Whetstone Magazine Volume 2

E C U A D O R / P E R U / R E P U B L I C O F G E O R G I A / M E X I C O C I T Y / V E R M O N T / S O U T H KO R E A

A J O U R N A L O N F O O D O R I G I N S A N D C U LT U R E .

ED.

ORIGIN FORAGING

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WINTER 2018

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Welcome to the second of what we hope is many volumes of Whetstone Magazine.

As I am ceaselessly reminded each time I tell someone I’ve started a food magazine, it’s no easy task.

So why the torment? It’s a question I’ve returned to repeatedly as the complexities of independent publishing have at times taken a toll on my inherently bloated anxiety.

But like so many, the timing of this endeavour makes persistence a non-negotiable.

Endurance is the only option. More pointedly, it is an essential quality of resistance.

All over the world, a disturbing insurgency of intense nationalism and misogyny reflects an illiterate fear of diminishing resources and erasure. The ways in which this has cascaded into society range from unfortunate to tragic. It is a painful irony that in the precise moment in which these fear-based prejudices are more pervasive than they’ve been in a lifetime, the exact opposite is true.

BILL ADDISON

As the “others” among us are asked to exist on the fringes of our society, if at all, our effort represents more than ten countries and covers more than a half dozen. We are proud to say this magazine is the construction of women and people of color.

As you’ll hear in more precise and beautiful language from African-American food scholar and historian, Michael Twitty, food is not the place to escape these conversations, rather it is a foundational opportunity for understanding.

With cookbooks, airplanes and Instagram, our affinity for global cuisine has reached meridian. Our hope is that there may be an equal care for the people and histories that have produced the beloved (and exploited) cuisines. Whetstone is an invitation to adore the people and traditions of other nations as much as we do their food.

Thank you for supporting us in this work.

With Gratitude, Stephen Satterfield Founder, Whetstone Magazine

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B la c ksm it h M o r i ah C ow l e s of Orc h ard S te e l SHELBURNE, VERMONT

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah Alexander Sarah Alexander lives and works in Burlington, Vermont. She is an avid cook, gardener, and writer. Sarah currently serves as the Gleaning and Food Rescue Coordinator at the Intervale Center where she addresses community food security and food access.

Abby Portman Abby Portman is the Community Relations Coordinator at the Intervale Center, an agricultural nonprofit based in Burlington, Vermont. Her main hobbies are cooking, eating, and photography.

Annie Sloan North Carolina informed Annie’s palate. She attended culinary school in Chicago, picked thousands of pine tips on Lummi Island, and sat at many of world’s best tables. At Evergreen State College, she studied food through a kaleidoscope and designed critical tasting studies. She’s currently thinking about food law and pecan pie.

Marina Goldi Marina is a buyer in the steel mill industry by day and a photographer by night. She enjoys traveling, architecture and exploring Detroit where she is known as @marinapiagoldi – a lifestyle blogger documenting her culinary adventures through the city.

Bella Luna Bella Luna is a writer and creative who spent the last 7 years in Oakland, California. She’s driven by a calling to reconnect with her ancestral roots. Bella now lives in México City 6

documenting personal and social experiences to find her voice in contemporary México. Follow her @theplaylust.

Sana Javeri Kadri Sana Javeri Kadri is a sometimes salty, permanently hungry, photographer and writer. She was raised in post-colonial Bombay, wound up in the produce aisles of California and can be currently found @sanajaverikadri on Instagram or in person wherever there are vegetables to be found.

She’s also schemer-in-chief for Diaspora Co.

George McCalman Raised in Brooklyn, Creative Director George McCalman received his BFA in philosophy at St. Johns in Queens, NY. He credits his Caribbean background for his unique ability to both embrace and rebel against traditional modes of design. His studio, MCCALMAN.CO, serves primarily art, lifestyle, and food clients. Follow him @McCalmanCo

Simran Sethi Simran Sethi is a journalist and educator focused on food, sustainability and social change. She is the creator of The Slow Melt, a podcast on chocolate and winner of the 2017 SAVEUR magazine Best Food Podcast. She is also the author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.

Heleene Tambet Heleene’s work is centered on global agricultural development and production systems. An Estonian native, she’s a graduate student in development economics in San Francisco, where she explores global food diversity and

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the future of small-scale farming through travel and writing. In her spare time she works on a farm in Sonoma County.

Laurel Bellante Laurel Bellante is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona. She specializes in food security in the U.S. and Mexico. Using a political ecology approach, Laurel is a passionate defender of farmer rights, rural livelihoods and more sustainable and just food systems.

Rachel Glueck Rachel Glueck is a recovering nomad, forging a semisettled life in Todos Santos, where she and her husband have a Mexican restaurant and mezcaleria, El Refugio.

Between raising their business and newborn, Rachel writes on culture, cuisine, and sustainability.

Satchita Melina Satchita Melina is a San Francisco based artist whose work consists of free-hand paintings and illustrations that review and draw on her love for the wild, Eastern traditions, sexual empowerment and socio-political issues. In addition to visual storytelling she also works as a doula and women’s sexuality educator.

Melissa Sáenz Gordon Melissa (aka MellyG) is the host of the Te Aprecio Show, a regional R&B radio program on BFF.fm. In addition, she’s a practicing visual artist and street photographer and advocate for collaborative spaces and open minds.

Seoyoung Jung Seoyoung Jung is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. She worked in Michelin star restaurants in New York for several years before returning to Korea to work at a Korean fermentation company. Seoyoung received extensive training about traditional Korean fermentation, and was also certified in Korean royal cuisine.

Sonja Swanson Sonja Swanson is a freelance writer based in Korea and the U.S. She moved back to Korea to explore her roots, worked in marketing and was an editor at Time Out Seoul.

R.S. Whipple R.S. Whipple received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. Her paintings, sculpture and animations have been exhibited internationally.

Janeivy Hilaro Neivy is a Puerto Rican and Dominican photographer based in Connecticut. He uses nature as his palette to deliver bold imagery of often overlooked places and locations. With a focus on community, diversity and sustainability, he’s been recognized worldwide for his efforts.

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Vermont Re In Burlington, a new agrarian portrait emerges.

CONTRIBUTOR

Sarah Alexander PHOTOGRAPHER

Abby Portman

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Being at the Ethan Allen Homestead can feel like you’re in the middle of Burundi, Somalia, or Nepal. Prayer flags hang tall with this year’s corn crop. Unfamiliar vines climb up calculated trellises of messy branches. The language variation creates a spoken symphony unlike any other; a beautiful and diverse composition fit for a full orchestra.

in Rwanda, where her parents were farmers. As an adult, Janine was the produce buyer for a small grocery market within her refugee camp in Tanzania. She worked closely with farmers to source nourishing food for her community and claims this experience helped her grow the savvy business skills she now uses every day.

This special place is home to New Farms for New Americans (NFNA), a community-based gardening and agriculture program for refugees and immigrants in Burlington, Vermont.

Through NFNA, gardeners and farmers are able to access tracts of fertile land to grow fresh, organic, and culturally significant crops. This time of year, men, women, and children from every corner of the world can be found tending their fields and reaping the harvest.

Many NFNA participants manage subsistence plots for their own household use, while others, like Janine, choose to grow on a larger, market garden scale. Most NFNA farmers carry lifelong agricultural experience from their previous home but struggle to find land and resources to continue their farming traditions in the U.S. Others begin a new farming journey once resettled in Vermont. Regardless of background and expertise, NFNA provides technical assistance and training around topics like greenhouse production, cold-hardy crop planning, and season extension.

It was a hot August day at the Homestead when I had the pleasure of meeting Janine Ndagijimana. Standing in a field full of African eggplant, I got to listen as Janine’s resettlement story and agricultural journey came to life. NFNA Program Specialist, Alisha Laramee, provided background information and a local translator to facilitate the conversation.

Janine has been farming with the program since 2012 and is one of the most inspiring and entrepreneurial growers. Refugees resettle to seek safety, freedom, and the chance to reclaim a life and future for themselves and their families. Janine has done just that, and has accomplished it through food and farming – and specifically through her successful production of African eggplant.

African eggplant, also known as intore or garden egg, is originally from Sub-Saharan Africa. The fruit is often egg-shaped and green in color. It has the taste and crunchy texture of a bitter green pepper and is usually stir-fried or oven roasted for a variety of soups, stews, and meat dishes. The crop is highyielding, relatively easy to grow, and simple to harvest and handle. In addition to African eggplant, Janine also grows hot peppers, dried beans, amaranth, African corn, and a slew of other vegetables, mostly for her family’s consumption.

Janine arrived in Vermont in 2007 by way of Tanzania. Her parents are from Burundi, but she was born in a refugee camp in Rwanda. When she was thirteen, her family moved to Tanzania, where Janine lived until relocating with her husband and children to Vermont. Her interest in food and farming began 10

In Vermont, Janine’s business has only flourished. She currently cultivates the most land of any NFNA farmer and recently acquired her own greenhouse. She sells her eggplants locally to Burlington-area markets and restaurants and ships produce throughout the United States to buyers as far away as Texas and Arizona. With two thousand plants in production this year, Janine will be harvesting about 300 lbs of eggplant every week, through August and September. In addition to produce, each spring Janine also sells the African eggplant starts and seeds to other New American farmers and gardeners throughout the Northeast. Of course, her family’s help is essential. Her husband is a part of daily farm tasks, as are her children. She hopes that one day her children will choose to be farmers as well.

Next year, Janine plans to increase her African eggplant production and would like to continue acquiring more land and a second greenhouse. She’d also like to start growing different crops for market, such as tomatoes. Janine is now an American citizen, and having called Vermont home for nearly a decade, she intends to stay. Vermont is thrilled, and quite lucky, to have her.

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Michael Twitty Calls Us In The African-American food scholar and historian puts his whole soul into the work.

CONTRIBUTOR

“You know they were punished.

You know they were whipped.

You know they were hurt.

The rest is left up to your imagination.”

When he’s upset, Michael Twitty doesn’t like to be alone. But after learning that his enslaved great-great-grandfather, Harry Townsend, endeavored to escape, but couldn’t, in that moment he needed to be. A Mr. Frasier was paid $5.00 for the return of Harry Townsend. The rest is left up to your imagination. At times it’s painful, but there is no distance between Michael Twitty and his subject matter. His profound interest in genealogy and genetics has placed Twitty and his family directly into his analysis and thesis, and in so doing, has made the personal universal. “I want people to know that Southern food came at a cost. Soul food came at a cost. Comfort food, from the Southern U.S., came at a cost.

And that my family was part of the human cost.”

I heard Twitty speak a year ago. We sat in an amber-lit room accented by the smell of aging books, hardwood, and freshly brewed tea. His chair was only a few feet in front of a fireplace whose overmantel, a short time ago, was bedecked with a painting of John C. Calhoun, former Vice President to Andrew Jackson and a vehemently pro-slavery South Carolinian. Twitty began his talk by noting the inherent strangeness of presenting in a building commemorating such a man. And his talking (and writing) — at once spellbinding, disquieting, and soothing — are what have

Annie Sloan

propelled him as one of the nation’s most essential voices on Southern food. Effortless brilliance has the power to pacify, and Michael Twitty drops profundities with the same practiced ease and grace with which he lowers flour-coated chicken into spitting oil. But his openness and astuteness come at a cost. By the end of his talk, tears were rolling down his cheeks.

Since then, Yale has renamed Calhoun College, Harvard has hosted a symposium on higher ed’s ties to slavery, and a few Confederate monuments have been toppled. Is this too little, too late?

Many who would unequivocally rebuke white nationalism don’t have the tools they need to sit with their pain and discomfort.

Americans have proven ill-equipped to properly remember the country’s tragedies. A blind eye at the dining room table is a blind spot in our hearts. It’s the same blind spot that allowed a bronze sculpture of Robert E. Lee, erected in 1924, to endure well into 2017. Patinaed statues of men atop horses aren’t history lessons, they’re monuments. They are symptomatic of our refusal to accurately remember.

If we are to preclude regression, the United States has a long way to go. We have not competently addressed our sins and Twitty is working tirelessly to change that. He takes on the United State’s most commonplace chicanery: obfuscation, willful blindness, and cluelessness. Intentional obfuscation often happens in pursuance of antebellum sentimentality. Southern plantations are billed as “attractions” and toured predominantly by ardent revisionists

Portrait by RS Whipple 12

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and wistful whites who pay tribute to Scarlett O’Hara’s dresses, breezy verandas, and twangy gentility. Docents feed guests’ spurious reminiscences by eschewing candor. Though the people who were enslaved on the property far outnumber those who weren’t, they’re rarely considered. This same affected amnesia caused Paula Deen to organize a plantation-style wedding for her brother, replete with realistic “servers.” During her deposition in a discrimination lawsuit regarding her wedding planning and similar goings-on, Deen said “of course” she had, on occasion, used the N-word. The Food Network dropped her three shows, retailers dropped her products, and amidst the commotion, Twitty’s notoriety rose.

On his blog, Afroculinaria, he composed “An Open Letter to Paula Deen.” In it, he let her know that he was relieved she hadn’t denied using the word. He is of the belief that everyone is at least a little bit racist. Accordingly, Twitty suggested that she start grappling with her explicit and implicit biases instead of blithely claiming she isn’t racist. He implored her to do the work. There was also a revelation that many of his friends had dressed up like her for Halloween. (This is admittedly a futile synopsis — if you haven’t read the letter, you should.)

Though the Washington Post called it his “takedown” of Paula Deen, Twitty has mastered the art of calling in, not out. He used this same approach writing to Sean Brock, a South Carolinian and fine-dining chef of distinction. During Mind of a Chef’s second season, Brock visits Senegal to study the roots of his kitchens’ cuisine. There he finds some ideas to “steal,” and references “missing links,” though there is no mention of the word “slavery” or any version thereof during the entire half hour. My friend and I finished the episode together. She looked at me knowingly.

