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This is Salvi. He is from the Bronx NY.

During these eight weeks of FoodWorks we have explored the big topics of Local and Organic food, of which the State of Vermont has historically been a strong leader. We have listened to people talk about their initiatives and strategies to push for more local, organic and sustainable. In the end, the discourse about food here is the same as about decision-making: it has to come up from the grassroots and be healthy for the community.

But Vermont is very rural, rather homogenous and very old. My interest in food has emerged with a concern about the environment and its future with society, our future, in the face of population growth, resource depletion, rising class disparities and nationalist tensions. Thus, my interest lies in places where the distribution of food and its access are crucial, where it doesn’t necessarily have a place in political agendas and urban development. And hence, decision-making occurs through a top-down process.

For this final reflexion about food for the last weeks of FoodWorks, I want to think about food and community and decision-making in a diverse urban setting. Moreover, I want to consider discourses and not just one discourse over these matters as well as the notion of identity/identities. The Bronx is a great example of how city planning, its laws and regulations, affect food access and distribution.

The Bronx has a population of 1,418,733 in 2013¹ (Vermont is 626,630²). The majority of the Bronx’s residents are foreign-born. Over half of its population is Hispanic or Latino, mostly from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. The food culture in the Bronx is diverse. The residents that have immigrated there have brought with them their own culinary traditions. On street corners you will find unlicensed food vendors selling specialties from Central America like mangoes with hot sauce, tamales, corn on a stick… varying with wherever the vendor is from. You will also find a lot of Mexican and Eastern European specialty shops that sell imported items. Most of the times the ingredients in the dishes sold are local in the old country, but not in the Bronx NYC. Rachel Slocum writes “producing and maintaining racial identity is dependent, in part, on holding on to food habits and tastes, which are themselves imagined as cuisines belonging to racialized groups or nations.”³

However, parts of The Bronx classify as food deserts. Food deserts are communities where there is little to no access to fresh food and produce, and are mostly found in poor areas, a lot of times in ethnic minorities’ neighborhoods⁴.

“In the impoverished Hunts Point section of the Bronx, home of the Northeast’s largest fresh food wholesale markets, the irony is that the neighborhood surrounding it boasts not one supermarket. Experts such as Susanne Freidberg an associate professor of geography at Dartmouth University claim small profits margins, space constraints, landlords’ preferences for tenants that don’t attract vermin, a perceived lack of demand and rising rents keep companies from full-service supermarkets in these areas.”⁵

Practices such as redlining keep urban poor areas poor and is often used by insurance companies and banks but also by retailers. The consequence is that fast-food chains and discount stores tend to aggregate in these marked areas. Retail redlining results into the uneven distribution of resources accross neighborhoods depending on their socio-economic status and racial composition⁶.

The reflexion around the food system in an urban context is somewhat related to the reflexion around public spaces because it is essential to the livelihood of a community, and society in general. Salvi’s story about the Korean lady making Kimchi in her unauthorized garden in Van Cortlandt Park (it is bigger than Central Park⁷) tells us the story of a woman making a traditional dish in the only way she can in the neighborhood she lives in. It also tells us something about the uses of the park. Loitering or hanging out, depending on who is the subject, taints this communal space destined to be a breathing place in the urban jungle. At the same time, the people who use the park have no where else to go for their time being. Salvi points out that the anarchist garden brought by the lady made the space more desirable, and the users more respectful of this space as a shared one.

Thinking about the Food System involves thinking about the little bits and parts that compose it and that interact with each other. By looking closely at it you will find that food is both an integral part and an expression of politics; it shows the powerplays of capitalism and its tolls on cities and its people. Food reveals segregation, exclusionism, community, identity, expressions of taste and culture, trends, authenticity etc… It becomes one way of looking at Society and examining its successes and its flaws.

Through research I have found that there are many initiatives in The Bronx to push for more gardens and to maintain existing ones. A few examples are the creation of Land Trusts and fighting for a Permanent Site Status. Often these initiatives battle with zoning laws to keep a plot of land from being developed.

