Cuisine & Empire: A Framework for Multi-Species Care on the American Farm

Cuisine & Empire

A Framework for Multi-Species Care on the American Farm

Elaine Zmuda

Advised by Rose Monacella

Master of Landscape Architecture Thesis 2024

Harvard Graduation School of Design

Acknowledgements

Any project, even one with an individual author, is a collaborative effort. None of this would have been possible without the incredible support network I have had over the past decade of my formal design education.

Bill Kemp and the staff at the McLean County Museum of History Archives were integral in my research. They assisted with all my tedious requests, confusion on dates, and compilation of materials. It was a joy to visit the museum because of them. Will Glazier, whose farm in Paxton, Illinois I visited, was inspirational. His colorful fields of bloody butcher corn and string beans showed me early on that polyculture was possible.

To all my reviewers and critics, thank you for your insights, they guided me along the path: Daniel Fernández Pascual, Ed Eigen, Nina-Marie Lister, Garnette Cadogan, Elisa Cattaneo, Kira Clingen, Thaisa Way, Elaine Stokes, Sonia Sobrina Ralston, Bert de Jonghe, Celina Abba, and Enrique Cavelier. For my final panel, thank you for a wonderful discussion that inspires me to continue this work: Jane Amidon, Neeraj Bhatia, Luis Callejas, Michelle Franco, and Kathy Velikov.

To my thesis group - Thank you for the support and for going through this process with me. Emilie, Roxanne, and Hana, our morning coffees were something to look forward to every day. Makio, you were the best server and cheerleader. Issam, Cory, Duke, and Priyanka, thank you for making the exhibition a breeze to set up.

Hana, your generousity, guidance, advice and open arms saved me this semester, I would not have made it without you. Devin, I always wonder how a person should be, and you have the best answers. Thank you being my home (and for putting up with all the crying).

I would not have even attempted to do a thesis without Rose, my wonderful advisor. Working with you was the best experience I could have imagined. Your support, care, generosity, and time means the world to me.

Most importantly, I have to thank my parents for their endless love and support. Without you, who only encouraged me and always made sure I had everything necessary for success, I would never have made it this far.

Harling, Maurice, Illinois State Normal University Prairie Preserve, McLean County, IL, 1944, Pantagraph Negative Collection, 1940-1945

On the American Farm, Empire reigns. A power structure that encompasses an ahistorical spatial totality, it creates the conditions for the control of human life and nature. Empire is also a place. It is located in McLean County, Illinois, the top producer of corn in the United States. This corn, no. 2 yellow dent, drives our cuisine, yet we eat almost none of it. Cuisine & Empire intersect in the farm as a problem of land. Cuisine & Empire: A Framework for Multi-Species Care on the American Farm re-grounds landscape architecture in agrarian practices. By reconceiving the land ordinance, it counters the scalable practices of Empire that reduce multispecies life to yields and quotas. Using non-scalable farm ecologies, infrastructures, economies, and land practices, Cuisine & Empire re-assembles food cultivation and culture.

Bill, Frank, Field shelling, McLean County, IL, 1944, Pantagraph Negative Collection, 1940-1945. Abstract

Frank, Bill, Grain Elevator, McLean County, IL 1941. Pantagraph Negative Collection, 1940 - 1945.

Cuisine & Empire a sampling

Cuisine & Empire proposes to re-assemble the American Farm.

Empire, for this thesis, is a concept describing a power structure incorporating the entire global realm. Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri characterize it as a spatial totality, existing out of time. Empire rules over and creates the conditions in which human nature and social life form. In the United States, it exists in the Land Ordinance Grid that organizes property across the country.

Empire is also a specific place.

It is a township in McLean County, Illinois, outlined by the land ordinance. McLean County, Empire’s home, grows the most corn in the US. This corn, usually no. 2 yellow dent, drives our cuisine, yet we eat almost none of it.

Cuisine and Empire intersect in the farm.

It is a problem of land, yet landscape architects rarely design working agricultural spaces. Cuisine & Empire reconsiders the role of landscape architects in shaping the American Farm. Rather than reinforcing Empire’s power, it stewards relational, non-scalable ecologies, infrastructures, and land practices that have the power to reassemble food culture and cultivation.