“What the hell? He acted like they immigrated to the South.” I shut my laptop indignantly and considered texting friends who worked for him.

Twitty’s methods were, of course, far more effective. He penned a 3,000+ word missive, saluting Brock’s trip to Senegal, while reminding him that it wasn’t uncharted territory and that chefs of color had long been exploring those connections. Like the Deen piece, it is thoughtful and solicitous.

The inverse of Brock’s approach is looking into the past to explore its gruesome bits. For people of color, avoiding history’s brutalities is sometimes a necessary act of self-preservation. Experiencing its reverberations daily, means you seldom need reminders.

Alternately, as white people, many of us have become adept at ignoring the past, occasionally stopping to view its horrors — for art’s sake.

Myriad perspectives were exchanged concerning the popularity of 12 Years a Slave and the buzz surrounding The Birth of a Nation.

Some argued that the films might help open the eyes stubbornly closed to the United States’ 246 years of slavery and subsequent lack of contrition. Others questioned the effectiveness of a slav-

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ery genre in entertainment. Discussions were less nuanced when HBO announced its forthcoming (ill-conceived) series, Confederate, from the producers of Game of Thrones. The show imagines a world in which the Confederacy didn’t lose, and slavery remained in its original form. After the press release, the internet pounced.

April Reign, who gained a following with her #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, ignited a similarly effective campaign as she and her followers tweeted #NoConfederate with a vengeance.

A week before HBO’s announcement, on the day of The Cooking Gene’s release, Twitty’s first book, he did an interview with Tom Ashbrook on his public radio program, On Point. During the interview, Ashbrook asks (states) incredulously, “It’s hardly as though the history of Africans and African Americans in the Old South is not visible, is not palpable.” Twitty corrects him, “...it’s as if we never existed. ” He reminds him that they don’t show up in the commemorative paintings hung in courthouses, that their graves are plowed over for gas stations and condos, and they’re being gentrified and expelled by hurricanes. “So, no, I don’t think we can take it for granted that everybody knows,” he protested.

Though he had already heard a few intermittent “wows” and other approving sounds from Ashbrook, Twitty further elucidated by sharing a conversation he’d recently had with a white woman from Savannah, Georgia. She told him that she had eaten okra, hoppin’ john, and red rice all her life. Astounded, she looked at him and asked, “Those come from Africa?” Twitty had this exchange while he was interpreting (not reenacting) slavery in Colonial Williamsburg. As part of his Southern Discomfort Tour, Twitty visits the aforementioned plantations of the South, cooking for persons past and present. His movements around the hearths and pots of yore pay tribute, linking and mending history’s broken strings to his contemporary gestures. He cooks and scrubs and kindles. The ghosts of these kitchens serve as puppeteers. Instead of researching the past, he is informed by it, he allows himself to be moved. In The Cooking Gene, Twitty writes, “I feel their souls passing through me as I cook and tell their stories. At the end of the day, I feel like a terminal and less like a man who is breathing and aware.” It’s unusual enough to see a culinary historian work with their hands, let alone one who places their body into their work. Or, a distinction he makes, one who commits “to doing.” And commit he did, in numerous ways. In order to write his first book, Twitty told me he “spent day after day sitting at the local Dunkin Donuts, from four o’clock in the morning till eleven o’clock at night, hammering away, hoping to get something meaningful out of those long days.” His book, part memoir, part culinary history, part wake-up call, took four years to complete, but was a lifetime in the making.

For food origin enthusiasts, its pages are filled with pithy defenses of its relevance, like, (one I immediately underlined), “There is no chef without a homeland.” There is the anecdote of him ingesting Virginia red clay and reflecting, “I was not just of Virginia — Virginia was in me.” On the phone, he shared how he cooks within this value system. “I cook intuitively and taste as I

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Michael Twitty’s “whetstone:” a mortar and pestle (often for black-eyed pea fritters) Advice to students of food: “Not everybody can do this, but anyone with heart can. Consider that this is about the people who cook the food, not the food itself.”

How to read The Cooking Gene: Like many others, I devoured it in a few days. But, I did take his advice and jumped around, referred back, and occasionally read it alongside food. My flagged, marked, and splattered copy already resembles the union of an essential tome and a well-loved cookbook.

Meal he’d cook with Sean Brock: “Oh goodness… I think I’d have to go with something like my family’s fried chicken. And that’s because his family recipe and my family recipe might be very similar — but they’d tell very different stories. And then we’d eat them side by side, not one after the other.”

go along and make sure that the conversation that I’m attempting to have with the people eating my food begins, ya know, with the food telling me about itself. Where it’s from, who it’s from, and why it came from there.”

To explore the where, who, and why more deeply, Twitty knew he had to go to West Africa. Though, he said, it was difficult to convince people of the essential nature of this trip. After finishing his first book and turning forty, he secured funding through a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign.

Although he had spent years researching the parallels and cultural continuities, being there made his heart swell. It was a big “I told you so,” he said. He would look around and see the connections he had only read about and think “Yeah, we did that. We did that! I told you we did that!” It reminded him of the first time he visited the South as a child. “There are moments of this visceral feeling of connection that the papers, the facts, and scholarship cannot prove or disprove. It just is.” He contends that it was in the taste of the food. In the rhythm of people’s steps, in their worries and values. “There’s a word for it,” he hesitated. “A long SAT-type word. Oh, yeah, sonder. The realization that everybody around you is very much like you. Just as complex and vivid and full of stories and memories.”

ers are a family, albeit a dysfunctional one. His message of connectedness is certainly antithetical to the “many sides” narrative.

But in a world of sides, there was a false dichotomy represented in Virginia, those who want to go back in time and those fiercely opposed. There is a much larger group in the United States that wasn’t represented — those unwilling to confront the past and thus unable to confront their biases. If the Land of Liberty is, at long last, able to properly remember, grieve, and honor its past, we will enjoy a future more farfetched than the plot of Confederate — one of true equality. Michael Twitty is handing us the tools.

Read his groundbreaking book. Attend his string-mending meals.

Listen to his heartening talks. Open his letters.

I asked him how it felt to add a printed and bound version of his thinking to his dynamic online and public presence. “I still don’t know what to think everytime I pick up a copy of the book.” Twitty revealed. “I don’t know if I even associate myself with the person on the cover.” His reply is consistent with his relentless search for deeper understanding. He knew at seven years old that he would would one day convert to Judaism, at ten that he wanted to work with historical recipes, and at sixteen that “being gay was nothing.”

Twitty, an African-American, Jewish, gay man was on the cusp of a trip to Charlottesville to cook at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, armed with his oft-repeated message: all Southern-

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Chef Norma Listman-Sanchez and friends explore the representative foodways of her hometown

CONTRIBUTOR

Bella Luna PHOTOGRAPHER

Sana Kadri Javeri

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México City. A Saturday night in June. Norma Listman was hosting friends from Mumbai and the Bay Area. I met the group at our favorite café in La Colonia Juarez. Within a few hours and many mezcales later, we all agreed to join Norma in a Sunday pilgrimage to her hometown of Texcoco, to experience the tradition of barbacoa. To set the stage, I’d only met Norma a few months into my México City immigration. A serendipitous event because we rolled in the same Bay Area circles, we went to the same places, but never crossed paths until we both made an instinctual decision to move to México late last year.

Norma is a chef and historian born in México. She trained for 10 years in some of the most revered kitchens and culinary projects to come out of the Bay Area such as Camino in Oakland, San Francisco’s Delfina group, and Charles Phan’s restaurant group.

To eat with Norma is to receive a wake up call about México’s place in the world. To visit her hometown of Texcoco is to get a glimpse into those beginnings. It is all too easy to get caught up in the hype and narrative that México City is having its moment, but experiences like Texcoco continue to show me that today’s México, the vibrant, the avant-garde, the melting pot, is nothing new, but rather a steady evolution over centuries grounded in traditions that are alive today.

We awoke with thick heads and caravanned from México City an hour north-east toward Texcoco. Along the journey we passed colorful favela style neighborhoods where thousands of workers, house cleaners, food vendors, artisans, etc., live and commute to and from México City daily. Our taxis dropped us off at the opening of La Purificación, a small town which is part of the municipality of Texcoco. Like moths to a flame, we all walked directly into the bustling site where, for over 60 years lamb and goat abattoirs have raised, killed, and sold their animals cooked barbacoa style every Sunday without fail. Generations before that, pre-hispanic indigenous cultures used the same technique to cook rabbit, iguanas, and other proteins.

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We were lured in by the smell of succulent meat being pulled out of large pozos, underground ovens used to slow cook barbacoa

wrapped in maguey leaves for at least eight hours. Walking under the green, vine covered canopy, I was immediately transported to my grandmother’s backyard. Although barbacoa is new to me, the style of cooking is comforting and familiar. As a child, my Mexican-American family marked our important celebrations by preparing cabeza, cows head. We’d spend the day cooking the head, including the eyes and tongue, in an outdoor oven made of brick and cement by my dad and his brothers. This style of cooking and eating defines for me what it is to convivir in our culture.

The communal effort where everyone has a job and no one wants for a full belly.

Norma always has this satisfied smirk on her face when she shows people her secrets to traditional Mexican cuisine and the frenzy it causes. She quickly snapped us out of it and gave instructions on how to navigate the vendors, giving each of us a task gathering ingredients from the scattered stands. Eighty lambs are slaughtered weekly in preparation for Sunday barbacoa. It was only 11:30 am, but we were already in danger of getting sold out. Someone was in charge of ordering the barbacoa with specific instructions not to forget la pancita, the delicious belly mixed with spices, onion, and juices from the barbacoa itself. Another was sent off to buy lemon, salsa, and avocados; another to buy handmade corn tortillas, and someone else to buy pulque, a slimy alcoholic drink made from fermented aguamiel or mead, scraped from the leaves of large pulquero maguey plants. I took on the ruthless job of scouting out a table among the politely aggressive Sunday crowd. I noticed at one table sat three generations savoring the tradition, a baby in his stroller enjoying piece after piece of meat handed to him by his grandfather.

We finally all regrouped and sat down at a communal picnic table and laid out our bounty: barbacoa, pancita, consomé, a soup collected from the juices that sweat from the barbacoa as it cooks underground, carafes of prickly pear and honey flavored pulque, green salsa, red salsa, aguacates criollos that you smash in your hand, consuming both the shell and meat within, lemon, corn tortillas, salt, cactus salad, and my favorite discovery of the trip: pápalo. A fragrant green leaf taking its name from the Nahuatl

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word for “butterfly,” used as a finishing garnish for the taco. I just nibbled on the gorgeous leaves in between tacos to fortify my belly for more and more.

Amongst us were a photographer, three architects, two chefs, a renaissance man, and myself. So naturally an impromptu photo shoot could not be helped. I heard Sana, our photographer, shout orders for someone to hold the carafe of pulque and “show us the sexy part of your hand.” Norma called for us to seal the tortillas under a warm cloth and close the bag of barbacoa so it wouldn’t get cold. She then demonstrated how to properly construct a taco. You start by using a fresh tortilla as a utensil to grab a chunk of barbacoa with your palm, then layer on fixing after fixing to get all the flavors of the table in one hearty bite. Barbacoa is as communal as it is messy! It is nearly a requirement to get your hands dirty to truly savor the fruits of such an undertaking. I’ve sat next to Instagrammers taking photos of their plates without eating a single bite, claiming a glory that places them in a trendy time and place. In the case of our banda, superficial is not what we do.

This whole scene was only the beginning of our Texcoco experience. My word count will not allow me to elaborate about waiting around under a shady tree as we cracked confetti filled eggs over each others heads. Hailing a passenger van to take us to Norma’s family home at the base of a Tezcutzingo mountain that houses the Poet King Nezahualcóyotl’s baths and botanical garden. About how upon arriving to the house we took shots of mezcal with Norma’s parents to fortify us for the hike up the mountain. Or, how we paused for an additional Solange-esq photoshoot art directed

by George McCalman, our aforementioned renaissance man.

And how on our way down the mountain we made friends with the owner of a puesto, a provision stand who shared his homemade pulque, bragging that it was way better than what we had that morning at La Purificación. He proudly sent us home with a gallon. How we barely made it back to the house and under the porch just in time for the afternoon rains. How Norma’s dad started playing the guitar to accompany the light percussion of the rain and how I started crying because I haven’t heard my father play that familiar sound in over nine months. How reinvigorating it felt to escape the infatuating chaos of México City. How, over the many phases of the day, beginning with a shared curiosity and respect for cultural traditions, strangers became family.

Absent in these scenes from the La Purif icación barbacoa experience, is the immense multigenerational atmosphere of the place. Some families arrive from nearby temples,

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but for many, barbacoa is its own kind of church.

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Two Worlds of Cacao Welcome to the backstage of the global chocolate industry. Simran Sethi and Heleene Tambet travel to Ecuador and Peru respectively, and report back on origins, markets, mythology and environmental threats to cacao.

We’re taking an especially close look at the industrious hybrid CCN-51, tracking its spread across the jungles of Peru and Ecuador.

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Origin Foraging in Ecuador Lifelong chocolate lover, author and scholar Simran Sethi travels to the center of origin and domestication of cacao.

What I had loved for my entire life, I could not find. Not in the colorful pods growing haphazardly out of tree trunks or the tiny orchid-like blossoms the size of my pinky fingernail; not in the pod’s sweet-tart pulp or its pale, acrid seeds. Only through fermentation, drying and roasting would the fruit of the plant categorized by botanist Carolus Linnaeus as Theobroma cacao — “food of the gods” — begin to approximate cocoa and chocolate.

