9th Annual Melon Forum

On April 13th, 2022, from 5:00-7:00 P.M., the Yale Sustainable Food Program hosted its ninth annual Melon Forum, during which seniors presented their theses on topics in food and agriculture at St. Anthony Hall. We are so grateful to have been able to gather and celebrate these seniors’ culminating studies at our first in-person Melon Forum in two years. If you weren’t able to attend, you can view the 2022 Melon Forum Brochure, which features seven seniors: Sol Thompson, Nat Irwin, Camden Smithtro, Alaina Perry, Elea Hewitt, Sophie Lieberman, and Catherine Rutherfurd. View all event photos here.

In a sunlit wooden room, where leather-backed books filled the shelves, over 40 students gathered to watch their peers present the projects they had spent a year or more working on. Outside, it was just beginning to look like spring, and thin, feeble branches beginning to bud with green leaves knocked against the scratched panes of the windows. The refreshments, including sprigs of green grapes, various types of cheeses, cupcakes, crackers, and wine, kept students full and ready to listen to the presenters. As the clatter died down, seniors took 15-minutes to explain their research and answer questions from curious audience members. 

Presenters included Sol Thompson ’22, who discussed his travels across Australia and the mental health impacts on farmers dealing with failing crop outputs; Nat Irwin ’22, who compared what qualifies as ‘regenerative agriculture’ across New Hampshire and Vermont; Camden Smithtro ’22, who studied the Land Institute’s usage of the term ‘regenerative agriculture’; Alaina Perry ’22, who analyzed a series of art pieces and their usage of food and dining elements; Elea Hewitt ’22, who researched the agricultural systems of her hometown in Willamette Valley, Oregon; and Catherine Rutherford ’22, who studied women’s impact on the kitchen designs and diets in public housing in the 1900s. (Thompson, Irwin, Smithtro, Perry, and Rutherford are all a part of the YSFP!). 

A huge thanks to YSFP Farm Manager Sarah Pillard ’22 for all her event planning and execution. Thank you also to St. A’s for hosting this beloved YSFP event. 

Photos by Reese Neal ’25. Please follow this link to view all the photos from the event.

Graphic design by Kapp Singer ’23. 

Post by Sarah Feng ’25. 

Workday & knead 2 know | Friday, April 8

On Friday, April 8th, 2022, the YSFP held its weekly workday and knead 2 know. The workday was spent tending to the soil and preparing for spring planting; students pulled weeds, finished turning the compost pile, and raised, smoothed, and broadforked beds. Continuing last week's work on the soon-to-be strawberry beds, students placed tarps and drip irrigation lines in advance of our plants’ arrival. It was a beautiful day, as sunny as the yellow daffodils which have recently sprouted up across the Old Acre. Even the chickens, recently welcomed back to the Farm, were basking in the sun as they ran around outside their coop.

After a fulfilling workday, students gathered in the Lazarus Pavilion to enjoy pizza and listen to the week’s knead 2 know, presented by Storm Lewis YSE ’23, Faith Taylor YSE ’27, and Fransha Dace YSE ’27 from the Yale School of the Environment’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative. The three scholars spoke about their various studies in the intersections of food, the environment,  and justice and discussed the implications of their research in informing policy. Storm presented her research on food sovereignty in Brooklyn, NY, and her radical approach to transforming food systems, which positions marginalized workers to own the means of their production. Faith spoke about the principles of Black veganism and how the practice can be leveraged as a form of liberation. Fransha spoke about how she aims to leverage her research and education to serve the South Shore neighborhood, her home community in Chicago. To finish off the afternoon, The New Blue of Yale sang some acapella tunes. It was an inspiring and impactful afternoon filled with questions for our presenters—thank you to Storm, Faith, and Fransha, and to everyone who came to work, eat, and listen. Photos of the event, taken by Reese Neal ‘25, can be viewed here.

