The Yale Sustainable Food Program

The Yale Sustainable Food Program aims to educate students about the links between food, agriculture, and the environment, creating community around the pleasure of physical work and eating well together. For information about our weekly workdays, sign up for our Monday newsletter at http://bit.ly/1PCQqL or check our website at http://bit.ly/1Sr2Hsi.

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Yale kale: taste the rainbow. (at Yale Farm)

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Incompatible Food Triad, update ii

Philippe Chlenski ‘18 is pursuing a degree in Mathematics & Philosophy. After spending two years at Deep Springs College in California and a year largely spent working in the food service industry, he has become interested in questions of labor, service, and pedagogy. He is especially interested in the ways that labor can be treated as an essential component of education. He hopes that the Lazarus Summer Internship will allow him to reintegrate these questions into his Yale education, or to take over and collectivize the Yale farm. Outside of the farm, he is also involved with the Student Technology Collaborative, Yale Catering, The New Journal, and the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.

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Incompatible Food Triad, update

Data Mining I

I used a utility called GNU Wget to create a mirror of the allrecipes.com website. This is very simple (although time- and bandwidth-intensive). I was initially concerned that, because allrecipes.com does not have open directories it would be impossible to create a totally accurate replica of its file tree. In fact, it seems that Wget magic is capable of doing this by other means, which are admittedly rather opaque to me.

Initially, I tried to get a mirror of the website using the following command:

wget --mirror --convert-links http://www.allrecipes.com/ -P ~/recipes/

Let’s unpack this for a second. “wget http://allrecipes.com/” calls the Wget utility on the allrecipes.com website, and the rest of the parameters tell Wget how to behave. “--mirror” calls Wget recursively, which means it will crawl through an entire file system until it “bottoms out,” so to speak. “--convert-links” makes links on pages refer to the local copies of webpages I am saving to my computer, rather than pointing to the allrecipes.com website as they do in the original I am mirroring. “-P ~/recipes/” specifies where on my computer the files will be saved.

As it turns out, this command doesn’t work: it only mirrors the allrecipes.com frontpage. This is most likely due to the fact that Wget doesn’t have information about the site’s structure and thus can’t get its recursive mirroring function off the ground. Luckily, allrecipes.com provides a site map. They most likely do this because (1) it can be convenient for users to navigate the website, and (2) they want search engines to know how to reach every page on their website; if the Google web crawlers can’t find a given recipe, then no one will be able to find that recipe in a Google search, allrecipes.com traffic will plummet, and they will lose ad revenue. Thanks to this, I was able to tweak my command a little bit and run the following:

wget --mirror --convert-links http://dish.allrecipes.com/faq-sitemap/ -P ~/recipes/

This works. Over the course of 24 hours or so, I got what I believe to be a full mirror of the website. Now, the challenge will be to clean, consolidate, and analyze these data.

Philippe Chlenski ‘18 is pursuing a degree in Mathematics & Philosophy. After spending two years at Deep Springs College in California and a year largely spent working in the food service industry, he has become interested in questions of labor, service, and pedagogy. He is especially interested in the ways that labor can be treated as an essential component of education. He hopes that the Lazarus Summer Internship will allow him to reintegrate these questions into his Yale education, or to take over and collectivize the Yale farm. Outside of the farm, he is also involved with the Student Technology Collaborative, Yale Catering, The New Journal, and the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.

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On Cooking

Cooking is a skill. That’s a thought that should be obvious, but it’s one I’ve never really realized as fully as I have now that I’m cooking for myself (or at least, attempting to).

This summer as a Lazarus intern at the farm presents the first extended period of time where I have to shop for and prepare my own food. There are no dining halls, and no parents. I have a few meals in my repertoire, but that handful of recipes starts seeming awfully meager when I’m faced with planning three meals a day, seven days a week.

And so I’m realizing: cooking is a skill. One that, right now, I don’t have…yet. But I’m getting there, and discovering the big, wonderful culinary world. Over the past 3 weeks of the internship, we’ve learned to make pizza in our wood-fired oven, made kimchi, and preserved lemons. At the MAD Yale Leadership Summit, I heard chef fellows talk about food in a way I’d never heard before, about dishes and presentation: bringing a whole other food language into the conversation.

The level of expertise of professional chefs is astounding—and equally astounding is that of home cooks. I find myself more appreciative of my mom’s cooking now than ever before—and appreciate, mostly, of the time, skills, and care it took for her to feed her family.

My mom’s cooking always seemed effortless. Probably this is because by the time I was old enough to pay attention, she had had years to streamline a system and schedule of cooking: between shifts at her different jobs, between other chores and errands. Or maybe I just didn’t pay attention. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time any of us overlooked the culinary and other domestic work of women.

Now, as I wander through the grocery store or open my fridge, I wish I had paid more attention when I lived at home. Now that, for the first time, I am fully in charge of what I put into my body, and how. Last summer, before I left for college, I tried to fit a childhood’s worth of cooking knowledge into a few weeks. I tried to help my mom cook dinner, to pay attention to the recipes she made. How do you make pierogi, or sznitzle, or bigos? Could you give me a recipe? Whenever I’d ask, my mom would say—well, she didn’t have a recipe for it. She didn’t follow certain measurements. Over the decades, she had just cooked, and innovated, and eventually, come to this set of recipes that she knew from memory now, the recipes that make up the food of my childhood.