CONTRIBUTOR / PHOTOGRAPHER

Simran Sethi

Chocolate — the foundation of the $100 billion confectionary industry — has been my lifelong companion: my birthday cakes, my wedding cake and the comestible that got me through my divorce. Historically, cacao has been used as currency, medicine, an aphrodisiac and even, in Mesoamerican rituals of birth and death, a stand-in for human blood.

“Observing an apparent similarity in the shape of cacao pods and human hearts,” anthropologist Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos wrote of Maya scholar Sir Eric Thompson’s research, “[he] suggested that they were both conceived of as repositories of precious liquids — chocolate and blood.”

Today, the average American eats about three-fourths of a pound of chocolate per month. (The Swiss lead in global chocolate consumption at more than a pound and a half

per month.) But chocolate wasn’t always consumed by the masses. In fact, it was a prized possession originally served as a beverage.

In the 16th century, the Spanish invaded the Yucatán Peninsula and Mexico and carried almond-shaped cocoa beans and recipes for the bitter, frothy concoction back to Europe as part of the spoils of their conquest. They stripped the drink of spiritual significance, sweetened it with sugar cane and made it the premier refreshment of the aristocracy.

While initially valued for its medicinal purposes, it was soon appreciated for its taste.

“Are we shocked to learn that a … drug with supposedly curative powers was converted to recreational use?” asks Michael Coe, anthropologist and co-author of The True History of Chocolate. “We should not be.”

In 1828, Dutch chemist Coenraad Van Houten patented his method for extracting cocoa butter, the fat that makes up roughly half of a cacao bean, from processed cocoa, leaving a “presscake” that could be ground into fine powder. The process he created led to the creation of solid chocolate when, in 1847, Joseph Fry (an English doctor who sold cacao in his apothecary as a healthy alternative to alcohol) blended the powder with cocoa butter and sugar. Molded into small blocks, the paste — designed more for

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Cacao expert Simran Sethi suggests that, like wine, the flavors of cacao vary due to season, harvest conditions and producer inputs.

sustenance than taste — was used by the military during the French and Indian War, Revolutionary War and in World War II. In love and war, chocolate has been our companion. This is why, in 2012, I travelled to Ecuador, part of a bean-shaped area where cacao originated. The area is also one of the centers of domestication for the crop — the place where cacao became chocolate. It is a country known for two types of cacao: a fine flavor variety called Nacional, and the high-yielding hybrid CCN-51. Together, they reveal the ways in which the crop — and its end products — have transformed since their inception.

Theobroma cacao is part of the mallow (Malvaceae) family of plants that includes cotton, okra, hibiscus and durian. Early designations were based upon only three types of cacao: Criollo (“native”), Forastero (“stranger”) and Trinitario (“native of Trinidad”). These identifications were vague because they were defined by appearance. Almost every kind of cacao — including Nacional, which is categorized as a Forastero — was slotted into these categories. More expansive classifications were published in a 2008 study by Juan Carlos Motamayor and a team of plant geneticists who clustered cacao into 10 genetic

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groupings organized by geographical location or the traditional variety most represented in that particular cluster (Marañon, Curaray, Criollo, Iquitos, Nanay, Contamana, Amelonado, Purús, Nacional and Guiana). These classifications are based on the actual DNA makeup of the plants, not just their morphology.

This diversity matters. I grew up thinking chocolate was one flavor, not many. But through years of travel to cacao origins, plus training in chocolate making and the sensory analysis of cacao, I have found a depth of aromas and tastes I didn’t realize existed. These flavors are dynamic and — just like wine — change, depending on the season, conditions of the harvest and intentions of the maker. Generally speaking, cacao from Ecuador is characterized as having floral, nutty and chocolaty notes, while beans from, say, Venezuela offer up more delicate flavors of caramel and honey. These myriad flavors are a combination of place, processing and the plant itself. In regard to the latter, diversity is revealed in the shape and color of the pods and in the thin layer of pulp surrounding the seeds. The flavors of this mucilage range from custard apple and honeydew to peanuts and lime. Each pod is different: some puckeringly tart, some sugar-sweet, some tart and sweet simultaneously.

The fruits of CCN-51 are thick and juicy, with large seeds that hold a higher percentage of fat. These pods take well to inputs near harvest, making them a more prolif ic (and prof itable) variety. However, questions about the longterm environmental health of the cultivar and region persist.

Biodiversity not only reveals an extraordinary depth of flavor, but also provides a hedge against future challenges facing the crop. Cacao grows in an equatorial band 20 degrees north and south of the Equator, a tropical area that is highly susceptible to climate change. A 2013 assessment of West Africa (where over half of the world’s cacao is grown) found that of the 294 growing regions examined in the study, 89.5 percent were likely to become less suitable by 2050.

altitudes that have been selected over time,” explains Michel Boccara, a visiting scientist at the University of West Indies’ Cocoa Research Centre. The tapestry of flavors is what makes the country one of the top global producers of specialty cacao. “Chocolate is a part of us; it is a part of Ecuador,” agricultural analyst Maria De Lourdes Alvear says.

“Yes, we are a small country, but we have something no other country has: the flavor.”

Those regions aren’t only impacted by rising temperatures. Pathogens with sinister-sounding names and devastating consequences — such as black pod rot, witches’ broom and frosty pod rot — along with mirids, moths and other insects, currently destroy between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s cacao crop each year, with losses estimated at $2 to $3 billion. Under hotter temperatures, this could get worse.

Yet with each passing year, this treasured gene pool is eroded by a cacao that, Boccara explains, has little diversity. CCN-51 was developed

by Homero Castro, an agronomist who spent years crossbreeding various cacao plants he’d collected from his travels. Working alone on his Naranjal farm he aptly called Theobroma, Castro cultivated a high-yielding variety resistant to frosty pod rot and witches’ broom — two diseases that had decimated nearly 70 percent of Ecuador’s cacao in the early 20th century and continues to harm the crop today.

This is why so many in the cacao value chain advocate for disease-resistant varieties like CCN-51, a hybrid developed in the same country as Nacional. Nacional, also called Arriba, is one of the finest diverse cacaos in the world. Arriba (meaning “up”) is a reference to cacao that comes from the upper basin of the Guayas River, as well as all the rivers and streams that feed into it. “[It] is a cluster of varieties from low

In 1965, on his 51st attempt, Castro crossbred plant material from the eastern jungles of Ecuador with two clones: one that originated in Trinidad (ICS-95) and one that had originally been collected in the Peruvian Amazon (IMC-67). It was a winning combination. He

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A RT I S T U N K N OW N

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named the variety CCN after the farm in Naranjal where he had conducted his work — Colección Castro Naranjal — and 51 for the number of times it took him to get it right.

Sadly, Castro never experienced the transformative impact of his work. He and his daughter were killed in a car accident in 1988 after leaving Theobroma. As a result, CCN-51 was never patented and ended up being released into the wild and planted on farms without much oversight. “In less than 30 years,” cocoa scholar Cristian Melo explains, “CCN-51 became the pride of the Ecuadorian cocoa industry. In terms of yield, [it] was like a sports car compared to a minivan.

It produced four times as much as Nacional, but the price for both varieties was the same.”

The promise of high yields, disease resistance and a lack of oversight resulted in the hybrid’s rapid spread. Farmers systematically replaced traditional varieties with CCN-51. “Anything old was destroyed in favor of these big pods,” Melo says. “Outside of the research institution there was no place to get traditional varieties.”

This has resulted in such a proliferation of the hybrid in Ecuador that the International Cocoa Organization — a global organization that oversees the designation of countries producing commodity and specialized cacao — downgraded the percentage of fine cacao grown in the country from 100 to 75 percent.

CCN-51 grows well in many places, but it lacks the flavors unique to Ecuador; it’s ubiquitous and offers a fairly flat cocoa flavor, akin to the bulk cacao grown in West Africa. As such, it leaves the country competing with Ivory Coast and Ghana, countries that grow the majority of commodity cacao. This mass cultivation erodes Ecuador’s capacity to offer something special that commodity-growing regions will never have. Specialness is being lost, pod by pod.

But, to be fair, CCN-51 was never intended to have the floral notes or flavor complexity found in Nacional. Homero Castro wasn’t thinking about taste when he bred it. At the time, no one was. Now farmers, conservationists, makers and manufacturers are deeply invested in supporting biodiversity in cacao because they know the potential it holds. The challenge is, despite this recent focus, the majority of smallholder farmers — a group who grows 90 percent of the world’s cacao — earn less than $2 dollars per day.

The fruits of CCN-51 are thick and juicy, with large seeds that hold a higher percentage of fat. This fat, once processed, becomes lucrative cocoa butter. When you see these pods, typically grown in full sun as a monoculture (which makes it easier to add inputs and harvest, but adds the host of challenges endemic to this type of cultivation), it is easy to understand why farmers have made the transition to a more prolific — and profitable — variety.

cional, or replacing them with high-yielding hybrids or clones. Although Ecuador’s National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIAP) has developed nearly a dozen clones that offer improved yield and taste, Melo says they have come too late: “Farmers know CCN-51 is a productive variety; they trust that. So now they have to also overcome the fear of trying something new. The rewards take years to manifest, and farmers wonder if they should risk their money on something that may or may not work.”

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these complex questions.

All the farmers I met in Ecuador are supplementing the Nacional they grow with crops such as bananas and/or CCN-51. This is not because they do not have a deep love for Nacional — farmer Alberto Bautista calls it “the cacao of [his] people” and “the blood of the earth” — but because the numbers do not yet add up.

“On one side, you have a high-yielding variety that gives you lots of cocoa with good chocolate flavor,” Melo explains. “On the other, you have a lower-yielding traditional crop — one that gives a cocoa with an incredible taste, the kind of thing craft chocolate makers dream about. The problem is, most times, farmers get the same price for both. In the end, we are asking Nacional farmers to forfeit the profits they would have made if they had switched varieties.”

The specialty market — of makers committed to producing highquality chocolate that accentuates diverse cacao, along with consumers willing to pay a premium closer to the value of the crop and the labor behind it — is, perhaps, our greatest hope for transforming the industry. But there is not yet any data that confirms specialty chocolate or mechanisms such as Fair Trade have lifted significant numbers of producers out of poverty. The reasons are complex, but they start with demand. “How much money are people willing to pay for flavor?” Melo asks. “Twice as much? Three times? And how much of that goes back to the farmer?”

What we pay is not enough. Prices don’t reflect the real value of the crop. “Farmers want to satisfy our need, but they also have to be able to earn a living. So the tension remains.”

To support these farmers — and the makers that support them — we consumers have to be willing to pay more and to value chocolate not as candy, but something far more precious. The food of the gods, there for us in times of love and war.

Portions of this story were adapted from “Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love,” named one of the best food books of 2016

by Smithsonian Magazine.

It takes about four years to grow cacao from seed and two years from grafts. The plants bear fruit for about 35 to 40 years, and then yields start to taper off. Every time yields diminish or plants die, farmers are faced with the choice of growing traditional varieties, such as Na-

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A Tangled Route to Fine Cacao In Quillabamba, Peru, Heleene Tambet goes hunting for the world’s finest chocolate, and along the way, observes the many impediments to its viability

The heat in Quillabamba came as a surprise in Peruvian winter. After a month in the rather chilly Andean highlands, I hadn’t expected this fruity paradise with its joyful souther vibe and a perfect summertime combination of sunshine and mosquitos. I sensed I was closer to cacao.

Peru is one of those countries that really has it all. It’s the birthplace of the potato and the cradle of the quinoa boom. The diversity of these crops – for instance 6,000 varieties of said potato – kept me busy while researching an organic certification program of the region. But more than anything else, I was led by, and also to, cacao. My infatuation made my trip to the jungle an inevitable one.

CONTRIBUTOR

Heleene T a m b e t PHOTOGRAPHERS

Heleene Tambet and Thibault C haillon

time, the country was the global leader in coca production. While locals have always used coca leaves for herbal and medicinal purposes not as a processed drug, USAID decided to direct major resources into completely eliminating the plants from the nation. Thousands of hectares of crops were denuded through aerial sprayings of glyphosate herbicide, and farmers were asked to replace their plants with different cultivars; one of these was cacao.

A few months earlier, I’d worked with direct trade cacao in Guatemala. I thought I was aware of the problems enveloping industrial chocolate: no quality checks, incoherent fermentation, low bar for every process from bean to bar, not to mention the social implications.

But in Peru, I stumbled upon something I was not prepared for.

This is how CCN-51 spread across the jungle areas of Peru. The high yielding cacao hybrid, developed in Ecuador just a decade earlier [as you just read in Simran Sethi’s story ], was given to farmers with a promise of prosperity. In many cases, native varieties were abandoned in the process. Among them was chuncho, a cacao type endemic to secluded tropical areas far from the coast, touching Brazilian border deep in the Andes. (Interestingly enough, the word “chuncho” is used by urban Peruvians to mock the people of the jungle.) The story of the drift, from ancient chuncho to modern CCN-51, brought me to Quillabamba.

As it was told to me, in the 1980’s, USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, identified coca cultivation as a major developmental roadblock for Peru. At the

The cacao growing areas in Southern Peru are not easily accessible. There was a 24– hour bus from Lima to Cusco, the center of Incan empire situated at an altitude of 11,000

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WHETS TO NE feet. La Convención, the tropical cacao region, and its capital Quillabamba, were another six hours away; once there, I was welcomed by a huge agricultural fair.

