Yale Sustainable Food Program

Alumni Interviews | Camden Smithtro '22

Farming is very physical work: plowing the fields, weeding the crops, harvesting and hauling the produce. But agriculture is also a matter of contracts and leases, bylaws and regulations. The Food and Farm Business Law Clinic at Pace University School of Law is there to help farmers navigate all the policies and paperwork that determine what they can plant, where they can plant it, and what they can do with their crops. In this interview, Camden Smithtro ’22, program coordinator of the clinic and a YSFP alum, explains the fascinating intersections between agriculture and law, from land use restrictions to intellectual property concerns. 

This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the worlds of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

What is the Food and Farm Business Law Clinic? What do you do as program coordinator?

A legal clinic is a program that's based at a law school, and it’s designed to provide experiential learning for law students. It gives students experience working with real clients, and it allows clients to access pro bono legal services. Our clinic is designed for farmers, food businesses and associated nonprofits.

We do transactional work, as opposed to litigation or administrative proceedings. That includes designing contracts, helping people sell a business or start a new business, reviewing and writing leases. We have a couple of succession cases where a family needs to figure out the logistics of passing their farm to the next generation. We have food businesses who are trying to purchase the intellectual property and equipment from a different business. We have a lot of producer co-ops and one consumer co-op. And we have a lot of nonprofits that started out being fiscally sponsored by another nonprofit, and they want to create their own nonprofit, which requires you to create bylaws and apply for tax exemptions. There’s a lot of paperwork involved. 

Our clinic was started in 2017, and a couple of years ago we hired the first staff attorney. I do all the grant management and grant reporting. I’m in charge of the clinic’s budget. I write up reports on what the clinic has done, both for our private donors and for our state reporting. I do all of the client intake interviews, and I designed a survey for clients to fill out rather than cold-emailing us. 

Because I’m the first program coordinator, a lot of my work in the first year was creating systems to streamline things and move things out of my bosses’ heads and onto paper. I set up a lot of databases to keep track of clients and to determine what information we want to maintain about cases and the partners that we work with. We have a lot of partner organizations in the state of New York, like Glynwood (where YSFP alumna Kate Anstreicher works) and the New York State Agricultural Mediation Program (NYSAMP). I’m the point person for a lot of our interactions with those organizations. We do a lot of client referrals to them and vice-versa. I’ve also been in charge of a new program called the New York Farm Transition Advisors Directory, in partnership with American Farmland Trust and NYSAMP, which is a living database we’re creating of different farm business technical service providers.

How do you choose which clients you take? 

It’s a combination of the type of work that the attorneys are experienced in — making sure that we are going to be able to provide effective service to our clients — and ensuring that we have a good variety of projects for the students. Each student works in pairs, and they generally have two to three projects they’re working on that semester. We try to make sure that the work the clients propose is manageable over the course of one or two semesters. 

Because we’re a pro bono clinic, another consideration is whether the clients meet our need-based or mission-based standards. Our clients’ household income can’t exceed four times the federal poverty level. For a nonprofit, they need to have a mission that it makes sense to support with pro bono work. We also have a lot of returning clients. There’s a couple people whom we’ve been excited to refer to attorneys who are not pro bono, because that means they’ve progressed enough as a business that they require a lawyer on call. 

You mentioned food businesses buying intellectual property. I haven’t heard much about IP in the food system — what issues come up there?

Something I’ve seen a couple times is white-label products, where you have a farmer or a food manufacturer who is creating products that they want to sell to other companies so they can market them as their own. We have a couple clients this semester who are working in tandem with a for-profit attorney who’s helping our students learn how to write white-label contracts for an herbalist and a meat vendor. 

Another thing that often comes up is trademark law, where businesses need to trademark the name of their business or their product. Other places just protect their name with an LLC or some other sort of business organization, which protects the name as a business entity. That’s a small part of our work, but the bigger fields of law that we deal with — both because of the expertise of our attorneys and the needs of farmers — are definitely leases, land use, and entity formation. 

Have there been any specific legal issues or intricacies that you have found to be especially interesting?

I think my biggest takeaway from this job is that law is a lot more complicated than I thought it was. That might be a bit obvious, but it requires so much detail. The things that I've been really excited about have been land use questions. I’ve enjoyed learning about agricultural conservation easements, which is when you own land and an organization pays you to agree that the land will never be used for anything except agriculture. You can’t turn it into a strip mall or build a bunch of houses on it. It’s a really cool tool to protect agricultural land, and a great tool for farmers who have very slim profit margins and benefit from the support of local governments or nonprofits. 

I hadn’t realized how much town and country law impacts land use. Having read through some town ordinances about land use, I’ve seen how really particular grudges can lead to policy changes that are enshrined for generations — like, you pissed off this council member, so now you’re not getting your tax break on your farm products, because they’re choosing to not count your crops as agricultural profit. Agritourism is a big example of how difficult it can be to figure out what’s allowed and what’s not. If you’re a farm, do you need special permitting to allow people to take tours of your farm? If you set up a value-added farmstand, is that okay? What about if you sell hot food from that farmstand? Agritourism hasn’t been very well-defined before, so it’s open to a lot of interpretation. 

You said you’ve gotten really interested in particularities of the law that you hadn’t expected to find so fascinating. Has this job changed your perspective on what you want to do going forward?

Yes! I went into this job really interested in creating agricultural policy. I have gained a tremendous understanding of the problems that small farmers are facing and the network of nonprofit support that’s available, as well as the ways that there are holes in that network. But I was surprised to find legal work so appealing. You’re trying to create the most elegant solutions to problems, and trying to get as much detail squared away without creating a mess. That style of analytical writing really appeals to me. In the policy sphere, there’s financial work, there’s communications work, there’s managerial work, there’s legal work. I’m starting to lean more towards legal types of work and am planning to apply to law school. 

What were your roles at the Farm, and how did they prepare you for the job you have now? 

I was involved in pretty much every aspect of the Farm. I started out as a culinary events manager, and then I did the Lazarus Summer Internship, and then I became a communications manager and was also a senior advisor and a Harvest leader. The communications role was most similar to the job I have now and was definitely helpful in finding food systems work after college. I also found a lot of my closest friends during undergrad through the YSFP. Those warm fall days, making pizza with my friends before everyone arrived for the knead 2 know, just chatting and pulling the pizza dough — I really miss that.

Vietnamese American Pastry with Lauren Tran | Chewing the Fat Speaker Series

On the last Monday of January, the Yale Sustainable Food Program hosted our first Chewing the Fat speaker series event of 2024 in conjunction with Timothy Dwight College. Pastry chef Lauren Tran and her husband Garland Wong traveled from New York for a college tea in which they discussed their experiences running dessert pop-ups and opening a bakery. Tran is known for her synthesis of Vietnamese flavors and French pastry techniques, and she shared her unique perspective on the relationship between food, culture, and identity to an audience of dozens of fascinated Yale students. 

Tran began with an overview of her path to becoming a pastry chef. Although she majored in political science and intended to go to medical school, she always had a passion for pastry. She spent years working both front and back of house in upscale restaurants in Seattle before going to pastry school and landing a position as a pastry cook at the Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern. When COVID hit and restaurants shut down, Tran, like many of her colleagues, started selling dessert boxes via Instagram under the name Bánh by Lauren. As the boxes grew in popularity, she pivoted to running pop-ups, where excited attendees would sometimes wait hours in line for a chance to try coconut pandan or thai tea chiffon cakes, macarons with flavors like red oolong and dark chocolate jasmine strawberry, and Vietnamese desserts like bánh bò nướng, or honeycomb cake. After months of successful pop-ups, Lauren and Garland began work on a brick-and-mortar bakery. 

Throughout the event, Tran spoke with nuance about her Vietnamese American identity and how it shaped her cooking. She pointed out that there are very few Vietnamese bakeries in New York, unlike on the West Coast, and described how her pastries can both connect Vietnamese Americans to their heritage and introduce many non-Vietnamese customers to unfamiliar flavors. She noted that she sometimes feels expected to “put pandan in everything,” but that she wants to employ the flavors in ways that make sense to her — neither obscuring them nor using them without careful consideration. She also described how, as a kid, she often ate Vietnamese pastries that were prepackaged and not freshly made. She wants her customers to eat sesame balls fresh from the fryer, but she noted that serving fresh pastries made with high-quality ingredients and sustainable packaging can be more expensive — and that customers often assume Vietnamese food should be cheap. 

Tran and Wong also discussed the many challenges of running a food business, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic. Wong jokingly described Tran’s chaotic system for managing the first pastry box orders: she would reply to every Instagram DM individually until he helped her draft form replies and spreadsheets to keep track of her customers. They described the challenges of finding an affordable location, as bakeries require specific infrastructure and ventilation that many buildings lack. Financing the bakery was difficult, since food businesses are a risky venture which banks are hesitant to loan to, and platforms like Kickstarter take a considerable percentage of fundraised dollars. And although Bánh by Lauren has attracted considerable online attention, especially after the New York Times ran a video profile of Tran, generating publicity is still a source of stress. Tran noted that many fantastic restaurants struggle to attract customers, while more well-resourced restaurateurs can rely on expensive public relations firms to bring in diners. 

Many thanks to Lauren and Garland for their insights and their delicious desserts. We also want to express our gratitude to Timothy Dwight Head of College Mary Lui, Associate Head Vincent Balbarin,Timothy Dwight staff members Kimberly Rogers, Samantha Gambardella, and Sharon Goldbloom, and their college aides for making this event such a success.

