After working as a public defender for more than 20 years, Jim Sheehan received an unexpected inheritance from a family member. Jim purchased and renovated six buildings in a run down corner of downtown Spokane, Washington and repurposed them for the collective good. For more than 20 years these buildings, now known as the Community Building Campus, have served as a community hub for grassroots campaigns, coalitions, and activists. In the new book, One Block Revolution: 20 Years of Community Building, leaders who have worked from this hub share their stories that highlight the legacy of this collective.
In this excerpt from the introduction by the editor of the book, author and social impact advisor with Measure Meant, Summer Hess recounts her work with Jim beginning as an executive assistant and how it catalyzed her work to build a sustainable future.
Soon after starting my job in 2013 as executive assistant to Jim Sheehan, founder of the Center for Justice and the Community Building Campus in Spokane, Washington, I returned to our office after lunch to a voice message from a Coca-Cola representative. He was calling about an old advertisement painted directly on the southwest corner of the Community Building and offered to have it restored, free of charge.
It seemed like a great idea to me. I was a newly minted MFA in nonfiction writing who felt a strong connection to the Spokane region and Eastern Washington University, where I had earned my degree. I felt the faded advertisements on early 20th-century brick evoked nostalgia for the early days of the Inland Empire. They spoke to a classic Spokane era, when industry boomed, when timber and minerals were trucked out by train and money flowed in, when buildings were so finely crafted each of them had a name. They also brightened and textured a city still creeping back from the shift out of downtown and into the suburbs. These advertisements, along with Art Deco flourishes on historic theaters and wide avenues planned during a period of abundance, made it easier to look past street-level parking garages and sparsely populated storefronts.
Like many mid-sized American cities, Spokane is also experiencing a reversal of this trend. Businesses are repopulating downtown, and people like me—born and raised thousands of miles away—are moving to the region for its high quality of life and education. If rapidly increasing property values are any indication, the city is changing quickly—at a slower pace than some residents would like, but at a rate that seems too sudden for others. As the density in downtown increases, Spokane has become more politically diverse. The Northwest Progressive Institute reports that the Clinton-Kaine ticket won the City of Spokane by eleven points in 2016, while Trump-Pence won Spokane County by nine. In 2020, Biden-Harris carried the city by seventeen points, while the county went Trump-Pence by four. Although this was an unusual election year, Spokane is representative of the national urban-rural divide, where higher population densities are shifting cities to be more progressive than their surroundings. The Community Building Campus (CBC) has served as the nerve center for planning, organizing, campaigning for, and accelerating this kind of progressive social change in the Spokane region.
But in 2013 I wasn’t tuned into the political landscape of Spokane; I was just excited to share a mural restoration project with my boss. I had been hired part-time as his executive assistant, and all that I knew about my job was that I was supposed to answer his mail and manage his calendar, which took about two hours a week. I knew that his previous assistant had helped him with unique and seemingly unrelated projects, from staging a theatrical reading of Love Letters with his life partner, Mary, to serving as non-voting secretary for the Center for Justice board, to organizing an annual pop-up soccer camp for kids at a nearby park. I had no experience in theater, but I could participate in this small piece of historic preservation. Jim and his team had gutted and, wherever possible, restored six buildings on the same block of Main Avenue, and I perceived them as testaments to his commitment to historic architecture. Surely, he would be excited about the mural project, too.
Jim returned to his office after enjoying a cup of soup from the Saranac Pub on the first floor of the building next door, said hello, and sat behind the credenza for his afternoon scroll through The Huffington Post.
“I had an interesting voicemail come through,” I said from my desk that peered out over Main Avenue, watching the lunch rush at the Main Market Co-op and Boots Bakery.
“Oh?” he asked, without looking up. He was dressed in his usual sweatshirt and track pants, which he had worn to a personal training session earlier that day. I told him about the Coca-Cola rep and his offer.
Still scrolling, his immediate response was, “Tell them they can restore the advertisement when they stop using love and happiness to sell a f—ing product.”
His tone was not angry, but it was clear. So was the fact that I was not working for your average developer or philanthropist. This guy saw a lot more at stake in the world than his profit margins or the public visibility of his family’s foundation. Even in something as benign as peeling paint, he saw the manipulative clutches of capitalism clashing with a higher good. I realized how complex my position as an executive assistant was going to be. Should I deliver his opinion verbatim? Should I spare the rep who was obviously a cog in the structure of a global corporation? Should I temper the language and communicate the message?
In that particular moment, I took no action. Telling the Coca-Cola rep about Jim’s stance on capitalism did not seem necessary. It was around that time I printed off the Community Building’s mission statement and taped it to my computer: “To host, inspire, and catalyze social change in the Spokane region.” I had no idea how an executive assistant could be an agent for change, but I kept the mantra in mind as I sorted out my place among the staff who managed the buildings that hosted more than forty nonprofits, small businesses, and state politicians. I did not know what my role was yet, but I knew the CBC was a place I wanted to be.
This was the most dynamic block in the city, and not just for social enterprises and nonprofits. Several other committed business owners operated eateries and unique shops. There was a constant refresh of energy on the block as students flowed in and out of bars and cafés, and activists trotted back and forth from public meetings or one-on-one brainstorming sessions. The CBC also included a two-screen independent movie theater, an art gallery, a food co-op, and a large multi-vendor space called the Saranac Commons. People who knew nothing of social justice movements happening above the ground floor came to eat, drink, and participate in diverse aspects of public life together.
Over time, I began to experience what Jim and the people he worked with were after. I learned that, as a career public defender, Jim understood how inequality threatens the livelihoods—and at times, the lives—of people in our communities, but there was little he could do from within the system to effect change. Then his aunt left him an unexpected windfall inheritance, giving him the chance to make the difference he had always dreamed of. That’s when he began to buy, restore, and repurpose historic buildings on Main Avenue as living, sustainable monuments to social justice. He invited local citizens and community leaders to leverage his personal wealth as a collective resource and
invested in the conditions for social innovation. Most importantly, I believe, he took advantage of a rare opportunity to stop treading water in the current system and to start asking, what’s possible?
Eight years after the Coca-Cola incident, and after several evolutions of my role and responsibilities, I am still the messenger, attempting to name and outline what can happen when resources and space are dedicated not just to a specific project, but a higher purpose. In the process of curating and editing this anthology, I find myself working anew toward that mission I had taped to my computer: to host, inspire, and catalyze social change, this time through the voices and stories of people who built and shaped this vision.
As climate chaos and obscene inequality ravage people and planet, a new generation of visionaries is emerging to demand a bold solution: a Green New Deal. Is it a remedy that can actually meet the magnitude and urgency of this turning point in the human enterprise? With lifelong activist and politician Tom Hayden, and Demond Drummer of Policy Link.
Featuring
Tom Hayden (1939-2016) was one of the leading figures of the student, civil rights, anti-war and environmental movements of the 1960s, and went on to serve 18 years in the California legislature. Following his legislative career, he directed the Peace and Justice Resource Center.
Demond Drummer is Managing Director for Equitable Economy at Policy Link, and a Fellow at New Consensus, a nonprofit working to develop and promote the Green New Deal that has advised many progressive leaders and organizations, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement.
Credits
Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
Written by: Kenny Ausubel
Senior Producer and Station Relations: Stephanie Welch
Editorial and Production Assistance: Monica Lopez
Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
Producer: Teo Grossman
Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris
This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.
This program was made possible in part by Guayakí Yerba Mate, working with Indigneous farmers in South America to grow shade grown, organic yerba mate. To inspire us all to come to life. Learn more about Guayakí’s products and regenerative mission at guayaki.com.
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Transcript
NEIL HARVEY, HOST: As Yogi Berra once quipped, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
The climate crisis is here now with a vengeance. It will be a long emergency that demands systemic solutions to prevent ecological ruin and the collapse of human civilization as we know it.
At the same time, extreme economic inequality has overshadowed even the infamous extremes of the runaway plutocracy of the Gilded Age.
The two crises are closely connected. Any real solution must address both.
The confounding factor is that there’s enough spin today to knock Earth off its axis. Several polls suggest that majorities of the public find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The challenge is that failing to imagine the end of capitalism may mean the end of the world.
Ever since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s, powerful sectors of big business set out to dismantle its reforms, and subsequently the 1960s reforms of Lyndon Baines’ Johnson’s Great Society programs, such as the War on Poverty and Medicare.
By 2020, the corporate class had made great strides in rolling back and defunding those kinds of reforms – that is, until the Green New Deal began to emerge with real force and popularity.
As in the 1930s, the only force big enough to challenge this titanic corporate power is the federal government. That’s where the real money is, as well as the power to make the rules that govern society.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summed it up in 1936 at Madison Square Garden: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
But what really is the Green New Deal? And what exactly was the New Deal, and how did it come about?
TOM HAYDEN: I was born at a moment that the New Deal saved my family. It was before and during my birth and my first two or three years that this happened, so I can only go back and listen to people and ask what happened.
