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.

Alumni Interviews | Joshua Evans ’12

You might know that miso is tasty. But did you know that it can contain never-before-seen forms of life? In the latest installment of our alumni interview series, Joshua Evans ’12 shares these and other findings from a decade in food research. A former Events and Farm Manager at the YSFP, Evans journeyed from New Haven to Copenhagen to explore fermentation and entomophagy at the Nordic Food Lab. Now, as director of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group at the Danish Technical University's Center for Biosustainability, he combines culinary research and development, natural sciences, environmental humanities, and more to explore how we might create a more sustainable and delicious food system. 

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

Let’s start at the beginning: where does your interest in food and food research come from?

It goes back to a lot of experiences in my childhood. I grew up in Canada, on Vancouver Island. My dad grew up in Northern Ontario, where there's not a lot of people. Instead, there's a lot of lakes and a lot of space. He grew up fishing and hunting for ducks. Through him, I remember having some profound early experiences, like catching my first rainbow trout. It was just me and him, in a canoe on a lake, early in the morning, and the sky was the same color as the skin of the rainbow trout. I remember him showing me how to hit the trout on the head the right way to kill it well. It was an encounter with the immediacy of taking life, and that being necessary for our own life. The question, at least for me, was less about whether to take life or not — because to persist we must — and more about how to do it well: a question of quality. There were other experiences that I had, fishing with him or picking wild blackberries or hanging around the garden growing up. I always had this sense of glimpsing something that was deeply meaningful. I didn't really understand why, but I felt it.

That explicit understanding only came later, in my teenage years, when I started reading books on food and agriculture by Michael Pollan and others. Suddenly I gained a language for making sense of those profound encounters with these larger webs of life, and how eating necessarily tied me to those. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to and ultimately chose Yale, because in the late 2000s, there weren't so many universities that had on-campus farms, and even fewer that had programming around them. The YSFP was the place where I felt like it was possible to explore all the different connections that food had to all these different disciplines in a way that felt really valuable and rare. 

After graduating, I moved to Copenhagen to do culinary research and development with the restaurant Noma through their Nordic Food Lab. It was a place that was deliberately set up to be between the academic world and the restaurant industry, to bring together people from these different worlds to explore the flavors and edible biodiversity of the Nordic region. There, especially through a big research project on insect gastronomy around the world, I became really interested in how different knowledge systems interact or fail to. So much of what we were doing — with the insects, with wild plants, with adapting traditional fermentations — inevitably came back to the synergies and the tensions between scientific knowledge and more traditional knowledge systems. That's what led me to study history & philosophy of science and science & technology studies in grad school. And that's what brought me to where I am now, where I have this research group in Copenhagen. We're using transdisciplinary culinary research and development to not just make new products, but to envision more diverse, sustainable ways of eating. We’re trying to use food innovation as a way to connect to and strengthen traditions rather than make them obsolete or somehow be in conflict with them.

Your online description of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group mentions all these interconnected food systems challenges — diversity, knowledge privatization, nutrition — and at the end of that list, you include blandness. How do taste and blandness fit into the bigger picture of these food systems challenges that you're trying to address?

I very deliberately put blandness alongside these other grand challenges as something that demands, I think, equal attention and urgency. I am of course not the first to call attention to this — Slow Food for example has been doing so for decades now — but in many circles, it's still really radical to propose that lack of flavor is correlated with lack of diversity, or that monoculture flavor is necessarily related to the monoculture that we see in agroecology and in our diets. Particularly at Nordic Food Lab, after visiting farmers and fermenters and food producers around the world, I started to notice certain patterns. Even though they can be in wildly different places and use wildly different methods, I've noticed — again, not as the first by any means, but another voice adding to the choir — that the most arresting, complex flavors often arise in contexts that are more diverse. They are structured by a certain orientation to the world. It's not about control. It's also not about being totally hands off. It's something in between. It's something more like tinkering: being involved, pretending neither to be masterful nor absolved. So following that kind of flavor will often lead us to cultivate those kinds of relationships with other species and those kinds of systems of farming or food production. 

This ‘in-between’ way of relating to other forms of life is something I've noticed with a lot of fermenters in particular. Maybe it’s something about our relationship with microbes — how tractable, how close to hand, but also how indirect those relationships are. Many microbes are not immediately visible, but they're sensible through their effects. Of course, there are many different ways of approaching fermentation. A more industrial way is predicated on as much control as possible. You can also be too hands off. If you're too hands off, then it just becomes rot.

I have a number of friends brewing kombucha under their bed who I think are maybe a little too close to that end of the spectrum.

And that’s cool! I’m all for experimenting, and far from it for me to tell anyone how they ‘should’ ferment or not — that’s definitely not what I’m talking about. But I think we've all tasted kombucha which is basically just vinegar, and it's not the most pleasant experience. I also don't think it's the most nuanced or rarefied or beautiful expression of what kombucha can be, because if you go too far in that direction, all kombucha just becomes acetic acid. That’s a good example of where there is a correlation between this in-between sweet spot of flavor and a kind of in-between ethics and politics of agency. I think there's a more general lesson in there about how to interact with other species. 

What you're saying about tinkering and exploring the limits of human control makes a lot of sense as someone coming from a researcher's perspective. What is the role of research in shaping a more sustainable and equitable and delicious food system? 

I think research can be a really powerful tool for supporting the kinds of transitions we want to see in food and agriculture. But of course, it doesn't necessarily do that. Most research in food is based in or adjacent to industry. That’s not to vilify industry entirely, because industry can also be variegated; but only to say that research is not necessarily transformative. However, I think we can be deliberate and try to design our research in a way that is as supportive of transformation as possible. For example, much of our work with fermentation involves DNA sequencing and metabolomics: high-tech stuff that can give us valuable knowledge, but that can also cost a lot of money. It's the sort of analysis that most traditional or DIY food producers don't have access to. I'm really interested in what happens if we give those tools to fermenters and food producers and say, ‘What would you like to know about the microbes that you work with? How can we design experiments together that can create knowledge that can actually feed back into your craft-based process? Can we use some of this high-tech science and interdisciplinary research not to help industry earn more profit, but to help other kinds of producers continue and deepen their practice that is more oriented towards diversity?’ For me, that’s one kind of research — inclusive, participatory, open-ended — that can help shape a more sustainable, equitable, and delicious food system.

I saw the paper that came out last month from the Sustainable Food Innovation Group about microbes and novel misos. Was that approach at play in the design of the study?

Yes! That paper comes out of my PhD, the seed of which comes from the work we were doing at Nordic Food Lab. At that time we were starting to develop what we might call ‘translated’ fermentations: combining techniques from different parts of the world with local ingredients, in the same way we might translate a book from one language into another, to make something that is old and new at the same time. One of the first fermentations we developed at Nordic Food Lab — shoutout to my old colleague Lars Williams who made it — was a miso using pearl barley kōji and yellow peas, whereas traditionally in Japan it would be based on soybeans and rice. So it's definitely a miso, but it had this very un-Japanese, very Nordic taste because of the peas — something that, if you’re a Dane, your grandmother might have served you cooked into a stew. As I learned more about the microbiology behind what we were doing, and how quickly microbes can adapt to new environments, it appeared likely to me that the chefs I was working with weren't just creating new flavors, which was their goal, but that they might also be bringing new forms of life into the world without even realizing it or trying to. We didn’t quite have the capacity at Nordic Food Lab to answer that kind of question ourselves, so in my PhD, I wanted to bring the scientific resources I had access to back to my culinary colleagues to study these novel, ‘translated’ fermentations together. We decided to use DNA sequencing to see, if we vary the substrates using the same recipe, does that lead to different microbial ecologies, maybe even new evolutionary lineages, new species or subspecies or strains, niches for new biodiversity? The short answer is yes — but of course, there's more complexity to it. For anyone who's interested, I can recommend reading the paper, and we have more papers coming out soon going deeper into this topic.

You’ve mentioned how your time at the YSFP shaped your future trajectory. How did the YSFP change the way you think about food? Were there moments on the Farm that felt like important transitions for you? 

There were so many moments of learning in and around the Farm for me. It’s hard to point to any single one; I think it was more about the process or the rhythm. I joined the YSFP as an events intern at the start of my sophomore year, continuing for the rest of my time at Yale, and I was also a farm manager in my senior year. Friday afternoons became this ritual special time at the end of the week. I would notice how the same dough recipe would change as the season got cooler and then warmed up again in the spring. I would notice all the interlocking seasons for the different crops as they would appear and then bloom and fade from the pizzas. Somehow the pizzas became this prism — one could see the distillation of the land around us in this little circumference of dough. If there’s one thing I think of with my time at the YSFP, I think of this feeling of process and overlapping rhythms that extend in time, all of those movements and changes in the land over multiple years, and noticing how our tastes and practices of care shaped and were in turn shaped by that land. That reciprocity has shaped how I approach cooking, how I approach research, and why I’ve gone on to do what I have.

