Modeling RegenAg Transition Finance | LSI '24

This post is part of Gus Renzin’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

It took me about five minutes to decide what I wanted my independent project this summer to focus on. Regenerative agriculture is just that awesome. Although no one single definition for it exists—some organizations classify a farm as regenerative based on practices (eg. cover cropping, no-till, mulching), others based on the outcomes (like raising soil organic matter levels, reducing runoff, and improving working conditions), and still others based on embracing certain foundational principles such maintaining living roots and welcoming animals—the bottom line is this: regenerative agriculture is all about farming in ways that leave land healthier than we found it. Farms practicing regenerative agriculture sequester more carbon, are more resilient to climate change and extreme weather events, and are more ecologically beneficial than conventional farms.

Given the numerous advantages that regenerative agriculture offers, I was surprised by the fact that less than 2% of US farms are regenerative. My immediate assumption was that the environmental benefits of regenerative agriculture must come at a financial cost, but nearly every report I read on the subject seemed to point in the opposite direction: studies by the Soil Health Institute and the American Farmland Trust used partial budget analysis methods to demonstrate that—even without upping prices or taking advantage of burgeoning ecosystem service and carbon markets—regenerative farms are, on average, significantly more profitable than they would be if operated conventionally. Regenerative farmers are rewarded for their focus on soil health with reduced dependence on expensive inputs like fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, and as a result, wider margins.

The major roadblock to widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture, I've come to learn, is the period of depressed profitability that occurs as farmers transition from conventional to regenerative agriculture. Quite simply, it takes time for the land (and the farmer) to adjust to a new way of doing things, and in the interim, yields can suffer and costs can rise. According to studies by BCG and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Bain and the World Economic Forum, and the Environmental Defense Fund, farmers must often weather several years of significant losses before hitting original and then increased levels of profitability.

Learning this was the impetus for my independent project this summer. I decided to treat the transition to regenerative as an investment, model farm-level cash flows over time, and ultimately analyze the financial viability of the transition through a capital budgeting lens. I began by compiling data from the Soil Health's Institute's study, ECONOMICS of Soil Health Systems on 30 U.S. Farms, which used partial budget analysis to compare per-acre profitability of 30 existing regenerative farms to projected levels of profitability if they were to be operated conventionally. Using the projected levels of conventional profitability as a baseline, I used excel to create this interactive tool to model a 6 year transition to regenerative agriculture for each farm that ultimately results in each farm achieving its actual level of profitability as a regenerative farm and maintaining those levels (adjusted annually for projected inflation) in subsequent years. The tool allows the user to choose the discount rate, average rate of inflation, interest rate, and one of eight options for projected transition losses based on scenarios proposed in "100 Million Farmers: Breakthrough Models for Financing a Sustainability Transition" and "Cultivating Farmer Prosperity: Investing in Regenerative Agriculture" and see the 12, 20, and 100 year IRR and NPV for each farm transition as well as the amount of time it would take for the farmer to repay a loan that would cover transition losses (which is one type of arrangement that innovative new financial firms in the regenerative agriculture space are using to support farmers through the transition). In addition to demonstrating which transitions are ultimately sound investments, the tool can help viewers to visualize the enormous economic potential of the regenerative transition as well as the risks that it poses, even for farms that are—from an operational and ecological standpoint—successful.

Overall, working on my independent project this summer has been an incredible experience. I've learned more about regenerative agriculture, financial modeling, and the workings of Microsoft Excel than I could have hoped. The most important thing I've learned, though, is how much must be done before a widespread transition to regenerative agriculture is viable. The work done by organizations like the Soil Health Institute, the American Farmland Trust, Bain, BCG, and the Environmental Defense Fund is incredible, and they shed light on the enormous financial and environmental potential of regenerative agriculture. But they—and by extension my tool—are nowhere near comprehensive enough to give farmers or financial institutions the information they need to confidently embrace the regenerative transition. The read-world data required to create accurate models just isn't there yet.

For widespread adoption of regenerative practices to be viable, farmers need reliable tools that can accurately predict how regenerative transitions will impact both their land and their bank accounts, and financial institutions need to deeply understand the risks and rewards that they expose themselves to in supporting those farmers. The need for far greater real-world data collection is clear, but as more and more information about the financial implications of actual transitions—not just projections—comes to light, I have no doubt that farmers and investors alike will confidently embrace regenerative agriculture.

10th Annual Melon Forum | April 12, 2023

On April 12, 2023, from 5:00 – 7:00 P.M., the Yale Sustainable Food Program hosted its tenth annual Melon Forum at St. Anthony Hall, where ten Yale seniors presented senior theses relating to food and agriculture: Gavrielle Welbel, Meredith Ryan, Kayleigh Larsen, Brianna Jefferson, Ben Christensen, Catherine Webb, Caroline Beit, and Lucie Warga, majoring in subjects from Environmental Studies to Economics. Raphael Berz and Michael Min contributed their prospectuses to our 2023 Melon Forum brochure. Virginia Davis ’23 planned and led the event. The students’ projects ranged across disciplines, methodologies, and theories, utilizing novel approaches to tackling wicked problems in food systems. To view the Melon Forum brochure, please visit this link.

Lucie Warga ’22 began the event with her presentation, assessing the socio-political climate influencing school nutrition standards in the last decade. Drawing from archival research and discussing cultural norms, Warga engaged in an interdisciplinary exploration of food standards for students in U.S. schools.

Following Warga, Meredith Ryan ’22 explained how she used remote sensing and Google Earth Engine to analyze how the Russia-Ukraine war impacted agricultural production in Ukraine. Ryan used sensing technologies to analyze different types of wavelengths absorbed and reflected by chlorophyll in regions of interest to determine the impact of the war on agricultural yields. 

Presentations focused not only on fluctuations in geography, but also on their shifting relationships with the people and environments around them. Catherine Webb ’22 highlighted the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, a collective of six Shinnecock women  who work to steward the land amidst “social geographies of antagonists and potential allies,” she wrote. Their ancestral relationship with kelp guides their present-day work in kelp farming. Themes of protection, spirituality, and connection imbued Catherine’s thoughtful presentation. 

“You can’t talk about hunger without talking about race,” said Kayleigh Larsen ’22. Larsen’s presentation explored American food politics, activism, and power from 1964 – 1973. Through three case studies—one of which highlighted the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program—she examined how grassroots organizers used food systems to contest values of an oppressive society. 

Next, Gavrielle Welbel ’22 presented their long-term research on rock weathering in agricultural settings through analyzing carbon dioxide removal, crop yields, and soil pH. In conjunction with a team of researchers and farmers, Welbel studies rock weathering at Zumwalt Acres, a farm which they co-steward in Sheldon, IL.

Next, Brianna Jefferson ’22—advised by YSFP Director Mark Bomford—presented on the intersections of hydroponics and environmental justice. Through interviews with companies in the Northeast and Florida, Jefferson investigated large hydroponic companies’ purported commitment to environmental justice and local communities. She found that while the companies’ commitments were largely opaque, they did at times positively impact communities by providing job opportunities in underserved areas. 

Jefferson’s presentation was followed by Caroline Beit ’22, whose project on the history of breastfeeding in American prisons tracked court cases and political visions of breastfeeding. Studying the racialized double-standards of white and Black women breastfeeding their children, Beit analyzed the effects of court decisions that have affected the accessibility and legality of breastfeeding in carceral settings. While breastfeeding has been repeatedly criminalized, other court decisions have elevated breastfeeding as a constitutional right. 