Photos from the event can be found here.

Sustainable (Fine) Dining | GFF '23

This post is part of Mao Shiotsu’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from September 2023 here.

Guiding question: How can the fine dining industry best promote food sustainability?

This summer, I wanted to explore how food, and more specifically dining culture, exists in Japan. I had just come out of a year studying cuisine in France, where I began to think about the significant differences between its cuisine and that of my home country. People’s relation to food in Japan seemed uniquely distinct from what I had seen that year, and from my childhood in Southern Europe. The Japanese thought on food, and thus cuisine, appeared inextricably linked to the preservation of nature. I was curious about these differences, especially at the level of fine dining, and wanted to understand how the criteria of “good food” differs. 

This, I thought, may provide hints for how environmental sustainability could fully establish itself as a globally important criterion in fine dining. The past years have seen an energetic movement towards sustainable dining, with the emergence of farm-to-table restaurants and with fine dining shifting towards something lighter, fresher, and local. I was curious to explore how this idea has existed naturally in Japan for centuries. As a Japanese person, I hoped to accurately portray the “heart” of Japanese people regarding food, which is inseparable from native nuances and sensitivities. This knowledge, I believed, could add an illuminating angle to the current movement. 

I talked to chefs, learned about farming from locals, and explored food markets to grasp the essence of Japan’s relation with food deeply enough to be able to explain it to people from foreign cultures. I explored various levels of food, from neighborhood vegetable patches to large supermarkets, and from home cooking to fine dining. I wrote an article for The Japan Times (a Japan-based, English newspaper) from what I learned this summer, on the topic of Japanese fine dining and how it diverges and converges with that of other cuisines.

One way in which I want to continue this project is by compiling recipes of Kyōdo Ryōri, regional Japanese cuisines using local ingredients. These cuisines are rapidly dying, as more people move to large cities and local food production decreases. During my visit to Wakuden no Mori, I got chatting with a local at a cafe, who told me about the Kyōdo Ryōri there— a type of chirashi sushi using canned mackerel. I would like to record such recipes, and create an anthropological recipe collection with stories of the ordinary home cooks, illustrating what sort of space the dishes have occupied in their lives. 

Fine Dining (Kyoto)

A well-respected name with over 150 years of history, Wakuden originally began as a Ryokan (Japanese inn) before opening two Japanese restaurants, Kōdaiji Wakuden and Muromachi Wakuden, which today hold two and one Michelin stars, respectively, and the Green Michelin star for sustainability. 

I had the chance to speak with Head Chef Daisuke Ogawa of Muromachi Wakuden about his values in cooking.

Bonito tataki with an unpictured side of ponzu. (Muromachi Wakuden) 

This visually understated, yet exquisitely perfected dish seemed to me to encapsulate what I was trying to comprehend. 

“What is important in your cooking?”

For Chef Ogawa, the customer’s kimochi (feeling) and the presentation of nature itself in the plates are core pillars of his cooking. Ingredient quality, therefore, is crucial. I went to see Wakuden no Mori in Northern Kyoto, a vast landscape of rebuilt forest where seasonal vegetables and spices for the restaurant are grown. Wakuden’s rice paddies also lie closeby. Restaurant staff help with planting the rice plants at the beginning of the season. 

Farm to table (Nara)

I went to Takatori City in the Nara Countryside to see the small restaurant run by the Yoshinaga couple, serving elevated Japanese household dishes using fresh ingredients. What I discovered there was a natural ecosystem of farm to table. Most households seemed to grow their own vegetables in the backyard, and share them with neighbors and the restaurant. 

Chef Yoshinaga let me help in the kitchen for dinner service. Neighbors had given him fresh vegetables harvested in the morning, with which he whipped up a new dish for that night. 

He also kindly fed me a delicious bowl of eel and egg on rice.

The freshest of vegetables seemed to be abundantly accessible there, naturally creating a farm to table ecosystem. Chef Yoshinaga recounted an interesting lesson someone had once taught him:  “Always boil water before setting out to harvest edamame, to eat the freshest possible.” I don’t actually know the true flavor of edamame, I realized. And I wasn’t even aware that I didn’t know it. 

A restaurant menu idea occurred to me from this story: An edamame bean where each seed is of varying levels of freshness. One is prepared right after harvesting, one after five hours, and one after a day. This could portray what “freshness” is to the modern diner.

La Collina (Shiga)

La Collina is the brainchild of Taneya, one of Japan’s biggest sweets companies. It is a dessert store unlike any other— a few shops lie dotted around an enormous green landscape, through which the customers wander, enjoying delicious treats on the way.

The project was borne out of Taneya’s leader’s desire to give back to his native Omi Hachiman City. Ingredients for the sweets are produced here, and on my visit, I saw many people working in the greenery— La Collina  is also a forest-rebuilding project, and thus its final completion is in fact decades into the future.

Food Markets (Various cities)

One thing I noticed once I started to think about this topic is that local food markets, or shōtengai, are still common in Japan.  Although they are decreasing rapidly in number, compared to other countries I have lived in, there seems to be a sizable population who continue  to buy produce from individual shops— fruits and vegetables from greengrocers, meat from butchers, and fish from fishmongers. 

Nishiki Market in Kyoto is among the most famous of Japanese shōtengai, with a huge variety of shops, for instance,  otsukemon (pickled vegetables) and fresh fish stores. Nowadays, though, the market seems to see more tourists than locals. 

Anchialine Pools in Hawaiʻi | GFF '23

This post is part of Grace Cajski’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship.

As an English and Environmental Studies major, I know environmental writing does two important things. Firstly, it creates a record of how humans have interacted with the environment in the past; how they have treated it; how they have conceived of their role in it. Thoreau's Walden, for example. But literature also shapes the way we interact with the external world. It catalyzes action; it proposes new modes of existing within nature; it redefines things. I think of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. 

Anchialine pools in Hawaiʻi Island could benefit from both these aspects. The pools are taken care of by a community whose work, knowledge, and values I find admirable—people we could learn from. And yet, so few people know of these ecosystems, even though they are case studies of the danger of invasive species, human encroachment, groundwater overuse, sedimentation, and so on. A piece of environmental writing about anchialine pools could celebrate the caretakers, record their knowledge and inspire action by bringing the pools into public awareness. 

When I was researching fishponds in Hawaiʻi two summers ago, I learned what anchialine pools are; I even saw some. They are bodies of water that sometimes look like unassuming puddles, but are actually brackish, connected underground to both freshwater and seawater. They are dynamic and resilient ecosystems, culturally and ecologically important (small shrimp native to the pools were often used as bait). They are home to some of the rarest marine species on earth. They provide habitat to endangered damselflies. 

A project to write about anchialine pools for a broad audience that isn’t yet aware of them would be a fitting capstone to my undergraduate studies, I thought: so this is my yearlong senior thesis for Environmental Studies, advised by Alan Burdick. 

I spent three weeks this summer on Hawaiʻi Island. I interviewed caretakers and other stakeholders. I joined the Division of Aquatic Resources for fieldwork. I researched and read. I worked with the Hui Loko, a group of anchialine pool and fishpond caretakers, to produce a StoryMap; now I’m writing the story itself. 

It has been an inspiring, educational, and fun project—one more glimpse into how coastal communities can and are feeding themselves in a changing world. Thank you to the Yale Sustainable Food Program, a community I cherish.  

This project was also funded by the Franke Program, the Yale Law School Law, Ethics, and Animals Program, and the Yale Center for International and Professional Experience.

Explore more through Grace’s ArcGIS Storymap here.

Meals as Sites of Poetic Imagination | GFF '23

This post is part of Kavya Jain’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from October 2023 here.

I spent the summer in New Mexico and New Haven, digging through artist and literary archives and interviewing artists, poets, farmers, and cooks. My research question was about the possibilities of meals as sites of poetic and political imagination, and I studied both artist sociality and the artistic nature of food processes. Functionally, I asked, where did food lie in the creative processes of art makers? 

My project emerged from discovering a relationship between painter Georgia O’Keeffe and poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, both artists in rural New Mexico. Berssenbrugge lives and writes in Abiquiu where she also worked for O’Keeffe, spending weekends at her home sharing meals. My project stemmed from my curiosity about those meals, their contents, and their relations to each artist’s production but specifically poetics. 

In New Mexico, I worked in the Georgia O’Keeffe Archives, reading through O’Keeffe’s cookbooks and understanding her relationship to food. Many are interested in O’Keeffe’s specific domestic order with its custom furniture and features, calling her home her biggest piece of art. She hired staff to cook, garden, and held an interest in nutrition, eating simply, seasonally and peculiarly for her time. Though O’Keeffe has the reputation of being a “maker” she really was just a person with strong preferences, aesthetic sensibility and the ability to pay staff to execute her visions, culinary and otherwise. What were the labor politics of this? 

Meanwhile, in conversation with Bersenbrugge and her literary archives in the Beinecke, food was not discussed as part of the creative process but an inhibitor to it. Berssenbrugge’s papers revealed an incompatibility between writing and food. Her conflicted relationship prevented her from her actual work: poetry. Speaking with Berssenbrugge, I considered her generational and gendered context as a woman tied to the second generation New York School. Perhaps to be taken seriously as a woman writer demanded that one disavow domesticity and prevent a victory of “life” over work. Misogyny dictated the relationship between artistic and domestic labor for many women and perhaps made it difficult for some to see the kitchen as a site of art, transcendence and intellectual rigor.