Animacy, Agency, and Agroforestry | knead 2 know ft. Rebecca Salazar '26

Although the morning was gray and overcast, blue skies emerged from behind the clouds for our final workday of the semester. Students, too, departed from dorm rooms and libraries to gather on the Farm one last time before winter arrives. Half the group took shovels to aging Halloween pumpkins, slicing and dicing the gourds into rich material for our compost pile. Other students spent a meditative hour breaking up garlic heads and sowing the cloves, laying the groundwork for next year's pizza toppings. Many breaks were taken to enjoy carrots fresh from the field, their sweetness amplified by the first frost of the season.

Students then climbed up the hill for a slightly heartier snack, as the pizza team served up pies topped with peppers, squash, and all sorts of delicious vegetables. While they ate, they listened to a fascinating knead 2 know by Lazarus Summer Intern and Native American Cultural Center and YSFP Seedkeeper and Programs Liaison Rebecca Salazar '26. Salazar's talk, delivered in partnership with the NACC’s Henry Roe Cloud Conference, focused on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and plant spirits as shown through the Three Sisters of squash, beans, and corn. 

Salazar explained that Eurocentric academic language not only obscures the purpose of practices like shifting cultivation but also misses the spiritual significance of Indigenous knowledge and foodways. She added that using terms like “Abya Yala,” which in the Kuna language means “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood,” “presents an ideological resistance to nationalist terms like ‘America’ and reaffirms the view of a unified continent which has its own life and spirit.” 

Salazar then articulated how "animacy, agency, and agroforestry" are intertwined through the cultivation of the Three Sisters and the milpa crop-growing system. She described the co-evolution between plants and people as “symbiosis,” not “domestication.” She detailed the history of this co-evolution, its role in Indigenous cosmology, and the medicinal, nutritional, ecological, and political benefits of milpa agriculture. For example, intercropping reduces erosion, while polycultures tend to produce more energy and thus greater food security. Milpa also offers a space for Indigenous resistance to colonization, as well as respect and acceptance for women who face discrimination in neoliberal markets. For more information on Salazar’s research, listen to her podcast reflecting on her summer as a Lazarus Summer Intern. 
After the knead 2 know, attendees warmed their hands around the fire pit, enjoyed hot apple cider and cake in celebration of the NACC's tenth anniversary, and watched a beautiful sunset while listening to School of Music professor Ian MacMillen and his band, Scrimshaw Foes. We thank Salazar for leading such an insightful talk and all the attendees who gathered with us for one last workday. Photos from the event by Reese Neal ’25 are available here.

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

“Peanut Butter” by Eileen Myles

Kavya Jain '25 presenting her knead 2 know

Song Writing Collective Member singing

Barley and Yale Hops brew heating up

Song Writing Collective Member singing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fine Dining and Sustainability in Japan | knead 2 know feat. Mao Shiotsu '24e

Last Friday brought 3.8 inches of rain to the Old Acre, but the rain and wind couldn't keep YSFP-ers away from last week's indoor knead2know. Dozens of students braved the blustery weather to attend the Friday talk by Global Food Fellow Mao Shiotsu '24, who spent the summer in Japan exploring the country's fine dining. 

Previously, Shiotsu took a gap year to study pastry and cuisine in France. After three months of culinary school, she worked in the fine dining restaurant Georges Blanc. “I started thinking a lot about restaurant culture, how dishes are made,” Shiotsu recounted. Contrasting her time in France with her upbringing in Japan, she said, “I started thinking about the differences between the priorities in the dish.” 

Over the course of the summer, Shiotsu spoke to chefs and farmers in many different regions and styles of Japanese cuisine, from the Michelin-starred Muromachi Wakuden in Kyoto to family farms in the countryside of Nara. Everywhere she visited, she was struck by the emphasis on simplicity and local ingredients. In Japan, “a dish with one ingredient can be fine dining” — a sentiment that Shiotsu’s Italian and French colleagues didn’t share. Although those European countries prize their local produce, they place more of an emphasis on the individual chef’s artistry, creativity, and storytelling, Shiotsu said. This is evident in everything from the level of decoration on the plate to the way restaurants are named: in Japan, it’s very uncommon to name a restaurant after the head chef. By comparison, Shiotsu observed that Japanese chefs see themselves as elevating nature, presenting ingredients in the way that best draws out their inherent beauty. As one Japanese chef told her, “Japanese cuisine is not an art, because in art, the artist is the main character.” 

Shiotsu also noticed differences between the two country’s approaches to food waste. In the Japanese restaurants Shiotsu visited, nothing was wasted. Food was sourced from the restaurant’s own gardens or from neighbor’s farms, and anything that wasn’t served to guests would be eaten by staff. At French restaurants, Shiotsu recalled, the chefs often made more meals than they needed and discarded them at the end of the night. 

The discussion gave students plenty to chew on both literally and figuratively, as they enjoyed moon cakes and babka and sipped tea made with the Farm's nettles, ginger, and mint. And there will be much more to ruminate on next week as our knead 2 knows continue with a presentation by Global Food Fellow Kavya Jain ’25. 

Photos from the event by Reese Neal ’25 can be found here.

Food and Faith at Zumwalt Acres | Workday and knead 2 know feat. Miriam Levine '25

Despite a few encouraging signs of early autumn weather, the past week has been remarkably hot and humid. Still and all, dozens of students braved the sweltering weather to come to the first workday of the semester, where they helped manage the profusion of late summer produce. We weeded the carrot field, scuffled the arugula beds, and harvested hops for our forthcoming batch of "Yale Ale," with plenty of breaks for cold water straight from the pump. 

Students then gathered under the Lazarus Pavilion for an engaging presentation by Food and Faith Fellow Miriam Levine '25, who spent her summer at Zumwalt Acres, a regenerative agriculture community in Sheldon, Illinois. Levine said her dream in life is to start a commune for pregnant people and new parents, so she was “really excited about learning how to build intentional community, especially with an emphasis on land stewardship.” 

After generations of being farmed with standard industrial practices, Zumwalt now strives to model what organic regenerative agriculture can look like in the heart of soy and corn country. The farm practices crop rotation, composting, minimal and no-till agriculture, and mulching. They also employ agroforestry strategies, relying on a “shelter belt” of fruit and nut trees to not only produce food but also protect the crops from pesticide from neighboring farms. 

They attempt to share this approach with the surrounding community through a variety of partnerships and special events. This summer, Zumwalt hosted a Perennial Soil Health event, which drew 50 farmers from the surrounding area to learn about regenerative practices. Levine acknowledged that she had “a lot of preconceived notions” about a region known for its industrial agriculture, but “being able to talk with these farmers, and hear how they’re noticing how their plants and their soil and the ecology have changed over time, and their fear about climate change and how dedicated they are to working on this topic, was incredibly meaningful.” 

Zumwalt is both a farm and a research and learning center. Levine specialized in mushroom cultivation, researching the power of fungi to decompose plastic, build homes on a substrate of human waste, and break down radioactive waste and petroleum. In partnership with the Planavsky Lab over in Yale’s Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Zumwalt Acres is also researching basalt, a volcanic rock that can sequester carbon and release nutrients into the soil when used as a natural fertilizer. 

The community is led by Jewish values. In addition to weekly Shabbat dinners and regular Jewish learning, the farm observes traditions like shmita, treating every seventh year as a year of rest for the soil and a time to give back to the surrounding community. They also follow pe’ah, the obligation to leave the corners of each field for those who cannot grow their own food — or, in Zumwalt’s case, donating that produce to a local food pantry. 

We thank Levine for her insightful talk, and we thank everyone who attended the knead2know and volunteered at our workday. This Friday, our knead2know will be led by Calista Washburn ’24, a Lazarus Summer Intern who spent the summer on the Old Acre learning about soil and clay harvests and its relationship historically to irrigation practices. 

Miriam was the recipient of the Food & Faith Fellowship Award, sponsored by the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale with support from the Yale Sustainable Food Program. Learn more by searching “Zumwalt” in the Student Grants Database.

Photos from the workday by Reese Neal ’25 are available here. 

The Farm as Classroom

The Yale Sustainable Food Program prides itself on growing food-literate leaders “on the farm, in the classroom, and around the world.” But what happens when farm and classroom are combined? Over the last year, many Yale professors have brought their classes to the Yale Farm, whether for a moment of personal reflection, a discussion of land politics, or an exploration of botanical science. While students finalized their decisions about what classes to take this semester, YSFP Communications Manager Sadie Bograd ‘25 spoke with a range of instructors about the ways in which the Farm can be fertile ground for learning. 

Hi’ilei Hobart, Indigenous Food Sovereignty (ER&M 316)

For students in ER&M 316, the class visit to the Farm was both instructive and restorative. 

“So much of the story about Indigenous food comes out of these really difficult and challenging histories of settler colonial dispossession and erasure,” Professor Hobart said. “The Farm… gave students a lot of breathing space to build community with each other, to exhale just a little bit.”