My mother is a master cook. It’s just one of many things she is, of course, though she might not have some of the skills professional chefs do. But I can’t think of any foods that are tastier, and carry warmer memories, than hers. Now, living on my own, experimenting with recipes, and trying to get the basics down, my goal is to attain some of those same things in my own cooking: good taste, yes, but also, good memories with good people in this still-new stage of my life.

Kinga Obartuch '19 plans to major in Architecture with a concentration in Urban Studies. She is particularly interested in community gardens, public parks, and other urban green space, and their role in creating better cities for residents of all socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.

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MAD reflection redux

There was something mad about MAD at Yale. I went into the summit with little idea of what was to come. I didn’t know any of the chefs in the important sense––I had not eaten at any of their restaurants, much less considered their social and cultural influence. When they were together on campus, along with professors, students, and journalists, what followed were energized, interdisciplinary conversations about gastronomy, society, ecology, ethics, even metaphysics. The conference was a lecture on everything from haute cuisine to modernism. But for me, the unprepared observer, it is now a social artifact. It is what happens when you bring celebrity chefs together, with different kinds of egos, degrees of interest in their social contexts, and motivations to disrupt their patterns of thought. On Tuesday, the first full day of programming, it seemed that Rene Redzepi was the only chef interested in contributing to discussion, and in turn, rethinking his approach to the world outside his noma kitchen. By Friday, a shared dynamic, a certain something in the air, was manifest––Kylie Kwong stood up in front of everyone at a final lunch to express her gratitude, after Alex Atala offered a spontaneous presentation the night before. In other words, the summit had its desired effect. It was evocative.

What does it mean to bring some of the very best chefs to Yale? What will it look like in five months that they were here, sharing a common energy?

It depends what they tweet about kelp and cow. Which is tasty and fashionable and which is outmoded and disruptive is determined, at least in part, by what chefs think. Insofar as they continue to cook for deep-pocket clientele, however, the world and its food systems will not transform. No ten people can fix the food problems of their time. As tastemakers, the chefs of MAD at Yale have the opportunity, and maybe even a recently informed desire, to shift the vectors of their cultural contexts toward something or other––environmental sustainability, decent pay for workers, access to healthy food––by an inch, or maybe just a centimeter, depending on what sort of ruler you use.

I’m Harry, a sophomore in Branford College. My major is Mathematics & Philosophy, and I like to take classes on logic, other topics in philosophy, music, and, of course, food and agriculture. I copy edit for The New Journal and I mentor an inmate at Manson Youth Institute in Cheshire, CT, as part of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project. This past April I lived on Soylent, a liquid meal-replacement, as a final project for my class on sustainable food and agriculture. Diet interests me. I want to know about products like Soylent, which some allege to be the future of food, and what the world might be like without “regular food,” whatever that might mean.

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The Herbivore’s Dilemma

I grew up in a culture where the daily consumption of animal products was not only expected, but considered a basic fact of life. It was kind of like, “The sky is blue, and we’re having brisket for dinner.” If you didn’t guess it from the title, here’s the plot twist: I’m a vegan. I became a vegan a little over a year ago, and for most of that year, I respected people’s decisions to eat meat. I didn’t like it, but I understood it as a sort of “You’ve made your choice and I’ve made mine” situation. While I dreamed of a world where everyone was vegan, mutual respect between vegans and animal consumers seemed like a more attainable goal.

I have recently realized that I can neither respect nor accept the status quo of a meat eating culture. The mass torture and murder of animals has become denaturalized to me over time. Today, it is no longer a given; it is disgusting and intolerable.

It’s easy for me to work myself into a lather over this issue. The strong emotional convictions I hold against torturing and killing animals mixed with my immersion in a meat-centric culture create a reactive alchemy which can boil over, often at the wrong times. Especially at meals, my veganism becomes a natural talking point. On the bright side, this works as a great way to spark conversation on a topic I love to talk about! However, it can be frustrating to walk the thin line between expressing my beliefs in a powerful and positive way, and turning into the stereotypical preachy vegan. I want to provoke reflection without offending, to push someone outside of societal norms without forcing them too much out of their comfort zone. Nobody enjoys having something shoved down their throat (foie gras, anyone?). But at the same time, I feel guilty trying to keep things comfortable. The animal you’re eating likely didn’t have a pleasant life, and being killed definitely doesn’t feel good. If I am considerate, am I cowardly? By avoiding the angry vegan inside me, do I make people feel safe, and slowly acclimate them to my ideas, or do I simply entrench their behavior as an acceptable status quo?

I’ve been grappling with these simultaneous feelings of having lost patience with animal consumers and wanting to make them change. I understand that the structure of food systems in the United States often results in meat being cheaper and more accessible than many vegan products. I do not condemn people who have next to no choice but to consume animal products. What I have had a hard time grappling with are people who have the education and means to stop consuming animal products, but continue to do it anyway.

