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.

Community Food: An Exploration of Cultural Foodscapes Through the Personal and Political| LSI '24

This post is part of Maia Roothaan’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

1. Around Our Kitchen Table

Out of 10? I’d ask after each of us had taken a bite of this morning’s buttermilk pancakes with flax and chia seeds. I always asked my family members to rate my cooking projects. And I did really wish to know how I could improve my skillset. It was my way of taking care of them, catering to dietary restrictions, flavor palates, comfort foods. 

Hmmmm, 9.5, a little too sweet. But still very good. Thank you, Maia. My dad reached across the table to dollop greek yogurt and applesauce on top of his stack, a combination I always found myself perplexed by. 

They’re good. My younger brother, Oliver, was dipping his pancakes in maple syrup using his hands. Even though we’re now 17 and 20, he still responds in much the same way to my queries. 

So, what’s in them? I loved this question. I still do. I recited the list of ingredients, noting how I’d added some seeds for just a bit of extra protein. 

2. Our Time in Aix

Je vous souviens! Vous êtes la fille qui a acheté la confiture des abricots et lavande, oui? I know you! You’re the girl who bought the jam with lavender and apricots, yes? 

It was one of our last mornings in France. Rose and I had visited the jam man, as we called him, several weeks ago to purchase an Aixoise special–apricot and lavender jam. I’d returned this morning to take in the scenery before this summer was over. 

Aix-en-Provence is a special place, especially for someone who loves food like I do. Each morning, vendors set up stands on cobblestoned streets. The market on the Rue Lapierre was on my path to class each morning. Often, I’d stop during my brisk morning commute to buy some tomatoes for a dinner salad with burrata or apricots for an upside down cake. Interestingly, these markets were cheaper than grocery stores, something I was unfamiliar with due to my American upbringing. 

My family had become regular Farmer’s Market go-ers during the pandemic several years before. I’d spot one of my elementary school teachers buying corn, or one of my friends working at the Hewn bakery stand. It became a spontaneous meeting place in a world that had become so insular. Instead of cobblestone streets, our Farmer’s Market was tucked into a parking lot downtown. We’d go religiously, even if just to buy a few things. 

Forever a hostess, the balcony of my house in Aix was the site of weekly Wednesday dinners. I’ve written, spoken, and thought a lot about these meals. We’d follow a ritual, Rose and I concocting a dessert without measurements (the house didn’t have measuring spoons or cups, something I reminisce on with delight) and Olivia and Isabel making the main and our salad. Each one a variation on the familiar. Hours passed with laughter and conversations I cannot recall, but I do remember the feeling of togetherness that hovered around those meals and on that balcony.

3. Vermont, July 2024

Our car curved along the road, following the path of a steady stream. My eyes took in the mist woven between the mountains ahead. I left my window open in the back despite the cool air whipping through the car, tossing my hair. 

We’d had a weekend full of alternative food, something I was both familiar and unacquainted with from my more urban upbringing. My parents had carved out their own alternative food spaces in our home, making homemade yogurt or bread. It was something they’d been intentional about. Here, it seemed that the practices I questioned growing up were the general cultural drift. 

On our first full day, my friends and I had climbed to the top of Mount Hunger. Our daypacks toted all the typical snack suspects–GORP, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and some sliced fruit. Although not an uncommon experience, I know we all felt lucky as we ate our sandwiches in contemplative silence. 

Saturday morning consisted of a walk around the Montpelier Farmers Market. In service of learning more about the foodways and culture of those perched behind the tables selling their goods, my eyes fell upon each, deciding who might be most willing to speak with me. Suddenly, I recognized a classmate from my high school in Illinois working behind the breadstand. In this way, I’d become an acquaintance of the unfamiliar. 

Maeve and I spoke for a few minutes. Finally, I nervously told her about my project, hoping that she might have insight into the story of Red Hen Breads. Randy, the owner, came over and eagerly explained how he’d always been baking bread. 

Probably since I was three years old, with my mother. My mind flitted to helping my dad bake bread in our Breadmaster and returned to our conversation. I’ve always wondered if it’s the things we’re passionate about innately, when we’re young, that we will somehow make a return to. 