As coffee, citrus and cacao are the jewels of local agriculture there, cacao chuncho wasn’t hard to come by. It was everywhere. Farmer after farmer told me how they are cultivating the best tasting, best smelling local chuncho — and only chuncho — supporting what I’d heard earlier. Despite being constantly pushed out by high yielding varieties like CCN–51, chuncho’s sensory traits are hard to beat. Some say, it’s the best chocolate in the world.

“Those farmers have no idea what trees they have!” cries Carlos Valer, a local cacao baron. The front porch table was covered in cracked cacao beans and old newspaper scraps. Dusty boxes of bean samples with scientific names lined the shelves. A carton with chocolate wrapping paper lay in the corner, and in the middle of the messy table was a thick book opened to a glossy page. On it is an image of Carlos’ smiling face holding a cacao pod in his hand.

Ingeniero Valer, as locals call him, has dedicated his life to the agronomy of cacao. He’s a chuncho evangelist. “Chuncho – este es el futuro de Perú!” Carlos talks about competitions where chuncho wins high prices, about the word oro (gold), that is always used to refer to chuncho, about Europeans who come to the Urubamba river valley only to find chuncho.

The situation below is slightly more dire. According to Carlos, the area under chuncho cultivation has been constantly decreasing. Today, there are 8,000 hectares in La Convención — just as many as the modern varieties. The farmers receive the same price for the hybrids and for the heirloom, around 6 soles (2 USD) per kilo. After the competitions everybody forgets, oro is just a cant, and Europeans have to go home empty-handed.

While chuncho’s favorable characteristics are already known to chocolatiers, there isn’t much of it available as the farmers are simply not organized. They grow on small plots, in small quantities, having no other choice than to sell to a broker – a word that locals themselves use for middlemen. The latter pays the farmers a margin slightly over their production costs, to then sell the bean with a price fourfold to industrial chocolate makers for whom the origin of the bean is irrelevant. It doesn’t really matter whether their bean comes from Peru or Tanzania; it’s a commodity.

The big problem for chuncho — bigger than anything else — is that no one knows. The farmers at the fair could be growing chuncho, but also, they might not be. So far, chuncho as a variety is barely identified. This is what Thibault Chaillon, a French graduate student, is on the hunt for. A group of researchers have formulated a hypothesis that this corner of Peruvian rainforest has the highest genetic diversity of fine flavor cacao in the world (a politically loaded proposition in the cacao sphere). Thibault came to Peru to contribute to the research and to study the reproductive properties of the chuncho variety.

Each day he would conduct field tests by pollinating plants. Each day, he would wait for the outcome of his efforts. Solving the puzzle of how chuncho reproduces would be the cornerstone for the diversity hypothesis. And the diversity hypothesis could be the cornerstone of a speciality cacao market.

“Mandarína! Mandarína!” Carlos was shouting somewhere in the forest. Fresh fruit! I smiled and ran toward Carlos. I found him holding a small yellow pod that he’d just cracked open: it was cacao from the tree next to us. Following his instructions, I took a bean, dripping in abundant, fibrous white flesh, and tried it.

What I tasted was like a prototype of a perfect mandarin. It was as sweet as a candy, braced by the most pleasant bitter note. What it lacked was astringency and acidity – characteristics usually attributed to CCN-51. Carlos knows exactly which ones of his chuncho trees taste like mandarins, which ones remind him of banana, or where to find mango-flavored fruit. We were just scratching the surface when I met the second Carlos of this story.

“Agronomists, technicians, they all tell us, ‘Grow hybrids!’

But farmers want to grow chuncho,” says Carlos Valer.

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Carlos Rodriguez is from a different world; draped in a collared shirt, he sat in his neat office at SENASA, a national agrarian institute. As an agronomist, creating the future for chuncho is not part of his tasks; it’s his personal passion. Something he allegedly do not get paid for.

Since 2014, he and his team have identified 60 distinct flavor profiles of chuncho: combinations of mango, banana, rose, iris, all kinds of nuts, fruits, flowers.

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Among the many problems facing Chunco — alleged to be one of the f inest cocoas in the world — is that it’s not always easy to spot. It’s also grown on small parcels of land and sold to industrial brokers without distinction. The commercial hybrid CCN-51, pictured on the far right, is more prevalent and vigorous.

“Agronomists, technicians, they all tell us, ‘grow hybrids!’ But farmers want to grow chuncho,” says Carlos Rodriguez, telling stories about the farmers they’ve found munching raw chuncho pods on their testing plots. That’s how much they value its taste. “They [agricultural engineers and government officials] don’t want to work with chuncho because they don’t know anything about it.”

Cacao chuncho is allegedly an ideal organic crop. According to Rodriguez, it adapts to natural conditions much better than hybrids, which cannot do without fertilizer. It’s always grown in an agroforestry system with a number of other fruit trees. Yet this is often the very same reason why small farmers do not get financial assistance – their plots have more than a single crop.

The lack of support infuriates Ingeniero Valer. “¡Pura cascara!” he shouts (“Only the shell!”) in the cacao forest after cracking another yellow pod that reveals just a few lonely seeds. He concedes that it indeed makes economic sense for farmers to abandon chuncho, or to crossbreed it with other, less tasteful varieties in a quest for higher yields.

Thibault says. “The first thing to do though, is to work. To conserve the germplasm with the means we have,” referring to the local farmers who mix their varieties, or simply opt out of agriculture to move to the cities, endangering chuncho’s existence entirely.

The other thing that I hear from everyone, despite their different interests, is trust. Growers don’t believe they can make money with their heirloom variety, or that being part of an association could help them.

“Farmers know so much more than scientists,” posits Carlos Rodriguez. “Right now, they do not want to share this information.”

So what is left, then, is research. Scientists have a lot on their plate when it comes to cacao and Peru. Is the center of cacao diversity really hidden in its jungles?

Thibault puts his hands on his head and looks up to the sky. “I think we don’t know. We simply do not know.” He sighs. “But if we aren’t going to find it out now, we’re never going to.”

Thibault came to Señor Valer with some news. With him were the results of the genetic tests that local scientists conducted several years ago. The goal was to identify which trees actually pass the chunco trials. Carlos has a bitter pill to swallow: only three out of his seven trees tested are truly chunchos. It turns out that even Carlos the cacao baron cannot be entirely sure what’s on his plot.

The story gets only more complicated when I later hear that Señor Valer himself was involved in the work of USAID and the spread of CCN-51 back in the 1980s. That’s where the wind blew from back then. But the times have changed. The possibility of doing things outside the sphere of industrial production, and the knowledge that the demand for such models exists, has made its way to the jungles around Quillabamba.

“If we could find evidence that La Convención [and therefore cacao chuncho] is the heart of fine flavor cacao, people would want it,”

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Wild Grapes Introspection and reflection at the altar of the world’s oldest grapevine

CONTRIBUTOR

Step hen Satterf ield PHOTOGRAPHER

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WHETS TO NE My introduction to the historical and geopolitical intricacies of the Caucasus region emanated from the same source of many of my life’s most profound learnings — a bottle of wine. It explains, sort of, eighty hours of travel for a mere two visits to a relatively unglorified corner of Eastern Europe.

In 2004, at the age of 20, I decided to study wine. Unlike most of the decisions from that period of my life, it turned out to be a really good one. I was enrolled at Western Culinary Institute, and part of their hospitality curriculum included wine education. A professional pathway culminating with a career in which I am paid to drink was too enticing to ignore.

My instructor was John Eliasson, a kind and shy man with an affinity for Burgundy. If he didn’t tell you that, his wines would. He produced a scant amount in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, under the label La Bête.

As I’d hoped, learning about wine was a deep immersion into all the world’s history, geography, and agriculture. It was the perfect medium to learn stories of people and place. Immediately, I knew wine was a venerable language that, once learned, could be spoken universally.

Even more importantly, it was a way to be understood everywhere. For the first time in my life, I was an excellent student.

I learned the language. By the time I reached legal drinking age, my palate was well seasoned. In the summer, Tavel Rosé (preferably on

the patio of the Heathman Hotel), in the fall, Oregon Pinot Noir — especially from Cameron or Cristom. Winter was Barolo season, and ’96’s were showing the best. By my mid-twenties, after jobs buying and selling wine in restaurants, I grew restless. The practice of selling wine, I learned, was about narrative, and the narratives that were repeatedly disseminated were all of European origin.

For years, I was unbothered by this. It was uncontested that the French, creators of the modern Cru classification system and world’s most coveted wines, were the proprietors of the world’s best. These were the wines to know, and along with their names, implied also, at the very least, the vintages, climate, and laws. Even the correct way to serve was prescriptive. Bored, naive and indignant, I left restaurants and started a nonprofit working with indigenous and black winemakers in South Africa.

Of all the “vin-doctrination” I endured, there is one lesson I found more essential than all others. It was the one most often repeated. It is the lesson of terroir, and of that particular lesson, I was, and remain, a zealous student.

Terroir is about place. It provides us with context. The context is derived through holistically considering the conditions and inputs of the place from which it emanates. From this point-of-view I began to interrogate the world. My curiosity and empathy compounded. Of

Raising a glass with Giorgi Natenadze at one of his many cellars in Akhaltsikhe. He’s spent much of the past decade traipsing through mountain forests in search of ancient vines growing in trees.

Fermenting unf iltered wine – skins, seeds and all.

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In Vardzia, Giorgi is reviving and multiplying his history, replanting vines from the Meskheti region that were previously thought to have been destroyed.

wine, the thing in life I’d been most dedicated to, I asked, what are your origins? What was the terroir, I wanted to know, not of a wine, but of wine?

The answer to this question was in the Republic of Georgia (not to be confused with my prevailing political class or my home state). It’s a tiny, but consequential nation in Eurasia — which, for Georgians, has for centuries meant constant and rightfully earned fear of antagonizing neighbors from all sides. During the 20th Century, its likeness, in customs, on maps, in geography classes, was devoured by the Soviet Union. The occupation ended in 1991, but Russia’s shadow looms omnipresent. This is especially true in the eastern half of the country, where winemaking — along with agriculture — is the most sizable part of an otherwise modest local economy. When Russia assumed power over the region, the state took control of the wine industry. Many vines and estates were lost, and the industry fell into a long period of instability.

But the Russia story is just the latest in a saga that’s been ongoing for centuries. Oppressive and opposing regimes well know that attacking the vines of a Georgian chops them at the base. Recent archaeological data is affirmation that wine is in the blood and fiber of Georgian people. In November 2017, fragments of a neolithic jar caked with 8,000 year-old grape, belied by tartaric as well as other acid residue, placed Georgia, for now, as the official birthplace of wine. Surely they don’t mind the validation.

About 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, two things happened that dramatically improved the odds of human prosperity. The temperature of the earth became more moderate, and at the same time, it started raining more. Humans evolved from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural ones. The domestication of plants changed everything about us: our constitution, our diets and our planet. This is especially true for the domestication of grapes. Wine became a foundational part of human life, ingraining itself into society in medicine, religion, relaxation and commerce. And the place that has given us the best look into those formative days and ways of drinking is the Republic of Georgia. To be more precise, newly found archaeological sites in the Kvemo province in Lower Kartli. That’s about 50 km south of the capital city, Tbilisi.

The sites are near each other, and one of them, the Khramis DidiGora, reveals an extraordinary specimen — an 8,000 year-old vessel.

It’s a single meter tall and wide, and large enough to hold more than one-thousand “modern” bottles of wine.

For six centuries, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interaction between Eastern and Western worlds. Relations between the Ottomans (Turks) and Georgians, for nearly just as long, has been tense. Giorgi Natenadze is from Meskheti (Samstkhe-Javakheti), a mountainous region in the southwestern part of the country. The sour historical remnants are as persistent in this region as the grape acid caked on neolithic pottery.

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WHETS TO NE Giorgi was my host. I was introduced to him on my first visit to Georgia in 2015 at a party at a natural wine bar in Tbilisi. He’s an energetic vintner, entrepreneur and preservationist. He makes and sells wine, but it’s his work as a preservationist that is particularly salient. He has more in common with the team of archeologists from the Academy of Science than he does with most fellow winemakers.

Over the last decade, Giorgi has gathered 40 different local grape varieties from his Meskheti region, of which 24 have been identified. These are grapes that for hundreds of years were thought to have been destroyed. From 1466-1479, the Ottomans encroached and eventually occupied Giorgi’s village. During the advance, countless indigenous grape vines were destroyed. Other Meskhetians fled the region to evade the Ottomans, taking with them grape cuttings. Giorgi’s elders depicted a region once overrun with wild grapes, and restoring the once thriving viticultural abundance is the key to understanding his work.

I’m accompanied by David Alexander. He’s a longtime friend and filmmaker who I pleaded with to join me on this journey. This experience needed to be documented, and I knew my emotions would preclude me from doing so wholeheartedly. Driving in a westward arc from the capital city Tbilisi, two hours later, and after a bit of navigation coaching from the locals, we arrived in Akhaltsikhe, a small city in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region. One of the first things I notice is a big, black, crazy looking SUV. It’s bulky, but shiny, like one you’d expect on safari, but more brutish. The wheels on it are enormous, as if it could grip onto thin air itself and 4-wheel it straight to the moon. The grape safaris, we learn later, are serious. That’s the harvest mobile, saved exclusively for the wild grape excursions. So no, that was not the car we were riding in.

Instead, we board the truck that’s been sitting in front of one of his many cellar dwellings. It’s for more modest cargo. We’re going to

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Chachkari, and before we get there, to Vardzia, the adjoining ancient city of caves. It’s also where he introduces us to a historic replanting project of the lost grapes, potentially reshaping Georgian wine history, and ultimately, the global wine market.

The drive to the south of the country is astounding. On one side, stacks and stacks of rock-ribbed hillsides. On the other, vast canyons below craggy hills, embellished with decaying castles and fractured stairs.

