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In Northern Spain, Agritourism Pushes Back Against Overtourism | GFF '25

In Northern Spain, Agritourism Pushes Back Against Overtourism 

This post was written by Sadie Bograd as a part of her O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

I spent this past June living and volunteering on farms in Asturias, a rural coastal region of northern Spain. When I wasn’t repairing fences or harvesting beans, I was interviewing my hosts and neighboring farmers (and tour guides and baristas and bus drivers) about tourism. I had traveled to Spain hoping to understand how agritourism shaped small-scale farmers’ conception of their work and their community. Inspired by advertisements inviting tourists to “be a shepherd for a day” in Navarre or join a fishing crew in Galicia, I wondered: what happens to farmers when they shift from growing a product to selling an experience? 

But when I arrived, I learned that the agrarian advertising belied a very different reality. Far from feeling overwhelmed by touristic interest in their work, the farmers I spoke to wished tourists cared more about their farms — wished they would do something other than complain about the smell of cow manure and the tractors blocking their photogenic views. The dominant model was not farm tourism, but rural tourism, in which visitors stayed in historic dwellings and visited natural landmarks but failed to engage with local communities. Agritourism, far from a challenge to farmers’ identities, had become a source of affirmation. It was a way to preserve traditions threatened by the arrival of mass tourism and a globalized culture.  

What follows is a journalistic reflection on my time in Asturias. Endless thanks to Macarena, Gerard, Severino, Alejandro, Paula, Manolo, Arantza, and everyone else I spoke with for their candor and hospitality. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Yale Sustainable Food Program and the O’Shaughnessy–Global Food Fellowship for making this research possible. 

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Drive through the winding landscape of Asturias, a forested region on Spain’s northern coast, and you’ll see endless pastures of grazing sheep and cattle. You’ll pass by the jagged green-and-gray cliffs of the Picos of Europa, the crashing waves of the Bay of Biscay, the crystalline shimmer of the Lakes of Covadonga. You’ll encounter centuries-old stone churches and small wooden granaries, called hórreos, elevated on pillars to keep out rodents.   

You will also see lots — and lots — of tourist rentals. 

As climate change makes temperatures unbearable in Spain’s traditional tourist destinations, like Barcelona and the Mediterranean coast, both Spaniards and their European neighbors have increasingly fled northward. Each summer, thousands of domestic and international tourists spend weeks living in Asturian alojamientos rurales: traditional stone and wood buildings that have been converted into rentable lodgings in sparsely-populated villages. In 2019, an estimated 2.3 million people traveled to Asturias — a region with a population of just one million.   

Travel writers hail Asturias as Spain’s “best-kept secret,” a region still unaffected by the kind of overtourism that has generated cost of living crises and widespread protests in cities like Barcelona and Seville. 

But from the perspective of many locals, the tourist hordes are already here. 

The Asturian government has been promoting the region as a “natural paradise” since 1985. But the new focus on Asturias as a “climate refuge,” combined with a post-pandemic surge in nature tourism, has pushed tourism rates to new highs. For Asturians, whose economy has long been based on ranching and farming, the arrival of so many visitors has brought with it countless challenges.

“You find people who come to the country but demand the standards of the city,” said Arantza Marcotegui, a local nature guide.   

Visitors park their cars in front of farm gates. They complain about roosters crowing early in the morning and tractors blocking the photogenic view. They don’t want to smell any cow manure. 

“If you’re in the middle of a village with cows, what do you want it to smell like?” Marcotegui exclaimed. 

It’s not just the occasional rude behavior that has locals worried. The rural region’s infrastructure simply isn’t built to accommodate so many people, no matter how polite. Marcotegui claimed that some towns had to close their beaches last summer because of fecal contamination in the water, the result of so many people’s waste flowing into the river. Macarena Lapuerta, a yoga instructor who rents a room of her house to tourists, said that other villages don’t have enough water for laundry during the high season. 

Even when the tourists go home, the prices stay elevated. Though tourism has brought economic benefits — in 2019, the tourism sector accounted for 12.71% of jobs and 10.6% of the economy — it has also led to a higher cost of living and an acute housing shortage. Many houses stay empty year-round so that tourists can rent them in July and August. This leaves local residents with no place to stay.

“If you want to be a teacher or a nurse here, there’s no housing. If you want to come work in tourism for the summer — they are always asking for waiters, but there’s no housing for them,”

Lapuerta explained. “There are more casa rurales [tourist rentals] than private homes, almost.” 

The problem is exacerbated by increasing corporate ownership of tourist lodgings, according to Paula Valero Saez, a former deputy in Spain’s left-wing Podemos party and the owner of a local tourist house. While the economic benefits of tourism accrue to a smaller number of people and businesses, the costs are borne by the entire community. 

As the economy shifts from agriculture to tourism, longtime residents also worry that their traditions will be lost. 

“The tendency is to abandon, to forget the Asturian language and customs, to impose tastes and fashion from outside,” said Manolo Niembro, who runs a restaurant and leads food tours in the Asturian village of Asiego. He said people are learning English and French for work and failing to use the Asturian language. They are forgetting how to shepherd, to grow vegetables, to make cheese and cider — and losing the values of food sovereignty, patience, and environmental stewardship that accompanied those skills. 

Asturias is known for its food: tourists eagerly seek out its cider, which is uniquely acidic and drunk in a single gulp, and fabada asturiana, a hearty stew of beans and pork sausage. Oviedo, the capital city, was named Spain’s Capital of Gastronomy in 2024, and the regional and national government have invested in a number of cider tourism initiatives. But according to some residents, even widespread gastrotourism has failed to support local farmers.

“The cider sector isn’t an agricultural sector, it’s an industrial sector,” said Severino García, founder of the Ecomuséu Ca l'Asturcón. Asturian families have grown their own apples (in farms called pumaradas) and fermented their own cider for generations. But the bottles tourists drink are often made in large factories and produced with apples from France or Czechia. The fabadas served in restaurants use beans from Peru or Bolivia. 

Indeed, when I toured Sidra El Gaitero, a cidery in Villaviciosa, the guide focused far more on the company’s enormous machinery and successful export business than on the origins of its central ingredient. The promotional video they played showed a smattering of apple trees, but not a single farmer — in contrast to the dozens of shots of factory workers and processing plants. Cider was treated as an example of “industrial patrimony,” not agricultural heritage. 

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It wasn’t always this way. Some of the earliest tourism operators in Asturias saw tourism and agriculture as closely linked. Alejandro Rozalén Valero, Paula Valero’s son and the operator of the village house La Valleja, explained that some of the earliest rural lodgings — like the one his parents started — were tied to the incipient organic agriculture movement. His parents moved to Asturias in the 1980s, part of a wave of urbanites fleeing an economic crisis and seeking to return to the land. They opened the village house in 1997 after a decade of ranching goats and selling marmalade. Tourism created a new market for their agricultural products, which they could serve or sell to guests. García, of the Ecomuséu, also started renting his quintana, or country house, in 1991 as a way to support his family’s ceramic and wool artisanship, as well as their ranch of autochthonous species. 

At the time, tourism seemed like a way to counteract rural depopulation. When Valero arrived in the small village of Rieña, the houses were full of families who had been there for 200 years, farming the same way they had for generations — but for whom “leaving here was a success.”  “When we came here, people thought we had to be terrorists, or drug traffickers, because it didn’t make sense that people from Madrid with careers would come here,” she said. “‘They’re fleeing something,’ they said.”

Her arrival also coincided with Spain’s 1986 entry into the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union. The EEC promoted an industrial model of agriculture, with larger farms obeying stringent hygiene standards: rustproof steel, automatized operations, hundreds of cows. Asturian family farmers, who were used to raising cattle for family consumption and selling small amounts of dairy to the market, couldn’t keep up — further fueling an exodus from the countryside.

“They demanded large investments, and people who had only 10, 15 cows, it was impossible to meet the hygienic demands of Brussels if you didn’t have something more to complement it,” Valero explained.  

Valero, who trained as a biologist, was part of a European team working on an ecodevelopment plan for eastern Asturias. They thought sustainable tourism might be one such complement that could generate new income for farmers: “a responsible tourism, that wants to know how one makes things, that wants to understand the countryside.” It would be a way to stabilize the population and sustain local traditions.  

Many farmers started opening up rooms in their houses. Lapuerta told me about a friend from a historic farming family, whose parents moved him and his three siblings into one room so that they could rent the other to tourists. 

But as tourism grew, the focus was more and more on housing, and less and less on the farming culture it was meant to support.  

“At the beginning, the casas rurales were linked to maintaining two activities; that is, you worked as a rancher, you worked in the field, and you had the house,” Rozalén said. “And increasingly people are specializing more in only having the lodging and it’s more like a hotel, and the other part that combines the field and the lodgings has been disappearing.”

Different people have different explanations for this shift. Marcotegui pointed out that tourism is often less labor-intensive and more lucrative than ranching. Rozalén described how difficult it could be to manage both an agricultural and a tourism enterprise at the same time. And Valero described how frustrating regulations can be for farmers: “They make it so difficult with bureaucracy that in the end you say, ‘Why so many difficulties? I’m going to be a waiter and that’s it.’”

The difficulty in supplying agritourism services mirrored a lack in demand. Lapuerta’s partner Gerard Jaumandreu, who maintains a small organic farm, explained that most tourists come to Asturias for three things: to see the Lakes of Covadonga, to ride a canoe down the River Sella, and to eat well. Understanding where fabadas and cider originated, or why their country farmhouse comes with an elevated granary, or how centuries of ranching shaped the pastoral landscape, isn’t part of the picture.

Public funding and regulations supported the transition from agritourism to a more generic “rural tourism.” National and international initiatives prioritized “economic criteria and increasing the supply of rural tourism facilities,” and deemphasized how tourists would engage with the rural environment outside their doors. 

“The government sold the model of taking out the rural and putting in tourists,” García said. “An old house that had cows, take out the cows and put in Madrileños.” 

As a result of all these forces, the Asturian population swells dramatically in the summer. But failing to support the longstanding local economy, tourism leaves shrinking communities behind in the fall. The region’s population has been declining since the 1980s, and a growing share is concentrated in cities like Oviedo and Gijón. According to Rozalén, many villages are “practically ghost towns” — including his own village of Rieña, where only three people live year-round. 

“I would have liked it if tourism had served to stabilize the population,” Valero elaborated. “But since the tourism isn’t linked with the land, we’re losing many traditional activities like ranching and agriculture.”

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The agritourism operators that remain see themselves as pushing back against this newly dominant model of disengaged rural tourism. They promote a revaluation of rural culture, of customs and values that now seem out of date.  

Manolo Niembro and his brother, whose family has lived in Asturias for generations, started running the Ruta'l Quesu y la Sidra in 1999. Their tour takes visitors to the family’s cheese cave, pumarada (apple orchard), and llagar (cider workshop), before ending with a shared meal. 

“Like all the families here, going back many years, everyone had livestock and everyone practiced a form of self-sufficient agriculture,” Niembro said. “We were establishing a kind of tourism that wasn’t just coming to the countryside, but understanding the countryside, participating in some of its activities.” 

Having studied geography in university, Niembro views his tour as a “geographic excursion” — a way to understand the people and practices that shaped the rural landscape. He hopes to expose visitors to a lifestyle that seems old, but that he sees as vital for a sustainable future.   

“People tend to identify the countryside with the old, the self-sacrificing, with what is out of fashion,” he said. “They think rural people are people without culture… [The tour] brings them an agreeable surprise, because they don’t know that the countryside is so complex.” 

Valero and Rozalén, too, hope to help visitors gain a deeper understanding of their surroundings. They offer marmalade and cheese-making workshops and invite tourists to help them with the apple harvest. This fall, they will launch an “edible forest” program, in which they will guide guests through the forest to collect ingredients for a group dinner.   

Like Niembro, Valero sees these types of activities as promoting “rural pride” for both tourists and Asturian residents. Lots of people “come to the countryside and only see green,” she says. The ability to look at a forest and identify walnuts and loquats, or to understand the geologic forces shaping different rocks, or to farm in a way that supports biodiversity and ecological balance: these are all valuable and unique forms of rural cultural knowledge.   

The goal is not to get rid of tourism, but to integrate it with rural heritage. García’s Ecomuséu Ca l'Asturcón runs ceramic and wool workshops, and leads guided tours through the family’s riverbank forests and pastures for native species. García described the Ecomuséu as “what Asturias should be: a balance between conservation and tourist activity.” 

*          *           *

Even agritourism hosts, however, believe there is a limit to what agritourism can achieve. 

Running a functioning farm while also guiding tours, leading workshops, and hosting guests is a lot of work. Niembro noted that the Ruta'l Quesu y la Sidra requires not just time and money, but emotional investment. He is unwilling to hire people from outside his family to impart a history that is not their own. 

“This isn’t tourism you can delegate,” he said. “We tell the story ourselves.” 

Rozalén said that sustainable and locally-connected tourism, because it is so labor-intensive, tends to be more expensive. Not many people are able to offer genuine agritourism, nor is everyone willing to pay for it. For both these reasons, there is a limit to how much these types of operations can grow.   

To Niembro, that’s the whole point.   

“Limited scale… is a very rural concept,” he said. Just as farmers learn to grow only as much as the land, and their labor, can sustain, he does not want his tours or his restaurant — or Asturias writ large — to accommodate more tourists than they can realistically support.

Most of the farmers I spoke with, then, think some kind of political intervention is necessary. There could be improved public funding for sustainable tourism. Rozalén said that complex permitting and other bureaucratic obligations make it difficult for farmers to access funding if they don’t have the money to hire a lawyer. He recommended that the state make a free online application to streamline police registries and other paperwork, since the existing services require payment. Niembro also suggested that government investment in agritourism needs to have a longer time horizon: after all, it takes 10 years for an apple tree to start bearing fruit. 

But they also believe that the time has come to impose some limits. Valero said she thinks the government should add environmental and social criteria to their tourism policies. She also thinks the state should stop giving out permits to open tourist houses in congested areas. 

“In the end tourism is very good, but it has to be quality tourism,” Rozalén said. “And sometimes, well, there isn’t enough quality tourism to feed all the tourists.” 

Determining what limits on tourism is difficult. Asturias is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, with its misty forests opening up into vertiginous cliffs and endless ocean. I understand why so many people want to visit. But if nothing more is done to protect the agricultural heritage that rural tourism is displacing, then the region risks losing what draws so many people in the first place.

“It’s hard for [tourists] to understand that this beautiful environment has to be maintained by someone,” said Marcotegui. “Most of this landscape wouldn’t be the way it is without ranchers. They shaped the landscape to be able to do what they do.”


People Focused Farming: A Short Documentary on What Defines Urban Farming | GFF '25

People Focused Farming: A Short Documentary on What Defines Urban Farming

This Voices was written by Sawan Garde as a part of his O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

Sunflowers and corn from The Three Sisters plot at The Edible Schoolyard Project. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.

I had two goals in mind when thinking about how I wanted to spend this past summer. The first was to connect with my home through community-based work. The second was to work, in some way, with food systems. Urban farming became an obvious way to realize these goals.

I was fortunate to work with The Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, CA and Urban Tilth in Richmond, CA this past summer. I grew up in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and quickly came to realize just how impactful these two organization’s decades of work have been on improving food equity in the East Bay.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I would work at The Edible Schoolyard Project, which was founded in 1995 by the chef Alice Waters. The Edible Schoolyard Project is located in Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Berkeley’s largest public middle school. It is an outdoor classroom, sanctuary for King students, and community gathering space. In fact, the gates to the garden are only locked during school hours. The Project is a key piece of King’s curriculum, and every student will take many arts, humanities, and science glasses in the garden and kitchen throughout their middle school education. My responsibilities included farm maintenance, cover-cropping and developing curriculum. I even got to test out my food justice and soil health curriculums on summer school students at King.

