep your papers” — useful reminders for us all. Fittingly, we had the Yale Song Writing Collective have their members perform original songs while we continued to think about poetry and eat pizza. We thank Jain for her insightful presentation and everyone who gathered on the Farm to hear it. Photos of the workday and knead 2 know by Reese Neal '25 are available here. 

Socioeconomic Trends of Traditional HomeGardens in Pitekele, Sri Lanka | GFF '22

This post is part of Ismini Ethridge’s 2022 Global Food Fellowship.

Socioeconomic Trends of Traditional HomeGardens in Pitekele, Sri Lanka

Ismini, left, picking tea.

Throughout my childhood, I spent many summers on extended visits to family in Sri Lanka. Some of my first and most poignant lessons around environmental and social justice involved food; watching my grandmother carefully wrap every grain of leftover rice in banana leaves to avoid waste, noticing food availability tied closely to seasonal changes and environmental constraints, and witnessing hunger to an extent that I had never seen at home in the US.

The year I began graduate school, a national crisis in Sri Lanka provoked by a ban on agro-chemical inputs presented a unique opportunity to examine the complex entanglements of food systems with socio-political and economic imperatives. Sri Lanka’s President, who was eventually forced by civilian protest to resign, announced the abrupt ban on imports of agro-chemicals in April 2021, citing environmental and health concerns arising from the overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, such as water pollution, soil depletion and erosion, and increased risk of colon, kidney, and stomach cancer due to excessive nitrate exposure in farming communities. The policy change, arguably motivated more by Sri Lanka’s diminishing foreign exchange reserves, brought global attention to the harms of modern agricultural systems devoid of environmental and social considerations.

A paddy field surrounded by forest/forest gardens.

The reaction was an outcry from farmers and the general public regarding the scant planning and lack of support to make the transition to organic farming, coupled with rampant inflation in food prices, and fears that the country could collapse into famine. The government ultimately rolled back many of the policies, but farmers’ harvests had already fallen by 40-70% percent due to lack of access to fertilizer when they needed it, and the concurrent economic crisis, the worst since independence, made it nearly impossible to import food items and other essential goods such as fuel.

Sri Lanka’s story, though perhaps the first to culminate in such dramatic effects, is not unique. Sri Lanka is one of many countries continually facing the deleterious consequences of colonial restructuring of food and economic systems, structural adjustment policies that pushed for the liberalization of agriculture, and a Green Revolution that fueled a dependence on imported chemical fertilizers and cash crop production.

In my nascent explorations aimed at trying to understand how Sri Lanka could move towards a more ecologically and socially integrative food system that bolstered local food sovereignty, I found immense inspiration and hope in learning about Sri Lanka’s deep history of traditional homegarden-agroforestry practices, often referred to as “tree gardens” or “forest gardens”. Homegardens are generally considered part of an agro-socio-ecological system that comprises domesticated plants and/or animals, as well as people, and produces a variety of fruits, vegetables, and non-timber forest products, that contribute to a family′s diet and may even provide additional income (Soemarwoto and Conway, 1992 cited in Mohri et. al 2013;124).

A new lookout hut being built after villagers began to re-adopt paddy cultivation amidst the national food crisis. Villagers take turns watching for animals from the lookout hut.

During the summer of 2022, I had the privilege, thanks to generous funding from the Yale Sustainable Food Program and the Tropical Resources Institute, to conduct research on homegardens in a small village in south west Sri Lanka adjacent to the Sinharaja Forest Reserve. Previous studies conducted in the area about 30 years ago revealed a rich practice of homegardening, as well as an encroaching influence of tea cultivation. The focus of my research was therefore to better understand the role of traditional homegardens in these smallholder livelihoods, how communities living in particularly precious ecosystems and landscapes were balancing subsistence food production with cash crop production, and more broadly, what could be learnt from these practices that are of national and even global relevance?

Planting tea crops.