In a recent episode of the podcast This American Life, guest Malcolm Gladwell discusses a theory called the “Threshold Model of Collective Behavior.” The theory explains that people make certain choices based on their personal thresholds. In Gladwell’s words, “Your threshold is the number of people who have to do something before you join in.” Everyone’s threshold is unique, meaning that different people require different amounts of peer pressure influence in order to sway them towards a certain behavior. Perhaps this explains why so many people I know continue to consume animal products even when they’re aware that what they’re doing is destructive and cruel. Their thresholds simply haven’t been reached yet. 

On one hand, this idea makes me feel hopeful and purposeful. As a vegan, just by existing, I could help people reach their personal tipping points and influence them to become vegan. On the other hand, the idea that peer pressure wields so much power is disconcerting. I believe people should base their choice to go vegan in factual and ethical understandings of their actions. Will these elements lose their potency as veganism reaches more people? I don’t think so. Vegans are well-versed in defending their dietary choices, and as their presence spreads, so too will the facts and beliefs they preach. Repeated exposure to these ideas will make veganism seem less radical, create a greater societal presence of vegans, and soon, voilà – more thresholds crossed!

Takeaway? Vegans: keep running your mouths! Always spread power and positivity, but bring out your inner angry, punk rock vegan when you need a little extra firepower to zoom across the next threshold.

Lauren Kohler ‘19 plans to major in environmental studies with a concentration in food and agriculture. The connections between environmental, human, and animal health excite Lauren, and she believes that the food we eat (and how we grow it) stands at the center of this axis. She loves being hands-on with plants, animals, and nature, but she also finds interest in food and ag policy, environmental/health education, and social justice reform. When she’s not outside biking or running, Lauren spends her time teaching nutrition and substance abuse curricula as a part of Community Health Educators.

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Incompatible Food Triad: BIG DATA EDITION

Can you put together a list of three foods or ingredients where any permutation of two ingredients is palatable, but if you put all three together you get an inedible mess? Most people who hear this question think there’s an easy answer, whether it’s “yes” or “no,” but it is as-yet unresolved. You can read more about this problem, called “The Incompatible Food Triad,” on George Hart's website.

What makes this question so tricky? The subjective nature of taste and the illegitimate status of “food pairing” as a discipline, for one. In the spirit of inquiry, let’s bracket these questions and assume that, from some Archimedean point, we can objectively determine whether or not a combination of foods is palatable. We can then imagine the problem as a conjecture which goes something like “there is no set of three foods such that any subset of two is palatable together but the whole set is not.” We would either have to prove this conjecture by a priori means, or find a counterexample: a set of foods which exhibits the property this theorem claims is impossible.

Such a set is what I, lacking the wherewithal or the means to prove the conjecture, will be searching for. It has become commonplace for mathematicians, when similarly backed into a corner, to level massive computationally-assisted brute-force attacks against their conjectures in hopes of finding a counterexample (relevant XKCD comic here).

In practice, the subjective nature of taste (which we are now briefly unbracketing) calls the status of any given counterexample into question. One possible way of dealing with this is to look at the statistics of people’s cooking and eating habits rather than trying to analyze taste directly. Such a proxy would have a readily-identifiable pattern (three foods appear in combinations of two but not all three across a given dataset) in the event that an incompatible triad of sufficiently common foods exists. Researchers in statistics and machine learning, alongside Wall Street types with a vested interest in this sort of thing, have recently made strides in establishing causation from data sets, which violates a core statistical mantra: correlation does not imply causation.

This is all to say that computers are very powerful and there’s a lot of data floating around there. It isn’t perfect, but you can get much, much better leads than conventional wisdom might lead you to believe just by massaging these data into something nice and then throwing some computational power at them. So here’s what I propose:

1. Mining data

This is probably going to be the trickiest part of the project. The data are out there, stored in a nice convenient form on (e.g.) the allrecipes.com servers. From the client-facing side, it gets a lot trickier. First of all, the ingredient data specifies all sorts of extraneous things, like quantities and various desired properties of the ingredients. Think “medium zucchini” vs “zucchini.” Second of all, the data aren’t all in one place. So far as I can tell, there’s no way of getting to them without crawling every recipe on the site, which I guess I’ll have to do. Getting clean data is really important for ensuring that the subsequent steps go smoothly, so I’ll be taking my time gathering small batches of data before trying to scrape up my final data set. For this part of the project, I’m planning on using wget, a free and open-source program for fetching data from web servers which you might remember from its starring role in the film The Social Network.

2. Analyzing data

This is another computationally intensive step. I think the steps would have to go something like this:

Assemble every possible (unordered) permutation of three ingredients. This may get ugly. Assuming just 100 discrete ingredients, we’re looking at 100!/97! = 970,200 distinct triads to analyze. In practice, we’ll probably have a lot more ingredients to work with. One potential solution would be only to use the most popular ingredients, although that would really limit our chances of finding our elusive triad.

Discard any ingredient-tuple (permutation of three) which appears (with sufficient frequency?) in the master list of recipes.

Discard any ingredient-tuple which makes an ingredient-pair which does not appear in the mater list of recipes.

Look at what you have left.

This will most likely be done in the wonderful R language. If this ends up being too computationally intensive (I really have never worked with such a large data set, and doing permutations scales up really, really badly), I might have to look at a math-ier way of doing it.