Tom Hayden
HOST: The late Tom Hayden first emerged on the national scene in 1962 as an author of the famed Port Huron Statement. It became the rallying cry of a generation, stating “If we seek the unattainable, it is to avoid the unimaginable.”
He went on to become a lifelong activist, working from both outside and inside the system – from the civil rights, anti-war and student movements of the 1960s to decades serving as a California State Senator and political force.
Born just at the cusp of the emergent New Deal, Tom Hayden first heard the stories from his mother about the life-saving difference it made in his family’s lives. He spoke about it at a Bioneers conference.
TH: What happened is that my grandfather died in a cannery accident, the fault of the Carnation Milk Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He fell in a vat and was chopped up. He left my grandma with 11 kids. And this was during the Depression, and she survived during the Depression and took care of those kids, and…during that time she was sustained by a $5,000 check from the company with regret for the death of her husband. There was no pension, there was no Social Security, there were no rights of organized labor. Her world fell apart in the late ’20s, early ’30s, and I don’t remember all that much about her, but I remember her as being sort of the quintessential Nani, you know, the grandmother, and all these kids.
And what they were doing in the Depression was huddling up together like students do today, five to an apartment who don’t know each other, but living through a semester at NYU or wherever. And they were selling apples, and they were doing odd jobs together and pooling what little they made every day in order to buy food and pay the bills to get to the next day.
They’re survivors, and they know a lot. I learned that too after leaving the university and going to Mississippi and Georgia and Newark that poor people know a lot that middle class people do not know unless they come from that background.
But anyway, in the middle of this process of the collapse of capitalism, the collapse of what government we had, there were the stirrings of the New Deal. There were social movements, Communist-party led organizing drives in manufacturing plants. Got nowhere. People got fired, got clubbed down, beat up, shot. Farmers—I don’t remember if they picked up pitchforks—but they went to work against the banks and the grange.
And they started a period of turbulent working-class expression and middle-class expression at having been sold out by somebody. And it started with finding ways to make enough food to eat, and it ended up with doing everything possible to obstruct the business as usual of the times unless they were fed, unless their children were fed, unless they could go to school, unless there was somebody to say that there was hope on the horizon.
And I remember my mom went through this, you know, the orphan of a father she hardly knew. And when I was growing up at the end of the ’30s and the beginning of the Great War, I remember sitting on her lap a lot and she’d always talk to me about how she loved Roosevelt. And I didn’t know who Roosevelt was, I just thought, Roosevelt, that’s God. [LAUGHTER] My mother loves God and God is—Roosevelt is taking care of us. She would keep saying that, because by that time, after these revolutionary inciting of working people and average everyday people, they had achieved Social Security, and I can’t tell you what that would mean for my mother when she’s thinking about Grandpa.
They achieved bargaining rights for organized labor. Unheard of. Seemingly impossible. They achieved pensions and all the rest of it, and they had achieved what was known as the New Deal, but at the time it was being built, they did not call it the New Deal, they called it “the movement”. It didn’t have a name. They didn’t announce, “Now we are starting a movement for a New Deal.”
What happened was this strange mix of a revolutionary impulse on the one hand; a liberal impulse from do-gooders who wanted a better government, second; people in the center who were very frightened at the possibility of social disorder and were timid about raising their head; and then people on the right like my priest, Father Charles Coughlin, who was busy organizing an anti-Semitic response to the very same conditions. And working closely with Henry Ford on the idea of a new Nazi party based in my hometown of Royal Oak or Hamtramck.
HOST: As President Roosevelt said in the face of the rising American Fascism:
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
Again, Tom Hayden…
TH: The people on the far right thought Roosevelt was a Communist. Most people that I would identify with were organizers. They were selfless people who didn’t work for much money, didn’t think far ahead, to the careers that they would hold as future labor bureaucrats or Democratic Party administrators [LAUGHTER], they wanted to know if they’d have their heads crushed by a policeman’s baton, and they were willing to do that. There’s sort of a lost generation there in history.
And there was another group, they were known as the brain trust of the New Deal, and they were a very eclectic group of people who were brainy, intellectuals. They were probably in the most important American tradition that I’ve ever studied, and I consider myself part of, the American pragmatic tradition. And I know that pragmatism is now a dirty word, but if you look under it, it means listen first, see how far people are willing to go, and improvise a step forward, a program that will take you a little bit towards survival or a little bit towards a better life as rapidly as you can.
The New Deal brain trust invented all these amazing programs. One parallel today would be like if somebody said, “We need a renewables work administration. We need to put every person in this country and on this planet who’s out of a job or underemployed into a great employment project, publicly funded, privately funded, but it has to happen because there’s a great work to be done.” The great work is to save us from the Depression in those days. No one had that idea in 1929. They were gripped with that idea by 1937.
The whole idea of industrial workers being organized, of old age pensions, delivering people Social Security, having to sit at a table and argue about whether we can also do healthcare, being told by the president we don’t have the votes, we can’t do that, some future generation will fight for healthcare, that’s how the New Deal was pounded out. It was just an unlivable situation. And out of that pragmatic determination they decided the government has got to hire people, the government has got to protect people, the government is what saved my mother, and why she loved Franklin Roosevelt.
It was a close call, you know. We could have gone to the right. We could have gone into chaos. And the answer to what might have happened we’ll never know ’cause then came World War II, and everybody thought, “Problem solved.” Everybody’s working down the street in the empty plant. They’re building planes and tanks and trucks and jeeps and cars. The car industry was formed out of that experience.
My father went to work as an accountant for a car company. Detroit was booming. My mother loved Roosevelt for those reasons, not ideological.
And when we come to that point when people are unable to be trapped in ideology but are willing to do what works, that’s the time when I think we’ll have the equivalent of a New Deal for the climate catastrophe.
HOST: The fork in the road that Tom Hayden foresaw has arrived sooner than even the alarmists projected. Climate disruption is already driving humanity to its knees, and it’s just getting going.
As climate chaos and obscene inequality ravage people and planet, indeed, ideology is starting to give way to pragmatism.
A new generation of visionaries is emerging to ensure that the Green New Deal that Hayden called for is poised to become a reality.
Demond Drummer
DEMOND DRUMMER: We see the Green New Deal as a World War II scale mobilization of all the resources of our country, our industrial capacity, our ingenuity, our financial capital, everything, all of the resources of our country to transition to a clean and just energy economy. We believe that we need to set out bold solutions that meet the scale and scope of the problem, and not let our politics define the type of solutions that we can implement. [APPLAUSE]
HOST: Demond Drummer is Managing Director for Equitable Economy at Policy Link, and a Fellow at New Consensus, a leading-edge non-profit policy “think-and-do tank” working with diverse partners to develop and promote a Green New Deal.
DD: So what are we proposing? We propose that we upgrade every single building in this country to the highest levels of energy efficiency, air quality, water efficiency, and water quality; upgrade our country’s infrastructure to be more resilient; accelerate, massively accelerate the adoption of renewable energy; restore our natural ecosystems; research, develop, deploy technologies to decarbonize heavy industry; and position our country to be a leader in clean manufacturing. Why can’t we do that?
We must also transform our food system and invest directly in farmers to adopt regenerative and sustainable agricultural methods. [APPLAUSE] Let’s take the subsidies away from Conagra and Monsanto [APPLAUSE] and give that money directly to farmers whose rural areas are being literally gutted of all their wealth. So we have a lot of work to do. The money is there. Don’t let nobody fool you.
So we also want to invest in America’s productive capacity to produce the stuff that we need to have a clean economy – electric vehicles, not too many, right, electric vehicles; the energy efficiency parts and components, pipes; all the stuff that we need to see the economy and have a society that we want. We have to build and produce more things here. About 25% of emissions comes from trade alone. So the economic mobilization will renew our economy and give rise to sustainable businesses and industries, and create millions of good, quality, high-paying jobs.
And because of the sheer size and scale of this great effort, the Green New Deal will leave no worker and no community behind. So the greatest generation mobilized our country to beat fascism abroad.
It is our task and our day and our time to beat fascism right here at home, and mobilize our country to meet the imminent and existential threat of climate breakdown. [APPLAUSE] And this is what the Green New Deal is all about.
HOST: At a deeper level, what’s also in question is the very economic paradigm that’s driving the destruction.
When we return, more on the comprehensive vision of a Green New Deal that Demond Drummer and a broad coalition of allies are working toward.
This is “The Green New Deal: Launching the Great Transformation”. I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.
HOST: When Demond Drummer was Executive Director at New Consensus, he worked closely with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey to draft the original 2018 resolution outlining potential elements of a Green New Deal.
Only 14 pages long, it rapidly gained nearly 200 Congressional co-sponsors. It was designed to be the beginning of a larger creative process, with the details to be determined along the way – American pragmatism for the 21st century.
