Kitchen Kwento

Writing the Way Home

I spent the past weekend up north with Movement Generation's ecological leadership retreat. I am still taking in the depth and breadth of that space, the people, and unexpected places that the gathering awakened (and recreating the delicious recipes...). One afternoon by the freshwater pond, we were asked to reflect on right relationship - our relationship to the future, as ancestors in a time of ecological crisis. My reflection came as a letter:

Dear granddaughter,

I am waiting for this pen to move, to be stirred by imagination. But I am having a hard time. I can barely imagine my own unborn children, or what the future will look like in 10 years, let alone your face. Yet somehow I believe I will meet you and learn from you as my teacher, in the next world.

Someone once told me of another way to understand DNA - as descendants now ancestors. Strands of me will live through you. They are waiting to be born. Right now my grandmothers write this letter to our future through my hands.

Our people have this word: balikbayan. It's used to describe Filipinos visiting the homeland, and as a brand name for those cardboard care packages sent to the Philippines. What it really means, though, is to return to the land. To homeland, because land is home.

My generation's story will sound like a fairytale to you. We have realized that we have been away from home for too long. This distancing came with a price. We have become sick - homesick. Its an illness that spans hundreds of years.

Our homesickness touches everything - the air, water, plants, animals, and soils.

But instead of naming the disease, many of us were told we had to create new diseases to cure the old ones. The cures would be expensive. They could cost us everything. Sometimes we were told it was our fault if we were sick, and that we deserved it. Worst of all, sometimes we became used to this terrible disease.

In this generation, we each had to become more than we already are - which is what we already are. We had to become doctors without going to medical school, learning new ways to heal. We had to become midwives, attending to the birth of a new world out of the old one.

Granddaughter, for some reason I am certain of you. When I remember you, you give life its compass, a throughline within uncertain waters. I know you will survive because my own ancestors survived. Through 500 years of colonization. Through enslavement and cultural erasure, through forced migration and assimilation. 

If my only ability in our age of extinctions is to relearn being balikbayan, I've fulfilled a responsibility passed on from the past. We are here to renew life. In a changing world, we must use our remembering as a weapon and a salve.

Granddaughter, I hope we will meet soon.

Love,

Your grandmother 

 

More:

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center

Movement Generation

On Farming and Saturn's Return

All things move in cycles. 

"So, where is your farm?" I am sometimes asked. "I don't have one," I reply. 

At times the response is simply, "Oh." Or, "Why don't you get one yet?" Or, especially if the questioning is from relatives, "Then why did you spend all that time doing that organic farming thing?" which I translate as, why didn't you do something sensible with your time...but at least now you're back from gallivanting. 

I get where the questioning comes from. But I also get it when I catch a wistful tone from those who share half-whispered dreams. Of being unsure how they got to where they are now, of feeling misplaced, of questioning their current job or city or town. Of not being 100% sure what that change would look like, but knowing there's this thing nibbling at the corners, and it isn't satisfied with crumbs.

A hunger for connection is a powerful motivating force. For me, two seasons of farming were driven by an early calling since childhood, a desire to physically practice reverence, and to learn the basics of what ancestors up until two generations ago knew how to do. It opened up new goals, while closing off other possibilities. 

In my current reality, at times I feel a tension bordering on sadness. My rural soul half-hungers in this beautiful city, so alive with stories and sound yet where green life must find its way pushing up through sidewalks, on rooftops and inside planter beds.

When I am quiet enough to listen, though, lessons from the farm are still there to be harvested. And I'm using them to help through tumult - that period of necessary growth between 27-30 commonly known as Saturn's Return:

Lesson: Break Open. The tiniest seed has the potential for tremendous growth. It requires breaking the shell and leaving behind smallness. Reaching true adulthood is not the smooth journey I thought it would be, just as germination isn't the end of ever-accelerating change. The next step is to harden off and to leave the greenhouse for good. It means planting roots into the harsh reality of the field, and to endure and grow through the forces of wind, air, rain, pests, disease, and blazing sunlight.

Lesson: Plan for Harvest. Plans inevitably change and adapt, but there is no harvest without a plan. Plan well, like your hunger depends on. Feed it unrelenting care and persistence. Take stock, get real with what is and isn't possible, and wipe the slate clean of crops that didn't give a good past yield, even if they were a pretty idea at the time. 