I then interviewed two creatives from a younger generation, working in both food and art, and organizing experimental gatherings centering both. One was poet and farmer Mallika Singh in Albuquerque and the other, artist and homemaker Tsohil Bhatia from the Red Flower Collective in New York, a food research and eating collective that hosts communal meals in borrowed kitchens. Interested in communal and social art practice, food was central to their conceptions of study, collaboration and politics. 

At the end of all these conversations amidst mesas and over green chile and hours in Beinecke boxes, I tried to situate myself. What conditions enabled me, also a woman and a writer, to see meals as a site of “poetic imagination”, a term I use by way of Robin D. G. Kelley. Kelley likens great poetry to radical politics, naming poetry the effort to see the future in the present and imagine a new society. I came to this project invested in a meal’s ability to do the same, evoking hope, desire and dreams of a more satisfying future. I leave with larger questions about where this orientation itself comes from and who is allowed it. I wonder now, where does poetry come from? Eileen Myles says we write poems from our “metabolism.” Zadie Smith says there is no great difference between writing novels and making banana bread, they are both just things to do. Regardless, food enriches this inquiry. 

We Are What We (Can) Eat? - Exploring Local and Cultural Foodways in Greater New Haven | GFF '23

This post is part of PwintPhyu Nandar’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship.

As I write this, I’m sitting at home in Richmond, California, with my maternal grandmother, who is visiting form Myanmar (Burma). We had spent this morning soaking ocean snails, along with two varieties of seaweed. A few moments ago, we were cleaning the snails to prepare them for tomorrow’s salad. While at home with my grandmother, I’ve helped her pick limes and pea eggplants growing in the front yard. In the back garden, I helped my mom trim back pennywort so it would grow back stronger in its recycling bin home.

Pennywort (above) and pea eggplants (below) from my family’s garden.

These moments are just a few that inspired me to ask how people access their cultural foods in urbanized areas. When I moved away from home to Los Angeles, there were ethnic markets abound, but not ones that carried my favorite vegetable or the correct brand of vermicelli noodles, and especially not ones that were within a few minutes’ drive instead of an hour. In New Haven, I was surprised to live close to Korean, Mexican, and Chinese grocery stores, but unsurprised to see a diverse customer base frequenting them. These experiences helped me formulate my two main questions, serving as the basis of my master’s thesis: (1) what cultural foodways exist in an urban area, specifically Greater New Haven, Connecticut, and (2) how individuals navigate these foodways.

To answer these questions I collected surveys, but most exciting to me, I also asked Greater New Haven residents to take me with them as they make their cultural meal. As such, I’ve visited ethnic markets in the area, such as Indian Farmers Market in Orange, International Market in Bridgeport, G Mart in Milford, and Key Foods (formerly C-Town Town) in Fairhaven. I’ve also visited markets that may seem like they don’t provide cultural foods but do in fact have the necessary ingredients for a cultural meal. These include mainline grocery stores, such as various Stop & Shops, ShopRites, and Aldis, but also organic food stores, such as Edgewood Market in Edgewood (where else, of course?), and Thyme & Season in Hamden. Residents I cooked with showed me their gardens or told me of their families’ garden. When I’m volunteering at the food bank, farmer’s markets, or at an urban farm, fellow volunteers will talk to me about how they share their cultural ingredients and meals with their friends or family.

View of International Farmers Market in Bridgeport from the parking lot.

In this section of International Farmers Market, you can choose the fish you want to buy. My research participant told me to look for fresh fish with round eyes, as opposed to fish with flat eyes.

I’ve also had many a conversation with fellow volunteers and my research participants about how they find themselves at Chinese or Asian grocery stores despite not being Chinese or Asian themselves. I want to make note of these conversations, because it reflects my observations at ethnic markets across Greater New Haven. Whether they may or may not be labeled as catering to a specific population (Indian Farmers Market for example), I’ve noticed these markets serve a diverse clientele, as I and the residents I go with to these stores may not necessarily belong to the population the market supposedly caters to. I’ve gone to the Indian Farmers Market with a Pakistani family. Asia, Africa, and Latin America, for example, are all large continents with a variety of different cultures. So, it’s only fair to say that ethnic markets do not serve monolithic populations, but rather diverse cultures from within the same continent, and across multiple continents. I’ve gone to G-Mart, an Asian market, with a Korean resident, as well as with a Chinese-Vietnamese resident with their Puerto Rican partner. Unsurprisingly, the cultural foodways in Greater New Haven are just as diverse as those who call this metropolitan area their home.

To be literal about my second question regarding how individuals navigate their foodways, there are a variety of ways for Greater New Haven residents to get to their cultural foods and back—driving, biking, taking the bus, or even walking. What I’ve found most important to this navigation and what surprised me the most was access to knowledge. Access to cultural food and access to knowledge are inextricably intertwined. One must know where to go to gather their ingredients (or sometimes who to go to), but more importantly, one must know what ingredients are needed and what to do with them once home from the grocery store, local urban garden, or the farmer’s market. There seems to be a gendered aspect to this knowledge, that I’m excited to delve deeper during my analysis, especially surrounding who passes down the knowledge of how to cook.

Speaking of knowledge, I would not have learned any of this over the summer if it wasn’t for the kindness of Greater New Haven residents. Those I’ve cooked with welcomed a stranger into their homes, let me drive with them to their favorite store, and taught me how to cook a meal that was dear to their heart. They opened up to me, shared stories about their families, and patiently answered my questions over chopping vegetables and spoonfuls of food.

I want to leave off with an anecdote from my first day of volunteering with an urban farm’s wellness program. I walked about two miles to where I thought was the correct location and met a stranger dissembling a structure meant for compost. Not seeing anyone else, I go up to the man to ask where everyone was. He let me know I was probably in the wrong location and after introducing ourselves to each other and telling him about my research, he offered to take me to the right place. Of course, I was hesitant to get into a stranger’s car, but there was a fatherly aura about this man and he seemed more worried about me than anything else. Once in the car, we swap stories about our cultural foods and he stops in front of Key Foods. He insists on buying me ice cream at the little cart called Catch the Flava. The ice cream there is the closest to what he grew up eating in Venezuela, where it was made with a hand-cranked shaved ice machine. “It’s the best ice cream in Connecticut,” he insists. And when I eat it, I’m inclined to believe him. After this stop, it ended up being only a short drive to the correct location. He drops me off, telling me to be careful, and I scamper off with coconut and passionfruit ice cream in hand.

This is the urban garden I was supposed to head to. When I took this picture, later in the summer, it had just rained, so everything is lush and green.

This was one stranger’s kindness, but as I mentioned before, my whole summer was flavored with kindness, week after week. When I do finally draft my thesis, I hope to return the favor by reflecting the care and love I experienced this summer in my writing. 

 

(I am grateful for the Global Food Fellowship, the Mobley Family Environmental Humanities Summer Student Research Grant, and the Williams Internship Fund for supporting my research. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge and thank the following organizations for having me as a volunteer: CitySeed’s Famer Markets, CitySeed’s Sanctuary Kitchen, Gather New Haven’s Farm-Based Wellness Program, and Loaves & Fishes. Lastly, this research could not have been possible without the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Dorceta Taylor.)

Deconstructing Farmworkers’ Invisibility in the U.S. Food System: A Case Study in the American South | GFF '23

This post is part of Bea Portela’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from November 2023 here.

Farmworkers are an invisible, but essential, part of our food system. 2.4 million farmworkers, 68% of which are foreign-born and 44% of which are undocumented, prop up our $1.2 trillion food and agriculture industry (source). This summer, I hoped to pull back the veil on farmworkers and the realities they face, in the hope of better educating myself and others in the Yale community. 

This summer, I worked as an outreach paralegal at an organization called Southern Migrant Legal Services. Based out of Nashville, we provide free legal services to farmworkers across Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The day-to-day of my work in the office involved communicating with clients, writing memos, and contributing to active litigation. 

The other half of my time was spent doing outreach to farmworkers in their rural communities. I was fortunate enough to spend time in the tomato fields and rice plantations of southern Arkansas; catfish farms of the Mississippi Delta; tree nurseries and squash fields of Tennessee’s Sequatchie Valley; and the tomato and strawberry farms in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. But behind the bucolic country roads was a reality that was anything but romantic. The states we serve are among those with the fewest labor protections for farmworkers. Though the South as a region has fewer farmworkers than some other US regions, this lack of workplace protection is still experienced by over 225,000 people (source). 

Rather than being empirical, my research was experiential. I listened and asked questions to learn from the knowledge of my fellow paralegals and attorneys, some of whom have been in the farmworker law field for decades. I learned by speaking with farmworkers on the ground. My research questions were the following: 

  1. What are the sources of farmworker invisibility in the United States? Is it rooted in history, deliberate policy, and/or farmworkers’ own fears? 

  2. What are the challenges facing non-profit organizations serving farmworker populations? 

  3. What are methods and strategies for farmworkers to feel more empowered? 

I cannot go in depth to answer these questions here, but I do have a few takeaways that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. 

The first is that the law, while it’s an incredibly powerful tool, can often be limited by which laws do or do not exist. Farmworkers have been systematically excluded from many federal labor laws meant to protect workers. For example, farmworkers are excluded from overtime pay provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). On small farms with less than seven workers, they’re not entitled to even the federal minimum wage of $7.25. (source) 

To be sure, states can create their own state laws to establish a higher minimum wage, a right to overtime pay, elevated housing standards, or worker’s compensation if injured on the job. However, few, if any, states in the South have crafted these additional state protections. (source) What this means is that legal service providers have less tools in our toolbox to protect workers. We cannot enforce laws that don’t exist. 