A few links:

Bronx Green Up: http://www.nybg.org/green_up

NYC Community Garden Coalition: http://nyccgc.org

Grow NYC: http://www.grownyc.org

Here are some recommended articles that have helped me in my reflexion around food:

Guthman, 2011, “”If Only They Knew” The Unbearable whiteness of alternative food”, Food Justice

Slocum, 2010, , “Race in the study of food”, Progress in Human Geography

Toi, 2013, Frankly Not About Food Forests, Black Girl Dangerous blog

About a month and a half ago, I attended a three day punk festival in Montreal. Late one night, exhausted and hungry after spending the previous hours crashing and clashing with the crowd at Dillinger Four, I and a couple of the folks that had been spending the weekend with went in search of sustenance. Given the hour and our budgets, we ended up at a greasy pizza joint, trying to figure out what exactly the alarmingly orange pellets on the “Montreal” were. Our confidence in the place was increased somewhat, though, by the presence of one of the bands that we had seen earlier, munching quietly at one of the formica tables. 

As we waited for our slices (including a piece of the mysterious Montreal) to be revived from their heat lamp stasis, a belligerent drunk stumbled in and began hassling the woman working the register. Things were escalating in a bad way – he threw his drink across the floor, she threatened to call the cops, he responded with volume – until the bassist from the other band stepped up and diffused the situation. A gaunt, angular dude dressed all in black with the exception of red Keds, he convinced the drunk to leave, placated the hostess, then came to shoot the breeze with us for a bit. Language barriers placed some pretty severe limitations on our conversation, but we stumbled along long enough to lick the grease from our fingers and part ways. 

In many ways, it was a disgusting meal. The pizza had been made hours ago – at the very earliest – from ingredients chosen far more for their resilience and ability to deliver on fat and salt content than health, freshness, or nuanced flavor (not to mention any sort of ethical or sustainability concerns). However, at 2 am, it was the perfect meal for a bunch of grubby punks. Even better, it provided the space for an impromptu community to temporarily spin itself into existence. I’ll likely never see any of the people from that night ever again, but, in that place, in that moment, we were all responsible for each other. However briefly, we took care of each other. It was pretty beautiful.

Which is all a very longwinded way of saying that I’m deeply suspicious of the tendency within the food movement to focus on intimately shared, tender moments like individual meals. This shared pizza met many of the criteria of that someone like Berry or Pollan might revel in. It brought people together. It founded community. It was pretty damn delicious. It also had absolutely no connection to a just, sustainable food system. It’s a terrible paradox of the food movement: while it’s crucial (and really easy when dealing with food) to foster personal connection, it’s also really easy to get stuck at that place and fail to connect our individual experiences to the leviathan that we are tied up in.

I find community organizer Marshall Ganz’s “Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now” model to be really useful. Within this framework (which I’m probably grossly oversimplifying – sorry), you first articulate a personal link to the issue at hand, then find systemic connections, then finally determine an immediate action forward. My pizza story didn’t really follow that arc at all. However, it did meet the goals of this prompt. What should we do with that?

The definition of a weed is a plant growing where it is not wanted. That’s all. This means that what is and is not a weed varies across time and place. In fact, a plant may simultaneously be considered a weed and not a weed by two different people (or even two competing opinions in one person’s mind!) observing it at the same time and in the same place.

A lot of my time these days is spent weeding, so I have plenty of opportunities to contemplate this. For instance, lamb’s quarters are edible plants that show up in my gardens a lot. When small, their leaves are really soft and taste kind of like fresh peas. I always take them out, but isn’t it weird to remove an edible plant from a place designed to… grow edible plants?

Last week, I removed some volunteer tomatoes from a bed that was planted with squash. There, they were weeds. I moved them to an adjacent bed that had been planted with cucumbers but that was still half empty. There, they are a crop. Five feet west, and they are no longer weeds (to be removed and thrown away), but a valuable source of food (to be cultivated, harvested, and eaten). Phrased that way, transplanting is like a miracle. It makes food out of waste with almost no effort!

Partway through this past semester I brought my family’s waffle iron to school. I was living in a suite with some friends, and we used the iron to make sweet and savory waffles for snacks and meals. Having the waffle iron reminded me of the times my parents had made waffles when we had relatives over, during relaxing weekend mornings, or for special occasions. It was also exciting to experiment with different types of waffles. We made waffles with a variety of ingredients including rice flour, anise extract, pumpkin, and almonds. The waffle iron meals and snacks showed me how nostalgic food can be, and how much room for experimentation cooking has. Everything we made was a waffle, but they all varied so much. The waffle iron was also a good addition since it gave us numerous opportunities to hang out and cook together, an example of how great food is for bringing people together.

