FoodLove: The Space Between Terroir and the Tao of Food

Elizabeth Storm

Liz Storm is a newly minted graduate of our local high school, a multi-creative social justice poet, wood carver, educator in-training, firefighting apprentice, world-traveler, notable scholarship recipient, youth leader, and a member of the Haida tribe. She has a lot of insights and wisdom to share about local BIPOC youth experience and leadership. We are lucky to have her in our community and lucky that she wants to return back here after she completes her full education.

Listen to Liz talk about her experience as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) youth at our local high school and what might be some small shifts that could make the future better still. She is very clear on the importance of student voice, and in a community that was most recently imagined largely for retirees, her admiration and respect for peers, elders, and traditions of her people, can remind us of the kind world we might want that will need to be led by our youth.

In this episode, Liz also provides a testimonial of joy for a program created straight from the heart of FoodLove and offered only with the deep help and collaboration of Amanda at the Farmers Market (which served as the fiscal sponsor for the program), advisors to the BIPOC student union (Melissa and Azurite), Oceana Sawyer, Michelle Hagewood (for her amazing world-building notebooks that we gave to youth to inspire creativity and use of their authentic voices), Mrs. Cruz at the high school’s culinary kitchen classroom, Darrell Thomas, Wellness Director at the Port Townsend High School, Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, and Chef Wyatt, or my new Oppa. The program, called Food Feast: Tracing Cultural Roots and Identity through cuisine and spoken word, was funded by a grant from Jefferson County’s Public Health Department. (It does take a whole village to raise our youth, particularly in the lingering effects of the pandemic.) Thank you to all of you who helped make this happen!

I designed the program to teach BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth and their friends who don’t identify as such to cook and to amplify their voices rooted in their identity. We focused on farm fresh ingredients to eat in season in keeping with the Tao of Food. The gift to us as facilitators of the program was all the joy and full-hearted connection with amazing young people— the next generation of leaders coming up in life with all the compassion, grace, energy, and grit to take on the world.

Below is Liz’s poem contained in the podcast:

A-Z ON OUR ECONOMY

by Elizabeth Storm

©2022 Elizabeth Storm. All rights reserved.

WHERE CAN YOU HEAR US NEXT?

Liz and I collaborate on social justice spoken word and poetry events in an ever-evolving collective of poets nicknamed “Shattering Glass,” and we’ll be performing together again at Soundcheck, a pre-Thing thing in PT. Come hear our provocative poetry interlude on social and environmental justice at Key City Theater on August 18, 2023 (6:30 to 8 p.m.). It’s called “Conjuring Climate Shift: The Alchemy of Elemental Forces—Rage, Grief, and Rituals of Wonder.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO SUPPORT BIPOC AND LGBTQ+ YOUTH?

As you listen, if you are moved to fund graduation stoles for BIPOC youth for next year, please contact Port Townsend High School’s Director of Well-Being, Darrell Thomas.

If you are interested in supporting more Food Feast programs or the production of this podcast through sponsoring an episode, please contact Rufina at [email protected].

WHAT ELSE CAN I LEARN?

Stay tuned for postings of simple cooking videos and recipes for beginners as part of the final pieces of the Food Feast program (which is beyond budget at this point) but nevertheless a good thing for those youth who couldn’t make it to the live cooking demonstrations. I’ll feature some food items that can make for some easy and nutritious meals.

Oil Pastel and photgraphy above are original to Rufina. Copyright 2022 Rufina C. Garay. All Rights Reserved.

The Shape of Land

Luminous yellow mounds,

Swelling with its own harvest, 

Heaving forward

Past Great Plains and prairie camus,

Blowing history out of the way.

This earth breathes and remembers,

If we just watch.

I want to touch them

Through the window with a full sweep of my hand, 

To know that they are as soft and welcoming as they look.

Different fields flow through them, wheat brushed neatly 

Into corn-row braids,

With mellowed green grass 

between crowded chaff.