Finally, Ben Christenen ’22 presented a graph-theoretical project on human population clusters as a function of geography. “People tend to live where they can grow food,” he said. Christensen  used computational methods to explore the geographic conditions conducive to supporting large populations, and considered if natural geographic clusters correlated with canonical ideas of “regions.” 

Around forty students gathered to watch these seniors present their culminatingYale academic works. The YSFP provided wine, a variety of cheeses, and sweet treats. We hope you’ll join us next year at our 11th annual Melon Forum. 

To view photos from the event, please follow this link. Photos by Reese Neal ’25. 

Alumni Interviews | Lauren Kohler '19

Lauren Kohler ’19 did just about everything there is to do at the YSFP, from tending Yale Farm crops to writing our ever-popular newsletter. The former Farm Manager is no longer harvesting carrots on the Old Acre, but she’s not done thinking about the food we eat and where it comes from. Kohler is now the Director of Food Systems Philanthropy at Stray Dog Institute, a private operating foundation that provides funding to and conducts research with organizations in the food systems and farmed animal advocacy movements. YSFP communications team member Sadie Bograd ’25 spoke with Kohler about her work and how it was shaped by her time at the Yale Farm.

This conversation is part of a new Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the world of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

How would you describe your work at Stray Dog Institute?

I help execute, develop, and manage our food systems programming, philanthropy, and strategy. In addition to managing our grants, I provide support beyond the check: for example, sharing a funder perspective on a presentation, or weighing in on a new strategy. I've also facilitated three different working groups since I came onto the team [in 2019], helping to provide a space for collaboration and a facilitating force for organizations in the movement. My work spans the philanthropic side and the connector, facilitator, and collaborative space-builder role.

On that note, could you describe the general landscape of food systems grant-making and the food systems movement?

Stray Dog Institute sits at the intersection of the farmed animal advocacy and food system transformation movements. Our benefactors, Chuck and Jennifer [Laue], have dedicated their time and their money to trying to end factory farming and make the world better for people, animals, and the planet. Because of their vision, we keep animals at the center of our work, and that's why we're focused on ending factory farming specifically. But we also recognize that factory farming exists within the broader landscape of the food system. And you can't look at industrial animal agriculture without looking at the intersecting oppressions and injustices that create the extractive, exploitative food system that we have today. We find a lot of overlap with [food systems] groups that are fighting to end factory farming in the US. It may not be for animals: it may be for rural communities, environmental justice reasons, public health reasons, soil health reasons.

Do all those different groups usually work together? And what are some of the challenges with doing so?

Different issues will bring different folks together. For example, one issue that I led a working group on was checkoff programs. Checkoff programs are a fund that producers of certain commodities, like dairy or beef or soybeans, will pay into per amount that they produce. That money is supposed to go to broadly promoting the consumption of that product and R&D for that product — we all know the “Got Milk?" campaign and “Beef. It’s What's for Dinner.” One of the issues is that the program has basically been co-opted by industrial animal agriculture, and that money is being used to support their interests at the expense of family farmers. That's a case where cattle ranchers and animal welfare advocates came together to fight a common enemy.

One challenge to collaboration between the farmed animal advocacy and food systems movements has been, rightly or wrongly, the idea that animal advocates prioritize animals at the expense of human interests. Today, the animal advocacy movement is a lot more inclusive and intersectional. There's also some understandable historical distrust there between rural communities and farmers and animal advocates. I think that that's been a difficult gap to bridge. On the other side, there continue to be challenges to collaboration between some food systems groups. Some folks see farmed animals as central to regenerative agriculture and aren't open to considering regenerative models that decenter animal farming. I think it can be off-putting to some animal advocates to see that side of the food systems movement promote beef consumption or cattle ranching as integral to a sustainable food system.

But I think that the animal advocacy movement overall has become much more aware of the importance of a big tent approach, and I think that has helped bridge the gap. There's a place for animals in conversations about the food system, and that doesn't take away the place of any other food systems actors. Animal issues have historically been seen as naive or pie in the sky. We’re really interested in having open conversations that challenge that, recognizing that conversations about the food system have to be about everything in the food system.

What have been some of the historic and current gaps in funding for food systems and farmed animal advocacy, and how do you try to fill that niche?

Historically, the animal advocacy movement has been predominantly very white, leadership has been male-dominated, and the funders have been white and male. That has led to an under-resourcing of groups that are not led by people of those demographics, particularly BIPOC-led groups and community-led groups. That's changing in some really good ways, and we have tried to be part of that change.

In addition, the animal advocacy movement has historically seen a lot of project-based funding. I can understand why a funder would be motivated to ensure that as much of their money goes specifically to their highest concerns, such as chickens in crates or the separation of cows from their babies at birth. However, focusing funding on specific issues may create challenges for nonprofits in covering their basic operating expenses. As a result, Stray Dog Institute has shifted to giving mostly unrestricted, general operating grants. Additionally, we used to give larger grants to fewer organizations. About a year after I came on the team, we decided that we wanted to take a movement-building approach and to spread that support across more organizations in the movement at necessarily smaller grant amounts.

Along with funding in smaller amounts, are you generally funding smaller organizations?

It varies. Sometimes our support may be a drop in the bucket for an organization with a multi-million-dollar budget. Those organizations are doing great work, and we do want to support them. But I find it really meaningful to provide support to smaller organizations who might not have a lot of funder support. A smaller grant can have a larger impact for an organization with a smaller budget. And I think that for those organizations, our support can mean more than the money itself, like having a funder who knows other funders say, “Hey, I'm supporting this organization, I think you might want to consider supporting them, too.”

I've asked you a bunch of questions about your job. I also want to talk a bit about your time at Yale. How do you think your work on the Farm influenced your career path?

My time at the Farm was so foundational to everything that I did in college and beyond. I have always been interested in the intersections between people and animals and the environment. I came into Yale knowing that I wanted to major in environmental studies, but not thinking that I would connect it to the food system so directly. I got pretty burnt out in college because so many of the issues in the food system are just so entrenched and sometimes feel hopeless. It felt hard to be like, ‘I want to focus my career on this.’

Working with the YSFP gave me a space where I could feel optimistic about the food system and working in the food system. The Farm was my happy place at Yale. The Farm was always the place where I went to feel at peace. And the people on the Farm are some of my favorite people in the world. It was very influential in making me feel like this work could be sustainable, and something that brought me joy, and something that's meaningful.

I'm a very hands-on, tactile person. Reading and writing and talking all day gets so exhausting. The appreciation of both hands-on and intellectual food systems work, and the way that those two things combined at the YSFP, felt very energizing.

That's great to hear. I feel like I'm constantly telling people this is the happiest place on campus. Every week I pick a tomato off the vine and I’m like, ‘Ah, life is going to be okay.’ Do you have any favorite memories from your time at the Farm?

Oh, all of them. I remember my sophomore year, when I was a Farm Manager, I worked with another awesome Farm Manager named Adam. We were Sunday workday managers, so there were fewer visitors on the Farm during our workday. There was one time where we raked all the leaves on the Farm into a huge pile and jumped in it. That's just a really happy memory, one of those where you take a photograph in your mind. I also think about the tomatoes in the hoop houses, and seeing the rows and rows of them strung up, and having been part of stringing them up when they were little tiny tomato plants and then seeing them go all the way to the top. Just all of the times walking around the Farm and it feeling like home. Even when there wasn't anyone there, it felt like home.