The rocky walls are spotted with darkened impressions. Behind those shadows is an intricate system of caves and tunnels. For centuries, the religious and ruling classes were kept secure here, but equally important, their servants also given practical pathways to reach their rulers.

An hour or so into our journey, through canyons and grasslands, we’re joined by the southward flowing Kura River. At the next hour interval, we cross a thin rocky bridge and continue uphill into an open meadow, spring green and agonizingly beautiful. Tumbling from the passenger seat, I stand for a panoramic survey of the village. I’m so breathless at the sight, I am gasping to take in air, so much so that my shoulders are engaged. Giorgi’s walking ahead, and occasionally, turns to see that my feet are still moving. Clearly I’m not the first visitor to find myself here, arrested and willfully imprisoned in these fresh meadows with sweeping views. With heavy breath and footsteps, I lumber to try and catch him. He stops at a tree and waits. It’s not a particularly remarkable looking tree, so I stop and wait on the story. Looking closer, the gnarled trunk and muscular branches come into focus. It’s a grapevine; a war casualty, spared; an artifact; a museum; a thesis of Giorgi Natenadze’s preservation work.

At more than 400 years old, it’s among the world’s oldest working grapevines in the world. I try to touch it, but before I can, I’m already beaten by the moment. I tilt my head back so the tears will puddle in my eyes instead of rolling down my face. I was unsure how they’d

Map by Katariina Talts

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View from high above Chachkari — an antiquated and cavernous village in the Meskheti region of Georgia, just north of Turkey.

be explained. I’m overtaken, grateful for this lesson in endurance and impermanence. Clutching these old, knotty vines, I think, this was why I’d learned the language. This moment was what had shaped my beliefs about the world, and most importantly, I’d arrived at the terroir of wine, the terroir of my terroir. Once again, the grapevine was my most reliable teacher. I cry like an elder reunited with parts of myself I thought were lost forever.

The wine produced from this contorted relic will be made with the timeless and exacting blend of deference and indifference. This seems to be the only thing Giorgi really commits to in the winemaking. He’s non-interventionist, and his wines are made naturally, and with rudimentary tools used to harvest, punch and ferment the grapes. He regularly uses clay vessels, called, qvevris to ferment or store the wine, just as the ancestors standing on that very ground had done millennia prior.

Giorgi’s fuzzy, unfiltered wines defy European standards of quality. Accordingly, many leading English and European wine writers ridicule the style. Still, all over the world, the number of “natural wine” converts — both makers and drinkers — far outnumbers the number swayed by wine writing. It’s a fast-growing community, and within it, Giorgi’s star will keep pace. Besides, he’s not making wine for criticism. This is a reclamation project. He is more archeologist than vigneron.

Stretching upward of 30 feet, the climb up the grapevine is a perilous one. The grapes will later be fermented for wine, and the cuttings grafted, preserving them for future generations. There are lots of admirers of Giorgi’s work, but during these critical moments of harvest, he’s often alone. But, as he scales the vines, his legacy does the same. These are the vines that will soon be planted in the terraces of Vardzia, a wonderland of hundreds of caves where Giorgi and a team of funders and politicians have partnered on an historic restoration project where the cuttings of these newly discovered grapes will be propagated.

With thousands of tiny cuts, Giorgi is changing the future of his country, grafting it to the past. Through fifty acres of terraced, handstacked stone, young vines, some as thin as a pencil, are propped against wooden stakes and plunged into red clay. There are almost twenty Meskhetian grapes among them. He’s given hundreds more to friends, encouraging them all to rewild the region with its native grapes. I’m imagining the day that somewhere, some 20-year-old sommelier begins their wine journey with grapes that were thought to be nonexistent when I started my own. I’m satisfied at the thought.

Whether or not they’re tested on it, Giorgi’s story is one they won’t forget. And that’s exactly the point.

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Double Exposure In Chiapas, climate change and neoliberalism converge on local farms.

CONTRIBUTOR/ PHOTOGRAPHER

Laurel Bellante

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“Si con el cambio climático ya nos pega la sequía y es poco la cosecha, imagínate la seguimos encareciendo con la semilla, con los costos de los insumos. Híjole es bastante difícil que una persona establezca un cultivo de esa manera.”

“If with climate change we are already being hit by drought and small harvests, imagine how [farming] keeps getting more expensive with the seed, the costs of inputs. Jeez, it is really difficult for someone to establish a crop in this way.”

Julio Pérez, a 35-year old corn farmer, spoke the above words on a hot summer night from his simple home in a small farming town in Chiapas, Mexico. Julio is among a growing stream of migrants who have returned home to their rural communities after years away in far-off cities or across the border in the U.S. Julio comes from a long line of farmers and ranchers. With a growing family to support, he has come back to this dusty town determined to find a way to make a living off the land. This task, however, is far from easy. Unlike his father’s generation, which farmed with the support of generous government subsidies and guaranteed purchasing policies, Julio now faces the increasing uncertainty of climate change in a political setting in which farmers have been left to fend for themselves.

It is said that who controls the seeds of a country controls its food system. In the context of climate change, it turns out whoever controls the seeds also wields important influence over farmers and their abilities to adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions.

This is particularly apparent in Mexico where climate change is increasing the already formidable risks associated with farming.

For over three decades, small-scale farmers have struggled to survive neoliberal changes in Mexico’s agricultural policies. Now, yield losses linked to environmental and climatic change, as well as the rising costs of production, are pushing farmers like Julio to a new level of vulnerability.

In 2000, geographers Karen O’Brien and Robin Leichenko coined the term “double exposure” to describe the way in which certain groups of people are disproportionately vulnerable to the combined impacts of economic globalization and climate change.

In southern Mexico, farmers show increasing signs of being “doubly exposed.” This double exposure is characterized by increasingly extreme and variable climatic conditions combined with inadequate public policies and dependence on transnational corporations for farming inputs and extension services.

Chiap as is the southernmost state in Mexico. During much of the 20th century, the lowland farm region known as La Frailesca where

Note: Sections of this article first appeared in Spanish as: Bellante, Laurel. 2017. La doble exposición de campesinos: políticas públicas y cambio climático. La Jornada Ecologica. Num. 212, June/July: 11-13.

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Julio lives was considered the “grainbasket” of Chiapas and was key to the state’s continuous ranking among the top in the nation for corn production. Even today, as you drive through the region, fields of corn, sorghum, and cattle extend in all directions. Billboards line the road all along the way. They announce the newest seed varieties from Dekalb (Monsanto) or Pioneer (Dow-Dupont); they promise “high yields” and “drought tolerance.” While most farmers in the highland regions of this mountainous state still farm and save their native corn varieties, here in the lowlands native seeds have become scarce and brand name varieties are the norm.

Over the last 30 years, lowland corn farmers like Julio have adopted Green Revolution approaches to farming in the hopes of achieving higher yields and greater incomes. Along the way, they became dependent on hybrid seeds and agrochemical inputs that must be purchased each farm season. A variety of federal programs such as Mexico’s National Seed Program (PRONASE for its Spanish acronym) and a vast system of national extension services originally supported this transition to “improved” seeds and agrochemicals. Nonetheless, policy changes since the late 20th century have ended or sharply eroded these supports. Taking advantage of the institutional vacuum left in the wake of this government retreat, transnational corporations such as Monsanto and Dow-Dupont pushed onto the scene, opening distribution centers

Even in good years, corn sales provide only minimal income to small-scale farmers

throughout rural areas and advertising their products in colorful highway billboards. Today, these corporate players have become the principal input providers in many parts of Mexico. And, perhaps more importantly, they have become the primary extension agents for farmers seeking guidance on how to farm in an increasingly variable climate.

With ongoing mega-mergers of seed and agrochemical corporations, the number of transnational corporations dominating agroindustry globally is being reduced from six to four: ChemChina-Syngenta, Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-Dupont, and BASF. Because the prices of seeds and inputs offered by these companies are pegged to the US dollar, the falling value of the Mexican peso is causing farming costs to rise to levels never before seen in the Mexican countryside. Hence, just as farmers face greater risks in production linked to climate change and declining soil fertility, their ability to confront these risks is hampered by rising input costs and a lack of social safety nets.

Even in good years, corn sales provide only minimal income to small-scale farmers. In Chiapas most farmers plant between two and twenty-five hectares of land. In 2016 (considered a good year), farmers in the Frailesca region earned between $125 and $560 USD per hectare after costs. In bad years – such as the droughtridden years of 2014 and 2015 – farmers may just break even or, worse yet, end up in debt. In such dire times, family members scramble to make ends meet through other means, oftentimes pushed to sell livestock or land in the process.

The onset of climate change in the tropical lowlands is spreading greater uncertainty in the agricultural sector and resulting in steep yield losses. Climate change experts suggest this situation will become increasingly dire as El Niño events become more frequent, temperatures become hotter, and rainfall patterns become more variable in coming years. Projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paint a grim future for rainfed farmers throughout Mexico and Central America and anticipate a net reduction in the areas apt for rainfed corn production in tropical regions.

Between 2014 and 2016, Chiapas experienced severe drought conditions that were compounded by the meteorological phenomenon El Niño. Although official sources from Chiapas reported only 10 percent crop losses in corn during the rainfed cycle of 2014, interviews with farmers in the Frailesca reveal losses as high as 80 percent or even total crop loss for some farmers. Looking out over the dried, stunted stalks of her failed harvest, one local woman explained: “This year my father invested a lot of money.

He planted 7 hectares of corn but it’s all for naught. It makes you so sad to see the corn there all dried up on the stock after all that effort to clear the land, to pay labor, to fertilize the plants and then to have nothing. We harvested very little this year. We had to buy corn to feed our family.”

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Advertisements for Coca-Cola and industrial seeds underscore the multinational assailment on farmers.

There are many factors that influence how vulnerable farmers are to the impacts of climate change. These include: access to irrigation, soil health, costs of production, adequate use of inputs, farmer knowledge, and access to meteorological data and technical assistance. Total crop loss can happen when plants lack water during critical periods of development, particularly during the flowering stage. Losses also frequently occur when low-income farmers lack the liquid capital to purchase the inputs required to counteract sudden pest or weed problems. Other times, losses result when drought conditions impede timely pesticide or herbicide applications. Because most farmers lack crop insurance, crop losses often go unreported and farmers are left to recover on their own.

Experiences of vulnerability in the agricultural sector vary greatly and yield losses linked to climate change can be difficult to calculate. Nonetheless, for farmers like Julio it is easy to identify the many factors that contribute to the risks they face. Nearly all farmers I speak with describe how the rains no longer arrive on time and, when they do come, fall sporadically and unevenly. Temperature extremes abound, resulting in hotter summers and colder winters. Farmers lament the paucity of information about climate change and their need for better seasonal forecasts for their region.

They begrudge their lack of credit access, technical assistance, and

feasible alternatives to farming corn. Everyone groans about the rising costs of seeds and agricultural inputs, the variability of commodity markets, and their frequent mistreatment at the hands of intermediary buyers known as coyotes.

Farmers are responding to this double exposure in a variety of ways. Many have reduced the land area they dedicate to corn production and have replaced corn fields with cattle pasture. Those lacking the necessary capital to go into ranching often prefer to rent or sell their land rather than risk farming it. Although many farmers insist on teaching their children how to farm for the sake of “maintaining tradition,” most hope their children will get educated and find other livelihoods. However, with few employment opportunities in the cities and harsher crackdown on immigrants in the United States, many farmers also worry that their family has few options for an off-farm future.

The farmers who have decided to remain in the struggle and keep farming have had to undertake new strategies to survive. Little by little, new groups and networks of farmers are emerging to counteract the many crises they face. Julio is the founder of one such group known as “Cerro El Peloncillo del Camotal” (hereafter the “Peloncillo Group”). With technical support and guidance from

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the National Association of Rural Farmers and Merchants (or ANEC for its Spanish acronym), the Peloncillo Group is exploring new approaches to farming and ranching that can reduce costs and soften the environmental impacts.

With 26 core members and more joining each season, the Peloncillo Group’s many initiatives include: large-scale production of compost, worm castings, and biofertilizers; a meteorological station to track local weather; training of local youth to monitor seasonal conditions and soil fertility; a savings and loan group with access to low interest loans; demonstration plots to compare different seeds and crop management practices; and efforts to recover and reproduce high-yielding and drought-tolerant seeds that can be saved and reused each season. These activities meet multiple goals simultaneously. They improve soil fertility, lower farming costs, improve information access, and encourage solidarity among farmers. When asked about how such initiatives can help Mexican farmers, the executive director of ANEC, Victor Suarez Carrera, noted that this solidarity is key: “Farmers cannot confront this complexity alone. Farmers must be organized at the local, zonal, regional, national and global level. Without organization, farmers cannot learn and confront this complexity.”

Although most efforts to confront the current crisis are emerging among farmer-driven collectives and social movements, the Mexican government also has some modest efforts underway. For example, through programs such as MasAgro, agronomists are researching multiple problems affecting crops in Chiapas. They develop low-cost solutions that can reduce farmer dependence on agrochemicals and improve soil fertility. In addition, they have a program to train new generations of extension agents. Other programs are focused on strengthening national seed policies and providers. Although a number of these initiatives have the potential to reinvigorate national seed supplies and improve extension services, given the gravity of the current situation and the dire forecasts for the future, these efforts remain vastly insufficient.