Later, I parted ways with my friends to see which other vendors I might be able to speak to. I found myself drawn to a honey and foraged mushroom stand. On one side jars of honey were displayed in varying shades of amber and opaqueness with dipping sticks to try each before purchase. I first tested the buckwheat honey–it was reminiscent of a Serbian wild honey brought to us by a family friend. 

I began to talk with Dave, the owner, who told me that his favorite way to eat his honey was by concocting a chocolate bar with a honeycomb filling. 

So, how’d you get into beekeeping? I picked up a jar of creamy honey, one of my favorite types to spread on an open-face slice of bread. 

It was this man right over there! Rick–he’s the one who got me into the beekeeping world. I’d noticed earlier how the two had engaged animatedly, laughing and cracking jokes with their customers. I smiled to myself, thinking about how the foods we come to love were like fingerprints we could leave on the lives of others. 

Sonya’s Subaru pulled into the driveway of the farm hosting the second annual Butterfest. After several hours of barn dancing and swimming in the river nearby to the farm, my friends and I joined the group of people gathered around a long table piled with potluck dishes. Clad in a butter-yellow dress, our host explained that this event was meant to commemorate the spirit of butter, of richness, and of community. 

My friends and I propped ourselves up against picnic tables, surveying the crowd as we ate our tapas-style meal. It was just the hour in the evening when everything was covered in the glowy haze one can usually only grasp on a movie screen. I began to realize, more and more, that the foodscape I wished to see, and had glimpsed here, in Vermont, was one cultivated by my community and individuals, rather than the invisible hands of government I’d frequently been taught could create successful preservation of foodways. 

As I look toward the future, I hope to continue writing about food, people, and my own relationship to both. Community and care drive food, and I plan to continue noticing how both seep into our American consciousness, something that is valuable in part because of the impossibility of encapsulating all of its truths.

Three Cakes & a Strawberry Salad | LSI '24

This post is part of Grey Battle’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

A few months ago, as my grandmother lay in a hospital bed, she told me, "You may not make Southern food, but you cook like a Southerner." She was sipping Cauliflower Miso Soup from a teaspoon when she added, "What I mean by that is, you don't make what we make, but you love people with food the way we do."

I am a well-fed child, and my grandmother, great-grandmother, and aunts are all teachers. I learned to read by sounding out recipes in a small, blue kitchen nestled among the trees in Tanner-Williams, Alabama. Here, I learned to set serveware, spell name cards, grin and swallow casseroles, say please and thank you, and hold hands for prayer around the dining room table. 

This project is an adaptation of four cherished family recipes, previously published in community cookbooks, to a plant-based style of baking. I have subbed ingredients, recalculated ratios, and transformed methods, allowing traditional recipes room to breathe, grow, and be inclusively shared and passed down. 

The traditional foods found in this booklet connect me to the women who raised me, and through these adaptations, this bond is strengthened. The language of loving through food is not constrictive but endlessly creative—a language my family taught me to speak and one I now share with you.

Find the zine here.

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.

Floral Pigments: A Recipe for Water-Soluble Printmaking Ink | LSI '24

This post is part of Sonya Sagan-Dworsky’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

This summer my independent project grew from a continued interest in process as a form of artistic expression. As a sculptor and printmaker I am constantly playing with my definition of a finished piece. So much of the joy that surrounds my artistic practice grows from an appreciation for method, material and the act of physical experimentation. I view my work as a visual record of the time and labor that goes into the piece itself and all the materials or tools needed for the piece’s creation. 

For my project I chose to focus on relief printmaking because the medium straddles painting and sculpture. Even though the carved block is used to transfer the image onto paper the object can also exist as a piece of art.  Reduction prints, a specific method  of relief printmaking, requires the artist to revisit the same block and continue carving as a new color is applied on top of the previous prints. The process results in a final print with enhanced visual depth, but also limits the number of editions of the image. 

Nori Paste Base
1. Mix 3 Tbsp or 20 grams of rice flour with 100 ml of cold water. Stir and set aside. 
2. Heat up 150 ml of water in a small saucepan until boiling.
3. Pour rice flour mixture into boiling water and begin whisking constantly. Whisk until mixture thickens and becomes translucent, about five minutes.
4. Turn off heat and whisk until mixture is lukewarm. Transfer to a glass container and place in the refrigerator until cold. Mixture will last for two to three days.

