Boss Febbo points to the photos whenever she wants to explain the key ingredient in the hoppy yet easy-drinking Kernza IPA she serves. While most of her customers have never heard of Kernza, the long roots in the poster help her explain the value of perennial grains, which don’t need to be planted fresh every spring. Instead, they can grow year in and year out, and develop incredibly long roots that help prevent erosion, retaining water, and sequestering carbon, an important boon for climate mitigation. Perennials could prove especially important in the decades to come, as new research has shown that the carbon held in place by roots underground accounts for nearly half of the planet’s total carbon storage.

Kernza is the product of decades of research by The Land Institute, which is developing other perennial crops in hopes of helping “displace the industrial, disruptive system of agriculture.” And 10 years after the research institute trademarked it, it’s proving to be a promising ingredient.

“It works in beer, it works in crackers, pasta, salads, and bread—and it’s delicious,” says Boss Febbo. She’s also confident that when more people learn about the grain’s environmental benefits, “they’ll realize it’s a no-brainer.”

Boss Febbo has been brewing with Kernza for over three years, and yet hers is one of just a handful of businesses that are using the grain. Patagonia Provisions, the sustainable food company nested within the larger outdoor clothing brand, is also brewing with it, Cascadian Farms made a limited-run cereal with it (though it was hampered by low crop turnout), and until last year, it was at the center of the menu at the high-profile San Francisco restaurant Perennial, which closed recently.

But it has yet to hit the mainstream. And because the market for the grain is so small, there are only around 75 farmers growing Kernza in the U.S. today.

Now, a coalition of 50 farmers, scientists, educators, policy experts, and food industry leaders across the U.S. have received $10 million to scale up production and commercialize Kernza. The five-year initiative, called Kernza CAP, is led by The Land Institute and the University of Minnesota, and the coalition has received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.

In order to bring the perennial grain to a wider audience, the Kernza CAP plans to go beyond farming and research, and will begin to hone in on production and supply chains, marketing and commercialization, and education. The project’s pitch to the USDA proclaimed that this project was not only a win for the environment but also a win for rural farmers, who have financially struggled under the commodity system, which in recent years has cost farmers more than they can sell their crops for. Instead, the researchers argue that Kernza can increase farmer income by greatly reducing the costs of tilling, synthetic fertilizer, and herbicide.

A presentation on Kernza’s soil and nutrient benefits. (Photo credit: Connie Carlson)

“Human life on this earth does not exist without healthy soil,” Tessa Peters, commercialization manager at The Land Institute, says. “We need grain crops [for foods] like bread, rice, pasta, and all of those are based on an annual agriculture, which is extractive. The development of a perennial agriculture that’s regenerative is essential to human life, because it means that we are not washing soil away, so we are able to survive the current existing climate crisis.”

How the Project Will Work

Luke Peterson grows 40 acres of Kernza at on his diverse 500-acre operation, A-Frame Farm, in Minnesota. He first planted Kernza in 2019, and is looking at the Kernza CAP with a long lens—one that goes beyond the five years dedicated to the project. “It’s not a crop that we can really compare to conventional row crops—it is its own thing,” he says.

Peterson says that after only a few harvests, he and other farmers working with researchers have helped improve the crop. “We’ve learned what kind of nutrients it needs, the soil it works best in, how to harvest it, and how to store it. We’ve got to start sometime, and this is a good way to get started on perennial agriculture.”

Peterson and the other participating farmers will carefully record their observations and data about planting, harvesting, processing, yield, and nutritional content. They will also take soil samples to measure biodiversity and nutrient levels before planting Kernza and periodically after. “We’ll be able to tell whether we’re building organic matter, and how microbial life has changed,” Peterson says. “We’ll be able to tell the nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus levels.”

The environmental quality team, led by Dr. Jessica Gutknecht, assistant professor in the department of soil, water, and climate at the University of Minnesota, will then use data from farmers to model the way the Kernza plants help keep nutrients out of groundwater and water ways as well as how well they absorb and store carbon.

Kernza CAP lead Dr. Jacob Jungers, assistant professor of agronomy and plant genetics at the University of Minnesota, understands the importance of opening two-way communication channels between farmers and researchers so they can work together.

“We’ve done field days in the past with farmers to present some recent results from our research,” the agronomist says. “We need to interact with growers about what big questions need to be answered, and this project is going to facilitate that communication and distribution of information so that we can go back to the lab and conduct the studies needed to answer those questions.”

Getting farmer feedback has already been key to Kernza’s breeding process. Simplifying the dehulling process, for instance, will help streamline the work involved in growing it and in doing so it could encourage more farmers to grow Kernza.

“Right now, Kernza keeps half its hulls on during the harvesting process, and plant breeders are trying to make sure that more naked grains with fewer papery hulls come out during harvest,” Jungers explains. “We can overcome that challenge through breeding and genetics, but also through agronomy.” Jungers says the coalition will ask farmers to experiment with factors like the timing of the harvest, so that the plant is dryer when harvested and more of the grain will come out threshed.

In order to get more farmers to plant Kernza, its seeds will need to be larger, which can be a challenge with a perennial crop, Junger says. “Annuals produce big seeds or lots of them because they only have one chance, while perennials generally have smaller seeds or fewer of them,” the professor says. But Jungers also acknowledges that flavor and ease of use will be crucial to Kernza’s success.

Peterson agrees. “We’re not really focusing on yield; we’re more focusing on flavor and texture and the ecosystem services that Kernza can provide for land.”

Priming the Market

Tracy Singleton, owner of Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis, believes that familiarizing the public along all levels of the supply chain—including restaurant and grain suppliers, bakers, grocery store owners, chefs, and consumers—will be vital to its success. To help popularize the grain and make a strong environmental point about what it can do, she started featuring Kernza on her menu in 2014. She wanted to “see what was needed to develop a supply chain that could scale.”

Over the past six years, Singleton has sounded the horn about Kernza in Birchwood Cafe email newsletters, social media, and press releases. She has featured Kernza on her menu at the Minnesota State Fair through a partner stall with the Minnesota Farmers Union, creating appetizing items like a Kernza eclair with a blueberry sweet corn filling and chocolate ganache and an heirloom tomato sweet corn BLT on Kernza focaccia bread. “We’ve created quite a buzz about it here in our local community, across the state, and even nationally,” Singleton says.

Singleton uses Kernza in both whole grain and flour form, in pancakes, waffles, grain salad, crackers, and a variety of baked goods. She especially likes its “subtle earthy, malty, nutty background flavor,” she says.

Singleton hopes to see puffed or rolled Kernza become available, so that it could easily be used in cereals and granola bars.

To streamline the supply chain, Tessa Peters says the plan is to form a business association. “It will be a polycentric governance mechanism to ensure all the players along the supply chain have input,” she adds. The aim is to create a model that’s replicable for other sustainable grains. “With the Business Association, growers and supply chain partners can communicate with each other about supply and demand and what it means to have fair pricing on both ends of the spectrum,” Peters says.

For farmers, growing Kernza will require something of a Goldilocks effect: Meeting demand without oversupplying the grain market will require them to get it just right. But Peters believes that if Kernza is priced correctly, and the market grows profitably, it won’t be a hard sell to farmers. And if it tastes right and is marketed favorably to consumers, it won’t be a hard sell to them. “It’s up to all of us to prove that it’s economically viable—it really won’t become mainstream until then.” (One thing the farmers of America may like: While spring wheat requires about 120 to 160 pounds of seeds per acre, Kernza requires only 15 pounds per acre because the plants reseed by nature.)