Doing so requires rethinking professional education from the ground up.

Land Grant Universities appeared with the expansion and settlement of the United States in the 19th century.Led by Jonathan Baldwin Morrill of Illinois College, farmers called for the establishment of agricultural education in each state. The Morrill Act outlined their funding and establishment. Land owned by the government, often seized from Native American tribes, was sold to fund the creation of state colleges.

The purpose of a land grant university is to, “ teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the only land grant institution in Illinois today. Its extension program, housed out of the campus in the city, promotes new agricultural technologies and standardized ‘best practices’

Cuisine & Empire proposes an alternative landscape architecture education, working alongside farmers and other cultivators. The curriculum of the school is the menu that organizes the thesis.

Course 1: Multi-Faceted Narratives challenges the dominance of Empire by carefully unearthing buried histories and traces of past ecologies on the site.

Course 2: Species in Situ is a close observation of current conditions. What species exist today, and how to they live?

Course 3: Respect & Recourse builds upon the previous courses, proposing new designs for food cultivation, economies, and cuisines.

Course 4: Collapse & Regeneration is the new land grant campus. The new school collapses the land ordinance by complicating ideas of property and ownership. The campus grows from each of the recourses.

Course 5: Eating in Communion is the act of sharing this new future together around a table.

hors d’oeuvre

Multi-Faceted Narratives

Empire tells a grand narrative of progress. The short film, The Empire of Corn, made for Cuisine & Empire, is in the style of a mid-century booster film. On the land ordinance map, images tell the story of triumph of human innovation over nature. This broad narrative does not have any indivuals, and corn is understood as something to control for the creation of industrial production that surround us in modern America.

While Empire tells one story, archives and local histories tell another. This book, which contains different histories of Empire, Illinois, gathered from the McLean County Museum of History and Pantagraph newspaper archives. It is a reference for the school curriculum, reconceiving technology and cuisine.

While ‘progress’ marched forward, daily life carried on quietly. The Kickapoo Peoples planted the three sisters. Early farmers used rhymes and songs to organize sowing seeds. Government farm policy changed and farmers conserved land until they were driven to plant on every square inch. Businesses opened and closed. Seeds were shared and sold, each carrying a history of cuisine and culture.

The site is a farm in section 33 of Empire township. It is 222.5 acres. Salt Creek runs through it, buffered with woodland before opening to corn fields and pasture.

In the 1874 McLean County Atlas, it was 15 separate parcels. By 1914, it had been consolidated into the property that exists today by John McConnell. Today, the O’Neill family farms the land, which they purchased in 1987.

The site contains histories of homes, of farm, of technologies, of climate changes, celebration, and devastation, today hidden by monocultures. Recognizing these histories and rooting them in a site impacts how we understand current conditions and respond with design.

Species in Situ appetizer

The farm is a multi-species landscape, even when industrialized. These 5 typologies, the field, the woodland, the pasture, the prairie, and the buffer strip each have been shaped by different actors, histories, and events. These form the base of our meal.

Each of these spaces has been shaped through technologies and techniques, both intentionally and not. They are designed spaces. By recognizing this, landscape architects see the influence of their skills. If these spaces were designed, they can be re-designed again to counter empire.

The Cornfield

The monotony of the cornfield is a result of the commodification of the plant. Machinery drives the spacing, the rows long and repetitive. The perfect stalk has been engineered into existence, first through hybridization at Funk Brothers Seed Company, then genetic modification by multinationals.

The Pasture

The pasture was historically a large portion of Illinois farms, but has been lost to the feedlot. While remaining pastures may look like prairies, they are highly controlled, with any plant that affects the taste of milk or meat weeded out and eradicated.

The Woodland

The woodland only remains as the Riparian Corridor - a required buffer around Salt Creek to limit runoff. Its sister landscape, the oak savanna, has been lost to expanding cornfields. Alongside oaks, osage oranges and other introduced then forgotten plants grow in a strange mix.

The Prairie

The conservation plot is another required space, where farmers try to rebuild soil. Their size is driven by property percentages, not ecological networks. Many are just strips along highway 136 or I-74. Unlike the earlier prairies of the region, these have been dried up by drainage tiles, with their deep soils broken over generations.