DD: You have to follow the rabbits down all of the rabbit holes. There is no piecemeal way to do this. And we do live in a system that took many, many years to get here, and it’s going to take some time to get back. And so we have to have a systemic solution.
Climate breakdown is a consequence, a symptom of very flawed economic thinking, flawed economic theory, bad economic models that exclude and extract.
It’s impossible not to tackle all aspects of our society, and by tackle I mean really examine, interrogate, and change the policy regime and economic regime that we live in. And what role can a government play? They invented stuff in ways the government can improve the material lives of people in this country – regulating banks, labor standards, all of this stuff that did not exist prior. And all within, like, a few years.
And it wasn’t one bill. Everybody’s like it’s going to be one bill. No. It was like a series of executive orders and court rulings, everything, legislation, all of the above.
So we believe that the Green New Deal should be at least as comprehensive as that, everything from decarceration to decarbonization. We have just a few years to right the ship, and there is no way to do that without being bold and visionary and aggressive.
HOST: Drummer says there’s a precedent for what a fast-forward mass mobilization can look like – and how impossible it can look until you do it.
When the US entered World War II, the productive capacity of the country simply did not exist to wage war on that scale.
The financial capital came from the government as both purchaser of the end product and as lead investor. A country that could only produce 3,000 airplanes before the war had produced 300,000 by the war’s end.
In reality, says Drummer, examples abound where massive government resources act as the seed investor to develop new technologies, industries and products. 80% of the technology in the iPhone was directly developed through government-funded research. Not to mention numerous life-saving drugs and vaccines.
Big business had no problem with the government’s response to the Great Recession of 2008. The Fed printed money to buy out the banks’ bad mortgages, and the banks continued evicting millions of people from their houses.
DD: And we didn’t extract a demand. We didn’t say keep the families in the homes. We just bailed out the banks. So we got real creative when it came to bailing out Wall Street.
What we’re saying is we can be as creative, not just from a fiscal policy standpoint, but from a monetary policy standpoint, right, to bail people out of this climate crisis that we have created, that mostly has been created by corporations that we’ve allowed to control our society.
So money is a tool, administrative law is a tool. So we believe the federal government has a role. Right? By statute, the federal government can override any state. By statute, it’s Constitutional. Federal government should have a high standard that’s a floor. You cannot go below that floor. Any state can go higher. Done.
There’s nothing sacred here. We have to really interrogate how we got here, and be very clear that from systems of government to money, to law and policy, everything is on the table, because life itself is in the balance.
HOST: A non-negotiable goal that Green New Deal proponents have set is to ensure that equity is built into any legislation.
Many critics of the original New Deal characterize it as an intrinsically racist program, and even a failure as a model. They point to the fact that on average, black Americans received less in terms of benefits than white Americans, which is true. In order to get New Deal programs through Congress, FDR made a deal with the Southern Senators whose votes he had to have.
There’s a reason, he says, that so many older black Americans speak fondly of the New Deal and enthusiastically supported the Roosevelt Administration.
For example, the Works Progress Administration employed 350,000 African Americans a year, about 15% of its total workforce. The same number were employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and there are other examples.
Critics often cite the design of the Social Security Act to deliberately leave out Black Americans, which is also accurate. Many targeted job sectors were excluded from the Act, and two thirds of African American workers were in those categories. Yet, Reed points out, out of the total 20 million workers excluded from social security, 75% were white.
In other words, it’s complicated. It’s about class as well as race, and how financial elites use racial divisions for their fiscal and political benefit.
In practice, universal policies such as a living wage and Medicare for All will make a transformative difference in the lives of Black Americans, other people of color, and white Americans as well.
As Tom Hayden projected, when ideology gives way to pragmatism – to doing what works – Demond Drummer’s comprehensive vision of a Green New Deal puts politics aside to implement the functional solutions that will address the crises facing us.
DD: The Green New Deal is a capacious framework that is designed to address the interlocking systems of oppression that affect us all. Some see this as a weakness, but I argue that the comprehensiveness of the Green New Deal is actually its true strength, because there is no way to truly transition to a zero-carbon economy without interrogating and challenging the logic of an economy that exploits people and extracts from the earth. [APPLAUSE]
And what we require in this moment is a new political consensus and a new economic consensus, a consensus that says that we will no longer be duped by the mythic invisible hand of the market–[APPLAUSE] a consensus that recognizes that the public sector has a fundamental role to play in shaping markets – energy markets, financial markets, labor markets – to serve the interests of society.
HOST: Coalition building is key to successfully crafting legislation that avoids perpetuating systemic inequalities. A diversity of voices is brimming with creative solutions on how to make that happen.
DD: So the Green New Deal is a movement of movements. It will be brought forth and sustained by an enduring alignment of our youth, who are leading the way and know that we all deserve clean air, clean water, and good food, workers who deserve pay on which a family can thrive. It’s being brought forth by scientists and researchers who can lead us into the light, and even by entrepreneurs of all types, investors even, who are looking for good returns that can renew this economy—they do exist—grassroots leaders and organizations who continue to lead change, mobilizations, moon shots, movements, that’s the story of our country. That’s the story of America. And we in this room and in communities all across the country are writing the next chapter of the American story. [CHEERS]
There is a direct correlation between wages that can’t sustain a family and an economy that can’t sustain human life on this planet. [APPLAUSE] So this morning, we, the people, we have an economic mandate. We have the ingenuity, we have the existential imperative, and the power to give ourselves a Green New Deal. And I know deep in my heart and in my soul that we can, and even more that we will. Thank you so much, Bioneers! [APPLAUSE]
This recipe is from Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys by Sandor Ellix Katz (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.
James Beard Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of “The Artof Fermentation,” Sandor Katz combines his love of travel and passion for fermented foods in his latest book “Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys,” he shares the stories of how fermented foods are often a unique aspect of a culture. The book is his personal culinary travelogue with recipes from his travels.
Tepache is a wonderful, effervescent, lightly fermented pineapple beverage popular in Mexico. It is made from the skins and core of pineapple; you can enjoy the fresh pineapple flesh and also make use of the parts typically discarded in order to enjoy it over a longer period of time.
Timeframe
2 to 5 days
Vessel
Wide-mouth vessel of at least ¹/2-gallon/2-liter capacity with lid or cloth to cover
Ingredients
for about 1 quart/1 liter
¹/2 cup/100 grams sugar (or more, to taste)*
Peel and core of 1 pineapple (eat the rest of the fruit!), cut into 1- to 2-inch/3- to 5-centimeter pieces
1 cinnamon stick and/or a few whole cloves and/or other spices (optional)
Process
Dissolve the sugar in about 1 cup/250 milliliters of water.
Place the pineapple skin and core pieces and the optional spices into the vessel.
Pour the sugar water over the pineapple, then add additional water as needed to cover the pineapple.
Cover with a loose lid or cloth, and stir daily.
Ferment for 2 to 5 days, depending upon temperature and desired level of fermentation. It will get fizzy, and then develop a pronounced sourness after a few days.
Taste each day after the first two to evaluate developing flavor.
Once you are happy with the flavor, strain out the solids.
Enjoy fresh or refrigerate for up to a couple of weeks.
If it gets too sour, do not despair! After straining out the solids, leave it with its surface exposed to airflow and it will become pineapple vinegar after a week or two.
* ideally piloncillo, panela, or another unrefined sugar, but any type of sugar will work
Sandor Ellix Katz, is a self-taught fermentation experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee. He is the author of two best-selling books: Wild Fermentationand The Art of Fermentation(winner of a James Beard Award in 2013). Through hundreds of fermentation workshops, he has taught around the world, he has helped catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. Sandor and his work have appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, PBS, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and numerous other national and international media.
In this Bioneers interview, Sandor dives deep into the fascinating world of fermentation.
Sandor Katz travels the world sharing his extensive knowledge about the culture, tradition, and health benefits of fermented foods. The author of “Wild Fermentation” and the James Beard Award-winning book “The Art of Fermentation” he is also the recipient of the prestigious Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Michael Pollan said that Sandor Katz has awakened more people to the diversity and deliciousness of fermented foods than any other person over the last century. His latest book is “Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys.” Sandor Katz was interviewed by Arty Mangan, Bioneers Restorative Food Systems Director.
ARTYMANGAN: What are fermented foods?
SANDOR KATZ: Fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms. Fermented foods and beverages are those that have been created by the transformative action of microorganisms, and that turns out to be a vast number of important foods and beverages.
ARTY: You talk about co-evolution, community and culture. What do those broad concepts have to do with fermented foods, and what is your view of the relationship between humans and microorganisms?