This past school year I was an RA in a sophomore dorm, so I used “building community” as a justification for my stress baking habit. I have found that people are more willing to offer a sentence or two when I trade cookies for words. Although I made some meaningful and some shallow connections this year when there was food involved, I have had repeatedly meaningful eating experiences at the farmers’ market that we frequent on Saturdays in Louisville. Rowan is always introducing us to his circle of friends at the market (everyone who works there). Rowan has made us feel as though we belong to this little pocket of the city and to Louisville as a whole. So, I go back every week to meet new people and wheedle my way into this community I want to belong to…and for free omelets. The same way that I coax conversation out of my peers with cinnamon rolls, so Rowan baits us with delicious omelets so that we will explore the market and make our own connections. The past several Saturdays, I’ve spent my time at the farmers’ market meeting new people and collecting new suggestions of places to explore with Rowan generally as my guide, but this Saturday I sat down to eat my omelet and was joined by two people who knew neither me nor each other. The moment was a bit surreal as they introduced themselves and it turned out that we were familiar with the same parts of the United States, and all the while the jazz band was playing my parents’ wedding song in the background. They too were not native Louisvillians, but both said that they find themselves returning to this farmers’ market whenever they are in town. When our conversation was at a lull we all turned to watch the band, soaking in the unusually cool weather and our coincidental connections to places. The farmers’ market has proven to be a pleasantly liminal space – between farm and table, people with babies, people with their babies’ babies, old people, young people, flour and scones, eggs and omelets, berries and pies, people who are from Louisville, people who transplanted to Louisville, and people who are neither from nor live here, but return to the farmers’ market nonetheless. I’m no psych major, but what I’ve learned from my limited exposure is the strength of memories that have a smell attached to it. However, I’d argue that taste is also a sense that tethers an experience to the memory archives.

Four days a week for my internship, I help prepare a meal for 40 people give or take, the vast majority of whom are economically poor. Sure, the food is part of it. We have to make sure enough egg salad sandwiches are ready, along with two main dishes, a green salad, and whatever deserts and sides have been donated. The food is the time-consuming part but in the end, it is the easy part of the meal prep.

The hard part of the meal is the intangible, inedible bit. While the 40 guests trickle in and out over the course of the hour, the volunteer prep crew hovers awkwardly around the buffet serving station. Sometimes we slink away into the kitchen to wash dishes or refill trays, and to get out of the eye of those we have made this meal for. Other times, two or three volunteers will eat amongst themselves and talk quietly. In all of these scenarios, the “meal” is not a meal. It is a setting where we, the volunteers, have made lunch for them, the hungry people.

Oftentimes there is a friendly, chatty atmosphere among the regular guests but it is something that I and many other new or occasional volunteers have a hard time joining. When one of us sits down, the conversation slows to a pause and eyes turn to us momentarily or – more uncomfortably – anywhere but us. The fault for this awkwardness is not mine nor the guests’, but the feeling persists. I have promised myself to sit down and eat with the guests every day and so far I have stuck to it. The diners have been welcoming, too, but I cannot shake the feeling of a barrier between us. The more I try to ignore this barrier and dichotomy, the frustratingly stronger it becomes.

How can I create a meal atmosphere where the distinction between cook and guest (along with the implication each of those roles brings) is so apparent? How can I be hospitable while also making the diners forget that I am the host? I believe I have made progress to the goal of being natural around the guests and treating them not as food insecure but rather simply as people. I appreciate any advice you have to help me advance further.

In the past three years after I came to the United States to study, I didn’t have as much time eating with my family. I miss home food and those time with my family. One of my most favorite time of the year is meeting with my whole family for Tomb Sweeping Day.

Because my family has a Chinese blood, every year we go to the ancestral gravesite to glorify our ancestors and clean the site. It is one of the most important time of the year that all of my family members come together, see each other and carry out our tradition. Everyone helps each other bring food and picnic stuff there. My mom always prepares for most of the food. She will cook some food one day earlier and she will get up at 3 am to make sure that we have all we need and ready to go by 5 am. My aunt usually takes care of the fruits and drinks. She is a fruit professional. All of the fruits that she cuts look so neat and pretty. As for mats and sticky rice, my uncle is responsible for that. In addition, my grandmother makes other food which most of the time pretty oily, but it is so delicious. Basically, everyone brings what they have and what is needed.