Another takeaway is that there are very large and legitimate barriers that keep farmworkers from speaking out against abuse, whether that be through the legal system or not. From my experience, farmworkers fear that if they call out potential violations, they will be fired and/or not rehired by their employers. This is amplified for the many farmworkers who come to the United States through a recruiter who acts as a middleman between the grower/employer and farmworker. Though it is technically illegal, farmworkers are afraid of being blacklisted by these recruiters. Branded as a troublemaker, this blacklisting could keep a worker from getting hired not just at their previous farm, but any farm, in the United States. For farmworkers desperate to provide for their families back home, this is not a risk they’re willing to take. 

My final takeaway is that though it is challenging, the work of farmworker legal service providers is invaluable. I am immensely grateful for the paralegals and attorneys I’ve learned from, all of whom are tireless advocates. By meeting farmworkers where they are, I hope we can bring more dignity to their work by informing workers that we exist to serve them, that they have rights, and that we will work as hard as possible to ensure they’re upheld. 

Endless tomato fields in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of northeastern Tennessee. 

A tree nursery in Middle Tennessee. The ornamental trees and flowers grown in these nurseries end up in garden centers across the country. 

A trailer park in Tennessee, an example of where farmworkers are often housed. 

Nourishing Abolition | Chewing the Fat Event ft. Jalal Sabur and Mike Capers

Warmed by a crackling fire under the Lazarus pavilion and nourished by miso-broth and toasted cinnamon bread, students and community members from all disciplines— the CT BIPOC food network, the Yale School of Drama, Yale School of the Environment, Yale College, the Yale Prison Education Initiative fellowship— gathered as the sun set over Edwards Street after a 60-degree day, to learn more about Sweet Freedom Farm.

On Thursday, November 16th, YSFP had the honor of hosting Jalal Sabur and Mike Capers of Sweet Freedom Farm for a Chewing The Fat event. The event was co-hosted by the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.

“Grow Food Not Prisons,” opened Jalal and Mike’s slide deck, as the two began the workshop discussing the intersections of Black land sovereignty and prison abolition. Sweet Freedom's namesake comes from the farm’s maple sugaring practices, which has long been an alternative to cane sugar, sugar whose production historically and presently relies on enslaved labor. Jalal and Mike explained Sweet Freedom’s mission “to positively impact people who are negatively impacted” by the prison-industrial complex, in order to create healing “on both sides of the fence.”

So, how can an abolition framework be actualized? Jalal and Mike elucidated their theory of change, which constitutes “builders, warriors, and weavers,” and layed out four pillars of abolition: divestment from the prison system, investment and nourishment, repair and resilience, and Black land sovereignty.

While Jalal and Mike shared personal and professional experiences throughout their presentation to visualize modes of abolition, their presentation was rooted in the long legacy of abolitionist history. A slide depicted a painting where we could see a pair of hands and a head being braided and wrapped in green leaves and vines. If you look closer, one can see literal seeds being braided into the hair. Jalal shared that the painting is used at Soul Fire Farm, and references that when enslaved people were abducted to the United States, people would braid seeds in their hair, carrying the resources for nourishment across continents. People who were enslaved, Jalal notes, had immense knowledge of the lands they were being taken from.

Photos of Freedom Fighters such as Harriet Tubman soon followed. A photo of Malcom X with his quote “Land is the basis for all Freedom, justice and equality,” projected under the Lazarus Pavilion as Jalal and Mike discussed how land sovereignty and food access has played and continue to play an integral role in Black freedom movements across generations, from Tubman to incarcerated Black Panthers to Sweet Freedom Farm.

Sweet Freedom Farm is located in Germantown, NY. Germantown is located in the Hudson Valley, a majority-white and affluent area. Jalal and Mike emphasized how the Farm’s very existence is powerful, working to normalize the presence of Black farmers in the area.

As of 2022, one percent of farms are owned by Black farmers in the United States, but that was not always the case. Jalal and Mike shared historical legislation during the Nixon administration’s infamous War on Drugs that increased both industrial farming and the prison industrial systems: the number of small farms in these years went down, the number of Americans in prison skyrocketed. Mike also noted that as he was pursuing his Associate’s Degree through the Bard Prison Initiative, he learned just how much tax money goes to benefit the prison industrial complex, and began to understand how food and health care access is tied to incarceration rates in neighborhoods in New York.

The prison industrial complex affects both those inside and outside prisons; Sweet Freedom distributes fresh produce to the families of people who are incarcerated and engages impacted communities in education about abolition and land sovereignty, informing the next generation of farmers. Sweet Freedom used to supply produce packages to be brought inside prison facilities by family members. However, in 2022, New York banned bringing fresh produce inside, limiting parcels to vendors certified by the Department of Correction; huge price hikes on produce made those products largely inaccessible for families and inmates. For example, a mango that might cost $.99 in the grocery store is $4.50 through the prison vendor. After this policy change, Sweet Freedom pivoted to movement work, participating in advocacy to get the state to reverse the ban. Simultaneously, the group pivoted towards abolition education for affected communities and providing for families impacted by the prison system.

After the slide presentation, participants —which included undergraduates, New Haven and Connecticut community members, and program participants with Sweet Freedom— had the opportunity to talk about their personal understandings of abolition and connect about their work and ideas.

Much gratitude to Jalal and Mike, the YUPP coordinators, the YSFP coordinators, and everyone who came to the Old Acre on a chilly fall night.

Photos from the event by Kavya Jain ‘25 can be found here.

Alumni Interviews | Joshua Evans ’12

You might know that miso is tasty. But did you know that it can contain never-before-seen forms of life? In the latest installment of our alumni interview series, Joshua Evans ’12 shares these and other findings from a decade in food research. A former Events and Farm Manager at the YSFP, Evans journeyed from New Haven to Copenhagen to explore fermentation and entomophagy at the Nordic Food Lab. Now, as director of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group at the Danish Technical University's Center for Biosustainability, he combines culinary research and development, natural sciences, environmental humanities, and more to explore how we might create a more sustainable and delicious food system. 

This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the world of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.


Let’s start at the beginning: where does your interest in food and food research come from?

It goes back to a lot of experiences in my childhood. I grew up in Canada, on Vancouver Island. My dad grew up in Northern Ontario, where there's not a lot of people. Instead, there's a lot of lakes and a lot of space. He grew up fishing and hunting for ducks. Through him, I remember having some profound early experiences, like catching my first rainbow trout. It was just me and him, in a canoe on a lake, early in the morning, and the sky was the same color as the skin of the rainbow trout. I remember him showing me how to hit the trout on the head the right way to kill it well. It was an encounter with the immediacy of taking life, and that being necessary for our own life. The question, at least for me, was less about whether to take life or not — because to persist we must — and more about how to do it well: a question of quality. There were other experiences that I had, fishing with him or picking wild blackberries or hanging around the garden growing up. I always had this sense of glimpsing something that was deeply meaningful. I didn't really understand why, but I felt it.

That explicit understanding only came later, in my teenage years, when I started reading books on food and agriculture by Michael Pollan and others. Suddenly I gained a language for making sense of those profound encounters with these larger webs of life, and how eating necessarily tied me to those. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to and ultimately chose Yale, because in the late 2000s, there weren't so many universities that had on-campus farms, and even fewer that had programming around them. The YSFP was the place where I felt like it was possible to explore all the different connections that food had to all these different disciplines in a way that felt really valuable and rare. 

After graduating, I moved to Copenhagen to do culinary research and development with the restaurant Noma through their Nordic Food Lab. It was a place that was deliberately set up to be between the academic world and the restaurant industry, to bring together people from these different worlds to explore the flavors and edible biodiversity of the Nordic region. There, especially through a big research project on insect gastronomy around the world, I became really interested in how different knowledge systems interact or fail to. So much of what we were doing — with the insects, with wild plants, with adapting traditional fermentations — inevitably came back to the synergies and the tensions between scientific knowledge and more traditional knowledge systems. That's what led me to study history & philosophy of science and science & technology studies in grad school. And that's what brought me to where I am now, where I have this research group in Copenhagen. We're using transdisciplinary culinary research and development to not just make new products, but to envision more diverse, sustainable ways of eating. We’re trying to use food innovation as a way to connect to and strengthen traditions rather than make them obsolete or somehow be in conflict with them.


Your online description of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group mentions all these interconnected food systems challenges — diversity, knowledge privatization, nutrition — and at the end of that list, you include blandness. How do taste and blandness fit into the bigger picture of these food systems challenges that you're trying to address?

I very deliberately put blandness alongside these other grand challenges as something that demands, I think, equal attention and urgency. I am of course not the first to call attention to this — Slow Food for example has been doing so for decades now — but in many circles, it's still really radical to propose that lack of flavor is correlated with lack of diversity, or that monoculture flavor is necessarily related to the monoculture that we see in agroecology and in our diets. Particularly at Nordic Food Lab, after visiting farmers and fermenters and food producers around the world, I started to notice certain patterns. Even though they can be in wildly different places and use wildly different methods, I've noticed — again, not as the first by any means, but another voice adding to the choir — that the most arresting, complex flavors often arise in contexts that are more diverse. They are structured by a certain orientation to the world. It's not about control. It's also not about being totally hands off. It's something in between. It's something more like tinkering: being involved, pretending neither to be masterful nor absolved. So following that kind of flavor will often lead us to cultivate those kinds of relationships with other species and those kinds of systems of farming or food production. 