SANDOR: The emerging consensus among evolutionary biologists is that all life evolved from bacteria. And the corollary to that, which we’re just starting to think about, is the idea that no form of life has ever lived without bacteria. We’re evolved from them and they are part of us, and, it turns out, that they give us vast amounts of our functionality. This is true not only for human beings but for all animals, all insects, all plants, and all fungi. When you harvest a cabbage or a carrot, it too has its indigenous populations of microorganisms. This is why all food rots and also why people around the world have had to figure out strategies to work with microorganisms that are inevitably present in order to make food more stable, more digestible and more delicious because the alternative is that organisms that are not especially desirable will begin to decompose the food.
ARTY: What health benefits do we get by eating fermented food?
SANDOR: Fermented foods and beverages cover a lot of ground. Coffee is fermented, chocolate is fermented, sauerkraut is fermented, miso is fermented, soy sauce is fermented, bread is fermented, vinegar is fermented. Obviously, all of these different types of foods don’t have exactly the same qualities, but fermentation transforms all of them in several important ways.
The first transformation is what I would call pre-digestion, the idea that the fermentation process begins digesting whatever the food and the compounds in the food are before it goes into our mouths. Generally, that renders nutrients more easily bioavailable to our digestive systems. Fermentation also can augment or enhance the nutrients in food and contribute additional nutrients. Pretty much all fermented foods and beverages have higher levels of B vitamins than the raw ingredients that you begin with, and this has to do with an accumulation of microbial bodies (living and/or dead) in the food which elevates the B vitamin levels.
Beyond that, there are unique micronutrients that I would call metabolic byproducts of fermentation organisms, and some of these have been found to be extremely beneficial. For instance, fermented vegetables contain compounds called isothiocyanates, which are regarded as anti-carcinogenic compounds. Natto, a type of fermented Japanese soy, has a compound that’s gotten a lot of attention—natto kinase, which has been found to help regulate blood clotting and dissolve fiber buildup in blood vessels. That has a lot of potentially helpful applications.
Pre-digestion can also aid in detoxification. Certain compounds in some plants can be toxic, and the fermentation process can break them down into more elemental forms, which neutralizes their toxicity. Not all fermented foods have live bacterial cultures, but those that do can help replenish and diversify bacterial populations in our intestines, which really do need diversification and replenishment to help maintain optimal health. So, fermented foods have a number of very beneficial effects, even though they vary somewhat from food to food.
ARTY: Some fermented foods on the market have been pasteurized, and some, such as, tempeh, are always cooked. Do those interventions diminish some of the benefits you just described?
SANDOR: Well, no. Certain foods, such as tempeh, have no history of being eaten raw. They’re always cooked. They’re not necessarily dangerous to eat raw, but tempeh is the work of a mold. The live cultures that are beneficial to us are bacterial cultures, not so much the fungal cultures — the molds or the yeasts. Some molds and yeasts may in fact be benign, but there’s no suggestion anywhere in the literature that I’ve come across that it is of any specific benefit to eat them raw, uncooked. The pre-digestion benefits from the fermentation process are not diminished in any way by cooking tempeh; nothing is lost by cooking it and killing the mold. If, on the other hand, you take a food like sauerkraut and can it with the use of considerable heat, well then you definitely are diminishing or destroying bacterial populations which otherwise would be extremely beneficial.
ARTY: Are there other fermented foods besides tempeh that are based on mold cultures?
SANDOR: Sure. There are all sorts of cheeses that involve molds, and generally in those cheeses the molds are eaten raw. Yeast is also a fungus, but it’s not a mold, and there’s no specific suggestion that eating yeast raw is of any particular benefit. Bread, or any kind of fermented grain product, or any kind of fermented alcohol, is fermented with yeast. Contemporary practices have the ability to isolate specific microorganisms, but human beings have only possessed that ability for about 150 years, and obviously most people in their kitchens don’t have the ability to isolate specific microorganisms. So, traditionally all fermentations have been the product of mixed cultures.
For instance, sourdough is a mixed culture of yeasts along with bacteria. Traditionally alcoholic beverages were always made as mixed cultures as well, with yeasts along with bacteria. So traditionally fermented alcoholic beverages actually do have some probiotic qualities that most contemporary fermented beverages do not possess.
ARTY: From my understanding, fermented foods are basically acidic but have an alkalizing effect on the body. How does that work?
SANDOR: First of all, let me say that not all fermented foods are acidic. I mean, there are some alkaline fermented foods. The Japanese soy ferment natto is one famous and somewhat notorious example. Across West Africa, the Yoruba culture has a group of condiments that are also alkaline ferments, but yes, certainly you are correct that the most widespread ferments—sauerkraut, yogurt and related ferments—are acidic. And yes, when you eat them, they have the net effect in your body of alkalinizing, which is a little bit counter intuitive. It basically has to do with making minerals bioavailable. Minerals are alkalinizing. A lot of our overly acidic state has to do with demineralization, and when you eat these acidic fermented foods, even though they are acidic, because they make the minerals in the food so much more bioavailable, they have the effect in our bodies of alkalinizing us rather than acidifying us.
ARTY: What is the infamy around natto?
SANDOR: Natto is this Japanese soy ferment that first of all has a slimy coating that develops on the outside of the soybean, so it just has this mucilaginous feel to it, which many people raised in the context of a Western palate find challenging. And then the aroma of this alkaline ferment is similar to that of ammonia, so it’s something slimy that smells like ammonia. Many of the other Japanese ferments—soy sauce, miso, sake—have gained widespread popularity in the West, but natto really has not gained much acceptance. I actually have learned to love it, but as often as not if I’ve tried to order it at a Japanese restaurant, I’ve been told that I won’t like it, I guess because they have had so many experiences of people ordering it and not liking it.
Fermentation creates strong flavors, but many are flavors that are not immediately accessible to everyone. They might be what we would describe as acquired tastes, and often, flavors of fermentation become really distinctive cultural markers because people within the group love these foods because they have learned as young children to love them, but people outside of the group find them really challenging. All around the world you find examples of this, and I think probably the most obvious example would be cheese, especially the really stinky cheeses. People who have grown up around them have learned to love them, and some other people learn to love them, but if you take someone from a part of the world where cheese is just not part of the palate, and you present them with one of these strong flavored cheeses, to them it just smells like something rotten. The flavors of fermentation are somewhat edgy, so they’re often not flavors that are accessible to everyone.
ARTY: Different locales have unique strains of indigenous microorganisms in their environment. How does that affect the fermentation process?
SANDOR: First of all, let me address why fermentation is important, and particularly the preservation aspect of fermentation. What sauerkraut has represented for people traditionally is a way to eat the vegetables that you harvest in the autumn through the winter. It’s a strategy for preservation. Same with a block of hard cheese. A block of hard cheese represents milk preserved from a season when you have more of it than you know what to do with to get you through the season when you might have to dry up your animal to have a new generation. It’s the same with salami. A salami represents a strategy to preserve meat from a pig for a longer period of time. Many of these ferments have, as their rationale, preserving food, which is ultimately about survival. These foods are extremely important survival foods, and in many temperate regions it just wouldn’t have been possible for people to live in them if they hadn’t developed strategies such as these.
Now in terms of the extremely local angle of it, it’s true that the particular bacterial strains that are going to be on your vegetables and on your fruits will be extremely localized. There are broad patterns of the types of organisms you find on different types of foods which are similar in different parts of the world, but the specific strains will always be unique. A great way of embracing the microbial environment in which we exist is to take foods grown in our local area and then use microorganisms present in that the local area to transform them. Then you have foods that literally are manifestations of your environment. Using the bacteria from your surroundings can be very powerful aid in being physiologically well-adapted to your environment. So, fermenting food in your own home can be a very, very powerful experience that in a literal and tangible way connects you to your environment.
ARTY: What are the impacts of the commodification of fermented foods?
SANDOR: Traditionally fermentation processes were adjuncts of agriculture and food preparation that were practiced broadly in most every community. The “de-skilling” of the 20th Century has removed them from the fabric of our lives and the fabric of our communities. Like every other aspect of food production, it has disappeared from our homes and is practiced behind factory walls, but part of the local food revival that’s going on right now is a widespread recognition that this is not entirely desirable. Sure, it’s freed up time for a lot of people to do other things, but it has come at great cost, and we really do need, for many different reasons, to have this connection to our environment that food creates.
Beyond other aspects of food production, the industrialization of agriculture happened during the same historical period that microbiology emerged, and the first triumph of microbiology was identifying the pathogenic bacteria that were the agents of some of the main infectious diseases, so we developed the cultural idea that all bacteria are bad, a widespread, generalized fear of bacteria. It’s an ideology I describe as the war on bacteria. The idea that we should kill and eradicate all bacteria is really misguided.
The most vivid reflection of this is the marketing of antibacterial soaps. There’s nothing sexier that you can write on a container of soap than to promise that it will kill 99.9% of bacteria. Most of us raised in 20th Century America have just come to accept this as a desirable objective, to kill all the bacteria, when in fact nothing can make us more vulnerable to disease than to try to wipe out all the bacteria, many of which play a hugely protective role in our lives.