Workday & knead 2 know | Friday, April 1st

On April 1, 2022, the YSFP held its first Farm workday and outdoor knead 2 know of the spring semester. The afternoon was spent propagating lettuces and mustards, turning the compost pile, weeding asparagus, tending to the chickens, and shaping beds for over 1,000 strawberry plants that will soon arrive at the Farm. While many of the beds on the Farm experience frequent turnover, the strawberry plants are a more long-term installment; they will be a constant, beloved presence for several years. The workday began with a burst of hail and concluded with brilliant sunshine. Students then headed up to the Lazarus Pavilion to gather, eat pizza made by culinary events managers new and old, and listen to Charlotte Emerson ‘22 give her knead 2 know presentation. Charlotte shared original creative writing about a peanut fair in Georgia, inspired by stories from her father, who grew up in West Virginia. Charlotte discussed how fiction can be used as an engaging and academically rigorous tool of research and detailed her own experiences investigating strains of peanuts and the cultural histories and practices associated with the crop. Charlotte also posed the question of what it might mean or feel like to “write about a place that is not your own.” On Friday, though, the Farm belonged to everyone who attended, as students relished the return to the space and to each other. Many thanks to all who showed up.

Photos by Reese Neal ’25. Please follow this link to view all the photos from the event.

Moonlight Stories on the Farm

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

Fall Feast: Celebrating Indigenous Food Pathways

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

Soil Health Policy Guidebook with Abbey Warner YSE '22 and Darya Watnick YSE '22

This November, the Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s Regenerative Agriculture Initiative published the Soil Health Policy guidebook. The report, written by Abbey Warner YSE ’22 and Darya Watnick YSE ’22, offers recommendations for creating community-driven, state-level soil health policy and programs. YSFP communications team member Kapp Singer ’23 sat down with Warner and Watnick to learn a little more about the goals of and approaches to creating the guidebook.

This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Abbey Warner YSE ‘22 (left) and Darya Watnick YSE ‘22, the authors of the Soil Health Policy guidebook.

Kapp Singer: Why is soil health so important?

Darya Watnick: Soil health is the basis for anything that you're growing because all of the nutrients live in the soil. Soil holds water, so thinking about the soil health as a baseline means that anything else growing in the soil is going to have better yields, better health, and better nutritional value in some cases. The better your soil, the more resilient your crops are going to be to droughts or pests. There are just so many benefits to thinking about farming through the lens of soil.

Abbey Warner: The only other thing I would add is the importance of having a broader view of soils—how are they also relevant to people who aren’t farmers or thinking about food systems? Soil provides a range of ecosystem services, from water filtration, to nutrient cycling, to food provisioning, which are all really critical to how we grow our food and our fiber. It’s also really important for other benefits related to water pollution or the ability to withstand drought and have more healthy ecosystems.

KS: What motivated you to create the Soil Health Policy guidebook?

DW: I had a summer internship in the summer of 2020 working with some folks who were starting a community group to launch a bill that would hopefully create a soil health program for the state of Colorado, run through the state’s Department of Agriculture. I have continued working for them since that summer—it’s almost been a year and a half at this point—and the program is now in place in Colorado, which is very exciting. I’d been talking to my supervisor about how we learned so much through that process, and how there are other states that are interested in following this same path. We came to the conclusion that we should write it down so that people don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s an initiative at the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale (CBEY) called the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative (RAI) that provides funding for student projects related to regenerative agriculture, and I thought this would be a cool opportunity.

AW: Darya and I were chatting about what to do for RAI and because she had already come up with a great idea, I was super on board. I had also been working in Colorado that summer and was really interested in the farming challenges there—ideas around soil health and water management. We ended up getting funding through RAI to create a guidebook that would collect all of these lessons learned from Colorado and also from other states that had passed soil health bills or programs, including California and New Mexico. We interviewed over 30 stakeholders from those states and also from other states that were in the process of working on soil health legislation or coalition-building to try to understand both the lessons learned and the needs of groups not as far along in the process. We were trying to strike a balance between providing concrete recommendations that are practical, but not overly prescriptive, because each state has a very different context around soil health.