Pigment Powder
1. Harvest fresh Marigold and Cosmos blossoms plucking flowers from stem.
2. Pack blossoms tightly on the shelves of the dehydrator separating marigolds and cosmos. Set to low temp and dry for at least twenty four hours.  
3. Once dry, place blossoms in an airtight container. If desired, separate marigolds by color into yellow and orange flowers. 
4. For Marigolds take scissors and cut blossoms away from seed pod minimizing any green material from being cut. For Cosmos either pull petals from the center by hand or carefully cut petals loose. 
5. Place a half cup of dried petals into the spice grinder. Begin grinding, adding more dried petals until powder covers blades of grinder. Blend for multiple minutes for a fine powder. If needed, sifted powder with fine mesh sieve before storing in an airtight container. 

Printmaking Ink
1. Mix equal parts water with alcohol preferably gin which is best for archival purposes. I use about one teaspoon of each for four prints worth of ink. 
2. Slowly add gin and water mixture to one tablespoon of pigment powder until a thick smooth consistency is achieved. If too liquidy, continue adding pigment powder.
3. Mix two tablespoons of nori paste into the pigment mixture with a palette knife making sure there are no lumps. Once smooth take a soft brayer and roll out ink. Listen for a sticky noise and even coverage on the brayer. Roll ink onto prepared woodblock, applying two to three coats.
4a. When using a press, adjust pressure to work with the thickness of the carved block. Place dry paper on top of the inked block and roll through twice stopping in the middle to switch direction. Pull paper off the block and place on the drying rack. 
4b. When working by hand, place paper on an inked block and apply even pressure with a barren or back of one’s hand. 
5. Pull paper off the block and place on the drying rack.

A Summer of Fermentation on the Yale Farm | LSI '24

This post is part of Hardy Eville’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

This past fall, I brewed my first batch of beer for the Yale Farm. Over the rest of the academic year, I continued to brew and expanded into other forms of fermentation – making a few varieties of miso during the winter. My goal for the Lazarus Summer Internship was to build on these projects. I wanted to undertake projects that highlighted the summer produce of the Yale Farm, preserving some of these flavors for students to try in the Fall and Winter months. I also endeavored to experiment with new methods, build a better repertoire of fermentation techniques, and work on developing my own recipes. 

Why fermentation? I see fermentation as a unique way to process the many things that grow on the Yale Farm. Apart from additions like salt and sugar, many fermented products are not mixed with any additional ingredients as they would with cooking. I see fermentation as a way to enhance the flavors of any produce by bringing out qualities that already exist within it. With fermentation, less inputs (besides waiting time) are needed to create diverse flavors.

Over the course of the summer, I was very aware of the timing of everything growing at the farm. In order to properly ferment things on schedule I had to know exactly when something would be ripe or in bloom. Through this, I felt very connected with the week by week changes of the farm. There was always an exciting anticipation about what would be ready next for a project. I also enjoyed thinking about the ways to process each ingredient, deciding between kombucha, beer, vinegar, lacto-fermentation, miso pickling, koji fermentation, and more. 

Recipes:

11th Annual Melon Forum | April 10, 2024

On April 10, 2024, from 6:00 – 8:00 P.M., the Yale Sustainable Food Program hosted its eleventh annual Melon Forum at the Humanities Quadrangle, where 5 Yale seniors presented their senior theses relating to food and agriculture: Amelia Davidson, Jack Denning, Kanyinsola Anifowoshe, Tadea Martin-Gonzalez, and Lisbette Acosta, majoring in subjects from American Studies to Psychology. Cierra Ouelette and Bea Soto contributed their prospectuses to our 2024 Melon Forum brochure, which was collated by Hilary Griggs '24 who 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.

Kanyinsola Anifowoshe '24 began the event with her presentation, assessing the collaborative public art project, Solitary Gardens, through an abolition ecology framework. Applying recent scholarship on the intersections of race, social relations, space, gender, and power in her examples of letters from incarcerated individuals, Anifowoshe shared why ties to ecology can “uproot systems of death and domination.”