I ache for further sight 

Down and through them, 

Looking for the promised amber 

In these waves of grain.

Under smoke-filled skies, there is

Also a buffalo-blood-red truth,

A dirty color palate, 

Shy a shade of genocide

Of beasts and people 

Who were of and for the land, 

Who were wise to, and worn by, the plot 

To starve nations 

By the isolation and separation 

of reservations.

Scattered in the flats and valleys, grass turned to hay

Is spiraled evidence of a farmer’s alchemy--

Rolled to the inside 

Like ancient symbols of the cosmos. 

I love the farmers and the hay rolls too,

in a troubled way.

Their work is noble 

even if these lands are stolen.

Did I just say that?

Even if these lands are stolen.

I don’t know if there will be a precious restoration

In the gracious reckoning I hope will come.

But what do I do with what I have witnessed?

At the warrior park,

Children without smiles played

Not far from the tin boxes

Where their parents

Stood in thresholds,

Withered brown and leaning in to speak

In 105 degree weather

With no air conditioning.

On the turning away,

We did not stop to rest there.

Life on the plains, 

Turns with a pitchfork and plow,

Gold and red,

Not with sounds of the herd’s stampede. 

Give us our daily bread

Is a prayer full of demand

Said by hearts of stone. **

Ancestors did not pray this way.

They prayed for the good hunt 

Until they knew the great herd had been shattered.

And nothing could be the same again.

The birthright of daily bread

Makes no room for a slow peace 

With the Sioux, Comanche, and Kiowa.*   

Pray for rain 

To douse the fires that halt my breath today.

Practice 

trust in the wind 

that the fire turns before and around you.

But I have somewhere to go.

I cannot take the withered with me.

Hope for a not-red sun at sunrise, 

Though we’ve ravaged the land,

Laid waste to the trees,

And fouled the waters.

We are not the same stewards as

The ghosts of those

Standing in doorways with no relief

A mile from the 

“Stop Meth!” sign.

We made the split-pea-smoke-fog sky, 

The relentless heat

Suffocating this stillborn summer.

To understand how our government and people conspired to eliminate indigenous peoples by destroying a primary food resource and a way of life, read

*https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/

**See and listen to Pink Floyd’s “On The Turning Away” for the resonance of observing Warrior Park, the neighborhood around it, the signs of societal struggle in the “stop meth!” sign

https://youtu.be/KjGXnSdVwCY

To understand more about what started the Dixie fire of 2021 that tainted the skies and crossed the wind currents over the Pacific Northwest in 2021, see PG&E agrees to pay $55 million in penalties and costs over two wildfires. - The New York Times (nytimes.com).

To read more about the Oregon fires that in combination with the California fires start to transformed by PG & E made for foreboding skies and oppressive air quality, see 2021 Oregon wildfires - Wikipedia.

To understand what the significance of seeing the “Stop Meth!” was to me, read this summary of research from the National Institute of Health on

METHAMPHETAMINE USE AMONG RURAL WHITE AND NATIVE AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS: AN APPLICATION OF THE STRESS PROCESS MODEL - PMC (nih.gov)

The “Stop Meth!” sign brought to mind for me the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe efforts on the Olympic Peninsula to help indigenous and non-indigenous peoples with opioid addictions, including black tar heroin addiction. The public outcry of NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard) arguments led to litigation against the tribe which has set its intention on healing people. That litigation only ended in 2021.

A Native American tribe plans to build an opioid treatment center, but neighbors have vowed to block it - Washington Post

On that road trip with some time to think about the connections between how we turn away from people who are deeply hurting and addicted, and how the S’Klallam tribe has led with courage and conviction to turn toward people in the face of opposition, I sat in the discomfort of how I have had the ability, the privileged opportunities to turn and look away from so many things.