“Teaching about the food system in a thoughtful way can feel a lot like doom and gloom,” she added. “So taking moments of actual joy becomes really important.”

The visits were also a form of “embodied practice” that helped students think about growing practices and labor in new ways. The class strung marigolds, tasted ciders, harvested crops, and assisted with Fall Feast, the annual celebration co-sponsored by the YSFP and the Native American Cultural Center. 

Dr. Hobart spoke to the limitations on the Farm’s ability to promote Indigenous food sovereignty, given its small size, non-Indigenous leadership, and position within the institution of Yale. Still, she noted that practices like sourcing seeds from Indigenous seedkeepers, planting a Three Sisters garden, and growing plants in ways that honor their heritage can “really make a difference.” 

More broadly, the Farm “gives space to allow people to come together thoughtfully [and] meaningfully,” she said. “Breaking bread together is not an uncomplicated process, but it so often does a lot to remind us that we are in community, even though that community can sometimes feel incohesive.” 

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay (ENGL 120) 

As part of a unit on writing about place, Nalebuff takes each of her ENGL 120 sections to a distinctive spot on campus, like the YUAG or the Beinecke. Last fall, her students ventured farther north to the Old Acre for an exercise in “noticing what you notice.” They spent forty-five minutes sitting or wandering the Farm in silence, writing down whatever they observed.

“I really want to encourage my students to think about what it is that they can say about a place that no one else could say,” Nalebuff said. “Eventually you start to see things in new ways if you just spend enough time in a place.” 

Nalebuff noted that the Yale Farm is a uniquely potent site for observation. “Being in any place, but maybe nature especially, often brings up personal memories,” she said. “A smell, or a certain kind of wind.” For students, the session on the Farm also formed an enjoyable experience that diverged from the pace of the indoor classroom. As she observed her students’ observations, Nalebuff felt that the class entered a “peaceful state” instead of having to “push through boredom.”

“It was such a spirited class, and everyone was grateful to be there and was so present,” she said. “It was one of those moments where the lessons of writing and of leading an engaged life felt so intertwined.” 

Linda Puth, Plants and People (E&EB 145) and The Ecology of Food (E&EB 035)

Dr. Puth specializes in interdisciplinary science classes that are accessible without prerequisites. Her courses “highlight some of the strengths of the Yale campus that a lot of students never know are there until their senior year” — a list on which the Yale Farm is at the top. 

Visits to the Farm bring Puth’s lectures to life. For example, the Farm’s wheat field showcases how plants evolve with domestication. Wild wheat has a center stalk that breaks apart when the grains are mature, dispersing the seeds widely so they don’t compete with the parent plant. But agricultural varieties evolved so that the stalk wouldn’t shatter, making them easier to harvest. 

The class visits also explore nutrient cycling, pest control, and different systems of agriculture.

Puth is currently on leave to lecture at Yale-NUS College. Although the classes she teaches there are similar in theme, she has adapted the content to Singapore’s tropical location. 

“Some of the students here have never been outside of the tropics and so they are used to constant day length — in Singapore, the day length changes by about 10 minutes per day over the entire year,” Puth said. “There’s never a freezing time. The seasonality is mainly just rainfall. So it's a very different system here and being able to talk about seasonal agriculture is a wonderful contrast.” 

Puth’s class has explored these contrasts through guest discussions with Farm Manager Jeremy Oldfield, as well as through site visits to in-ground, rooftop, and vertical farms in the area. 

Sophy Naess, Painting Time (ART 332) 

In a class about representing time in painting, there’s no better place to go than the Farm. ART 332 students make multiple trips to the Farm over the course of the semester, witnessing the Old Acre’s evolution over both a four-hour class and an entire season. The visits thus allow students to explore the passage of time on the small scale (like the changing light between late afternoon and early evening) and the large (like the growing and ripening of a field). 

The class trips generate conversations about themes of pastoralism and labor, Naess said. 

The Farm enables “thinking about the idea of nature as some kind of force to behold, as a romantic idea, versus thinking about the way that the space has to be constructed and cultivated,” she elaborated. “Conversations about that come up when talking about composition, framing. Are you representing the labor that happens here through looking at the wheelbarrow, or the shipping container that holds the tools?” 

There are also countless opportunities to develop technical skills: working with figure and background, movement and abstraction, and above all, color.

The Farm is “so resplendent with color,” Naess said. “We really get into the myopic examination of the incredible range of color that exists within a small area of a garden.” 

Max Chaoulideer, The Politics of Food (ENGL 114)

Chaoulideer’s writing seminar focused on many contentious topics in our contemporary food systems: urban agriculture, conscientious consumerism, the romanticization of agrarian life, contests over land usage and ownership. The class visit to the Yale Farm was a way to explore all of that. 

According to Chaoulideer, Oldfield explained how the Old Acre is an “educational farm” more than an “agricultural” one. With its limited footprint, the Yale Farm will never produce enough to feed all of Yale’s campus. Instead, it serves as a space to “question or disrupt the status quo” through the crops it grows, the practices it employs, and the space it creates.

“A common throughline in the class was how to think about food both as a very concrete, practical, nutritional substance [and] as a kind of political tool,” Chaoulideer said. “For a lot of students, it was a new concept that… the place and process of growing could raise critical questions.” 

The Farm became a reference for that kind of critical agriculture, Chaoulideer said. The YSFP is constantly exploring how it relates to Yale Dining, to the university as a whole, and to different parts of the New Haven community — “raising questions about what the Farm should be or could be.”  

Many thanks to all these instructors for their time and generosity. This semester, new classrooms are coming to the Old Acre, including students from ENGL 114: Matters of Color / Color Matters, ARCH 1021: Architectural Design 3, ENG 114: What We Eat, and HSAR 553: Embodied Artisanal Knowledge. 

Alumni Interviews | Kate Anstreicher '18

A successful crop needs support in order to thrive: insects to pollinate it, people to weed it, sunshine and water to help it grow. Farms, too, cannot thrive in isolation. That’s where the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming comes in. Founded in 1997, Glynwood is an agricultural nonprofit which builds connections between and provides resources to food systems actors in the Hudson Valley. As Glynwood’s Program Manager, YSFP alumna Kate Anstreicher ’18 helps manage the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, the Food Sovereignty Fund, and other initiatives. In this interview with YSFP communications manager Sadie Bograd ’25, Anstreicher explains the crucial role that stakeholder-driven partnerships play in sustaining a thriving agricultural community. 

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

What is the Glynwood Center for Food and Farming? What do you do as program manager?

Glynwood’s mission is to ensure that the Hudson Valley remains a region defined by food and farming where farmers can thrive. One main part of Glynwood’s work is our regional food programs, where we help build producer coalitions in the Hudson Valley to assist with things like collective marketing and skill sharing. I manage the Hudson Valley CSA [community supported agriculture] coalition and help with communications, website development, and other parts of various projects. 

Since land is so fragmented in this region, a lot of farms are small-scale, diversified vegetable operations, for which CSA is a good model. In 2016, we founded the CSA coalition and received grant funding to build a central website with a directory where consumers can search for farms near them using their zip code, what sort of things they want in a CSA share, and how they want to pay for it. That's been an important, centralized way for CSA farms to promote their offerings. We also organize an annual winter summit where we promote peer learning. 

One of our earliest regional food programs was working with cider makers and apple growers. The alcoholic cider industry has grown a lot in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years, and New York is no exception. Glynwood saw an opportunity to help large-scale apple producers create a value-added product in the early 2000s. We got funding to send cider makers, apple growers, and other restaurateurs and spirits experts on several international trips to see other regions in which cider is a proud and long-standing industry. Those international exchanges helped grow the industry and provide technical assistance. We're still doing a lot of cider work, but our work also resulted in the founding of a separate organization, the New York Cider Association, which does advocacy to make sure that New York’s laws are supportive of cider makers. Lately, they’ve been working on doorstep delivery and shipping. Right now, there's this weird bottleneck: New York cider producers can ship their product to consumers in other states, but I could not order a bottle of cider from a New York producer to have it arrive at my door.

Those sound like valuable partnerships. What else does Glynwood do? 

Our food access work has expanded since the pandemic. We founded our Food Sovereignty Fund in the spring of 2020 with an advisory council of farmers, food pantry representatives, and other folks across the region who were concerned about the increase in food insecurity at the onset of the pandemic. The Food Sovereignty Fund aims to channel more fresh produce and meat and dairy products into the emergency food system—although what we call an “emergency” is really a chronic issue in our country. We build contracts and pay farms in advance to grow food for food access partners and their communities, whether that is a food pantry run out of a church or a larger organization that also makes hot meals. We prioritize building relationships with farms that are run by historically marginalized farmers, including BIPOC, queer, and female farmers. This year, we contracted about $300,000 to 22 different farms who distributed food to 20 different food access partners.