Education is Key

The Kernza Cap Project is banking on early education as a key driver of Kernza’s long-term adoption in the mainstream. A number of educators from University of Minnesota and The Land Institute are developing agroecology curricula for middle school through graduate school that emphasizes the farming side of the equation—including agronomy, rural sociology, and ecosystem services—as well as the product side, including product development, supply chains, and marketing.

“We really want to make sure that students understand the importance, not just of Kernza, but of and how important perennials can be to solving the climate change-based problems we’re all going to be facing,” Peters says.

To illustrate the importance of perennials, Peters says they’ll employ “photos that show a farmer pulling up dark, rich soil from under perennials, and we’ll take that a step further and show that every time that farmer tills the soil, some percentage of that soil blows away, with wind or washes away when it rains. We’ll teach children that the thing left underneath it, bedrock, cannot support human life, and that an inch of soil [gets built] in a million years.”

Peters says multimedia will be indispensable in educating younger populations, but age is critical. “The education arm is focused on targeting younger kids because they’re the ones who are really going to be grappling with the consequences of agriculture as it stands today.”

Jungers says that getting the message across to students isn’t hard when “we have this case study right in front of us.” Jungers is referring to Minnesota’s rural drinking water, much of which is derived directly from the ground. Nitrogen levels in water have risen due to fertilizers from annual crops like corn and soybeans, particularly in southern Minnesota.

“It’s come to a point where nitrogen levels have exceeded EPA drinking levels, and we’re investing a lot of money cleaning out nitrogen,” Jungers says. “Communities are directly impacted because they have to pay for it.”

Kernza, on the other hand, absorbs nitrogen and keeps it from leaking into to local waterways, and ultimately to larger bodies of water such as the Gulf of Mexico.

“A lot of our environmental impact research will be focused on reduction of nitrogen under a Kernza field versus a business-as-usual field, and that’s where we’ll be interacting with high school students and 4-H,” says Junger.

Jungers has been impressed with the educational curriculum he’s seen so far. In September, he traveled to Cold Spring, Minnesota, to meet with 10 Future Farmers of America (FFA) students who were planting Kernza right next to their school, Rocori High School. The school paid for the seed and rented the field, and Jungers assisted in helping plant the crop. Then the students made a short video and explained to the audience why they were planting a perennial grain. “The students blew me away with how well they got it,” Jungers said.

Ultimately, that tendency for most people to “get it” when presented with the facts about Kernza is what gives everyone involved in the Kernza Cap Project hope, even if the road ahead to mainstream adoption will be a long one.

“If we all demand that food is cheap, I don’t think Kernza will be a very good fit,” said Peterson, the Minnesota farmer. “But if we look at water quality, climate change, and soil health, and we work together on it, Kernza will be very popular.”

Except where noted, all photos courtesy of Jacob Jungers.

Farmers interested in growing Kernza can apply to the program here. 

The post Can the Climate-Friendly Grain Kernza Finally Hit the Big Time? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Denise Blackmon learned to make gumbo from her mother, who learned it from a cousin from Louisiana.

“It’s literally just a list of ingredients, no measurements. I had to watch her make it over the years forever and I just know how much red pepper is supposed to go in and how it’s supposed to look,” says Blackmon, who runs a home-cooked soul food operation in Moreno Valley, California.

Blackmon, who launched Soul Goodness in August 2019, has seen her business grow substantially since California’s shelter in place order was enacted in March. She has gone from cooking two days a week to four or five, “and each time, I’m at my max,” she says. There are no soul food restaurants in Moreno Valley—an arid city located east of Riverside in Southern California—so her cooking has drawn a number of committed customers to Foodnome, the website that serves as a marketplace for her and other home cooks looking to sell meals in the region.

“I don’t just do fried chicken, but different kinds of fried fish, oxtail, gumbo, and smothered pork chops. You’re not going to get that at Coco’s or Applebee’s,” says Blackmon.

And her traditions go deep, as evidenced by feedback she’s hearing from repeat customers. “I had an older Black lady call me up and get very emotional. She thanked me and said my food tasted just like her mother’s,” she adds.

Although Blackmon had served platters of black-eyed peas and greens to large groups of friends, she had never worked as a professional chef before she clicked on a Facebook advertisement for Foodnome aimed at recruiting home cooks. The site helped her get her space in order, get an inspection from the local health department, and reach an audience. Within six weeks, she was catering a grand opening event for around 150 people.

As the caregiver for her 25-year-old autistic son, the opportunities to make a flexible income at home are rare for Blackmon. “If you’re caring for someone with special needs, it’s hard to get a job,” she says, adding, “what I get from the government … is barely enough to pay the bills.”

Home chef Denise Blackmon with some of the soul food she prepares for Soul Goodness. (Photo courtesy of Denise Blackmon)

Operating a home kitchen also offers a sense of meaning. “Socially, this has lifted me up and put me back into the world of adult relationships,” she says. “I cook a meal, people give me a good review, and I have a positive conversation with them. I’ve even made friends.”

Just two years ago, Blackmon wouldn’t have been able sell the food she cooks at home. Since 2013, The California Homemade Food Act has allowed home cooks to make and sell certain low-risk foods from home, such as baked goods, jam, and granola—but it does not allow vendors to sell hot, home-cooked foods.

In 2014, Bay Area food entrepreneurs Matt Jorgensen and Charley Wang co-founded high-profile startup Josephine to serve as the “Etsy of home- cooked meals.” Working with 3,000 home cooks, Josephine created what Jorgensen calls a “private-club” environment for home cooks to sell hot meals to their friends and neighbors without paying the rent of high-overhead commercial kitchens.

Josephine, Jorgensen says, wanted to help home cooks who didn’t qualify to sell under The California Homemade Food Act, while assisting them with food safety training, liability insurance, and business coaching. Local health officials served Josephine cooks with cease and desist orders, leading the organization to close its doors in 2018.

After closing Josephine, Wang and Jorgensen realized that they had already invested a significant amount of effort into promoting policies to support Josephine’s work, and that they should continue that push. In early 2018, they launched the COOK Alliance, a coalition aiming to pass policy support for home restaurants—and later that year, they were successful, with the passage of the AB626, which allowed for the permitted operation of Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations, or MEHKOs.

Now, following the mass restaurant industry layoffs and economic downturn of the pandemic, home cooks like Blackmon are seeing a surge in business.

Benz and Justin Martin, who together own Cooking Thai by Benz in La Quinta, have seen an influx of orders as well, which have helped supplement their pandemic-related loss of catering jobs. “Since the pandemic, we have about 150 percent more business,” Benz says. “Business was going kind of slow at first, because people weren’t really sure what was home cooking, what was homemade food. Since the pandemic, we can do curbside as well, so that’s worked out well.”

Orders have doubled and tripled for vendors associated with the COOK Alliance. “There’s a recognition in the pandemic of what it means to have resiliency and rely on friends, family, and extended neighborhood networks in lieu of this commodified, large-scale industrial system we’ve become very reliant on,” Jorgensen says. “So, there’s been more empathy and willingness to compensate food labor.”

