FEATURE
Interpreting Foodways: My Journey
Tamales on a plate. Photo courtesy of Dash of Color and Spice.
If there is one thing that connects us as human beings, it is food. No matter who you are, where you come from, or even what your political beliefs are, food has affected your life in one way or another. And everyone has a story about what connects them with food. For some, it’s the moments that brought us together with our loved ones in our early formative years. Or it reminds us of the special seasons and why they matter to us. Regardless, food is a great bonding tool that helps us come together, enjoy each other’s company, and create moments that will last a lifetime. Furthermore, food can be used to educate people about different cultures and traditions, and even to help people and the planet. Throughout this article, I will discuss how food can be a tool for helping people connect with each other and with the world.
Personally, food has always been a cornerstone of my past and my identity. While most would bemoan making meals from scratch, I consider it an art form. I consider cooking a hobby, one that gives me great pleasure. More so, it connects me with my family on a deeper level. Each year, my family and I gather around the table and make tamales from scratch. In a big bowl would be the maize; in another, ingredients such as meat in red sauce; and in another, black olives, green chili, or cheese slices. From there, we would spread the maize onto our cooking sheets, add the ingredients, and then neatly fold them up into a large tray to put away in the freezer.
Afterwards, we would take the tamales out during the month of December and have them for breakfast along with eggs and sauce; on Christmas morning, we would take the remaining tamales out and enjoy a nice feast with ham, eggs, and a special Christmas casserole dish made with bread, eggs, and cinnamon. Like many families around the country and world, food gives us traditions to hold onto. It reminds us that time is precious and we must relish the moment before it leaves us forever.
My mom and brother are getting the maize ready to make Tamales. A time-honored tradition in our house during the holidays! Photo by Aaron L. Cobas.
Connections and Crisis
As I mentioned earlier, food can have connections with us through family traditions, and it can also be culturally significant, especially if that food is in danger. In Europe, there is a growing crisis of olive trees being slowly abandoned, leading to a massive decline in the Mediterranean region. In fact, roughly 440 million olive trees were abandoned in Italy alone. This decline is due to several factors, including disease and the depopulation of rural regions where olive groves are grown as people move to more urban centers. Olive trees are more than just nature's reserves of food, such as black olives and olive oil. Culturally, olive trees have been a symbol of peace and tranquility—if you have ever stared at the national seal of the United States, you will see the national bird, the bald eagle, and in one talon a set of arrows and another an olive branch.
While this news is unsettling, there are strategies that can help stave off the decline of the olive tree. One such organization is Abandoned Grove, where people can adopt an olive tree and receive a pint of olive oil in return. Furthermore, agroforestry and sustainable tourism strategies can help people reconnect with the land, replenish the soil, and, at the same time, offer a unique experience that will last a lifetime.
Olive branches. Photo by Dainela, shared courtesy of Gardening Know How.
Food can do more than teach us about family and tradition; it can also be part of the solution to an ever-present problem threatening our country. If you turned on the news or even glanced at your social media feed, you can see that there is a growing divide in our country. The growing polarization dividing people has made many people in our nation more cynical, more hateful, and even more suspicious of those who are not “in our camp.” Animosity is not a new concept; what is new, however, is the hold it has on us since the advent of social media, new technologies, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle.
However, food can be used to depict the cultural significance of people from different parts of the world while also reconciling with a painful past. During this year’s Super Bowl Halftime performance, Bad Bunny opened the show with a depiction of farmers working in sugarcane fields, chopping the sugarcane with machetes. During colonialism, the Spanish invaded the island and forced the Taínos—the island’s indigenous population—to move the sugarcane. Soon after, the conquistadores—the Spaniards—brought in enslaved people from Africa to the island to also work the fields. Bad Bunny, in a nod to his homeland, showed that food is culturally tied to his home and that we must never forget the sins of the past. More than that, he used food as art to bridge the gap and offered an alley to compassion rather than a pessimistic outlook.
Food as an Empathy Tool
As we try to understand how to fight this lingering pessimistic outlook on society and find solutions to help bridge the gap, food can be the answer. One professor adopted this mindset and tested it through a series of studies and experiments focused on the idea that everyone needs to eat. In A Decent Meal: Building Empathy in a Divided America, Professor Michael Carolan studied how people interact when working towards the same goal. He used the common theme of food because, as he explained, "everybody has to eat." And, well, food must come from somewhere. His studies helped him understand how people would feel if they were working with someone who had different beliefs and attitudes about community than the other.
One case study involved two individuals, Nick and Juliette, working together on a Community Supported Agriculture operation in Colorado. The purpose of a CSA is to bring the community together to help run the farming operation. The goal is to help share the benefits and risks of the harvested crop with the community. This demonstrates the importance of community building and the importance of limiting food waste that ends up in the trash. For Carolan, he had interacted with this CSA in the past but now wanted to see how two people from different backgrounds would work as they were caging heirloom tomatoes.