We have a farm on site that's over 230 acres. In 2007, we started our farmer training programming, in which apprentices learn sustainable vegetable and livestock farming practices. We also help organize apprenticeships at other farms. A lot of farms want to help train the next generation of farmers, but they don't necessarily have the time or the resources to provide educational opportunities to their employees. We're able to pay those farmers for a four-hour workshop, for example, so they still get their hourly wage but can come to Glynwood. 

We build additional revenue for our mission-related work through site rental. We're really close to the city, so people want to get married in the Hudson Valley. Model Hailey Bieber and her husband, Justin Bieber, came for a photo shoot once because Hailey was modeling for Vogue. They ended up using one of our goats. 

I’ve seen some recent reporting that land prices have become a big issue for farmers in the region. Could you elaborate on these and other challenges that farmers face in the Hudson Valley? 

There is a competing interest in the beauty of the landscape. Particularly during the pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers found it scary to live in the city, and the Hudson Valley became a very popular destination for people to settle down, to buy land, to have a family. I really don't blame them, but that has put a lot of pressure on the land market, and land values are astronomically high. Land access is a huge issue here for farmers who want to start a farm from scratch, especially first-generation farmers who don't have that much collateral and aren't inheriting land. Luckily, there are a lot of organizations in place that can help acquire land and found these incubator parcels. 

Land access includes housing. The market here is honestly terrifying. I'm a salaried employee at a relatively well-resourced nonprofit, but the Beacon housing prices are a stretch for me. For people in a farm crew making $16 an hour, I can't even imagine how hard it is. I've heard stories from farmers who've said that they have tried to hire someone, and then that person can't find housing, so they can't take the job.

Something else that has shifted in the past five years alone is the climate crisis and the severity of the climate disasters that are occurring on an annual basis, even in our region. It’s the whole gambit: both too little water and too much water and crazy wind storms and hail storms in the middle of the summer and tropical storms. 

You said that your mission is to maintain the Hudson Valley as a region defined by farming. What does the agricultural landscape look like? 

This has been a bustling region for thousands of years. The Hudson River has always been a river of commerce and was stewarded by Indigenous populations for generations. At the beginning of colonialism, the Hudson Valley became a region that freighted food to New York City. 

There are a lot of vegetable farms and orchards. You need to drive further north or west to get to crops like corn and soy. The land is too valuable here for that commercial scale. We also have some awesome raw milk dairies in the region, including sheep and goat dairies. It's harder to find big enough parcels of land for large-scale livestock production, especially for cattle. But I know of a lot of people who are raising broilers and laying hens.

It's amazing how robust the farming community is here. There are some multi-generational farms around, but the Hudson Valley is also a bastion for young farmers, first-generation farmers. We have an incredibly robust queer farming community and increasingly BIPOC farming community, in large part thanks to farms that are very intentionally building that community, like Soul Fire Farm, Rock Steady Farm, Sweet Freedom Farm. They're all advocating for food justice and for the training of BIPOC farmers and queer farmers, and they’re building a safe space for those farmers. Chaseholm Farm is a queer-owned, third-generation, grass-fed dairy, and they have a dairy drag show every June that's popular among farmers. 

How does Glynwood fit into that community? How do you figure out the specific challenges that you can help address?

We're still learning. We are a well-resourced, majority white organization, so especially when it comes to things like food justice and social justice, we're not the experts. For example, with the Food Sovereignty Fund, the accountability council is really our guiding force. We have the time and the resources to facilitate the project, but we need input from folks who are on the ground distributing food and representing communities elsewhere in the Hudson Valley. 

We're trying to get more into language justice and offering more of our services in Spanish in particular, because there are tons of farm workers here whose first language is not English. Quite a few farmers are using the H-2A program to employ farm workers from Guatemala and Mexico. We try to have several bilingual events a year and are trying to translate as many written resources as we can. We also bought equipment for bilingual events that we are willing to rent out to other entities for free, because we think that language justice should be more widespread. That was in large part inspired by the Hudson Valley Farm Hub who already had that model in place.

One thing that we have to remind ourselves of is that efficient work is not always the best work. You want to see change really fast, but it's slow, intentional work in which you involve stakeholders that can help you better achieve your goals in the long run. 

Slow, intentional work—that reminds me of the Yale Farm! Could you tell me about your time there? 

The Yale Sustainable Food Program was a wonderful and influential part of my college experience. I started volunteering at the Farm my first-year fall and was working as a culinary events manager by the following spring semester. I loved being able to be outside every Friday, rain or shine, and to learn some awesome culinary skills from Jacquie. The Chewing the Fat speaker series was also amazing. That was the first time that I heard Leah Penniman [of Soul Fire Farm], Michael Twitty [author of The Cooking Gene]. The lineup was just incredible, and it opened up a new dimension of food and agriculture and environmentalism to me.

Graduate Student Food Insecurity | Workday and knead 2 know feat. Kiera Quigley and Destiny Treloar

Now is the time to stop and smell the roses—as well as the apple blossoms, daffodils, and all the other flowers blooming on the Farm. On Friday, students practiced attuning to their senses and centering in the moment as part of a mindful kala practice led by Shruti Parthasarathy ’24, co-president of the Yale Student Mental Health Association. Participants took a break from the workday for a session that combined bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance, with mindfulness meditation. They returned to the fields refreshed and ready to weed the peas, hops, and asparagus.

After the workday, students headed up to the Lazarus Pavilion for a knead 2 know by Kiera Quigley MEM ’23 and Destiny Treloar MESc ’23 about food insecurity amongst students at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). Kiera and Destiny shared the campaign that began during their class “Organizing: People, Power, and Change.” After settling on the topic of food insecurity, the students disseminated a survey among YSE students that aimed to understand the scope of the problem and potential solutions. They found that one-third of YSE students experience food insecurity—compared to the national average of 10 percent. Rates of food insecurity are even higher among PhD students (compared to master’s students), first-generation students, low-income students, BIPOC students, and Latinx students. 

Respondents identified a range of barriers to consistent food access. Cost was the most significant problem for food-insecure students, in addition to a lack of transportation. Kiera pointed out that many YSE students live in East Rock, a neighborhood which lacks a large, affordable grocery store. The majority of respondents, both food-insecure and not, also indicated that lack of time was also a problem: many students don’t have the spare hours to shop and cook for themselves.

Students suggested a range of possible solutions. The most commonly proposed initiatives were increased stipends and financial aid. Others advocated for better transportation and shuttle options to local grocery stories, a community food pantry or fridge, community organizing to bring more affordable food stores to the area, and efforts to transport leftover food from campus events to an accessible location. 

Kiera, Destiny, and their classmates have shared these results widely. They organized a banner drop publicizing their findings in the YSE graduating class photo. They have also spoken with the Graduate and Professional Student Senate and with the YSE administration, and they plan to discuss their findings in a forthcoming publication.  

We thank Kiera and Destiny for sharing their important work with us, and we thank all the students who joined us for their presentation and at last Friday’s workday. We hope to see you at our last pizza workday of the semester this Friday, with a workday at 2:00 PM and a knead 2 know at 4:15 PM by Diego Ellis Soto, a PhD candidate in the department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, about his work turning the Yale Farm birdsongs into music. Photos from the workday by Reese Neal ’25 are available here.

Alumni Interviews | Sophie Mendelson '15

As the weather gets warmer, nothing sounds better than the sweet, cold taste of an ice cream sandwich. As co-founder and operations director of Sugarwitch Ice Cream Sandwiches, Sophie Mendelson ’15 is there to sate that summertime craving. Her St. Louis shop offers a range of frozen delicacies, all named after famous witches of literature. Whether you’re in the mood for an Ursula (vanilla ice cream, rainbow sprinkles, and a salty brownie) or a Zeniba (sencha tea ice cream with a nori rice crispy treat), Sugarwitch has something to offer. Sophie sat down with Communications Manager Sadie Bograd ’25 to share the story behind the scoops. 

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.

Sophie (right) told Voices: “If kid me could see that I get to be making ice cream and recommending my favorite fantasy books to people, I would just be so overjoyed.”

Tell me about Sugarwitch! How did it get started? 

My wife Martha started making ice cream sandwiches and bringing them into work as a distraction in the wake of the 2016 election, and they were a hit. So I started making them and feeding them to my classmates, and they were also a hit there. We had daydreamed casually about trying to make it a business. When we found ourselves in Columbia, Missouri, as grad students, we were like, “Okay, let's give it a go.” We naively thought that we'd have a lot of free time in the summer as grad students, which wasn't true, but we took about a year researching all the regulations and getting set up, and then we started production in 2019. We just did it over the summer for the first couple of summers, selling at the farmers market. But it became something we didn't want to let go of, even when it wasn't necessarily practical. When Martha got a full time job in St. Louis at the end of 2019, we decided not to stop. That's when we really started looking for a more permanent space. We ended up in what is St. Louis's longest continually-operating bakery. Since then, we've been growing our team and just really enjoying St. Louis as our home.

Why ice cream? And why ice cream sandwiches?