Preparation for a cooking class in which we explored food supply chains with summer school students and cooked fresh pasta with tomatoes from The Edible Schoolyard Project garden. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.

On Thursdays and Fridays, I would work at Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm, only thirty minutes north of Berkeley. Urban Tilth feels like a completely different world. North Berkeley’s tree-lined streets with flowers overflowing from every front yard gives way to broken glass on shadeless streets lined on each side by industrial warehouses. Urban Tilth was founded twenty years ago by Doria Robinson, a lifelong resident of North Richmond. Located directly next to the Chevron Refinery, California’s third-largest oil refinery, North Richmond struggles with some of the worst asthma rates in the country. Urban Tilth’s programs range from youth education to job training, public health education, subscription-based weekly produce bags, and watershed restoration. The organization makes sure to serve its community holistically, operating sites all throughout Richmond and providing employment opportunities for community members. While there, I worked on farm maintenance, staffing their free farm stands, and public health education.

Leading a nutrition workshop in Lucas Park, a public park in Richmond, at the end of the summer. We discussed the impacts of sugary drinks on our health, gave away free produce, and made fruit and vegetable smoothies together. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.

Throughout the summer, as I explored the work of my host organizations, I became curious about how two organizations that operate in such different, yet complementary ways, could both be considered urban farms. What defines urban farming? What makes an urban farm an urban farm? What struck me in the first weeks of my summer was just how many people I was meeting daily. I began to pose my curiosity to them, capturing their answers on video. What has resulted is a short documentary exploring the many ways of defining urban farming.

Implicit in my decision to create a documentary lies my answer to this question. Urban farming is people focused farming. It prioritizes connecting community members to their neighbors and to the land over monetary profit. It envisions an urban food system where people are empowered to grow their own food. It also challenges the physical status quo of urban spaces, giving soil once covered by concrete the chance to heal and breathe again.

Just as urban farming helps defines and redefines so many relationships, it has redefined my connection with home. Working with the dirt, alongside passionate community members, gave me a new, tactile connection with the place I come from, a connection I could not have anticipated.

Setting up for the Friday free farm stand at Parchester Village in Richmond. Urban Tilth operates free farm stands every day of the week in different locations throughout Richmond. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.






Community-Based Food Justice Support in New Haven | GFF '25

Community-Based Food Justice Support in New Haven
This post was written by Meryl Braconnier as a part of her 2025 O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

As soon as I parked the rusty van outside the senior center, it was game time—three hours of constant movement and flow, setting up the temporary farmstand for the eagerly awaiting customers. I focused on one motion at a time, in a chaotic dance with my two coworkers—open the trunk, set up the tents and tables, lug out the coolers upon coolers of vegetables, stack them high in rustic, wooden baskets, hang up our signs, turn on our pay station—all under the watchful gaze of dozens of elderly folks, with their walkers, canes, and wheelchairs, lined up against the dull beige bricks of the Bella Vista Senior Center. The front of the line had been waiting for nearly two hours, securing their primary selection of the local vegetables and fruit.

Residents at Bella Vista Senior Center lined up at the start of Common Ground’s Mobile Market on July 15, 2025. Photo Credit: Meryl Braconnier

Every Tuesday since mid-July, I’ve assisted with Common Ground’s Mobile Market—a farmstand on wheels that brings fresh, local, affordable produce directly to New Haven communities afflicted by food apartheid. Our diverse customer base contends with mobility, transportation, language, and financial challenges, on top of limited grocery stores, making it difficult, if not impossible, to access and afford local, nutrient-dense produce. The Mobile Market literally meets people where they live with cheaper, whole-sale prices, accepting federal benefits and offering 50% off purchases using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), thanks to a matching donation from CitySeed, New Haven’s farmers markets organizer.

This summer, I furthered local food justice initiatives in New Haven, supported by the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s Global Food Fellowship and the Yale School of the Environment’s Carpenter, Leonard G. Fund. I split my time between Common Ground, an environmental justice charter high school, urban farm, and environmental education center, and Gather New Haven, the nonprofit that manages the city’s 40+ community gardens and offers community development programming.

During this practical, on-the-ground experience, I considered how to increase access and connection to healthy foods and nature through Common Ground’s Mobile Market and community gatherings. I also explored a new community engagement strategy with Gather New Haven’s garden network: the NYC Urban Field Station’s Stewardship Salons.

From Field to Feast: Increasing Food Access in New Haven

Through heat waves and rain, I assisted with all aspects of Common Ground’s vegetable production from planting to harvest and helped manage their Mobile Market outreach and delivery. Our farm team raked, shoveled, mulched, weeded, pruned, harvested, and sweated. Under our attentive care, our diverse crops, like kale, tomatoes, parsley, and beans, flourished on the 1-acre site. Urban growing spaces, like Common Ground’s farm and Gather’s community gardens, are largely constrained by size, soils, and resources. Their beauty and bounty radically resist our country’s cracked, inequitable systems of food production, distribution, and consumption, offering healing experiences and nourishment.

2025 farm intern team at Common Ground posing by freshly prepped beds for winter squash plantings. From left to right: Isabela, Linda, Pauline, Ethan, and Meryl. Photo Credit: Diane Litwin

With the Trump Administration’s devastating cuts and rollbacks in funding for environmental justice and food access programs, Common Ground was unable to hire a Mobile Market manager for the 2025 season. Thankfully, my coworker Ethan Reynolds and I received Yale funding to carry on with the Mobile Market’s 14th season.

Although our capacity was limited—dropping from the typical 5 stops per week to 1 stop per week—we held seven Mobile Market stops from June to August, split between the Bella Vista Senior Center, Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, and the Towers at Tower Lane, senior living community. At those seven, two-hour stops, we serviced nearly 350 customers. About 60% of our customers purchased their produce with federal benefits from the Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP) for low-income seniors or for nutritionally at-risk women, infants, and children.

Myself and my coworker Takeira assisting a Tower 1 resident with her joyful kale purchase. Photo Credit: Karisma Quintas

All the fruits and vegetables sold at the Mobile Market are grown at Common Ground or on Connecticut farms within a 20-mile radius of New Haven. The Yale Farm donates crops when they have a larger harvest. The Mobile Market upholds a dignified dimension of food access work: ensuring people can eat healthy, high-quality foods that are relevant to their culture. I see the vital need for the Mobile Market in the long lines of customers waiting at nearly every stop and in the smiles on people’s faces when they share how they plan to prepare their fresh produce.

Stewardship Salons: Connection to Action to Resilience

In collaboration with Zion Jones, Gather’s Community Engagement Coordinator and Environmental Educator, and with the support of the NYC Urban Field Station, we developed and hosted six Stewardship Salons, facilitated by diverse community leaders, on the topics of safety on the urban farm, compost management, fermented DIY fertilizers, communal gardening values, local indigenous histories, and building sacred relationships with the land. Through my organization, creativity, and communication, I provided Gather New Haven with a transformative, community engagement model that helped them build connections to their communities and other social justice groups and facilitators.

Stewardship Salons are collaborative co-learning spaces where participants engage with place-based topics and exchange knowledge, building individual and collective capacity to care for natural resources, land, and communities (Stewardship Salon Guide, 2024). The Stewardship Salon framework emerged from a 2017 workshop titled “Learning from Place” hosted by Native Hawaiian master teacher, Kekuhi Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, bringing together Hawaiian and NYC stewardship practitioners. Since 2017, the NYC Urban Field Station (USDA Forest Service and NYC Parks Department) have hosted over 30 Stewardship Salons for the personal and professional development of their diverse stewardship practitioner network.

The workshops provided safe spaces for an open dialogue amongst gardeners, garden managers, and community members, catalyzing action through connection. Through our Safety on the Urban Farm salon, Gather staff and board members met Carmen Mendez of New Haven’s Livable Cities Initiative. Within a week of the salon, Mendez helped fulfill a priority safety measure for Ferry Street Farm in Fair Haven: installing flood lamps on the telephone poles looking over the growing space.

Gather's first Stewardship Salon, Saftey on the Urban Farm, at Ferry Street Farm in Fair Haven on July 9, 2025. Facilitated by Sadiann Ozment, a Gather NHV Board Member. Photo Credit: Meryl Braconnier

At our salon on Communal Gardening and Gather New Haven’s values hosted by Nadine Horton, founder and manager at the Armory Community Garden, we brought together 10 garden coordinators who oversee the volunteers and growing activities at Gather’s dispersed garden sites. This listening session provided a rare yet essential opportunity for the garden coordinators to get to know each other and share knowledge, fostering resilience between the urban growing spaces. One main outcome was the plan to create a shared communication channel, via Slack or Discord, for the garden coordinators to stay connected.

Following the salon, one of the participants emailed us with gratitude:

“Thank you all for organizing this salon with a joyous spirit and generous hospitality. [In my opinion,] it was much needed on so many levels: 

·       reinforcing/building relationships among garden leaders. 

·       having a say in the future focus and sustainability of this organization. 

·       visiting the lovely possibility of what could be as set by the Armory garden.”

Nadine Horton facilitating a conversation on communal gardening values with Gather's garden coordinators on July 19, 2025 at the Armory Community Garden. Photo credit: Meryl Braconnier.

The Stewardship Salons on Compost Management and Korean Natural Farming (KNF) provided folks with the skills and knowledge to maintain their own garden spaces through regenerative practices. At the KNF Salon facilitated by Gather’s executive director, Jonathón Savage, 19 participants weeded Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) from an overgrown garden bed, stripped the leaves into shared bowls, and massaged the fragrant leaves with brown sugar. Everyone took home some of the communal mixture, packed tight into glass jars covered with paper towels, to ferment into a low-cost, DIY plant amendment.

The final two workshops on Local Indigenous Histories and Building Sacred Relationships with the Land inspired deeper connections to place through historical context and meditative offerings of thanks to the earth. Guided by Clan Mother Shoran Waupatukuay Piper and Babalawo Enroue Onígbọ̀nná Halfkenny, I left small tokens of gratitude by the banks of the gurgling West River: lavender, tobacco, walnuts, and a slice of tomato.

As I gave my offerings, I lifted my gaze to meet the steady, glowing gaze of West Rock, illuminated by the setting sun. I thanked the cliff for watching over me this summer as I built relationships with Common Ground, Gather, community members, and the land, helping to feed my neighbors and build upon the deep, rich topsoil of community-driven, food justice initiatives in the Elm City.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Yale Sustainable Food Program’s Global Food Fellowship and the Yale School of the Environment’s Carpenter, Leonard G. Fund for making my summer financially possible.

Thank you to the farm team at Common Ground, Deborah Greig, Diane Litwin, and Victoria Zucco. Thank you to Gather New Haven’s executive director, Jonathón Savage, to Zion Jones, and to the Farm Based Wellness Program coordinators, Ruth Torres and Celin.

Thank you to the Stewardship Salon facilitators, Sadiann Ozment, Nadine Horton, Takeira Bell, Jonathon Savage, Clan Mother Shoran Waupatukuay Piper, and Enroue Onígbọ̀nná Halfkenny.

Thank you to the NYC Urban Field Station team, especially Neha Savant and Lindsay Campbell, for your mentorship and guidance.

Farmers, Cattle, and the Colorado River Crisis | GFF ’25

Farmers, Cattle, and the Colorado River Crisis
This post was written by David Rosenbloom as a part of his 2025 O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

This summer, I traveled to Colorado as a Global Food Fellow to speak with those working on the future of agriculture in an increasingly water-scarce West. With an agricultural sector dominated by beef and dairy, Colorado embodies how water-intensive agricultural sectors along the Colorado are navigating today’s challenges and tomorrow’s uncertainties. I set out to learn how policymakers are balancing environmental concerns with the economic self-determination and cultural legacies of agricultural communities, what conservation initiatives are taking root on farms, and how different stakeholders view the future of Colorado agriculture.

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A storm is brewing over the Colorado River. Its sources are many: chronic overuse engendered by a 1922 compact that allocated water among the seven basin states on the basis of unusually wet early-20th-century data; explosive population growth across the arid West, placing some forty million people dependent on the river today; a run of exceptionally promising snowpack in the 1980s and early 1990s that gave the illusion of abundance one last breath; interim management guidelines adopted in 2007 that did little more than delay an inevitable reckoning with scarcity while water levels continued to decline; and, above all, a twenty-five-year, climate-change-intensified megadrought, the most severe in the basin in over a millenium, that has reduced flows by 20% from their long-term average. The result: there’s no longer enough water to go around – allocations still promise about 15 million acre-feet a year, but the river now delivers barely 12, and projections warn of an additional 20 to 30 percent decline by mid-century.

The 2007 guidelines are set to expire after 2026, and representatives from the seven basin states have been convening to decide the future of water in the region. At the heart of these negotiations lies agriculture. The most detailed accounting of the Colorado’s water use to date, a 2024 article published in Communications Earth & Environment, found that irrigated agriculture consumes 52 percent of the basin’s total supply and 74 percent of all human use. Of the river’s agricultural share, nearly two-thirds are devoted to crops, such as alfalfa and other hays, used to feed beef and dairy cattle.

In Colorado, one thing became immediately apparent to me: everything – or almost everything – revolves around seniority. Colorado follows the prior appropriation doctrine, which means water rights are not tied to land ownership but to who first diverted water and put it to “beneficial use.” In times of shortage, the State Engineer and local water commissioners administer water according to priority: senior users can call for water, and junior users upstream must reduce or stop their diversions until the senior right is satisfied.

Colorado farmers, in general, hold 19th-century or early 20th-century rights; in contrast, transmountain diversions supplying Front Range cities usually have mid-20th-century rights, making them junior. The upshot: if there isn’t sufficient water in the river to satisfy all users in the state, the priority system dictates that urban centers like Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs would be among the first to be cut off.

Facing an increasingly uncertain water future, I discovered that these municipalities have thus been incentivized to engage in “buy and dry” schemes: purchasing farmland and/or senior water rights and taking the land permanently out of production to ensure enough water is available for the cities. But farming communities tend to be resistant to these types of initiatives. Philip Womble, an attorney and hydrologist specializing in water policy and water markets, underscored to me the nature of this opposition: “these concerns must be understood as concerns around the social and cultural impacts on these communities [...] of external actors resulting in less and less agricultural land being farmed.” For Brian Richter, president of Sustainable Waters, a global water education organization, this is completely understandable: “Paying a bunch of farmers for their land or water rights [...] starts to tear at the fabric of rural communities. Because if you have a third of the farmers no longer growing crops in a place like Grand Junction or, you know, Yuma, then you don't have as many people showing up in the restaurants, you don't have as many people buying new cars. You know, there are, there are good examples in the west of how small rural communities got decimated because too much reduction in agricultural water use took place. And so the agricultural communities are very defensive, very resistant to allowing that to happen.”

The reality, though, is that water is unlikely to be turned off to the big cities any time soon. As Douglas Kenney, Director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Law School, put it to me: “you're not going to be growing alfalfa in western Colorado while Denver runs out of water.” As alternatives to “buy and dry” scenarios, then, stakeholders in Colorado have been increasingly turning towards initiatives that improve water conservation on farms without infringing upon the social and economic foundations of rural communities.

One such initiative that kept on coming up in conversations is the System Conservation Pilot Program, run by the Upper Colorado River Commission in partnership with the four Upper Basin states. First implemented between 2015 and 2018, the program compensates farmers for voluntary and temporary reductions in water use, primarily through producers fallowing parts of their fields.