This spoken word piece is a tribute to land, landscapes, and indigenous people whom I’ve had the good fortune to meet including Jo of the Chinook tribe, Naoime of the Chemakum and Jamestown S’Klallam, Mackenzie and Loni of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, and Sabrina of the Makaw tribe. All of them have been doing the work of social justice. The images within the piece are ones I experienced across the Great Plains as we road cross-country in an RV during the pandemic to see my mom for a monumental birthday.

In seeing the land, I was struck by the beauty of these landscapes as if they were moving paintings rushing past the window, yet I knew there had been a different landscape and life there before the buffalo herd and indigenous peoples were decimated. In being struck by the current beauty, I could begin to imagine the depth of historic and ongoing loss.

In my imaginings of the past, I felt very deeply what the great cost of our daily bread has been.

© 2021 Rufina C. Garay. All rights reserved.

Social Justice Spoken Word dedicated to Loida, painting and photography by Rufina

Celestial Bodies in Chaos                                                                               

Dropped from the sky

not Adam but atoms

bouncing in excitement

at the freedom of bursting out of dark matter

into known space

A playground of Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, reaching for each other,

bonding but needing Oxygen

To breathe

Needing the white of Phosphorus

To glow

Needing Sulfur to waft

The stench of humanity’s waste

In life

To keep us humble

In our evolution and

To remind us that it isn’t just dust to which we return,

But star dust.

Star dust that

We do not remember.

We cannot remember.

We must remember, even if slowly.

Something in my bones knows another something eternal,

Neurally networked first in sea,

then in sky through the lightning amidst the ether,

underfoot in forests among the fruitful mushrooms,

causing intentional decay,

Great Gaia’s macrophages eat at just the right moment,

while taking shape,

molded out of the earth from what was deep in the ground,

Adam, a mad man, a mud man arose

in his intelligence.

But what of his celestial soul?

Not far from the campfire glow, I stand.

Maybe I can feel my other brethren’s intelligence,

Micro-thumping and pulsing that attunes my heart to

synaptic sensory messages between trees

made of salmon eaten by bear, creating forests

Lightning speed qi traveling to and fro

In the story below the understory to

tell us we’ve forgotten that

we are celestial bodies,

that we are all connected kin.

How our faulted memory hurts

Now that this brother is broken, underfoot, under knee,

this one’s run gunned down,

these sisters shot, blood spilled,

bullet-riddled in the day and night,

without warrant,

Reminders of the dark matter son hog-tied,

“voluntarily” river drowned

in front of his Father,

because the boy simply loved

from the core of his celestial being.

He was radiant light too bright for marauding Adams.

I don’t know why the whole world isn’t crying.

Our neural networks in isolation fail us.

My boy asks, what was the first color of the universe?

Black, because it absorbs all of the energetic frequencies—

Becomes the container for all things not yet felt or dreamed.

Even the scientists keep waiting for nothing to happen,

To detect with secret desire the capture of dark matter

Deep in containers under the earth where no light shines.

But the darkest matter is already in hearts bound to this earth

And it is easy to see in daylight.

I stretch my neck up and arch to see the whole obsidian night dotted

By a multitude of celestial lights,

Encircled by the towering council of Douglas firs around me and this portal,

Pointing the way back.

I wonder at a sky so ordered in its brilliance

Taking light years of time to produce

This one moment of impermanent connection

To the constellations telling stories

And in this I see how small I am

No matter how grand the touch of this beauty, this limited awareness

Of the beginning and of eternity.

Mother Tree tends to my need for comfort in

my inadequacy to hold the light and the dark together

here in the woods,

not the lone Madrona standing guard

by lovers of and in Alexander’s Castle

On this earth

In this skin I’m in

To feel part of this cosmos

To know that he is me, and I am him,

The trees feel me and I them,

The wind becomes the shadow of my breath,

Shades of the same celestial bodies beyond light

Pure energy.

Did those whispers of yesteryears’ light stay in the sky when the time came to choose?

Did they sense the loss and pain to come from forgetting what we really are?