3. Field work

Simple: if there are any, I’ll try to cook up some of the suggested incompatible food triads. In the pursuit of knowledge, it’s gonna get weird in my kitchen for a while.

Philippe Chlenski ‘18 is a rising junior in Yale College. He studies Math and Philosophy and is a Lazarus Summer Intern.

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Reflections on the MAD Yale Leadership Summit

In our day and age, restaurant chefs experience unprecedented global influence. This creates an unprecedented opportunity to radically transform the relationships between food and local and global ecologies, economies, and cultures. Last week, the MAD Yale Leadership Summit brought together front-running chefs from six countries and three continents with Yale College students recruited to serve as hosts, research assistants, and co-learners. The relationship between the MAD Foundation - “mad” is the Danish word for food - and Yale began when Chef René Redzepi visited Yale’s campus in 2011 and met Chester D. Tripp Professor of History Paul Freedman and Yale Sustainable Food Program Director Mark Bomford. Together, the groups worked on a program that challenges chefs and other food leaders to take principled action on issues of sustainability, ethics, and justice. Last week’s Summit is the result of this unfolding collaboration between MAD and Yale held in large part at the Yale Farm, with the inaugural group of chefs including Alex Atala, April Bloomfield, David Chang, Jessica Koslow, Kylie Kwong, René Redzepi, Olivier Roellinger, Rosio Sanchez, and Michel Troisgros. 

We heard from academics whose work takes food as its pivotal axis: Jim Scott spoke on the shift from hunting and foraging to agriculture; Krishnendu Ray shared his research on the ethnic restaurateur and the American city; Maria Trumpler spoke on women, food and culture; Jeremy Oldfield spoke on soil, climate change, and fermentation; and John Wargo spoke on environmental law and health. We also heard from leaders in the food world who call out the externalities of remaining within the status quo: Danny Meyer’s no-tipping policy paves the way towards living wages for restaurant workers; and Smita Narula’s scholarship and activism surrounding the right to food powerfully questions prevailing strategies for “feeding the world.” And we heard from Yale students, who presented research on topics ranging from food justice and indigenous foodways, to the political economy of gender, and then led discussions with the chefs. 

World-class chefs and Yale University may seem an unlikely juxtaposition at first glance. Yet it is in the discourse between experts in seemingly disparate fields that we can find solutions to complex and systemic challenges. Ahead of this week’s summit, the chefs shared the most pressing questions they have about the food industry and the role they play in driving change. One asked: “How do you build a restaurant that is socially and environmentally responsible and financially viable? When is growing the business the right thing to do?” Another questioned: “What is our responsibility as chefs and as business owners, and to whom?” One posed: “The kitchen is at the intersection of society, public health, environment, and culture. How can we work together to create better and just food for all?” Finally, one put it simply: “How do you know when to ask for help?” Difficult questions like these demand transformative answers found within and outside the kitchen walls, at the crossroads of economics, politics, and ethics, and in an amalgam of theory and of practice. The inaugural MAD Yale Leadership Summit provided opportunities to begin tackling these important questions. 

At the tail end of the Summit, I am reminded of one of Yale’s singularities. When degrees are conferred, graduating students are “admitted” to all their “rights and responsibilities.” It’s a small linguistic difference from other universities, where students are awarded the “rights and privileges” of their degrees, but it amounts to a tremendous shift in perspective. Privilege affords responsibilities: to oneself, to the planet, to different ways of knowing, to those who are less fortunate than we are. As chefs, students, and academics with the privilege to speak up and be heard, we all asked ourselves over and over again: how do I benefit? At whose expense? And how can I be an ally to those that are struggling? MAD Yale Leadership Summit Participants leave Yale with new perspectives on and humbled by the roles they play in the world not only as chefs, students and academics, but as agents, abettors, teachers, amateurs, allies, citizens, and caretakers. 

Bella Napier BK’14 is the outgoing Lazarus Fellow in Food and Agriculture at the Yale Sustainable Food Program. She majored in Ethics, Politics and Economics.

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We should be studying for finals, but instead we're taking a sneak peak at #TenRestaurants That Changed America, Professor Paul Freedman's groundbreaking new book, due out in September.

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For the last meeting of Mark Bomford's "Approaches to Sustainable Agriculture," the seminar students came to the farm to hear student presentations, talk food sovereignty, and learn a couple things about nitrogen capture!

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Kinga Obartuch ’19: Food Forges Friendships

In high school, I volunteered at an urban garden with a group called the Dirt Actualizers. Until recently, I had never thought about how important food was to my experience and relationships.

DA met every Saturday in the two-and-a-quarter acre space behind our high school. The school was built relatively recently on a lot previously used by the Chicago Streets and Sanitation. As a result, the land was a brown field. For about a decade after the school’s opening in 1999, the land behind the school wasn’t much more than a giant mud puddle, incapable of growing anything. Around 2009, before I arrived there, some students and volunteers from other organizations began working on the space, first to create one garden, then eventually, to transform the whole space. Parts of the landscape now include a playing field, several gardens, an agricultural area, and an outdoor classroom. It’s still a space in progress, and definitely looks it, especially since our efforts receive no official funding from the school or elsewhere—everything is donated or bought by volunteers.