Moonlight Stories on the Farm

Under a full moon on November 18th, YSFP students Kayley Estoesta ’21 and Ally Soong ’22 hosted a night of spoken word poetry and music on the Farm. With the theme of moonlight stories to guide them, students came together to share their work, perform for each other, and enjoy some bubbling apple crumble during a chilly evening of community. We hope to turn this event—co-hosted with the Jook Songs—into an annual celebration on the Farm. Photos by Reese Neal ’25.

Fall Feast: Celebrating Indigenous Food Pathways

On November 18th, 2021, the YSFP hosted Fall Feast: Celebrating Indigenous Food Pathways in partnership with the Native American Cultural Center. The lunchtime event brought together our communities over a delicious meal, thoughtfully prepared by NACC-YSFP Liaison and Seedkeeper Catherine Webb ’23. The menu, which featured Three Sisters chili, fried squash patties, cornbread, and ground cherry pie, utilized produce grown in the Three Sisters plot on the Farm, including Buffalo Creek Squash, Skunk Beans, and White Cap Corn, grown from seeds gifted to us by Liz Charlebois, a member of the Abenaki tribe. To learn more about the Three Sisters, read Catherine’s beautiful blog post and poem. You can also read the Yale Daily News article about the event here. Many, many thanks to everyone who made this event a success! Photos by Reese Neal ’25.

GFF Grace Cajski Explains Her Project that Explores Hawaiian Fishpond Aquaculture

Grace Cajski was a 2021 Global Food Fellow. To learn more about the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s Global Food Fellowships, please visit this page.

Growing up in New Orleans, I loved going to the water with my father. We’d kayak. We walked along the bayous and boated across the lake. My father is from Oʻahu, and, in the summer, we’d go back to his childhood home. There, we sailed, explored, and visited with family and friends. One of whom was Vernon Sato, my father’s old neighbor. He was a phycologist and aquaculturist. In his retirement, he wrote a book about Moliʻi fishpond, an ancient Hawaiian fishpond. Sometimes, he’d take us there. 

Nine hundred years ago, the Hawaiian population was growing into the hundreds of thousands. They invented fishponds, loko iʻa, to feed their community. It was the first aquaculture system in the Pacific Rim. Chiefs, or aliʻi, designated a kiaʻi loko to care for and operate the fishpond. Caring for a fishpond was an art, and the knowledge it took to understand the pond and its creatures required years of apprenticeship. When the West colonized, when it forbade most Hawaiian practices and converted communal land into private property, this artistry was lost. 

In the past fifty years, nonprofits and community groups have been working to revive fishponds. They have removed invasive mangroves and rebuilt the kuapā. Now, they are contending with problems like pollution and invasive species. Additionally, the aquaculturists who operated the ponds a generation ago are aging, and their knowledge will soon be lost.

If these problems can be resolved, fishponds could salvage Hawaii’s ecosystems. And, they could help solve the anthropocene's defining problems: resource scarcity, ecosystem decay, and climate change. 

During my gap year, I became fascinated with fishponds. Particularly, I reflected on how humans know the natural world: I realized that we know it through work, and that the food chain is what fundamentally connects us to the ecosystem. Beyond observing nature, sustainable food systems are how humans play a role within the environment and are part of natural ecosystems. 

I wondered, how are ancient Hawaiian aquaculture practices relevant to solving the environmental and social issues associated with the anthropocene today? Who are the figures behind this movement? And, can these revived practices inform other aquaculture projects? 

During April of 2021, I received a Global Food Fellowship from the Yale Sustainable Food Program to write about the fishponds and the community around them. I hoped to delve into the aquaculturists' stories and their work. I planned to bring their philosophies and knowledge to a wide audience with my writing. Through my project, I also planned to explore solutions, illuminate challenges, and celebrate Hawaiian culture. 

I embarked on my project in June of 2021: I spent thirty-five days on Oʻahu and spoke with more than forty fishpond caretakers, scientists, nonprofit leaders, civil servants, community members, conservationists, and educators. I visited fishponds, aquaculture facilities, and nonprofit offices. I snorkeled in search of seaweed, and I removed mangroves from a fishpond. I typed transcripts of my interviews with elders and fishpond leaders, and sent them to the University of Hawaii's Center for Oral History. 

​​I am grateful to have had the opportunity to witness and take part in such work, as well as to have connected with so many inspiring figures. I am humbled by the privilege of hearing their stories, and telling them.

To learn more about my research, you can read my article about fishpond aquaculture for ECO Magazine here, and you can read my blog post for the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication about how climate change is threatening fishponds here. I have work forthcoming in Oceanographic Magazine, and I will be presenting the project at the American Geophysical Union Fall 2021 Conference. 

-- 

This project was also supported by the Yale Law School’s Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP), the Yale Environmental Humanities Program, and the Yale Summer Journalism Fellowship.

8th Annual Melon Forum

In previous years, the Melon Forum gathered together seniors from across Yale to present their theses on food and agriculture. Amongst friends, family, professors, food, and drinks, the seniors would celebrate the culmination of their year’s work. As this kind of gathering was not possible in 2021, we’ve chosen to commemorate the scholarship of our seniors through a digital platform.

The 2021 Melon Forum Brochure features seven seniors: Natalie Boyer, Epongue Ekille, Tomeka Frieson, Grant Halliday, Marlena Hinkle, Kitty Kan, Micah Clemens Kulanakilaikekai’ale’ale Young and Amanda Zhang. Read their abstracts in the provided link!

Graphic design by Vicky Wu ’21.

kneaded 2 know: Sam Shoemaker on the Mysteries of Fungi

With some of our in-person programming on pause this year to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we’re revisiting past moments to reflect and learn. In this Q+A, Noa Hines ’21 chats with Sam Shoemaker ART ’20, to go beyond his knead 2 know presentation last fall, “The Mysteries of Fungi”.

Noa Hines ’21 is part of the YSFP’s communications team. She is an Architecture major concentrating in Design. Her favorite part of the job is using photography to to help document all of the joyful memories at the YSFP.

Noa Hines: What inspired you to create art with fungi?

Sam Shoemaker: I had been interested in mushrooms for many years before I started working with fungi in my artwork. I actually was trying to keep them separate from the studio, because I was afraid that if all of my hobbies were about art making, then I would make very poor company and I would turn all of the things that I enjoy into work. But the obsession grew and I eventually realized that I needed to bring the mushrooms into the studio because I was spending so much time researching and thinking about them.  So that led me to start cultivating fungi and not just identifying them. 

It was actually one of my fears to become “another fungi artist,” but now I think about it very differently because it actually makes a lot of sense that artists are drawn to fungi. They're very enigmatic and unpredictable organisms. They sort of fall between the cracks in terms of how we think things work. They’re connective tissue that brings all of the familiar together but lay mostly out of sight and underground. And the community that has studied them both in the US and internationally has been sort of on the fringes. Most people who study fungi are citizen scientists and self-taught autodidacts. I think artists usually fit into that category: they're self-taught, they’re craftsmen, they’re researchers. So a lot of the people that I seek counsel from are not people with PhDs in biology. And most of the people who are doing the most cutting-edge science do not come from a traditional science background. I felt very invited for that reason to get into it. 