Lesson: Face the Broken Places. These past two years have surfaced the uglies and the neglected places. Its lifted the curtain on obsolete habits, on the rusted and decayed things no one else can move out. While some things can be appreciated or even repurposed, for most its time to thank them for past use...and then take them out for recycling.  

Lesson: Make and Take Your Own Medicine. Plant medicine is labor intensive. It takes growing the plant, followed by multiple steps of harvesting, processing, straining, and jarring. Shortcuts fool no one and lead to a lesser product. If Saturn's Return is about taking stock of what hurts and is in need of healing, its also realizing there's no doctor, pharmacist or medicine in the house, simply yourself. 

Lesson: Flock. Exposing your foundation to all the elements can be lonesome. It has to be. But there is still a need to pause for warmth and companionship, even if its not romantic partnership. I have leaned so much on others in this phase, and especially on those who have survived the arc of their Saturn's Return into stronger, surer and brighter versions of themselves. 

More: 

I used to think Saturn's Return was woo-woo crap, but now that I'm in the thick of it, I can't stop talking about it. Natural cycles are the greatest teacher. There, we see constant change, see maturation, decline, and decay. We are a part of these cycles, and the small wrinkles that begin around our eyes, or the gray hairs that creep in, are only small external signs of vast, internal changes. I didn't even go into the many other farm metaphors, whether pruning (prioritizing), composting (death and transformation), or pest management (enough said).

Looking back at my first season, its no coincidence that many of the women were also between 26-31. These women weren't drifters - they came with a deep sense of purpose and questioning, some looking to make lasting change in their life trajectories, others to add on skills to heal their communities. All had put the pause on commitments - on jobs in nonprofits, as teachers, therapists, fundraisers, gardeners, in roles as partners, caregivers and mothers. Long-term relationships ended or were tested. While some are now working on farms or food justice related work, others have integrated the season in profound ways, gone on to school or to earlier work with a different reference point.

There's lots of info about Saturn's Return out there, some better than others, and so I'm not including any here. The curious can simply Google and click away. Or better yet: why not ask folks where they were in that period between 27-30?

‘Āinatarian: A Conversation with Gigi Miranda

 

Getting back to the source. Photo credit: Gigi Miranda

I am lucky to have come of age where "local" was a way of life. In Hawai'i, ʻāina is land. Nurturing the land is to mālama ʻāina. I remember those who continued traditional practices - from pounding poi, to gathering limu, to fishing - as practicing daily acts of resistance. It seemed to challenge the privatization of land, the toxic industries destroying aquifers, the influx of imported foods. Witnessing the struggles of people in their own homeland humbled and inspired me to understand my Filipino roots. I wondered, what is our way to mālama ʻāina? What is that relationship when in another's homeland?

So when I heard of Gigi Miranda's workshops on healing through food and land-based practice, I couldn't wait to hear more. Based in O'ahu, this Pinay sister generously shared stories from her path and on choosing to go "ʻāinatarian" (note: coined by Faith Pascua, a young Ilokana poet/student and her ipo (sweetheart) Noa Helelā, a young Kānaka Maoli poet/student).

Yes, that is a sweet poi creation. Photo credit: Gigi Miranda

KK: What inspired you to connect to food and healing? Do you relate your Pin@y roots to your food work and if so, how?

GM: Itʻs who I am, how I was raised and how I live. I reconnected to my roots and continued my ancestral traditions. Seeing my father die at 59 years old from heart disease, diabetes and a host of other conditions as well as my own healing journey, it was not only food but a healing from the disconnection from our ancestral lands, in our practice and way of life.

The drastic changes, demands, and stress of trying to raise our family of seven kids, incorporation into a Western diet and lifestyle, and a loss of our culture, was detrimental to his and our family life. So many of us have loved ones suffering from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, hypertension and other conditions.

Connecting to Pin@y roots is in my culture, language and traditions. I was raised growing our own food, fishing from the ocean and preparing our own meats as my ancestors have done for thousands of years.

KK: What's a dish or ingredient you identify with?

GM: Munggo guisa and fried fish, my Nanayʻs roots. Pinakbet, my Tatayʻs roots. Fresh pounded paiʻai by my Kānaka sista farmer friends. Fresh niyog/niu/coconut (my maternal ancestors roots) that I love making into healing ʻĀinatarian foods! 

Breadfruit, or `ulu. Photo credit: Gigi Miranda

 KK: What do you see as crucial issues - and opportunities - around food facing Pin@ys, Asian/Americans, Pacific Islanders, and all communities today?