Despite some promising figures from this first trial – 64 projects implemented, an estimated 51,000 acre-feet less of water used by participating farms – the program’s raison-d’être wasn’t entirely clear. The water conserved by participating farms was not taken out of use entirely: as a policy expert at the Colorado River Water Conservation District told me, “Ideally, if you are going to do a program like this, you would want to put this water that's conserved somewhere so that you can use for compact compliance…But the Pilot Program doesn't do that. If someone conserves water, that water continues to go downstream. Someone immediately downstream from that person can use that water for whatever they want.”

Chuck Cullom, Director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, admitted to me that these are valid concerns, which is why UCRC has taken a different approach for the second iteration of the program, which launched in 2022. Rather than fallowing their land, farmers in the program are now encouraged to invest in new tools for drought resiliency that they likely wouldn’t otherwise attempt trying. As he explained, “Farming is a risky endeavor because of the vagaries of markets, costs and hydrology … but if you can offset their risk for new endeavors, new approaches, new crops, then you'll have a lot more takers.” With over 60 contracts agreed to in 2023 and over 100 in 2024, Cullom believes his team has demonstrated not only the “appetite for producers to develop their own local drought resiliency tools,” but also the untapped potential of on-farm conservation initiatives: some farmers decided to take a field out of production tor rehabilitate infrastructure, others tried new alternative forage crops like triticale, while still others opted to try out different soil health treatments.

Unfortunately, though, Colorado producers have not been able to participate in this new iteration of the program. In 2021, the Colorado River Water Conservation District put forth an argument that conservation was not a “beneficial use” of watering, and soon after the State Engineer concurred. The result, as Anne Castle explained, is that “in Colorado we have adopted the legal position that conservation of water is not a beneficial use,” meaning farmers risk their rights if they accept payment to use less.  

But the SCPP – which has been halted since its reauthorization bill stalled in the House this session – isn’t the only mechanism through which Colorado farmers are being encouraged to explore conservation initiatives. Kate Greenberg, Colorado's Commissioner of Agriculture, has been pushing for investments within the state that recognize the need to adapt to the times: the STAR soil health program, first launched in 2019 and now expanded through the federally backed STAR Plus initiative, pays producers to adopt practices like cover crops, reduced tillage, and crop diversification; the state’s Drought and Climate Resilience Office, created in 2021, coordinates agencies and provides planning tools for water-scarce regions; agrivoltaics research and demonstration projects, supported by a $500,000 state grant program in 2023, tests, for example, how solar arrays can be paired with grazing systems and crop production; and the Climate Smart Market Expansion Project, launched in 2025, helps producers who invest in climate-friendly practices reach new markets through grants of up to $90,000. These initiatives reflect, as

Commissioner Greenberg told me, that those in Colorado’s Department of Agriculture are committed to “looking for ways to keep farmers on the land, to keep folks in production…providing incentives to produce in a way that's more environmentally sustainable and meets the real environmental conditions of our time.”

Some, however, argued to me that the problem is too large to be solved by these types of initiatives. Richter, for example, pointed out that since the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government has been paying roughly $1.3 billion per year for farmers to temporarily fallow fields or reduce water use, and that even at that scale, it has only covered about one-third of the conservation needed to balance water demand with supply. “The temporary thing,” Richter told me, “is untenable. It’s an unworkable solution. We’re not going to keep approving more than a billion dollars a year…There has to be new strategies put on the table, and they're gonna be very difficult for the agricultural community to swallow and agree to. But there's no way in the world you can save the river system and prevent catastrophe without doing it.”

Kenney agrees. In our meeting, he emphasized that changes in technology, in terms of net consumptive changes, doesn’t make nearly a big enough difference. The tradeoff, between, on the one hand, taking serious steps for conservation by taking land out of production, and, on the other, the devastating cultural, economic and social impacts that this has, was the focus of our nearly hour-long discussion. If the river system isn’t to be completely decimated, “agriculture is not going to come out of this happy,” he told me. Ultimately, for Kenney, the question is whether in the interest of conserving the river, “we as a society are comfortable with the effects that moving away from water-intensive farming sectors will have.”

– 

The storm over the Colorado is only growing darker, and the future of agriculture in the West lies directly in its path. As Richter warned me, “this could very likely turn into the biggest water crisis in human history, and it's coming at us at a frightening speed.” Whether the seven states summon the will for serious reforms or continue to defer the hardest choices remains to be seen. But, as I learned this summer, when the reckoning arrives, the agricultural landscape of the West will be profoundly transformed.

Black Hair Care and Land | LSI ’25

Black Hair Care and Land
This post was written by Asia Anderson as a part of her 2025 Lazarus Summer Internship.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I can make my hair easier to tend to. Which styles might save me 20 minutes before class each morning, and whether I might be able to make my braids last between the first day of classes and Thanksgiving break. I was envious of my peers who had never budgeted two hours each Sunday to wash and coil their hair, or eight hours on a Wednesday night to get a new style.

After my first working day on the Farm, I was faced with a new dilemma. Between the walk up Prospect Street and prepping fields for new crops, I was certain my hair wouldn’t be able to withstand the conditions of the Farm. Two hours turned to four hours that week as I tried to anticipate any challenges I might meet in the weeks to come: thicker creams, stronger gels, longer drying times.

I wondered how others managed it—how many Black people, even 400 years ago, without diffusers or hair custards, prepared their hair to weather each of the four seasons on a working farm or plantation. What practices persisted through long and arduous trips across the Atlantic, and which ones could not survive the soil conditions of a new land? 

Black enslaved peoples brought okra seeds from West Africa into the Southern United States. Southern slave owners loved the thick and viscous texture of the vegetable, and began to use it as a thickener in their soups. It was one of the few crops that could remain in a slave’s garden, and it carried a lesser known legacy of being used to condition and soften the very curly hair of many African and Caribbean people. While personal care often included herbal and natural fixes, Black hair care in colonial America specifically became an issue of time and convenience. 

The time that many African people had used to braid and nourish their hair seemed incompatible with the new living conditions they now faced in America. As more generations were born into enslavement, traditions were lost, along with much of the knowledge of how people might use the seeds their families brought overseas to care for themselves. It wasn’t until the two natural hair care movements (50s-70s, 2000s) in the United States that Black people considered that knowledge a necessary part of hair care. 

During that period there was a slow and steady shift from hair control to hair care. This was the guiding question of my research project. How did people, especially black and brown people, return to the use of the land to nurture their hair during this shift? 

Okra was the base material of the first natural hair care product I created throughout my Independent Project — a hair mask that also includes oat, roselle (hibiscus), and rosemary. African shea was the base of another — a hair and body butter that also includes beeswax, castor oil, calendula (marigold), and oat. 

Through this project I hoped to reframe my outlook on my own hair care this summer, seeing the farm as a resource, rather than an obstacle.

Returning to the soil: Gardening as form of embodied knowledge | GFF ’25

Returning to the soil: Gardening as form of embodied knowledge

This post was written by Bendy Sohn as a part of his 2025 O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

For two weeks, I embarked on a journey of discovery, memory, soil, and gestures. This research began as a personal quest to learn how to farm from my father virtually. I aimed to uncover the lessons that were lost within those constraints. My father is a subsistence farmer and deacon in Liberia, and I wanted to learn from him not just through words, but through the quiet, embodied knowledge that is passed down from hands to land.

As a child of Liberian migrants, I’ve often felt the weight of distance—cultural, emotional and geographical. This fellowship is an avenue to attempt to close that gap, I wanted to not just witness but how my father taught, through tools, gestures, repetition and unspoken understanding. and my research asks: How Liberia’s indigenous farming practices facilitate the transfer of knowledge across generations?  What gets passed down when we plant together, dig together, sit with the land together? My project lives in that space—between adaption, memory, labor, and care. 

My approach to answering my research questions was based on presence, repetition, and relational learning. Instead of collecting data in a traditional sense, I aimed to reconnect, observe thoroughly, and learn through experience and reflect. I understood clearly that my father's knowledge was not only found in the words he spoke but also in the consistent actions he carried out. 

Arriving in Liberia in early August during the rainy season posed some challenges, as there were only a few days each week when the rain was light or absent. My father suggested that certain plants would thrive in this climate during that time. Navigating the rain—both working against it and with it—taught me the importance of patience as I waited for the downpour to subside before heading to the site. Before we began any activities, we created a schedule to help us stay organized and focused on our responsibilities and goals.

My father took me to his land, a vast area of greenery surrounded by a giant palm tree. We surveyed the land and mapped out how much we wanted to clear for our project. The following day, we set out to find all the materials we would need. My father suggested we gather a hook, a shovel, a pair of boots for him, a rake, and a machete. He specifically suggested one of each tool, as he wanted us to share the responsibility by taking turns.  After collecting the tools, we visited his neighbors to trade seeds. For the seeds we couldn't find, we went to an informal farmers' market, where a wide variety of seeds were available at affordable prices.  The seeds we collected were for water spinach, okra ,and palava sauce. These three plants my father would plant during the rainy season. During our time together that day, my father asked me about my connection to land in the United States. I struggled to find an answer since I didn't have a direct connection. He then advised me to create one, explaining that learning how to farm or garden is an essential part of being self-sufficient as an individual. He emphasized the importance of knowing where our food comes from and how it gets to us. Later that day, I wonder how my food gets to me before I digest it? Who planted it and how long did it take to harvest ? I reflected on how I did not have a connection to land in the U.S and chasing for one in Liberia. 

Photo by Bendy Sohn

The following day, I visited the site with my father and brother. Before we started any work, we took a moment to pray.  We then began the task of brushing and clearing the land. I found this process very challenging. My father started brushing and demonstrated the technique for me. He worked for a few minutes while I watched closely. I observed that clearing was a technique-based action; from his form, it was evident that the motion was consistent and thorough. Although the action seemed simple, I quickly learned that it was less about physical strength and more about technique and endurance. I felt a sense of insecurity because I did not perform at the same speed and efficiency as my father. He reminded me that my body hadn't fully grasped the task yet. I wonder what it means for physical labor to be not only seen as a task but also as a form of knowledge. This shifted my understanding of gardening, as digging, clearing, and planting became languages of experiences I was not familiar with and will require more repetition to grasp them. 

As I worked through the tall grasses, I used a hook we fashioned from some found wood to gather and direct the cut grass to a specific spot on one side. I quickly realized how important it was to work efficiently, but I also felt the strain on my back from the repetitive movements after just a few minutes. The grass seemed to weigh more the deeper I went into it. My father reminded me that making sounds would help keep up our motivation as we tackled the clearing. We teamed up to clean the area, taking turns in a rotation: first my father, then me, followed by my brother. Together, we decided to set up three garden beds, each designed for different seeds.

In the following days, we focused on digging walkways between each garden bed. These walkways were designed to separate the plants and allow us to observe their growth more easily. We then turned over the rich soil, noting its dark and milky appearance, which indicated its high nutrient content. Using a shovel, I lifted and turned the soil while my father leveled it with a rake to create an even surface. Once we had prepared the soil, my father cut small branches from a nearby tree to mark the spots where we planted the seeds. This technique helped us keep track of where each seed was planted. We then began making signs for each garden bed and started planting the seeds in their designated areas, making sure to space them out from one another. For the palava sauce seeds, my dad noted that they need to be sprinkled on the soil instead of being buried like the other seeds. We then proceeded to put the stick over the seed we buried in the soil. How long would it take for these seeds to harvest, since it is the rainy season would the climate disrupt the growth ? These questions ponder my mind. 

During this productive week, time seemed to slow down, and my understanding of land, labor, and place changed. I had always viewed labor as a means to complete a task, but while gardening, I realized it was more of a struggle that required me to slow down. I needed to focus not just on finishing the task but also on appreciating its significance to my roots. And also how I learned that “doing something right” should not be my primary concern; instead, allowing myself to be patient and open to learning was far more valuable. Land to me was seen as something I just admired from a far, but nearly interacted with closely, through my observation land became a living archive of memory, labor and belief. 

I left Liberia with new knowledge of gardening, a routine that involves care, rhythm, repetition and intergenerational resilience. It also involves adapting to climate changes as it works hand in hand. What was passed to me can’t be held in a notebook—it lives in the gestures that were enacted along by my father, the challenges within the gestures were a learning moment along the ones that were semi familiar.


Photo by Bendy Sohn


Garden Walks: Improving access to community gardens in New Haven | LSI ’25

Garden Walks: Improving access to community gardens in New Haven

This post was written by Jam Lian as a part of their 2025 Lazarus Summer Internship.

Working at the Yale Farm this summer has enabled me to think deeply about what agriculture can do for American cities. Cities like New Haven are often defined as urban, in opposition to rural, disconnected from the land and food that sustains them. However, community gardens and urban farms allow us to reclaim the land, to regain control over our sustenance and livelihoods. As a matter of policy, urban agriculture is more than just another way to produce calories and pounds - it is a way for the city to establish, localize, and govern itself. 

For urban planners, it cannot be ignored. 

One of New Haven’s greatest strengths is its extensive network of community gardens, farms, and nature preserves, over 50 of which dot its urban fabric from Westville to Fair Haven Heights. Unified under Gather New Haven and the New Haven Land Trust, these community gardens form a crucial pillar of New Haven’s food system, providing access to fresh food for thousands of residents. However, food insecurity remains an issue for 22% of New Haveners, twice the national average—and more remains to be done.

Understanding food insecurity in New Haven requires an understanding of its geographic inequality. Outside downtown, poverty is concentrated in specific neighborhoods, such as Newhallville and Fair Haven, which consequently limits access to fresh food from grocery stores and other markets. While New Haven’s community gardens are able to help fill some of the gaps, their heavy geographic concentration leaves some neighborhoods underserved.

As we look towards building future community gardens, this project proposes quantitative recommendations on where to site them to best address poverty and food insecurity in New Haven.

Fig 1. Existing community gardens in New Haven (green dots), and heatmap of poverty (dark red = 1000 people.)

Like any other public service, a community garden’s impact depends on the area and number of people it can reach. To be practicable and useful to a community, gardens must be within walking distance from their volunteers and customers. Thus, it is important to define each garden’s walkshed—the area that can be reached on foot from that garden. Since previous research suggests people are willing to be   involved with gardens at most a kilometer or 1.5 kilometers away, I used OpenStreetMap data on street networks to generate walksheds for every existing community garden as well as candidate locations for new community gardens.

Fig 2. Example 1km walkshed.


To generate candidate locations, I used New Haven’s map of Silver lots—vacant and unused lots that could be theoretically bought and converted into a community garden, of which there are over 400. From there, I computed scores to estimate the number of impoverished people currently being reached by each existing walkshed, and how many more people could be reached by each candidate location’s walkshed. Using these scores, I wrote a greedy algorithm to take these candidates and rank them from most to least effective—creating a simple list of recommendations. 

Fig 3. New proposed community gardens (green), existing community gardens (blue) and their walksheds (1km)

There are, of course, significant limitations on these locations—many do not have suitable sunshine, space, or configuration for a community garden. Additionally, the difficulties of engaging a community, starting up and building infrastructure, and finding funding remain. However, for New Haven government or Gather New Haven, these recommendations offer a good starting point to build off of, and adjacent locations on local parks have great potential for urban agriculture while still filling geographic gaps in New Haven’s foodscape. 

This project has enabled me to explore the intersections of geographic data, food systems, and urban planning—interests that I’ll continue to pursue at Yale. I’m excited that my work will offer urban agriculture advocates in New Haven a concrete place to work from, and I’m hopeful that it can be used to further expand New Haven’s network of community gardens—ultimately reducing food insecurity in the city. 