When we look up, are they laughing at our folly?

When we fall from grace

Out of the lightness of being

Into

Gravity,

Depravity,

and chaos of misremembering, dismembering,

owning, controlling, each other,

in forgetting that we are all made up

of dark and light matter,

Let go the darkest matters of your heart.

Stay fireside with me, celestial beings,

Know we belong together

Radiating light for each other

Out of the cosmos that birthed us

And into the future we birth.

 ©2021 Rufina C. Garay. All rights reserved.

Some notes that may be helpful for the references above:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/150128-big-bang-universe-supernova-astrophysics-health-space-ngbooktalk

This article references the idea of common composition among stars, star dust, and human bodies. There is talk from one of the authors of the book featured of the “impermanence of our bodies” which is something I have been thinking about with the losses I’ve experienced of aunts and an uncle to COVID-19.

https://www.space.com/35276-humans-made-of-stardust-galaxy-life-elements.html This article provides the element list in common that I wrote about in the piece.

“Great Gaia’s macrophages eat” alludes to the idea of the planet earth metaphorically being a single cell that would have macrophages to clean out the detritus, like the fungi.

The reference to “neurally networked first at sea” is a reference to the networking of individuals to a collective through observations of behavior in schools of fish (murmuration in birds which I am slightly obsessed with)

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2018/06/19/schooling-fish-may-offer-insights-into-networked-neurons/

I reference the ether which is an outdated concept (pre-Einstein) in relationship to light. The intention is to have people imagine a time when they could see something with their eyes like lightning and conjure up a story about the existence of ether that might change the speed of light. Einstein taught us that ether does not exist despite scientists trying to prove its existence at the time (that light travels at a constant speed means that no ether slows it down). We eventually gave up on this idea of ether, despite the romance of it. This is the anchor I put in sand that we could change indoctrinated false beliefs that contribute to racism, bias, and racially motivated violence.

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/light/a-new-view-of-light

The following link and the movie Fantastic Fungi explain how fungi communicate information in the network of trees and are the basis for the lines about “lightning speed qi traveling to and fro in the story below the understory”

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet

“made of salmon eaten by bear, creating forests” is the acknowledgement that the forests of the Olympic Peninsula exist as “salmon forests” from bears eating the salmon and dispersing the remains of what they have eaten. The trees are composed of the nutrients from salmon and entangled in the health of the salmon population. As the salmon population is suffering the overfishing by people and environmental harms, we must recognize the intricate complexity of the relationships among all living things. Listen to the FoodLove podcast with Jessica Plumb to understand more. https://www.recipeswithrufina.com/foodlove-podcast/foodlove-10-jessica-plumb 

“other brethren’s intelligence” refers to how species within the forest communicate, and “Micro-thumping and pulsing” is the imagined sound of the fungal network at work communicating information.

Chinese mythologies tell stories about people as celestial beings or immortals. These stories are part of my heritage as a Chinese-Filipino-Spanish American and part of the Taoist studies in which I’ve engaged.

Questions about the “folly of the fall” reference these mythologies generally. See http://idp.bl.uk/4DCGI/education/astronomy/myth.html

“Now that this brother is broken, underfoot, under knee, --is a reference to George Floyd

this one’s run gunned down,  --is a reference to Ahmaud Arbery

these sisters shot, blood spilled, --is a reference to Breonna Taylor and also to the Asian women in Atlanta who were slain by Robert Aaron Long (Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; Yong Ae Yue, 63; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/us/atlanta-shooting-victims.html

bullet-riddled in the day and night,

without warrant,”--is a reference to the hollowness of having a “no-knock” warrant in the Breonna Taylor case

“Reminders of the dark matter son hog-tied,” --is a reference to Willie James of Live Oak, Fl whose sweetheart feelings for a White girl led to his heart-breaking murder in 1943 https://www.the-journal.com/articles/our-view-caste-provides-lesson-in-black-history/

“voluntarily” river drowned — Read Caste to understand this story

in front of his Father,

because the boy simply loved

from the core of his celestial being.