Both Martha and I made a lot of ice cream growing up. My mom says that I used to talk about starting an ice cream shop when I was little. So if we were going to do something, it was going to be ice cream. The sandwiches came about because it was the best way that Martha could think of to make the ice cream more shareable. Bringing a tub of ice cream into an office is one thing: you need a scoop and bowls and spoons, and people have to feel like they can go into the freezer and scoop themselves some ice cream from the communal bucket. But with ice cream sandwiches, you have these little packets that everybody can grab. And then we were intrigued by the constraints of the ice cream sandwich and the creativity that it demanded, because of the structural considerations that aren't so much of a thing when you're just making a pint of ice cream. 

What do you mean by structural limitations? 

We make a very high density ice cream. There's less air in our ice cream than you would often find even in a super-premium ice cream, because we need it to stand up as a structural element. We pour our ice cream into a sheet pan with a cookie on the bottom, put another giant cookie on top, and then we slice it all into squares. So it has to be able to withstand that process and be firm enough and strong enough to be sliced and moved around. 

The other thing is with the cookies themselves: how they slice, how they freeze. Is it something that you can bite into, or is it something that’s going to be a rock? We have three main categories of cookies that we riff on. One is a very fudgy thin brownie cookie. That fudginess — the moisture there, and the high butterfat — makes them freeze in a nicely biteable way. We do a lot of nut-based shortbreads because they have a wonderful frozen texture. And then we do a fair amount with Rice Krispie treats that we press really thin, that being an easy gluten free option.

Where does your flavor inspiration come from? 

A lot of it comes from nostalgia. We have a very collaborative flavor development process with our team, with nostalgic impulses drawing from a lot of different food backgrounds. Additionally, we rely on seasonally available produce in this area. We work with the farmers market and a farm delivery program out of Illinois. My master's degree was with the Agroforestry Center at the University of Missouri, so we do a fair amount with agroforestry crops that do well in Missouri and Illinois, like pawpaws and hazelnuts and pecans. And we of course draw flavor inspiration from what we see happening around us. St. Louis has a really wonderful food scene, so we do a lot of collaborations with other businesses and restaurants. It's fun to look at somebody's menu and think about what would complement what they're already doing.

I also noticed your website highlights sustainability and ethical labor practices. You talked about sourcing local and seasonal ingredients, but could you elaborate on the ethical labor practices? How do you think about using business as a mechanism for food systems change and sustainability?

Both Martha and I, as grad students and as undergrads, were academically looking at food systems. We both were drawn to the labor side of things and were seeing this real lack of sustainability within labor practices all along the food chain. That is obviously a massive and very complicated problem, but in starting Sugarwitch, our core question really was, “Can we make a company where sustaining livelihoods is the driving force of all of the choices that we're making?” Not to say that we have an answer to that question, but that’s the touchstone of any strategic choices that we make about growth, about hiring, about how we set up the schedule and what kinds of tasks we ask people to do and how much creativity people get. We try to pay a living wage, we offer PTO and sick time, we just started salarying people, and we are working on developing healthcare benefits — we just don't have enough full-time employees yet to qualify. Those are some of those structural things that we are thinking about. A lot of what we've done, I don't think anybody would advise us to make these choices from a strict business perspective, because they go against the conventional logic of how you prioritize and where you want your margins to be. But what is the point of the company if we can't make it create these livelihoods for folks? The more that we prioritize the team and everybody's wellbeing, the stronger the company is. 

We are also in the process of converting to a worker-owned cooperative structure. We’re working with WashU’s legal entrepreneurship clinic, so this awesome group of law students is helping us draft an operating agreement and bylaws. It's slow going because there aren't a ton of resources in Missouri, specifically on the financial side of things. We have a lot of questions about the tax implications for staff who then become members of the coop. Finding a CPA who can actually explain that has been really difficult. That, to me, is another critical part: not only saying, “You have wonderful ideas, and I want your help with flavor development and your vision for the cafe,” but also, “You have actual ownership in this entity, and because we are all contributing to its ability to thrive, we will ideally all benefit from that as well.”

What else have been some of the biggest challenges of running a business?

Having zero business background has been quite challenging. We're self-teaching and we're figuring everything out from scratch. But we've also had tremendous mentorship from other businesses and people we can ask questions of, so it is possible to do it. It’s helpful to know the conventions before you break them. I am somebody who really likes to plan, and diving into this unknown territory has really challenged me to loosen my grip on the idea that I will know ahead of time exactly where I'm heading. I think that goes hand in hand with the desire for this to be a collaborative effort. Having a team of people working on it, and not just being one lone individual trying to make a go of things, is absolutely critical. 

I noticed that your menu is all witch-themed. Where did that idea come from?

It came from the sandwich pun. We’re both really big readers, and I have always loved fantasy and science fiction. And it was a way to keep it fun and lighthearted. It's been an awesome way to connect with both kids and adults. The partner of one of our staff members works for a bookstore in town, so we do a lot of collaborative events. I think we're going to be able to stock some of the books that we named the ice cream sandwiches after. If kid me could see that I get to be making ice cream and recommending my favorite fantasy books to people, I would just be so overjoyed. 

Given what you're saying about being able to appeal to children, who is your target audience?

We've done our best to not settle too hard into a specific target audience. But the other side of that is that we are very vocal about our politics. We have developed a following that is very on board with the fact that we talk on our social media about funding abortion and trans kids’ rights. So in that sense, our target audience are people who are down for that type of messaging, and we have really cultivated a wonderful and very queer customer base. 

In terms of the types of flavors we do, we kind of span the range from very classic Americana flavors, like vanilla sprinkle brownie, to flavors that are derived from the cultural backgrounds of our staff, as well as some of the more out-there ideas that we have, more culinary flavors that we're seeing and wanting to play with. We have people who come in and are like, “I want the Ursula every time, I want the vanilla sprinkle brownie, and I never need to try anything else,” and that is great. And then we have folks who are like, “Give me everything with tea in it. Give me all of your herbal flavors.” We have fun spanning that range.

Could you tell me about your involvement with the YSFP?

When I was a student, I started out as a pizza intern my freshman year. I did that for two years and had a phenomenal time learning to work the pizza oven. But I was also super interested in the production side of things, and I transitioned over to the farm manager team for my junior and senior year. The summer following graduation, I helped run the internship program. 

The Farm really felt like it was my home at Yale. There were a lot of things that I was figuring out about myself in college. I had a lot of anxiety, though I wouldn't realize until later that I could put that name to it. But the YSFP was a place where I felt at ease and got to do tangible things. I had spent the year before college working on farms and working in kitchens, and it was kind of an odd transition back into the classroom. To have that continued opportunity through the YSFP really eased the transition and helped me maintain some of the confidence that I had developed in that year, and gave me a space where some of the pressures and expectations of the rest of the university got to fall away a little bit. 

Systemic Change with Food Systems Policy | Workday and knead 2 know feat. Nisreen Abo-Sido

The warm spring weather has brought new life to the Farm. The chickens are back in their coop, their clucks mixing with the sound of human conversations. At last Friday’s workday, students nurtured the Old Acre's budding sprouts: sowing snow peas, weeding our asparagus and sage, and scuffle-hoeing the fertile soil in the garlic beds. They got their hands dirty turning over the soil in a field which has lain fallow for the last five years—a task that left dirt caked under many fingernails—then headed to the Lazarus Pavilion for fresh pizza topped with mushrooms, pesto, and three kinds of potatoes. 

While students ate, they listened to a knead 2 know from Nisreen Abo-Sido MEM '23, a YSE-YSFP liaison and Agroforester-in-Residence at the Farm. Abo-Sido’s undergraduate education was in the hard sciences, but after a fellowship living and working in rural communities internationally, she developed an interest in the economic, social, and political factors that shaped farmers’ abilities to earn a living and employ sustainable, agroecological practices. Abo-Sido shared her insights from working with New Haven’s Food System Policy Division (FSPD) last summer, where she explored how policy can create systemic change and promote more environmentally sustainable and just food systems. She connected contemporary inequities in food systems to the legacies of redlining and urban renewal, noting, “If policy was a part of the problem, we can also imagine that policy needs to be a part of the solution.” Eighty percent of New Haven residents live within half a mile of an urban farm, community garden, or farmer’s market, but there are still barriers to access, like a lack of information and financial resources, the absence of citywide efforts to connect urban growers with market opportunities, and continuous disinvestment in Black and Brown communities. 

Participatory processes are crucial to changing these systems, as seen in FSPD initiatives like the Community Advisory Board. The Division has also received a USDA grant to increase education and access to “specialty crops”—fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, and other non-commodity crops. With the grant money, they are running community workshops on topics like beekeeping, connecting farmers and cooks within New Haven, and establishing a seed library in community spaces. In addition, the FSPD is working to expand values-based procurement practices. 

Many thanks to Abo-Sido for her informative and thoughtful presentation. We also thank all the students who joined us last Friday, and those who visited the Farm on Saturday for Battle of the Bands, where student performers competed for a chance to perform at this year’s Spring Fling. This week, we’ll have another workday at 2:00 PM and a knead 2 know at 4:15 PM by Sasha Carney ’23. Photos from the workday by Reese Neal '25 are available here.