I spent the better part of two months living in Pitekele, learning about homegardens and changing land use practices through household interviews and ethnographic research. The lives of the villagers are far too rich and complex to be encapsulated in one summer study, but a few trends and moments stood out as profound learnings. Nearly all households engaged in some form of cash crop production, usually tea, but homegardens remained an almost sacred staple for every household. One of the eldest villagers described caring for her homegarden as similar to loving and caring for a member of the family. Despite the increasing prevalence of tea cultivation, villagers rarely reported sacrificing homegarden land for cash crops, and the majority reported growing more food items in their homegardens since the last formal study was conducted 30 years ago, indicating that homegardening practices were still a stronghold in the community.

Villagers had an acute awareness of the role homegardens played in their food sovereignty as well. They took pride in being self-sufficient in growing many staple items, such as jackfruit, breadfruit, manioca, coconut, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. Many noted that despite losing jobs amidst the economic crisis and decreased tea yields due to the fertilizer ban, families were generally able to furnish their basic needs from their gardens. The intimate level of social integration required by village homegardens also helped ensure the economic and social security of the villagers, and played an integral role in the social cohesion and culture of the village. The rich diversity of plants and crops grown in homegardens, for example, was largely due to seed sharing amongst the community. Children not only played in the homegardens, but knew nearly every plant—vegetable, herb, medicinal—growing in them.

Pristinely clean water in the main river that flowed through the village.

Still, villagers faced challenges with their land and cultivation. While homegardens generally didn’t require any inputs, chemical fertilizers and pesticides were used on nearly all tea land, and crops suffered when the sharp rise of fertilizer prices restricted access. Forest laws that restricted hunting of animals and the use of forest products such as wood for fuel, timber, and fences meant that villagers were facing increasing pressure from wildlife threatening their vegetable crops. Local government offices made subpar attempts to support homegarden cultivation by providing some vegetable seeds and occasional workshops on how to make organic compost. 

These villagers demonstrated traditional agroforestry as a practice that afforded remarkable resilience amidst compounding national crises, yet there remains a clear opportunity for both localized and national policy efforts to more effectively support smallholders to maintain their traditional homegarding practices and have viable livelihoods.

Food Sovereignty in Urban Environments: Brooklyn, New York | GFF '22

This post is part of Storm Lewis’s 2022 Global Food Fellowship.

Food Sovereignty in Urban Environments: A Case Study of Brooklyn, New York

Growing up in what used to be a predominantly Black neighborhood, I witnessed how gentrification and food insecurity transformed Brooklyn’s foodscape. My drive to address disparities in food access further developed as my family grappled with the impacts of breast cancer. The relationship between cancer and diets made it clear to me that the quality of food consumed is a critical component of community health. Yet, food apartheids pervade areas where I grew up.

As a student and activist, I turned to urban agriculture as a platform to gain autonomy and help others connect to nutritious foods. Whether I was growing collard greens in my elementary school yard or advocating for public school gardens, I found strength in the ability to grow food. My experience gardening made me understand that access to healthy, culturally appropriate food is only one facet of community health. Black communities must also have a stake in the production of our foods.

 Historically, Black farmers have been systematically discriminated against and denied the right to cultivate farmland for decades. Institutions such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have strategically reduced Black land ownership by limiting access to loans and access to quality land free from environmental hazards. The number of Black farmers in the United States continues to decline due to the loss of land and agricultural knowledge in Black communities.[1]

In 2017, less than 1% of New York State Farmers were Black.[2] [3] For the Black farmers that managed to produce an annual harvest, their profit margins were significantly lower than White farmers. Given this history, current efforts to improve food systems must support models in which Black farmers can achieve self-determination through communal or individual control of agricultural land.

 Food sovereignty is one of the few approaches encouraging communities to define and control their food systems. However, few studies examine the pathways to success for Black farmers. My study fills this gap by questioning what Black-led, food sovereignty organizations exist in Brooklyn across the food supply chain. Do they self-identify as food sovereign? Lastly, what are the barriers to implementing food sovereignty on a local and national scale?

Hattie Carthan Farmer's Market.

 In June of 2021, I used a multi-method approach to understand the challenges and achievements of Black foodways through interviews and participant observation. I spoke with over forty-five organizations ranging from Green Thumb, Universe City, East New York Farms, Seasons Plant Shop, New Visions Garden, Oko Farms, to Red Hook Community Farms, and other gardens in Brooklyn.