I found out about DA completely by accident my junior year, and within a few weeks I was spending hours working there, moving wheelbarrows of woodchips, weeding, and above all, hanging out.

Food was a central part of my experience at DA, especially of the social part. After a few hours of hard work—moving woodchips, clearing a bed, or moving rocks and soil to build a new one—we’d take a break in the shade, sit around picnic tables, and dig into the snacks. One of the biggest and most exciting parts of the workday was figuring out lunch for the day, which involved making a food run to the nearby grocery store to buy as much food as creatively as we could with the paltry budget we had. We made hot dogs and popcorn over fires we built, and did some experimental cooking with plants from our garden. We didn’t harvest too much from our agricultural area, but what we did joined our meals, or was brought home with volunteers: zucchini, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and lots (and lots) of sunchokes.

Those breaks would turn into hours of cooking, eating, and talking, hours before we got back to work. But they were some of my most memorable and enjoyable times at DA.

Here at Yale, I’m forging new relationships around food: grabbing lunch or dinner with friends, ordering late-night meals, taking guests from back home out to eat. It’s interesting that even without really being conscious of it, gathering over food can be so conducive to making and deepening friendships.

Kinga is a freshman and photographer for the YSFP.

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Anna Lipin ’18: What Does Food Justice Actually Mean?

This post originally appeared as a column for Broad Recognition, Yale’s feminist magazine. 

“Food justice” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. I’ve done it—often—without a firm grasp on its connotations. Justice is a word I can understand, that we can all understand. But what does justice mean with regards to food? This week I read an aptly titled paper, “What Does It Mean to do Food Justice?,” for my class “Approaches to Sustainable Agriculture.” Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program Mark Bomford teaches this college seminar, and in it I have dived into all of the different buzzwords and ideologies of the 21st century food movement. I’ve read life-cycle analyses in the “Organic” module and histories of Parisian urban agriculture in “Local.” I’ve been forced to reckon with conflicting data analyses, moonshot solutions, and the inherent complexities of overlapping yet divergent global food systems.

Our last unit focuses on food justice and food sovereignty. The paper (which is not too long and highly recommended) explains the theory and actions behind the terms “food justice” and “food sovereignty.” This paper considers places in the Global North historically influenced by corporate agri-food, and the diverse modes of resistance that have sprung up. According to the authors, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux and Rachel Slocum, food justice has to do with equality, food sovereignty with the right of people to choose how their food gets to them. Food justice is more urban and U.S.-based (and the Global North in general). Food sovereignty focuses on small scale, maybe indigenous farmers (and more of the Global South). Together with food sovereignty, food justice sets up a dichotomy between industrial agriculture and a “more equitable, ecologically viable alternative.” The two “aim to institutionalize equity in and control over the food system.” In short, food justice/sovereignty takes its form in each locale with respect to the local systems of oppression and attendant food injustice. The concerns of a community in an American city without access to affordable produce because of discriminatory housing and development practices is different than those of La Via Campesina, “an international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants, and agricultural workers from around the world.” Yet they both seek agency within unequal global food systems.

And as with any entrenched hierarchy, women get the short end of the stick in food systems—both in paid labor and unpaid home work. Women disproportionally fill low-quality jobs in the food industries. They are 27% of female farmers (owners and managers). The reverse is true with low wage farm work and food processing, with women relegated to lower paying and high intensity jobs. Three quarters of Wal-mart’s minimum wage sales employees are women. These types of jobs—with long shifts, at entry level, with no benefits—subject women to food insecurity at rates higher than men. Women, who increasingly head single-parent households with dependent children, need food justice especially.

Gaining an understanding of what “food justice” actually means is important in understanding my role in creating more equitable food realities. The reason I had such a murky idea of its definition has a lot to do with the co-opting of the term by alternative food network-ers and others that write “food justice” into their mission statements. Now that’s it’s a popular term, it’s joining “local” and “organic” as “values” with market premiums, to be slapped on food products. But sussing out which organizations are actually “doing” food justice is harder. Just as restaurants use “sustainable” and “local” to attract customers (Here’s a piece from the Tampa Bay Times that uncovers just how many restaurants blatantly lie about the provenance of their ingredients) farms and other organizations in America are heading down the same path with food justice.

Similarly, those advocating for farmer’s markets and non-GMO food production have “conflated ‘more local’ with ‘more just,’” according to the paper. Further, “many food movement actions operate under the assumption that the relationships involved in shorter supply chains will ensure better social relations, whether they do or not these networks have tended to disavow and distance themselves from labor rights and inequality or to assume that their intentions would lead to more equitable outcomes without committing the resources necessary to achieve such outcomes.” Starting a farmer’s market doesn’t help farm laborers, for example. Access to local eggplant doesn’t reform a system built on ensuring that certain people don’t have access to healthy food. Charity (food banks, etc) is also not food justice (I think this is an obvious point, that relying on private donations to meet the shortcomings of our country’s food system is messed up, unsustainable, and maybe even counter-productive if it’s framed as a “solution”). This is why food justice is separate from other food “movements” that have gripped America in the past fifty years.