KS: Your report outlines that a community-based approach is key to tackling issues of soil health. What kind of results or outcomes become possible when the whole community is involved?

AW: At its most basic level, having community involvement in soil health policy-building is really the only way to get these sorts of policies and programs passed. With every natural resource issue that you’re working on, there’s always going to be different sides to issues. There’s also a lot of very real concerns that different stakeholders have about how agricultural policy is made, how environmental policy is made, and the repercussions those policies could have for certain communities. It was really interesting hearing about how in some cases, it wasn’t even necessary to organize for the support of certain stakeholder groups—like commodity crop organizations—but to organize to the point that they wouldn’t actively oppose a certain policy.

DW: Community-building also helps bring farmers or ranchers—whoever is going to be implementing the practices—to the table, because they’re the ones who are going to be doing this work on their fields. You could have the greatest program, but if they don’t feel like it’s actually valuable to them in any way or worth their time to implement, then obviously you’re not going to have a good result or make a real impact. 

KS: Tell me about your approach to creating this guidebook. Are there any notable parts of the process you’d like to share?”

AW: Darya and I came in with a really concrete idea about what we wanted to do, which was helpful in keeping focused throughout the process. The first semester we were working on this mainly involved background research, outlining the project, and getting the Institutional Review Board (IRB) exemption so we could interview people. Then, in January of last year, we started our interview process, and that was when we interviewed over 30 different stakeholders. That was my favorite part of the process—it was really interesting to talk to all these people and get to ask them questions about what sort of lessons they wanted to share with other people, or what sorts of things they were curious about in soil health policy-making. We were able to tap into this wide network of people from different worlds, but who are all really coming together on soil health. I felt so lucky to get to talk to all of those folks. Then, at the end of the spring semester, we started our writing process. We outlined and drafted the guidebook and then edited it throughout the summer and into the fall, and then we worked with a design team to help us format it so that it would look fun and exciting to read instead of looking like a typical research paper.

DW: We split up the sections and did a little writing retreat—we went to an AirBnB for a weekend and spent hours writing. This was a huge part of how it got done—just sitting down and forcing ourselves to write.

Soil Health Policy: Developing Community-Driven State Soil Health Policy and Programs (November 2021). Click here to read the full report.

KS: Now that the report has been published, whose hands do you hope it will end up in? Who do you think would benefit most from reading through the Soil Health Policy guidebook?

AW: We’re really hoping it ends up in the hands of either already established groups that are hoping to drive soil health policy-building in their state, or maybe in the hands of state agency staffers or legislative staffers who are already thinking about soil health and other environmental issues.

DW: We wrote it for a very specific audience—the groups Abbey just mentioned—so hopefully it finds its way to that audience. 

AW: And that could also include people at nonprofits, or really anyone who is interested in soil health, which is cool. There are definitely states that are already interested in this work, like Montana, Nebraska, and Virginia. There are lots of different people who are already thinking about this all over the nation. Hopefully they can pick the report up wherever they are in that process and find something useful to them.

KS: Is there anything else you’d like people to know about the guidebook that I haven’t asked about?

AW: We’ve gotten some feedback from some people that this toolkit could be helpful for other natural resource issues like urban greening. Since a lot of the tips we were trying to give are very practical, and not necessarily exclusively related to soil health, anyone who is trying to build a coalition around a natural resource issue may find something useful in it.

KS: Thank you both so much.

GFF Grace Cajski Explains Her Project that Explores Hawaiian Fishpond Aquaculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q&A with Forest Abbott-Lum YSE '21

Group picture from the 2-bin volunteer build (all done by hand!) in early March 2020. Volunteers are standing in the 2 bin system itself.