The Buffer Strip

The Machine Buffer exists in many forms and scales on the farm. It is the highly standardized space required for the movement of machines. At these unconsidered edges of control, a surprisingly diverse array of species grow, later to be eliminated as weeds.

Respect & Re-Assemblage main course

Recourse 1: The Field Plot

The three sisters is a historic assemblage developed in the America before European settlement. Corn, beans, and squash grow together in harmony. This dish, inspired by Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef, brings the field onto the plate, beginning to generate a local cuisine.

Looking at corn anew reveals its rich history that we can taste. It was domesticated from Teosinte; Over 9,000 years, the human touch shaped it into different varieties with unique uses in cuisine: sweet corn, flour corn, dent corn, flint corn and popcorn. Still, corn is not entirely under our control, even the genetically modified crops of today. Corn makes its world. It produces enough humidity to affect weather across the midwest. It changes soil chemistry and absorbs carbon dioxide in a method rare in the midwest. It is alive, not just a commodity.

The prairie has been long undervalued because it appears boring from our typical viewpoint. But at the ground level, it teems with life. The soil is dense with roots holding glacial deposits in place. Insects burrow in the crevasses, creating hummus in their intricate networks. Birds nest in the tangle of grasses and flowers. Rusty Patch Bumble Bees buzz from flower to flower. Water flows seasonally through the wet prairie, filtering minerals and creating a deep, rich soil full of life.

The precision of the machine has shifted over the past 200 years of settlement in Empire. Human and animal-powered tools left unique signatures in the soil patterns. Now, tractors create precise zones of control. In the leftover spaces, there is a chance for unexpected life to grow.

From these species and techniques, The field plot becomes a polyculture. Unlike a monoculture, the polycultural field already begins to form a cuisine. A diverse plate, rather than high yields of a single crop, is the result. It is based on histories of the land and species, which are evident in the design.

The technique of setting up the field shifts. The ts are planted in mounds made through cut and fill. On the mound, the corn is planted first, growing into a trellis the beans use when they are planted. The beans fertilize the corn by fixing nitrogen. The squash, planted last, shades the plant roots and soil, cooling them in the hot summer.

The ditches, where smaller tractors move through, are not left over, but spaces offered to other species. The three sisters expands to include the prairie. The diverse grasses, flowers, and pollinators return and water once again pools in the soil. Other species, such as ground chickens, squirrels, cows, and sheep, are invited in to eat, instead of being driven away to preserve the crop.

Aggregated together, the mounds break from a monotonous pattern into one that responds to specific soil conditions on a plot. The field breathes and shares, moving water, minerals, and seeds throughout the site.

Recourse 2: The Compost Corridor

The compost corridor is rooted in techniques of weaving together plants to form hedges. These techniques travel through foodways, from hedgerows to presentation. This pie crust calls back to the fields where its ingredients grow with its latticed crust.

The oak forests and savannas endemic to Empire before settlement were important homes for both peoples and animals of the region. A tree’s entire body serves as food for others across its lifespan. The atmosphere of each tree forms a sectionally varied ecosystem of microclimates. It is room and board to thousands of other species.

The hedges outline pastures where cows and other ruminants graze. Through their digestion of the land, they help to remake the soil, through managing grasses, spreading seeds and bacteria through manure, and compressing soil.

The compost corridor expands and thickens the idea of property with these species in mind (pause) Rather than a line dividing, it generates new soil through composting, and forms shared spaces through weaving together uses. Here, we see an orchard leading into the existing woodlands. Hives for pollination are centrally located and protected. Cows graze in the returning oak savannas.

The line is now layered. First, osage orange saplings are woven in to a living fence, like you see in this model here [point to hedge] Another layer of a wattle fence provides a dense enclosure, where farm compost digests the field and transform it into soil. All parties along the corridor contribute to and share this resource.

The articulation of the hedgerow composes relationships between other programs as well. The line opens to enclose more controlled uses, such as orchards, or creates protected zones, where cows can shelter or hives are hidden.

The techniques of weaving branches becomes a way of weaving together separated uses. The lattice is a medium for growth, for building upon, and for sharing. It grows food and digests it, forming a cuisine-cycle.