Following Anifowoshe, Lisbette Acosta '24 shared her senior thesis situated in her home country. Using statistical analysis, "Household food and water insecurity and the association with life satisfaction in the Dominican Republic," examined foodways and resource allocation changes after the pandemic, ultimately signaling a gap in resource allocation for older individuals, less educated individuals, and women.

We returned from a quick break, where we refilled our plates with the wonders of a Caseus cheese platter, to a presentation centering around the history of indigo. Amelia Davidson '24 took us on a journey of British and American imperialism, sharing the deep history of indigo from India, Japan, West Africa, and North America before colonial contact. Davidson weaves us through the imperial power structures of indigo up until the late nineteenth century, from its path to a “simple mercantile good,” to a color used to “appropriate and other non-Western cultural tastes.” 

While Davidson examined indigo production on a cross-continental scale, Tadea Martin-Gonzalez '24 looked at a multinational corporation, the United Fruit Company (UFC), at a singular site: Golfito, Costa Rica. In her presentation, Martin-Gonzalez used visual/site analysis along with familial oral history to unpack colonial nostalgia prevalent in a town built by UFC rooted in “principal Indigenous erasure and Black exclusion.” The preservation politics of place and space that are prevalent in the idea of banana culture in the 1930s in many ways lay a foundation for settler violence which is seen in the Megayacht culture emerging on the coastal waters of Golfito today.

Finally, Jack Denning '24 presented a portion of thesis research that in the end was omitted from his final paper: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU). Established in 1934 by a group of Black sharecroppers, STFU grew to nearly 400,000 members by 1938. Using historical analysis, Denning focuses on the speeches and life of one of STFU’s most outspoken non-Black union members, Claude Williams, articulating that Williams’ frameworks of racial capitalism allowed for a better understanding of poor working conditions prevalent in southern farmworkers.

Around fifty students gathered to watch these seniors present their culminating Yale academic works. We hope you’ll join us next year at our 12th annual Melon Forum, featuring projects from the Class of 2025.

To view photos from the event, please follow this link for the first half of the event, and follow this link for photos from the second half of the event. Photos by Fafa Van Ha ’22 and Avery Wayne ’26. 

Chewing the Fat with Jaime Sunwoo '14 | April 6, 2024

After our weekly Knead 2 Know presentation which featured a presentation from PwintPhyu Nandar MeSc '24, folks migrated from the Yale Farm to the Humanities Quadrangle Lecture Hall for a screening of Jaime Sunwoo’s performance film SPECIALLY PROCESSED AMERICAN ME (2022). The screening and Q&A with multidisciplinary artist Jaime Sunwoo '14 following the film was part of the Chewing the Fat speaker series, kicking off a weekend of events for Sunwoo, including a Shadow Puppetry workshop hosted by the Historical, Artistic, and Cultural Resources team of Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center.

Laughs and chuckles were heard throughout the hall during one of Specially Processed’s opening scenes: three Hormel Girls singing a jingle about all things SPAM, creatively using acrostic lyrics repeating the word S-P-A-M. These characters’ jingles, accompanied by a Hormel Cadet, are pieces of absurd humor interwoven throughout the autobiographical performance based upon Sunwoo’s Asian American upbringing and family experiences during and after the Korean War. The characters in Sunwoo’s play reference the Hormel Girls, an all-female performance group from the late 1940s who toured around the country promoting Hormel products, including SPAM.

Written by Sunwoo and co-directed by Sunwoo and Karim Muasher, Specially Processed tells Sunwoo’s story through the product SPAM, the canned meat. It investigates SPAM's legacy in the military, and its significance in the Asia-Pacific, from Mukbang’s trends on YouTube to shadow puppetry scenes depicting stories of the War itself, as remembered by Sunwoo’s grandmother.

During the Q&A, Sunwoo shared more of her creative process in writing the play, particularly how her family’s oral histories informed the storyline. When asked what it was like to run the show, Sunwoo explained that the play ran while masking and pandemic restrictions were still heavily present in New York’s theater scene, shaping both rehearsal capacity and viewer experience. She also articulated her thought process for certain costume and design decisions such as the large can of SPAM, noting that certain surreal aspects of the play are reflective of her emotions and perceptions of familial stories told throughout the play.