That [knead 2 know] was the first talk that I gave on fungi at Yale and that was a great opportunity. I didn't really know how to present or organize my thoughts so I went up there, ranted for 15 minutes before sitting down, and then everyone started eating pizza. [Someone] said “What? You didn't open it up for questions.” So clearly I have a lot to learn about public speaking, but that experience led to other talks and I'm starting to refine it. Since then, I’ve taken my skills back with me to California and I'm starting an urban mycology farm. I've just finished building my lab in a basement.

“...one of the things I want to convey with these talks is that this [field] is really ripe for the picking, that anybody can jump in. You don’t have to have a PhD. 

”

— Sam Shoemaker

NH: I have a lot of questions about that, but first, do you want to talk about any of the other talks you’ve given and what it's been like to participate in that?

SS: I have mostly been giving talks on Zoom. I gave a talk to a class at CalArts; some friends were organizing a Zoom lecture series when we all went into quarantine. I started sharing what I know and making myself as available as possible to people who want to learn because the people that I learned from made themselves very available, for free, to share what they know. I've really tried to respect that tradition of contributing back, because I've been given a lot. 

Another thing about giving these talks that has been really healing and exciting is that we are in an unprecedented time politically, ecologically. There's tragedy on a global scale. And yet, fungi are this really unexplored part of our world where we can find so many answers and there are so many places where we have not applied science and research. There's so much excitement right now in the field of mycology that we should pay attention to because we need to look to new solutions. We have to do things very differently in the way we think about food and the way that we think about conserving our soils and our old growth forests. And one of the things that I want to convey with these talks is that this [field] is really ripe for the picking, that anybody can jump in. You don't have to have a PhD. 

For example, I’ll ask a group of mycologists who have been doing this for 30 years, “Instead of growing things in plastic bags, why don't we grow them in ceramic pots?” Just really simple things like that and they’ll say, “We just have never tried it.” Even compared to the art world, [mycology] is such a small community. And nothing is set in stone, all the techniques that we use have all been developed in the past hundred years.

“Mushrooms have always been the organisms to take care of the waste and things that we don’t know how to break down and process ourselves...”

— Sam Shoemaker

NH: One thing I remember from your talk was that you brought up this one species of fungi, and really stood out to me how resilient it was. You presented these conditions that seem toxic to other organisms or humans; fungi can just thrive in that. That's definitely something to think about in terms of how we preserve food, and how we may change the way we're thinking about cultivation, especially when there's such a shortage of resources. 

SS: It keeps me up at night, so it's very easy to convey the excitement that I have. I've wanted to start a book called 10 Conversations with 10 American Mycologists. The mycologists that I know would all have very different answers if I were to say, “Right now I have $10 million that you can invest into research or any myco-related project. Where would you put it?” Some people would say food, some people would say remediation, some people would say medicine and the research of psychedelics.

There's just so many places that we need to get into and a lot of airtime is spent right now on psychedelics. When people hear the words, “mushrooms,” or “shrooms,” or “mycology,” they assume drugs. And I think there are a lot of really exciting things happening in that world; Berkeley just opened a department on their campus for the study and advancement of psychedelics, I forget which terms they use, but they're studying psilocybin and LSD and other things for therapeutic medicinal purposes. And you don't have to go far before you hear an NPR piece or some podcasts talking about microdosing. 

But the things that I don't think we hear as much about are sustainable food systems that we can find through mushrooms and mycology. Most people don't hear about remediation and I think those topics need a lot more airtime because we have an ocean full of plastic. We have put heavy metals in our soil all over the planet and we have spilled oil into our water sources.

Mushrooms have always been the organisms to take care of the waste and things that we don't know how to break down and process ourselves; asphalt, stone, concrete, landfills, plastics— mushrooms have tremendous potential to do this and to store our carbon banks on this planet. And the more we use fungicidal pesticides and treatments that deplete our rhizomatic systems and our ecosystems, the more damage that we do.

“I want to do everything fast and loose because I have an artist brain. In art school, they just tell you, ‘you can do anything you want, there are no rules.’ With mushrooms, there are rules. 
”

— Sam Shoemaker

NH: It sounds like there are a lot of ways this field can address the global state of the environment. What are some things that have been a bit challenging in your work, and what are you looking forward to?

SS: I’ve been very fortunate. I am finding my obsession and practice at a time when there's a lot of interest and support for people doing what I'm doing. I'm starting this mushroom farm in LA that doesn't have an official name yet, but I am more or less the only person who's attempting to do this in Southern California right now, which is still a big surprise to me. There's challenges with growing mushrooms, but I feel that I've been ushered to the front of the line because a lot of people want to do this and they don't know how to get access to fresh, locally grown mushrooms.

I would say the biggest challenge is learning to scale that up. Mushrooms are still very mysterious to me and I'm still getting experience on how to grow them at a much larger scale than what I'm used to. My small studio projects are very different from trying to produce 100 pounds of fresh mushrooms for farmers’ markets every week. Another thing is if I let my space get dirty; I have this lab, and I have to mop the floor every day and scrub the surfaces with bleach, alcohol, and peroxide. I've become very knowledgeable about my cleaning routines, and I haven't been known to be somebody that mops every day. I’m kind of paranoid because I'm creating these ideal environments for fungi and molds to grow, but I need the mushrooms to grow. Not mold. In order to do that I can't go in there being sweaty and covered in bacteria and BO. I need to be in there squeaky clean with bleached clothes on, and then do my work very, very carefully.

I want to do everything fast and loose because I have an artist brain. In art school, they just tell you, ‘you can do anything you want, there are no rules.’ With mushrooms, there are rules. 

NH: Can you walk me through the process of growing mushrooms?

SS: Mushrooms don't grow from seeds. The caps of most mushrooms will drop spores. I have worked with other laboratories that produce commercially viable, high-performing strains of mushrooms, which get brought on a petri dish of agar. A wedge of that will get moved to more agar so I can keep replicating this strong mushroom culture. Then I'll take some of the wedges and add them to sterilized grain. Rye grains are very good for mushrooms, but those are very difficult to find in bulk organic, so I'm using wheat berries (Note: Sam is moving towards getting an organic certification).

So I get these dry berries, I soak them, I cook them, and then I sterilize them at just the right moisture content. Then I introduce a piece of that agar wedge to the grain; when it spreads across the grain, that's called colonization. When it's fully colonized and the mycelium is spread all the way across, I break those pieces up and then I'll bring them to more grains. That is what is going to produce spawn, which you can kind of think of as seeds. When I put the spawn on the sawdust that I grow the mushrooms on, it’s inoculating the substrate, a bit like how you would plant a seed in the soil. 

I've sourced all of my sawdust from an Amish farm, because it processes the oak without any motor oils or additives that could be less ideal for food-grade materials. Then I supplement that sawdust with organic soy holes, which is the byproduct of soy and soybeans. Those holes that get tossed to the side are great nutrition, my mushrooms can chew right through that. So that gets bagged up and heated for a 36-hour cycle where they're all in steam at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, so they get pasteurized really well. It comes out, I add the spawn, they grow, and then I move them into the fruiting chamber. So while they're colonizing, it's a dry, kind of warm room they’re incubating in. Then when the mushrooms are ready to grow, I take those blocks, I move them into my wet fruiting room where it's 90% humidity. Eventually, I slash the bags open and the mushrooms come out!

I cool those mushrooms off, collect them, and then those are going down to the farmers’ markets or maybe personal chefs. I have other friends who are kind of working with mushrooms and we’ll trade our agar plates like it’s a club. “I can't get this one to grow, you try this! Oh, this one likes it a little bit colder, or, this one doesn't like to have too much oxygen, so I'm going to put a little tarp there.” You spend time with the mushrooms to see what they like. If they're happy, you're happy. 