I am always excited to see my cousins and play with them. As we are getting older and older, we all have more and more responsibility, which means we have less and less time to see each other. My favorite part of this occurrence is when we all eating together after we finish worshiping. My mom, my aunt and my grandmother will bring the food and fruits that they prepare to the mat and we will sit in a circle getting ready to eat! In the middle of the circle, there are northern-style yellow curry, chile-based dips, deep fried crispy pork rinds, chicken stir-fried with sliced ginger, grilled chicken, fruits–mangoes, papayas, watermelons, durians–and sticky rice. Moreover, we have the food that we pray our ancestor to combine, for example red curry, thai basil stir try, dim sum and desserts–cakes and rice balls. As usual we sit on the mats around the food and start eating. My parents and my aunts always stay out of the circle because there is not enough space and they want the kids to eat as much as they can. I always appreciate their sacrifice and their love to us.

This time is always my most joyful time because I have a chance to talk and catch up everything that is going on with our lives.

Even though I don’t have a chance to go to this event anymore, when I go back home during summer, we will have an opportunity to get together in Mother’s Day or “would like to meet” day. Having a good meal and good time with my family is always the most precious and greatest time. Honestly I don’t want anything special but family time.

Ever since I read the book “Goat Song,” by Brad Kessler, I’ve been in love with the concept of “terroir.” It’s a term that belongs to the world of winemaking, and refers to the unique environmental conditions that create the inimitable taste of a certain wine. Subtle differences in soil, temperature, humidity, and numerous other factors mean that no two bottles are ever the same, at least in the eyes of an aficionado (which I am most definitely not). Once upon a time, I saw viticulture’s vocabulary as kind of exclusive and maybe even esoteric. From my first sips of wine at the family dinner table, I struggled to overcome my skepticism. Hints of chocolate? Velvety undertones? Notes of liquorice, vanilla, and cloves? Wine descriptions were not only tongue-twisters to say, but also to taste.

That was until my time in Haiti converted me into a connoisseur of a different sort: not of sophisticated and expensive wines, but simple and everyday food. After long hours building houses in the rugged mountains, I was ready to refuel with my fellow volunteers—“refuel” the operative word here, as we ate solely to sustain our energy. My trip was an adventure in every sense except the culinary. The humanitarian organization that we worked with didn’t pack in specialty dishes or drinks, so I went to bed never full, but always nourished for another day of arduous construction. Yet our smaller rations were much more substantial than what the Haitians have on a weekly basis (an average of seven meals). To be honest, a privileged dining experience for American “voluntourists” would have been insulting to the residents of the village who subsisted on the most basic of staples: rice, beans, plantains, and on rare occasions, scrawny chickens that make America’s definition of “free-range” seem restrictive. Even so, the nightly, nearly identical rice and bean meal that the villagers prepared for the volunteers could not have been better. There were few, if any spices, to supplement the dish. Yet I found that raw, pure ingredients satisfied me.

I can’t attribute my affection for Haitian food to the “technical” taste. It’s the more abstract qualities that I appreciated, the social and cultural terroir that I savored. We were well-fed American volunteers, and Haitian mothers inexplicably and generously fed us what could have—and should have—gone to their own children. It was difficult to reconcile our service work, regardless of its value to the village, with the saddening sacrifice they made on our behalf. As I look back on the experience, I’ve come to believe that Haitian hospitality is so rich and complex that it exposes the injustice and illogic of our socioeconomic distinctions. How can we call Haiti a “developing nation” when its food—symbolic of Haitians’ willingness to open their lives to strangers who live literal and figurative worlds apart—is so far above American fast-food? It’s a tragedy that the “developed” label suggests superiority somehow, yet entails a loss of connection with food, and ultimately, a detachment from place-based culture. Can the United States be a nation of homogenous chain restaurants and at the same time a cultural “melting pot”? I’m more skeptical about this apparent contradiction than I am about winemaking adjectives. The give-and-take nature of my time in Haiti—we helped Haitians improve their infrastructure, while their gratitude manifested in lodging and meals—is the relationship that we should share with our food in the U.S. If we pay better attention to the origins of our diet—the care of both place (environment) and people (culture) who cultivate—I think our empathy will deepen. We’ll be able to bridge cultural divides and recognize the commonality of the human experience, with food the ultimate and universal element.

The mornings at Middlebury when I can barely stomach burnt coffee in the dining hall, I reminisce about those two brief weeks in a country that could hardly be considered a “destination” hotspot. And yet for me, happiness in the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation was as simple as a thick, rich cup of Haitian coffee, loaded with frothy milk and fresh-cut cane sugar. Even more important than the unique flavor was the fact that Haitians and American volunteers drank the coffee side-by-side in silence, welcoming the warmth of the sunrise. No faltering words were needed—the strong coffee easily broke the language barrier. I remember getting up at the crack of dawn once to watch a Haitian woman tend to a cauldron of the bubbling brew with loving care, like it was her own child. Given the superstition surrounding cauldrons, there are many mysterious ingredients that could’ve been in that enormous pot. But I wasn’t wary. I’d witnessed the craftsmanship and sacrifice that went into a beverage that many people don’t take time to think twice about, so it was no mystery to me why Haitian coffee could taste better than any Starbucks special blend.

As I read today’s blog prompt, I realized that my last post about dinner at Claude’s house nicely answers this prompt as well last week’s. I think that goes to show the consistent themes among Berry’s writings from section to section and time period to time period as well as the importance of preparing and/or eating food with others.

The example which I’ll describe in this post has many similarities to that of the dinner at Claude’s house, and is equally as memorable of an event. In the fall, I was living abroad in a small ecovillage in Findhorn, Scotland. Similarly to a college campus, there was a dining hall (otherwise known as the community center) where community members would prepare lunch and dinner each day. No one was required to attend meals, but many people did, and Sunday brunch was particularly popular. As an assignment for one of my classes, I, as well as 3 other students, decided to prepare brunch from all local ingredients. It was definitely challenging – Scotland is not the most lush place in November. Unfortunately, we were unable to prepare the whole meal from local ingredients, but we made an egg, vegetable, and cheese casserole of sorts as well as a delicious blackberry-apple crumble (with Scottish oats and honey). My friends and I picked blackberries until we had splinters and our hands were stained bright red so that we would have enough to feed around 120 people. The apples came from the trees planted many years ago all around the community. We got leeks and some other vegetables from the community farm and we even bought rapeseed oil, which is grown in Scotland, to grease the pans. It was a hectic time in the kitchen, but everything was completed by 11:00 am on that Sunday, just in time to bring out to the crowd of people anxiously awaiting their Sunday morning brunch fix.

My peers and I described our project and then observed as people read our signs which explained the origins of the food and as they took their first bites into the eggs and crumble. Many people complimented us on the food afterwards, and although I was relieved that the stress and planning was over, I felt that people appreciated not only the food, but the intention and efforts behind it. All aspects of this communal meal made it unique for me – gathering ingredients, cooking (although I learned that the expression “too many cooks in the kitchen” does truly have a practical meaning), displaying/serving, and eating. The communal setting allowed for a more direct communication and a more memorable meal.

When I was abroad in Madrid, Spain, my friends and I celebrated Thanksgiving. What made this special was the fact that our differences brought us together. We were celebrating Thanksgiving in a different country and we were sharing a part of our culture to other peers from different countries. It was a bit difficult to find a whole turkey and all of the staples that we may be used to in the United States. However, this allowed us to improvise and make the dinner unique. This Thanksgiving became a sharing of different foods, and I enjoyed the process it took to accomplish this Thanksgiving dinner. We had Italian food, Spanish food, a homemade pie, a desert from Australia, baked asparagus, homemade garlic bread, turkey breast, Jewish cuisine, and some really great wine. We all met at my friend’s flat that she shared with other international students, we cooked and baked together, and explained what each of us did for this celebration. For those who had never celebrated, they shared with us similar holidays or how they ate with their families, and the image of Thanksgiving that they envisioned. The Spanish language brought all of us together. My fondest memories included cooking and watching how all of our different cultures and differences actually connected us. This meal with friends whom I knew prior and with people I met that day ended up being not only nourishing and nostalgic, but gave me a sense of community that was created through food.