An American in Paramaribo: Biodiversity Conservation and A Voyage Into Surinamese Maroon Culture Through Food | GFF ’25

An American in Paramaribo: Biodiversity Conservation and A Voyage Into Surinamese Maroon Culture Through Food

This post was written by Maia Simone Roothaan as a part of her 2025 O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.

I spent this past summer living in Paramaribo, Suriname, the most forested country in the world. Suriname is also the only country in Latin America where Dutch is spoken, being a former colony. In my three months there, I found myself surrounded by many other languages, including Sranan Tongo, Saramaccans, Spanish, Portuguese, and French (the other language which I speak.) Suriname is a country of rich diversity, in language as I’ve explained above, but also in ethnicity, religion, landscape, and of course, food.

August 7, my last visit to the CI office where my coworkers bid me farewell with a lunch of saoto soup.

While Suriname is technically not an island, it tends more towards its Caribbean island neighbors, culturally. The Maroons are one of the largest ethnic groups in Suriname, just over 20%. They escaped slavery into the forests of Suriname; much of their African culture and language is still preserved because they have continued living in their own forest villages. Through my work as a legal intern at Conservation International, I had the opportunity to visit several Maroon villages, enabling me to connect with their culture through food.

My first visit was to Brownsweg to observe the opening of a community agroforestry school to help the community with food sovereignty efforts. For a long time, they have been reliant on having produce and other products driven in from the city, Paramaribo. This project was being sponsored by Total Energies, the third largest oil company in the world, who have just launched a new drilling project off the Surinamese coast. On our two hour drive back, my colleagues and I enjoyed lunch we bought from a Javanese restaurant by the roadside–I had a traditionally vegan dish made with rice that is pounded into cubes, fried tofu, bean sprouts, and spicy soy sauce. The Javanese first came to Suriname as indentured labourers, and they make up 15% of the population.

We were led to the meeting center in Pikin Slee after disembarking our canoe.

My second work voyage to the interior was a three day trip to Pikin Slee which involved several hours by bus and then by boat down the Suriname River. I was observing the culmination of a project done as a part of CI’s African Descendents Program. We had a meeting with many of the villagers, the chief, and CI staff to reflect on work being done to provide women with upward economic mobility through the monetization of traditional agriculture crops, primarily cassava and peanuts. I think Surinamese people like peanut butter even better than Americans; for lunch I had sweet peanut soup with cassava bread and cassava/peanut cake. There were other things, but they were all meat, so I couldn’t eat them. Dinner back at our accommodation consisted of savory peanut soup and bakabana (fried plantain with peanut sauce.)

During this visit, I was delighted to learn that the scarf each woman wears wrapped around her waist has a saying in Saramaccans that has meant something important in her life. All women are given this when they are officially recognized as women by their community. In certain ways, women in these communities are honored, but in others they are prevented from access to certain economic pathways. The women testified that they have felt empowered to be able to sell their products through the partnership with CI. They feel that they can be leaders in their community.

From a morning hike at Fredberg Mountain.

Maroon men lead ecotourism and jungle adventure trips in Suriname’s interior (93% rainforest.) I went on several of these trips, including a savannah tour with my friend Iris and two guides named NemNem and Silvano. I quite enjoyed the food on this trip, especially because it was entirely vegetarian. We ate bami with kousenband, curried boiled eggs and aubergine over corn and rice, and potato, brown bean, and egg curry over rice. We also ate acai sap (juice) from the forest. NemNem and Silvano walked with the machete, told us to stay back, and we heard a rustle of leaves and saw a spindly, white tree cascading down to the forest floor. On it were the acai berries, which are quite hard and inedible raw. Our guides picked the berries from the tree, washed them, crushed them, and cooked them into a juice. We likewise learned about the seeds of the maripa (palm) tree. They contain oil, and when they fall to the forest floor, they are infested with beetle larvae. They are a special treat in Maroon communities, who cook them in a pan. These larvae eat the oil and grow fat inside the seeds, taking up the entire space.

Jerry and his wife, Lisa, in the plantain grove of their farm.

One of my colleagues, Jerry, has a penchant for farming. I visited him on his farm in the Saramacca district on my last weekend in Suriname. My housemate Suze joined me for this day. Jerry’s wife, Lisa, picked us up in Paramaribo, and we drove through Wanica and ended up in Saramaaca at the farm. Jerry took us on a tour, showing us the different avocado varieties he grows, pomme de cider, and how he constructed his watering system. My favorite tree in Suriname has to be the mango tree; I think they have an air of magic about them. Of course, Suze took a picture of me standing under one at the farm. Jerry told us about his plans to expand into agrotourism. He wants to eventually make the farm his full time job. He feels relaxed when he is on the farm in a way that he doesn’t anywhere else. We wandered back towards the plantain grove and we heard howler monkeys in the trees. Towards the end of my visit, we returned to the lean-to at the beginning of the farm and ate masala chickpeas and salad with Jerry’s children and the rest of the family.

I have had a longstanding relationship with the Yale Farm, having served as a Culinary Events Manager and 2024 Lazarus Summer Intern. This critical engagement with food systems, agricultural leaders, and theories across disciplines heavily influenced how I engaged with Surinamese culture and my work on conservation law and community development, for I saw food as an entry point into connecting with new people about their lives. In my internship, I created a sustainable finance and law framework for 7.2 million hectares of Amazon rainforest. I'm incredibly grateful to the Global Food Fellowship for its support of my work this summer, and would particularly like to thank Jacquie Munno, who has long been one of my mentors here at Yale. I look back on my summer in Suriname with fondness, remembering the fruit stand near my house where I would buy dragonfruit to chill in the fridge, eating saoto soup with my colleagues, and wandering through the Saoenah Sunday market with my lovely housemates.

Reimagining the Future of Sustainable Food: A Short Film on Agricultural Innovation | LSI ’25

Reimagining the Future of Sustainable Food: A Short Film on Agricultural Innovation

This post was written by Mara Klein as a part of their 2025 Lazarus Summer Internship.

At the beginning of this summer, the word “agrotech” brought to my mind gleaming robotic weeders, thermal remote sensing drones, and polished data maps overlaid on fields. My understanding of the future of agricultural innovation was influenced by an amalgamation of corporate websites, carefully aestheticized and flooded with greenwashing. I thought that the solution to agriculture was still in the works: miracle technologies being formulated to liberate farmers from our extractive, monocultural system and eradicate greenhouse gas emissions, chemical pesticides and herbicides, and fertilizer runoff. When I was first planning my independent project, I wanted to explore the science behind these technologies–how they interacted with the soil, the plants, and entire farm ecosystems. 

I knew that I wanted to combine science and art to effectively communicate complex ideas to a wide audience. I also wanted to challenge myself and learn a new skill over the summer. So, I decided to delve deeper into journalism, which I had only briefly engaged with in the past, and introduce myself to the world of filmmaking. With the help of YouTube and a free subscription to Adobe Creative Suite, courtesy of Yale, I learned how to shoot footage, edit clips, and color-grade to achieve a cinematic look. I taught myself to hastily assemble a tripod, then stuffed it inside an Uber and carried it all the way to the Lockwood Experiment Station in Hamden for my first interview.

After speaking with Richard Cecarelli, the farm manager at Lockwood, I realized that a new angle might be in order for my film. As we sat outside in the summer heat, I listened to Cecarelli talk about the grim reality of most farming ventures: it is an incredibly risky profession, and even farmers who want to implement more sustainable practices often find themselves blocked by high startup costs or incompatibility with current equipment. Furthermore, Cecarelli pointed out that most farmers are already incredibly skilled at their work and able to perform tasks flawlessly and efficiently; therefore, new technologies must prove themselves before farmers are willing to invest in them and risk losing a crop. Furthermore, while automation can alleviate the back-breaking labor inherent in agriculture, some innovations run the risk of replacing human jobs. From my conversation with Cecarelli, I realized that agricultural innovation is a double-edged sword. The question remained: how can farmers test potentially helpful innovations while minimizing financial risk and other negative side effects?

Lockwood Experimental Station. Photo by Mara Klein.

Next, I spoke with Nat Irwin, a recent Yale alum and YSFP graduate. Before starting their current employment at Alameda County Recipe4Health, a food-as-medicine program, Nat worked with OpenTEAM for a little under three years. OpenTEAM, which stands for Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management, is a groundbreaking community of academics, agrotech specialists, farmers, and more. OpenTEAM focuses on open sourcing and data sovereignty as a way to empower farmers. When I asked Nat about their vision of agricultural innovation, they pointed out that farmers are constantly innovating on their own land: at its core, farming is perpetual problem solving and adaptation.

My interview with Nat reframed how I think about the future of agriculture. Many corporations push blanket solutions to overburdened farmers who are unwilling to adopt expensive, untested technologies. Open sourcing new techniques, management strategies, and technologies allows farmers to address the challenges that arise on their own unique plot of land, sharing their experiences and impressions with the rest of the ag sector.

Throughout my filming process this summer, I’ve realized that there is no shiny deus ex machina hiding in a corporate laboratory or website. Instead, farmers already have extensive expertise and insight—accumulated from years spent working with the land and intimately witnessing the effects of our changing climate. While certain technologies are undeniably beneficial for farmers, it is vital that we focus on amplifying the voices of farmers themselves, especially young, black, and Indigenous farmers that have been systematically silenced and excluded from agriculture. The key to improving our agricultural system is creating space for cooperation, empowering farmers to rely more on each other and less on exploitative corporations. The future of innovation in sustainable agriculture is rooted in collaboration, communication, and respect for ever-changing land and people alike. 

Massaro Community Farm. Photo by Mara Klein.

Mara’s film is not available online, but you can contact her at mara.klein@yale.edu.


Our Electric Future and Food Sovereignty | GFF '24

Our Electric Future and Food Sovereignty

This post is part of Allie Douma's 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

As someone studying and working in the environmental field, I am constantly thinking about what our future holds. The impending climate crisis seems to creep closer every day. Many of my counterparts at school are focused on the much-needed transition to electric renewable energies and electric vehicles. This transition away from fossil fuels is essential. The fossil fuel economy has been unjust and has left many communities polluted and many of us wondering how we can get out of this difficult mess. Now, as we transition to renewable energies, new communities are faced with the burden of becoming “energy communities” and what that means for them. Many of these communities are not wealthy and now are being burdened with supplying the materials and energy for wealthier folks to maintain their lifestyles.  They see very little of the profit themselves. It seems like we are telling the same story of extraction, but for a new era this time it is covered with a green veil signaling that these energies are clean and endless.

[image_credit] Source: Talon Metals Corp.[/image_credit][image_caption]Location of the Tamarack North Project[/image_caption]

Over the summer I studied this tension by filming a documentary, called “Protecting the Land of Sky-Blue Waters”, about the advocates against a proposed copper nickel mine in Tamarack, MN.[1] Tamarack is in Aitkin County which is around 2 hours north of the twin cities surrounded by bogs, wetlands, agricultural fields, and lakes which are home to wild rice, an essential cultural and food resource for Anishinaabe people. Wild rice, which is called Manoomin or “the good berry,” is the reason that the Anishinaabe walked from the east coast to what is today Minnesota. Their prophets told them to walk where the food grows on water. That food was the Manoomin, and it has been the center of their culture and an essential food resource for generations. Every year Anishinaabe people begin their ricing season with a ceremony to pay respect to those who have come before and to thank the creator for the wild rice. As they rice, they intentionally knock rice back into the lake to reseed the rice for the next season.

The Anishinaabe have been able to maintain their ricing traditions partially due to the 1855 treaty.[2] The 1855 treaty established both the Leech Lake reservation and the Mille Lacs Reservation and granted the Ojibwe of Minnesota their rights to fish, hunt and gather on the lands they ceded to the government. The Talon metals mine may impact the Ojibwe treaty rights by limiting the Ojibwe’s ability to harvest wild rice and fish on their land and by polluting their resources. Wild rice is extremely sensitive to sulfides in the environment and many lakes in the Great Lakes region have already lost their wild rice resources.

Talon Metals is purporting that this mine is necessary for the domestic production of critical minerals or minerals that are important for electric powered vehicles and other renewable energies. Talon is stating that the world simply needs to mine today so that the next generation does not have to, but they fail to take into account that there is no evidence of a high sulfide mine not polluting in a water rich environment. They fail to understand that mining today could impact a cultural and food resource for future generations. Furthermore, it is projected that there needs to be a 40% increase in the production of copper and nickel to reach the renewable energy goals, but this mine would not get us much closer to that goal. Currently the United States only accounts for 5% of worldwide copper reserves and copper recovered from scrap metal contributed 33% of the U.S. copper supply in 2024. There are also predictions that electric vehicle companies will continue to find ways to use less and less copper, so while the projections for copper currently are high that will continue to change as the technology changes.

There are so many potential issues with the mine—from increased noise and air pollution to the fear that the company may continue to increase their mining site, as has been done in the past. While Talon is saying that this mine will be beneficial for jobs and for the electric future, there are still so many questions to be answered. Community concerns about the potential of pollution from the ore processing led Talon to propose to transport the ore to a processing facility in North Dakota, which has a much drier environment. The company seems to be trying to adapt to the concerns of the citizens, but many of the folks that I spoke to remain concerned. They fear that if something does happen, if there is an increase in sulfides that wild rice resources could be lost in the region forever and in a changing climate, indigenous food sovereignty is already being threatened.

We are in a time of change. Business as usual is not going to solve the problems that the fossil fuel economy created. We must start thinking creatively and listening to Indigenous people who have been living in harmony with their ecosystems for generations. We have to prioritize our food, water, and air. My summer working with these advocates reinforced the power of listening, listening to community members, listening to our environment, and listening to the past to help inform our future. We have the power to choose what the electric future will be and we must center the voices of those who have been harmed by the past to ensure that the future is different.

While I sometimes get overwhelmed with these questions of what the future of our energy system holds this summer also made me hopeful. People reminded me that we have so many solutions already in motion. We have electric resources that we can recycle, we can learn how to use less materials in our batteries, we can create more public transportation to limit our need for personal vehicles and we will continue to create new solutions together.

I want to thank the Tamarack Water Alliance, The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and the Big Sandy Lake Band of Ojibwe for welcoming their land and speaking with me about their work and advocacy. I also want to thank my funders the Global Food Fellowship, The Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Program, and the Franke Public Humanities program for making this possible. My documentary, “Protecting the Land of Sky-Blue Waters” will come out this spring and will highlight these community voices to help us all question what our electric future should look like.

Tree crops for whom? The socio-ecological implications of agroforestry on farmscapes in the Northeast | GFF '24

Tree crops for whom? The socio-ecological implications of agroforestry on farmscapes in the Northeast.

This post is part of Sophia Hampton’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

As I drove between farms in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Maine this summer there was always one or two of those blueish cardboard pints wedged in my car’s cup holder and filled with varying seasonal riches. In June, mulberries, serviceberries, currants, and goumi berries. In July, blueberries and cherries. Then, sweet peaches and plums, the colors of an August sunset.

ripening plums

Being in a constant state of fruit abundance was a highlight from my summer researching agroforestry (the intentional integration of trees and shrubs on farmland) in the Northeast. It’s also one of the reasons I get so excited about the increasing amounts of trees and shrubs that farmers are planting on their land as agroforestry gains momentum in the US.

Where conventional agriculture prioritizes production over social and environmental values, combining trees and shrubs with annual crops presents an opportunity to address multiple competing values in the climate crisis. Depending on species and design, agroforestry systems can provide timber harvests, carbon sequestration, erosion reduction, flood control, diversified crop harvests, and biodiversity benefits on lacking landscapes. In short, a winning equation: all the good stuff that trees can do +  economic benefits + the delicious and productive benefits of a farm = financially viable farmers, ecologically sound landscapes, and good eating.  