And then after I harvest the mushrooms off of those blocks, they are really great for compost. I have a friend that owns a cactus store and he is starting to add myceliated blocks to his cactus soil. He says that with the experiments that they're doing they're getting 30 years of growth out of their cactuses in just three years. 

NH: Do you have any final thoughts you want to share? 

SS: I think a really big change is about to happen where [mushrooms are] going to become a big business. And I think that will bring us two steps forward, one step back in a lot of ways. 

I really want to see mushrooms fully utilized in this world, but it's already becoming this huge corporate environment, where it used to be a very counterculture science. As I start this business the biggest question that I have is, how can I make mushrooms in a way that serves everyone and not just the kind of Prius/Whole Foods crowd? I think that hasn't really been answered to yet; the potential is there. We know we can produce this protein-rich food at a fraction of the resources that we use to produce meat and a lot of other crops that we grow in the wrong places. This is a great solution for feeding our urbanized world, but we just need to find a way to make it accessible and beneficial to more than people who just want to spend money on a fancy ingredient. 

As things become big business, keeping that citizen science alive is really important. But that free education moment is not going to be here forever. And I can't just donate everything that I grow. I have to be able to make some money to keep the lights on in the studio and just keep this place running. As somebody right out of school, I'm very naively idealistic about everything, but I think things can be better than we've done them before. The more you get your head into what people are doing, the more you realize that there's a lot more happening. A lot of doors in the world are closing, a lot of doors in the world are opening, and mushrooms are a really exciting place [that] we should turn our mind’s eye to.

The Politics of Indigo: a Q&A with Deja Chappell

Deja Chappell ’21 has worked with the YSFP as a Market Manager and as a Seed-to-Salad Coordinator. This year, she leads the natural dye workshops for YSFP students, and participates in farm workdays. She is currently pursuing her B.A. in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.

Camden Smithtro ’22 is part of the YSFP’s communications team. She is an Environmental Studies major, with a concentration in Food and Agriculture. The best part of her job is learning from her fellow YSFP staff members!

Camden Smithtro: How did you begin dyeing with indigo?

Deja Chappell: I got involved with natural dyeing really randomly, just being on Instagram and looking at people do natural dyeing or mending, and fashion sewing. Pretty much anything with textiles. I was like, ‘oh, this is really cool!’

Before this I’d been introduced to the idea of eco-fashion, which was presented as ‘you better make really good individual choices. And you better, you know, only buy really expensive ethical brands.’ But then looking into it more, and also finding more people of color in that section of Instagram, I realized that eco-fashion was bigger than just your individual decisions.

There's a whole global fast-fashion industry that's built on exploitation and unsound ecological practices. So I sort of saw natural dyes as a way to counter that. Yeah, it's really tactile, and it's really cool. And yeah, it was this aesthetic preference, but it was also this political decision as well.  

I started following this one particular dyer, Graham Keegan. And he was doing a national tour, basically a cross-country dye workshop tour. I saw there was one in Alabama last summer, right before I was about to go out of the country. And so I was like, ‘what if I signed up and just went to do it? Otherwise I wouldn't know how to [dye with natural indigo].’ And then I went to that workshop, and that was a really wonderful experience. I met a chef there who had been involved in the YSFP in the early days, and knew Alice Waters. It was in the middle of nowhere, at an Antebellum mansion near Selma in a place called Marion, Alabama. It was a very interesting experience. I learned a lot and that's when I realized after you process all the indigo, and after you make the vat setup, there is so much room to be creative.

And of course, I'm still learning more. I'm from the Southeast, and am the descendant of enslaved people. I thought about exploitative mono-cropping and enslaved labor in the Southeast and how we always hear that they were growing cotton. When I researched more, I realized they were also growing indigo, because indigo grows really well in humid climates. And I realized not only is this [Southern land] unceded stolen territory that's being exploited, with its soils being diminished and ruined from the plantation economy, but this exploitation was also tied to the global textile market. And to this day, I feel like there's a connection between racial capitalism and the fast fashion industry, especially all of the waste and environmental destruction from fast fashion today. So I feel connected to natural dying in a political sense. Even if it's just an interest, it still has these political implications.

CS: So you follow these people on Instagram, then you went to the workshop. Was the next step talking to Jeremy and bringing the indigo to the farm? Or was there also an in-between?

DC: Oh, yes! So the way that the Yale Farm started to grow indigo began with the all-staff meeting in spring 2019. I had already been working for the Farm coordinating with public schools for Seed to Salad. And then we had the all-staff meeting and Marisa talked about growing mushrooms, and Jeremy made a point that the Farm is a place where we want to support everyone’s curiosity. And we will also pay [for students] to do cool things. So, at the end of that meeting, I just went up to Jeremy and I was like, would we ever grow indigo? And Jeremy told me ‘yes, the Farm is focused on food, fiber, and fuel. So that would fall into the fiber category. And that is absolutely something we'd be interested in doing.’

And then I told Jacquie, and Jacquie told me that someone had tried to do, you know, indigo and natural dyes before and it just sort of faded out, but the Farm would love to do it again. So it's actually not even me that started it. Many people before me have been interested. But it really was just that simple conversation.

The next thing I knew, Jeremy is telling me that he’s going to be planting indigo for the summer [of 2019]. So then when I came back to school that fall, we had this little test plot of indigo.

CS: Yeah, I was a Lazarus Summer Intern that summer. I remember seeing the baby indigo!

DC: And I'll just go ahead and say that last year, when I tried to process the plants that was my first time ever doing that, it failed. I let them soak too long. And then I also did that again this year. But the encouragement from Jeremy and Jacquie and everybody has been: it's okay to fail here. This didn't work out this year, and we'll do it again next year. We'll try again, and we'll learn. I still wish we could dye with our own indigo. But I feel like next year, we will know exactly what to do.

CS: Can you walk me through how you get from plant to pigment?

DC: Yes. But first I want to — part of this process being so political is acknowledging that something you think can only be done one way is just maybe one of many ways. It may be a way that was developed for efficiency and not for any other goal in mind. So the way that we attempted to extract our indigo is through aqueous extraction, which just means soaking in water. Indigofera tinctoria is the plant type. But when we say indigo, indigo is the pigment within the plant. In the plant state, you can dye with that directly onto fabric. But to make an indigo that is the most legible as indigo dye, you have to turn that into pigment. I think it's indigoten into indoxyl, which is the oxidative form of that. And that is where this aqueous extraction process comes in.

We soak the leaves in water, and the temperature really matters. You can absolutely do a cold soak. Some dyers say the cold soak gives you a pure, richer color. Then you soak that in water. And when that water starts to turn teal, that's the prime time to then go process the pigment that's been soaking. If you let it soak too long, the water turns brown or darker. That means it has soaked past the time where you could really process it with the aqueous extraction. And that's what we've now done twice. But we won't do it again!

If the process works, you take the leaves and debris out and add slaked lime or calcium hydroxide. Ryan Steele ’21, our in-house chemist, can explain the actual formula and what happens, but you start by whisking the slaked lime in, just a couple of teaspoons per gallon. It’s about an hour-long process of whisking on and off. It takes a while. But once you've whisked it enough, that pigment binds into itself and it can settle on the bottom. Then you let it settle, and keep it absolutely still.