“It's been ten years since I graduated, and it was so joyful to return to share such a personal project. My time studying at Yale was foundational for my art practice. There, I dived into so many fields—art, history, science—and that curiosity still fuels my multidisciplinary, research-inspired process.” Sunwoo wrote on Instagram, following her visit.

We are grateful for Jaime’s time and thoughtful insights from graduating Yale, as well as Anthony Sudol for making the screening possible. Sunwoo’s visit was generously organized in partnership with Stella Choi '26, Ishikaa Kothari '25, Assistant Dean Joliana Yee of the Asian American Cultural Center, and sponsored by the Traphagen Alumni Speakers Series of the Yale College Office of Student Affairs, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the Yale School of Environment 1980 Fund.

Chewing the Fat with Chef Irene Li | February 22, 2024

On a cold when-will-winter-end Thursday afternoon, folks entered Timothy Dwight’s Head of College House for a College Tea featuring Irene Li. As they entered, attendees were greeted by college aides and the smell of dumplings. Lemongrass pork, curried sweet potato, and cheeseburger-filled dumplings covered an entire table, accompanied by creative sauce combinations—soy aioli, and sweet chili apple sauce, to name a few—for all to try.

Chef Irene Li drove down from Boston for a college tea as part of our Chewing the Fat speaker series in conjunction with Timothy Dwight College. Li described her work at Mei Mei Dumplings and Prepshift as promoting sustainability, food waste reduction, fair labor, and financial practices in the restaurant industry.

We began the tea by learning about Li’s bright college years and gap years at Cornell University, where she found a passion for food simultaneously with and without her family. At the end of a gap year in April 2012, Irene opened Mei Mei Dumplings the food truck with her siblings, which grew into a casual counter-style lunch and dinner eighteen months later. Today, Mei Mei operates as a factory, cafe, and classroom with a 30-person staff.

“I’m first and foremost a diner, and I am worried about the independent restaurant industry.” Li noted that her experience running Mei Mei through all its iterations impacted her desire to engage with local and state-level advocacy. She also wanted to apply her expertise in supporting other independent restaurants through Prepshift, a company that uses a reimbursement model with local governments to provide consulting, coaching, and technical assistance for small restaurant businesses across Massachusetts. Outside of Prepshift, Li has spent time advocating to raise Massachusett’s tipping wage, a policy that traces back to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. “In the end, we should just pay for what labor is worth,” Li responds after being asked what the restaurant experience would look like without tipping.

In the second half of the tea, questions arose about her second cookbook co-written with her sister Margaret titled Perfectly Good Food - A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. Perfectly Good Food teaches readers how to cook flexibly and creatively, with tips and recipes that are suitable for ingredient substitutions. On Friday, students were able to create dishes that took inspiration from Li’s book. First, the student group Asian Recipes at Yale hosted a luncheon at the Asian American Cultural Center, which was then followed by a noodle-pulling workshop hosted by Li, employing methods of “shopping the pantry” to Timothy Dwight's buttery inventory.

Many thanks to Irene for her stories, insights, and delicious dumplings. Li’s visit would not have been possible without the Asian American Cultural Center and Timothy Dwight College, so thank you to Assistant Dean Joliana Yee and Assistant Director Sheraz Iqbal of the Asian American Cultural Center, Timothy Dwight Head of College Mary Lui, Associate Head Vincent Balbarin, Timothy Dwight staff members Kimberly Rogers, Samantha Gambardella, and Sharon Goldbloom, and their college aides for making not only the college tea but also Irene’s various events during her visit a success.

Photos from the College Tea can be found here, and photos from the rest of Irene’s visit can be found here. Photos taken by Avery Wayne '26 and Fafa Van Ha '22.

Chewing the Fat with Woesha Hampson-Medina '18 | February 21, 2024

On the last Wednesday of February, at 6:00 PM, a crowd of students, staff, faculty, and community members huddled in the warmth of La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos. Even though the sun had set half an hour before, attendees were welcomed by a beautiful sunset painted on the kitchen wall. From the horizon emerges a long table surrounded by folks of all generations ready to eat.