I also engaged in fifty-five hours of volunteer work at farms and gardens. Some of the tasks involved weeding, watering, and harvesting plants, building trellises, picking up trash, organizing tool sheds, and selling produce at farmer’s markets. The information collected will contribute to a resource guide that helps food producers access funding sources. The final paper will also provide recommendations for local governments to support Black food systems.

Overall, it was a privilege working alongside farmers to grow and distribute fresh produce. I am humbled to have learned from those who dedicate their lives to food production. As a result, I gained a form of knowledge that cannot be taught in the classroom nor read in literature. I will carry these lessons with me as I move through my studies at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and beyond.

To learn more about my research, you can read my article on food sovereignty published in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal. Later this year, I will partner with MidHeaven Network to moderate a podcast series featuring Black agrarianism in New York City. I will also present my project at the New Horizons in Conservation Conference, ​​the RITM 3-minute Research Presentations, and the YSE Summer Experience Showcase. 

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This project was made possible with the support of the Global Food Fellowship, the Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Summer Student Research Grant, the RITM Research and Conference Travel Award, and my research advisor, Dr. Dorceta Taylor.

Full Links:
https://uraf.harvard.edu/files/uraf/files/mmuf_journal_2021.pdf
https://www.midheaven.network

Citations:
[1] Taylor, D. E. (2018). Black farmers in the USA and Michigan: Longevity, empowerment, and food sovereignty. Journal of African American Studies, 22(1), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-018-9394-8

[2] Taylor, D. E. (2018). Black farmers in the USA and Michigan: Longevity, empowerment, and food sovereignty. Journal of African American Studies, 22(1), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-018-9394-8

[3] United States Department of Agriculture. Census of Agriculture. 2017 Volume 1, Chapter 1: State Level | 2017 Census of Agriculture | USDA/NASS. (2017). Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2017/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_State_Level/.

The Food Markets of Saint Petersburg

Food is a subtle thing.

When Emily Sigman MF/MA Global Affairs ’20 traveled to Saint Petersburg last summer, she spent much of her days exploring its street markets. From the ​byzantine aisles of Sennoy to fruit stalls scattered the city, Emily was keen to observe what subtleties there may be. For starters, the brightly speckled berries that adorned so many booths. How much could they reveal about Russia’s biodiversity? In how small farms grew, but also in what could be foraged?

It helped that berry vendors often had their own stories of (mis)adventure. Mostly older women, the ​stall owners trekked ​hundreds of miles into the countryside to pick their desired fruits. As they set up their businesses from the trunks of their cars, these women regaled Emily their tales of evading regulatory authorities: an endless game of cat-and-mouse.

Wild mushrooms were also popular goods in Saint Petersburg’s markets. During her presentation for our weekly knead 2 know series, Emily invited two audience members to act out a script she’d written. Her text featured a number of conversations she’d had with locals about their perceptions of mushrooms.

“Do you know how to prepare these mushrooms?”

This conversation’s participant had asked Emily about cooking mushrooms. She’d had her own interesting theories of how toxins came to be “on” mushrooms, and what restaurants and processors then did to remove them. Surprising? Yes. But un-scientific? Not necessarily.

Most unexpected though, were the literary connections Russian locals drew with the city’s markets. One of Emily’s acquaintances dubbed Sennoy “a field of miracles in a country of fools.” She caught the reference immediately. “Field of Miracles” was the title of a popular television show, with a deeper reference to Tolstoy’s famous children’s story, The Golden Key. And the use of “fool”? Actually positive. Based on the Russian folktale trope Ivan the Fool, this character is simple-natured, his destiny always one of good fortune.

In her time abroad, Emily was exposed to a vast spectrum of Russian ethno-gastronomic experiences and beliefs, windows into the more complex cultural workings of food. In other words, sometimes, the most interesting connections between food and identity were not as obvious as a clearly stated culinary tradition. Instead, cultural milieus were built subtly, subconsciously. For example the literary references to describe these markets hinted at a cultural claim over space, couched in, or at least related to, Russian and Slavic identity. How then, might these perceptions interact with the non-Slavic foods and people who also inhabit, and even control neighboring and overlapping spaces? Another research question for another day.

Emily’s research was partially funded by the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s Global Food Fellowship. Photos provided courtesy of Emily. Event photography by Vuong Mai '21.