Finally, you pour off the water on the top, and now you have a blue paste. The blueness of that paste is going to be based on the time that you harvested and the amount of time you let the leaf soak. So no two vats are going to be the same, and no two process extractions are going to have the same hue. Making the vat involves iron and a little more slick line and heat.

CS: I’m just thinking about all this. It's such a cool process.

DC: Yes, it's a cool process, but it is chemical heavy, compared to what we've been doing with the marigolds and the scabiosa and the dahlias, which just involves steaming to get pigment directly from the flowers. And again, there are methods with indigo leaves that are more similar to that. We haven't tried it, but the color comes out a little bit more teal than the blue we’ve seen.

So yes, this aqueous extraction method is one method, but it's not the only method. Fibershed has an extraction guide. They take a stance and say the aqueous extraction method comes from this idea of efficiency, and just trying to convert a whole lot of leaves into indigo really quickly. But that is sort of a capitalist framework of trying to get the pigment, which is just like, ‘let's get it and let's not think about anything else.’ There is also a Japanese method called sukumo. It's actually an ongoing compost pile of the plant which takes multiple years, you know. It takes way more time to cultivate that and then to sustain it, but it actually gives just as rich, if not richer, pigment. But that's not the timeline that a for-profit production would be on. For the ease of our farm, we're doing aqueous extraction. It's something interesting to consider, all the different ways that you could extract pigment.

Another cool thing about the indigo pigment that Ryan can explain a little bit more thoroughly, is that you have all these time windows you need to meet to keep the pigment alive. If we leave our leaves soaking too long, like I was talking about before, it's like there's some sort of irreversible process that disintegrates the pigment. I don't fully understand it. But yes. There are ways to preserve the thing that we want, without just putting it in water and taking it out.

This is a water-intensive process by the way. The water waste from fashion and textiles is a major polluter globally. There are companies that do have a waterless cycle, which means they keep the wastewater and use it again, or something similar. But in general, there's a ton of toxic water waste from textiles and it definitely happens more in the Global South fueling markets in the Global North rather than the other way around.

CS: Where do you see yourself going with this hobby or this interest?

DC: I hope that the Yale Farm continues to do natural dyeing at any scale after I'm gone. I would love to study sustainable textiles. I'm not particularly interested in working in the fashion industry. But I am very interested in any way we can have sustainable processes for cultural and aesthetic things that people are attached to. Everyone wears blue jeans and there's all sorts of trends and standards for what people wear with their clothes. Clothes are very transient, but they're also very personal. I would love it if we could still have our culture, but not have all of the ecological devastation and labor exploitation. I would love if we could still have that, but I do think that we would need a fundamental restructuring of the entire global economy and the dismantling of racial capitalism.

But as far as natural dyeing, I think it's just something that is fun, and I'll try to do it wherever I go. One thing that I realized through this process is that you don't have to turn your interests or your hobbies into something marketable. You could do an experiment, and you can be interested in it for a little bit, walk away from it, and then come back to it. And if someone becomes interested in it, because of what I’m doing, then that's worth it.

CS: Do you have any final thoughts that you want to share?

DC: I'm still learning about, and want to center a vision for returning to natural ways of doing things that actually account for Indigenous, Black, and Third World histories of sustainable living and innovation. Often, when I think of indigo dyeing, the first place my mind goes to is Japan. I actually do have Japanese heritage; my mom is Japanese and Black. But there's all these lovely pieces from centuries in the past, and those things are preserved in museums. Naybe because we're growing Japanese indigo for climactic reasons, I think of Japan. But you know, natural dyeing and indigo extraction from different types of plants has been prominent throughout Central America and Africa, especially West Africa, and also all throughout Asia. It's really exciting to think about the global histories and epicenters of textile innovation throughout history, and connecting them all in this global sense—beyond just one culture.

7th Annual Melon Forum

In previous years, the Melon Forum gathered together seniors from across Yale to present their theses on food and agriculture. Amongst friends, family, professors, food, and drinks, the seniors would celebrate the culmination of their year’s work. As this kind of gathering was not possible this past May, we’ve chosen to commemorate the scholarship of last year’s seniors through a digital platform.

The 2020 Melon Forum Brochure features seven seniors: Rocky Lam, Marisa Vargas-Morawetz, Natasha Feshbach, Annie Cheng, Tiana Wang, Jessica Trinh, and Mara Hoplamazian. Read their abstracts in the provided link!

Graphic design by Vicky Wu ’21.

Content Link Block

Select a page and create a visual link to it. Learn more

Voices Blog

Pickling and Preserving as Legacy

Charlotte’s Illustrated Recipe Cards. See hyperlink below for the full digital PDF.

This project is an exploration of the various ways in which we define preservation. I approached it with an interest in creating physical recipes to preserve knowledge, memory, and community during a time in which distance is at the forefront of everyone's mind. I wanted to focus specifically on Yale Farm produce to create potential for future in-person culinary workshops. It is also important to note that this is by no means the end of this project. Like any good recipe collection, I want this to be built upon, altered, and exchanged by the YSFP community. Like any good pickle, alteration is key to preservation.

Peering into my own home kitchen this past summer, I sorted through the box of recipes that my grandma passed down to my mom, as well as the box that my mom jump-started for me last December. The recipes are, for the most part, familiar. Some credit where they came from; others don’t. Some ask you to rely on intuition; others detail exactly what every step ought to smell, look, and taste like. All carry the mark of care and memory. These recipes, hand scrawled by generations of family members and friends, have made me reflect on that which is able to be preserved over time. Much has been lost over these past few months and much, in general, is lost through the passing of time. These recipes, however, have endured, connecting me to people who have no conception of my existence. I wanted to find a way to cultivate connection and community during this time of isolation. Though these recipes were created with the intention of future in-person cooking collaborations, I have also presented them in a digitalized format to adapt to the current safety measures keeping us from communing.

In addition to centering my project on the theme of preserving recipes and community, I also paid homage to this idea by focusing my recipes on the food preservation methods of pickling and preserving. I explored the history of both of these practices, tracing the first instance of pickling back to 2400 B.C., where evidence was found of Mesopotamians soaking cucumbers in acidic brine. Pickles quickly caught on as a health food in 50 B.C. when Queen Cleopatra credited them with contributing to her health and legendary beauty. The link between pickled goods and health became common knowledge, and was later used to the advantage of Columbus in his voyage to the new world to stave off scurvy among his sailors. By the 1650s, a real industry began to arise around pickles in the US. Dutch farmers in the area now known as Brooklyn began growing cucumbers that were, in turn, pickled and sold on the streets, the beginning of what would become the world’s largest pickle industry.

Pickling laid much of the groundwork for the innovative thinking that led to canning. In the early 19th century, canning began as a preservation practice born out of the need to sustain troops. During Napoleon’s attempt to conquer Europe, he created a contest for the general public, promising 12,000 francs to the person who could come up with the best way to feed his soldiers. A french candymaker, Nicolas Appert, won the competition when he discovered that placing food in a bottle, removing the air before sealing it, and boiling the bottle, would preserve its contents.. Using glass containers, Appert preserved vegetables, fruits, jellies, syrups, soups and dairy products. Pasteurized milk started showing up on the tables of military officers and preserved products became a household staple for many middle class families.

However, Appert did not understand why his invention worked; he just knew that it did. A half century later, Louis Pasteur discovered how microbes cause food to spoil, illuminating the relationship between heating jars to a high temperature and destroying food-spoiling microorganisms (thus the name “pasteurization” rather than “appertization.”)