I got a glimpse of what food justice might look like, coincidentally, a few days before reading this paper at my second Cherry Bombe Jubilee (here’s my account of last year’s event). It’s a day full of girl-power panels featuring women that are succeeding and breaking boundaries in a small slice of the food world. These women are operating small businesses, running their own restaurant kitchens, forging new lenses in food media, and writing cookbooks. One standout panel, though, was entitled “So You Want to Be a Farmer?” Although other panels and speakers had spoken about overt sexism in kitchens and the challenges of finding investors as a woman, there was little acknowledgement of the underlying iniquities that the entire food industry relies on (low-wage farmworker labor, the unbearable whiteness of alternative food networks, destructive government policies).

This panel, moderated by Erin Fairbanks of Heritage Radio Network, featured five female farmers. Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm was one of two Cherry Bombe speakers who had “food justice” in her pamphlet-biography. I realized in reading “What Does it Mean to do Food Justice?” a couple days later, that Penniman is a fitting illustration of what food justice looks like in the U.S., where race continues to influence who gets access to healthy food. Penniman put it like this: “there’s a long history of land-based oppression of African Americans” and “inherited trauma” from the legacy of slavery and sharecropping. According to its website, “Soul Fire Farm is committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. We raise life-giving food and act in solidarity with people marginalized by food apartheid. With deep reverence for the land and wisdom of our ancestors, we work to reclaim our collective right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system. We bring diverse communities together on this healing land to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health and environmental justice. We are training the next generation of activist-farmers and strengthening the movements for food sovereignty and community self-determination.”

Thus Soul Fire Farm is responding to America’s specific history of oppression. It reintroduces people that have been alienated from land—black farmers constitute less than 2% of America’s farmers—in an effort to, among other things, make the alternative food movement less homogenous. They train black, latino, and indigenous farmers to grow and cook their own food, involve formerly incarcerated youth, reach out to other groups to underscore the links between food justice and the group’s focus, and deliver affordable (they accept SNAP benefits) boxes of produce to families in neighborhoods that lack access to grocery stores.

There are a lot of complexities that arise when speaking, writing, and thinking about food justice from an academic perspective. Whether it’s a case study or a blog post, it’s important to bear in mind as an ally that listening to the unique concerns of local stakeholders should be the first step of anyone claiming to practice “food justice.” Whether it’s attending a local food policy council meeting or calling your congressperson, bearing in mind who exactly you are advocating for is essential. For those of us who might not take those steps, we can remember that the “food movement” isn’t just about the environment or GMOs or vertical agriculture, but social justice.

Anna is the Social Media Editor for the YSFP. She’s a sophomore political science major.

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Senior Advisor Hannah Sassoon takes our breath away—as usual—with her art. Happy Spring, everybody! (at Yale Farm)

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Grace Castillo ’18: Farm in Bloom

In just the past week, daffodils all over Yale’s campus have begun blooming in full force. As I arrived at the Yale Farm for last week’s Ground Truthing, I couldn’t help but notice – and tweet about – the hillside between the driveway and crops, which was filled daffodils and crocuses. For me, their bloom was a definitive and cheery mark that spring had arrived and that summer would be just around the corner.

Although much of my involvement with YSFP relates to the place of food in my life and the way larger agricultural systems impact the planet, the farm’s Instagram is definitive proof that I’ve devoted attention to the farm’s flowers. In fact, one of the first things I noticed upon beginning my work last September was the Yale Farm’s main flowerbed, which was filled with the slightly overgrown last blooms of summer zinnias and sunflowers. Although seemed like an integral part of the farm, I learned that one of YSFP’s senior associates, Sarah Gross, had designed and planted the bed in just the past year.

For me, flowers occupy an important space on the farm. They’re beautiful, yes, but their significance extends beyond aesthetics – different flower varieties mark the passing of the seasons with their blooms, freshly picked bouquets on the farm’s wooden tables promise communal sit-down meals of delicious food, and the pollinators that flock to flowers remind me of the complexity and elegance of the natural world around us.

In many ways, flowers occupy the same social spaces and interpersonal linkages that food does. We mark life events with both food and flowers – weddings, birthday celebrations, and graduations usually involve both large group meals and also congratulatory bouquets. Like homemade meals, a vase full of flowers is a gesture of closeness and affection.

Growing up in the Washington DC area, I witnessed firsthand the power of flowers to bring groups of people closer to one another. The tidal basin’s cherry blossoms, whose clouds of white and pale pink blooms usually peak in mid or late March, attract thousands of people to DC every year – the very young, the very old, and everyone in between. Families, couples, and friends travel to the Smithsonian for a shared experience of appreciation, much like the way these same groups would at some other time sit together for the shared experience of a meal.

Flowers also encompass other concerns of the YSFP, such as the effects of large-scale production. Like rice, corn, and cotton, flowers are often grown in enormous monocultures spanning acres upon acres. They too are often genetically modified, treated with pesticides, and are environmentally questionable. Bouquets in many grocery stores, with too-bright flowers packaged tightly in plastic wrap, feel equivalent to other generic foodstuffs shipped in from states – or even countries – away.