There is just one, food relationships. It is in our relationships in our food and how we make our food choices and practices in our familial understanding and relationship to the land that affect ours, our communityʻs and ʻāinaʻs health, no matter who or we are. It is not only about food. itʻs about our culture and way of life.

In Hawaiʻi, Hawaiians and Filipinos have some of the highest health rates of chronic illnesses. The traditional belief and practice of mālama ʻāina (taking care of the land) that sustained Kānaka Maoli for 2,000 years has changed over foreign contact and with current U.S. occupation to a Military Industrial Complex.

Land rights and access for Kānaka Maoli and sustainable land practices for Hawai‘i’s settler population remain a determining factor of health girded in historical struggles and colonial relationships. It is the direct impact on the health and livelihoods of the indigenous and settler populations. The main economic unit of the ʻohana that cared for their ili in their ahupuaʻa and okana has changed. It is now the main economies of militarism, tourism and GMO companies that are the toxic landscape in the health, livelihood and culture of the people, ʻāina and our food.

Tasty roots. Photo credit: Gigi Miranda

The State of Hawaiʻi imports 80-90% of its food. There is less than 3,000 acres of certified organic farmland, while the military occupies an estimated 245,000 acres, GMO companies own or lease an estimated 40-60,000 acres spraying over 70 different chemicals daily with development always a threat to our ʻāina. 

Certain ethnic groups with noted health disparities are employed in service jobs and supporting the State of Hawaiiʻs infrastructure. The price of a median home is $450,000, average rent has doubled in the last 20 years while 37% of the homeless are of Kānaka Maoli ethnicity and 39% of the prison population.

Yet slowly but surely communities are reconnecting, healing the land and themselves. The sovereignty movement grows in our food, our land, our communities and consciousness. Shifts to more sustainable, local living economies and efforts to mālama ʻāina in preventing further “health” impacting development or expansion happens in every thought, every moment and every day as kupaʻāina.

Learn more:

Visit Gigi's Facebook page: Whole Plant Based Cooking and Living

Classes at The Green House

Navigating (and Nourishing) a New Year

New year's arrived on a ridge in Tagaytay, the Philippines. It shifted into place somewhere between starlight, the smoke of fireworks, dark water, and poppers echoing into the night. My parents, sister and I were like children: we jumped up and down for luck, ran circles holding bags of clanging coins open to the sky, and filled bowls with round fruits. But if I ran extra fast, or jumped higher than usual, it was not with that exuberant feeling of years past. It was more like a big amen and to please bring in the new. 

Even with January firmly underway, I still feel the resonance of that year's passage. Through it all, there was so much to be grateful for. Here are some from 2012:

Filipino Farmers of the New Millenium

After months of emails, I finally met Gil Carandang, a Filipino organic agriculture advocate and fellow alumni of the Farm and Garden program. (We "just" missed each other by 10 years, and are possibly the only Filipinos in the program's 40-year-history!). I traveled to Gil's teaching farm in Laguna to join a 3-day workshop on beneficial indigenous micro-organisms. Gil breaks down any mystique around natural farming into practical and resonant terms, and provides technical assistance to cooperatives seeking organic certification. Nourishment: a glimpse of Filipino natural farming in the archipelago. 

A Season on the California Coast

Wishing to deepen my farming skills and work with youth, I spent my second season at Pie Ranch in Pescadero. While barely an hour outside of south San Francisco, it felt like another world. From sleeping in a yurt on a historic piece of land and chopping wood to burn for heat, feeling the chills of a coastal winter, to living by the rhythms of over 250 pasture-raised chickens, I grew in often unexpected ways. Nourishment: bridging with Bay Area youth and finding joy in their discoveries.

Building Networks 

2012 witnessed the growth of more collaborations that lift up the voices, stories, needs, and strengths of people of color in food and farming. From launching the Farm and Garden POC alumni network, joining across years of visionary food leaders, to organizing with AAPIs on the farm bill and Prop 37, this work is growing and will continue. Nourishment: the strength of relationships.

Telling Our Food Stories

Arts and culture are necessary agents to bring relationships with each and the earth into balance. While being back in an urban area can feel far from the beauty of living close to the land, I found my senses touched by storytelling, as writers use food as a community builder and a place of collective memory. I had the chance to interview young leaders, like Reyna Maldonado, and artists against Prop 37 like Angela Angel and Robin David. Nourishment: giving and receiving stories.