The invention of preservation practices, not just limited to pickling and canning, but salting, freezing, and drying, is also tied to the idea I touched on earlier: food being used to create community. As soon as humankind had a method to preserve food, they were able to spend much less time hunting and gathering
and more time with one another, building civilizations and, with that, community.

I hope you enjoy these recipes and have the chance to think about the ways in which food helps you commune with the people and spaces you love. Happy cooking!

Art in Agricultural Labor Movements

“La Ofrenda” by Yreina Cervantez, 1989. Restored in 2016.

How do worker-led agricultural movements use graphics to communicate? I considered this question, among many others, in my independent project for the Yale Farm Summer Internship. Here is a link to the full Zine.

Cooking to Gather

The idea that food builds community and bridges cultural identities is often taken as a given. I wanted then, to imagine a workshop series that looks at the ways pop food culture has failed to deliver on its promise of community-building and equity.

By considering non-conventional food actors, I hope the workshop’s participants can interrogate whitewashing and appropriation in a food culture dominated by celebrity and social media-dominated food culture. Can we build more intentional communities of care?

Photo by Itai Almor '20.

Here is a link to the full project.

The Coded Language of Southern Cookbooks

Published in 1912, Bibin’s “Southern Cookbook” documented the invaluable culinary contributions that Black domestic laborers made to Southern cuisine.

"Bread, to me, should be a part of every meal. It is so good, so satisfying." - Edna Lewis

For me, bread represents a break from the cooking traditions of my mom. I've spent thousands of hours with my mom in the kitchen, watching her turn out pastries, cakes, cookies, pies, and everything in between. For a brief time when I was young, she became a freelance cake decorator to help make ends meet. But I never saw her bake a single loaf of bread.

I'm not really sure when or why I became obsessed with bread. I think my mom was disappointed, in a way, because she saw it as a rejection of the baking she tried to pass down. No one in my mom's entire family bake traditional yeasted bread. They make cornbread, biscuits, pancakes, and other "simple breads"; "poor people food", my mom once called them. We bake different biscuits depending on the occasion.

I didn't question why no one in my family had learned to bake traditional yeasted bread until I took a class on food history. It turns out there’s plenty of reasons that two-day-fermented­, spelt-blend sourdough breads are not eaten in my family. Some reasons are regional (my mom is from rural Appalachia), others are due to the time in history (baking powder more available than yeast), but the biggest reason is simply class.

Bread, particularly white fluffy bread, has historically belonged to the upper and middle class. I wanted to find out how cookbooks then, contribute to these class hierarchies.

Here is the full link to my Zine.

Mapping the "Grandparents' Garden"

What’s in a history of a garden?

I first learned about the Grandparents’ Garden** through fellow Yale Sustainable Food Program student and friend, Addee Kim. We were at our friend Lauren Kim’s Knead 2 Know talk on urban food forests in Taiwan, when Addee mentioned the Garden during the Q & A session. At the time, I had just formally accepted my summer internship with the Yale Farm, the beginning of a (hopefully!) lifelong engagement with food systems, food justice, and sustainable agriculture. I knew I wanted to do my independent project on the Garden, even though I had never been there, let alone walked past it.

When Covid-19 outbreaks worsened across the United States, I struggled with finding ways to connect with the gardeners. People were already on edge, so a stranger walking over and striking up a conversation would likely cause alarm or at the very least, discomfort. Given that many of the gardeners were elderly, I hesitated to conduct ethnographic research face-to-face in the first few weeks of my internship. What follows is a mental and visual roadmap of the many, many conversations with people— from my housemates Emily Sigman and Steve Winter to our next door neighbor Caroline Posner (one of the few younger, non-immigrant gardeners)— that eventually led me to meeting several gardeners, who have their own sections below. This project would not be possible without them, their patience, generosity, and openness to a complete stranger. Aside from those who have a direct connection to the Garden, I am incredibly grateful to Jacquie Munno, Sarah Mele, Erwin Li, Abby Lee, and Mark Bomford for giving me insightful guidance throughout this project period.

This project is ultimately the culmination of my journey among a web of interrelated people and communities. My time in New Haven this summer has also given me time to experiment with gardening and growing. I like to think that by doing gardening every day across the street from the Grandparents’ Garden, I was engaging in an indirect form of “participant observation.” By learning and experiencing the challenges of growing vegetables from seed with limited knowledge and resources, I could also manage to understand some of the challenges and delights that my neighbor gardeners were experiencing.

A link to the full zine can be found here.

**The “Grandparents’ Garden” is an informal name, one that I choose to use throughout this zine for ease of reference. I borrow this name from Addee, and from local news articles that highlight the elderly demographic of the Gardeners.

It is important to note that not all of the gardeners are necessarily grandparents, and even more so, that the Garden is living and transforming even as I conduct my research. Even my usage of the term “Grandparents’ Garden” (rather than “the garden” or “my plot”) denotes my status as an outside observer looking in, since each gardener has their own ways of naming and thinking about the Garden.

"Would I Eat It?" A Look At Atlanta's COVID-19 Emergency Food Relief

As the falcon wing doors of the Tesla Model X opened, the bottom of the cardboard box I held gave way. Cans clattered, grapefruits rolled, and a waterlogged box of powdered mashed potatoes hit the pavement with a splat. We wedged what was left of the pulpy boxes into the car and gave it a little pat as it sped off to make deliveries. The rain had soaked my cloth mask and I wished for gills. It was my fifth week working as a packer in Atlanta’s COVID-19 Emergency Grocery Delivery depots. 

When my Yale Farm Summer Internship went remote, I had already journeyed south to be with my family. Funding from the internship had enabled me to volunteer, so I began working at four grocery depots in Atlanta, Georgia: CJ, SWEEAC, ICM, and FH. These depots arose as part of emergency responses to rising food insecurity during the pandemic due to lay-offs, illness, and economic hardship. The depots were also intended to help elderly and immunocompromised people avoid visiting hubs for infection: grocery stores and self-choice food pantries. As I packed the groceries, I wondered how these particular items were chosen. Were they what clients needed? Did the highly variable supply add up to the same nutrients?

By the time I began volunteering, these pantries had already undergone vast transformations in their models. Before, clients could shop amongst the supply and choose items they knew they needed, accounting for their tastes, diet-related illnesses and dietary restrictions. Emergency grocery delivery, on the other hand, uses a pre-packed model that is convenient, based on family size, and the parcels are uniform. Due to the transmissibility of COVID-19, this has become the most common, most efficient, and safest way to carry out emergency grocery distribution. They needed more hands to meet management needs and we volunteers had newfound free-time to pitch in. 

To understand how these delivery services were addressing the nutritional needs of clients in Atlanta, I catalogued the contents of bags at four depots, basing the percentages on a 2,000 calorie diet and calculating the percentages per person and per day. 2,000 is an arbitrary number of calories. It is based on the FDA’s penchant for nice round numbers. Recommended calories are based on the weight and activity level of an individual. I averaged the number of people in a served household and used the 2,000 calorie diet because it was standard.

I found that, although CJ, ICM, and SWEEAC served similar populations, they varied immensely in the content of their packages. The presence of more or less of a food group was based upon that week’s availability of the group, not designated for a specific need or request.