“Spot the Inca Cola?” Rebecca Sosa-Coba '26 motioned to the iconic yellow and blue logo as friends gathered around the mural to take in all the details. Sosa-Coba, along with Zoe Cire MFA '24, a graduate-affiliate at the Native American Cultural Center, led a community-wide effort to create a mural for La Casa Cultural’s newly renovated kitchen.

After attendees served themselves dinner—orange chicken, chickpea stew, rice, beans, pork pupusa and loroco pupusa, and agua jamaica—catered by Sandra Trigueros and Elmer Galvez of La Cocina de Sandra, Woesha Hampson-Medina '18 presented "Savoring Stories: Indigenous Foodways and Community Building at la Mesa" as part of our Chewing the Fat speaker series in partnership with La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos.

Hampson-Medina is a San Diego native with Mexican, Chippewa, and Ho-Chunk roots. She first took us to the tables that ignited her passion for food and cooking. Hampson-Medina shared several stories, from those involving women in her life within the kitchen to the cultural practices surrounding funeral practices on her father’s side.

The next part of her presentation took us on her journey to Yale. Wanting to understand food at a molecular level, she studied chemistry at Yale, with a thesis examining the mechanisms of kimchi fermentation. Outside of the classroom, Hampson-Medina began to parse out her identity both through the Native American Cultural Center and La Casa Cultural, ultimately finding community through food.

The power of connecting across cultures through a meal was further emphasized after leaving Yale. Right before the pandemic, she went on to earn her Masters in World Food Cultures and Mobility at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy with a focus on the indigeneity of maple syrup. Since then she has worked in many food-focused roles across industries, but is most inspired when working with food at the heart of building community.

Throughout the event, Hampson-Medina spoke with nuance about her Mexican, Chippewa, and Ho-Chunk roots and how it shaped her career and the communities she hopes to work alongside throughout her life. She pointed out that while she grew up relatively far from her Chippewa and Ho-Chunk relatives, meals are a vital way of finding community, connection, and continuation of cultural practice. Currently, she is the Food Grant Program Manager at Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.

In dialogue with the kitchen mural unveiling, Woesha’s presentation highlighted the importance of food and cultural identity, the importance and presence of Indigeneity in a space such as La Casa, and the importance of alumni who have made and continue to be a part of La Casa’s vibrant community. Many thanks to Woesha for sharing her journey through food at and beyond Yale. We also want to express our gratitude to La Casa Cultural Assistant Dean Eileen Galvez, Assistant Director Carolina Davila, and mural leaders Zoe Cire '24 and Rebecca Sosa-Coba '26 for bringing so much meaning to Woesha’s visit. This event was supported by the Traphagen Alumni Speakers Series of the Yale College Office of Student Affairs.

Photos from the event can be found here. Photos taken by Sumarha Tariq '27.

Alumni Interviews | Camden Smithtro '22

Farming is very physical work: plowing the fields, weeding the crops, harvesting and hauling the produce. But agriculture is also a matter of contracts and leases, bylaws and regulations. The Food and Farm Business Law Clinic at Pace University School of Law is there to help farmers navigate all the policies and paperwork that determine what they can plant, where they can plant it, and what they can do with their crops. In this interview, Camden Smithtro ’22, program coordinator of the clinic and a YSFP alum, explains the fascinating intersections between agriculture and law, from land use restrictions to intellectual property concerns. 

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

What is the Food and Farm Business Law Clinic? What do you do as program coordinator?

A legal clinic is a program that's based at a law school, and it’s designed to provide experiential learning for law students. It gives students experience working with real clients, and it allows clients to access pro bono legal services. Our clinic is designed for farmers, food businesses and associated nonprofits.

We do transactional work, as opposed to litigation or administrative proceedings. That includes designing contracts, helping people sell a business or start a new business, reviewing and writing leases. We have a couple of succession cases where a family needs to figure out the logistics of passing their farm to the next generation. We have food businesses who are trying to purchase the intellectual property and equipment from a different business. We have a lot of producer co-ops and one consumer co-op. And we have a lot of nonprofits that started out being fiscally sponsored by another nonprofit, and they want to create their own nonprofit, which requires you to create bylaws and apply for tax exemptions. There’s a lot of paperwork involved. 