And yet, solutions in a capitalist economy are rarely that straightforward. As US agroforestry grows in popularity, taking on significant investment and institutional backing, I wanted to spend some time critically engaging with agroforestry as a so-called solution. To this end, I spent my summer conducting research on how agroforestry engages with the logic of property law in the Northeast, the place I call home. While these may seem like unrelated spheres, they are anything but. The takeaway of my almost four years of grad school working towards a dual degree in law and environmental science is that property regimes have a foundational impact on the socio-ecological outcomes of land-use decisions.  

Several scholars are making the case that to truly transform agriculture’s negative impact on socio-ecological systems, there needs to be a shift in property relations–a land reform. The big question I carried with me this summer was: can agroforestry without land reform be everything it pitches itself to be?

mulberries from the summer

The history of agriculture in the US is one place to see how property regimes dictate specific results. Before European settlement, Indigenous groups in the eastern parts of Turtle Island participated in what some scholars call landscape-level agroforestry, tending woodlands for chestnuts, hickories, pawpaws, maple syrup, wild game, and countless other food crops and medicinals. They also managed open, fertile floodplains as planting grounds for annual crops in complex planting rotations and patterns. Waterways and the abundance they hold played a significant role, too. A defining feature of this system was kincentric tenure relations, where communities of people managed whole watersheds together while reaping abundant harvests for the collective. The binary between forest and farm I grew up knowing probably wasn’t very relevant. 

When European settlers arrived on the eastern coast, they brought property concepts that disrupted any cohesive land management. Instead, settlers converted land into a speculatable asset that individuals could use for their own wealth accumulation at the collective’s expense. Anchored in this system, settlers carved up the landscape into homesteads, estates, and plantations utilizing a style of agriculture that relied on clearcutting forests, enslaved labor, annual crops, and domesticated livestock.

Central to the conceptual origins of this property system was racial domination. Cheryl I. Harris’s foundational paper, Whiteness as Property, articulates the parallel impact of White supremacist identity formation in converting Black people into property while also extinguishing any property rights for Native Americans. The racialization of property continues today. Of particular relevance here, White people currently own 98 percent of all US farmland.

Agroforestry is a ripe place to engage with ideas of land ownership because a person planting trees is acting on an assumption, or a hope, that the tree will be there for many years. Depending on the species, maybe for hundreds of years. Planting a tree is a statement, an investment in a future that looks a particular way. With my research, I wanted to know what type of future farmers are imagining when they integrate trees into their land. Who is included in this future? When the USDA offers 60 million dollars, paying farmers to plant trees on farmland, whose future on land are they investing in?

The racialized status of farmland ownership today adds another dimension to the growing investment in agroforestry. As one of my interviewees from my summer fieldwork asked, “Who is this solution for?” 


Sophia Joffe Hampton (she/they) is a JD/MESc candidate at Vermont Law School and the Yale School for the Environment.

The Legacy of Scarcity: Soviet Food Practices and Attitudes Toward Waste | GFF '24

The Legacy of Scarcity: Soviet Food Practices and Attitudes Toward Waste

This post is part of Danya Blokh’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

The waitress at Ukrainian East Village Restaurant walked past our table several times over a span of ten minutes. She looked at our plates with evident discomfort. My pelmeni were all devoured, but my friend across from me had only half-eaten her borscht. Finally, the waitress approached our table.

“All done?”

My friend nodded, and the waitress shook her head in palpable disappointment.

“Really?”

When the waitress walked away with our plates, my friend asked, “what was that all about?” To me, the waitress’ reaction was perfectly predictable. It was what I dubbed Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, a condition I’d grown up witnessing at my own kitchen table. If I didn’t finish every last bite of my Russian mother’s potatoes or cabbage soup, it would cause her palpable concern. “Are you feeling alright?” she would ask. “You always used to like this dish.” My Ukrainian father intervened too, though more pedagogically: “you know, Danya, you should never waste food.” The leftovers were never thrown out. They were saved in the fridge for a day, two days, and then, eventually, I would walk into the kitchen to find my mom or dad finishing the scraps on my behalf.

Many immigrant diasporas in the US who experienced food insecurity in their home countries are thrifty in their treatment of food, retaining their old rituals of food preservation. Nonetheless, Post-Soviet Food Syndrome has always felt unique to me in its ethical charge. For my post-Soviet family members, throwing food away was not just financially irresponsible, but morally reprehensible, while saving food was not only a means of conserving resources but a moral obligation. My summer research project sought to uncover the underlying causes of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome through academic research accompanied by interviews with immigrants from the USSR.

In my research, I was able to isolate three primary causes of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome. The first, and least surprising, was the memory of food scarcity in the Soviet Union. Grocery stores in the USSR were characterized by unpredictability, frequent shortages, and long queues. One interviewee, who grew up in Moscow, explained that during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, foods like fish and oranges were unreliable, while under Gorbachev even staple items like bread, milk, and cheese were frequently missing. His experience was specific to Moscow, which was better supplied than other cities. An interviewee who grew up in Kharkiv said there was a single store in his hometown where, once a month, residents could purchase cheese. Another interviewee explained that the situation was worst in small towns, that, for instance, people from towns with sausage factories couldn’t buy sausages because they were all sent to Moscow.

This uncertainty regarding the availability of certain products led Soviet citizens to become extremely attentive to the sudden availability of otherwise rare products. Soviet women, who were typically tasked with acquiring food for their households, often carried an avos’ka, an elastic, infinitely expandable string shopping bag which could be used to stock up on any rare commodities they came across. The word avos’ka derives from avos’, or “what if,” as people who carried such a bag had a mindset of “what if I find such-and-such unlikely product?” One interviewee explained to me that so-called meshechniki (bag people) from the provinces would come into Moscow and spend the day going from store to store, collecting food to bring back home. The arrival of massive groups of shoppers into Moscow, coming on buses or trains with their avos’kas at hand to purchase kielbasa at grocery stores, were dubbed kal’basniy disand (kielbasa paratroopers). Soviet citizens also learned strategies to navigate the long queues outside stores. Mothers, for instance, would involve their children in grocery excursions. One interviewee remembered that her mother would leave her to hold a place in line at one store while she ran over to another shop next door. Another recalled bringing her kids to the store because they’d sometimes give her bigger portions. Other parents, recognizing this, would ask if they could borrow her kids when they walked through the line so they could also receive more food.

In summary, Soviet citizens developed a complex set of practices for acquiring food, practices which came to occupy much of their time and attention every day. These routines have remained embedded in the minds of post-Soviet citizens. A person who remembers waiting in line for several hours to buy a piece of meat will likely hesitate to discard some expired sausages in more fortuitous times, even four decades later.

Indeed, some Soviet emigres to other countries reported feeling uncomfortable with the sudden…

This thrifty and utilitarian approach to food intersected in a curious way with the second element of Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, that of ideology. In her essay “Cold War in the Kitchen,” Susan E. Reid writes about the great degree to which the global conflict between the US and the USSR was waged in the domestic sphere. In the context of peaceful economic competition,’ Reid writes, “the kitchen and consumption had become a site for power plays on a world scale.” One paradigmatic example is the 1959 Kitchen Debate, a spontaneous discussion between Khrushchev and Nixon at a propagandistic US exhibition in Moscow showing a “typical American kitchen” in order to flaunt American prosperity and technology. Khrushchev’s comments during this debate—for instance, his critique of the unnecessary difficulty of American devices and the overabundance of items in the kitchen—reflect the USSR’s striving to define its proletarian ideology as frugal and rational, in contrast to the indulgent decadence of bourgeois Westerners. Reid writes that “intervention in the forms and practices of daily life was an essential aspect of the way the Khrushchev regime sought to maintain its authority and bring about the transition to communism. Everyday life—as the title of a brochure for agitators proclaimed—is not a private matter." Thus, Soviet citizens internalized an ideological prerogative to exercise caution and thrift in all aspects of their daily lives, including their treatment of food.

The admonition of wastefulness was accompanied by a glorification of labor. Children were taught that food production required labor, and that this labor made the food worthy of respect and admiration—a lesson which many Soviets learned firsthand through mandatory farm service. One interviewee told me, “the way I thought about it, if I built a fence and someone destroyed it, I would be unhappy. So if I expect respect toward my labor, I should respect others’ labor. Even if the person who made that bread never finds out that I threw it away, it’s still wrong to throw it away. I thought about how I would feel if I had made that bread.”

This conception of food and labor was passed down through official ideological channels, such as publications and brochures, as well as educational institutions. One interviewee recalled being forced to eat food in kindergarten. “They gave you bad food, mannaya kasha with clumps, eggs, really bad borscht. Kids didn’t want to eat it, but they forced you. The approach was, nothing should be left on your plate. If you didn’t finish, they would literally kick you out of the classroom. They would take my desk into the hallway and force me to finish it, even if I was gagging and crying.”

Yet the repugnance for waste was not only transmitted in schools, but also unofficially, in the domestic sphere. One interviewee remembered her grandmother, a generally kind and permissive person, becoming very disappointed if she didn’t finish her food. “I didn’t want to eat her soups but she would keep saying, just one little spoon, come on. Is it really so hard for you to finish your food?” Another interviewee explained, “if an adult caught a child throwing food away they would reprimand them and say, that’s labor, someone collected those grains and ground them, that’s all labor and so it’s bad to dispose of it. No one said, eat that bread because I paid fifteen cents for it. They said, eat that bread because it’s labor, it’s saintly, during the time of the war that bread would last someone a whole day.”

            This passing reference to the war underscores the third constituent element of Post Soviet Food Syndrome—inherited wartime trauma. The war had been a time of widespread famine in the Soviet Union. One interviewee’s mother, evacuated to Irkutsk, mostly got by on fried potato skins; another said his parents, who were evacuated to Uzbekistan, ate so many turnips that their stomachs became constantly stretched. Starvation was most acute in Leningrad, where over a million Soviets died during two years of siege by the Germans. Though none of my interviewees had directly experienced the blockade, many were familiar with the national mythos of the “blokadeniks” and their years of famine.Wartime horror stories about hunger abounded in the late Soviet decades, invoked for moral lessons regarding perseverance, self-sacrifice, and, often, food consumption. [insert a bit more here]

            Soviet attitudes toward food were shaped by these three conditions—food insecurity, Soviet ideology, and wartime trauma. What I call Post-Soviet Food Syndrome, however, refers specifically to the persistence of Soviet attitudes beyond the disappearance of these conditions. Like my parents, the Soviet immigrants I spoke to were middle class Americans with reliable access to food sources; most were long disenchanted with Soviet ideology; and few had surviving relatives who still remembered starvation during World War II. Yet the practices shaped by these conditions continued. One interviewee explained that he still used Soviet techniques for saving food, like adding water to oversalted food, or cooking herring in fish to make it less salty. Another continued to preserve the breadcrumbs left on his kitchen table after a meal, a habit passed down from his father. Additionally, several interviewees reported feeling lost and uncomfortable in American grocery stores, overwhelmed by the sudden multitude of options. One told me, “I realized that having less choices made things simpler.”

            As I mentioned earlier, the aversion to food waste is not a uniquely post-Soviet phenomenon; in fact, various people with no direct connection to the former Soviet sphere told me that their own families acted much like my own. Yet what strikes me as unique about the Post-Soviet Food Syndrome is the way its component parts influence and reinforce one another. It is possible that, without the mythology of wartime starvation, the Soviet ideology of frugality and moderation might not have carried the same moral weight; without the direct experience of food shortages, the war stories may have lost their relevance in popular consciousness; and so on. But I believe these three coexisting strands legitimized and strengthened one another. In my conversations with immigrants from the USSR, I not only noticed that these same three topics repeatedly come up, but that they frequently blended into one another. Interviewees quickly departed from relating their experience with food lines to telling me about their parents’ memories of war, or went on a tangent (usually laden with irony) about the ideology they were raised with. These three elements of the Post-Soviet Food Sydrome, though disparate, came together to reinforce the idea that food is sacred and should not be wasted for any reason. In the future, I would love to expand this project by researching other cultures and identifying the constituent elements of their approaches to food waste, thus setting the Post-Soviet case alongside other examples.

Note: the thumbnail photo was taken on the Yale Farm and is not an official contribution from Danya’s fellowship experience.

Contemplation: Rice, Vegetables, Tofu, Soup, Fruit | GFF '24

This post is part of Eli White’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

Rice

Daily memories of the monastery layer over each other in my mind; the patina of a single summer pale and thin in comparison to the lifetimes of the venerable monastics who live in Fo Guang Shan Monastery. Lately, I am thinking of the weight of a bowl of rice. The bowl, small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of a small hand. Before you really begin a meal at the monastery—and there are quite a few things you must do before you begin a meal at the monastery—you're meant to take your bowl of rice and chopsticks and eat three mindful bites. I remember thinking what I was told to contemplate with each bite. With the first, "I vow to practice all goodness." With the second, "I vow to eradicate all evil." And with the third "I vow to liberate all sentient beings." And the act of calling to mind such aspiration, as a genuine dedication of purpose, leaves a person changed. 

A standard meal at the monastery. Photo courtesy Fo Guang Shan. 

Maybe just a seed of disturbance against a selfish habit. Maybe a sprout of an open-minded heart. A rhythm of moving plates, bowls, and chopsticks; shaven heads, brown and black robes; something larger than yourself, of which you cannot be anything but wholly a complete part. Intertwined: history and tradition, Dharma and embodied practice. Food in the monastery—as, in truth, really *all* things in the monastery are—is not a route practice, a simple chore of living, but something that engages the mind, heart, soul, and body. All of it—the words and images of the hall, the people sitting with you, and the rice in your bowl—is a lesson. A lesson that is, in fact, compound and myriad hundreds, if not infinite, lessons. The dining hall is a classroom. 

During the 10 weeks I spent at Fo Guang Shan monastery in southern Taiwan this summer, I experienced more than a singular modality of living and engagement with Buddhism. A body in a space does not exist without dynamics of expectation, history, and limitation. I only took Refuges and Precepts to formally become a Buddhist 2 years ago. My proficiency with Mandarin is nothing to write home about. But the goal of this research was not to come back to you with an extensive ethnography that offered a concrete conclusion about what I think, or a highly technical analysis of the carbon inputs and outputs of the monastery that could quantify a carbon footprint. I am mostly only, if you can call me anything at all, a student. 

Photo courtesy Fo Guang Shan.

For a week in July, I had the tremendous opportunity to participate in a short-term monastic retreat. Rather than my normal schedule, which was fairly flexible outside of work hours and had me living with the other international volunteers, the retreat had me living in a smaller part of the monastery under the guidance and discipline of the monastics. I gave up my phone, which had been my lifeline in the previous weeks to everyone I love. I brought essentially no more than a towel and underclothes; they provided a uniform for the week. For the duration of that week, we slept in the dormitories of Tsung–Lin University, the monastery's school for both beginning monastics and lay people who want to seriously learn more about the Dharma. Tsung-Lin is like a heart or a brain of the bigger monastery, always filled with movement and enthusiasm for learning and practice. We went nowhere without the groups–we got up together to the sound of the bell, went to morning prayer, did chores together, ate together.

Receiving Alms Bowls, as part of ordination at the monastic retreat. Alms bowls are an incredible important object of the Buddhist monastic tradition, where monastics originally subsisted only off of begging. While Mahayana Buddhists generally no longer practice this, traditional alms-rounds are still practiced in many countries. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University. 