In a review of food pantries in high income countries from 1980-2015, food bags were low in vitamins A, C, and calcium and adequate in macronutrients. In the pantries I studied, the micronutrient levels varied from site to site with SWEEAC as the most consistently high-nutrient bags.

Although SWEEAC appeared to provide consistently high nutritional values, I had concerns about food borne illness while distributing their boxes. Many pantries and food banks use a similar criteria for admitting or refusing food: “would I eat it?” I abide by the five-second-rule. That’s not a great standard to approve food for the most vulnerable, immuno-compromised, elderly, and food insecure populations in Atlanta. This criteria is not uniform and it was difficult to imagine myself eating the types of foods we were packing to begin with due to the large quantities of the staple items we doled out. 

The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996 limits the liability of food donors under the pretense of food waste concerns (30 to 40 percent of food in the USA is wasted)  and the suggestion that, if 5% of food waste was recovered, 4 million Americans could be fed. Because food borne illness is common and rampant (48 million cases annually), donors must be protected from liability except in cases of gross negligence in order to incentivize donation and rescue of waste. Georgia, like most states, does not have state legislation or regulations about food safety for donations beyond absolution of liability for food donors. 

The meat handling processes made me more uncomfortable than anything else I experienced. I don’t eat meat and was repulsed by the fluids leaking from the styrofoam. At one pantry, the dripping packages were bagged together with twice-baked potatoes and other non-meat foods. The meats were often close to expiration (which is common in food donations because recently expired food is still safe to eat, just not able to be sold). These shrink-wrapped bags of frozen meat would sit sweating in the Georgia sun for an hour before they were packed into cars to their destinations where they might sit on a porch or door step for a while longer. Once, we opened the freezer to find that the 5lb bricks of ground turkey had defrosted to a sickening tenderness to the touch. They went out with all the other food. Raw meat was a part of the emergency relief because clients demanded it. Would I eat it? No. But enforcing dietary restrictions on other people can be patronizing and culturally insensitive.

“It is difficult for pantries and banks to refuse donations. The Atlanta Food Bank rarely turns away donations. Their intent is to bring people to the table and thus, their food acceptance policy is welcoming even to food they know they can’t use.”

A pre-packed parcel of food is inherently curated to the assumption of what people eat: a mix of food groups and a diversity of items. Going further to create a vegetarian or low sugar parcel can mean throwing away supplies or refusing donations without regard to client desires. Given the pandemic precautions, people are unable to choose their own food. For people living more than a one mile radius from a grocery store, there is a heightened risk of heart failure. Should they be denied red meat, a known cardiovascular hazard? It is difficult for pantries and banks to refuse donations. The Atlanta Food Bank rarely turns away donations. Their intent is to bring people to the table and thus, their food acceptance policy is welcoming even to food they know they can’t use. They either find a way to move this food or try to dispose of it in an environmentally conscious way. The reason for this welcoming policy is to allow them to communicate with the distributor to see if a better option can be reached with healthier food. As a result, some of the food they have to move is sugary, highly processed, or otherwise unhealthy. 

These policies contribute to the randomness of the COVID-19 emergency grocery response. What I mean by randomness here, is the the lack of a system and the subsequent nonuniformity of the product. Based on their depot assignment, clients can receive anywhere from 22 to 83 percent of a 2,000 calorie diet. The quantity is not based on the severity of the need. Calories alone are not enough to remedy acute hunger. Randomness invites food waste, culturally and medically inappropriate foods, and increased lack of control for individuals over their food choices. The speed at which the depots emerged and the rate that hunger continues to grow has created a network with with variable offerings and an unclear strategy beyond calorie fulfillment. 

“Excess and redundancy are signs that this response to COVID-19 related hunger should be more systematic.”

I often wondered, while packing, how families were using the jumbo cans of tomatoes and five pound bags of grits each week. One of my tasks included calling clients to take them off the list for delivery. One client told me she wished she had been taken off the list earlier because the dry goods were just piling up in her cupboard. Depots are limited in funding and volunteer staffing. Keeping up, week to week, with the rate at which client circumstances are changing has become difficult. Excess and redundancy are signs that this response to COVID-19 related hunger should be more systematic.

Georgia has reopened against the wishes of Atlanta’s mayor. As the governor sues the mayor for her attempt to restrict reopening, COVID-19 cases have steadily increased. The moratorium on evictions is about to expire and back rent is piling up. Food insecurity will continue to grow throughout the state. The sustained chaos of the pandemic has begun to feel routine. Some pantries have been forced to move locations as the spaces they used revert to kids camps and churches. Prior to the pandemic The Atlanta Community Food Bank had a multi-year expansion plan for growth but the massive numbers they are seeing now have accelerated their timeline. The anti-hunger groups’ state of emergency has endured for longer than expected and their efforts show no sign of slowing. Emergencies call for rushes of adrenaline and short bursts of speed and precision. Calling the response an “emergency” has begun to lose meaning. The end is not in sight for this emergency and these hunger relief groups have accepted that COVID-19 emergency grocery delivery is the new normal.

We Could Play Eden All Day

Failed Inosculation, Part of Multimedia Project by Angela Higuera ‘22.

“Do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back?” - Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead

For the Yale Farm summer internship, I created a multimedia project that explores my relationship to land and agriculture.

The conception of my project first occurred after reading William Cronon’s astute piece, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” His was the first piece of writing I had come across to explicitly question and undermine my own understanding of Nature and the American landscape. I’ve always been drawn to landscapes for their unique ability to convey our subdued emotional states. Contemporary photographers, such as Rebecca Norris Webb and Jennifer Garza-Cuen, were great inspirations; they both use people-less shots of American landscapes to express internal turmoil. Only after reading “Changes in the Land” by Cronon and “Uncommon Ground,” a series of essays concerning the human relationship to land, did I become attuned to the ways Webb’s and Cuen’s images reify our mythologized portrayal of Nature.

The imagery in this exhibit is accompanied by excerpts from Danez Smith’s book of poetry, Don’t Call Us Dead. Smith’s poems —in addition to discussing a plethora of challenges specific to Black Americans— offer Land as an ever shifting and complex character. “we could play Eden all day” is a line from Smith’s poem, “Summer, somewhere.” Though this current body of work doesn’t explicitly address the role that Western religion plays in my fraught relationship to land, the title is meant to suggest an alternative and liberating understanding of Christianity’s confined representation of Nature, one that celebrates the mundane and encourages human engagement with our non-human material surroundings.

To view the full multimedia project, click here.

Art Show: Opening Reception

A History of SPAM Workshop

Photography by Logan Howard '21.

Aesthetics of Food & Farming

Besides cooking and gardening, painting and drawing have been wonderful and healing ways for YSFP students to stay connected with food and agriculture, especially while physical distancing. Through the creative visual lead position and other opportunities, our students often use their art to tell stories about the Yale Farm. In doing so, they add their own voice and experiences to the rich conversation around the aesthetic of food; what’s worth learning? Examining? Re-imagining?

“Sungold Cherry Tomatoes” by Drew Vallero, Stanford '22

“Summer Eggplant” by Drew Vallero, Stanford '22

“Honeybee & Flower” by Drew Vallero, Stanford '22

“Rhode Island White” by Drew Vallero, Stanford '22

"Harvesting Carrots" by Vuong Mai '21

“Sleeping Among Plants'“ by Vuong Mai ‘21

“Spring on the Yale Farm Lazarus Pavilion” by Jisu Sheen ‘19

“Summer Rays” by Jisu Sheen ‘19