Like Berry’s exploration of grandmother’s homemade pie, this week’s selection of works explored the value of tradition and passed down knowledge in creating sustainable and resilient food systems. LaDuke and Nabhan explore food traditions through the lens of folklore and indigenous survival, something we have yet to investigate in this course. I really enjoyed the points brought up in LaDuke’s talk and Nabhan’s excerpt because it brings in a population that’s sometimes even marginalized from food sovereignty or justice talks. Indigenous peoples like the O’oodham have knowledge of American soil and ecosystems to a much greater extent than any other demographic group in the country – why, as Nabhan highlights, do we continue to provide people with the complete opposite?

Vandana Shiva’s talk is definitely the piece that stayed with me most prominently. She perfectly encapsulates (pun intended) a holistic thinker. Her criticism of monoculture of the mind points out quite succinctly the root of most food issues. Pointing out that many farmers are committing suicide due to an inability to profit from their efforts exacerbates the point that federal efforts generate a cycle where no person, let alone the land can flourish. A lot of the “help” that governments believe they are providing, such as welfare food to the malnourished O’oodham or synthetic fertilizer to desperate soil, are not tapping into the time tested knowledge of tradition.

I do wish that Shiva had expanded on the point that women are a core position in starting, as she calls it, a “food revolution”. Women are often the ‘designated’ homemakers and with that profession comes an incredible knowledge of food and food preparation. This sort expertise is usually very specialized to a specific local or region. Orosco from Nabham’s chapter recited a very unique diet of foods for an ecosystem that to many modern food systems would seem to produce almost no sustenance. Industrial farms in no way could survive in the desert as the O’oodham had. What baffles me is why we are using the vast and specialized knowledge of indigenous peoples, more specifically native women, to figure out how to thrive in even the remotest of places.

There is no need for the extra calories in synthetic dahl a.k.a. modified soybeans when there is millet that, as Shiva describes, reproduces in the millions. A boiled down version of this collection of talks and writing proves the task of specializing and localizing the approaches to providing nutritional and substantive food to not be as difficult as it may seem. Traditions that our ‘monoculture of the mind’ has been blind too, might have already figured out a resilient and sustainable food system!