For every demonstration event or workshop led by a national seed company or government program, transnational corporations give many more. Corporations like Monsanto gather farmers for field days to promote their newest seeds and products, often leading farmers into greater debt rather than guiding them towards lower-cost solutions. As Julio explains: “The corporations give you assistance but all of it is based on chemical inputs, one hundred percent. Corporations want to cover the whole productive cycle: they sell you the seeds, the technical assistance, and they also sell you the agrochemicals…Today it is hard to farm without agrochemicals and chemical fertilizers because that is the farming model they have imposed on us. They have made us believe that that model is the only one that exists when in reality there is a different alternative.”

What’s more, public investment in training and agricultural extension is severely underfunded. The MasAgro program, for exam-

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ple, has only four full-time employees to cover the entire state of Chiapas. Given the diverse ecologies, needs, and cultural contexts of the state, this number is deeply inadequate. Employees in these programs admit that without more funding, their ability to effect change remains limited.

On my last visit to the Frailesca region this past December, I went to visit a number of farm plots that Julio manages. Part of his work with the Peloncillo Group is to establish comparative plots that demonstrate the difference in soil and crop health of different management systems – conventional and organic. Standing between two such plots – one managed using compost, vermiculture, and biofertilizers, and the other managed using conventional agrochemicals – the difference between the two was palpable.

The soil on the plot managed using organic techniques was dark and spongy; the first corn leaves burst forth in a brilliant green.

In contrast, the soil in the second plot was hard and compact; the young corn leaves seemed to struggle to push up through the tough, dry soil. Julio tells me that this unmistakable difference between the two plots, as well as the recovery of the native corn seed he has planted in the field, is what gives him hope for the future. He explains, “The seed companies make us think there is only one option in farming, pushing us to buy inputs with them.

But the reality is different. There are many processes available, such as producing compost, worm castings and worm juice, and the use of certain bacteria that help fix nitrogen in the soil. That is what we are learning. We believe that this [alternative] is feasible because we have done it and proven it. We want to show more than anything that it is viable to farm in a different way that is more balanced and, above all, without damaging the environment. Conventional agriculture is all about killing, polluting, and destroying. In contrast, the agriculture that we are promoting at this time is different; it is about balancing resources: climate, water, soil, seeds, food, and family economy.”

The Mexican countryside is in a deep, extended crisis. Farmers already living a precarious rural existence face growing uncertainty and risks associated with the onset of climate change, the depletion of soil health, the lack of agricultural extension, and their dependence on transnational corporations. In contrast, the experiences of farmers such as Julio and organizations such as the Peloncillo Group demonstrate that feasible solutions already exist, that alternatives abound to lower the costs and risks of farming in the era of climate change. Our task now is to find ways to spread these seeds of change and foster them to help them grow.

While most farmers in the highland regions of this mountainous state still farm and preserve their native corn varieties, here in the lowlands native seeds have become scarce and brand name varieties the norm

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WH E T S TON E

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Shots With...

Melissa Sáenz Gordon The artist, photographer and DJ leads us through her ancestral homeland and favorite past time — mercado hopping

Melly G speaks food fluently. Her Mexican mother, who was raised in Bayard, New Mexico, reared her on green chiles, chimichangas and tacos molidos. She later worked in some of the best restaurants in the U.S, both in her hometown of San Francisco and later, New York.

In 2013, she traveled extensively through southern Mexico, starting in the Yucatán and ending in Mexico City. The following photo sequence brings us along in her journey.

FUN FACT ABOUT ME: I love grocery shop-

an epic mercado surrounds the church.

ping. Having spent most of my time in my

I’d indulge in a vaso of Tejate and simply

hometown of San Francisco, I had access

admire the vegetables I’d never seen before,

to mercados that catered to different

wishing I had a crew of friends to invite over

communities. When I lived at Cesar Chavez

and cook for. Grills are readily available to

and Mission, I’d bounce between Samiramis

cook the just purchased vegetables and

Imports for Middle Eastern specialties like

meats. I spent hours at this market, and

tahini and za’atar flatbreads and across the

visited each Sunday during my time there.

street. I frequented Casa Guadalupe for cotija and verduras. I completely zone out when

MERCADO DE SAN JUAN is nestled near

I’m in a market and get lost in the variety, the

Chinatown in Mexico City. It supplies restau-

typography on the labels, the aromas and the

rants with the best of the best. I admired the

cultura of the offerings.

butchers who carved carcases in plain view with a borderline performative aspect.

IN 2013, I TOOK AN EXTENDED TRIP through southern Mexico beginning in the Yucatán and

MEXICO CITY IS A MAGNET for the highest

ending in Mexico City (CDMX). I visited Yotho-

quality goods produced by the nation, and

lin, Chiapas and Oaxaca in between. I sought

this market was rife with options. Mercado

out the markets, because, I love to snack, y’all.

life is so honest. It’s an opportunity to inter-

But en serio, markets provide a window into

act with people firsthand and is my preferred

the cultural nuance of that region.

means of supporting and connecting with the communities in which I visit or reside.

TLACOLULA IS A TOWN about twenty minutes from Oaxaca City. On Sunday’s,

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MERCADO MADNESS Traipsing Mexican mercados through the lens of artist and radio host MellyG.

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Roadside fruit vendors in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca

A carnicerĂ­a in Mexico City, Mexico

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A grape vendor in San Cristรณbal de las Casas, Chiapas

A neatly arranged fruit situation in San Cristรณbal de las Casas, Chiapas

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Fish in Wind and Sun The days when drying fish was a matter of survival have long passed, but their beloved flavors endure on the Korean Peninsula.

CONTRIBUTOR

Bhuri Kitchen PHOTOGRAPHERS

Bburi Kitchen and Sunghoon Cho

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Korean barbecue might be the most familiar representation of the national cuisine abroad, but grilling huge piles of meat is a recent trend that doesn’t reflect the majority of Korean culinary history.

For hundreds of years, beef consumption was limited to special occasions and the aristocracy. The rest of the largely agrarian population kept their cows in the fields, not on their plates.

As luck (or geography) would have it, the Korean peninsula is surrounded on three sides by sea, and we’ve helped ourselves to the bounty of clams, crabs and fish for protein. Even as meat consumption has risen in recent years, South Koreans still consume over double the amount of seafood per capita that Americans and Europeans do, edging out Japan and Norway for the top spot in a U.N. study of 24 countries between 2013 and 2015. While raw and freshly grilled fish are popular, Korea’s sweltering summers and freezing cold winters made food preservation an essential part of our food traditions and drying fish in winter was one of the most common ways to keep fish ready to eat year-round.

“Drying foods in the sun and wind is an ancient method of preservation,” Harold McGee writes in On Food and Cooking. On the Korean peninsula, archeological evidence suggests that people have been processing fish since Neolithic times (6000 BC to 2000 BC) — one study of a coastal Neolithic settlement analyzed fish remains and observed a higher concentration of large fish heads (which are more oily and difficult to preserve) than bodies, suggesting that villagers caught the fish, discarded the heads and took

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the carcasses elsewhere for processing. The authors argue these early communities didn’t have to rely on grain storage, and therefore agriculture, during periods of stress because they had access to long-term stores of fish.

It makes sense: drying fish doesn’t require advanced tools, and the resulting fish is light, portable and delicious. McGee points out that “dehydration intensifies and alters flavor” by concentrating flavor molecules and breaking down cellular structure, promoting enzyme activity. There’s a lot going on in this disarmingly simple process.

Just about every type of seafood can be dried and stored for later.

If you walk around older neighborhoods in seaside villages today, you can sometimes see the catch of the day hanging up to dry in small courtyards. In markets, you’ll find special shops just for dried seafood called geoneomul stores. They sell staples like dried seaweed and shrimp for soups, dried squid for snacking, and all kinds of dried fish for grilling and steaming.

Silver, fragrant anchovies come in wide cardboard boxes and a half-dozen sizes; the largish ones for stock, medium for snacking and the smaller for banchan (side dishes). You can order your fish ban-geonjo (half-dry and chewier) or geonjo (fully dried).

Today, supermarkets have fully stocked freezers of seafood from all over the world, but dried fish is more than just a relic of the

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Gwamaegi, from the cold waters of the southeast coast, is considered a drinking food, best paired with traditional rice brews

Hwangtae is from the northern part of the country, and is the most prized form of pollack, taking several months to make.

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days before refrigeration. Preservation has less urgency today, but as cornerstones of other global cuisines teach us, from cheese to chutneys, necessity and flavor can go hand-in-hand.

wrapped gift sets to their families and co-workers, a box of premium bori gulbi is an extravagant one, sometimes selling for well over $500 USD for ten fish.

Dried fish have intense, salty flavors and deliciously chewy texture. They’re surprisingly diverse, too. Here in Korea, three types of dried fish in particular showcase how our ancestors worked with their landscapes to create tasty, long-lasting nutrition.

Holiday gift inflation aside, more reasonably-priced bori gulbi meals can be had in Korea. The fish are soaked in rice water, steamed and de-boned. They’re sometimes served with cold rice soaked in green tea.

GANGWON-DO HWANGTAE Gangwon-do, the northernmost province of South Korea is a mountainous one, with snowy valleys and pine forests. Here, every winter, you’ll find a forest of dried pollack hanging from wooden racks in long rows that could easily fill a baseball diamond. It’s a beautiful place. Your footsteps are muffled in the snow, but if you pause for a minute, you might hear the papery rustle of these hwangtae moving in the wind. Hwangtae is just one of many preparations of pollack (there are over 40 different names for the fish), which is so popular it’s known as the “national fish.” Each South Korean eats an average of ten per year.

GYEONGSANG-DO GWAMAEGI Move over to the Southeast coast and you have a very different ocean: the waters here are deep, cold, and very, very blue. In winter, if you drive to Guryeong Harbor, in North Gyeongsang Province, you’ll notice pink and silver fillets dangling from what look like wooden laundry racks. Get a little closer and you’ll see these fillets are so rich in fat that they are literally dripping with oil. This is gwamaegi, a rich and dense dried fish that has the texture of jerky. Gwamaegi is traditionally made with herring and was originally called “gwan-mok-cheong-eo,” or herring skewered through the eye. Starting in the 1960s, herring catches began to decline, so now a lot of gwamaegi is made with Pacific saury, a slightly smaller, skinnier fish with a little less oil.

Hwangtae is the most prized form of pollack, and takes several months to make. Shifting pressure systems from Siberia and the Pacific every winter create a pattern of three days of cold followed by four days of warmer weather, and these temperature fluctuations are even more extreme in the mountains. The fish freeze and expand, then thaw and contract —an all-natural freeze-drying process. Over the course of months, the meat becomes tender and flaky and turns a bright goldenrod (“hwang” is the Chinese character for yellow). The best hwangtae will flake like bread crumbs when you scrape it.

Hwangtae can be torn into strips and eaten as a snack, coated in a gochujang marinade and grilled, dressed with fermented sauces and served as a side dish, grated and rolled into delicate round fishcakes, or made into a simple but delicious soup called hwangtae-guk, a popular hangover cure.

JEOLLA-DO GULBI The broad mudflats of the West Sea in South Jeolla Province are rich in nutrients and historically draw spawning yellow corvina every spring. These small croakers have a distinctly golden sheen and a mild, nutty flavor. Beopseong Harbor is known for its dried yellow corvina, called gulbi. They’re salted and hung to dry for several months, and because the area has low humidity during the day but high humidity at night, the flesh of the gulbi dries slowly, giving you a slightly softer fish.

One version of gulbi is called bori (barley) gulbi. After drying for two to three months, the fish are taken down and stored in earthenware jars filled with barley. The barley absorbs some of the fish oils, helping it keep longer, and imparting a sweeter, grainier flavor to the flesh, which turns a deep amber color. Bori gulbi is a rare delicacy. During the holiday season, when people bring silk-

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Guryeong Harbor, where 80% of the country’s gwamaegi is made, is located on a small peninsula facing southeast and gets the salty ocean winds coming right off the water. This, combined with temperatures that fluctuate between 10 degrees below and 10 degrees above 0 Celsius, create the chewy, flavorful final product. The best gwamaegi should have between 25–30% moisture content — you’re looking for a fish that gives a little when you press on it.

Gwamaegi is often thought of as a drinking food, something to pair with traditional rice brews, but whether you imbibe or not, it’s absolutely delicious in ssam, or vegetable wraps. Layer however you like: maybe you take a leaf of cabbage, a sheet of dried or fresh seaweed, some green onion or raw garlic, add a piece of gwamaegi and finish with a dash of vinegared gochujang.

CHANGING TIMES One startling commonality between all of these dried fish is that the vast majority of the fish no longer come from Korean waters.

Overfishing and rising ocean temperatures have decimated the yellow corvina, pollack and herring populations, and Korean fishing boats are going further and further afield, some as far as the Okhotsk Sea, to bring back enough fish for the demands of the market.

As climate change continues to impact weather patterns, how will these traditional drying methods, which rely on the natural environment, adapt? In some ways, keeping these traditions alive has required us to demand even more from the oceans. Will the disappearance of hwangtae, gulbi and gwamaegi be the wake-up call we need?

A forest of dried pollack hanging from wooden racks in long rows.

Hwangtae is often cut into strips and served as a snack, but here, makes for an inviting soup.

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Puerto Viejo Dissecting Dominican roots and stew with the Abreu family.

CONTRIBUTOR

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Stephen Satterf iled

PHOTOGRAPHER

Janeivy Hilario

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In the summer of 2015, San Francisco’s economy was flourishing, but my existence there had grown repetitious and increasingly lonely. I had many friends, but that summer, I lost one of my closest, Franklin, with whom I started this magazine. I interpreted my unfathomable devastation as a definitive sign that the respite from the city that I’d been craving had announced itself.

The criteria was straightforward, established by Samantha, my partner at the time: 1) sunny and 2) Spanish-speaking. Sold. To that list I added internet. My request was the only one that wasn’t satisfied. We settled in the Samaná Province, an extruding peninsula on the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic. I was there to write, to gather the pieces of myself and launch Whetstone.