The war on bacteria has made our culture afraid of bacteria and bacterial foods. Despite that, though, fermented foods remain many of our favorite delicacies. Cheese is fermented, cured meats are fermented, chocolate is fermented, coffee is fermented, but most of us have nothing to do with the process. It’s a mysterious process that we imagine is happening under the guidance of microbiologists. Some of the products are good and some of the products are really bad, but there is an inherent diminishment with globalized commodities.
First of all, food that comes from halfway around the world is always nutritionally diminished just because it’s older, it’s been sitting around longer, and nutrients degrade over time. A lot more energy is embedded in these foods in the form of transportation and packaging. The thing about all foods —whether it’s seeds that have evolved in specific places or styles of fermentation based on bacteria that are specific to certain places — is that they’re a manifestation of that place. Globalization in certain ways can expand people’s horizons, but it also untethers our food from its relationship with place. I think we have a huge craving in our culture for connection to place, and food is an important way that people are finding that connection. There is no food where this connection is more tangible than in a fermented food or beverage.
ARTY: Do you consider composting a fermentation process, and if you do, can you make the analogy to the process of fermenting foods?
SANDOR: Well, I would definitely connect the process of composting with fermentation. The oldest styles of fermentation were always wild fermentations, i.e. based upon organisms that are spontaneously present on the food, but where do those organisms come from? They come from the soil. There’s a direct relationship between the health of the soil, the health of the plants, and the ability of the bacteria on the plants to ferment the plants into delicacies that people love to eat.
Generally, for a biologist, fermentation specifically describes anaerobic metabolism. Even though there are some ferments that everybody agrees require oxygen, most ferments are the result of the activity of anaerobic organisms. Compost can be created in anaerobic systems or aerobic systems. Generally, the preference is for aerobic compost, so to a biologist who’s a stickler about terms, a healthy aerobic compost pile isn’t a ferment exactly, but I prefer to work with a broader lay definition that fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms, and in this sense, every fermentation pile, no matter the style of fermentation, is an example of fermentation. And if we want to take a larger view and think about the cycles of life and death on this Earth, fermentation is what connects life and death. Fermentation is what takes dead plant and animal matter and recycles it back into more elemental forms that can nourish further lives. It’s why we don’t see an accumulation of dead plant and animal matter on the Earth: fermentation is always recycling it back into elemental forms that restore soil fertility and keep the cycle moving around.
ARTY: You talk about ferments of flowers and legumes. What are some of the more unusual foods that can be fermented?
SANDOR: There’s really no food that can’t be fermented. People ferment meat, fish, grains, beans, and vegetables. There is no class of foods that cannot be fermented, and there are all sorts of incredibly obscure ferments. One that just popped into my head is hoppers, which is a Sri Lankan ferment of coconut and rice. They are wonderful light pancakes done in a pan that has a shape something like a wok, so at the bottom you have a thick pillowy pancake, and then up at the edges you get a crispy lace ferment. So really, you could travel anywhere in the world and come up with really distinctive local ferments, not necessarily made from exotic ingredients but from whatever ingredients are abundant in that place. Those ingredients may be obscure to us but are really important to the people in that part of the world.
We are especially honored and happy that the Bioneers radio series not only won the Bronze Award this year in the prestigious NY Festivals global contest, the “Oscars” of radio and podcasts, but that it’s for a 3-show series in the Social Justice Category.
Since day one, our Bioneers premise has been that “it’s all connected.” Environmental wellbeing and social justice are one notion indivisible. But since we’re probably better known as an “environmental” organization, it’s very gratifying to receive this recognition in the Social Justice space.
I strongly encourage you to take a quiet moment and listen to the shows, which are really powerful and meaningful. As always, our radio team sees ourselves as jewel setters for the actual Bioneers Conference speakers. In each of these three shows, the speakers are profound and spellbinding, and the information is incredibly important, interesting and timely.
I offer huge props to my esteemed Bioneers Radio teammates Stephanie Welch, Emily Harris and Neil Harvey. It’s always a tight team effort with dynamic creative flow.
We hope this recognition will keep helping us reach more people and new audiences! In the NY Festivals contest, we were in competition globally with all the major networks and big-time podcasts, and it’s your money mojo that puts us in the game. Thank you, as always, for your unwavering support of Bioneers.
Please spread the word! And we’d love your feedback about the shows.
Kenny Ausubel Bioneers Co-Founder & CEO, and Executive Producer & Writer of the Bioneers Radio Series
The drumbeats demanding that the fossil fuel giants be held accountable for sparking the climate crisis are getting louder. Here in the U.S., more cities, states, and counties keep filing lawsuits seeking compensation from the oil giants for climate-related damages and to fund adaptation projects. Last spring, a Dutch court found multinational Shell Oil guilty of violating human rights and ordered the company to slash its emissions, and many other international lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations are pending.
Author and investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz, Greenpeace International attorney Michelle Jonker-Argueta, and Carroll Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Laws discuss the latest twists and turns in the global effort to hold the oil companies accountable for their deception and delay. Moderated by Jason Mark, editor in chief of Sierra magazine.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Panelists
Antonia Juhasz
Antonia Juhasz, one of the nation and the world’s leading, award-winning investigative journalists and writers on energy and climate whose bylines include Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN.com, The Nation, The Guardian and many more, is the author of three books, including: Black Tide and The Tyranny of Oil. An adjunct lecturer at Tulane University, she is a 2020-2021 Bertha Fellow in Investigative Journalism and has held many prestigious journalism fellowships at leading universities in the past decade. Antonia has traveled all over the world in her investigations of oil extraction’s impacts and founded and runs the (Un)Covering Oil Investigative Reporting Program sponsored by the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Michelle Jonker-Argueta, J.D., acting Senior Legal Counsel for Strategic Litigation at Greenpeace International, advises campaigns on the development and implementation of strategic litigation to hold governments and corporations accountable for climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as the resulting human rights violations. An attorney registered with the New York Bar who holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, she is also a Dutch lawyer.
Carroll Muffett
Carroll Muffett, President of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), a nonprofit that uses the power of law to protect the environment, promote human rights, and ensure a just and sustainable society, is an expert on international environmental law and a leader in the emerging fields of climate litigation and climate-related financial and legal risks. He is lead researcher on a number of CIEL investigations, including on the oil industry’s nefarious role in: climate science, geo-engineering, the global plastics crisis, and carbon capture. He is also a member of the Commission on Environmental Law of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and on the board of the Climate Accountability Institute.
Jason Mark
Jason Mark is the editor-in-chief of Sierra (the magazine of the Sierra Club) and the author of Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man. His writings on the environment have also appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Nation, among many other publications.
It would not be breaking news to suggest that modern society needs to repair its relationship with the natural world. The rationales for this necessary shift are myriad, from ethical and moral obligations to our fellow planetary inhabitants to literally existential concerns for many species (including our own), including the very real possibility of over-cooking our only home in the not-too-distant future. The question is: How? How do we begin to heal and restore our relationship with the rest of the web of life?
There are many answers to this essential question and this week we share three different approaches – Respect, Knowledge, and Partnership.
Naturalist Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt explores the “infinity of living intelligences,” by way of time spent raising a starling in her home. Legendary explorer, scientist and “Arbornaut” Dr. Meg Lowman describes bringing an entire class of mobility-limited students high into the forest canopy over half a decade to support cutting edge research. And journalist Ben Goldfarb discusses the very real potential for ecological restoration by partnering with the American Beaver, once responsible for shaping the very face of our continent before being trapped nearly to extinction.
Starlings, Infinity, and the Kith of Kinship | Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt
The starling bird’s impressive ability to mimic the sounds of life as it unfolds around them speaks to the way that song illuminates their practice of sharing in the web of life. In this excerpt from the brand new book, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt reflects on the beyond-human kinship her relationship with starlings has illuminated, and the infinity of intelligences cradled by reciprocity in a world that both includes yet surpasses the limits of human knowledge.
The Arbornaut – A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us
Author, conservation biologist and explorer Meg Lowman is one of the world’s first arbornauts. Whereas astronauts explore outer space, arbornauts make discoveries in the tops of trees. In this excerpt from her brand new book, The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us, Meg skilfully weaves together conservation, water bears, and increasing access to the outdoors and science for marginalized communities.
Beaver Believer: How Massive Rodents Could Restore Landscapes and Ecosystems At Scale
In his brand new book, EAGER: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, journalist Ben Goldfarb dives into the past, present and potential future of the American Beaver. Goldfarb explores the historical extent of beavers in North America and the dramatic transformation of the entire landscape as a result of the truly barbaric fur trade that led to colonization of the interior of the continent and the near extinction of the species. In this interview Bioneers’ own Teo Grossman, Ben discusses how he came to write Eager and the important ecological role beavers play as incredible agents of ecological restoration.
Ben Goldfarb will be speaking at the 2021 Bioneers Conference. Register today and join Ben and many others in the Bioneers community!