And yet, not everyone in the state has been able to participate in this home cooking renaissance. On paper, AB626 allows entrepreneurs across the state with MEHKO permits to cook and sell food from their own private kitchens. But few permits have been issued, because each individual county must adopt the act before home cooks can apply to get one, and to date, only Riverside County has adopted the act. Solano County will become the second county to adopt the act when shelter-in-place orders end, and San Mateo, Santa Barbara, and Imperial Counties, along with the City of Berkeley, have opted in, but haven’t begun issuing permits.

The new law allows MEHKOs’ foods to be delivered, picked up, or even eaten in the cook’s own home, effectively turning it into a tiny, community-oriented restaurant. MEKHO operators can only serve a maximum of 30 meals a day, for a total of 60 meals a week, garnering no more than $50,000 dollars in gross annual sales.

Home cooks can choose to market and sell their food on their own, or via an AirBnB-like marketplace such as Foodnome, Shef, or DishDivvy. The organizations assist home cooks in procuring their MEHKO permits and guide them through the process of creating an online menu. They have also advocated for counties across the state to adopt AB626. (In counties where the new law hasn’t gone into effect, Shef requires their cooks to use commercial kitchens.)

Making Space for Marginalized Business Owners

Isaac O’Leary, marketing director at Foodnome, has seen a 150 percent increase in sales since April, and he hopes to get more county-level lawmakers to see the rising sales of home cooked foods as evidence that they should adopt the act.

“I talk to diners often on our customer service line, and the surge in interest is people flocking to really familiar comfort meals they trust in a time of crisis,” says O’Leary. Foodnome has also seen “a massive increase” in demand for these permits since the beginning of the pandemic.

O’Leary sees home cooking enterprises as a way to engage a group of cooks who were previously excluded from earning income through their food, including parents of high-needs children, single and stay-at-home parents, and refugees and immigrants who face language and cultural barriers.

“The restaurant industry is incredibly racist and sexist, and we see this as the rung of the ladder that doesn’t exist—the rung below the food truck or food cart,” says Jorgensen. “Sometimes it’s the only available economic opportunity, given the education and other professional opportunities (cooks) might have had.”

An internal 2018 COOK Alliance poll found that the microenterprises in its network kitchens are overwhelmingly run by people from marginalized populations. Eighty-five percent of the cooks were women, and about one-third were first-generation immigrants (many of whom COOK Alliance believes may be undocumented). According to Foodnome, more than 80 percent of permitted MEHKOs in Riverside County are operated by people of color, with more than 40 Black and POC-owned small businesses created in the last year alone.

Of course, the tradition of cooks of color selling hot prepared foods long predated AB626—from bulk bags of Oaxacan tamales sold through Facebook groups to combination plates of oxtails, rice, and plantains marketed on Instagram. But operating a permitted MEHKO allows home cooks to gain a wider audience, and saves them from worrying about fines from their local health authorities.

“Just the fact that my kitchen is certified … puts me a couple of steps ahead,” Blackmon says. “I don’t know if you know how hot chicken is supposed to be if you’re just cooking out of your garage. I don’t know if your tools are sanitized. But my kitchen promotes safety, and the county board of health has certified me to be public food-worthy.”

Benz Martin of Cooking Thai by Benz. (Photo courtesy of Benz and Justin Martin)

Justin Martin sees the permitting fee as a potential roadblock for small, home-based operators, whose margins are often slim. In Riverside County, where the Martins operate their MEHKO, the fee is $651 while administrative fees for violations range from $100 to $500.

“When I found out the fee was north of $600, my jaw almost hit the ground,” Justin says, adding that it “could prevent a talented and ambitious home chef from ever going into business.”

COOK Alliance hopes to work with investors to launch an equity fund to defray MEHKO permit fees. The equity fund hopes to offset the cost of an approximately $1,000 permit in Alameda County, across the bay from San Francisco, which could be a barrier to many home cooks. “City of Oakland code enforcement officers, who walk around telling pushcarts they are illegal, will be able to refer them to a formal program,” Jorgensen says, mentioning that he hopes to expand the permit equity fund to other counties.

Challenges to Adoption

Some cities and counties have voiced opposition to AB626. The city of Chino Hills has officially opposed the adoption of the act in San Bernardino County, citing “new and potential serious health risks to the public and create new enforcement challenges for our staff.” According to recent data collected by the COOK Alliance through its biweekly advocacy calls with 40 county leads who advocate in their respective areas, California’s Nevada County, Siskiyou County, Tulare County, Yolo County, and City of Pasadena have all expressed opposition to the bill.

In some counties, officials have struggled to implement the law county-wide because of individual cities protesting.

“I supported AB626, but we have not moved forward on it because it has to be countywide and not all cities in Alameda County want to implement,” Alameda County Supervisor Wilma Chan says. “We have County Council looking at if we can do a pilot in one or two cities under the bill.”

COOK Alliance, Foodnome, and DishDivvy have attempted to alleviate the fear of perceived health risks with hard data.

“It’s taken a little bit of time to build the concept … that these are legitimate food facilities, but the work of these home restaurants over the past year has spoken for itself,” O’Leary says. “We’ve sold 10,000 meals with no reported cases of foodborne illness and no complaints about noise or local disturbances.”

According to the language in AB626, MEHKO inspectors must survey the home kitchen, onsite eating area, food storage, utensils and equipment, toilet room, janitorial or cleaning facilities, and refuse storage area. If there is a complaint, MEHKO owners may have to pay a reasonable fee for the cost of the inspection themselves, according to the law.

The law also specifies a variety of rules to keep the neighborhood residential and not commercial. It prohibits signage or outdoor displays advertising the businesses, and requires owners to comply with local noise ordinances.

Lee Thomas, who runs a takeout and catering barbecue business called GrilleeQ out of his home in San Leandro and volunteers as county lead for COOK Alliance, believes that counties and cities should run studies focusing on their concerns, such as parking in residential neighborhoods and noise disturbances, before shutting down the possibility of adopting the law.

Lee Thomas stands by his grills for GrilleeQ. (Photo courtesy of Lee Thomas)

Thomas has also seen his business grow during the pandemic through Facebook and word-of-mouth and would like to make his brand of comfort food—from boneless chicken thighs in his homemade secret sauce, to hickory-smoked tri-tip—available through an online marketplace. When it comes to food safety, he says his customers tell him they feel safer buying dinner from a one-man operation.

“A lot of it was really because people don’t want to go grocery shopping, and a lot of people like that it’s only me, one person, cooking their meal,” he says.

Like Blackmon, Thomas says his cuisine is unique in his city. “There’s Korean barbecue, Hawaiian barbecue, but no one’s smoking [their] meat with hickory,” he says.

Promoting a variety of cuisines in a gentrifying area is just one of the reasons Thomas believes his county, Alameda, should adopt AB626. The former San Leandro councilmember hopes to convince current councilmembers by arguing for the value of unique cultural opportunities. “San Leandro prides itself on being a diverse city, but now we actually have a chance to really build upon that,” Thomas says.

Thomas says he is advocating for the educational aspects of AB626 for students because his daughter has expressed interest in the business and culinary aspects of GrilleeQ. He imagines high school students learning how to run their own microenterprise businesses. Thomas also sees the value in students being able to take field trips around the world, but in their own cities—by visiting the kitchens of home cooks.

“There are unique regional cuisines whose cooks may never be able to access the quarter of a million dollars needed to open a restaurant and get that legitimacy.”

In a Foodnome survey of its diners, the top three reasons customers buy meals on the site are for the cultural education, to access otherwise inaccessible cuisines, and to support small, local businesses, O’Leary says.