Cooking 

There is an inexplicable joy of cooking with others. Alone, I go into a flow and could almost cook day and night, lost in a ginger haze. In a group, it can be messy, unpredictable, and fun. 2012 brought new seasonal themes - Cooking with Coconut and Sweet Roots - and new faces to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center's Kitchen. And a first Yelp review - when my environmental justice organization FACES teamed up with The People's Kitchen, our vibrant crew threw down a specially crafted Filipino food menu and a program for nearly 150 guests. Nourishment: communal cooking for body and soul.

Weaving Connections

My friend Mylene says she was asked, "Where is the Filipino canoe?" That question planted a seed. Barely a year later, on a cold Sonoma County morning, I sat around a fire circle together with Mylene and a group of Native and Filipino/Americans at the launch of the Bangka Journey project. Envisioned by a core group of friends, the dream is to revitalize Filipino canoe traditions in California as a healing pathway. It wouldn't be possible alone. The the project is blessed to receive the gift of guidance and wood from First Nations in California and the Pacific Northwest who have already been reclaiming canoe traditions - carving paddle by paddle, connecting youth to elder, and getting bodies in sync. 

Projects like Bangka Journey are often not in the eye of the mainstream media - but they are all around us, agents of change happening with or without recognition, shifting at the individual and community level, reminding us of who we truly are and all that we can become. The sacredness of water, of family, and all our connections, is always there but sometimes feels difficult to see. But when they are held and nourished, bold transformation is not only possible but inevitable.

Nourishment: the hope of paddling (by literal paddle or otherwise) into balance

How To Cook An Aching Heart

There is a time to simmer, and there is a time to toss it in and turn up the fire.

As an undergraduate, I realized with dismay that I was not meant to be a biologist. I was more interested in biology's sweeping narratives of evolution, adaptation and attraction than in following good lab protocol. But many years later, there is one lesson that I remember as mystical. Its a process as familiar to the home cook as it is to the researcher.

There are some proteins that change their structure through exposure to heat, or a compound like salt or acid. Take away the change agent, though, and it reverts back to origins. Yet for other proteins, once exposed at a certain threshold they can never return. We can see this as lime juice seeps in and "cooks" tender raw fish into kinilaw, or in that quick flash of an egg hitting a hot pan. This second cooking is about total transformation, disruption so complete there is no going back.

Its a process called "denaturing" - although it is natural. The reversible kind is found in certain foods I don't care much for - like Jell-O, an uncertain liquid and solid thing. Many foods I do love, like kinilaw or a frittata, are examples of the latter. They deliciously exist, made possible by complete surrender to a new form and way of being.

Technical as denaturing sounds, this process of complete transformation is a somewhat romantic and a very human story. Its hopeful. And scary. Complete surrender to a new and even unnamed shape? Sometimes the ambivalence of Jell-O seems a lot safer than the irrevocable change of a frittata.

 

Cracking the boundaries of the egg = giving up an old form   

And this takes me to the inspiration for this post, to the questionings on love that surfaced in my late 20's and followed me from the kitchens to the fields to the subways.

Love, that active ingredient, is like a kitchen fire, salt, or vinegar. If we allow ourselves to be cooked, it can be scary to knowingly offer all that we are, uncertain if it will end in something scrumptious or just...charred.

Truth is, it takes more than the sheer force of that powerful ingredient for transformation to occur. It takes a substance willing to take it all in. It takes knowing that afterwards the change will be permanent, even when that ingredient is gone. 

Tonight is a glad but aching place. I am learning anew how to cook with this heart I have. I am learning how wholeness and brokenness are kindred, how the pained heart reflects a capacity to feel, how the risk of change is outweighed by the danger of becoming numb and tasteless. 

Cooking with an aching heart is about staying present. It is to continue even when the knife slips onto a naked finger. It is to clean up the blood but get back to the kitchen again, putting aside trepidation. To cook with an aching heart is to fearlessly peel roots and reveal what's really under the skin. It is to dice onions that make you cry, squeeze lemons despite their wince, and balance out sweetness with salty, bitter and sour.

Sometimes (and this is the hardest to learn) cooking with an aching heart is to discern when something just doesn't taste right and there's nothing to blame but the broken oven. It is to cook for the entire neighborhood and eat mouthfuls stolen between moments. And as night approaches, to doggedly prepare a meal for one, to somehow receive nourishment until finally, finally inviting the beloved guest for dinner.

More:

Rumi on Chickpeas. Seriously.