In the monastic environment, you spend a lot of time lining up—by assigned number—and walking together in two even lines. There is a certain art to moving around the monastery this way, in monastic robes. You have to follow the paths together, know how the collective is going to move, keep your body in flow with the pattern. Post-retreat, I took time to pause and watch as the long line of nuns and students from Tsung-Lin walked past after breakfast, their dark brown and black robes moving like the waves of a peaceful ocean. At retreat, we would line up in the courtyard and chant the name of Amitabha Buddha as we went together to lunch. From Tsung-Lin, you can see the golden-colored great standing Amitabha Buddha that face out towards the highway, bathed in the warm light of the sun. 

​Once everyone is seated in the dining hall, there is still more that happens before we eat. Two monastics strike the guiding bell and the wooden fish, the signals for mealtime. Then the lead chanter intones the offering verse, and collectively the community sings the prayer to offer the food available to all Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and sentient beings. Someone lights incense. Then, and only then, does everyone, seated in long rows of tables, begin to take in their rice and soup bowls and their vegetable plate. Everyone eats in silence–and not just silence of voice, but also as absolutely quiet of body that can be achieved. The discipline master for the retreat would call out the sound of chopsticks clattering against a bowl, or of a chair that was carelessly pushed backwards with a protesting screech. Everyone tries very hard. Mistakes are made, and pointed out, and corrected. 

​There is a correct way to do most things at the monastery. It is very possible to fail. There is a specific order to take in your bowls, and hold them, and put them back to request more. You shouldn't rest on the backrest of your chair at all. Your robes will slip down your shoulder, or drag in your congee, if you aren't very careful. Even if you are, you will still probably fall short of perfect, and someone will call you out on it. *Don't panic.* Be willing to accept the correction. Move on. Pay more attention and, eventually, it gets easier. You remember–three bites of rice to begin, three aspirations. Consider: rice as a teacher of etiquette. 

Tofu

Outside of the retreat, I worked this summer with the International Volunteers at Fo Guang Shan monastery, mostly serving food and cleaning in the Cloud-Dwelling Building (the main dining hall). The International Volunteers is a more fluid group, with some people coming and going and only staying for as little as a week, or less. Most days, my schedule was very easy–with my primary task being helping for second meals. After formal meals, we take the leftovers from various places and line them up in an efficient buffet outside the kitchens. People—monastics, volunteers, anyone with a busy schedule or who was serving for first breakfast/lunch/medicine meal– line up with their reusable containers and move efficiently through the line. 

​Before retreat, keeping up with the schedule of the monastery sometimes weighed on me. I had gotten upsetting news, which I couldn't do much about but wait, and I felt very far away from everyone and very lonely. I was grasping at moments where I could make myself meld into the flow of things, feel happy for where I was. Losing the will to go to morning prayer left me often dragging my feet all day; I didn't want to eat. 

​The dining hall is often also referred to as the hall of Five Contemplations in monastery, because of five phrases that are often displayed on the wall. These are as follows: 

  1. Assess the amount of work involved, weigh up the origins of the food.

  2. Reflect on one’s own moral conduct, perfect or not, take this offering.

  3. Safeguard the mind against all errors, do not give rise to hatred or greed.

  4. Regard this food as good medicine, so as to treat the weakened body.

  5. In order to accomplish the Way, one deserves to accept this food.

​The monastery asks the individual, not without kindness, to be real and honest about their conduct. The point is always to move forward, do better. Food is a medicine that helps us do that. 

​There's always some kind of protein on your plate at the monastery, and it's most often tofu that's been cooked in one way or another. In its simplest form, it's maybe just tofu with a bit of sauce. It's usually the first thing I clear off my plate into my rice bowl, mixed up with the rice into bites. The exception to this is if it's dry and more sponge-like–then, I save at least one piece until after I eat the vegetables, to get as much juice and sauce off as possible. When eating in the dining hall, one wants to leave their plate as clean as possible, both for the people picking the plates up, and the people in the dish room. 

Preceptors of the monastic retreat walking to visit the Patriarch Shrine. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin University. 

Something I would later be told at retreat is this: you're only here for a short time. Are you focused on the short time, or on being here? Leading up to retreat, and after retreat, I felt a shift coming over me. Discipline, by which I am trying to say *living the kind of life you actually in principle want to live*, happens in the moment. In the breath, in the focus and attention to what's on your plate in front of you Today. 

​The prevalence of tofu in the monastery diet is, of course, because the monastery is vegetarian. The monastery restricts a number of other foods too—the kitchen uses no alliums. Between these restrictions, Fo Guang Shan is also building affinity and joy for vegetarianism with the volunteers who visit. When there were summer camps with kids, we even had soy-meat "chicken" nuggets.

Besides the highly-ritual, specific food environment of the dining hall on the monastery, Fo Guang Shan also had a number of cafes spread out, run by both monastics and lay people. Here they served vegetarian food also, in more casual settings. Sometimes you would even see monastics there for lunch. There’s a coexistence of things at Fo Guang Shan monastery. Old and new, traditions, austerity and joy, people. The name of the cafes are “Water-Drop teahouses,” which the founder of Fo Guang Shan, Venerable Master Hsing Yun, imagined as places for people to gather with feelings of generosity and community. The meaning is to “respond to a water drop of kindness by returning with a gushing spring.” These are places of rest for visitors, amidst all the movement and work. 

​All my life, I mostly thought of the motivations for discipline coming from an external place of fear, pressure, and pain. I had more success when I focused on joy: on what made me joyful, and how I could bring joy to others. 

Vegetables

​When eating a meal, there's a shared language of movement of plates and bowls that helps communicate needs, without creating noise. You can leave your vegetable plate, for example, for several moments until someone comes by to take something off for you. Once you bring in your plate, however, you are obligated to finish whatever is on it. At retreat especially, we were encouraged to accept all the food on our plate as offering. In absence of a good tofu sponge, it's best to reserve a sizable chunk of soft vegetables on your plate for the purpose of cleaning off sauces. 

​The system in the dining hall at the monastery centers around preventing food waste. This is, in part, the principle of wiping your plate as clean as you can—to accept everything, down to the last drop. It was offered for your benefit, that you might continue with the strength to do the most good for the world with your day. The food on your plate is not important simply because it is delicious. To ignore part of it, and simply discard it, would be to throw away something precious. In Fo Guang Shan, we talk about the four acts of giving: Give people confidence, give people joy, give people hope, give people ease. Generosity is talked about as being cultivated in all acts of life–to even walk to work in such a way that others are inspired. 

Dishwashing at Short-Term Monastic Retreat. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin University. 

​Waste creates problems. At the end of meals, the serving team works together to collect the plates and bowls as quickly as possible. Managing the waste—separating out any aluminum containers or paper napkins from fruit peels—is a task. Dealing with any leftover food would be a whole other task, of which there just simply isn't time for. There's more important things to get to. Then the food waste is heavy, and needs to be sorted and disposed of. Gratitude begets joy and ease. The venerable monastics would often tell me—the dining hall is a place of shared equality. There is merit built in the act of service, and merit built in the act of receiving. Finishing the food on our plates is part of building affinity with each other–a collective act of consciously valuing the resources we are provided with. 

​While working in the Cloud-Dwelling building, I occasionally helped in the mornings after breakfast with preparing fruit for lunch. I was working one day counting out grapes for to-go bags, and being very precise about trying to get 10 grapes, with an equal distribution of size, in each bag. This also meant that I was lagging behind, and slowing up the production line we had going. One of the Venerables who works in the dining hall grabbed my baggie to show me how she was doing it—less precise, much faster. She turned to me and said emphatically, "We race time!"

​There is a common perception, perhaps, that the Chan and meditative environment of the monastery lends itself to a slow environment. While the monastery was certainly less hectic than the general world environment for me in many ways, I was also startled by  the quick pace of life. People move around Fo Guang Shan with a certain dedicated energy of purpose. There is a low tolerance for waste here; food in the dining hall is not wasted, time is also not. I have actually several times heard wasting time is likened to breaking the precept against Killing, as “killing time” reduces the meaning of a life.  Sometimes it felt like we were rushing from task to task, behind schedule from the moment we woke up. This is not to say the monastery is not also a place that contains great stillness; the enormity of focused, collective stillness found in morning prayer or lunch mealtime offering verse touches the heart and the soul. But all things here are done with dedication and purpose, an aversion to waste. 

Ceremony during the Short-Term Monastic Retreat. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University.

Soup

​With every meal at the monastery, there is some kind of soup. In the morning, it might be warm soy milk or congee. At lunch or dinner, it often is some variety of (local and seasonal) vegetables in a lighter broth. There is a trick to leaving your plate as clean as possible—hot broth poured over the vegetable plate and rice bowl loosen oils, leaving behind something that can be finally wiped even cleaner by a saved piece of greens or tofu. In the morning, the serving team prepares teapots of hot water, which you can request by moving your emptied soup bowl slightly in front of the vegetable plate. 

​Early in the summer, when I was just working for the second lunch, I got assigned to serve soup. There's a fair amount of communication that soup serving requires—how much broth do you want, do you not like this?, how many scoops? just broth?—and the shape of the kitchen ladles felt unwieldy in my hands. People were often putting to-go containers in front of me that I was leaving messy. 

​The first time I helped with formal dinner service, a student from Tsung-Lin showed me how to hold the ladle differently, so the handle braced against my wrist as I moved down the long line of tables serving. Ladles became a source of comfortable familiarity; the tool fit nicely in my hand. The work of serving soup was a joy, even when tiring. Even still–formal meal service is weirdly terrifying. 

​Everything is on a rhythm of life that gives us limited time to do anything. At the dining hall, soup, rice, and vegetable dishes have to all be served in the time it takes to sing the offering verse. It's a matter of giving people ease, hoping that their meal is prepared with the equanimity of the entire environment. Even before ladling soup, we have to set out hundreds of chopsticks in long straight lines. The chopsticks are round and metal, and prone to rolling right off the table. 

​Peaceful is not a state of being that is stagnant. The mind will drift away from the tasks at hand, if we let it. We are so very often elsewhere from our work, boundless in our ability to be led along by our attention spans. We ought to care an awful lot, I think, about the rhythm of life we live within. All rhythms of life leave footsteps upon the earth; a singular want can leave jagged grooves. If I'm left with one thought from soup this summer, it's that the ingredients in the soup shifted over the course of the summer, and I didn't even know enough Mandarin to ask what everything was. 

​ Meals at the monastery are coordinated like something of a very specific dance. Everyone knows their parts, the music is set and specific, and the timing is a coordinated effort. Over the course of the summer, there were days where as many as a thousand people were sitting in that hall. For a big festival, especially Lunar New Year, the monastery feeds even more at once. Sometimes it was visiting volunteers, monastics, sometimes it was many kids for summer camp. The four teams divide the dining hall, and work together to efficiently feed everyone. I was often struck by how much slower I moved, and how lost I fumbled about. After the retreat, and getting to talk a little more with Tsung-Lin students, I thought a lot about the number of places people in that dining hall came from. All of us, floating around in some cosmic soup broth, ladled out in this bowl or the next only by chance. 

Preceptors setting the tables for Lunch at the retreat. Photo courtesy Tsung-Lin university.

Fruit

​Every day there is fruit prepared to go with lunch. Local Taiwanese fruit was, simply put, a profound experience for me. Orange, sun-ripe; Mangoes, sweeter and softer than ice cream; Pineapple, soft and yellow-sweet all the way through the core; Lychee, full to their skins with sweet juice; Passionfruit, tangy and bright; Avocado, softer than butter. 

​Snacks were a larger part of life at the monastery than I expected. At the main shrine, we'd usually find ourselves invited to sit down after cleaning with a cup of juice and a packet of crackers in hand. At the dining hall, I almost couldn't make it out of a shift without, between the kitchen aunties and the monastics, my apron pockets bulging with various treats. Fruit, crackers, sticky rice dumplings. Juice boxes, electrolyte packets. Even at monastic retreat, there was a morning after chores they had us sit together for a tea-meditation. And outside of retreat, I was often in the reception center enjoying tea, prepared by myself or by friends. 

​The monastery was an environment of abundance, even as it was an environment of austerity. It was an enormous privilege to get to walk under the walkways shaded by bamboo, my stomach full of food and my tongue still remembering the delight of mango. Less felt like more. Every second, something to be grateful for. 

Great Compassion Shrine. Photo courtesy of Tsung-Lin University. 

There are many ways to live a life, and many ways to live a life that is meaningful. In some ways many lives are lived in ways that are parallel to each other, interconnected, or crisscrossed in strange patterns. I wish I could share with you the morning I felt incredibly lonely and far away from home, and I walked up to the Shrine of Great Practice and ate a mango I had been given. I felt a great, energetic love and joy for life in my bones. My soul felt awake, a flock of swallows rising up, as in the soft evening sky at the monastery. 

View from the terrace outside Tsung-Lin’s dining hall of the standing Ambitabha Buddha that faces the highway, greeting visitors. Photo is my own. 

A Seat at the Table: A Year in Jordan | GFF '23

This post is part of Thalsa-Thiziri Mekaouche’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship.

Dealing With A Crisis

Things do not always go as planned. There are events, outside of our control, that can change our intended course of action. What is in our control however, is how we react to an unexpected change of circumstances.

What I had not planned when I carefully prepared my research agenda was that I would start my internship in Jordan on October 8th, one day after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th. I had prepared to step into a conflict that had been going on for decades but I had not prepared to encounter the ugly face of the most brutal warfare. During the first few weeks of conflict, I anxiously watched the news and deeply felt the distress of those surrounding me, Jordanians, Palestinians and Israelis alike. The research question that had brought me to Jordan in the first place, namely, whether lasting peace could be achieved through environmental cooperation, took a new dimension. Fortunately for me, the organization I worked for, EcoPeace Middle East, withstood the explosion of violence and I interned there from October to May.

EcoPeace Middle East is an environmental peace-building organization founded in 1994 by a group of pioneering Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists. Led by a trilateral leadership based in Amman (Jordan), Tel Aviv (Israel) and Ramallah (Palestine), it seeks to address the ecological collapse of the Jordan Valley, the transformation of the legendary ‘Mighty’ Jordan River into an open sewage and the increasing impacts of climate-driven water scarcity on people and non-humans. In the 2000s, in the context of the second intifada, it became obvious to the organization that transboundary environmental cooperation was not only necessary to reverse the dramatic destruction of their shared ecosystem, but that it could also build bridges between peoples divided by decades of conflict. In the last two decades, EcoPeace Middle East has developed a wide range of programmatic tools to bring about this vision. Throughout my stay, I became convinced that environmental peace-building offers an avenue for conflict resolution in the Middle East. This belief comes from my exchanges with Jordanian youth who explained to me that despite their anger, they consider that climate change threatens all life, regardless of borders. In that sense, they are ready to go beyond usual narratives on conflict to look for ways to build cooperation and understanding.

Environmental Peace-Building in Practice

Jordan EcoPark: Sustainable agroecosystem at the heart of the Jordan Valley

The Jordan EcoPark is one of EcoPeace’s greatest achievements and an illustration of how the organization innovates to rehabilitate ecosystems while offering opportunities for local development through green tourism and sustainable agriculture. In coordination with the Jordan Valley Authority, EcoPeace transformed the northwest hills of Jordan into a tree-filled, ecologically diverse habitat covering 22 hectares of land. The EcoPark allows residents and tourists to access the local biodiversity in a sustainable manner through eco-facilities such as wooden eco-cabins, kitchens and toilets supplied by water obtained from green filter water treatment and the recycling of gray water and solar-powered appliances.