“The tragedy of this paradigm that [says] restaurants are the only safe place to get food is that there are all these food cultures that are seldom represented in the food industry,” he adds. “There are unique regional cuisines whose cooks may never be able to access the quarter of a million dollars needed to open a restaurant and get that legitimacy.”

If the act gets adopted in major California cities, it will likely attract people who are out of work from the restaurant industry, the same folks who are already setting up small food businesses only accessible through social media—such as this list of creative food “side hustles” in the Bay Area, which connects consumers directly to out-of-work chefs offering everything from Japanese-inspired Basque cheesecakes, to laksa, strawberry rhubarb pies, and ramp fettuccine.

“Almost 25 percent of restaurants will not reopen with the same [number of] staff, and there are lots of talented culinary creatives who now need employment,” O’Leary says.

But it’s unclear whether, at least in the short term, unemployed chefs with high-end experience will flood the market in cities that had developed food scenes prior to the pandemic—and whether there will be space left for less experienced folks from marginalized backgrounds.

Either way, over the long-term, Jorgensen says there’s the potential that AB626 will shift in the way people think about and value the people who feed them.

“When you go into someone’s kitchen and see their kids and eat food directly from the cook, it becomes a very de-commodified thing, and what we’ve come to expect of food is that it’s commoditized and cheap,” he says. “[The MEHKO movement] is a Trojan horse for empathy building, and we’re hoping that there’s greater long-term visibility because [home cooks] bring so much richness to what America is.”

This article was updated to reflect the fact that Josephine closed operations in 2018, not 2015.

The post It’s Now Legal for Home Chefs in California to Sell Meals. Will More Cities Get on Board? appeared first on Civil Eats.

The dish was a harbinger of her bright career as a chef and an advocate for Native health and foodways, in which she highlights foraged, local ingredients, precolonial, nutrient-packed foods, and creative culinary technique. For Reed, using Native American ingredients is part of a larger philosophy of reclaiming indigenous diets and honoring diverse Native American traditions.

Her food traditions are rooted in a deep, conscious political activism, which led her to author a 2015 essay entitled “Food Sovereignty is Tribal Sovereignty.” Also in 2015, she launched an Indigenous food social media campaign with a private Facebook group of the same name now over 7,000 strong, inviting Indigenous people involved in food practices including hunting, fishing, nonprofit work, and gastrodiplomacy to network, share information, empowering themselves and one another.

Born in Dallas and adopted at five months old by a white family in Dallas, Reed grew up only an hour and a half away from the Choctaw Nation capitol of Durant, Oklahoma. Even so, she did not learn about her Native heritage until she was in fifth grade studying the Trail of Tears, and her adoptive mother mentioned she was Choctaw. This sparked a deep hunger to learn about her ancestry.

“Since there was a real lack of access to realistic, truthful representations of Native people in the media, when I had the chance to reconnect with Native communities, and later Choctaw communities, it drove me to try to find the root of things—to make sure what I was learning and taking in was correct,” Reed says. “This is still very much a part of my personality—to not be satisfied with a given narrative, to dig deeper.”

Brit Reed (left) cooks during I-Collective’s 2017 NYC Thankstaking pop-up series. (Photo © Elizabeth Hoover)

Reed says her adoptive parents’ love for the kitchen and regular family meals instilled a sense of importance around food. At Evergreen State College in Washington State she concentrated on food policy, tribal governance, and tribal food sovereignty while pursuing a Masters in Public Administration.

In 2016, invited by Karina Walters, a Choctaw member and the founder of the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, Reed cooked on the Choctaw Trail of Tears, walking the direct route and preparing plant-based foods for Native Americans facing diabetes and chronic disease.

Reed now lives on a Coast Salish reservation in Washington, where she works for a diabetes program at the local clinic in Tulalip, creating meal plans that she describes as empowering, due to their ability to connect tribal members to their culinary history. With her culinary collective, I-Collective, Reed frequently hosts pop-ups that seek to revive ancient customs, featuring Indigenous, often foraged, ingredients.

Civil Eats recently spoke with Reed about how she came to rediscover the Native foods of her tribe and her work to help other people regain and revive their Indigenous foods and cultures.

How do you and I-Collective educate people about the impact of Native American foods on the world?

Unfortunately, people don’t realize the history of Indigenous food. Seventy percent of the food in markets originally came from the Americas, including a lot of things considered base ingredients, like tomatoes in Italian cuisine. Where would Asian cuisines be without chilies? Potatoes—people think they’re from Ireland, but they’re from the Americas.

The colonization of our native foods happened without our consent, for better or for worse—that process occurred with native foods, with our medicines and plants, things integral and sacred to us. Much like rice is integral to Asian cuisines, corn is that way to us and quinoa to the Quechua [of South America]. [Quinoa’s rapid rise in popularity] had a dramatic effect on the health of communities.

What are some of your most beloved ancestral dishes?

Smoked salmon is always a favorite of mine. Tanchi lobona, which means corn. And poshofa, which is historically made with corn and hominy, and whatever kind of game is available—venison or rabbit or squirrel. Now, it’s made with pork. That happened because fur trading killed all the deer in our territory, so we used the pigs left by the Spanish. It’s a simple dish, but the more it’s stewed, the better.

Nvni Homma Sholobachi Tuk (smoked salmon, mussels, foraged mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, and potato crisps) from Reed’s capstone meal at Seattle Culinary Academy. (Photo © Katherine Kehrli)

What role does corn play in Choctaw culinary culture?

Corn is not a traditional food for certain tribes. But corn is very important for my tribe historically, especially prior to being Christianized—we’re a very heavily Christian tribe right now. Much like how Indigenous peoples across the world have used Catholicism to bury their traditional spiritual ways, cultures, and philosophies inside, Choctaws did this as well.

I remember reading that corn had been considered pretty sacred; we had harvest ceremonies recognizing the sacredness. There are different stories about how it came to us: like with a bird flying from what is now Mexico, dropping seeds along the way. It was a staple food, and it was the responsibility of [Choctaw] women to grow corn.

If you look at older recipes, the cuisine heavily [uses] corn. There are so many types of cornbread: it’s in our soups, in our traveling foods. At one time, there were 8,000 varieties of corn here in America, though we didn’t know it. When you go to the grocery store, you get two or three, maybe four varieties of corn. If you go to seed banks, you can see a wider variety. Even there, it’s not what it used to be. I’m always blown away by the vast differences of what’s available, whether it’s deep purple—so much it’s almost black—or glass corn.

How do you learn more about traditional Choctaw cuisine?

I’m fairly fortunate to have Ian Thompson [as a mentor]. He has a Ph.D. and he did a lot of research because his wife got Type 2 diabetes, so they went on a strict traditional Choctaw diet. I’m thankful to him and Devon [Abbott Mihesuah], who wrote Recovering Our Ancestors’ Gardens, which focuses on the history of what happened. I have stood on their shoulders since they did this work.

How do today’s Choctaw recipes compare to their pre-Colombian versions?

Many recipes are full of postcolonial ingredients, and I’m trying to go beyond say, the five well-known Choctaw recipes. I try to get my hands on all the written material I can regarding eyewitness accounts of Choctaws. Honestly, some of these things might even be false. I’ve been told several times that when the University of Washington was doing research between 1910 and 1930, elders would see them coming up the road and would deliberately tell [tribe members] to give false information to not give [researchers] access to those foods. So, some of those things I read with a grain of salt. People actively tried to protect it by giving out false information at the time.