Video: Biomimicry with Janine Benyus
The designs inherent to the world we live in can serve as blueprints to how we curate solutions to infrastructure and other challenges. Bridging the divide between biology and design can help advance how we approach innovation. Rather than setting ourselves apart from the genius that surrounds us, humanity can design a harmonious destiny with the same biological patterns that construct our world.
Bioneers is happy to support Pachamama Alliance’s Global Community Gathering on November 4th, a gathering of allies from around the world working toward a thriving, just, and sustainable future. Join to hear from speakers including Van Jones, Paul Hawken, Lynne Twist and more! And discover how you can be a part of the movement for a thriving, just, and sustainable future with Pachamama Alliance.
The Red Road is a concept shared among Indigenous communities and is used to describe a right path of living. Although often used to connote the journey of sobriety, The Red Road more broadly refers to a right way of living in harmony with the earth and the relatives we share it with. In this article from Te Maia Wiki, she describes her experience traversing cross country from the pacific northwest to Washington D.C. with a 25-foot totem pole carved by the Tears Carvers of the Lummi Nation. The Red Road to D.C. raised awareness of the industrial threat to sacred sites and nurtured prayers in ceremony for protection along the way.
Te Maia Wiki is a descendant of Yurok and Tolowa people, from Northern California, and Māori people, the Indigenous people of New Zealand. Te Maia is an Indigenous youth leader who is committed to using digital media to tell stories that promote social, economic, and political equity. Over the summer, she had the opportunity to document the journey of a Totem Pole sent from the Lummi Nation in Washington State to the Biden-Harris administration and the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.
Even as a 15 year old, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by family or community people coming together to work to make the community better. As a double-Indigenous girl (my mom is a Yurok from northern California and my dad is Maori from New Zealand), there were always reasons for our family and community to organize to promote the health, well-being and existence of our people and way of life.
This summer, between sophomore and junior years of high school, I was given the opportunity to step outside of my own family and community to apply the values and skills I’ve been raised with, to bring light to the frontlines of Indigenous environmental justice issues across the nation as a media fellow with Wingspan Media, sponsored by Save California Salmon.
Save California Salmon, a non-profit based in Northern California dedicated to restoring river flows and salmon habitats, offered an internship program to support youth organizers dedicated to environmental justice. I applied, and while this gave me the opportunity to interview my tribal leaders on water rights, Wingspan Media Productions also offered the opportunity to join the Red Road to DC journey with them as a media fellow. When I say, “them,” I mean, Nikki Caputo and Mo Hollis. Three years ago, when I was in eighth grade, I worked on a series of anti-vaping, and pro-sacred tobacco use Public Service Announcements (PSA). Since then, I’ve had the pleasure to work with Wingspan Media on different media projects and PSAs.
This led to a summer on the Red Road Journey to DC. House of Tears Carvers, from the Lummi Nation, carved a 250-foot long totem pole, and brought it into Indigenous communities leading organized demonstrations against environmental injustices on the way from Washington state, to the American Indian Smithsonian in Washington, DC. As people from across the country united to pray, the totem pole brought media attention to the ways in which Indigenous wisdom and sovereignty could restore the health of this planet. Our team of three was responsible for all things media: managing the livestreams for each event, curating photo galleries, and producing videos highlighting each sacred site. Our long days started with setting up the tech at venues early in the morning, and then taking turns managing the livestream, editing, and conducting interviews. As soon as each event ended, we packed up the technology into our mobile production unit, (i.e. the minivan), and set off on an, often, 12 hour road trip while one adult would drive, the other would edit, and a certain someone would sleep in the front seat. Sometimes our days ended late in a hotel room. Other times, we ended in a parking lot with minutes to spare before the next event started.
To say the experience was transformative for me is an understatement. I will forever be inspired by the bravery, wisdom and strategy of Indigenous leaders I met along the journey, including Winona LuDuke at White Earth Minnesota days after she was released from jail to rejoin the Line Three frontlines. I was honored to meet, and spend time with Faith Spotted Eagle, an instrumental Indigenous figure involved in Braveheart Society and Great-Grandmother Mary Lyons, a significant Ojibwe elder and spiritual advisor. I had the opportunity to photograph Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland as she received the Totem at the National Mall in Washington D.C. I met countless activists, tribal leaders, grandmothers, moms, youth leaders, and genuinely authentic human beings all dedicated to ensuring the voices of Indigenous people are heard and amplified in order to heal the planet for everyone. Regardless of what happens to me in my life, I will always be Indigenous- that comes first. Wingspan prioritized, and honored that.
Even though I value the technical production skills and aspects, like the “we’re in the middle of a flash flood and need to get hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment packed” moments, the most significant lesson I learned was the power of indigneous sovereignty. At each event I saw people from all walks of life, abilities, and roles come together for a common cause. I recorded, and documented grander moments – from speeches by elected officials and tribal leaders – but my favorites were the small, quiet moments. For example, when I first drove into Shell City Camp, the frontlines of Line 3, I remember the energy feeling like I passed through a force field, because of how significant the energy shift was compared to the fields in rural Minnesota surrounding it. At first, I thought the energy came from the grandness of the movement; the abundance of organizers and allies. But, what caught my eye was the way “Honor the Earth,” was hand-written on the compost bins with peace signs and hearts, or the, “Welcome Lummi Family,” signs. Behind a camera, I had the privilege to capture the, “minor miracles,” and I learned that without the small moments – the everyday people coming together – the big moments didn’t mean anything. All along the journey, there were connections made with the work to Save California Salmon and to restore the Klamath River. Seeking out to capture beautiful moments has given me the ability to see how organizing draws people together and how media can add critical texture and energy to advance big issues.
The Totem’s arrival in DC was important symbolism – a gift and a reminder that Indigenous people are present and we’re loud and we’re not taking the destruction of our world sitting down. But my own journey was powerful because I learned that underlying all this is the power of people to come together for a common cause to bring hope to change. The more we can amplify the voices of these everyday leaders on the frontlines of today’s movements, the more we can bring to light the hope to create real solutions to heal our planet and I was honored to play a small role in promoting that good this summer. That is the lesson I’m taking forward with me.
Save California Salmon’s Youth Water Protector’s work is part of their Advocacy and Water Protection in Native California curriculum projects. The curriculum and more information is at https://www.californiasalmon.org/. You can watch the most recent youth water protectors webinar and learn about how you can help at https://www.youtube.com/c/SaveCaliforniaSalmon.
Wingspan Media is more than a production company. We’re media advocates – full spectrum media makers specializing in campaigns, capacity-building, consultation, engineering, graphic design, photography, production & training – 360 DEGREE MEDIA. Learn more at https://www.wingspanmedia.net/.
Solidarity Economics is an economic frame that recognizes that people are not just individuals, but also members of broader social groups and communities, that people are motivated not just by self-interest, but also by caring for others and a desire for belonging, and that we can and should build our economy not on an embrace of individuality and competition, but rather on a sense of commons and our shared destiny.
In this session, Natalie Hernandez, Associate Director of Climate Planning and Resilience at Climate Resolve, and Nailah Pope Harden, Executive Director of ClimatePlan, join Manuel Pastor, one of the nation’s most influential thinkers on poverty and social movements, and Chris Benner, a leading innovator in urban political ecology, discuss how these concepts might apply in the realm of solidarity with people and the planet, and how we can make this real in terms of policy and power in this moment.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Panelists
Manuel Pastor
Manuel Pastor, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at USC and Director of its Equity Research Institute, has long been one of the most important scholars and activists working on the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities and the social movements seeking to change those realities. He has held many prominent academic posts, won countless prestigious awards and fellowships for his activism and scholarship, and is the author and co-author of many important, highly influential tomes, including most recently, State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Means for America’s Future (2018) and the just-about-to-be-released Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter.
Natalie Hernandez
Natalie Hernandez is a Los Angeles region-based specialist in environmental policy and community planning who is deeply knowledgeable about climate change-related government processes, funding, stakeholder engagement and resilience. She is Associate Director of Climate Planning & Resilience at Climate Resolve, where she has: managed climate preparedness projects, co-authored California’s Adaptation Planning Guide, led community outreach for an urban cooling project in Canoga Park, and provided technical expertise on a number of climate grant programs. Her past positions include stints at the California Natural Resources Agency, California Air Resources Board, Institute for Local Government, and USC’s Equity Research Institute (formerly USC PERE).
Chris Benner
Chris Benner, Ph.D., the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, also directs the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change and the Institute for Social Transformation there. His research examines the relationships between technological change, regional development, and the structure of economic opportunity, focusing on regional labor markets and the transformation of work and employment. He has authored or co-authored seven books (including the forthcoming Solidarity Economics) and more that 75 journal articles, chapters and research reports.