This ‘in-between’ way of relating to other forms of life is something I've noticed with a lot of fermenters in particular. Maybe it’s something about our relationship with microbes — how tractable, how close to hand, but also how indirect those relationships are. Many microbes are not immediately visible, but they're sensible through their effects. Of course, there are many different ways of approaching fermentation. A more industrial way is predicated on as much control as possible. You can also be too hands off. If you're too hands off, then it just becomes rot.


I have a number of friends brewing kombucha under their bed who I think are maybe a little too close to that end of the spectrum.

And that’s cool! I’m all for experimenting, and far from it for me to tell anyone how they ‘should’ ferment or not — that’s definitely not what I’m talking about. But I think we've all tasted kombucha which is basically just vinegar, and it's not the most pleasant experience. I also don't think it's the most nuanced or rarefied or beautiful expression of what kombucha can be, because if you go too far in that direction, all kombucha just becomes acetic acid. That’s a good example of where there is a correlation between this in-between sweet spot of flavor and a kind of in-between ethics and politics of agency. I think there's a more general lesson in there about how to interact with other species. 


What you're saying about tinkering and exploring the limits of human control makes a lot of sense as someone coming from a researcher's perspective. What is the role of research in shaping a more sustainable and equitable and delicious food system? 

I think research can be a really powerful tool for supporting the kinds of transitions we want to see in food and agriculture. But of course, it doesn't necessarily do that. Most research in food is based in or adjacent to industry. That’s not to vilify industry entirely, because industry can also be variegated; but only to say that research is not necessarily transformative. However, I think we can be deliberate and try to design our research in a way that is as supportive of transformation as possible. For example, much of our work with fermentation involves DNA sequencing and metabolomics: high-tech stuff that can give us valuable knowledge, but that can also cost a lot of money. It's the sort of analysis that most traditional or DIY food producers don't have access to. I'm really interested in what happens if we give those tools to fermenters and food producers and say, ‘What would you like to know about the microbes that you work with? How can we design experiments together that can create knowledge that can actually feed back into your craft-based process? Can we use some of this high-tech science and interdisciplinary research not to help industry earn more profit, but to help other kinds of producers continue and deepen their practice that is more oriented towards diversity?’ For me, that’s one kind of research — inclusive, participatory, open-ended — that can help shape a more sustainable, equitable, and delicious food system.


I saw the paper that came out last month from the Sustainable Food Innovation Group about microbes and novel misos. Was that approach at play in the design of the study?

Yes! That paper comes out of my PhD, the seed of which comes from the work we were doing at Nordic Food Lab. At that time we were starting to develop what we might call ‘translated’ fermentations: combining techniques from different parts of the world with local ingredients, in the same way we might translate a book from one language into another, to make something that is old and new at the same time. One of the first fermentations we developed at Nordic Food Lab — shoutout to my old colleague Lars Williams who made it — was a miso using pearl barley kōji and yellow peas, whereas traditionally in Japan it would be based on soybeans and rice. So it's definitely a miso, but it had this very un-Japanese, very Nordic taste because of the peas — something that, if you’re a Dane, your grandmother might have served you cooked into a stew. As I learned more about the microbiology behind what we were doing, and how quickly microbes can adapt to new environments, it appeared likely to me that the chefs I was working with weren't just creating new flavors, which was their goal, but that they might also be bringing new forms of life into the world without even realizing it or trying to. We didn’t quite have the capacity at Nordic Food Lab to answer that kind of question ourselves, so in my PhD, I wanted to bring the scientific resources I had access to back to my culinary colleagues to study these novel, ‘translated’ fermentations together. We decided to use DNA sequencing to see, if we vary the substrates using the same recipe, does that lead to different microbial ecologies, maybe even new evolutionary lineages, new species or subspecies or strains, niches for new biodiversity? The short answer is yes — but of course, there's more complexity to it. For anyone who's interested, I can recommend reading the paper, and we have more papers coming out soon going deeper into this topic.


You’ve mentioned how your time at the YSFP shaped your future trajectory. How did the YSFP change the way you think about food? Were there moments on the Farm that felt like important transitions for you? 

There were so many moments of learning in and around the Farm for me. It’s hard to point to any single one; I think it was more about the process or the rhythm. I joined the YSFP as an events intern at the start of my sophomore year, continuing for the rest of my time at Yale, and I was also a farm manager in my senior year. Friday afternoons became this ritual special time at the end of the week. I would notice how the same dough recipe would change as the season got cooler and then warmed up again in the spring. I would notice all the interlocking seasons for the different crops as they would appear and then bloom and fade from the pizzas. Somehow the pizzas became this prism — one could see the distillation of the land around us in this little circumference of dough. If there’s one thing I think of with my time at the YSFP, I think of this feeling of process and overlapping rhythms that extend in time, all of those movements and changes in the land over multiple years, and noticing how our tastes and practices of care shaped and were in turn shaped by that land. That reciprocity has shaped how I approach cooking, how I approach research, and why I’ve gone on to do what I have.

Animacy, Agency, and Agroforestry | knead 2 know ft. Rebecca Salazar '26

Although the morning was gray and overcast, blue skies emerged from behind the clouds for our final workday of the semester. Students, too, departed from dorm rooms and libraries to gather on the Farm one last time before winter arrives. Half the group took shovels to aging Halloween pumpkins, slicing and dicing the gourds into rich material for our compost pile. Other students spent a meditative hour breaking up garlic heads and sowing the cloves, laying the groundwork for next year's pizza toppings. Many breaks were taken to enjoy carrots fresh from the field, their sweetness amplified by the first frost of the season.

Students then climbed up the hill for a slightly heartier snack, as the pizza team served up pies topped with peppers, squash, and all sorts of delicious vegetables. While they ate, they listened to a fascinating knead 2 know by Lazarus Summer Intern and Native American Cultural Center and YSFP Seedkeeper and Programs Liaison Rebecca Salazar '26. Salazar's talk, delivered in partnership with the NACC’s Henry Roe Cloud Conference, focused on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and plant spirits as shown through the Three Sisters of squash, beans, and corn. 

Salazar explained that Eurocentric academic language not only obscures the purpose of practices like shifting cultivation but also misses the spiritual significance of Indigenous knowledge and foodways. She added that using terms like “Abya Yala,” which in the Kuna language means “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood,” “presents an ideological resistance to nationalist terms like ‘America’ and reaffirms the view of a unified continent which has its own life and spirit.” 

Salazar then articulated how "animacy, agency, and agroforestry" are intertwined through the cultivation of the Three Sisters and the milpa crop-growing system. She described the co-evolution between plants and people as “symbiosis,” not “domestication.” She detailed the history of this co-evolution, its role in Indigenous cosmology, and the medicinal, nutritional, ecological, and political benefits of milpa agriculture. For example, intercropping reduces erosion, while polycultures tend to produce more energy and thus greater food security. Milpa also offers a space for Indigenous resistance to colonization, as well as respect and acceptance for women who face discrimination in neoliberal markets. For more information on Salazar’s research, listen to her podcast reflecting on her summer as a Lazarus Summer Intern. 
After the knead 2 know, attendees warmed their hands around the fire pit, enjoyed hot apple cider and cake in celebration of the NACC's tenth anniversary, and watched a beautiful sunset while listening to School of Music professor Ian MacMillen and his band, Scrimshaw Foes. We thank Salazar for leading such an insightful talk and all the attendees who gathered with us for one last workday. Photos from the event by Reese Neal ’25 are available here.

Farmworkers' Rights, Marimbas, and Dancing in the Moonlight | knead 2 know ft. Bea Portela '24

There was a fantastic turnout at the Friday workday and all the tasks were completed in record time. Not only did students tidy up multiple different tunnels around the Farm, they also raked fallen leaves, removed hops vines, and turned the compost. All in all, it was a highly productive session and we are super grateful for the wonderful sense of community throughout the day. 

It was then time for Global Food Fellow Bea Portela '24 to present her knead 2 know. Through her summer internship at Southern Migrant Legal Services, Portela immersed herself in the advocating process via direct outreach to farmworkers. “They don’t really know about our services,” says Portela, “so it’s up to us to reach out to them and tell them that we exist.” As part of her outreach, Portela got the opportunity to travel to a lot of beautiful places in the south. However, with various ‘private property’ and ‘no trespassing’ signs around the farms, work was both beautiful and challenging. Portela shared with us that working and living conditions of farmworkers were not ideal. Many homes were left unfinished. Some farmworkers lived in makeshift barracks and cramped conditions. Portela believed that it was important for people to understand the conditions that farmworkers were living with, in order to emphasize the importance of giving farmworkers the support they need and reaching out to them. 

The farmworkers she talked to were not always receptive due to understandable reasons like fear of retaliation and potential for job blacklisting. If a farmer is not efficient in their work, Portela noted, word can get around the recruiters who have contacts with each other, effectively preventing the farmworker from getting hired anywhere in the United States. Portela with the outreach team ultimately tried a new outreach strategy towards the end of her internship that she calls “the tentacle approach”, which essentially meant that the legal aids were  talking not only to farm workers but also people in the community connected with them including family and friends, former employees, community leaders, local immigration advocates, and more. This, while Portela experienced only once, already proved to be very successful and a more effective way to do outreach.

Afterward, the Yale Marimband performed for the first time on the Yale Farm. There was nothing quite like it: attendees got up and danced as fun rhythms rang through the air. Cheers and laughter ended the day on a high note, marking the performance a resounding hit. Intercultural Moonlight Stories the same night was also a success. With s’mores, hot chocolate, tea, and a campfire warming everyone up in the chilly night, we witnessed so much talent from singing to poetry reading to kazoos to group performances and more under the moonlight. The group cheered each other on in a supportive, intimate atmosphere. 