So, knowing that the Choctaw protected their recipes, how do you find authentic recipes to decolonize Native diets?

I have definitely talked with elders about what their traditional foods are. Through the work I do with the Yappalli, through being able to create more ties with community and hoping to go down [to Choctaw reservations] to create more ties. By foraging. It’s a work in progress.

What role does foraging play?

There are traditional foods that both the Coast Salish and Choctaw people ate. One is nettles—they’re kind of painful [to gather], but good for arthritis and inflammation. I also like gathering salmonberries that come up in the spring. I like to gather the blueberries and wild strawberries that grow here in the Pacific Northwest. They’re much smaller and a lot more flavorful, but not as prolific as blackberry. There’s an invasive species called Himalayan blackberry and another, indigenous one that’s smaller and more flavorful.

How would you feel if Native American foods were suddenly appropriated in many non-Native restaurants?

Indigenous people are finally taking back our cuisine and creating access to those foods we haven’t had since we were taken from our reservations, and I think people now see that and they think it’s a trend, when it’s not. It’s us embracing us and our foods and our culture and our spirituality.

When The Herbfarm Restaurant [in Seattle], a place that has a pricey rotating tasting menu, did a tasting menu called “Land of the Totem,” it was problematic for several different reasons. First of all, this is not the land of the totem. Certainly in British Columbia there was totem making, but not here. They also perpetuated this idea of the vanishing Indian, as if we’re not here, as if we don’t have a very strong culture which we do have in the Northwest, even more so than some other tribes.

They also perpetuated this idea that they were bringing back all of these dishes, salmon head soups or whatever. The recipes were from a woman who was married to someone Native and she had been granted access, but not everyone is supposed to have access. With Native families, not everyone had knowledge—sometimes you had to earn knowledge. She had a special place to gain knowledge, sold it off to The Herbfarm, and they created a whole meal out of it.

The menu for Reed’s capstone meal at Seattle Culinary College. (Click for a large version) Photo © Katherine Kehrli.

How can tribal communities ensure future generations honor their culinary traditions?

Often, tribal nations open up restaurants to represent them as a tribal people and instead of hiring someone Native, they go and hire a non-Native chef. While that wouldn’t seem odd in general industry, it is for us. I wish tribal governments would hire their own people so they can mentor other tribal members interested in carrying on those ways and making a living.

There’s an opportunity to make sure all the knowledge and spiritual teachings go with it if a Native person is working with their community. We’re more likely to represent food in a culturally appropriate way and we control our story. Our own representation of ourselves is often taken from us. It’s time for us to control our own stories.

You went to culinary school at Seattle Culinary Academy. How was that experience?

I was in a program that was fairly diverse, though there was still emphasis on French technique. I wish there was more time dedicated to other cuisines outside of Europe.

In school, they would talk about the ancestral people who used to grow and cook wild rice. I said, “There are people I know who are out there ricing right now.” I’m rather mouthy. There’s this pressure that builds up inside me when I hear incorrect information. On day one, they told us Europeans brought potatoes up to North America. We definitely had other potatoes  we were eating; Choctaw had words and language around these potatoes. They’d say ‘Show me proof’ and I’d say ‘I can’t because it’s oral history.’

What would you say to students who are being othered like this in culinary school?

The only thing you can do, if you have it within you, is step up. It isn’t the easiest journey but you can make it easier for other people. [Seattle chef and I-Collective member Hillel] Echo Hawk graduated from Seattle Culinary Academy before I did; she’s not a person who likes to speak up at all, but she did. She did a four-course meal for 12–15 people for her capstone and it was all traditional foods. If she hadn’t chosen to challenge things where she did, it would’ve been even worse for me. [Seattle chef and I-Collective member] Jayson Running Bear has plans to be the next native to go through Seattle Culinary Academy.

What’s next for you?

I would like to create programming for the community in addition to cooking. I would really like to do the Food Sovereignty Assessment Tool at Tulalip, a training program that assists Native communities in reclaiming their local food systems. It helps demystify the process of data collection about local food systems and provides tools and a framework for communities to measure and assess food access, land use, and food policies. When I walked around, there was one banana available here on the reservation, in all of the markets. That was it as far as fresh fruit, so I’d like to be able to increase our food security on the reservation.

I want to work toward learning more of our precolonial cuisine, as well as being able to go back to Oklahoma more often. I would love to get better at [speaking] Choctaw and have more insight into traditional thought processes and language. I just found out there’s another Choctaw chef, which makes me so excited.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Top photo © Katherine Kehrli.

Update: This article was updated to more accurately reflect Reed’s birthplace.

The post Chef Brit Reed Brings Political Activism, Indigenous Traditions to the Table appeared first on Civil Eats.

Despite the challenges, the farm survived, and three generations and a century later, his great-grandson Greg Massa is still growing rice, along with his wife Raquel Krach. Although Greg’s father, Manuel Massa Jr., opted to use herbicides, Greg has chosen to farm organically, meaning he’s facing the same weeds as his great-grandfather, which are difficult to remove once he floods his fields with nourishing waters.

“We farm organically because we think spraying poison on food and on our environment is wrong,” Massa says. But being an organic rice farm has been anything but easy, requiring Massa and Krach to employ an arsenal of farming techniques: crop rotation, cover crops, field preparation, timely planting, and deep water followed by drought stress to restrain weeds.

“Rice is difficult to grow organically with modern varieties that were bred for high inputs of nitrogen and herbicides to kill weeds,” Massa explains. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve tried using goats, mowing, and spraying vinegar with limited success.”

Set on 200 verdant acres in Hamilton City, Massa Organics farms rice, almonds, sheep, and pigs. Sandwiched between two majestic national forests, the Mendocino and the Plumas, with the Sacramento River at its feet, Massa Organics is 15 miles from the university town of Chico.

Massa Organics’ rice fields after a winter rain.

Though rice, which Massa sells to restaurants in town, is its primary selling staple, the farm also sells its grass-fed ground lamb at the Chico farmers’ market and raw nonpareil almonds, jars of almond butter, lamb, and pork to farmers’ markets in the Bay Area

In a rice industry dominated by larger producers like Lundberg (which does its own conservation work), Massa Organics is the rare independent brand selling directly to its customers through markets, CSAs, and small retail stores using social media as a marketing tool. Rarer still is the Massa approach to farming as a means of ecological work. The couple views each crop as part of a fully functioning ecosystem—the rice as part of a pond ecosystem and the almonds part of a woodland ecosystem—that relies on biodiversity and natural relationships for crop health.

An Ecological Approach to Farming

Massa and Krach both have Masters’ degrees in ecology and moved to the farm in 1997 with hopes of re-thinking his family’s approach to conventional commodity farming. Though they could have entered academia, the pair was inspired by Krach’s agroecology research on Costa Rican tropical tree plantations growing right next to rainforests without harming them.

“I was doing my research on this actual plantation and thought, ‘This is kind of weird that I’m doing this in a research-based situation when we have a real farm,’” Krach says. Hoping to engage in applied ecology that made an immediate difference, she convinced Massa they could convert his family farm into a living experiment.

“We chose organic farming as a means of doing conservation work because our methods promote biodiversity by mimicking natural ecosystems,” Massa says.

Snow geese spend a winter morning on the farm in this photo from a drone flying over Massa’s fields.