Jordan EcoPark Visitor Center

Green filter water treatment plant at the EcoPark

 Spread across the EcoPark are areas called “learning stations”, which educate visitors on water conservation, organic farming and climate change among other topics.

The two pictures above are the learning stations at the EcoPark. Each poster focuses on an environment-related theme

I went to the Jordan EcoPark twice throughout my stay, which gave me the opportunity to see for myself how agroecosystems and water regeneration offered solutions to some of Jordan’s greatest challenges – water scarcity and the erosion of soils caused by unsustainable farming practices.

Another aspect of the EcoPark that I truly enjoyed was how it put forward the rich Jordanian cuisine. I was lucky that  local chefs, all of them born in the Jordan Valley, took me along the way when they went foraging for the local khobeizah (little mallow), a wild green plant that is widely consumed in the form of chopped salads or as stuffing in pillowy bread and pitas.

Khobeizah at the EcoPark

Climate Diplomacy Training

Among its numerous programs, EcoPeace Middle East developed a Climate Diplomacy training for university students and young professionals. Participants are invited to a first training in their respective countries (Israel, Jordan and Palestine) and those who demonstrate the greatest leadership potential receive higher level training and meet their Jordanian, Palestinian and/or Israeli peers at a regional gathering in the Jordan EcoPark (or in a third country depending on security concerns). I contributed to the development of training materials and delivered a module on the role of international agreements in climate action. These workshops were an opportunity to interact with Jordanian youth and understand their aspirations in the context of a devastating war in neighboring Israel and Palestine. Some of my dearest memories of Jordan are when, at the end of a long workshop day, rich in debates and learning, we would sit under cypresses and eat together ouzi (seasoned rice mixed with peas, onions, and carrots topped with crunchy nuts and aromatic ground beef) or makloubeh (upside-down rice casserole with meat and vegetables), finished off with knafeh (akawi melting cheese topped with shredded filo dough crust and sweetened by flavored syrup and crunchy nuts). When you say the word ‘knafeh’ in Jordan (or in Egypt, or in Palestine, or in Lebanon where some version of this dessert also exists), eyes light up and smiles bloom on people’s faces. Everyone associates knafeh with celebration and sharing.

School Feeding Programme

While October 7th marked a clear escalation of violence in the region, Jordan has been absorbing the consequences of various conflicts in the Middle East for decades. The country has the second-highest share of refugees per capita in the world. It hosts over 700,000 refugees (for a population of about 11.5 million people), mostly from Syria and has seen its population double in the last two decades. This has put a strain on Jordan’s ability to meet its population needs, including nutritional needs.

During my internship, I took the initiative to assess the state of Jordan’s school feeding system and helped EcoPeace write a proposal for a pilot project on environmentally-sound school feeding in the Jordan Valley. When it comes to fruition, this pilot project will contribute to improving education outcomes for children in one of Jordan’s poorest regions, while also improving the perception of EcoPeace by locals. In fact, one of the greatest challenges faced during my year-long experience in Jordan was the boycott movement against the organization, which denied that transboundary cooperation with Israel was a red line. In multiple instances during my internship, EcoPeace had to adapt or cancel its activities to avoid confrontation with the boycott movement.

This only strengthened my will to advocate for environmental peace-building as a way to focus on what unites us.

Li Amman

When I think of my internship experience in Jordan, I hear Feiruz’ song resonate in my head Li Beirut, which means ‘My Beirut’. In spite of the conflict, or perhaps because of it, Amman and its people, have grown to be very special for me, to the extent that I would attempt to sing Li Amman had I had the talent of the Lebanese legendary singer. While waiting for the sudden ability to sing beautifully, I can at least write this post and conclude on these two last thoughts. First, I have grounds to believe that environmental peace-building can be successful. What is more important now is to develop a clear understanding of the conditions that favor successful outcomes in environmental peace-building and to gather more granular data on similar work elsewhere in the world.

Second, I want to thank everyone I met in Jordan, as well as my EcoPeace Israeli and Palestinian colleagues whom I met via zoom. I have not dwelled on what they taught me, the tough moments we lived through together and the joyful ones too. I also remember spending Eid-al-Fitr among Jordanian friends, learning how to make msakhen (roast chicken, heavily scented with sumac and and a few other warm spices and served with caramelized onion flatbread) and maamouls (shortbread sweets made for the end of Ramadan). Through food, I connected intimately with the people I grew to respect and love there. To all those who read this post, I wish you peace and joy, hoping that better days will come.

At the time of writing, EcoPeace has been nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize and supports humanitarian action in Gaza, while also continuing its programmatic activities on environmental peace-building.

Acknowledgments:

I want to thank EcoPeace Middle East for this unique experience which contributed greatly to my understanding of the region.

This internship would not have been possible without the support of the Global Food Fellowship, the Henry Hart Rice Fellowship and the Libby Rouse and Ganzfried Fellowships. Beyond financing this experience in Jordan, the various people in charge of these fellowships helped me monitor the security situation throughout my stay and provided me with a platform for sharing what I learned. If you would like to learn more about EcoPeace as a case study for environmental peace-building, you can check out this paper, which I wrote with the Jordanian Director of EcoPeace Middle East: From an Inflammable Region to A Resilient Land of Opportunities – A Case Study of EcoPeace Middle East's Approach to Conflict and Environmental Action (here).

Digital Village: Exploring Food and Change in the Mountain Villages of Azerbaijan | GFF '24

This post is part of Stephan Sveshnikov’s 2024 Global Food Fellowship.

I wrote the initial draft of this post in Khinaliq, a small Caucasian village in Azerbaijan, just south of the Russian border. The entire medieval village, built of stone and perched on a steep hilltop, is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, partly due to the significance of the long transhumance route that runs through the surrounding mountains: thousand-year old footpaths along which men herd sheep and goats on seasonal migrations that last hundreds of miles. In the courtyards of low stone houses, bricks of cow dung and straw were drying to be used as fuel for the winter. A group of renegade goats roamed the streets, and in one paddock a calf was trying hard to eat the flower off a thistle. As a local brochure explained, the “main activity of the Khinalig community is sheep and cattle breeding.” This fact remained unchanged even now, in 2024, despite an asphalt road connecting the village to the regional center of Quba and, perhaps one of the biggest changes of all, high speed internet access (as of 2022).  

The fog had rolled in and thunderstorms were blowing through the mountains, so I put on a yellow parka against the chill and wrote at the guesthouse, looking out the window at a flock of geese that made its way from house to house along the rutted dirt road, eating the tastiest grasses from each yard before moving on with much babble. They had no concern for the rain. In the evening, around 7 o’Clock, the distant lowing of cows signaled the end of daylight. They came down from the mountains, and headed back to their respective homes in small groups. Everyone went out to milk (most of it would be made into cheese). Then we gathered around the table for dinner. On the TV, which had been on all day, the children scrolled through YouTube shorts.  

I did not speak the language of Zaur and his family. It is a Caucasian language (classified as “severely endangered” by UNESCO) native only to this village and one that neighbors it. To communicate, we spoke to each other in short, clipped, sentences through Google Translate.

When dinner was over and the tea had been poured, I asked, through the app: “How has internet changed life in Khinaliq? Is it good, or are there things about it you don’t like?” 

***

I had come to Azerbaijan because I wanted to know how life in remote mountain villages was changing because of the internet. For some time, my friends and I had been coming across YouTube videos that showed villagers cooking in the scenic Caucasus mountains. The videos were usually over an hour long and had titles like “Life and Cooking of the Mountain Village Hermit Family! Traditional Cuisine Far from Civilization” or “Rustic Recipes using Local Products! Life in the Villages.” On screen, weathered villagers milked sheep and cows, made cheese, grilled meat, and baked bread from scratch. Usually all was silent except for the sound of farm animals and the crackling of wood on the fire or water pouring from a pitcher. Most of the videos ran over an hour. I started to get more curious about who was behind the camera, and when I looked into it, I realized that many of the most popular videos were filmed in Azerbaijan.

 So what was this? A form of digital tourism? A way to keep village life afloat in the twenty-first century? Documentary footage? Was it staged? Was it authentic (and what would that mean)? Who in the village benefited?

 After several attempts to get in touch, I finally heard back from a channel called “Sweet Village.” They agreed to an interview, and even promised to take me into the field to watch how they filmed. We agreed that I would stop by their office on Monday, the day after I landed. Thus my first stop in Azerbaijan was at the quiet and well-lit headquarters of SOS Media. Inside, young social media, film, and analytics experts were hard at work editing footage and planning their next trip into the mountains.

I knew very little walking into the office. My contact at the SOS Media, Tukyaz Taliyeva (job title: Project Manager), had told me that her company was responsible for three of the YouTube channels I was interested in. In an interview with Tukyaz and the Executive Director, Lyubov Gladysheva, I learned that this family-owned company had nearly 100 employees. There was a filming schedule, there were script writers, editors, and other experts. Their main target audience was in the United States (since YouTube pays creators based on ad revenue, and ads are the most expensive in the U.S., that is the most lucrative market). Later in the week we would head to the Qəbələ region, where most of their footage was shot, and I would meet the family behind “Sweet Village,” who were relatives of the man who had started the parent channel and the most iconic of them all (almost 6 million subscribers), Wilderness Cooking.

 The road from Baku to Qəbələ climbs out of the desert plains near the Caspian Sea into the green Caucasian Mountains, winding along silty, shallow rivers. By the time you reach the outskirts of Baku, there are herds of cows, goats, and sheep grazing on the roadside. Qəbələ itself is a prosperous market and tourist town. A few tourists come here, mostly from the Arab countries and India, to enjoy hiking, fresh food, mountain views, and waterfalls. It made sense that someone would have come up with the idea to film in this place: it’s a relatively small step from agro-tourism to digital agro-tourism.

 The “Sweet Village” family lived (in their whitewashed stone summer home) on the slopes of the mountains outside Qəbələ, in a small village called Qəmərvan. On the porch, Shamsi, the grandmother and one of the YouTube stars, served me scalding hot tea and the little fried triangles of flaky dough and walnuts called “pakhlava.” The crew set up for filming -- a scene in which Malik (the grandfather’s) and Shamsi’s daughter, Günay, would bake a raspberry pie. One of the younger men — evidently a relative, was getting ready to film on an iPhone. His dream was to direct movies in America — he was interested in the indie movie scene. I told him he might never have as large of an audience there as he has now, on YouTube (736K subscribers on the Sweet Village channel).

Once the filming got going, it went about the way any cooking show would. Lots of stopping and starting. Snatches of soft conversation between cut and action. After about ten minutes, Malik (who was not being filmed that day) got bored. “Do you want to go up into the mountains?” he asked me. Of course I did.

High above the village, Malik recited the poetry of Lermontov and we talked about the seasonal migration of animals from the summer mountain meadows to winter grazing grounds down in the valley. In his younger days he had spent many nights with the sheep up in the mountains. Even now, in his late seventies, he walked fully upright, straight up the mountain slopes, without pausing for breath.

 “Isn’t it strange, I said at one point, “that so many people here want to go to America -- but in America, so many people watch your channel and wish they were here?”

Malik’s face was impassive. “It’s normal,” he said. “Take these mountains, for instance. To you they’re breathtaking, because you’re seeing them for the first time. To me, they’re ordinary. It’s like that.”

 When I had asked Lyubov Gladysheva, the Executive Director at SOS Media, about why people loved these videos so much, she said simply, “people are more or less alike.” In other words, everyone loves to watch the process of cooking good food, and to relax by enjoying beautiful scenery.

As far as I could tell, Malik and Shamsi’s lives had not changed much since they became YouTube stars. To them it was an unremarkable thing. Life for them still centered around their grandchildren, around their livestock, and around the seasonal migration from their village home in the summer down into the valley in the winter.  

***

Back in Khinaliq, heavy rains had washed out the bridge, and I had to take a more mountainous road back to Baku. Morning found me at the general store. Outside, a saddled horse was tied to a telephone pole. Its owner, a shepherd, was inside, stocking up on food before heading back up into the mountains. In the courtyard across the road, Yusif Askerov Bagiroglu, the assistant director of the historical museum, was enjoying the morning sun. He was old enough to remember the summer when professors from Moscow State University traveled out to Khinaliq to document the language and create an alphabet. I asked him, in Russian, about Khinaliq’s future. What would the village look like one hundred years from now?

Yusif shook his head at the question. “One hundred years I cannot say. It is not given to us to see that far. But I can tell you that in twenty years there will be no more livestock raising. Tourism will develop. This process has already begun.” There were already plans for a hotel and a restaurant. The jobs of the future would be in the service industry.
“And how do you feel about this?” I asked.
“How? Well how…this is progress. It is inevitable —” he looked at me searchingly — “isn’t it?”

 A couple of days prior, Zaur, my host, had answered my question about the internet without hesitation, shaking his head. “The internet is good!” he said. Then he grabbed the TV remote and turned on a black-and-white 1937 film showing Khinaliq in the era of Soviet Collectivization. The road had not yet been built, and electricity was just being set up. There was no television. The oldest man in the village could remember the days of the Russian Empire. Wheat was threshed by hand and water had to be carried every day from wells. We watched in silence, and then the film ended and dinner was over.

I still don’t know what Zaur was trying to say by showing me that film. It was as if he was saying, “is this what you want? To see the village as it was before the internet?” Or maybe he wanted to say: “The internet is good. It allows me to show you how life was before, which is what you want to see. Here it is.” In any case, it was easier to show me than it was to explain anything through the translation app. 

So, what can I say about village life in the Caucasus? Nothing here stands still. On the slopes of one of the mountains outside Khinaliq, I saw a shepherd silhouetted against the sky, head bent over his phone. Young people film their grandparents and post on YouTube. No one uses the old tools, which are relegated to local museums. TV, internet, cars, electric lighting -- it’s all here. So is the plastic garbage clogging the ditches. Some of the problems are very old, and they are different from the problems most of us (at least in New Haven, Connecticut) will encounter in our lives: how to cut enough hay for the winter, how to tell your own sheep apart from your neighbor’s, how to wean a calf from its mother. Some of the problems are new. But in the end it is hard for me to say what role the internet plays. The internet may accelerate some of the processes of change, and retard others. But it does not have much power on its own. The internet will bring tourists to Khinaliq, but only if the government repairs the washed out road. The internet allowed one family in Qəmərvan to create a thriving media company, but most of those new jobs are in the city. Maybe the most crucial thing that access to the internet does is change the lives of children, both by altering the way they spend their free time, and by making them realize very early on that the centers of culture are urban. But on this trip I did not ask about children. 

 One of the newest videos on the “Sweet Village” channel is titled “How Azerbaijani Family Lives in 21st Century? Cooking KFC Fried Chicken Far from Civilization.” The chicken (probably not from the village) is breaded by hand and then fried in cast iron cauldrons over a wood fire. The caption to the video reads:

Life in our azerbaijani home is simple, but full of warmth. Today, my family and i made homemade chicken nuggets using fresh ingredients from our garden. We cooked and laughed together, sharing stories as we prepared the meal. Living in the 21st century has its challenges, but these moments remind us of what truly matters❤️

There is a reason, of course, that these quiet meditations on food preparation are so popular, and this caption captures the crux of it fairly well. If there is anything universal about humans, it is that they like to prepare good food together, tell stories and laugh, and feel warm at heart. Sometimes we are almost embarrassed to say it out loud, because it sounds too simple. And the truth is that many of the people around the world who watch these videos are enthralled because they see something that they want to replicate in their own life. In that way, the YouTube channel “Sweet Village” is as much about the people who watch it as it is about Azerbaijan.

______________________________

Stephan Sveshnikov is a PhD student in the Yale History Department whose research focuses on agriculture and village life in Russia and Eastern Europe. You can read more about his travels in Azerbaijan and elsewhere on his Substack.

