Yale Sustainable Food Program

The Coded Language of Southern Cookbooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the full link to my Zine.

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Mapping the "Grandparents' Garden"

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What’s in a history of a garden?

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

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

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

A link to the full zine can be found here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We Could Play Eden All Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

To view the full multimedia project, click here.

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Aesthetics of Food & Farming

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

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The Food Markets of Saint Petersburg

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Food is a subtle thing.

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

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

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

“Do you know how to prepare these mushrooms?”

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

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

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

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

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Celebrating Foods of the Black Diaspora

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For Black History Month, the Afro-American Cultural Center and Yale Sustainable Food Program have partnered together for a special event series, “Cooking Across the Black Diaspora.” The collaboration honored and commemorated this year’s 50th anniversary for both the Afro-American Cultural Center and Yale Department of African American Studies.

“Cooking Across the Black Diaspora” weaves into the Sustainable Food Program’s long-standing speaker series, known as Chewing the Fat. Building upon the conversations with past Chewing the Fat guests like Michael Twitty and Leah Penniman, we recognize the food traditions and innovations of Afro and Black-identifying peoples from across the world. In hosting Nyesha Arrington, Paola Velez, Kiki Louya, and Bryant Terry, this series held space for four chefs to share their stories, of food and identity, heritage and resilience, healing and justice.

The series culiminated in an evening celebrating the foods of the Black diaspora. Students and New Haven community members shared reflections on sweet potato pie and chosen family, soup joumou’s history in Haitian liberation, and the evolution of rice across continents. Logan Klutse ’22 offered a poem contrasting growing up hungry with the abundances of Yale’s dining halls.

Bryant Terry then followed, noting while he's proud of his cookbook Vegetable Kingdom, his live events mean little if they did not inspire community and action around Black foodways. Cooking to the tune of Bjork's "Hunter", Bryant demoed his book’s carrot soup, sharing his beginnings as a food justice activist inspired by the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast program. Besides a few cooking tips, Bryant spoke more on the powerful connections between Black cooking and broader racial justice. The evening closed with conversation, book signings, and more of Bryant’s delicious carrot soup with Atticus sourdough.

Special thanks to the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Saybrook College, LoveFed New Haven, People Get Ready Books, and the Table Underground for also supporting Bryant’s visit.

Icon Image from Bryant Terry’s Vegetable Kingdom. Photography by Noa Hines ’21.

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Detroit's Hyperlocal with Kiki Louya

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What does building a hyper-local food movement around equity look like?

Kiki Louya is a born Detroiter and Congolese-American chef, who founded Folk and The Farmer’s Hand. Together, the restaurant and grocery store have advanced the fair treatment of food and farm workers alike, supporting thriving urban agriculture and food justice efforts in Detriot. Also a co-owner at the all-women hospitality group, Nest Egg Detroit, Kiki visited Yale on February 24 to speak more about triple bottom-line practices (environment protection, social responsibility, economic success) in food business.

Kiki’s visit was the third in our “Cooking Across the Black Diaspora” series. A themed line-up for Chewing the Fat, this series was conducted in collaboration with the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. In doing so, it commemorated Black History Month, and the 50th anniversary for both the Afro-American Cultural Center (fondly referred to as “the House”) and the Yale Department of African American Studies. Timothy Dwight College also supported Kiki’s time on campus.

Following a podcast session with YSFP student Thomas Hagen ’20, Kiki shared lunch with Yale students & staff, as well as New Haven community members at the House. Emphasizing her connection to food through her father’s cooking, Kiki spoke of the unapologetic ways she often brought her Congolese heritage into her menus and work, even when her career in hospitality may have been at odds with her own family’s wishes for her; later that afternoon, a number of students were able to enjoy cooking with Kiki, learning of a Congolese peanut stew Kiki’s father often made for her as a child. A perfect dish for winter!

YSFP student Kenia Hale ’21 moderated Kiki’s public conversation, exploring how Folk and the Farmer’s Hand have worked to address inequity, from tipping policies to empower urban agriculture in Black neighborhoods. The next day, Kiki was able to delve further into Detroit’s urban “revival” and working with many stakeholders like activists and farmers as part of a class visit to YSFP Director Mark Bomford’s college seminar, "CSYC 312: Sustainable Approaches to Food & Agriculture.”

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American Breads Before 1850

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Maria Trumpler, Director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources, kicked off our spring semester knead 2 know series with a special interactive presentation titled, “American Breads Before 1850.” Starting at noon, participants made amaranth crackers from Sean Sherman’s “Sioux Chef Indigenous Kitchen”, as well as “hoe” cakes, rustic corn bread, and beaten biscuits inspired by Michael Twitty’s “The Cooking Gene.”

Maria reflected with audience members on what breads across U.S. history tell us about the deep connections between grain and social life. But more importantly, she noted, these staples help us center the people that history has too often marginalized, such as women, enslaved people, and indigenous tribes. When combined with embodied practice, what we eat then, offers more than an understanding of the past, but honors the ways in which people have shaped our present.

Photography by Sol Thompson '21.

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Food & Urban Empowerment with Erik Clemons

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In honor of 2020 Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend, the YSFP hosted a conversation with Erik Clemons, founding CEO and President of the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT). Based in New Haven, ConnCAT hosts after-school job, arts, and culinary programming to advance the careers of unemployed or under-employed adults and at-risk youth. In a public conversation at Pierson College, Erik shared with students and New Haven community members about his working relationship with Yale, ongoing development projects in Dixwell, and how ConnCAT’s programming has led to meaningful employment and equity in the New Haven community.

This Chewing the Fat event was co-sponsored by Pierson College and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

Photography by Logan Howard '21.