Like Massa’s ancestors, he and Krach chose to farm medium-grain Calrose rice, a versatile variety bred specifically to flourish in California. The result is a sweet, nutty brown rice high in fiber and taste that Charles Phan, executive chef at the renowned San Francisco restaurant The Slanted Door, serves and swears by. But its taste isn’t the only reason that Massa and Krach chose Calrose over jasmine and basmati varieties.

“Small farmers in Thailand sell a little jasmine rice, and they’re reliant on that for their income,” Massa said. “Many generations of Thai farmers worked to select jasmine rice to make it what it is. We decided early on we were not going to grow jasmine or basmati because it felt too much like stealing their genetic heritage.”

Soon after taking over, Massa and Krach began to transition the land to organic, eventually diversifying the operation, adding almonds, wheat, and several heritage breeds of animals to the mix. By 2002, the rice operation was certified, and the rest followed over the course of the next eight years. Today, their whole operation is certified organic.

Creating a Natural Woodland Environment

Integrating heritage animal breeds—Dorper sheep, Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, and Berkshire pigs—has been an important way to improve the farm’s ecological footprint as well.

Some of Massa Organics’ piglets.

Krach and Massa have pioneered a natural grazing pattern for their sheep, converting their 30-acre almond orchard into a natural woodland. Every morning, and sometimes in the afternoons, Massa and Krach move an electric fence to cover a different 6,000- to 8,000-square foot area, guiding 100 Dorper sheep and lambs to a new patch of orchard.

Mimicking the ancient patterns of pack herbivores like pronghorn antelope, the sheep graze happily on perennials and other grasses. In the process, the herd replicates a natural woodland ecosystem—one that consists of mature trees, understory plants, large mammals, small mammals, birds, and insects all living in symbiosis that serve the crops well.

The woodland environment attracts beneficial insects that protect against pests, and the grazing animals naturally remove weeds, fertilize the almond trees with their waste, and create a richer soil for insects and thus a richer food source for birds.

Massa and Krach pasture their 120 pigs as well. In addition to creating natural fertilizer, Krach says the pigs provide a plowing function for the farmers, digging up stubborn weeds, and are mostly fed rice, wheat, safflower, and hay that is grown on the farm. “They’re part of the cycle,” she says. “If they tear up the ground, we can just plow it and move them out.”

Agriculture is intricately connected to the larger web of life for the pair. “Everything we do with the animals is totally counter to mass production,” Krach says. “Letting them live like they should is the only way we can imagine.”

Spring is a lively time for Krach, as she manages their animal operations. Most of the 45 ewes are pregnant this time of year and hungrily mow down the tall grasses by at least a foot over three or four hours in the field. Krach finds it hard to go inside when she’s standing in three-foot grass watching her ewes and 11 lambs, the babies frolicking in a beautiful pink sunset.

Sheep before an approaching storm.

“It’s pretty idyllic,” Krach says. “It’s hard work, but raising the sheep is fun, and it’s lambing time, so I can’t get enough of them.”

Soon, the lambs will go to the farmers’ market to be sold. Krach sees letting the animals go as part of the cycle and hopes to educate omnivores about where their meat comes from. “We hope we can teach people and they can learn about [how we raise animals] by knowing our farm or buying our products,” she says.

Water Limitations and an Ecological Lifestyle

Almonds, like meat, have often gotten a bad rap as a water-thirsty crop in drought-ridden California. But as an almond farmer, Massa sees much of that response as scapegoating.

“Yes, it takes some water to grow [almonds], but if you look at what you get out of these nuts, [it’s worth it],” he says. “They’re really full of health benefits—they can regulate your blood sugar and hold your hunger at bay for several hours. I’d challenge you to find another crop that could do that.”

Greg says rice used to have a similarly bad rap. “In terms of water used per serving, rice can be pretty good. Lots of crops use a lot of water, and in most of California, you can’t dry-farm everything.”

150 tons of compost to be spread on the Massa almond orchards.

With two water-intensive crops, Massa Organics is fortunately situated just a few hundred yards from the Sacramento River near its intersection with Stony Creek. Half the land is in an irrigation district with water rights from the river, and the other half of their water comes from what Greg called “very good groundwater,” with minimal sinking of the ground.

Massa and Krach’s dedication to ecology and conservation—a view of the bigger picture that goes far beyond profits—has also inspired innovation. They live in a well-insulated, energy-efficient rice straw-bale farmhouse, use solar panels to provide approximately 90 percent of the farm’s energy, and use biodiesel made from vegetable oil they recycle from local restaurants to power most of the farm’s vehicles.

“Our background in ecology directs everything we do on the land,” Massa says. “We’re always looking to stack enterprises, integrate processes, grow new things, and grow them better.”

Photos courtesy of Massa Organics.

The post Growing California Rice and Almonds Against the Grain appeared first on Civil Eats.

While cooking in a Syrian restaurant in Oslo, Arnous would often make Syrian cake samples and give them away for free, hoping to spread love for his culture’s sweets. But he found that his daily travel expenses from Jevnaker to the restaurant were too large. He’s eager to share the craft his uncle taught him at a bakery in Damascus, but Arnous does not yet have the space nor the money to do so.

And he’s not alone. Without permanent kitchens physical baking spaces, Syrian refugees often struggle to make a living abroad with their native culinary skills and traditions. Molhem Tayara, a 21-year-old a baker living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, works in a Lebanese restaurant to make ends meet. Tayara, whose specialties include flatbreads called manoushe za’atar and lahm bi’ajeen, honed his skills over four years working at a Syrian bakery in Jordan. Despite vigorous accolades of the Kalamazoo food community, Tayara can’t afford to open his own bakery. But he’s determined to continue Syrian baking traditions.

Molhem Tayara.

“The flatbreads are important to me and other Syrian people because our grandfathers left them to us to always remember our culture,” Tayara said, adding: “It’s not easy to save all the secrets.”

One quandary for refugees like Arnous and Tayara is sourcing traditional ingredients, either from Syria or other Middle Eastern nations. The protein-packed Syrian whole wheat conventionally used in flatbread has been diminished by Assad’s strategic bombing and is expensive to purchase abroad, so refugee bakers often find themselves using typical North American wheat flours. “The wheat grown and produced in Syria has better quality than the imported wheat,” Arnous said. “When you use imported, you need to use more flour to get the same result.”

A Fraught History

If you want to destroy a culture, the earth-scorching Romans knew, destroy not only its armies, but also its food sources and traditions. The story of the Syrian wheat crisis is a long, complex saga of systematic violence, governmental mismanagement and ecological crisis. Global warming contributed to the Syrian Spring, but agricultural analyst Franchesca de Chatel argues that it was not the main factor, and that the government’s agricultural mismanagement and rapid economic liberalization predated the drought.

The downfall of the crucial crop began long before the Civil War, with Assad’s desire to capitalize on wheat exports, soil-depleting agricultural policies and over-reliance on rainwater. The soil, depleted and salinized by monocultural planting and inefficient surface-watering irrigation policies, was further ravaged by a climate-fueled drought from 2006 to 2011. Farmers turned to well water to irrigate their crops and depleted groundwater sources, leaving fields dry. A estimated 1 to 1.5 million farmers, newly unemployed, migrated to the urban slums of Syria.

Once the war began, food security plummeted as wheat fields were bombed, rural irrigation canals were destroyed and fuel for irrigation pumps became hard to come by. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported in 2013 that wheat and barley production “dropped to less than 2 million tonnes last year from 4 to 4.5 million tonnes in normal years,” but production wasn’t the only problem. Wheat needs to be milled and distributed, but few farmers had means of taking their product to market.