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The season in Las Terrenas was a poorly planned accident. It was an unusual destination, and not just by the fanciful standards of a resort town. It’s a haven for expats from all over Europe, and perhaps relatedly, a place beholden to a subdued, but unmistakable, darkside. We weren’t the only ones looking to get lost in aquamarine waters, thick jungles and rugged mangroves.

Dining there was an uneven experience. The Italian expats (of which there are countless) brought with them a slew of pizzerias.

I must concede that being overfed on pizza did not diminish my daily quest of trying to distinguish the very best pie in town. On the contrary, actually. Dominican restaurants that were delicious and sparse with tourists were harder to come by.

That wasn’t the case at Rosy’s, though, a restaurant in the center of town with a local chef for whom the place was named. She was always there, always with an inviting smile. Her signature dish, sancocho, is a meat and vegetable stew that is not only one of the signature dishes of the island, but of Latin America. So it’s fitting that one afternoon, in the company of an Argentinian lady we’d be-

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friended there, we were introduced to a Dominican friend of hers, Maritza. She was accompanied by her younger brother...Franklin.

Maritza and Franklin were polite, but preoccupied. At the time, they were traveling between Terrenas, where they’d just opened a wellness store, and New York, where they helped run the family business, a 30-year-old Dominican restaurant in Crown Heights.

Traveling to New York for the exclusive purpose of dining is work I’ve been engaged in for over a decade. Of course I wanted to know how their sancocho measured against Rosy’s. It’s possible that they mistook this as an empty threat, but almost immediately upon meeting them, I was announcing my intention to dine at their restaurant. It took a couple years, but I did.

How to best describe 2017 for future generations will undoubtedly prove an impossible task. The inventory of horrific occurrences characterizing our daily news is endless. It’s not just that the news is disturbing, it’s the accompanying, unencumbered craziness of seemingly every event, large or small. One such quintes-

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sentially 2017 story came from Brooklyn. Specifically, it emerged from Crown Heights, a predominantly West Indian and African American neighborhood in the middle of the borough. It’s a story about gentrification, but because 2017, it had to be the most galling example of an already bad thing.

In July, Summerhill, a self-proclaimed “boozy sandwich shop,” announced their opening with a press release. In it, the owner, a former corporate tax attorney, boasted bullet-hole-ridden walls as part of the decor (it was cosmetic damage) and, in a putrid attempt at humor, advertised and sold brown-bagged “Forty Ounce” bottles of rosé (actual brand). She’d somehow managed to simultaneously indulge in the worst stereotypes of African Americans, while trivializing the poverty and violence that plagued the neighborhood in the decades before her arrival. It was grotesque, obtuse and a climatic anecdote for the emboldened racism, ignorance and amusia of 2017.

Two blocks north, and a scant mile westward, is Puerto Viejo Restaurant. It’s on the corner of Grand and Dean where it’s been

since 1986 –– longer than Becky Brennan, Summerhill proprietor, has been alive. It is also where I reunited with Maritza and Franklin; Puerto Viejo being the family-owned Dominican restaurant of which they spoke of in Las Terrenas. It’s possible to walk right in, but it’s even easier to walk by. Its stealth, black-bricked exterior is surrounded by auto repair shops. Inside, the restaurant is handsome and unpretentious.

On a recent visit in the latter part of a Saturday afternoon, the restaurant is pulsing. It’s enlivened by Spanish guitar pouring through the speakers, the reverberant echo of a ringing phone, the greetings of patrons entering and exiting, and a bell, repeatedly tapped twice to issue the universal restaurant call and response: Order up! It’s busy. The air is filled with various Spanish accents, black Brooklyn and yes, gentrifiers. All of them enjoy the space equally and cordially.

It’s a Brooklyn bastion, a place where diversity is as dense as the housing and, for those of us not from New York, a kind of impressionable hopefulness that makes us wish we had could bottle

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this wonderful medley of humanity to take back to our respective communities as proof of what is possible.

their version of a beloved national dish, and in the process, their account of the way things were.

Interrupting my liberal utopian fantasy was the lingering annoyance of Summerhill. There was a lot I didn’t know about Crown Heights, but what I did know is that people who knew even less of its history than I should be wary of opening a business there.

Eduardo and Cristina are from Jarabacoa, one of 13 and 15 children, respectively. Eduardo, an elementary teacher back in the Dominican Republic, first migrated to the US in the late 70’s, right in the middle of two mass migrations from the Dominican Republic to the United States, but especially New York. Dominicans are the largest foreign-born community in New York, but our entanglement with the country is more about our own imperialist aspirations, than a simple mass exodus for greener pastures.

An accompanying thought, was that a bustling, black-owned brickand-mortar in any capacity should be celebrated. I implored Maritza to let me talk to the architects of this anomaly, her parents, Eduardo and Cristina. She agreed, and after some convincing, I returned to New York a few months later, this time to the Lower East Side –– where Maritza and her brothers, Franklin and Eduardo Jr., grew up.

I wanted to hear from Eduardo and Cristina about the Crown Heights they knew, the one callously depicted in the press release.

How did they feel about Becky and their rapidly changing neighbors? Over Cristina’s sancocho, I got that opportunity. I learned

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In 1869, Ulysses Grant approved the annexation of the Dominican Republic (then commonly known as Santo Domingo), with plans to ultimately make it a state. But in a story suitable for today’s headlines, Congress was unable to reach a requisite two-thirds majority vote to move forward — the apprehension prompted by the belief that the mixed race population wasn’t suitable to become “American.”

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In the century’s subsequent decades, the Dominican dictator Ulises Heureaux over-leveraged the financial stability of his country.

Plummeting sugar prices — the country’s leading export — sent the economy into a steep decline. Eventually, a New York financial firm called the Santo Domingo Improvement Company (SDIC), assumed the country’s railroad contracts and the claims of its European bondholders. For the majority of the first three decades of the 1900’s, the US government controlled the Dominican economy, funneling money to Wall Street creditors, first, then what was left over to the Dominican government.

In 1965, the United States again invaded the Dominican Republic, this time in the name of political stability. They bolstered support for the authoritarian regime of Joaquin Balaguer from 1966 to 1978. This period of continual turmoil expedited many Dominicans’ resettlement to New York. Eduardo Abreu Sr. was on the tail-end of this first wave.

Eduardo is a modest man, described endearingly by his family as a man content with a single shoe for his two feet. His life as

restaurateur was less about specific aspirations and more so the specific available opportunities in the States at that time. In 1984, at his cousin’s urging, he opened a restaurant, Caribe, on Dekalb Avenue in Bushwick. It was sold, and two years later Puerto Viejo opened a few miles south in Crown Heights. At that time, the neighborhood was best known for junkyards and thieves. A life insurance policy and the restaurant were opened concurrently.

It was Cristina Abreu, his wife, who pushed Eduardo to grow the business. And so he did. When pressed to divulge the most stark differences of the last 30 years, he recalls regular walk-outs without pay, and the objectionable visitors from a nearby methadone clinic on Classon Ave. The jukebox, slot and poker machines helped cover rent — at the time $400/month. Cops were often called but never came.

More benign examples of a bygone era were the prices of food.

Home fries, sausage, toast, and your choice of tea, coffee, or juice could be had for $2. For lunch, rice and beans with your choice of meat, $3.75. The food and its adjoining pricing reflected the

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neighborhood and its Latin and African American factory workers. There was not a single Becky in sight, and most certainly, no Summerhill’s.

It’s hard to ignore the juxtaposition of the restaurant that stands today. It’s undergone renovations in step with the neighborhood, and is outfitted with industrial chic decor of the moment. There are concrete floors, and an elongated bar and wooden tables. Behind the bar, Carmen, warm, with an ageless face, prepares your food as she has there for the last 20 years. The obsidian walls and smoke grey ceilings are both adorned with ornate molding. And the food, the food is so deeply satisfying. Reflective of the interior, Puerto Viejo is comforting without being condescending, effortlessly earnest. It is truly authentic, without the pejorative baggage that comes along with the ubiquity of that word. It is a restaurant that embodies Crown Heights, diverse without trying, built with pieces of what was there and what became.

Back home, Cristina has spent hours preparing the sancocho and finally, it’s ready. Maritza, Franklin, Eduardo Jr., and their aunt,

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Carolina, gather to enjoy the meal that is so uniquely theirs that it’s not even the same recipe used in the restaurant. Cristina’s been making this meal her whole life, and watching her painlessly construct sancocho is a particularly pleasurable type of theatre.

The ingredients: yucca, potatoes, squash, tarro and more, all tell a story of imperialism and of heritage. Sancocho is coated in the Abreu’s story, layered and complex, with requisite patience and a satisying finale. But as always, embedded in the specificity is the universal. Cristina’s sancocho is a conglomeration of tradition, memories and adaption, but like Puerto Viejo and countless other Dominican families and enterprises in New York, it is over sancocho that stories of endurance are constantly being recounted and rewritten. And those are the best ones.

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Cristina’s Sancocho Servings: 8 people Total cook time: 2 1/2 hr Prep: 1 hour

2

green bananas whole hen (or chicken) cut into 10 – 12 pieces 1 lb of pork ribs cut into small pieces 1

INSTRUCTIONS INGREDIENTS 4

garlic cloves, crushed with a pilon (mortar and pestle) 1/2 yellow onion, chopped 1 /2 green bell pepper, chopped 1 teaspoon oregano 3 celery sticks, chopped in half 6 sprigs of cilantro teaspoon of salt teaspoon of black pepper 2 tablespoons of olive oil 1 quart of water 1 cup of vinegar 1 cup of lemon juice 3 green plantains, peeled and sliced into 1-inch pieces 1 cassava / yucca, peeled and sliced into 1-inch pieces 2 taro / yautia, peeled and sliced into 1-inch pieces 3 potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1-inch pieces 1 yam, peeled and sliced into 1-inch pieces 1 squash, peeled and sliced into 2-inch pieces

1. Clean hen and pork ribs by submerging in vinegar and lemon. Cut and discard the excess fat and skin.

2. After submerging and cleaning the bird, set aside.

3. Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat.

4. Add the meat and squash.

5. Season with garlic, onion, pepper, oregano, 2 chopped celery sticks, salt and pepper.

6. Cook over low heat until meat is tender.

7. Once the meat is tender, cover it in water.

8. Once the water evaporates, refill pot and continue to boil for an additional 10 minutes. Remove from heat and strain broth.

9. To the strained broth, add plantains, taro, cassava, potatoes and yams. Boil until soft and add additional water if necessary.

10. Add tender meat back into the boil.

11. Ten minutes before serving, add celery and cilantro.

12. Accompanied with a side of white rice and avocado

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Shots With...

Satchita Melina Artist Satchita Melina was raised between many worlds. When the Bologna native found herself in Bara Mangwa, a remote village in South Asia, she learns the hardship of its aboriginal people and captures the way of life they struggle to protect.

The original inhabitants of this region are the Lepcha, Nepalese, Sherpa and Bhutia people.

They are of Buddhist-Nepalese descent, part of the Tamang clan, a systematically displaced aboriginal group. The women from these photos are a family I befriended while living in the region. Today, the people of this region work fiercely to protect their traditions from the pressure to assimilate with mainland Indian culture and politics. Sikkim was once a Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom, remaining independent until 1947 when it merged with India. This area of West-Bengal near Kalimpong, on the other hand, is the heart of the Gorkhaland movement, a political wave that has been fighting for an independent territory, but not without violence and agitation. I feel very fortunate to have been welcomed into their home, where they shared their food, stories and customs with me.

Portrait by RS Whipple

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WAY OF LIFE Satchita Melina photographs life in the Himalayan borderlands.

Grandmother and aunties sipping chyaa (tea) at the Heritage Farm House in Bara Mangwa, a remote village set between the border of Sikkim and West Bengal.

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Corn being stored in the “’godam” (storehouse). This word actually derives from the English “go down”, as these pantry units were often below ground level, and the British army stationed in this area influenced local language. The dried corn is used to feed livestock, make popcorn, and when ground up, it is used to make a staple cornmeal porridge called dheroh (known as dhindo in Nepal).

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Grandma prepares the porridge dheroh, colloquially known also as “corn-rice.â€? This gruel is eaten at lunch or dinner traditionally with gundruk, a fermented mustard leaf dish known to all Gorkhali and Nepalese diaspora households. It is especially popular among diabetic and diet conscious people because it is considered healthy and believed to make one stronger. The traditional stove seen here is known as the chulo, made of local clay and burns ďŹ rewood for fuel.

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Mother prepares a puffy Tibetan style deep-fried whole wheat bread. The bread has various names such as husyang phaley, or numtrak balep, or gurung, when served with honey and chyaa.

This originally Tibetan food is popular in this area because of the rich cultural diversity and exchange of the region. For breakfast it is served with tea, and at lunch time with tarkari (vegetable curry) and acchar (pickle).

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Making Miss Kim Ji Hye Kim’s path to becoming a chef and restaurateur might not have been a straightforward one, but it was an inevitable one.

CONTRIBUTOR

Stephen S atterf iled

As a second-grader, Ji Hye Kim made a business decision. No bully, nor institution — not even her own mother — would get between her and the thing she loved most. And the thing she loved most was food. It started at home. “That is delinquent food!” cried her mother, Sook Lee, who did not approve of her daughter’s primary gastronomic infatuation, Tteokbokki, served and prepared on the streets of Seoul. Ji Hye did it anyway, subsidizing her habit by saving money that was intended to be exchanged for school lunch. Instead it went to the vendors. Ji Hye wasn’t the only one either. It was a poorly kept secret that in fact many of the children were doing this very thing, stashing their lunch money in milk jars, foregoing the school lunch until enough had been saved for the spicy, crispychewy rice cake dish. Eventually the school caught on and swiftly issued stern policy prohibiting the purchase of outside food. It still didn’t stop her.