Recourse 3: The Shared Silo

To counter empire, the Shared Silo spatializes the local economy, which is more than just commodities and cash flow. Knowledge is passed through generations and between neighbors in celebration. This recipe for corn souffle, is passed down by Elaine’s mother in a form of generational knowledge, then shared with you, the reader.

The Shared Silos are collective sites for grain storage, but also social life. The vernacular architecture is adjusted to reflect the new cultivation. Each farmer of the collective is granted a number of silos, where they store their grains. The diversity of color comes through the woven netting and wire mesh. The arrangement of the bins forms spaces for different seasonal uses, mirroring the events of the field. Inflatables pop-up to support different activities throughout the year.

The mix of uses responds to each collective’s needs. Greenhouses display varietals farmers may want to try. An amphitheater hosts classes for knowledge sharing. People gather for the harvest festival in a dinning pavilion at the end of each growing season.Market spaces allow for local exchanges. The silos pool the resources farms already often share.

Each shared silo feeds into a larger local mill. This millshed holds about 250 farms and 25 collective silos. Whereas large mills today create demand for specific types of corn varietals, this local mill responds to variations in yearly crop.

Unlike most large mills, which use wet milling to create industrial products and ingredients, this mill uses dry milling, making grains into the many colored flours, grits, polentas, and meals used in the local cuisine. These products return back to the shared silo, where they are sold in a local market, creating cycles.

Collapse & Regeneration palate cleanse

The recourses to empire come together and form a new mode of farming. It must be shared and taught to transform more than a single farm. Cuisine & Empire transforms the model of the Land-Grant institution into one that counters empire and forms new cuisines.

This new campus is transformed by the recourses to empire. It continues this transformation by remaking property.

For the duration of the school’s tenure in this site, it is a communal property, understood as a shared resource, like the riparian corridors or the shared silos. Hedge spaces erase boundaries, and students and faculty partner with neighbors in trust for mutual benefit.

The school is based on existing conditions and history. Its curriculum mirrors that of the thesis project.

Students begin with an understanding of the multiple histories of the site. They situate the species in current conditions. Their design interventions, created with knowledge passed on from farmers, disassemble empire at multiple scales and create local connections, cycles, and cuisines.

The school is transformational. As part of is process, it moves every 3 years with involvement from the students. As it moves, it establishes an eco-region, creating relationships between farmers and becomes the medium through which knowledge is shared. This movement breaks the land ordinance that spatialized Empire. Rather than scaling down a logic of control and property, A new mode of organization, driven by the cultivated relations emerges.

The field plot is driven by the polycultural plants growing, changing each season.

The campus is formed by relations between neighbors across time. As it transforms into the school for a set time, it is a public space, where students learn, farmers find resources, and the community comes to celebrate.

The mill-shed gathers the different farms into a self-sustaining local economy.

The eco-region is determined by similar conditions for growing certain crops, family networks, and cuisines; it is linked through the knowledge shared by the school.

This new application of landscape architecture, from the field to the eco-region, has continental implications. The entire nation can be remapped through relations of cuisine as opposed to property.

Crucially, this is not fixed, but growing and changing.  The table and the cuisine will look completely different in 100 years due to climate change, cultural shifts, and events we can’t yet predict. Each iteration of the school responds, builds upon its shared knowledge, and alters the landscape. There is always something new to taste.

Eating in Communion dessert

Eating in Communion comes back to the table the thesis was served around. In her essay, “On-Non-Scalability,” Anna Tsing notes that conceptualizing the world and making it real are intimately related. As the thesis presentation imaged a new agricultural landscape, it began to become real, if just for a moment. Cornbread, made with locally milled grains (from Janie’s Mill in Ashkum, Illinois), was shared with all at the table.

Cuisine & Empire disassembled agricultural empire. The impacts move beyond just the farm, all the way to the table, which is now recognized as another way to view the landscape.  It asks not just what and where, but who we are eating with.

Sources & Resources the community

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Bibliography Continued

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Videos and Media

a Miro board with the different films and animations made for Cuisine & Empire can be found at this link or using this QR code.

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNvpGnow=/?share_link_id=556161369548