Our clinic was started in 2017, and a couple of years ago we hired the first staff attorney. I do all the grant management and grant reporting. I’m in charge of the clinic’s budget. I write up reports on what the clinic has done, both for our private donors and for our state reporting. I do all of the client intake interviews, and I designed a survey for clients to fill out rather than cold-emailing us. 

Because I’m the first program coordinator, a lot of my work in the first year was creating systems to streamline things and move things out of my bosses’ heads and onto paper. I set up a lot of databases to keep track of clients and to determine what information we want to maintain about cases and the partners that we work with. We have a lot of partner organizations in the state of New York, like Glynwood (where YSFP alumna Kate Anstreicher works) and the New York State Agricultural Mediation Program (NYSAMP). I’m the point person for a lot of our interactions with those organizations. We do a lot of client referrals to them and vice-versa. I’ve also been in charge of a new program called the New York Farm Transition Advisors Directory, in partnership with American Farmland Trust and NYSAMP, which is a living database we’re creating of different farm business technical service providers.

How do you choose which clients you take? 

It’s a combination of the type of work that the attorneys are experienced in — making sure that we are going to be able to provide effective service to our clients — and ensuring that we have a good variety of projects for the students. Each student works in pairs, and they generally have two to three projects they’re working on that semester. We try to make sure that the work the clients propose is manageable over the course of one or two semesters. 

Because we’re a pro bono clinic, another consideration is whether the clients meet our need-based or mission-based standards. Our clients’ household income can’t exceed four times the federal poverty level. For a nonprofit, they need to have a mission that it makes sense to support with pro bono work. We also have a lot of returning clients. There’s a couple people whom we’ve been excited to refer to attorneys who are not pro bono, because that means they’ve progressed enough as a business that they require a lawyer on call. 

You mentioned food businesses buying intellectual property. I haven’t heard much about IP in the food system — what issues come up there?

Something I’ve seen a couple times is white-label products, where you have a farmer or a food manufacturer who is creating products that they want to sell to other companies so they can market them as their own. We have a couple clients this semester who are working in tandem with a for-profit attorney who’s helping our students learn how to write white-label contracts for an herbalist and a meat vendor. 

Another thing that often comes up is trademark law, where businesses need to trademark the name of their business or their product. Other places just protect their name with an LLC or some other sort of business organization, which protects the name as a business entity. That’s a small part of our work, but the bigger fields of law that we deal with — both because of the expertise of our attorneys and the needs of farmers — are definitely leases, land use, and entity formation. 

Have there been any specific legal issues or intricacies that you have found to be especially interesting?

I think my biggest takeaway from this job is that law is a lot more complicated than I thought it was. That might be a bit obvious, but it requires so much detail. The things that I've been really excited about have been land use questions. I’ve enjoyed learning about agricultural conservation easements, which is when you own land and an organization pays you to agree that the land will never be used for anything except agriculture. You can’t turn it into a strip mall or build a bunch of houses on it. It’s a really cool tool to protect agricultural land, and a great tool for farmers who have very slim profit margins and benefit from the support of local governments or nonprofits. 

I hadn’t realized how much town and country law impacts land use. Having read through some town ordinances about land use, I’ve seen how really particular grudges can lead to policy changes that are enshrined for generations — like, you pissed off this council member, so now you’re not getting your tax break on your farm products, because they’re choosing to not count your crops as agricultural profit. Agritourism is a big example of how difficult it can be to figure out what’s allowed and what’s not. If you’re a farm, do you need special permitting to allow people to take tours of your farm? If you set up a value-added farmstand, is that okay? What about if you sell hot food from that farmstand? Agritourism hasn’t been very well-defined before, so it’s open to a lot of interpretation. 

You said you’ve gotten really interested in particularities of the law that you hadn’t expected to find so fascinating. Has this job changed your perspective on what you want to do going forward?