The following is a transcript from an interview done in October 2020. “KE” refers to Kayley Estoesta, a YSFP Comms Manager, and “FAL” refers to Forest Abbott-Lum, the YSFP Composter-in-Residence.

The “A-peel” of Compost

KE: How did you become interested in the world of waste management? 

FAL: Waste management kind of just happened to me. Around 2016, I started looking for jobs in New York City, where I could use Mandarin, and also get outside. And what came across my radar was the New York City Compost Project, which is funded by the Department of Sanitation. They were hiring for a position with a pretty wild title called “Organics Recovery Coordinator.” It was located in Flushing, Queens, which is America's fastest growing Mandarin-speaking Chinatown. It just seemed like a unicorn of an opportunity, because I would get to be outside managing an industrial compost site, and I'd also get to be doing Mandarin Chinese outreach for the community, and building a zero waste coalition from home gardeners to the people that did Tai Chi in the park. 

Forest taking a break from some tractor work at the compost site in Queens (look at that carbon:nitrogen ratio!).

It was really exciting to be on the front lines of getting people to not take trash for granted. And I became totally fascinated by the flow of urban food waste. Waste is an externality that we all have personal contact with to some degree. The biggest slice of the food waste pie is actually household food waste. 

Waste management is also a very male dominated space. In general, the community gardening and environmental outreach world is pretty female-dominated. But to generalize, the world of waste management is a bunch of dudes between the ages of 40 and 60, and a really macho work culture with big machines and heavy lifting. And that was such a new cultural space for me to be in. I'd been in the policy world, and then I had been in the world of sustainability startups. The identity of someone who's in waste management sometimes can be completely opposite to the identity of someone who self-identifies as an environmentalist; yet, we're all in the environmental field. 

And I can tell you a little bit more about the compost site that we were running in Queens. If we had been in California, it would have technically been large enough to be considered and regulated as an industrial compost site. But as far as industrial compost sites go, it was actually quite small. What we were trying to do was prove that you could make compost in a way that was friendly to urban environments. It doesn't smell bad, it doesn't attract rodents, and it can benefit the community who gardens and participates in it as a green space. 

KE: Before we get further, could you briefly explain the process of composting? And speak to why composting as opposed to other methods of waste management?

FAL: Composting is a managed method of controlling the decomposition of organic waste, so that your end product creates a nitrogen rich, organic material that can be used as a type of fertilizer. A lot of people who are backyard composters get really anxious about what they can compost. They're like, “Is the whole pile gonna become contaminated if a little bit of egg white gets in there?” But when you get to the industrial scale, people are composting Diet Dr. Pepper by running over it with a huge machine and crushing out all the liquid, or composting entire dead pig carcasses.
When you’re making industrial-scale compost, things are getting so hot in the pile that you can get to a point called PFRP (process to further reduce pathogens, 15-20 degrees C). The microbial activity is getting so hot, you're killing off all of these harmful pathogens, which is what you have to do to sell compost if you're an industrial compost site. But once you're getting that hot, you can put pretty much anything organic in there. Meat, dairy, compostable bags made of bio plastic, shredded dollar bills.

Forest waving from the deck of an industrial compost sifter in California while getting trained as a US Composting Council Site Operator.

The Issue of Household Food Waste

KE: Could you expand on your earlier point about urban food waste being the bulk of all waste? 

FAL: 40% of total food waste in America is generated in the process of getting food from a farm all the way to someone’s fork. Of that 40%, how much do you think is generated from individual households? It's 43%. So it's not the majority, but it's the biggest slice of the pie by far. What’s more is that household food waste is eight times more carbon intensive than upstream food waste just because of the refrigeration and preparation it took to get to your fridge.

Composting is not a perfect solution to this issue. The best case scenario for reducing food waste is just having people eat the food. Second best is that animals are eating the food. Third best, and this is contested, is power generation through a biogas digester. And then in fourth place is compost, but the EPA considers compost just a little bit above landfill or incineration.