One day, an envious dissenter intervened. A bully. He blackmailed her, issuing the following ultimatum: “Either you do my homework or I’m ratting you out to the school about the illicit Tteokbokki.”

PHOTOGRAPHER

Marina Goldi

This was not a difficult choice. Ji-Hye turned in the boy’s work alongside her own and Tteokbokki was uninterrupted. This dish started out as royal cuisine, but devolved into inexpensive street food after the Korean War. Thirty years later, Ji Hye makes her own version in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

When Ji Hye was enrolled in the University there, she was tangentially aware of Zingerman’s Delicatessen, but not entirely. It would have been hard for anyone in Ann Arbor, and for countless outside of it, not to be. Zingerman’s is a well-known and revered institution.

35 years ago Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw began selling corned beef sandwiches in a 1,300-square-foot delicatessen that grew into a family of businesses, employing more than 700 people. In 2009, Ji Hye was one of them.

She was eager to return to Ann Arbor at the time. Her husband was a professor at the University, but meanwhile in Princeton, NJ, Kim worked at a healthcare startup, at a job she really didn’t want to have, but had to keep. She was overworked, well paid and unfulfilled.

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Kim’s food is an amalgamation of taste memory, vociferous research and principles of Korean Buddhist cuisine.

One of myriad post-9/11 reverberations, were fewer jobs, let alone industries willing to sponsor green cards. In 2006, her legal status changed after marrying her husband, Karl, but she stayed an additional two years at her office job. Just as Kim decided it was time to move on, she encountered an article about Zingerman’s in the New York Times. Again, she knew of the place, but what the article detailed (which nearly every one them about Zingerman’s does) was a story about the company’s tremendous ethics. Their reputation has been built on fine and ethical food, but equally, a transparent and inclusive operating style that has made former employees into future stakeholders in the company. On her next visit to Ann Arbor, she gave the deli –– which also included a retail side dense with an international selection of luxury foods –– a closer inspection. At the cheese counter, she had an impressionable exchange. She marveled at the cheesemonger’s knowledge and the great care with which he cut the cheese. That’s what she wanted. She wanted to cut cheese. Without any sense of irony, she began widely proclaiming this to her friends and family. Soon she went from working shifts at the deli to managing them.

Because she always does the most, just like pulling double-duty in second grade, she led shifts at the deli, while simultaneously engaged in vociferous research on her native cuisine. Her collection of books grew from dozens to hundreds. She developed a particular soft spot for ancient Korean cookbooks, many of them reprints from hundreds of years ago. She was awash in the food of her youth and from centuries before it. This is where, for instance, she

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learned that her beloved Tteokbokki was once regal because of its expensive parts. Rice was expensive, and before its informal street adaption, included addendums like dates, pine nuts and chestnuts.

Stripped of its luxurious supplements, it evolved into something akin to gnocchi, but more dense and even more chewy.

In her research, she honed a love of Korean Buddhist cuisine. It is a cuisine rooted in specificity, tied to place and time. It’s hyper-local, very seasonal, and as much an approach to life as it is a bowl of food.

According to Kim, “It’s a cuisine of subtraction, highlighting the ingredients without overpowering them with too much seasoning.”

The architecture of this considerate way of cooking, immensely informed Ji Hye’s food, which is humble, thoughtful and appropriately adjusted to fit her time and place.

All this research needed to live somewhere. Kim wasn’t just a researcher, she was a doer, and in the house of Zingerman’s, doers were rewarded. In 2011, backed by Paul, Ari and the fellow partners, Ji-Hye (with her then business partner, Kristen Houge Jackson), opened San Street Cart. Lots of dumplings ensued. It was one of the foods from childhood Kim was most fond of, and her remembrance of the dish was heartily received by the people of Ann Arbor.

The roaming restaurant was a major success. A poetic revolution had seemingly been completed. She’d gone from the unflappable seven-year-old, defiantly committed to her street eats, to now serving it. As the business grew, so too did her clarity of vision and ambition. Other essential operating skills, like ordering and inven-

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Tteokbokki is a definitive Korean dish, and signature item at Miss Kim.

tory, became part of the many essential lessons of her early entrepreneurial experience. She did pop-ups in neighboring bars, until eventually, in 2016, her Pan-Asian streetfood cart metamorphosed into Miss Kim –– an excellent Korean restaurant serving food from Michigan’s farms.

Her preparedness and practicality make her success seem inevitable, but she is a woman of subtlety. Since she left Seoul as a 13-yearold, very little of her life was about what she wanted to do. Her status in this country was tenuously joined with her obligations first as a student, then as an employee in a “useful” sector. Realizing the tight-knight relationship between her life’s desires and US policy, studying political science was a way for her to learn more about the laws in the country, so that she could better understand how they would affect her opportunities. The Econ degree was equally practical. How on earth was she supposed to get a job with one in Poly Sci? In that period in between leaving New Jersey and returning to Ann Arbor, for the first time in her life, she was in a moment in which she could finally choose to spend her time exactly as she desired. At 31, she thought, “This is the time for me to do something that I want to” and if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter. She could always go back to the less fulfilling jobs. But Ji Hye was bound to succeed. She’d always quietly worked twice as hard to maintain a relationship to food. Her liberation was at the cheese counter. It was, for a woman who loved food more than anything else, the easiest response to a question regarding her unfettered happiness. And to dine at Miss Kim is to taste her taste memory, her learned, and her

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earnest love of recrafting the food from which she is constituted, adapted for the place in which she stands. It’s as much an approach to life as it is a bowl of food. And through her tireless research, it is a right she’s very much earned.

Below, Ji Hye Kim selects a few definitive dishes from Miss Kim. Buddhist Bibimbap: Bibimbap is a cornerstone rice dish of Korean cooking. In the spirit of of Korean Buddhist cuisine, Kim’s version is loaded with seasonal local vegetables and, in customary fashion, topped with an egg.

Tteokbokki: The infamous Miss Kim special. They get freshly made, never- frozen rice cakes from a local lady who runs a grocery store, where she also grows Korean vegetables, and has a small fermentation lab in her shed.

Jook: Specifically corn jook is a basic porridge, and one dish that consistently shows up in really old cookbooks. Ji Hye’s oldest (a reissue) is “Sanga Yorok” from 1459. At Miss Kim, it’s always on the menu, whether it’s chicken or mushroom jook. It’s comforting, and easy to make. Corn jook is particularly special for her. It’s what her mother ate during the lean times of her childhood.

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Tlaltequeadas: Heritage and Health CONTRIBUTOR / PHOTOGRAPHER

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Rachel Glueck

The foods of a culture are the result of social, economic, and agricultural opportunity. Mexico is a prime example of this complexity: one of the most diverse countries in the world, whose cultural heritage suffered conquest. Recently, however, there’s been a rise of interest in indigenous grains and native cuisine.

It’s the start of a trend that, with the right application, could become strong enough to change the health of a nation.

It was at one of the country’s cardinal native dance gatherings that I began to grasp this interplay of culture and cuisine. My future husband was proudly describing for me the importance of dance for Mexico’s native population as we strolled through the pop-up market where vendors sold beef tacos, chicharrones, sodas and packaged sweets. “Why do you dance?” I asked him, searching for the motivation behind the showy feathered headdresses and animal skin costumes. “To honor Mother Earth and celebrate our ancestors,” he replied. “So… why then is most of the food here meat-based, non-native, processed, and served on styrofoam plates?” And with that question I sent one of the great leaders of the Aztec dance community into momentary existential turmoil.

Four and a half years later, still struggling to get enough vegetables on my plate, I found myself in the marketplace of Tepoztlán — the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, home to hippies, shamans, and truth seekers. I came across a sign reading El Cuatecomate: Comida Prehispanica hanging above a stand of multicolored veggie burgers, moles, and fresh juices. The owner — a clean-cut forty-year-old man in khaki trousers and a button-up shirt — rattled off his offerings faster than I could follow. A few keywords stood out: vegetarian, gluten-free, sugar-free. I chose two tlaltequeadas and allowed Hansel, the vendor, to pair it with the mole of his recommendation.

The joy of discovering a Mexican dish so delicious, healthy, and composed of native ingredients (and green plants!) made a lasting impression on me. Eight months after, I returned to Tepoztlán and sat down with Hansel to learn more.

Tlaltequeadas, a Nahuatl–Spanish word combination that translates to “tortilla de comida,” resemble a veggie patty, and as far as I can tell, are only found in Tepoztlán, in the Mexican state of Morelos. I suspect the native population wasn’t making veggie burgers per se, but Hansel, who learned the dish from his grandmother, informs me that the ingredients are entirely those used in precolonial times. Their key component is pinole — a flour he makes of ground blue corn mixed with wood ashes — which is the binding element of the ingredients. Hansel sells about 10 different tlaltequeadas, made up of 90% wild foraged and 10% cultivated plants. Their composition varies and can include familiar ingredients such as chia, amaranth, and pumpkin seeds, or — more abundantly — quilis (wild herbs), chaya, elache, quitoniles, flor de ztompantle, cenizos, etc. In other words, plants that are difficult to translate or locate abroad.

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Hansel is nothing like the other dull-eyed market vendors who sit passively waiting to sell their wares (si Dios quiere - if God wants).

He expresses his enthusiasm with a sincerity that doesn’t diminish despite long days of attempting to capture the attention of potential customers, habituated meat lovers, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. His university background in biochemistry makes him a powerhouse of nutritional information, which he passes on to me in snippets over the course of several weeks, breaking away regularly to call out to passers-by, “Deliciosa comida prehispanica artesanal!” I narrow in on a few familiar ingredients, chia and amaranth: staples of precolonial diet and trade.

Chia, one of the more well-known “superfoods” today, has a rather astounding list of nutritional benefits: high in antioxidants, dietary fiber, enzymes, Omega 3 and 9, five times the amount of calcium found in milk, and 4 times more potassium than in bananas.

The seeds, for which the state of Chiapas is named, are excellent for heart health, treating diabetes, boosting energy and metabolism, and providing essential nutrients to pregnant women.1 The gelatin-like substance they produce when soaked protects the stomach, regulates metabolism, regenerates intestinal bacteria, and helps treat ulcerative colitis.2 Hansel uses white chia seeds, which are endemic to Morelos and produce four times the amount of mucilage as the far more common black variety.

Amaranth is equally fascinating. Vilified as a destructive superweed in the United States, it is consumed as a “superfood” in Mexico. Its protein content (13%) is higher than most other grains in the world, and its composition is quite similar to animal protein.

It contains a lunasin-like peptide that has cancer-preventing benefits. When combined with chlorophyll (such as found in the quilis), its molecular structure changes, enabling it to kill off cancer cells.3 Like chia, amaranth is gluten-free, reduces inflammation, and improves digestion. For food and trade, it was as important a grain as corn for the Aztecs. Because of its use in religious ceremonies, the Spanish conquistadores doled out severe punishment for anyone caught producing, possessing, or consuming amaranth. Although it was impossible to completely eradicate, the consumption of amaranth — one of the Aztecs’ main protein sources — was radically reduced.

With a diverse and largely plant-based diet so powerfully loaded with nutrients, the health of the prehispanic populations in Mexico was strikingly different to that of today’s. “We call this a malinchismo,” Hansel informs me. “It’s when someone turns their back on their own culture in favor of another culture.” It’s a reference to La Malinche, the lover of Hernán Cortés who acted as advisor, interpreter, and intermediary between her Nahuatl people and the

1. The Journal of Molecular Biochemistry 2013 2. www.cureforulcerativecolitis.com 3. Michael Terra. (2003) Treating Cancer with Herbs: An Integrative Approach 4. Hernández M. Encuesta Nacional de Salud y Nutrición de Medio Camino 2016: Resultados ponderados.

[Presentación] Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública

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conquistadors. She is viewed alternatively as a traitor, victim, and mother of the mestizo race. As has happened with so many other conquered lands, the natives quickly learned that lighter skin and European customs and language gave one authority and respect; indigenous blood, traditions, and cuisine were shameful and were to be hidden or discarded.

Although the Spanish did their own amount of damage to the native diet, it wasn’t until U.S. influence (namely, processed foods) took hold in the 70’s and 80’s that the real problems started. While the elderly often still eat according to their Spanish-influenced native diet (particularly in rural villages), the younger generation is more likely to eat processed snacks, sodas, and foods heaped with refined sugars, additives, and food coloring. They have, in fact, taken the worst of the Westernized diet and run with it: 7 out of 10 adults in Mexico are either overweight or obese, and diabetes is now the leading cause of death in the country.4 Perhaps in part because of these disturbing statistics, we’re beginning to see a renewed interest in native cuisine and healthier diets. There are small pockets around the country where groups are gathering to educate and empower others to change their eating habits; non-profits have formed to assist rural communities to take up the cultivation and marketing of their native foods. A steady increase in foreign interest in superfoods and native cultures has certainly made an impact, showing that, once again, the beliefs, desires, and money of the privileged classes dictate the direction of our cultural preferences — this time, hopefully, for the better.

Hansel views every aspect of his business as integral to creating the change he hopes to see in his country. Most of his purchases are from foragers or small, local producers. Food, he says, when prepared with love and intention, creates a flow between the mind, body, and spirit. When I ask him what he hopes to see happen in the future with native cuisine, his answer comes with swiftness and conviction, giving the impression he’s spent years refining his life’s purpose: “Recover our rich gastronomy, be ambassadors of our alimentation, create conscious food, and eradicate illness.”

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