Yes! I went into this job really interested in creating agricultural policy. I have gained a tremendous understanding of the problems that small farmers are facing and the network of nonprofit support that’s available, as well as the ways that there are holes in that network. But I was surprised to find legal work so appealing. You’re trying to create the most elegant solutions to problems, and trying to get as much detail squared away without creating a mess. That style of analytical writing really appeals to me. In the policy sphere, there’s financial work, there’s communications work, there’s managerial work, there’s legal work. I’m starting to lean more towards legal types of work and am planning to apply to law school. 

What were your roles at the Farm, and how did they prepare you for the job you have now? 

I was involved in pretty much every aspect of the Farm. I started out as a culinary events manager, and then I did the Lazarus Summer Internship, and then I became a communications manager and was also a senior advisor and a Harvest leader. The communications role was most similar to the job I have now and was definitely helpful in finding food systems work after college. I also found a lot of my closest friends during undergrad through the YSFP. Those warm fall days, making pizza with my friends before everyone arrived for the knead 2 know, just chatting and pulling the pizza dough — I really miss that.

Chewing the Fat with Lauren Tran | January 29, 2024

On the last Monday of January, the Yale Sustainable Food Program hosted our first Chewing the Fat speaker series event of 2024 in conjunction with Timothy Dwight College. Pastry chef Lauren Tran and her husband Garland Wong traveled from New York for a college tea in which they discussed their experiences running dessert pop-ups and opening a bakery. Tran is known for her synthesis of Vietnamese flavors and French pastry techniques, and she shared her unique perspective on the relationship between food, culture, and identity to an audience of dozens of fascinated Yale students. 

Tran began with an overview of her path to becoming a pastry chef. Although she majored in political science and intended to go to medical school, she always had a passion for pastry. She spent years working both front and back of house in upscale restaurants in Seattle before going to pastry school and landing a position as a pastry cook at the Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern. When COVID hit and restaurants shut down, Tran, like many of her colleagues, started selling dessert boxes via Instagram under the name Bánh by Lauren. As the boxes grew in popularity, she pivoted to running pop-ups, where excited attendees would sometimes wait hours in line for a chance to try coconut pandan or thai tea chiffon cakes, macarons with flavors like red oolong and dark chocolate jasmine strawberry, and Vietnamese desserts like bánh bò nướng, or honeycomb cake. After months of successful pop-ups, Lauren and Garland began work on a brick-and-mortar bakery. 

Throughout the event, Tran spoke with nuance about her Vietnamese American identity and how it shaped her cooking. She pointed out that there are very few Vietnamese bakeries in New York, unlike on the West Coast, and described how her pastries can both connect Vietnamese Americans to their heritage and introduce many non-Vietnamese customers to unfamiliar flavors. She noted that she sometimes feels expected to “put pandan in everything,” but that she wants to employ the flavors in ways that make sense to her — neither obscuring them nor using them without careful consideration. She also described how, as a kid, she often ate Vietnamese pastries that were prepackaged and not freshly made. She wants her customers to eat sesame balls fresh from the fryer, but she noted that serving fresh pastries made with high-quality ingredients and sustainable packaging can be more expensive — and that customers often assume Vietnamese food should be cheap. 

Tran and Wong also discussed the many challenges of running a food business, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. Wong jokingly described Tran’s chaotic system for managing the first pastry box orders: she would reply to every Instagram DM individually until he helped her draft form replies and spreadsheets to keep track of her customers. They described the challenges of finding an affordable location, as bakeries require specific infrastructure and ventilation that many buildings lack. Financing the bakery was difficult, since food businesses are a risky venture which banks are hesitant to loan to, and platforms like Kickstarter take a considerable percentage of fundraised dollars. And although Bánh by Lauren has attracted considerable online attention, especially after the New York Times ran a video profile of Tran, generating publicity is still a source of stress. Tran noted that many fantastic restaurants struggle to attract customers, while more well-resourced restaurateurs can rely on expensive public relations firms to bring in diners. 

Many thanks to Lauren and Garland for their insights and their delicious desserts. We also want to express our gratitude to Timothy Dwight Head of College Mary Lui, Associate Head Vincent Balbarin,Timothy Dwight staff members Kimberly Rogers, Samantha Gambardella, and Sharon Goldbloom, and their college aides for making this event such a success.

Photos from the event can be found here.

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.)