When the essential flour did make it to Syrian bakeries, bread lines were systematically bombed, often shortly after they were announced. Multiple sources including Human Rights Watch, The New Republic, The Telegraph, CNN, Syria: Direct and Middle East Research and Information Project have all reported the bombings of Syrian bakeries by Syrian and Russian governmental forces. In December 2012, a Sukhoi-22 ground attack plane killed at least 60 Syrians waiting for bread in Halfaya. In January of 2016, Russian planes bombed a British-funded bakery in Hazano, killing eight. The symbolic message imparted a new level of terrorism: “We will starve the rebels into submission.” Bread prices tripled from 2011 to 2014, but waiting in a charity line for free bread wasn’t safe either.

Since then, even as some parts of the Fertile Crescent came back to life, analysts say it may take decades for food security to restabilize in Syria. Today ISIS controls what remains of the agricultural land in the northern part of the country. Although the Syrian government announced that it would produce 2 million tons of wheat this season, some experts say that the country will be lucky if it produces enough to feed its dwindling population—let alone have anything left to export.

Meanwhile, many Syrians are struggling to continue their vital traditions abroad. For Arnous, that means flatbread. “(The Syrian flatbread) has protein and all Arabs eat it; it is our tradition and culture. We need it and couldn’t go without it.” Now, he’s also considering teaching others his craft. “I want my son to cook like me,” he says.

Passing on Tradition

Ismail and Rasoul Alsalha, the brothers behind the Toronto-area Syrian bakery Crown Pastries, are another refugee family working to keep Syria’s sweets tradition alive. Their two younger brothers, ages 14 and 21, are still learning the craft of Syrian baklava, of which Crown Pastries sells nine different kinds. “Our baklava is not like the Greek or Turkish baklava,” Ismail says. “We use more nuts inside, the dough is very thin, and the baklava is not too sweet.”

Ismail and Rasoul Alsalha of Crown Pastries.

Had the family been able to stay in Aleppo, the younger Alsalha sons might have learned baklava’s tricky ways as Ismail and Rasoul did, from their grandfather, who had a bakery in Aleppo for 32 years. When the family fled to Canada in 2009 under refugee status, they were forced to abandon the bakery. Then, in 2015, they opened their own Syrian bakery. Now, the two younger boys are still focused on school, but the Alsalhas have big plans to expand the physical space and cultural scope of the family business and bring their younger siblings into the fold.

“We’re going to expand the bakery so we can do classes where Syrian kids—or anyone—can come and we will teach them how to make baklava,” Ismail said.

Rasoul recollected the importance of baking to the Alsalhas as children. “In the summertime we used to go to our grandfather’s bakery full-time,” he remembers.

The quest to keep the tradition of Syrian baking alive is being mirrored across Toronto at Newcomer Kitchen, a nonprofit pop-up kitchen located in an upscale deli. Each week, one of the 60 Syrian refugee women of Newcomer Kitchen cooks a meal that is sold online for pick-up or delivery, and the profits are shared with the cooks. From s’fouf—a golden turmeric, anise, vanilla, coconut, and pistachio semolina cake—to qataief, dumpling-like pastries stuffed with nuts and cheese then drizzled with syrup, the Syrian chefs of Newcomer exhibit incredible skill. Newcomer offers an extensive list of classes that pass cooking and baking skills on to other Syrian-Canadians as well as to the community at large. In the process, the Syrian refugee women are learning from one another.

“The bonding that’s happening in the kitchen is really crossing over intra-cultural barriers,” Newcomer Kitchen director Cara Benjamin-Pace said. “There are divisions in Syria, so those friendships, solidified through baking, help overcome those differences.”

Bakers from Syrian Sweets Exchange Phoenix.

Benjamin-Pace often pairs an older matriarch more experienced in baking with a younger Syrian woman. “Often families are separated, with mothers unbonded from daughters,” she said. “These intergenerational baking lessons give them a sense of family when they are far away from home.”

When special treats are being baked, Benjamin-Pace orders costly Turkish flour that is similar to the Syrian flour the women are used to. An experienced baker, Benjamin-Pace has also been teaching them how to adapt to the usage of various types of North American flour, including pastry flour, cake flour, bread flour, sourdough starter, and all-purpose flour.

Building New Businesses

In Phoenix, Arizona, an organization called Syrian Sweets Exchange Phoenix has received funding from the International Rescue Committee to start a commercial space where future generations of Syrian-Americans will learn the art of baking. The group, which has brought 25 Syrian women together to bake desserts, also helps the women obtain food handler’s licenses and stalls at 10 of Phoenix’s weekly farmers’ markets.

Nancy Speidel, the volunteer co-organizer of Syrian Sweets Exchange, explained how important sweets and pastries are to the participants. “Syria is known for its sweets, and in the Middle East, it has one of the highest standards of sweets,” she says. “Since they already have a reputation of being the best of the best in the region, they’re very proud to bring those sweets here and showcase them.”

Tan Jakwani, the other volunteer co-organizer and the child of Vietnamese immigrants herself, emphasized the networking potential of a physical space for the Syrian bakers. “We learn about cultures through foods and I really want to help our new Syrian immigrants integrate into Phoenix and make it a stronger, richer city,” she said.

When its new cooperative commercial kitchen opens, Syrian Sweets Exchange will sell the sweets to retail locations and offer baking classes, bringing in further income for the women. The goal is to help make the women become self-sustaining entrepreneurs, adds Speidel. “We’re going to give them a facility and they can make a small business and, eventually, a living out of this.”

Top photo: Molhem Tayara at the Victorian Bakery in Kalamazoo, Mich.

The post Syrian Bakers Fight to Maintain a Tradition of Excellence appeared first on Civil Eats.

In many American restaurants, the Asian salad is right up there next to the Greek salad and the Caesar salad. You might think this is progress—cultural inclusion on a menu. And yet the Asian salad is often the one that comes with a winky, jokey name: Oriental Chop Chop. Mr. Mao’s. Secret Asian Man. Asian Emperor. China Island. Chicken Asian Chop Chop. Chinese-y Chicken…

The casual racism of the Asian salad stems from the idea of the exotic—who is and isn’t American is caught up wholesale in its creation. This use of “Oriental” and “Asian” is rooted in the wide-ranging, “all look same” stereotypes of Asian culture that most people don’t really perceive as being racist. It creates a kind of blind spot.

Although many readers shared the piece, and thanked Tsui for her insight, she was also barraged with anger and criticism. And she isn’t alone. In recent years, writers who dare to look critically at the way food and race intersect have often been trolled, degraded, and threatened on and off of social media. At Civil Eats, we have focused on food justice and the intersection of food and race since our inception and have also experienced this disturbing growing trend in reaction to our stories. We invited Tsui and several others writers to weigh in about the increasing and seemingly coordinated efforts to silence their voices.

Bonnie Tsui, writer and author of American Chinatown

Photo credit: Aurora King

I was astounded by the level of rage that boiled up. It seemed that many people felt my questioning of the nomenclature was equivalent to a direct attack on America and a rejection of the existence of hamburgers and French fries. I received a lot of notes that relied on flawed logic, a set-up of false equivalencies—that just because someone writes a piece about X, she doesn’t care about Y, she is making too big a deal out of Z, she should be worrying about A, instead, save your outrage for B.