Environmentalism and Anti-fatness | Workday and knead 2 know feat. Austin Bryniarski and Samara Brock

The weather was gray and windy, but spirits were warm and bright at our first workday of the semester. With tendrils of spring sprouting across the Farm, students broke ground in our fields, using shovels and hoes to turn and level the soil in preparation for peas and other crops. Others headed to the strawberry patch to gather leaf litter and give the berries space to grow. Many of the strawberries are sending off runners, or horizontal sprouts that must be pruned to leave room for others. Although their leaves are still brown, the plants are hale and hearty: according to farm manager Jacob Slaughter ’24, “they just haven’t woken up yet.” Meanwhile, our newest culinary events managers, proudly wearing our new YSFP hoodies, went for a tour of the Old Acre, where they learned about the many pizza toppings we can anticipate in coming weeks — garlic chives, anyone? On the other side of the Farm, Slifka Center affiliates gathered to harvest parsley and horseradish for Passover seder. 

With dirt under their fingernails and smiles on their faces, students returned to the Lazarus Pavilion for some long-awaited pizza. The team did not disappoint, slinging out pies layered with roasted garlic, sweet potato puree, caramelized onion, kale, and much, much more. Attendees then sat down for an engaging knead 2 know by YSE doctoral candidate Samara Brock and former Lazarus fellow Austin Bryniarski '16 YSE '19, in which they discussed their article, “How anti-fatness crept into the environmental sustainability movement.” Brock and Bryniarski explained that a growing number of environmentalists have started to promote the concept of “metabolic food waste”—the idea that fat people eat too much and therefore have a greater negative impact on the environment. The flaws with this theory are manifold. Firstly, it misunderstands the science of weight and metabolism while perpetuating fatphobia, discrimination, and the erroneous and damaging belief that fat people are “failed thin people.” The speakers quoted author and fat activist Virgie Tovar, who said, “Fat people are a natural part of human diversity, and if there are not fat people in the future, then that future has failed on some level.” In addition, it maintains a focus on individual consumption decisions rather than on systemic change to food systems, choosing to scrutinize the fat body while obscuring the bodies of farmworkers and others who are harmed by unsafe labor conditions, pesticide use, and more. 

After a thoughtful Q&A, attendees returned to conversations over pizza, accompanied by the songs of a cappella group Something Extra. 
Thank you to Brock and Bryniarski for their presentation, and to all those who spent the afternoon with us. Next week, we’ll be back on the Farm for a workday at 2:00 and a knead 2 know at 4:15 by Nisreen Abo-Sido MEM '23. Photos from Friday can be found here.

Costa Rican Fisher Ecological Knowledge | Knead 2 know feat. Daviana Berkowitz-Sklar '23

Scientific data and lived experience are often portrayed as conflicting sources of information. But in last Friday’s knead 2 know, Global Food Fellow Daviana Berkowitz-Sklar '23 explained how these two ways of knowing complement each other in her analysis of Costa Rican billfish. 

Costa Rica is home to various fishing interests, including sport fishing.. Sport fishing mainly targets billfish, a group of large fish with pointed bills that includes blue marlin and sailfish. Sport fishing generates hundreds of millions of ecotourism dollars each year, but many sport fishing captains have reported a perceived decline in the billfish population. 

Stanford’s Project DynaMAR (Dynamic Marine Animal Research), the group with which Berkowitz-Sklar works, has used satellite tags to track billfish movement and create models of where billfish are located, but these tags are very expensive and not always accessible to other fishery research projects. Incorporating local ecological knowledge in these models may be helpful to fill gaps in scientific data and to include local communities in the scientific process. Local fishers add a valuable perspective, as they observe the state of the billfish fishery on a daily basis, including at times when scientists are not present.

To document fishers’ knowledge, Berkowitz-Sklar conducted semi-structured interviews with 54 sport fishing captains in six different fishing communities along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. She asked interviewees about the availability of billfish, how far offshore captains traveled to fish, whether this distance had changed over time, and what threats the billfish population faced. She also engaged fishers in a participatory mapping process, giving interviewees a map of the region and asking them to circle the best areas to find sailfish and blue marlin. 

Berkowitz-Sklar is generating habitat suitability models by combining the participatory map data with other environmental predictors that fishers had indicated were important, like bathymetry (the topography of the ocean floor), chlorophyll-a levels, and sea surface temperature. These kinds of models can be used to predict not only where billfish currently reside, but also where their populations might move and what regions are most in need of conservation as ocean conditions change. She will look at fisher-mapped billfish distributions and  DynaMAR’s satellite tag data side-by-side to explore how ecological knowledge and scientific methodologies can work together.  

In addition to gathering information from local fishers, Berkowitz-Sklar wants to ensure that her research is useful for her interviewees. To that end, she is writing a report and creating infographics to share with local fishers, and she presented her findings to Costa Rica’s Ministry of Fishing. In the future, Berkowitz-Sklar also plans to conduct similar interviews with other fishers in other fishing industries to include a wide range of perspectives.

We thank Berkowitz-Sklar for her insightful knead 2 know and hope her work inspires future Global Food Fellows. We also thank all those who joined us for warm soup, crusty bread, and fresh chili oil (homemade by Caitlin Chung ’25). This Friday, former Yale Farm Summer Intern Eli White ’25 will deliver our last indoor knead 2 know of the semester, as they present their work on the aesthetics of food and agriculture — and give attendees a chance to make their own watercolor paintings. We’ll be back on the Farm after spring break.

Vermont Land Ethics | Knead 2 know feat. Katie Michels

Yale students gathered over bowls of warm sweet potato soup last Friday for a knead 2 know from Katie Michels MESc '23, MBA '24. Michels spent last summer driving around Vermont as a Global Food Fellow, interviewing both conventional and organic livestock farmers about their relationships with the land. Michels positioned her interviews in the context of longstanding tensions between local farming and environmental communities over water quality and other issues. Farmers’ perspectives are often silenced or marginalized, but Michels wanted to give those perspectives their due, asking weighty questions like “What does stewardship mean to you?” and “Why do you manage your land in the ways that you do?” 

The answers she received were as varied as the farms she visited. Michels said it was difficult to draw themes from her 21 semi-structured interviews, but she identified a few cross-cutting motivations underpinning her subjects’ land management practices. Many farmers cited ecological incentives: this grass keeps the songbirds coming back, or this crop keeps carbon in the soil. Others referenced a dedication to their community or expressed a desire to raise their children on a farm. Farmers of all backgrounds and beliefs displayed a strong independent streak. As one of them told Michels, “I think the decision to farm was that I didn’t have to apologize for my lifestyle… that it was defensible.” 

Although Michels aimed to interview an even mix of conventional and organic farmers, she found that conventional farmers were much less willing to speak with her, perhaps because of the intense media scrutiny commodity farmers often face, in contrast with the valorization of small-scale, direct-market operators. Among the five conventional farmers she interviewed, a focus on feeding people was a consistent theme. One conventional farmer said she wouldn’t adopt organic practices because she wanted to be able to sell her ground beef at five dollars a pound—to ensure that “more than just the college professors can access the food.” Michels described how conventional farmers are constrained by markets. Many of them use ecologically-sensitive techniques, but choose not to sell into the organic market because of the challenges of obtaining certification and the downward price pressure in the industry. “We have a country that doesn’t pay very much for food, and that comes on the backs of farmers,” Michels noted. 

Certain limiting factors also kept reappearing in Michels’ conversations. The weather was intense last summer, and the labor market was tight. Farmers told Michels that even if they offered employees twice as much as they paid themselves, they couldn’t get enough applicants. Knead 2 know attendees also asked questions about the role of technology in land stewardship. Michels mentioned that the Natural Resources Conservation Service (a technical assistance agency at the U.S. Department of Agriculture) has been pushing farmers to implement expensive, tech-driven solutions. Farmers face a difficult decision: these innovations would reduce labor expenses, but create a long-term dependence on technology companies. At the same time, Michels highlighted the ways in which farmers have adapted to a changing tech world. Almost everyone she interviewed used smartphones to help manage their farms, for example. 

Michels hopes to share her findings with technical assistance providers and policymakers. She is partnering with the American Farmland Trust to do a larger survey focused on similar questions. We thank Michels for her willingness to share her findings with us, and hope future Global Food Fellows take inspiration from her thoughtful approach to her research. Photos from the event can be found here.

Join us at future winter knead 2 knows at 12:30 PM at the Office of LGBTQ Resources (135 Prospect St). We’ll be back outdoors at the Yale Farm after spring break.

Alumni Interviews | Chloe Zale '12

Busy college students across the country are familiar with Chloe Zale’s cooking, although most of them don’t know it. Zale is a senior recipe developer at HelloFresh, a meal kit company which sends its customers a weekly box of recipes and pre-measured ingredients. The 2012 alumna took a circuitous path from prepping pizzas on the Yale Farm to crafting meals in a test kitchen — she was a strategy consultant for seven years before going to culinary school. In this interview with YSFP communications manager Sadie Bograd ’25, she shares her insights on finding inspiration, in cooking and in life.