 

 

Community Food: An Exploration of Cultural Foodscapes Through the Personal and Political| LSI '24

This post is part of Maia Roothaan’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

  1. Around Our Kitchen Table

Out of 10? I’d ask after each of us had taken a bite of this morning’s buttermilk pancakes with flax and chia seeds. I always asked my family members to rate my cooking projects. And I did really wish to know how I could improve my skillset. It was my way of taking care of them, catering to dietary restrictions, flavor palates, comfort foods. 

Hmmmm, 9.5, a little too sweet. But still very good. Thank you, Maia. My dad reached across the table to dollop greek yogurt and applesauce on top of his stack, a combination I always found myself perplexed by. 

They’re good. My younger brother, Oliver, was dipping his pancakes in maple syrup using his hands. Even though we’re now 17 and 20, he still responds in much the same way to my queries. 

So, what’s in them? I loved this question. I still do. I recited the list of ingredients, noting how I’d added some seeds for just a bit of extra protein. 


2. Our Time in Aix

Je vous souviens! Vous êtes la fille qui a acheté la confiture des abricots et lavande, oui? I know you! You’re the girl who bought the jam with lavender and apricots, yes? 

It was one of our last mornings in France. Rose and I had visited the jam man, as we called him, several weeks ago to purchase an Aixoise special–apricot and lavender jam. I’d returned this morning to take in the scenery before this summer was over. 

Aix-en-Provence is a special place, especially for someone who loves food like I do. Each morning, vendors set up stands on cobblestoned streets. The market on the Rue Lapierre was on my path to class each morning. Often, I’d stop during my brisk morning commute to buy some tomatoes for a dinner salad with burrata or apricots for an upside down cake. Interestingly, these markets were cheaper than grocery stores, something I was unfamiliar with due to my American upbringing. 

My family had become regular Farmer’s Market go-ers during the pandemic several years before. I’d spot one of my elementary school teachers buying corn, or one of my friends working at the Hewn bakery stand. It became a spontaneous meeting place in a world that had become so insular. Instead of cobblestone streets, our Farmer’s Market was tucked into a parking lot downtown. We’d go religiously, even if just to buy a few things. 

Forever a hostess, the balcony of my house in Aix was the site of weekly Wednesday dinners. I’ve written, spoken, and thought a lot about these meals. We’d follow a ritual, Rose and I concocting a dessert without measurements (the house didn’t have measuring spoons or cups, something I reminisce on with delight) and Olivia and Isabel making the main and our salad. Each one a variation on the familiar. Hours passed with laughter and conversations I cannot recall, but I do remember the feeling of togetherness that hovered around those meals and on that balcony.



3. Vermont, July 2024

Our car curved along the road, following the path of a steady stream. My eyes took in the mist woven between the mountains ahead. I left my window open in the back despite the cool air whipping through the car, tossing my hair. 

We’d had a weekend full of alternative food, something I was both familiar and unacquainted with from my more urban upbringing. My parents had carved out their own alternative food spaces in our home, making homemade yogurt or bread. It was something they’d been intentional about. Here, it seemed that the practices I questioned growing up were the general cultural drift. 

On our first full day, my friends and I had climbed to the top of Mount Hunger. Our daypacks toted all the typical snack suspects–GORP, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and some sliced fruit. Although not an uncommon experience, I know we all felt lucky as we ate our sandwiches in contemplative silence. 

Saturday morning consisted of a walk around the Montpelier Farmers Market. In service of learning more about the foodways and culture of those perched behind the tables selling their goods, my eyes fell upon each, deciding who might be most willing to speak with me. Suddenly, I recognized a classmate from my high school in Illinois working behind the breadstand. In this way, I’d become an acquaintance of the unfamiliar. 

Maeve and I spoke for a few minutes. Finally, I nervously told her about my project, hoping that she might have insight into the story of Red Hen Breads. Randy, the owner, came over and eagerly explained how he’d always been baking bread. 

Probably since I was three years old, with my mother. My mind flitted to helping my dad bake bread in our Breadmaster and returned to our conversation. I’ve always wondered if it’s the things we’re passionate about innately, when we’re young, that we will somehow make a return to. 

Later, I parted ways with my friends to see which other vendors I might be able to speak to. I found myself drawn to a honey and foraged mushroom stand. On one side jars of honey were displayed in varying shades of amber and opaqueness with dipping sticks to try each before purchase. I first tested the buckwheat honey–it was reminiscent of a Serbian wild honey brought to us by a family friend. 

I began to talk with Dave, the owner, who told me that his favorite way to eat his honey was by concocting a chocolate bar with a honeycomb filling. 

So, how’d you get into beekeeping? I picked up a jar of creamy honey, one of my favorite types to spread on an open-face slice of bread. 

It was this man right over there! Rick–he’s the one who got me into the beekeeping world. I’d noticed earlier how the two had engaged animatedly, laughing and cracking jokes with their customers. I smiled to myself, thinking about how the foods we come to love were like fingerprints we could leave on the lives of others. 

Sonya’s Subaru pulled into the driveway of the farm hosting the second annual Butterfest. After several hours of barn dancing and swimming in the river nearby to the farm, my friends and I joined the group of people gathered around a long table piled with potluck dishes. Clad in a butter-yellow dress, our host explained that this event was meant to commemorate the spirit of butter, of richness, and of community. 

My friends and I propped ourselves up against picnic tables, surveying the crowd as we ate our tapas-style meal. It was just the hour in the evening when everything was covered in the glowy haze one can usually only grasp on a movie screen. I began to realize, more and more, that the foodscape I wished to see, and had glimpsed here, in Vermont, was one cultivated by my community and individuals, rather than the invisible hands of government I’d frequently been taught could create successful preservation of foodways. 

As I look toward the future, I hope to continue writing about food, people, and my own relationship to both. Community and care drive food, and I plan to continue noticing how both seep into our American consciousness, something that is valuable in part because of the impossibility of encapsulating all of its truths.

Three Cakes & a Strawberry Salad | LSI '24

This post is part of Grey Battle’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

A few months ago, as my grandmother lay in a hospital bed, she told me, "You may not make Southern food, but you cook like a Southerner." She was sipping Cauliflower Miso Soup from a teaspoon when she added, "What I mean by that is, you don't make what we make, but you love people with food the way we do."

I am a well-fed child, and my grandmother, great-grandmother, and aunts are all teachers. I learned to read by sounding out recipes in a small, blue kitchen nestled among the trees in Tanner-Williams, Alabama. Here, I learned to set serveware, spell name cards, grin and swallow casseroles, say please and thank you, and hold hands for prayer around the dining room table. 

This project is an adaptation of four cherished family recipes, previously published in community cookbooks, to a plant-based style of baking. I have subbed ingredients, recalculated ratios, and transformed methods, allowing traditional recipes room to breathe, grow, and be inclusively shared and passed down. 

The traditional foods found in this booklet connect me to the women who raised me, and through these adaptations, this bond is strengthened. The language of loving through food is not constrictive but endlessly creative—a language my family taught me to speak and one I now share with you.

Find the zine here.

Modeling RegenAg Transition Finance | LSI '24

This post is part of Gus Renzin’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

It took me about five minutes to decide what I wanted my independent project this summer to focus on. Regenerative agriculture is just that awesome. Although no one single definition for it exists—some organizations classify a farm as regenerative based on practices (eg. cover cropping, no-till, mulching), others based on the outcomes (like raising soil organic matter levels, reducing runoff, and improving working conditions), and still others based on embracing certain foundational principles such maintaining living roots and welcoming animals—the bottom line is this: regenerative agriculture is all about farming in ways that leave land healthier than we found it. Farms practicing regenerative agriculture sequester more carbon, are more resilient to climate change and extreme weather events, and are more ecologically beneficial than conventional farms.

Given the numerous advantages that regenerative agriculture offers, I was surprised by the fact that less than 2% of US farms are regenerative. My immediate assumption was that the environmental benefits of regenerative agriculture must come at a financial cost, but nearly every report I read on the subject seemed to point in the opposite direction: studies by the Soil Health Institute and the American Farmland Trust used partial budget analysis methods to demonstrate that—even without upping prices or taking advantage of burgeoning ecosystem service and carbon markets—regenerative farms are, on average, significantly more profitable than they would be if operated conventionally. Regenerative farmers are rewarded for their focus on soil health with reduced dependence on expensive inputs like fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, and as a result, wider margins.

The major roadblock to widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture, I've come to learn, is the period of depressed profitability that occurs as farmers transition from conventional to regenerative agriculture. Quite simply, it takes time for the land (and the farmer) to adjust to a new way of doing things, and in the interim, yields can suffer and costs can rise. According to studies by BCG and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Bain and the World Economic Forum, and the Environmental Defense Fund, farmers must often weather several years of significant losses before hitting original and then increased levels of profitability.

Learning this was the impetus for my independent project this summer. I decided to treat the transition to regenerative as an investment, model farm-level cash flows over time, and ultimately analyze the financial viability of the transition through a capital budgeting lens. I began by compiling data from the Soil Health's Institute's study, ECONOMICS of Soil Health Systems on 30 U.S. Farms, which used partial budget analysis to compare per-acre profitability of 30 existing regenerative farms to projected levels of profitability if they were to be operated conventionally. Using the projected levels of conventional profitability as a baseline, I used excel to create this interactive tool to model a 6 year transition to regenerative agriculture for each farm that ultimately results in each farm achieving its actual level of profitability as a regenerative farm and maintaining those levels (adjusted annually for projected inflation) in subsequent years. The tool allows the user to choose the discount rate, average rate of inflation, interest rate, and one of eight options for projected transition losses based on scenarios proposed in "100 Million Farmers: Breakthrough Models for Financing a Sustainability Transition" and "Cultivating Farmer Prosperity: Investing in Regenerative Agriculture" and see the 12, 20, and 100 year IRR and NPV for each farm transition as well as the amount of time it would take for the farmer to repay a loan that would cover transition losses (which is one type of arrangement that innovative new financial firms in the regenerative agriculture space are using to support farmers through the transition). In addition to demonstrating which transitions are ultimately sound investments, the tool can help viewers to visualize the enormous economic potential of the regenerative transition as well as the risks that it poses, even for farms that are—from an operational and ecological standpoint—successful.


Overall, working on my independent project this summer has been an incredible experience. I've learned more about regenerative agriculture, financial modeling, and the workings of Microsoft Excel than I could have hoped. The most important thing I've learned, though, is how much must be done before a widespread transition to regenerative agriculture is viable. The work done by organizations like the Soil Health Institute, the American Farmland Trust, Bain, BCG, and the Environmental Defense Fund is incredible, and they shed light on the enormous financial and environmental potential of regenerative agriculture. But they—and by extension my tool—are nowhere near comprehensive enough to give farmers or financial institutions the information they need to confidently embrace the regenerative transition. The read-world data required to create accurate models just isn't there yet.

For widespread adoption of regenerative practices to be viable, farmers need reliable tools that can accurately predict how regenerative transitions will impact both their land and their bank accounts, and financial institutions need to deeply understand the risks and rewards that they expose themselves to in supporting those farmers. The need for far greater real-world data collection is clear, but as more and more information about the financial implications of actual transitions—not just projections—comes to light, I have no doubt that farmers and investors alike will confidently embrace regenerative agriculture.

Floral Pigments: A Recipe for Water-Soluble Printmaking Ink | LSI '24

This post is part of Sonya Sagan-Dworsky’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

This summer my independent project grew from a continued interest in process as a form of artistic expression. As a sculptor and printmaker I am constantly playing with my definition of a finished piece. So much of the joy that surrounds my artistic practice grows from an appreciation for method, material and the act of physical experimentation. I view my work as a visual record of the time and labor that goes into the piece itself and all the materials or tools needed for the piece’s creation. 

For my project I chose to focus on relief printmaking because the medium straddles painting and sculpture. Even though the carved block is used to transfer the image onto paper the object can also exist as a piece of art.  Reduction prints, a specific method  of relief printmaking, requires the artist to revisit the same block and continue carving as a new color is applied on top of the previous prints. The process results in a final print with enhanced visual depth, but also limits the number of editions of the image. 

Nori Paste Base
1. Mix 3 Tbsp or 20 grams of rice flour with 100 ml of cold water. Stir and set aside. 
2. Heat up 150 ml of water in a small saucepan until boiling.
3. Pour rice flour mixture into boiling water and begin whisking constantly. Whisk until mixture thickens and becomes translucent, about five minutes.
4. Turn off heat and whisk until mixture is lukewarm. Transfer to a glass container and place in the refrigerator until cold. Mixture will last for two to three days.


Pigment Powder
1. Harvest fresh Marigold and Cosmos blossoms plucking flowers from stem.
2. Pack blossoms tightly on the shelves of the dehydrator separating marigolds and cosmos. Set to low temp and dry for at least twenty four hours.  
3. Once dry, place blossoms in an airtight container. If desired, separate marigolds by color into yellow and orange flowers. 
4. For Marigolds take scissors and cut blossoms away from seed pod minimizing any green material from being cut. For Cosmos either pull petals from the center by hand or carefully cut petals loose. 
5. Place a half cup of dried petals into the spice grinder. Begin grinding, adding more dried petals until powder covers blades of grinder. Blend for multiple minutes for a fine powder. If needed, sifted powder with fine mesh sieve before storing in an airtight container. 


Printmaking Ink
1. Mix equal parts water with alcohol preferably gin which is best for archival purposes. I use about one teaspoon of each for four prints worth of ink. 
2. Slowly add gin and water mixture to one tablespoon of pigment powder until a thick smooth consistency is achieved. If too liquidy, continue adding pigment powder.
3. Mix two tablespoons of nori paste into the pigment mixture with a palette knife making sure there are no lumps. Once smooth take a soft brayer and roll out ink. Listen for a sticky noise and even coverage on the brayer. Roll ink onto prepared woodblock, applying two to three coats.
4a. When using a press, adjust pressure to work with the thickness of the carved block. Place dry paper on top of the inked block and roll through twice stopping in the middle to switch direction. Pull paper off the block and place on the drying rack. 
4b. When working by hand, place paper on an inked block and apply even pressure with a barren or back of one’s hand. 
5. Pull paper off the block and place on the drying rack.

A Summer of Fermentation on the Yale Farm | LSI '24

This post is part of Hardy Eville’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.

This past fall, I brewed my first batch of beer for the Yale Farm. Over the rest of the academic year, I continued to brew and expanded into other forms of fermentation – making a few varieties of miso during the winter. My goal for the Lazarus Summer Internship was to build on these projects. I wanted to undertake projects that highlighted the summer produce of the Yale Farm, preserving some of these flavors for students to try in the Fall and Winter months. I also endeavored to experiment with new methods, build a better repertoire of fermentation techniques, and work on developing my own recipes. 

Why fermentation? I see fermentation as a unique way to process the many things that grow on the Yale Farm. Apart from additions like salt and sugar, many fermented products are not mixed with any additional ingredients as they would with cooking. I see fermentation as a way to enhance the flavors of any produce by bringing out qualities that already exist within it. With fermentation, less inputs (besides waiting time) are needed to create diverse flavors.

Over the course of the summer, I was very aware of the timing of everything growing at the farm. In order to properly ferment things on schedule I had to know exactly when something would be ripe or in bloom. Through this, I felt very connected with the week by week changes of the farm. There was always an exciting anticipation about what would be ready next for a project. I also enjoyed thinking about the ways to process each ingredient, deciding between kombucha, beer, vinegar, lacto-fermentation, miso pickling, koji fermentation, and more. 

Recipes: