All Pib Slow Play | GFF '22

The pib's cooking process relies on hot stones, fired in the pit, to hold and release heat.

All Pib Slow Play: A Sedimentation of History and Sound (APSP) is a hybrid decelerationist music and food programming project. It sets cumbia rebajada (slowed cumbia) and ambient sounds to the cooking of tamales using an underground pit-roasting method: the Pib. All Pib Slow Play was conceptualized and designed by Miguel Gaydosh beginning in 2021. This is an ongoing project and research will continue to be gathered on the Arena channel Suena la Cumbia, with occasional updates made to the website.

 Listen to a mix here

The project is named after a record by DJ Screw and a letter to Elysia Crampton. APSP is a means to research, practice, and evolve traditions that generations of Indigenous families have kept alive across the Americas, while sharing the fruits of this process and celebrating the soil.

Chef Sandra Trigeuros and family preparing and cooking the primary dishes throughout the evening.

APSP synthesized after learning about Rosalia Chay Chuc’s traditional cooking methods in the Yucatán, which sparked memories of my family's tamales and pib cooking in Southwestern Guatemala. These inspired me to revisit cumbia rebajada videos found online, and realize the potential of combining the pib’s ancient slow cooking techniques with slowed cumbia’s intoxicating rhythms.

As a performance, APSP centers slowness as a vehicle, and Kency Cornejo and Diana Taylor’s ideas of embodied acts “as an essential mode of cultural, spiritual and social representation and transmission of knowledge," to awaken a resistance to Yomaira Figueroa's concept of destierro (uprooting) through memories of home/lands and land practices.

 "They used to have very detailed history books. But when the Spaniards came, they burned thousands of them. So they had to pass all the information by mouth."
Ricardo Muñoz
Chef's Table: BBQ Season 1, Episode 4: “Rosalia Chay Chuc”
2020

While the first iteration of APSP was about sharing food on a farm and broadcasting on Local Radio, the next version will focus on the idea of a social sculpture in an urban pocket forest—at Cactus Store NY's garden this Summer—as a space for people to gather and learn through programming surrounding the idea of deceleration.

Guests and students learned hands-on through food preparation.

APSP is an investigation of the potential for socio-ecological interfaces—bringing ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ the ancient and contemporary, together through living forms—from the ground beneath our feet to sounds reverberating down city blocks.

 “Not an earthquake but an accretion, a sedimentation of history and sound [...] I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anything so geologic. A certain chemical trace inheres, like the smell of rock after rain, recording or suggesting things now invisible but not gone.”
Jeffery J. Cohen
"A Letter from Jeffrey J. Cohen to Elysia Crampton,” DIS Magazine
2015

APSP is a chance to move slower with and closer to the earth through a mixing of sounds, flavors, and links lost and found. Digging beneath the surface of our daily accelerationist culture, pib and rebajada methods come together to manipulate space and time, unearthing impossible moments in cavities of potential.

Laser-etched banana leaves served as as informal placemats.

Thank you to Sandra Trigueros and her family, Geovanni Barrios, Jacqueline Munno, Isabel Rooper, Pancho Blood, Jeemin Shim, and Kyle Richardson. The first volume of All Pib Slow Play was supported by the Yale Sustainable Food Program, and Yale School of Art's inaugural student-curated exhibition, No White Walls.

You can find more information on allpibslowplay.org and Miguel will be sharing updates on Instagram in the coming months.

A crowd of students and guests gathered under the Pavilion to eat, drink, and learn.

Workday and knead 2 know | Friday, September 23

 On September 23, 2022, around two dozen folks came up to the Farm to participate in our weekly workday. The fall harvest was fully upon us, and the afternoon was all about pulling, picking, and prepping.

One group pulled weeds from the lower culinary berm, a tangled texture of green. YSFP’s Manager of Field Academics Jeremy Oldfield taught attendees how to distinguish the weeds from the crops: lemon balm—a cousin of mint—was the target crop, and an eggplant cousin—with spikes!—needed to be pulled, along with unwanted veins of ivy growing in the underbrush. One group of participants dedicated itself to the berm, other students picked sweet peppers (and snuck a couple delicious bites), Still another strung up chrysanthemums.

After the berm was cleared of weeds, workday attendees took turns digging holes and planting black eyed susans. These seedlings had been growing in the Yale Science Building greenhouse for about a month, and they'll spend the next month pushing their roots into the berm. In the winter they’ll die back; come spring, they’ll bloom gold.

As the workday faded towards pizza-time, the sun started to dip towards the horizon and some workday participants wandered the flower field adjacent to Prospect Street. YSFP Communications Manager and photographer extraordinaire Reese Neal ’25 aptly noted that what makes our Farm so special is its dedication, not just to growing food and creating community, but also to celebrating the beauty that comes from working the earth.

 All the while, our undergraduate culinary events team was working hard to whip up some delicious pizza and press some fresh apple cider. Workday attendees—happy to sit down after two hours of farmwork—were spoiled with platters of pizza. As they ate, former Yale Farm Summer Intern and beloved YSFP community member Donasia Gray ’23 gave a moving knead 2 know about her summer working with the Sweet Water Foundation. She helped build and grow a neighborhood space in Chicago that uplifted the local community, recycled discarded materials, and redefined public space. Afterwards, participants asked questions, ate more pizza, mingled, and laughed. As always, many thanks to those who came; and, please join us next time.  

To view all photos from the event, please follow this link.

GFF Grace Cajski Explains Her Project that Explores Hawaiian Fishpond Aquaculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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