Nailah Pope Harden, who has years of community organizing experience spanning regional, state and national environmental justice campaigns, is the South Sacramento-based Executive Director of ClimatePlan, where she: manages state policy campaigns; mobilizes partner organizations; provides analysis on policy, state investments, and legislation; and builds strong relationships with state agencies and key decision-makers, all in order to further Climate Plan’s vision of a healthier, more equitable California.
Many boys and men of color have to grapple with very potent intergenerational traumas deeply linked to the racism, oppression and systemic inequities their communities have had to endure for so long. The Covid Pandemic has unfortunately exacerbated many of these underlying dynamics, resulting in increased levels of domestic and community violence in many neighborhoods. This session, facilitated by internationally-recognized author, community leader and healing practitioner Jerry Tello, offers an intergenerational conversation among young men, elders, and middle-aged men of color. They explore the deep traumas they and their communities suffer from, and how to develop strategies of responsibility and accountability that face the truth, but also create conditions for deep healing and prevent these wounds from undermining our families, communities and selves.
With: Jason Seals, professor of African American Studies at Merritt College, with a long career in youth development; David Bouttavong, a Fresno, CA-based first generation queer Lao American activist with extensive experience working on issues affecting young men and boys of color.
This discussion took place at the 2021 Bioneers Conference.
Panelists
Jerry Tello
Jerry Tello, of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan ancestry, raised in South Central Los Angeles, has worked for 40+ years as a leading, award-winning expert in transformational healing for men and boys of color; racial justice; peaceful community mobilization; and providing domestic violence awareness, healing and support services to war veterans and their spouses. He co-founded the Healing Generations Institute and the National Compadres Network, where he is currently Director of Training and Capacity Building. He has authored numerous articles, videos, curricula, and a series of children’s books, and is a member of the Sacred Circles performance group.
Jason Seals
Jason Seals, a professor of African American Studies and Chair of Ethnic Studies at Merritt College in Oakland, California, also has a long career in youth development, serving in multiple roles across the nonprofit, mental health and juvenile justice sectors, and he continues to facilitate community workshops and professional development trainings on a wide range of topics, including radical healing, anti-racism, parenting/fatherhood, and systems change. Professor Seals is also often called upon to provide his expertise as a consultant, curriculum designer and speaker, and he provides a platform for a wide range of African-American authors, leaders, activists and artists in his podcast, A Moment of Truth.
David Bouttavong
David Bouttavong, a Fresno, CA-based first generation queer Lao American, is on the outreach team of Poverello House, working with individuals experiencing homelessness in his town, and also serves on the board of the Laotian American Community of Fresno. He has had extensive experience as a health educator working with young men experiencing trauma and incarcerated youth with Planned Parenthood Mar Monte and doing advocacy on issues affecting young men and boys of color, including with Fresno Barrios Unidos and the Fresno Unified School District.
Bryant Terry is a James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author renowned for his activism to create a healthy, just, and sustainable food system. Since 2015 he has been the Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco where he creates public programming at the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, culture, and the African Diaspora. He is the author of four books, including Vegetable Kingdom and Afro-Vegan, and his new collection of recipes, art, and stories entitled Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora [A Cookbook] is soon to be published by 4 Color Books/Ten Speed Press.
Bioneers’ Arty Mangan interviewed him in anticipation of the publication of his new book. Check out a recipe from the book here.
ARTY MANGAN: You have a rich family heritage around food culture. How did that influence you in becoming an activist chef?
BRYANT TERRY: I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and I come from a family that has agrarian roots in the rural South. My family had farms in Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas. It was something I took for granted growing up, but I gained a greater appreciation of it when I was living in the hyper-urban environment of New York City. By visiting different family members, particularly my paternal grandfather who had an urban farm in his backyard, I learned a lot about the seeds-to-table cycle. A lot of the things that were a part of how my cousins and I grew up laid the foundation for I’ve been working on the past couple of decades.
I think, talk, and write a lot about how my grandfather used every bit of available space in his backyard to produce food for the family. He had muscadine grapes, walnut and pecan trees, half-a-dozen different kinds of dark, leafy greens, even at one point, pigs and chickens, but I don’t want to romanticize it because, to be honest, I actually hated working on his farm. I think all of the grandkids did; we didn’t want to be weeding, harvesting, shucking corn and shelling peas and all that, but now I’m so glad my grandfather made us do it because there are so many life lessons we learned in his backyard garden.
Growing and raising food was just the way that they lived. It wasn’t anything special. I think a lot of it came out of survival. My grandparents were working class Black folks who moved from the rural to the urban South and brought to the city an agrarian knowledge and a connection to the land. They had an understanding of the importance of being self-determined and being able to feed yourself. My grandfather would often say to me: “If you rely on other people to feed you, when they decide they don’t want to anymore, you’ll starve.”
It’s been frustrating for me the past two decades to see magazine and newspaper articles about practices (growing food at home, canning, preservation, urban homesteading, etc.) that were second nature to my family and ancestors, but that almost always feature young, well-educated, pretty white women with cute pictures of them in their boots out on farms and all that, so I feel it’s important for me to uplift the legacy of my elders. It may not be sexy to cover them doing it, but this was the work that people did to take care of their families, to ensure survival, to feed people in their communities. I think it’s important that we all tap into the older generation who hold that knowledge and make sure we record their stories and hold the memories and the history of the things that they did to take care of their families.
One of the most important lessons I learned early on that I carry with me to this day is the importance of supporting your community and of mutual aid. My grandfather had so much surplus that he shared and gave a lot away to neighbors. They would barter and trade. They had a thriving local food system in their working-class South Memphis community. Everybody was producing food in some way, whether it was Miss Johnson growing tomatoes on the front porch or Mr. Hill who had fresh herbs in his kitchen window sill, or Miss Bonner who had the mini-orchard in her backyard with the peaches, pears, and nectarine trees. People shared food and bartered. My grandfather would also give a lot to the church where he was very active. This was all taken for granted. You gave back to your community. It helped shape me, as these examples led me to understand that we need to be proactive in working towards structural change to ensure everyone has access to healthy, fresh, affordable and culturally appropriate food. We need to take care of our people. We need to ensure people have their basic needs met. That was second nature in my family’s community.
ARTY: There’s no question that African American contributions to local food security and food sovereignty have been overlooked. I worked in Mississippi and Alabama with Black farmers through Bioneers, and some of what you were just talking about brought me back there. I had the privilege also to stop by Tuskegee University and see the George Washington Carver Museum. Have you been there?
BRYANT: Yeah. My parents lived in Huntsville, Alabama.
ARTY: It blew my mind how many of the things that we’re promoting today as progressive, Carver was developing and advancing, such as bringing cutting-edge farming education to the farmers where they lived, increasing farmers’ incomes by value-added products made on the farm, using all parts of the crop, and art and creativity coming from agrarian culture. Carver was also an amazing artist.
Bryant Terry photo by Adrian Octavius Walker
BRYANT: Carver’s contributions are not celebrated enough. Carver’s inventions are just innumerable, from paints to lotions and soaps, and obviously peanut butter! And there are so many other unacknowledged and erased contributions and inventions of people from African descent. Things like the hairbrush, stoplights, heating furnaces, infrastructure for telephones. I encourage people to do the research. Many Americans are undereducated or miseducated (in part due to the chokehold that Texas has on the textbooks that are being used throughout the country). The contributions of Black folks and other people of color have long been hidden or erased from the teaching of history.
ARTY: As the Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora you are in a position to elevate the African contributions and influences on cultures and cuisines around the world.
BRYANT: I’m discovering that a lot of people don’t know what the African diaspora is. My forthcoming book, Black Food is a largely diasporic book, if you will. The African Diaspora is a collection throughout the globe of communities of people who descend from people native to the African continent. A lot of emphasis is in the Americas because of the transatlantic slave trade which brought so many Africans from West and Central Africa to different parts of the “new world.” Most people here don’t know that the largest Black population outside of the African continent is actually in Brazil, and only after that comes the population of Black folks in the United States.
There are culinary techniques such as deep frying, grilling, and cooking things in the ground that were pioneered on the African continent and then exported to different parts of the world. Of course, many different cultures have contributed to the wider culinary landscape, but for me it’s important to uplift the food ways, the classic dishes and the flavor profiles of the African diaspora. In the mainstream, European food is often placed at the center, at the top of the culinary hierarchy, and that dominant culture often ignores “ethnic cuisines.”
From the beginning, my work has been about educating people about these contributions and helping to move Black food (my shorthand for food of the African diaspora) closer to the center and away from the margins. This has been my mission. A lot of it has emphasized African American cuisine, but you can’t talk about African American cuisine without looking at the larger diaspora. In fact, I would argue that African American cuisine is the original modern global fusion cuisine when you consider the food that traveled from West and Central Africa to the Caribbean and to the American South. You have the influence from the African continent, you have foods that were native to the Americas, and you have the influence of European cuisine, and that cross-pollination created something new and vibrant and flavorful. I want people to not only appreciate the food because they like eating delicious food that has roots in Africa, but I also want them to respect and appreciate the people who created these traditions. If you love whatever the culture produces—whether it’s music or art or food— then appreciate and support the people in that culture as well.