I wanted to address briefly what happens to food waste if it goes to the landfill. And of course, this really varies by where you are. If you're here in Connecticut, my understanding is most of your trash is getting incinerated. But if it's going to landfill, the food waste problem also becomes an environmental justice problem. Because oftentimes, landfills are located next to communities of color. And then you have just a bunch of volatile organic compounds and potential health risks. Some of the earliest environmental justice work by the Black community was protesting the building of a landfill. There's a long history between environmental justice and landfill organic waste. You have to think if it’s not going to the compost site, where is it going? And chances are to the landfill or the incinerator.

But I think the really tricky thing about household food waste reduction in the United States is that this is a dispersed collective action problem that happens out of the eye, making it harder to implement mass behavior change.

KE: How much do you see this problem of food waste being at the scale of the individual and the individual's behavior, versus at the scale of the local/city government level, versus national policy? 

FAL: Food waste does vary from place to place. If you're in the Global North, most of your food waste is consumer driven at the household level. And if you're in the Global South, most of your food waste is driven by supply chain losses. I'm just going to zero in on the United States.

I think there are so many well-intentioned food waste bloggers that are trying to teach you how to cook with your banana peels. And I applaud their effort. But I think that approach is a bit misguided.

What has worked in other parts of the world, South Korea being a good example, is when you make the private public. In parts of Seoul, they installed food waste counter machines, where you have to separate out your food waste, and then bring them to a publicly viewable area where it runs up a fee for how much food waste you're generating. That's actually seen a 95% decrease in household food waste. 

With my experience in New York City, which is a fairly liberal city, I don't know if Americans would go for that approach. The challenging thing about the United States is that for so long, we have really normalized the idea that trash is something that you only need to think about for like 0.3 seconds. Changing the narrative on that is not impossible, but it is difficult. Part of what we were doing for the compost project was to set up a food scrap drop off station. We would set up buckets to collect compostables voluntarily from New York City residents. And while people were commuting to the subway, we would place them out and have outreach materials. We were essentially public-facing representatives of compost on behalf of the Department of Sanitation. 

Another important thing is changing the material circumstances of how people buy groceries. On the grocery store level, this means selling unbundled produce, and making sure that when you buy a pack of herbs you can take what you want from it. I have a bunch of rotting herbs in my fridge right now, don't y'all? So changing the material circumstances and portion sizes in which people consume food are your best strategies for reducing household food waste.

Making Compost Cute! : Compost at the YSFP

Food scrap + carbon mix at the Yale farm with some really healthy looking red wiggler worms!

KE: Could you tell us about the new compost system that you helped build for the YSFP last spring?

FAL: The idea was that we would create a system that would be rodent proof and allow us to compost a wider range of waste. What that entails is making sure your bins are sealed off so you don't have rodents getting in, because that is the worst case scenario for any community compost site. Number two priority is to actually compost the range of waste that is produced on the farm, especially the aromatic food waste that hadn’t been composted before. To do this you need a sealed off compost bin and a good mix of browns, which are carbonaceous materials needed in order to get your compost pile hot enough to kill off a lot of the pathogens. That’s 131 degrees or above for three consecutive days.

One benefit is that when you build a really nice looking compost system involving the community, it visually centers it as an important part of the farm in a way that a decomposing pile of organic material does not. Making things cute is actually very vital.

After a colleague, Jenna Davis, helped me get the lumber, I partnered with my friend Jon Miller. He is running a business that helps veterans with job placement (Outlaws Inc.) and he wanted a test run for mentorship and to build something with his hands. By winter we were able to build a three-bin system. 

Jon with the first three-bin at the Yale Farm.

After this pilot, we had some extra lumber; coordinating with Jacquie and Jeremy, our next idea was to do a public-facing workshop. We had about 10 people from the Forestry School and YSFP come out to help us build a two-bin system, which is going to be dedicated to in-person events at the Farm when they resume, so you can just walk right beyond the pizza oven and then drop off your compostables. 