The message this dismissive trolling sends: We’re not allowed to talk. We’re not allowed to make critical observations about the language we use for food, or see it as telling of our wider perceptions of the world and the people in it. It’s hard not to see a larger resonance to this. There are many perceptive, thoughtfully written stories about race and food, but from the trolling in the comments sections and on Twitter—all blunt instrument and ham-fisted vitriol, often not responding at all to what the original writings say—you’d think that subtlety and balance did not exist. They do.

Shakirah Simley, co-founder, Nourish|Resist, 2017 Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture exchange fellow

Photo credit: Molly DeCoudreaux

People of color in food maintain a triple burden: They must be equally eloquent on the roots and recipes of their specific food culture, while remaining skeptical of grossly appropriative and derivative versions of said food and culture (hello weirdly racist Asian chicken salad, fried chicken joints in blackface, and straight up stolen Mexican recipes). All the while, dealing with the interpersonal and structural racism that limits their full potential within kitchens, dining rooms, fields, or editing rooms.

In the face of all this, we persist. We honor unsung food heroes. We open our dream restaurants, which pay homage to our ancestors. We have to show why we matter—bringing forth the stories, the flavors, the issues, the ingredients. We tell our own stories, because we must. And then we get told why we shouldn’t. Because blander, muted, and inappropriately seasoned versions of our food and ourselves is what sells covers—on magazines and in dining rooms.

Spicy, but not too much. Speak up, but not too much.

There are seven specific ways that people of color in the food world are censored and silenced in order to protect white feelings. Responses to our attempts against erasure, generally fit into one of these categories: hate speech and trolling; defensive denial; whitesplaining; the Devil’s Advocate; #NotAllWhiteFoodPeople; the culture vulture/Colombus-er; and finally, polite acceptance, which is often presented as allyship—even if it’s far from it.

America and its institutions have a long history of stifling POC voices with indifference and violence; instead of pens and pulpits, people now have mastheads, keyboards, and Twitter accounts. Like clockwork, the Seven Horses of the Fragility Snowpocalypse always appear, for fear a queer brown chef speaks to her legitimate and industry-wide experience. Reporting on well-founded research of restaurants shows striking inequity within restaurants in progressive cities, generates hate-fueled mail. God forbid, someone ask for a specific country when a food blogger tosses out a recipe for “Asian noodle salad.”

We cannot even talk about the truth behind our own discrimination or racial abuse without being further abused and discriminated against, particularly on social platforms that have broad reach but don’t protect users—celebrity or not. Advising people #dontreadthecomments isn’t enough. It’s not enough for people like me to control, manage, navigate their own behavior for fear of white reaction. It’s time for white people to listen and hold other white people accountable—chefs and writers alike.

Stephen Satterfield, sommelier, urban farmer, WhetstoneMagazine founder, and Food52 writer in residence

Photo credit: Audre Larrow

We’ve arrived at an interesting moment in food media. For so long, the lens through which food was viewed and documented was a fundamentally European one. But as we’ve grown more serious about our dining, the way we consume food has evolved from something that defines our interest to something that defines us. Some now see “food as identity” and many are beginning to acknowledge the limits of seeing delicious food as the exclusive terrain of white men.

Readers and food enthusiasts are no longer willing to accept Eurocentrism as exceptionalism. And some food editors are increasingly making very public efforts to elevate the more diverse voices within the chorus. I know this to be true as I’ve been a beneficiary of this new enlightenment.

The awkward thing, though, is that this all happening in precisely the moment in which regressive racial ideology has been given a new pass by the current administration. Racist rhetoric has been unleashed, and nowhere is this more evident than online. This convergence of events—a more diverse set of food writers, plus emboldened, overt bigotry has meant these writers and their ideas are being met with vitriolic, defensive, and just plain racist comments.

Abolishing racial inequity endures as the work of the privileged, and so intrinsically, needs to loudly shouted down not by the writers who are the target of the racism, but “everyone else.” For the rest of “us,” the work continues. Keep writing.

Dakota Kim, writer and food editor, Paste Magazine

I own my own privilege in the food space. I’ve diversified my writing income streams so that I’m not as afraid to speak my mind. Not everyone has that privilege to speak out without fear that the ever-present backlash against people of color speaking their minds will lead a trauma-inducing Twitter feud—or worse.

Every time I write something asserting the right of people of color to speak out about culinary appropriation, I get hate mail. Every. Single. Time. I get vicious attempts at delegitimization and self-esteem destruction. Trolls add me to lists called “#NotReallyaJournalist” and “#CantWrite.”

I have the privilege of multiple higher-ed degrees and a healthy writing career, which allows me to dash off an article in an hour, publish it, and not worry too much about how a wordy sentence might characterize me. Think about folks who don’t have those privileges and are trying to write about cultural appropriation or defend themselves in social spaces.

The thing that frustrates me most about the current culinary appropriation conversation is how narrow it is. It fails to see the larger context of capitalist neo-colonialism and it fails to talk about social justice and true equal opportunity. Food is not your separate, happy, safe sphere, away from politics. Food is politics. Food is culture.

We focus too much on the poor Americans who were “forced” to shutter their pop-up food cart (they weren’t really forced, by the way — they chose to shut down in the face of criticism); we don’t focus enough on the million small cuts a day to underrepresented people of color.

Every time a Black or Latinx restaurateur is passed over for a business loan, that news goes silently into the void. When an unofficial community garden supporting people of color in a gentrifying neighborhood is razed to build condos, it doesn’t make mainstream food media headlines, even though it’s the bedrock of feeding a community healthfully and fighting for survival.

We’re too busy talking about the latest Momofuku cookies. I’m not saying I’m innocent of writing about viral trends, but how do we steer this ship toward deeper waters—such as the not-radical ideas that creators in developing nations (like the tortilla makers that the Kooks Burritos ladies learned from) should get paid for their expertise, or that slavery deserves reparations for building this country?

Tunde Wey, writer and host of the Blackness in America dinner series

Photo credit: Claire Nelson

We can’t talk about race and food, because nobody wants to acknowledge the truth—privilege (racial or gender) is a deeply satisfying possession. And we are selfish, exploitative, and manipulative in our attempt to hold on to it.

And because racism does not have a benign history, and its consequences are tragic, this announcement becomes an indictment of the individual or organization as entirely awful. And nobody thinks they are evil or wants to be thought of as such, so they fight the characterization, doubling down on the position that is being assailed because if they can win the fight then they can prove they are good.

This pessimistic reaction to the charge of racism conflates the disagreeable parts of who we are with the entirety of who we are. We are not exclusively, and permanently, the motivations that drive us to protect our privilege. But those are the potentials we have invested in.

We can’t talk about race because we don’t want to be vulnerable, it’s uncomfortable—it’s antithetical to our psychological survival to be in an emotional space where the foundation of our identity is challenged.

To talk about race and food, we have to change the terms of engagement. We should reward not just the finished product of transformation but the process. My personal experiences, hosting public dinners on race and immigration, over the last year and a half in communities across the country, has taught me that the tensions inherent in these sorts of conversations are reconcilable only through a substantive transformation of the individual and the system. Both have to inform each other, happening in tandem, and also independently. Then, talking constructively about racism becomes about exiting our current state of unwitting materialism and moving toward a less material and more emotionally vulnerable place where we can admit to being corrupted without seeing ourselves as irredeemable.

The post Why We Can’t Talk About Race in Food appeared first on Civil Eats.