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.

I want to start off by asking about recipe development. How do you craft a recipe from start to finish?

There are different organizations in which recipe developers have a home. People develop recipes for magazines or blogs, for meal kits like myself, or even for brands — someone could be hired by Betty Crocker to do seven things with some cake mix. But the end goal is typically to have a home-cook-friendly recipe that tastes the same way it did when it was developed in a test kitchen.

I start with an assignment from our product team, which is called a brief. They give me a protein, any operational constraints, and sometimes an inspiration or things not to do. So it could be “Chicken dish, and don't do Mexican because we have a lot of Mexican chicken dishes right now.” But that leaves a lot of options open. I get four of those every week, and for each of those briefs, I come up with a few ideas. I present them to my team in a brainstorming session, and we pick one idea for each of those briefs. 

From there, I actually write the recipe and cook it a couple times. Every time I cook it, my team tastes it, and we decide whether I need to change something. When everyone's aligned, someone else on the team will cross-test it to make sure that it is exactly the same as my version. Then it gets edited by our editorial team, laid out on a recipe card and sent to the customers who order it. From my brain to someone's plate, it could be up to six months. 

Customers can also see out six weeks in advance. And for the most part, there are no repeat recipes for any six-week period. So there are a lot of recipes in rotation.

Where do you find inspiration for all those recipes? Particularly, how do you think about exploring other cuisines that you're not as familiar with?

I would say our customer is relatively mainstream. So I'm not going to be doing anything crazy that you might find in a three Michelin star restaurant in New York. We would maybe look at the Cheesecake Factory as a restaurant for inspiration, or I look at cookbooks. Sometimes I come up with ideas completely out of the blue. 

As far as ingredients or recipes from other cultures, we have a limited set of ingredients available to us. There are occasions where I might need to use an ingredient that wouldn't be the most authentic. Let's say we want to make a paella from Spain. The ingredient that gives the rice its yellow color is saffron, but we do not have saffron as an ingredient. So for our paella dishes, we put a little bit of turmeric to color the rice. I personally try to do more cuisines that I have more familiarity with, but occasionally I will take inspiration from various world cuisines. I like to order food from restaurants in New York and try to emulate those dishes. 

I'm curious about this idea of making cooking approachable for a mainstream audience. How do you balance introducing your customers to new flavors with recognizing that they may view some foods and cuisines as more ‘adventurous’ than others? 

It's interesting because America is so hugely diverse. Our customer base is primarily white, but I don't want to make it seem like we're only catering to a white audience. I think that the most important thing for a company like HelloFresh is, if you're introducing a new flavor, can you do it in a familiar format? Like if we have a new Vietnamese sauce, can we put it in a stir fry with vegetables that people are used to? You may not get the perfect representation of how that dish would be made in its home country. But you introduce people to new ingredients, new flavors, and then as they become more familiar with them, you can add more and more complexity and interest, and people develop a palate over time for that.

It sounds like developing recipes is pretty complex. What are the hardest parts?

I think that the hardest part is nailing the flow, and making sure that it's an enjoyable cooking experience for someone at home. We don't want to have three pans going at the same time. It's about working backwards from the final plate — like, I know I need to have cooked zucchini and cooked rice and cooked chicken on this plate. If I'm going to be cooking the chicken on the stove and it takes this much time, maybe I need to do the zucchini in the oven and not on the stove, because otherwise the rice will be cold by the time the zucchini is cooked and the chicken is done.

Apart from the cooking itself, I would think there must be challenges in communicating the cooking process clearly. Are there skills that you've had to learn in terms of writing the recipes?

The most important thing when you're writing a recipe is to include as many sensory cues as possible. You want to make sure that you're touching on the way an ingredient looks when it's done, the way it smells. It's not just about time, because every stove has a different power; every oven is calibrated a little differently. I would never say, “Roast zucchini until it's done, 10 to 12 minutes.” You would give a “brown and tender” or “brown and fragrant” so that people can anchor on multiple elements of completion, not just a timeframe.

Shifting gears, could you tell me about your history with food and what made you want to be a recipe developer?

I am from New York City, and I still live here. When you live in New York, food is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it becomes key to your existence. As a kid, I remember doing taste tests all around New York with my dad, where we would find the best pizza or the best ice cream. We'd do research in the newspapers — there wasn't Yelp or anything like that back then — and we would try seven slices of pizza in different boroughs and take notes. It built this appreciation in me for refining something into its best form. 

That started to play out when I was a preteen. I think I was in fifth grade when I baked twelve batches of chocolate chip cookies. I tweaked one thing every time so that I could make my perfect cookie. I really liked that iterative process of cooking, tasting, refining, cooking again, tasting again, getting input from other people, and refining until it met my vision. That was foreshadowing that recipe development might be a career I was interested in. 

It was something that I didn't even really know was a career until I went to culinary school in 2019, after I had been a strategy consultant for seven years. I definitely had some other paths that I followed as a teenager and early adult. I studied opera, and when I got to Yale, I was really intense about singing for my first couple years. Then I realized that I did not want to be a professional opera singer. It wasn't the thing that lit me up. And I figured I should probably focus on something else. 

How did you find that “something else”? 

There was a college tea for an alum who was the vice president of Murray's Cheese, which is a fantastic cheese store in New York. I went home for Christmas break right after that. I was looking at all of the internships in the Yale career database, and they all looked so boring to me. I had this low moment where I was like, “I hate everything. What am I going to do with myself?” My dad sat me down and said, “Well, what do you like?” I was fresh off that cheese tasting, so I said, “I like cheese.” He said, “Why don't you do something with cheese, then?”

I emailed the Murray's VP and asked her if I could spend the summer working at Murray’s. She responded immediately and said, “Go for it. I'm going to connect you with my head of HR. You can rotate through all the different departments and learn all about cheese and food business.” I thought that sounded amazing. It sounded way more interesting than all of the PR and finance and marketing internships that were listed in that database. 

Wow! That sounds like an incredible opportunity for a Yale student. You were also involved with the YSFP as an undergrad. What was your experience like at the Yale Farm? 

When I came back from my summer at Murray’s, that was when I switched gears. I wanted to get involved with every food-related thing on campus. One of those things was the YSFP. As soon as the communications manager job popped up in the student job database, I applied for it. I didn’t necessarily want to work as a farm manager because I'm a city girl, and it felt a little too far afield. But the communications piece — talking to all the professors of food-related courses and assisting with the speaker series — that sounded super fun. The next year, I worked as an events and pizza intern. I loved that we were using Liuzzi local cheese and the vegetables from the Farm and making our own dough in the oven. It was such a special community. I worked at one event where René Redzepi from Noma came. We had a big meal at Miya’s and pulled out all the stops.

I know I've asked you a bunch of questions. Is there anything I didn't ask about that you want to mention?

I think it's important to underscore that life is long, and it's okay if it takes you a little while to find your calling. I found mine in college, and then I had a little diversion when I worked in consulting, but I gained so much from that experience. Even though at the time, I certainly had some existential strife, I ended up in a place that I'm really happy with. It’s important to listen to yourself and take advantage of opportunities when they come up. And when you do find something that you're passionate about, really go after it. Believing in yourself and your intelligence and seeking the things that call to you will make for a happy life.

Alumni Interviews | Emily Farr '14

From our landlocked Farm at the top of Science Hill, you might forget that New Haven is a coastal city. Not so for Emily Farr YC ’14 YSE ’17. After getting degrees in Geology and Environmental Management, Farr embarked on a career in aquatic food systems. Previously, she was a Fishery Management Specialist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She now works as Senior Fisheries Program Manager at Manomet, a nonprofit that uses science and collaboration to protect coastal ecosystems. She spoke with YSFP communications manager Sadie Bograd ’25 about the challenges and opportunities facing Maine’s fisheries. 

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 does it mean to be a senior fisheries program manager? What does your day-to-day job look like? 

At Manomet, we're focused on building resilience in the fishing community in the Gulf of Maine. The area is changing rapidly due to climate change, gentrification, and other pressures that are happening along the coast. I support the fishing community and coastal communities in responding and adapting to that change. I work with shellfish harvesters out on the mudflats, I work with river herring harvesters. I do a lot of convening, bringing people together to share what they're learning and hearing and seeing, and then figuring out how we can collaboratively address the challenges they're facing.

Could you describe the landscape that you're working in?

There are fisheries that take place far out in the ocean, but the fisheries that I work in are mainly coastal. I primarily work with the shellfish fishery, which is mostly wild clams, both soft shell and hard shell. Those clams live in the mudflats, which are in the intertidal zone, between the high tide and the low tide line. Harvesters often walk out onto the flat; sometimes they take a boat. They often use a clam rake to get the clams out of the mud at low tide, while the mudflats are exposed.