The YSFP has explored agriculture’s links to music, folklore, social justice, traditional cooking,cultural niches, and community – why not add flowers, with their link to art, family, and romance, to the mix? Perhaps we can extend our conversations not only to the dinner table, but to the bouquets that sometimes sit in the center of those same tables.

Grace is a sophomore in Davenport college majoring in English. She is a part of the YSFP’s social media team.

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Grace Stonecipher ’17: The Value of Physical Learning

Last Friday, piece of pizza in hand and surrounded by friends, I found myself looking at the farm and thinking, ‘this is so cool.’ Having interacted with the farm for almost three years (1 as a volunteer and 2 as a farm manager), it can be easy to take the Old Acre for granted as the place where I spend four hours of my week leading volunteers in a workday. But when I give it a little more thought, I’m struck by just how special this small patch of campus is to me.  It was the first place at Yale that I felt comfortable, and as a freshman struggling with the transition to college, coming to volunteer every Friday was the highlight of my week. As my time as a farm manager comes to an end, I’ve begun to reflect on what the farm has meant to me, and why my time there remains a highlight three years later.

During a staff-wide discussion about the values of the farm earlier in the year, there was a lot of focus on the role of the YSFP in creating a space for discussion about current issues in food and in developing ‘food literate leaders’ to go out and make a difference in the food system.  While I definitely agree with these goals, I most identified with a comment of a fellow staffer member when she brought up the value of learning new skills and in engaging with the farm in a more physical way.

As college students, we spend so much time on academics – looking at computers and textbooks, or engaging with peers in seminars or even at the lunch table.  And of course, that’s why we’re here – to learn. But I think that learning can come in a lot of different forms, and it doesn’t always have to be academic. I like that on the farm, I can learn through action.

I find a huge amount of value in getting to work with my hands for four hours every week, something that students at Yale don’t get, or take the time, to do. It’s like hitting a reset button – for the time that I’m on the farm, hands in the dirt, all of the work and stress from central campus doesn’t really matter.  I can focus on the tasks at hand, and at the end of the workday, feel like I’ve accomplished something.

I also love the practical knowledge that gets passed on the farm – how to use a scuffle hoe, what a broad fork is, how to score bread, how to roll pizza dough, how to plant garlic… the list goes on. It makes me happy to watch volunteers take ownership over these tasks and then teach them to their friends. I’ve also come to really appreciate the camaraderie that doing physical labor with other people creates. I’ve had fascinating conversations with co-workers and volunteers alike that likely never would have happened had we not spent an hour harvesting spicy mix together.  

It can sometimes feel like learning in a more physical way is looked down upon as a lesser use of time, especially in places of higher education.  But I have to disagree with this viewpoint – I think physical, hands-on work is really important, both as a break from classroom academics, but also as a supplement.  I’m so grateful that the farm has created a space where multiple types of learning are possible.

Grace is a junior at Yale majoring in Environmental Studies. She’s a Farm Manager for the YSFP. 

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Claire Chang ’18: Food in the Desert

I spent the first week of spring vacation on Tucson, Arizona with my family. We watched baseball, went hiking, and visited museums. As we drove around Tucson, we passed countless strip malls and gated communities of identical adobe houses. In this arid, urban environment, the closest I came to thinking about agriculture or food production was when I tried to decide what to order at one of the many Mexican restaurants we visited.

Unexpectedly, one of our tourist stops, the San Xavier Mission, inspired me to give a bit more thought to food production in the desert. Originally constructed in 1692, the restored Catholic church is located nine miles south of downtown Tucson. Our tour guide recounted the story of its founding; a Jesuit priest, Francisco Kino, established several missions in Spanish territory around the start of the 18th century. He founded the San Xavier mission in the middle of a Tohono O’odham settlement. Our tour guide explained that the Tohono O’odham people, a native group that had lived in the Sonoran desert for centuries prior to the arrival of the Spanish, cultivated melons and squash that they irrigated with water from the Santa Cruz River, which now runs only part of the year.

The plaza in front of the San Xavier Mission in Tucson, Arizona.

As I stood out in the sun and looked around at the dry soil and remarkably cloudless sky, I could not imagine how people could have subsisted in the desert, even if they did irrigate their crops. I became curious about how people sustained themselves in this harsh landscape before widespread dam and well construction enabled a population explosion in the area.

It turns out that for hundreds of years, the Tohono O’odham people survived on much more than just melons and squash. They foraged for wild foods such as mesquite bean pods, cholla buds, and prickly pear fruit. They also cultivated desert-hardy crops like tepary beans and 60-day corn. In fact, the Tohono O’odham remained food self-sufficient up until the mid 20th century.

These desert plants that sustained the Tohono O’odham have adapted to their arid environment in a variety of ways. For example, their expansive, shallow root systems allow them to absorb the small amounts of water that moisten the top layer of soil during light rains. Cacti, which provide cholla buds and prickly pear fruit, are especially well adapted to arid environments. To minimize water loss through evapotranspiration, cacti do not have leaves and have a waxy, outer covering called a cuticle. Mesquite trees can shed their thin, feathery leaves during prolonged periods of drought in order to avoid water loss. In addition, many drought-tolerant plants make use of crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) to fix carbon during photosynthesis. This form of carbon fixation allows the plants to take up carbon exclusively at night, so they do not lose water through their open stomata during the day.