Nick and Juliette were on opposite sides of the political spectrum; so much so that it might as well have been the Grand Canyon. Nick is to the right of center in his political beliefs, whereas Juliette is a proud progressive liberal. Each of them differed on issues such as guns, immigration, and maybe even sexual orientation. However, after several sessions working together on the CSA, they were coming together as if they had been friends for several decades. What is more, as Carolan demonstrates, each of them “learned something from the other.” Juliette, she had started coming around on guns, and Nick was rethinking his stances on gay rights and immigration.
A Decent Meal by Michael Carolan helped me to explore using food as a way to build on empathy towards each other. Photo courtesy of Stanford University Press.
This test showed that when people come together centered around a common goal, we don’t just see people, we see past the superficial lens of politics or the cultural differences we have. Furthermore, the commonality of helping grow a community garden can foster a kinship that extends beyond the chore of growing food. Nick recalls how, after the mandatory volunteering, he continued his relationship with Juliette through actions such as sharing recipes, building raised garden beds, and even picking green beans.
Carolan used food as a strategy to examine people’s attitudes, mindsets, and overall emotions toward those with different beliefs, traditions, and even racial and ethnic backgrounds. But food can also be used to demonstrate the need for new, innovative solutions to our world. Consider the fact that as the world’s population continues to grow, there will be more demand for food production, as well as more strain on our food systems to meet that demand. Furthermore, even as technology increases, there are people across the world who don’t have reliable access to food, storage, or transportation. Consider that, by 2030, about 600 million people worldwide will face hunger.
Solution Strategy
For a problem of this magnitude, we need solid, innovative strategies and the need for a more reimagined world, one that will help our communities and the world. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) show us that to have a more equitable future, one that puts the planet above profit, we must address world hunger as one goal that must be at the forefront of global food policy.
One strategy to accomplish this is the Zero Hunger Challenge. Introduced at the Rio+ conference by the UN Secretary-General, it calls on governments, civil society, faith communities, the private sector, and research institutions to fight world hunger and malnutrition among children worldwide. Finally, the challenge also calls for our food systems to be more sustainable. This includes not focusing on food systems that turn a profit (i.e., no more on cash crops such as corn and sugarcane). Finding new and innovative strategies for our food systems also requires a new paradigm, one that doesn’t just see food as a resource or something to be turned into profit.
To understand this, I asked someone from the Climatebase Fellowship to help me understand a new solution: regenerative agriculture. Eugenia Hernández works for Vayda as a Senior Growth Product Manager, but she previously worked in the tech industry. During our time together in the Climatebase Fellowship, I asked her what drove her to her new passion for regenerative agriculture. Eugenia shared, “I’m a very curious kind of person [and] I love history.” She talked about how ancient food systems depended on tending the soil to ensure it was sustainable for civilizations to maintain. Furthermore, we discussed how food has shaped her life, both professionally and, more importantly, personally. Eugenia said, “I was thinking about the other day because someone asked, ‘Why is food so important to you?’ One of the things in my life that gives me the greatest pleasure ever is coming back from a grocery store or supermarket, and looking at the variety and the colors, which gives me so much joy. That’s my connection to food.”
In my interview with Eugenia, the term regenerative agriculture came up several times (for this portion, I will use the acronym RA). For someone with a limited scientific background, this term felt almost alien to me, and I wanted to learn more about RA and how it can help our planet. In short, regenerative agriculture is an innovative way not only to tackle climate change but also to help restore our degraded lands.
RA's plan is two-fold. It sequesters carbon from the atmosphere into the soil—roughly 1,000 pounds of carbon per acre per year can be put back into the ground—and it makes our food systems more resilient by reducing the risk of crop failure from extreme weather events. As I continued researching, I found new ways to support RA. One such method I found was supporting organizations that are already helping to integrate RA into our local food systems. One organization is called Farmer’s Footprint. This coalition of farmers, scientists, and other community members has come together to have a deeper relationship with the land while removing harmful past practices that have degraded the soil.
Conclusion
Food has always fascinated me. Whether it was the variety of selections at the grocery store, the smells of a freshly made meal, or, even later in life, the politics of our food production systems. Only in the past few years have I seen how food has fundamentally changed in our lives and how climate change and soil erosion can threaten our food systems.
From the lessons that I have learned from my own past experiences, to A Decent Meal, and learning more about regenerative agriculture, I will take this collective knowledge and experience to continue to find new, innovative ways to reduce food waste, make our food systems more resilient, and use food to teach about empathy for people, no matter who they are. Food is central to our world, and, like the roots of a redwood tree, I believe it has deeper roots that we have yet to see.
Climatebase Fellowship allowed me the opportunity to meet with some amazing people, including Eugenia, who offered her amazing insights into Regenerative Agriculture (RA). Photo by Climatebase.
Circle graph showing the principles of Regenerative Agriculture. Photo by Regenerative Farmers of America.
Circle graph showing the benefits of Regenerative Agriculture. Photo by Regenerative Farmers of America.