And the river herring fishery — Maine is actually the only state that has a commercial fishery for river herring. The species spends most of its life in the ocean, then comes up into lakes and ponds to spawn in the spring. Some harvesters use nets, some of them have traps. In all of those cases, they're harvesting just a portion of the run and letting much of it continue upriver to spawn. It's a really cool fishery, because the harvesters are the stewards of that resource. They're responsible for monitoring it, for sending data to the state to help manage it, and so they play a critical role in making sure that it's a healthy species.

Why are fisheries so important and what challenges are they facing?

Fisheries, like all food production systems, are an important livelihood for thousands of people. Maine coastal communities are culturally and economically dependent on fisheries. Like people who farm, people who fish are always coming up with new ways to adapt to the pressures that they're facing. But that's not always easy to do, and it often requires support and collaboration. 

One of the biggest changes to ocean ecosystems today is that the water is warming quickly and species are shifting their ranges. Many of the species that people have long harvested in the Northeast are either moving North or moving further offshore, and new species are coming in. For example, lobsters are the most important fishery in Maine, and their range has started to shift. They are fished using pots — traps at the bottom with vertical lines in the water column. There have been increasing entanglements with right whales, not necessarily from the lobster fishery, but entanglement is a big risk, and it's a very endangered whale. The whale populations are also shifting, in part because their food source, plankton, is changing in its relative abundance. So climate change is creating all of these shifts in the places where species are and where their food is and where people are fishing, and it's creating these new conflicts with no easy solutions. 

I also mentioned gentrification along the coast. I work with shellfish harvesters who have to cross private property to access the intertidal mudflats where they work. They rely on informal agreements with landowners, but there's been a lot of turnover. Many of the new landowners don't understand that traditional use of the coast, so these harvesters are losing access.

How are you responding to that coastline development and privatization?

In Maine, shellfish are managed collaboratively between the state and municipalities. Each town is responsible for stewarding its own shellfish resource. We've been sitting down with the shellfish committees of the towns that we work closely with and mapping out where they currently access the coast to harvest. That hadn't been captured for a variety of reasons, partly because some of that information is sensitive and confidential: as a harvester, I might have a relationship with this landowner, and they allow me to cross their property to get to the flats, but they might not allow every other harvester in town to do that. But everyone agreed that change is happening so rapidly that we need to sit down and document where access is, and then figure out creative ways to preserve it. That looks like working with land trusts and thinking about easements on private property, or acquiring land that the town can use to allow access. The harvesters are doing landowner appreciation days, where they bring landowners together and share, “This is why clams are important. Let's all eat clams together, talk about the resource, build some relationships and trust.”

And what are some of the adaptations that you're investigating on the climate change side?

Another species that's been increasing in abundance in the Gulf of Maine is the invasive green crab. It's originally from Europe, and it's been in the Gulf of Maine for 200 years — it came over mostly in ballast water from ships. But it's really exploded in abundance as the water has warmed because it's a super resilient species. The green crab is an extremely voracious predator of shellfish, clams in particular, and it's creating a real pressure on that important resource. One of the things that we've been working on is developing a commercial fishery for green crabs, to help relieve that pressure on the ecosystem and create a new fishing opportunity for harvesters. 

Are there difficulties that arise in trying to convene people from so many different groups? Or unexpected partnerships? 

It's always challenging when people are speaking different languages and are coming from different backgrounds. Fishers, scientists, managers — their day-to-day lives look really different. But I think there's great success that comes out of bringing all those groups together on a regular basis. It really requires trust, and it requires true relationships. 

I facilitate a network of people working on river herring. There are harvesters, there are communities that volunteer to count the river herring as they're coming back into ponds, there are tons of scientists, there are managers at the state and federal and local level. We have this network that brings people together to share information and talk about what questions they want to answer and how they can partner. It’s been really gratifying to see how, as that network has continued, new relationships have formed. People are meeting outside of it to collaborate on projects. It’s slowly building trust, and that’s really great to see. 

What have been the barriers to building trust in the past?

Both fishermen and the management community are under different pressures and different mandates, and it's hard to be in someone else's shoes. There have also been regulatory decisions that people didn't agree with, and that has eroded trust. There wasn't necessarily a ton of listening from the management side in the past, and I think we've gotten better in that department. But trust is something that you have to earn, and it takes time. And it's harder to build back when it's lost.

One of the biggest examples in New England is the groundfish fishery, which includes cod. There was a population collapse in the 1990s, which led to new regulations, including the institution of a ‘catch shares’ system that allocated the right to fish based on your historic participation in the fishery. This was a problem for some of the smaller-scale fishers who had relied on the fishery but didn't have a huge amount of harvest, or who didn't fish for a few years, and so didn't end up getting access when the regulation changed. That created real conflict. 

Our work at Manomet is pretty much completely driven by what the fishing communities want to see. We're guided by their ideas and perspectives and knowledge. I think that's really important, because they've historically been excluded from decision-making arenas.

Could you tell me more about your roles at the YSFP? 

Oh, man. What roles didn't I have? I started as a farm intern the summer after my sophomore year, after volunteering every now and again. Then I was a farm manager for the next few years. I took notes at staff meetings for a semester. And then I spent the summer before grad school helping to support the summer internship work. When I was at YSE, I helped to manage the berms and the perennial beds.

Did your work on the Farm influence your choice of career or teach you any skills that you use now?

Definitely. My undergraduate geology degree was focused on climate science. Working at the Yale Sustainable Food Program, I was interested in the connection between food systems and climate change. I thought that fisheries and the ocean were an interesting place where those two things meet. When I did the summer internship, we visited the farm that Bren Smith was starting at the time. He now runs GreenWave, but he was growing and still grows kelp and oysters. We went out on his boat to see the farm and learn about that operation. That was one of my first real introductions to growing and harvesting seafood from the sea.

He talked about how he was using seaweed and oysters as both carbon cycling and buffering from storm surge. To me, that really clicked as, “We're growing food, and we're thinking about climate resilience at the same time. What does that look like in other parts of the ocean and in other seafood systems?” It was a really formative experience for me.

Alumni Interviews | Lauren Kohler '19

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

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

How would you describe your work at Stray Dog Institute?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Workday and knead 2 know | Friday, November 4

The last pizza workday of the semester was a warm and sunny one. The atmosphere on the Farm was ebullient as students rounded out old harvests and prepared for new crops to come. Students were grateful for the sunshine as they harvested and sprayed 20 pounds of carrots for the Dwight Community Fridge, misting themselves in the process. After many weeks of garland-making, workday participants harvested all the marigolds they could to make a final round of summery decor. Preparing for garlic was a multi-stage process, with some students breaking up softneck garlic bulbs while the rest used scuffle hoes to prepare the fields. They all gathered to plant the hundreds of cloves, each of which will grow into a full-fledged bulb of its own. They also delighted in threshing and winnowing our Midnight Black Turtle beans. Some students tossed the pods in pillow cases, beating them against the ground in order to remove the beans from their husks. But many took the more meditative route, separating the beans by hand, and the hoop house was full of the sound of pods cracking and beans cascading into buckets. The beans will be used in this week’s Fall Feast—a partnership with the Native American Cultural Center—while the husks will end up as dry matter for the compost. Other students helped pick hot peppers, resulting in many tests of spice tolerance—tempered by spoonfuls of ricotta donated by the Culinary Events Team. 

Hot peppers weren’t the only things eaten, as participants gathered for pizza in the Lazarus Pavilion. This week’s knead 2 know was delivered by Camilla Ledezma ’23.5, a Culinary Events Manager and 2021 Global Food Fellow who spent her summer in Spain. Her presentation focused on the role of non-human animals and animality in the Spanish colonial project. She described how Spanish colonists believed in a humoral theory of health, in which the body contained a mixture of four humors, each tied to a respective temperament: blood (sanguine), phlegm (phlegmatic), black bile (melancholic), and yellow bile (choleric). Food played a role in balancing these humors—beef and pork, for example, were sanguine, while fish was phlegmatic. Upon arriving in what is now called the Americas, Spanish colonists were concerned that eating Indigenous foods would affect their humors, making them more like Indigenous people. In the colonial imagination, Indigenous people were seen as animal-like, in part because of their different foodways and agricultural practices. For example, the land was supposedly insufficiently developed, at least until the arrival of European cows wreaked havoc on the environment in an “ungulate eruption.” Ledezma also reflected on the ways in which Indigenous people resisted the imposition of colonial foodways. She noted that high rates of lactose intolerance among Native peoples can be read as the body resisting the forced introduction of beef and dairy.

After a round of questions about Ledezma’s thought-provoking presentation, students enjoyed the last Farm-fresh pizzas of the semester. Next week from 3:00 to 5:00 PM at the Native American Cultural Center, the Farm will co-host its annual Fall Feast, a celebration of Indigenous foodways. Thank you to everyone who has joined us on the fields and under the Lazarus Pavilion this semester. Photos from the event can be found here.