In accordance with daylight savings ending, the next (and last!) knead 2 know of the semester on Friday, November 10th will start at 3:30 PM EST. Lazarus Summer Intern Rebecca Salazar will be talking about her podcast episode titled “The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency”. The event will be in collaboration with the Henry Roe Cloud Conference timed with the 10th year celebration of the Yale Native American Cultural Center. 

Photos by Reese Neal '25 from this past week’s knead 2 know can be found here.

Fall Feast

What a day October 27 was on the farm! Our annual Indigenous Fall Feast could not have been met with better weather. The meal — three sisters succotash, wild rice salad, beet poke, sunflower chia pudding, white cap cornbread, oh my — was sourced from the Old Acre, local vendors, and Indigenous producers in Hawaii and Turtle Island. Producers included Massaro Community Farm, Mexican Amaranth, Noh Foods of Hawai’i, Romona’s American Indian Foods, Red Lake Nation Foods, Schoolyard Sugarbush, Séka Hills, and Sweetgrass Trading Co.

The event honored the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, grown on the Farm and gifted by Abenaki Seedkeeper Liz Charlebois, and served as a celebration of Indigenous foodways.

It was such a joy to see the community come together and to watch conversations over beautiful food, warmed by the setting sun on a picnic blanket, last into the evening. Our Native American Cultural Center Seedkeepers and Programs Liasons Emerson Harris '26 and Rebecca Salazar '26 welcomed us to the feast, explaining the significance of the three sisters as a means of resisting American settler colonialism. Salazar and Harris offered a poignant critique of Yale’s land acknowledgment and spoke of indigenous resistance to dispossession. To learn more about the history, meaning, and utility of the Three Sisters, listen to Salazar’s podcast, “The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency,” produced this summer as part of the Lazarus Summer Internship The podcast can be found here. Salazar will also be presenting her summer research at our last knead 2 know of the semester, on November 10th.

The line for the feast commenced after the land acknowledgment and gratitude to the organizers was shared. Soon, groups spread across the hill, sitting on picnic blankets while student performers Pilar Bylinsky '25 and Ryan Bibb '25 sounds spread throughout the Old Acre.

After all the cornbread was consumed, the evening concluded with Semilla Collective's Jarocho performance group Son Chaneques Rebeldes.

Conversation, in the Lazarus Pavillion and on picnic blankets spread on the hill, lasted late into the evening, augmented by the beautiful setting fall sun. Students were able to take a piece of Fall Feast home in ʻōlena-dyed cotton gift satchels, which contained rattlesnake beans, white cap corn, buffalo creek squash, hawaiian pink salt, and dried ʻōlena.

Many thanks to the Native American Cultural Center, the Native and Indigenous Students Association at Yale, and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Department for co-sponsoring this event. Photos from the event by Reese Neal '25 can be accessed here.

Oysters and Sunshine | knead 2 know ft. Elizabeth Chivers '26

Friday, October 13th saw a bright sunny sky, which supercharged a very productive workday at the Yale Farm. Among merry chatter people uncovered sweet potatoes, strung red pepper ristras, and harvested basil in large buckets. In the midst of mid autumn stress, workday participants also dyed strips of fabric into a dye bath of turmeric powder and ʻŌlena. Soon the fabric will be knitted together and strung up into a garland to adorn the Lazarus Pavilion during the Indigenous Fall Feast later this month. After a full fall workday, everyone made their way to the pavilion afterwards to listen to the Friday talk by Yale sophomore Elizabeth Chivers ’26. 

Chivers was a Lazarus Summer Intern this summer who undertook independent research over the summer about the dynamics of change, relationships, and industry in the Point Judith Pond Oyster Farms with the goal of answering one question: “What are the defining practices and economics of Southern Rhode Island’s oyster aquaculture?” She conversed with three local farmers on-the-ground to hear their experiences on practices, as well as how the practices have changed in response to global warming over the years. 

Among the interviewees was Harvey Cataldo, founder and owner of Bluff Hill Cove Oyster Company. The primary method used by their farm is the floating bag system, where the mechanisms are spread out horizontally over the ocean’s surface. Chivers also added discussion about how climate change has impacted the industry from the point of view of people constantly engaged in it, highlighting to the audience how global warming results in higher water temperatures, which in turn leads to higher bacteria growth in the sea. This results in a higher likelihood of people getting sick from seafood, a challenge that those in the oyster industry have had to face more and more urgently in recent years. Another interviewee was Chris Morris, a fisherman and a lifelong resident of Rhode Island, who discussed his first-hand observations of oyster farming throughout his many years as an active member. His individual perspective provided a complementary contrast to Cataldo’s larger-scale one. The third interviewee was Mick Chivers, a college student receiving mentorship from Cataldo and Morris as someone new to the industry. The intensive interview-based project drew observations in three primary realms, namely the changes oyster farms have noted from warming sea waters, the relationships between people in the industry, and how technology and policy have shaped the industry as we know it today. 

Chivers’ personal connection to her research project led to a high-impact presentation, which was then followed by inspiring and thoughtful conversation as The New Blue a cappella group performed. Read her Voices post recapping more of her project here. Pizza and concord grapes made their way through the crowd as the sun began to set. 

Photos from the event by Elio Wentzel ’26 and Arrow Zhang ’26 can be found here. 

Poetry, Food, and Archives | knead 2 know feat. Kavya Jain '25

Here at the Yale Sustainable Food Program, we like to think we go against the grain — but sometimes, that means working with the grain. On Friday, October 6, students started on a batch of Yale Ale using malted barley and hops from the Old Acre. If all goes according to plan, the mixture will ferment into a delicious brew over the next few weeks (by the time you’re reading this, spoiler alert: it did). While some students stirred the pot inside the propagation house, others sowed heirloom wheat and rye seeds in the fields. The rye will be harvested next July as part of the Yale Summer Session course “Rye: Cultural History and Embodied Practice” (co-taught by farm manager Jeremy Oldfield and Maria Trumpler).

Students then washed their hands and turned their attention to a different carbohydrate: pizza. While they enjoyed the delicious pies topped with apples, eggplant, and everything in between, they listened to a fascinating presentation by Global Food Fellow Kavya Jain '25.

Jain’s fellowship was inspired by a project for the class “Poets and their Papers.” While exploring the archives of poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in the Beinecke Library, Jain found an exhibition guide from the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Jain learned that Berssenbrugge was a friend of O’Keeffe’s and regularly shared meals with her. She set out to explore how meals function as a site of poetic imagination, traveling to rural New Mexico to interview Berssenbrugge directly.

The initial conversation with Berssenbrugge was disappointing for Jain. The poet expressed hostility toward Jain’s project, failing to see the connection between food and art. In many of her papers, too, Berssenbrugge implies that the two are in conflict, expressing anxiety over her body and suggesting that devoting effort to food takes energy away from writing. 

Although Jain found the interview difficult, her further work helped her make sense of the conversation. After reading the book Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions and talking with New Mexican poet and farmer Mallika Singh, Jain saw how gender and generation might have shaped her and Berssenbrugge’s relationship with food in different ways. 

As the summer progressed, Jain also started to reframe her research question. She held a Zoom call with a member of the Red Flower Collective, an art and research collective that explores queer and diasporic identities through home cooking. The conversation led her to ask not only how food exists in poetry archives, but also how poetics might serve to archive food practices. Upon returning to New Haven, she hosted her own archive-making meal, asking friends to respond to the poem “Peanut Butter” by Eileen Myles and to reinterpret the evening’s menu in a way that aspired to abstraction, not perfection. 

Jain ended the presentation with an exhortation to “eat, read poems, and keep your papers” — useful reminders for us all. Fittingly, we had the Yale Song Writing Collective have their members perform original songs while we continued to think about poetry and eat pizza. We thank Jain for her insightful presentation and everyone who gathered on the Farm to hear it. Photos of the workday and knead 2 know by Reese Neal '25 are available here. 

Fair Trade Debunked | LSI '23

This post is part of Jasmine Jones’ 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

From the beginning, I knew that I would use this summer as an opportunity to delve into my longstanding interest in the Fair Trade movement as a gateway to ethical business. However, little did I know that I would end up “debunking” the Fair Trade model. My guiding question throughout my research was “In a global trade system faced with inhumane labor exploitation and environmental destruction, what have been the main approaches to conducting ethical business?” My perception and understanding of the word Fair Trade have transformed these past few months and pushed me to question what I value in an ethical business. 

At the start of this project, I simply wanted to focus on consumer education and spreading the word about Fair Trade labels and the impactful work they are doing for laborers and the environment. However, somewhere along the line, I discovered criticisms of Fair Trade and how this was leading to emerging counter initiatives. I eventually found it more fitting to take apart the word “Fair Trade” and discuss what these labels mean, their origins, importance, effectiveness, criticisms, and the overall global response. There is a lot to tackle with 400 plus Fair Trade labels. Therefore, I found it most effective to structure my project as first, a general introduction to what Fair Trade is and its history that concerns discussions of colonialism, industrialization, and consumer consciousness. I followed with a discussion of why Fair Trade is important through an analysis of 6 key standards of the certification (Price Floor, Premium, Stability & Credit, Working Conditions, Institutional Structure, and Environmental Protection). Then, I discussed the economics of Fair Trade and Development Economics as a reminder that Fair Trade and its partners all abide by the realities of global trade. Following this I looked into 5 key areas of criticism for Fair Trade including Inefficient Positive Economic Impact, Market Inequalities, Certification Exclusion, Label Fatigue, and Greenwashing. Furthermore, I pursued case studies in the organization Fairtrade International and the company McDonald’s as a comparative analysis of a third-party verifying organization versus an independent company with self-certification standards. In the end, instead of reaching a definitive conclusion on the Fair Trade model, I developed visions for the future to expand the Fair Trade movement. By addressing wants, incentives, and accountability for both Fair Trade and independent company Green Standards, there will be progress toward addressing the flaws in the global exchange of goods.