It was my first time actually building a compost bin. And big shout out to Jon, for being my main mentor and showing me how to actually put it together. But I came in with the plan and the blueprints and a compost site from the New York City compost project. And that is open source. So if anyone ever wants  to build their own, I have the blueprint ready for them. It just takes a day and two people. YSFP funded the materials, they were super supportive in getting it all together.

KE: Thanks so much for your time and for sharing all this knowledge, Forest. I can’t wait to see our compost in action back at the Farm!

EXTRA RESOURCES:

Open source blueprints for building 3-Bin Compost System

8th Annual Melon Forum

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

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

Graphic design by Vicky Wu ’21.

Love Letters/Blood Memory/The Fourth Sister

Catherine Webb (Cherokee Nation) is a Seedkeeper and Programs Liaison between the Native American Cultural Center and the Yale Sustainable Food Program. This blog includes her poems, originally featured in the Yale Daily News, with a new introduction from Catherine.

Introduction

This poem is about planting The Three Sisters for the first time in my senior year of high school. In southern California, I was far away from my ancestral territory. But I connected through growing heirloom seeds from the Cherokee Nation.

When I came to Yale the next fall, I became the inaugural Seedkeeper and Programs Liaison between the Native American Cultural Center and the Yale Sustainable Food Program. Although I became the official link between the two, Noah Schlager (Poarch Creek Band of Indians) and Kapiolani Laronal (Haida/Tsimsian and Native Hawaiian) began the partnership and gardens in 2017.

In 2017, Elizabeth “Liz” Charlebois (Abenaki) gifted Noah Schlager Buffalo Creek Squash, Cranberry Beans, Skunk Beans, Pigeon, Beans White Cap Corn. In 2019, Sharon Maynard (Mohegan Council of Elders) gifted Abenaki Flint Corn and Delaware Black Flint Corn. The latter corn is said to have been used by medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon, the Great Aunt of Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, the current Medicine Woman and Tribal Historian for the Mohegan Tribe. In 2019, I planted seed from the Cherokee Nation seed bank, including Cherokee Colored Flour Corn, the Trail of Tears bean, and the Georgia Candy Roaster squash, at the NACC plot. Other students have contributed seed over the years, and the NACC plot also has hosted ground cherries, passionfruit, okra, and camas root.

When planting, building relationships with the land and the plants is essential. When I have planted The Three Sisters, ceremony has not been formal, but has always been intuitive and intentional. It is important to prepare for a good planting by maintaining good thoughts and energies to transfer into your work. It is also important to acknowledge and understand the land that you are on. Land acknowledgments are an opportunity to honor a tradition of asking for permission to enter and occupy space.

Yale occupies the ancestral homelands of the Quinnipiac, Paugusset, and other Algonquian-speaking peoples. Yale University had its beginnings with the founding of the New Haven Colony in 1638. With the establishment of the colony and Yale, the Quinnipiac were pushed out of their traditional land and relegated to the less productive lands east of the river, where Lighthouse park is today. The New England Indian Papers Series at the Yale Library provides valuable accounts from this time, largely through the second-hand writing of colonial settlers. What has happened on this land has happened across Turtle Island, and settler colonialism resulted in genocide. Oppressive tactics have not only aimed to eliminate people but also ways of life, including food systems.

Yale is inextricably connected to this history of oppression. But through holding space for Native plants and stewardship on the Yale Farm and the NACC plot, I believe that students, staff, and visitors alike can begin to go further than acknowledging the history of this land and actively support current decolonization efforts such as the #LandBack movement. As I write near the end of my poem, it is not enough to marvel at or acknowledge the resilience of a people. We need accomplices for justice.

A letter to maize, beans, and squash

Dear Sisters, you are my younger Sisters. I was eighteen years older than you when you rose from the soil. Isn’t soil like blood? Living, moving, providing. Heart pumping, I was planting and praying without knowing. 

Dear Maize, 

You are the oldest Sister like me. Your head was green, and my hair was black when we were born, at different times. But all life ages, and my hair became light like my mother’s and you grew silky ears. Little maize in little mounds, you looked like weeds until you outgrew me, waving in the wind, feeling the wind like I do when I am sailing. 

Dear Beans,

Before I planted you around Sister Maize, I placed you in my mouth. My saliva broke down your defenses to prepare you for rebirth in Mother Earth. Silently saying: you will be a part of me again. Your abundant children nourish my body, just like you did for my ancestors. Trail of Tears bean, you remind me why I am here today. Blood to soil. Little black gift of life.

Dear Squash,

The vigorous youngest Sister, spreading low to the Earth body. Curling vines, sometimes trying to climb. Blossoming beautiful flowers, large protective leaves. Sometimes I wanted to climb under your fronds, so I could lay close to the Earth like you do. To feel the joy of our Sisters swaying and ascending and tilting towards Sun.

A letter to my Cherokee ancestors 

My plant Sisters introduced me to you, as I’m sure you knew would happen. Seven generations ago, you were praying for me. Praying without knowing that I wouldn’t know you for eighteen years. Sometimes I wonder– if you knew I was white, would you still have prayed for me?

But I came to be because you came before. Because you touched the Earth and carried Seed. My Sisters reminded me of this, and taught me to remember. Not for myself, but for the next seven generations. Resilience? Yes.  Justice? In time.

I am the Fourth Sister

I am the Fourth Sister. I am the Seedkeeper and I am a Two-Legged Seed who is also growing and giving and dying. Still water still runs in the blood, soil, and memory. 

This poem was originally published on November 30, 2020 in the Yale Daily News online.

Political Dessert with Paola Velez

The following blog post shares more from Paola Velez during her visit Paola visit to campus as part of the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s “Cooking Across the Black Diaspora” series. A themed line-up for Chewing the Fat, these events were 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, the series 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. Ezra Stiles College and La Casa Cultural also supported Paola’s time on campus.

Paola’s visit included a podcast on Chewing the Fat, lunch and flavor pairing workshop using frio frio (shaved ice) at La Casa, and a public conversation with then Head of College Stephen Pitti at Ezra Stiles.

Chef Paola Velez’s earliest food memories are from the Dominican Republic, where she lived with her mother in a sleepy town known for cacao farming. But even after she and her mother moved to the Bronx, she still had strong memories of food. The mothers in their mostly Dominican neighborhood gathered often for their families to share meals. One mother would bring the rice, another the beans, and so on. Until they had enough for everyone. Food insecurity may have affected her childhood, but her community came together to cook together. There she learned hospitality. She learned how to share a meal.

This act of sharing food remains an important ideal to Velez. “It’s the great equalizer: food is that moment in time when we all have to be quiet and eat.” By cooking for people, she is able to direct the conversation that they will have with their food and each other. At the moment, such conversations center the past. Velez may cook with plenty of local Mid-Atlantic ingredients, but she elaborates on their history by connecting her sourcing to anywhere that the African slave trade touched: not only from the Americas, but Asia too. Soy sauce, for example, sneaks into her desserts for a touch of umami.

After all, Velez considers it her duty to cook with history, especially as a pastry chef. Everything associated with dessert, like alcohols, sugars, and fruits, comes from the African slave trade. Her awareness of the cultural significance of her food allows Velez to ask all her patrons to grapple with its violent history.

But she does more than spark conversations about history. She asks people to do something about it. And here, Velez leads by example. As an executive chef, Velez makes a point of hiring marginalized people, especially women of color and trans people. She never had a culinary mentor, but Velez hopes to utilize her position of power to open doors for people like her. To do this, she built a team at Kith/Kin founded on trust and mutual respect. “People need to feel safe at work to succeed,” she explained. She learned how to be a good manager, and teaches those below her the same practices. She asks questions. She listens.

To hear her talk, it is clear that Velez is much more proud of her work with people than her work with food. She spoke excitedly about how she brings a rotating staff with her to banquets and offsite events, so that everyone has a chance to find their future employer and move up in the ranks. Her goal is to train her staff well and have them move on, rising to power in a different restaurant and opening those same doors for marginalized people in their own place of work. Little by little, Velez is creating a community of love in the world for world.

She asks us to do the same. One of the most emotional moments was when Velez explained how much it meant for her to be here, at Yale, talking to a room of aspiring leaders. “I just cook food,” she said, but that food is an entryway point to places like Yale and the people “with the king’s ear, who can mobilize change.” Who she will be voting for in years to come. Who she will be trusting to teach her children. Who will be making policy to make changes for the better. People like us, who go to Yale or work in DC, are the people Velez hopes to influence through her food. She tells us her story in a way we cannot ignore. At least, I hope not. Just like there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as an apolitical dessert.

Andi Murphy: Indigenous Foodways & Storytelling

In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, the YSFP joined the Native American Cultural Center (NACC) in welcoming Andi Murphy, Navajo journalist and creator of the Toasted Sister podcast, for a two-part online event, featuring a cooking demo and a conversation that explored indigenous food sovereignty.

A video of the cooking demo can be found below. Follow along to learn how to make one of her favorite dishes, a Wild Rice and Bison Stuffed Poblano Pepper with Pumpkin Seed Sauce.

Farm Musings

Logan Howard ’21 is a Creative Visual Lead on the YSFP’s communications team. She is an Environmental Studies major, concentrating in Urban Environments. She loves that her time with the YSFP involves connecting people and place through art.

Over the past few weeks, I've been on the Farm helping to document the physically distanced workshops and workdays. I started the semester doing this through photography: a dynamic and mobile method of capturing many different moments. I would move all throughout the Farm in an effort to get as many different shots of  crops, the harvesting hands, the candid laughs, or the bees and butterflies on the flowers. It was active and exciting-- interrupted with brief pauses to focus in on a shot or to see how a quick shutter turned out. But sometimes, I found myself wanting to just sit. To find one corner of the Farm and just watch as my peers filled buckets with tomatoes, or as the sun’s glimmer on the hoop houses changed with each passing cloud. I wanted to slow down. What would happen if I focused less on capturing everything, and instead focused more on a few special moments? 

So I started illustrating. 

Instead of a camera, every workday I came to the Farm with my iPad or sketchbook. The hour or two that I spent drawing was slower, but more intense, much like the pace of life I’ve grown accustomed to this year. I spent longer looking at one crop, observing one person, listening to conversations, and absorbing the energy of the Farm. It was static and calm, interrupted only when picking a new spot and subject. The refreshing feeling of being outdoors, away from Zoom calls, and near people other than my roommates was something I wanted to bask in. I’m grateful for the beauty, spirit, and resilience of the Farm always, but especially now in my senior year and in these unprecedented times.

kneaded 2 know: Sam Shoemaker on the Mysteries of Fungi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”

— Sam Shoemaker

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

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

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

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

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

— Sam Shoemaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Sam Shoemaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camden Smithtro: How did you begin dyeing with indigo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7th Annual Melon Forum

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

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

Graphic design by Vicky Wu ’21.

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Voices Blog

First Farm Workday of the Semester

With Yale’s arrival quarantine period ending last week, the Yale Farm welcomed back our first students since last March for a physically distanced farm workday. This fall, workdays will focus on harvesting and packing produce for the Semilla Collective of New Haven.

For more details on our programming during COVID-19, please refer to this page.

Photos by Noa Hines ‘21 and Logan Howard ‘21.

Pickling and Preserving as Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art in Agricultural Labor Movements

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

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

Cooking to Gather

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

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

Photo by Itai Almor '20.

Here is a link to the full project.