A mesquite tree in the desert. The bean pods and seeds that the trees produce can be ground into a meal. The meal can be eaten as porridge or used to make flatbread.

A prickly pear fruit growing from a cactus.

At present, Arizona primarily is known for its cotton and citrus production. However, in recent years, several organizations in the southern part of the state have begun to promote wild food sources and desert crops.  Growing concerns about water scarcity have contributed to this attention on indigenous plants. Furthermore, these plants have the potential to improve human health. As white settlers and urbanization pushed Native Americans like the Tohono O’odham people onto reservations, their diets increasingly began to consist of processed foods high in sugars and fats. The health consequences have been severe; American Indian adults are twice as likely to develop Type II diabetes compared to non-Hispanic whites. Between 1990 and 2009, diagnoses of Type II diabetes increased 110% among Native Americans ages ten through nineteen. Many plants indigenous to the Sonoran desert are high in soluble fiber and help to stabilize blood sugar, so increased consumption of these foods could help reduce the prevalence of obesity and diabetes in native populations. The plants provide many other nutritional benefits, as well. For instance, mesquite pods contain calcium, manganese, iron, and zinc, and the seeds are about 40% protein.

Native Seeds/SEARCH is an example of an organization devoted to the conservation and use of plants indigenous to the Southwest. The non-profit’s work encompasses seed banking, seed distribution, and education. The organization has roughly 500 varieties of corn, 200 types of beans, and 1,300 other types of seeds, many of which are available to the public, in storage. I didn’t make a stop there with my family this time around, but if you ever find yourself in Tucson, Native Seeds/SEARCH may be worth a visit.

Claire Chang is a sophomore in Pierson and a Farm Manager for the YSFP.

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Hannah Hauptman ’18: The Mixed Blessings of ‘Sustainability’

Over Spring Break, a friend asked me what the “sustainable food” part of the Yale Sustainable Food Program (YSFP) meant. While we have discussed and debated this issue at times, this isn’t a question we go over at weekly staff meetings, and there’s no elevator-pitch response given to each YSFP student staff member. We each have to answer from our individual perspective, and thus since my perspective is constantly shifting, my response also changes slightly with each iteration.

I gave what I felt was a reasonable answer. I told her that, for me, “sustainable food” is a lens through which we make decisions about food and farming. It means that agricultural choices are made after holistic consideration of the effects on both people and land over the long term. I emphasized that it isn’t a term that denotes one specific agricultural technique, philosophy, or way of eating.

Another girl responded, “well, that’s the whole beauty of the term ‘sustainability,’ right? That it’s so flexible. That way people can relate it to whatever they care about.”

She was right. The word’s flexibility allows people to integrate it into their eating choices, their business practices and their unique lifestyles. Through it, groups can prioritize their concerns and bring their specific values into the conversation. In many ways, this commitment to flexibility makes up a core tenet of the YSFP as it strives to appeal to an incredibly wide range of consumers and producers, eaters and growers. Taking a strict position on the merits of genetically modified crops or vegetarianism, for example, would inevitably alienate parts of any audience. Fixed stances polarize and exclude, whereas the Program aims for compromise and conversation. Thus, (I think) the relativism of the term ‘sustainable’ accurately reflects the philosophy of the Program more generally.

However, the beauty of the term is also its greatest drawback. Its flexibility, in comparison to its now heavily regulated ancestor “organic,” means that anyone can claim to be sustainable, thus potentially stripping the term of its meaning and power. To take an example from the opposite end of the agricultural spectrum, let’s look at Monsanto. Their website opens with the line, “in the face of climate-related challenges, it is more important than ever to advance sustainable agricultural practices that can help make balanced meals more accessible to all.” This rhetoric is reinforced by their Student Opportunities page, which pulls in environmentally-conscious potential interns by reassuring them that “at Monsanto you’ll be part of a sustainable company focused on reducing our environmental impact and promoting conservation” (monsanto.com). Monsanto’s communications staff can’t touch organic—USDA guidelines won’t let them. But they can use ‘sustainable’ to make vague claims that are persuasive, effective and don’t require substantiation.

Sustainability connects to an incredibly broad set of priorities that range from environmental degradation and social justice to profit and public image. I am hesitant to dismiss Monsanto’s motivations as underhanded or nefarious—their executives and scientists may well genuinely believe they are practicing a sustainable form of agriculture. Furthermore, using the rhetoric of sustainability in pursuit of profit and image isn’t inherently corrupt; lots of small growers who can’t justify the stringent and expensive USDA Organic certification call themselves sustainable to get the price premiums they deserve.

The flexibility contained in ‘sustainable’ is a powerful double-edged sword. For the most part, I think it makes sense to keep the term undefined; so much can be lost in processes of strict delineation or quantification. However, it’s crucial to also consider what is lost in the malleability and relativism of the term, and try to strike a balance. That’s what the YSFP aims for, after all: balance.

Hannah is a farm manager for the YSFP majoring in History. She was also a Lazarus Intern in the summer of 2015.