ARTY: A large focus of your work has centered around food justice, which is sometimes framed as combatting apartheid in the food system. What does that mean to you?
BRYANT: I’m glad you asked about “food apartheid.” I think a lot of people have been slow to pick up on it. Food activists have largely abandoned the term “food desert” to describe areas devoid of good quality, healthy, fresh affordable and culturally appropriate food. A lot of food justice activists have largely supplanted that term and have been using “food apartheid” instead to describe the material conditions in which many people are living in historically marginalized communities. Karen Washington, a movement elder, reminds us to focus on the root problems in these historically disenfranchised communities. She argues that food apartheid is a more appropriate term because it looks at the whole food system along with race, geography and economics. Deserts are natural ecosystems, so the concept of food desert gives the impression that it is a natural phenomenon. Many people mistakenly view deserts as devoid of life; actually, many deserts are teeming with life, so that term reinforces the idea that many low-income, historically marginalized communities are devoid of anything but crime and poverty and are associated with negative stereotypes.
These communities are actually very vibrant. They’re not totally devoid of good food. People even in the most economically stressed circumstances who are immigrants from different countries or who may have migrated from the South to the West Coast or the urban North, have carried their food traditions. They’re bringing the seeds and crops and growing foods in their backyards or fire escapes, so I think it does a disservice to imagine these communities as deserts in the popular imagination; it prevents a lot of people from understanding the systemic barriers that people in these communities face, whether economic, geographic, or physical, to accessing healthy, fresh and affordable food. Food apartheid is such an important way of framing it because it allows us to imagine solutions for addressing the apartheid. So, respect to Karen Washington for pushing us in that direction.
ARTY: What systemic changes need to happen for people to be black, green and healthy?
BRYANT: Many of the issues we’re dealing with are the result of policies that actually create barriers to the health and wealth of Black communities. It’s important for us to understand the role that we also play as citizens and to ensure that we’re electing public officials who are working in the best interest of regular people and not the multinational food corporations and big ag. I think if there’s anything 2020 taught BIPOC folks, it’s that America isn’t going to save us; late-stage capitalism isn’t going to save us. We have to create parallel systems owned and driven by the people most impacted by food insecurity and food injustice. We can’t wait on these larger institutions to save us. A lot of people have been struggling and getting sick and dying, as they deal with so many impacts of these broken systems. We need to create our own agricultural systems in rural areas and cities. We need to invest in co-ops, so that people can actually own the businesses they’re shopping from and supporting. People at the margins really need to buckle down and work toward creating our own systems that are going to support us and ensure that we’re surviving and thriving.
ARTY: Back when we were working together in the Bioneers Just Us for Food Justice Program for youth, you organized grub dinners based around hip hop. Now you’re organizing “diaspora dinners.” As your work progresses, you seem to be reaching even further back into Black culture and heritage for inspiration.
BRYANT: As part of my work at the Museum of the African Diaspora, I did produce diaspora dinners, but they have been on hold for over a year because of COVID. I started them 1) as a way to further double down on the bounty and brilliance of different culinary traditions, classic dishes, and flavor profiles throughout the African diaspora; and 2) it’s been important for me to create spaces in which we can celebrate, love each other, be kind to each other, take care of each other, feed each other and have joy. When we talk about food justice, equity, racism, and many other issues, these are heavy realities. We need to ensure we’re addressing these issues, but I don’t want to be in a cycle where we’re constantly feeling like victims and focusing on what’s wrong. I think it’s important for us to also uplift and celebrate best practices. It’s just really important for us to chill and have joy, and eat good food and have good music.
Much of that goes back to my childhood because I come from a musical family. Whenever we had gatherings around food, there was always music present, my Uncle Don playing the piano, his brothers harmonizing, my mom and her sisters jumping in and singing. These things were so central to the way that we lived when I was growing up, so part of my mission is to reintegrate many of the things our industrialized food system has excluded. There’s been a chasm in which food has been isolated on one side as a commodity, while many of the things that have been so central to food—community building, music, art—from cultures throughout the world have been taken out of the picture, but they are in fact inseparable from food and the way that we feed ourselves. My work includes bridging that chasm and showing how we can reintegrate them in a modern context.
We’ve been robbed by the industrialized food system of our interactions with things that nourish us in complex ways and that have been a part of the way societies throughout the globe have traditionally interacted with food. That’s why, in my books, I have suggested soundtracks of music, art, films and other books. All these things are equally important.
ARTY: Your new book, Black Food, is not only a platform for your own voice, but it brings in the voices of other black leaders, artists, and chefs. Why was it important for you to write this book?
BRYANT: It really came out of this movement moment in 2020 when we were seeing uprisings throughout the country because of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and others. The media was regularly revealing racism and white supremacy, even in the food media. I’ve wanted to write this book since 2015 when I started my residency at MOAD. The programming that we are doing there is so cutting-edge and inspiring to people all over the globe. We get emails every week from around the world asking us about the program. People and institutions, even organizations that don’t have a focus on food, want to include more programming around food into their work.
So, my agent and I pitched a book, and my publisher immediately understood the vision, and we made it happen. But I wanted to go beyond that, so I now have my own publishing imprint under Penguin Random House called 4 Color Books. This is the vision I’ve had. I felt that it was a perfect time to actually create some sustainable institutions that aren’t just about publishing my work but about lifting and nurturing and supporting the work of other budding authors who have a lot of important things to say. Our first project is a cookbook by 17-year-old Oakland-based Afro-Latina chef, Rahanna Bisseret Martinez who was a finalist on Top Chef Junior when she was 12. She’s worked at top at restaurants such as Chez Panisse, Ikoyi in London and the James Beard House in New York City. She’s brilliant. We’re very excited about her book. We’ve also acquired two additional books: a photography book by a Black photographer in New York City, and a “pizza manifesto” by Scarr Pimentel who is an Afro-Dominican pizzaiolo in New York, who has a very popular pizza shop, Scarr’s Pizza.
I’m very excited about the publishing work we’re doing, but I made it clear from the beginning that I don’t want to just publish books. I want to put some muscle behind ensuring that we see further diversification in food media. We’re in the midst of planning a black food summit that will be held at the Museum of African Diaspora in April of ’22. We are amassing databases of BIPOC food photographers, food stylists and people who are creatively working in food media. It’s oftentimes hard for BIPOC folks to break into these fields because you get into them by shadowing and by networks and nepotism. It’s just how the world works. I want to do all I can to help create pipelines because the typical answer you get is: “Well, we looked. We tried to find a Black photographer or food stylist, but we just didn’t find anyone who would work for this project.” I had to confront that working on Black Food. It was excruciating just finding a handful of Black food photographers who would work for this particular project. That just further underscored the importance of creating these resources. That can no longer be the excuse. We can create databases so that people in the industry can tap into this brilliant talent pool that I think is often not being sufficiently supported.
My goal is to train and prepare a new generation to pick up this ball and run with it much further than I can. Initially, I was thinking in terms of grassroots activism. That’s where most of my energy was going, but I’m thinking about that now as an author and publisher. I see myself as a building block, and I want people to one day talk about me being someone upon whose shoulders they’re standing. I want to be in the crowd, in the audience cheering them on, and thanking them for the brilliant work that they’ve done that can go further than what I ever imagined.
“In late summer our work might be thinning the long vines off the sweet potatoes because my father would say we’d only have little stringy potatoes if we didn’t.” —From Mama Dip’s Kitchen by Mildred Council
Mildred Edna Cotton Council founded Mama Dip’s Restaurant in 1977. She was the daughter of a sharecropper, the granddaughter of a slave, and the founder of a culinary empire. She was also my grandmother. One of her most popular dishes was her sweet potato biscuits. I’ve adapted her recipe to make it vegan. Coconut milk adds a delicate richness, with cinnamon and brown sugar providing an extra hint of spice that elevates these biscuits to another level.
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1⁄2 teaspoon kosher salt
1⁄4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1⁄2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup mashed sweet potato, chilled (from about 1 large sweet potato)
1⁄4 cup chilled coconut milk, plus more as needed
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, brown sugar, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon.
In a small bowl, whisk together the chilled sweet potato and coconut milk. Add this mixture to the large bowl and mix just until the dough comes together. Turn out the dough onto a floured surface and press together with the heel of your hands. If the dough is not holding together, add in additional coconut milk one tablespoon at a time—I usually need to add about 2 tablespoons.
Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface. With floured hands, bring the dough together, then pat into a rectangle that is about 1 inch thick.
Cut the dough into rounds, using a 2-inch biscuit cutter. Place the biscuit rounds about 1 inch apart on the prepared baking sheet. Brush the tops of the biscuits with coconut milk.
Bake the biscuits for 12 to 15 minutes, until they are puffed and just barely golden.