Overall, with this “debunk” I exposed new approaches to look at Fair Trade and areas for improvement. However, I still plan to support Fair Trade as it is the most reputable on a large scale. I am excited to see how this movement evolves in the future and to reach the ultimate goal of welfare and transparency in ethical business. 

You can view my slides here!

The Effects of the Old Acre’s Hill on Its Soil | LSI '23

This post is part of Pete Muhitch’s 2023 O’Donohue Summer Fellowship.

The Yale Farm’s slope uniquely impacts both its above-ground management and the structure and properties of the soil that lies beneath. Along the farm’s hill, are a series of berms running north to south. The berms, consisting of a wonderful variety of perennial herbs and flowers, are in place to mitigate runoff, erosion, and leaching, and carve out a flatter surface for crop production. Pictured below is a map and picture of the farm from the perspective of the path between beds 2U and MAPLE. The yellow lines highlight the elevation change of the land, while the blue lines highlight the berms. 

On its own small scale, the Old Acre slope and its terraces tie the Yale Farm into a global history of farming on hillsides. Indeed numerous societies across the world have employed terracing techniques to transform thin-soiled slopes into soils viable for agriculture. A cursory wikipedia search offers rice farming in mountainous areas of Vietnam as one prime example. 

Topography is a major factor of a given soil’s development. As biological, chemical, and physical processes weather a parent rock (in the case of the Yale Farm, a reddish sandstone called New Haven Arkose) into soil, gravity can transport soil particles depending on an area's topography. Pictured below is a slide adapted from a presentation from Scott Fendorf PhD, a Stanford University soil scientist. This topography principle suggests that soils at the base of a slope tend to be deeper and wetter, as a result of the leaching and accumulation of fine-particle clays from the upper parts of the slopes. Soils on a slope, therefore, will be shallower and more rich in heavier sand particles, and resultantly are well drained. 

With a historic and scientific backdrop of hillside farming, this project aims to study what effects, if any, the slope has yield on the farm’s soil in varying locations. Acknowledging my own lack of expertise in soil science, to the best of my abilities, the goals of this project were to (1) determine the chemical and physical properties of the Yale Farm soil, (2) determine any variance in soil properties versus soil position on the slope, and (3) determine any variance between cultivated and uncultivated soils. In pursuit of accomplishing these goals, I was able to practice soil field analysis techniques, offer scientific suggestions for patterns in the soils, and further inform one thread of the farm’s narrative (its hill!) with data collected. 

A series of four holes were dug to study these thoughts. Though more holes would increase the accuracy of the project, at a certain point too many holes would be beyond the scope of the project (digging is laborious and impractical for the farm). The location of each hole is denoted with an ‘X’ in the map above. Each site was selected to form a line down the hillside, in order to compare the soil at various points along the slope. A hole was additionally dug in field 2M to discover the effects twenty years of agriculture has had on the soil there, compared to the rest of the hill around it. At each site, the soil’s horizons, depth, texture, aggregation, relative wetness, color, and nutrient content was assessed. Texture was determined using the wire method; the Munsell soil color guidebook was used to determine color and aggregation; samples of the near-surface soil of each site were collected and sent to the University of Connecticut soil nutrient laboratory for analysis. Below are the physical results of the project. 

Hill, 41.32041 N, 72.92198 W:

The soil at the hill site consisted of a sandy, well drained, reddish soil (increasing numbers before YR in the color column denotes a change in hue from red to yellow, i.e lower numbers before YR mean a redder hue). After around 26 inches of digging, I reached what I refer to (throughout this project) as the soil’s BC horizon. Though not quite a C horizon of unconsolidated rock, the BC horizon still largely contains soil particles, but is significantly rockier (and more annoying to dig) than the B horizon that lies above. At the risk of oversimplification, I will describe basic soil horizons: an O horizon consists of organic matter and detritus at the surface of the ground; an A horizon is the uppermost soil level, typically high in organic matter and home to plant roots; the B horizon is found below the A, and is lower in organic matter but higher in rock derived nutrients, which are weathered from the C horizon; the C horizon is unconsolidated rock material, just starting to be weathered in soil. Beneath the C horizon is rock. Texture and color changes commonly denote a change in horizon. 

Upper farm, 41.32036 N, 72.92130 W:

The upper farm hole was the most difficult and confusing hole of the project. The soil there is very compacted, sandy (to the point I could not form a ball for the texture test), and shallow. After 28 inches of hard digging, I reached what I believed to be a C layer of solid, impenetrable red rock. This soil presented the same red hue as the hill site.

Field 2M, 41.32036 N, 72.92132 W:

Field 2M yielded a greater clay content than the two higher dig locations. This included a Bt horizon, referring to a translocation, or leaching, of clay to the B horizon of more than 20% increase from the upper horizon. 2M is also deeper (requiring 33 inches of digging before the BC layer was reached) and of a more yellow hue than the upper locations. The relative moisture of this site is altered by the field’s irrigation, resulting in a very dry surface soil, but wetter in the more clay-rich deeper regions. 

Lower farm, 41.32036 N, 72.92133 W:

The most clay rich soil was found at the lowest dig site, which aligns with the topography principle of soil formation. This hole had the same yellow-ish hue of 2M, but required more than 43 inches of digging before any semblance of a BC horizon was reached. As a result of its clay content, it was the moistest soil of the project as well. 

Overall physical results: 

**relative wetness affected by irrigation schedules 

The principle of topography and resulting soil properties largely hold true on the old acre. Lower dig sites tended to yield wetter, deeper, more clay rich soils, while the upper two sites were sandier, shallower, and drier. The upper farm site does preclude the farm from perfectly following the topography principle, with abnormally shallow and coarse for its slope position. This could be due to leaching from the slope it is on, but also could be a result of other factors, such as the berm lying above it trapping erosion from the upper slope, or the many tree roots that surround it. Another perennial possibility is that the land was altered by unbeknownst human activity. Upper soils also tended to be redder. I offer the following explanation: soil color is largely determined by the predominant oxidation state of the soil’s iron. Given the difference in moisture and other physical properties of the upper and lower dig sites, the iron oxidation could be likewise different, explaining the color difference. 

The topography principle also has implications for a soil’s nutrient content. Nutrient leaching will often occur on slopes as a result of runoff, causing nutrients to settle at the bottom of a hill. Moreover, clays and organic matter, also more abundant at a hill’s base, generally have a greater capacity to hold nutrients due to greater particle surface area.

Hill: 

Upper Farm:

2M:

Lower Farm:

Overall there does appear to be a greater concentration of nutrients, and a higher pH, at the base of the hill on the farm. While it is possible that this is due in part to topography and the accumulation of clay there, it is likely because the soils of the farm have been affected by 20 years of fertilization and lime application. It is therefore clear that years of farming has drastically increased the soil’s fertility and improved its pH. These improvements appear to not be limited to the field 2M, the only site currently being cultivated, but extend to the other on-farm sites (upper and lower farm holes). This could be a result of leaching of fertilizer, or due to an accumulation of nutrients at the base of the steeped part of the hill. Regardless, the data shows a greater nutrient content, pH, cation exchange capacity, and base saturation in the three on-farm soils tested in contrast to the hill site. 

Revisiting the goals of the project, the four holes dug largely appear to uphold the topography principle of soil formation, as the project does show a trend of deeper, more clay rich and fertile soils at the base of the hill. Cultivated soils also tend to be more fertile and higher in pH, but this does not appear to be localized to beds that are currently being cultivated. Personally, it was great fun to get dirty, dig some holes, and practice some soil science techniques while investigating this unique characteristic of the Yale farm. 

Dynamics of Change, Relationships, and Industry; Point Judith Pond Oyster Farmers’ Reflections | LSI '23

This post is part of Elizabeth Chiver’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

I grew up with four brothers in Rhode Island, where we were raised by two distinctively wise parents who loved teaching us. One central part of this education-rich upbringing was the way we explored and strengthened the capacity to sustain ourselves and others using the land and sea surrounding our home. We dug, weeded, raked, fed, harvested, and caught in the blooming backyard, shallow salt ponds, messy coops, and open ocean that I call home. It was a vein of my life that so wholly centered a meaningful ethos and community. Ths vein is even more present in the experiences of my father and many of his friends, who engage with these practices on an industry level. The understandings and ways of learning cultivated by growing up in this context have been deeply defining to my personhood and perspective. When I was offered the opportunity to delve into a food-related topic for my independent project, I knew I wanted to return to my home state and communities, centering the breadth of experience, knowledge, and sovereignty that food producers in the area possess. One industry that particularly interested me was the oyster aquaculture industry, which is blossoming, sustainable, and local in ways inherent to its product and contexts. I decided to conduct interviews with oyster farmers who work in the Point Judith Salt Pond and ended up centering three–Chris Morris, Harvey Cataldo, and Mick Chivers–who all share common connections. I wanted this to be guided by their voices and reflections, rather than preconceived vision, so my research question was loose, asking “what are the defining practices and economics of Southern Rhode Island’s oyster aquaculture?” 

I headed to the salt pond a few times, each day with a list of questions and an open mind. Standing on the docks, we looked over the gear and bags as each of the interviewees reflected broadly on their skills, contexts, and work. The focus shifted; as I conducted my interviews with these farmers, I noticed the topics that kept cropping up and the threads that connected them to one another. I was left with hours of recorded interviews rich with parallels and intersections going far deeper and beyond just “defining practices and economics.” Those were certainly central aspects of the conversation, but I noticed that the reflections and memories shared in the interviews were defined by three core dynamics – change, relationships, and industry. Further, one relationship in particular stuck out as a root for each person’s connection to the work – that with brother, fisherman, mentor, and lifelong Rhode Islander Tom Hoxsie, who passed away in 2021. With this in mind, I opted to write an account of what was pertinent and omnipresent throughout these interviews, with the aim of highlighting the knowledge and recollections of these three different individuals, with their varied positionalities and perspectives.

My final project takes the form of a written piece. On an academic level, it provided me an opportunity to attempt new ways of learning and sharing information in a way that was true to the interviewees that first held and shared it. The project involved learning to utilize new technology, conducting dynamic interviews, responding to a depth of information, and synthesizing different but overlapping voices into an informative, truthful piece. The material and experience garnered throughout this project is thanks to the farmers who shared their labor and minds with me and my Sony recorder. The gift of their rich voices enables so much further thought on what the food and fishing industry looks like, particularly at this personal scale. It is clear that relationships to land and sustenance (of self, of community, of climate) are vital ones, as seen in their experiences, in my childhood, and wherever people grow and eat. 

This writing is linked here (in progress). It centers the knowledge and memory expressed by these farmers, with the aim of accurately recording these practitioners' reflections on their defining practices and experiences of the industry, one which lends itself well to sustainability, growth, and small-scale ownership.


Additionally, the slides I used for my presentation are linked here.


The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency | LSI '23

This post is part of Rebecca Salazar’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

A bit on creating a podcast episode for my independent project: I chose to record a short pilot episode for my project because I wanted to move away from the traditional written academic work and think about how sound and movement, all those things that contribute to the animacy of life, cannot be flattened down into the written word. In the podcast I reflect on my positionality as a reconnecting native who was raised mestize but prefers to take on the placeholder of xicanx identity. My experience in dissecting why the Three Sisters is a site of resistance and rematriation has been the basis of my understanding of the role of seedkeeper as somebody who maintains the sanctity of plant-human relationships and can place them in terms of the community-identity that characterizes diverse indigenous communities. The cross-time and cross-generation relationship or kinship building that maintains life and culture today has given me hope for our relationship to the earth and the role of indigenous activists, farmers, scholars, and people to lead the way in restoring human-non-human relationships during the growth of climate change as a symptom of neocolonialism. 

Listen to the podcast episode The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency below:


Making a Yale Farm Olla: An Exploration of Soil Composition and Traditional Irrigation Practices | LSI '23

This post is part of Calista Washburn’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

For several months this summer, sections of the grassy and peaceful Yale Farm became a muddy and noisy construction zone. As work crews brought in backhoes and dug trenches across the Farm, installing some critical tech infrastructure for the University, the summer farm team grew accustomed to large piles of soil and yellow work machines dotting the landscape. For me, what began as an annoyance became an exciting opportunity to explore the Farm’s soil.

Piles of soil on the southeast side of the Farm, dug up by construction crews in June and July 2023

While all aspects of soil are important to farmers, it is the organic elements—compost and decayed matter, soil carbon and nitrogen—that seem to get center stage time and time again. As the construction crew dug up more and more of this beautiful red, organic-matter-poor soil, I became increasingly curious about those inorganic components we spend less time thinking about.

 

I’ve loved ceramics and pottery since middle school, and I have spent hours in the Murray Pottery studio coiling sculptures and throwing wobbly saucers on the wheel. I had heard about the process of harvesting wild clay—clay found in the soil all around us—and was eager to try my hand at it. The piles of topsoil lying around the farm presented the perfect opportunity.

 

Over the course of the summer, I developed a “wet process” method for harvesting usable clay from the mixture of gravel, sand, silt, clay, and organic matter that comprises the Farm’s soil. Iterated steps of adding water, mixing, letting particles settle, and pouring off the still-suspended smaller particles gave me an experiential understanding of the Farm’s soil makeup.

A bin of Yale Farm clay drying in the sun

 

My firsthand exploration of clay harvesting at the Farm prompted me to learn more about the relationship between ceramics and agriculture, particularly a ceramic-based irrigation method called “pitcher” or “olla” irrigation. The term “olla” can be used to refer to a wide bodied, narrow-necked earthenware pot that is buried and filled with water in order to irrigate the surrounding soil.

 

Olla irrigation relies on the porosity of low-fired clay to deliver a steady supply of water right to the roots of crops. Instead of water dripping out at a constant rate, as in drip irrigation, water in a buried olla will seep out as a result of negative pressure created by the dryness of the surrounding soil and water tension. Ollas will irrigate soil when it is dry and there is negative pressure, but cease to irrigate when the soil is wet and the pressure gradient evens out. The combination of this intermittent irrigation and the fact that ollas deliver water right to the root zone with little evaporation makes olla irrigation incredibly efficient.

Source: https://www.permaculturenews.org/2022/11/29/irrigation-with-ollas/

Diagram of a buried olla, with a zone of water seepage

Though it can be used in almost all climates, pitcher irrigation has been prevalent in arid and desert agricultural settings for thousands of years. Farmers have used olla irrigation in China, India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, the southwest United states and Northern Mexico, and large swathes of Africa. In these places, the water savings of pitcher irrigation have made it possible to grow water-intensive crops—even melons—in the most adverse conditions.

 

Though it is not a recent development, olla irrigation has become a trendy topic in gardening blogs and other small-scale agricultural resources in the past 10 years, and particularly since 2020. Though the scientific community as a whole has given far less attention to pitcher irrigation, the past decade has seen an increase in interest in pitcher irrigation as a remarkably efficient water-saving technology. More and more studies seek to include pitcher irrigation methods and to quantify and optimize their water savings in different agricultural settings. As droughts plague many parts of the U.S. and the world, and as we are increasingly forced to confront the flaws with modern agricultural technology, olla irrigation is hailed as a tried-and-true method with better results than some—if not all—modern technologies.

 

The trendiness of ollas among gardening blogs, while it remains relatively obscure within mainstream farming wisdom, has helped me reflect on the ways in which traditional knowledge retains legitimacy in modern agricultural spaces. While small-scale farmers and gardeners tend to value tried-and-true, inherited practices, conventional large-scale agriculture focuses much more on cutting-edge technologies and scientifically-proven numerical optimizations.

 

In my summer of clay exploration at the Yale Farm, I was able to acquaint myself with clay and pottery in a myriad of its forms, from its origins mixed in the soil to an ultimate fate as a vessel centered in cultural, functional, and historical contexts. I am deeply grateful for the Yale Sustainable Food Program and Lazarus Summer Internship team for their enthusiasm about my experimentation.

Fine Dining and Sustainability in Japan | knead 2 know feat. Mao Shiotsu '24e

Last Friday brought 3.8 inches of rain to the Old Acre, but the rain and wind couldn't keep YSFP-ers away from last week's indoor knead2know. Dozens of students braved the blustery weather to attend the Friday talk by Global Food Fellow Mao Shiotsu '24, who spent the summer in Japan exploring the country's fine dining. 

Previously, Shiotsu took a gap year to study pastry and cuisine in France. After three months of culinary school, she worked in the fine dining restaurant Georges Blanc. “I started thinking a lot about restaurant culture, how dishes are made,” Shiotsu recounted. Contrasting her time in France with her upbringing in Japan, she said, “I started thinking about the differences between the priorities in the dish.” 

Over the course of the summer, Shiotsu spoke to chefs and farmers in many different regions and styles of Japanese cuisine, from the Michelin-starred Muromachi Wakuden in Kyoto to family farms in the countryside of Nara. Everywhere she visited, she was struck by the emphasis on simplicity and local ingredients. In Japan, “a dish with one ingredient can be fine dining” — a sentiment that Shiotsu’s Italian and French colleagues didn’t share. Although those European countries prize their local produce, they place more of an emphasis on the individual chef’s artistry, creativity, and storytelling, Shiotsu said. This is evident in everything from the level of decoration on the plate to the way restaurants are named: in Japan, it’s very uncommon to name a restaurant after the head chef. By comparison, Shiotsu observed that Japanese chefs see themselves as elevating nature, presenting ingredients in the way that best draws out their inherent beauty. As one Japanese chef told her, “Japanese cuisine is not an art, because in art, the artist is the main character.” 

Shiotsu also noticed differences between the two country’s approaches to food waste. In the Japanese restaurants Shiotsu visited, nothing was wasted. Food was sourced from the restaurant’s own gardens or from neighbor’s farms, and anything that wasn’t served to guests would be eaten by staff. At French restaurants, Shiotsu recalled, the chefs often made more meals than they needed and discarded them at the end of the night. 

The discussion gave students plenty to chew on both literally and figuratively, as they enjoyed moon cakes and babka and sipped tea made with the Farm's nettles, ginger, and mint. And there will be much more to ruminate on next week as our knead 2 knows continue with a presentation by Global Food Fellow Kavya Jain ’25. 

Photos from the event by Reese Neal ’25 can be found here.