A Columbia University professor has been conducting a search for dark matter with a lot of waiting and only small signs of possible discovery. Time will tell us if there is substance in dark matter or if it will go the way of ether. The “dark matter” is the hypothesized glue that holds the universe together. In calling Willie James the “dark matter son,” I am saying that his loving nature—beyond the boundaries of skin color—is the glue that we aren’t looking for but that might matter more at a spiritual level rather than a scientific level. His innocent love is reflected in Isabelle Wilkerson’s story of how he enjoyed the people in the department store where he worked and sent Christmas cards to all of them, including the White girl whom he admired and loved as a sweetheart. He could have been anyone’s son, just like George, Ahmaud, and so many others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/science/space/14dark.html

I don’t know why the whole world isn’t crying.—This is how I have been feeling about the historical atrocities and the stories in Caste.

Our neural networks in isolation fail us.—This is my observation and a wondering about empathy and why we might be missing some of the connectivity that exists in other species like the schools of fish or the networks of mushrooms to see the urgency and devastation of this moment.

“What was the first color of the universe?” is a question my son asked me.

Black, because it absorbs all of the energetic frequencies— I answered him and realized that art makes its entry for me here in the thought that all colors are absorbed in Black. There is alchemy in art and poetry. The importance of Blackness and respect for darkness exists in so many contexts. See Rumi’s poem Searching Darkness.

Mother Tree is a reference to the work of Suzanne Simards. https://fantasticfungi.com/the-mush-room/finding-the-mother-tree-book-finding-the-mother-tree-suzanne-simards-new-book/

The juxtaposition of Mother Tree in the same stanza as the lone Madrona reflects my wondering about the knowledge that there is always a Mother Tree in any forest. I wonder if the Madrona that stands alone at Fort Worden outside of Alexander’s Castle is the Mother Tree there, because it is not partnered with another tree. Typically, Madronas are partnered with hard woods that provide an overstory without over shading the Madrona. In Fantastic Fungi, there is a description of how Mother Trees will throw off their offspring further away in the underground network of mycorhizzial communication if there is a feeling of being unsafe. Though I love Fort Worden, I realize that so much was lost for the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe and Coast Salish peoples in the building of this national historical park. I also wonder how many madronas were cut down to make it. I wonder how unsafe the trees began to feel as the different barracks and buildings like Alexander’s Castle were built, and whether the notable Madrona there stands alone for a reason.

The references to “depravity” and “dismembering” are references to lynching practices described in Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste.

“in forgetting that we are all made up

of dark and light matter”—is a reference to the yin and yang of Taoism, the duality that resides in wholeness or oneness and within each person. It is also a recognition that we will need to confront ourselves to accept hard things, dismantle sacred things to some, and still seek and find joy.

“Whisper of yesteryears’ light” suggest the time lapsed in seeing the things with your eyes and the revelation of this time period over the past 400 plus years and a multitude of other ancient stories of domination, conquest, and slavery. The science of starlight and the relationship to time is discussed in this article.

https://theconversation.com/when-you-look-up-how-far-back-in-time-do-you-see-101176

The “campfire” is a reference to being outdoors in nature to begin to understand one’s place in it more fully. The circle of Douglas firs references the moment when I looked up at the sky in Oregon at a tribal reservation site when I felt held by the constellations and the universe despite the pain of experiencing personal outrage and grief over the burden sometimes placed on people to speaking about social justice issues in the face of allies who are not quite that. That moment of connection with nature was the night when this piece began speaking to me.

I’m grateful to Naomi Shihab Nye, Velda Thomas, Crystie Kisler, Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman, and T.S. Eliot for sharing their resilient world views and for the beauty and wonder within their poetry.

Their works, words, experiences in nature, and an encouraging friend like Loida, always help break the radio silence of struggle.

I’m grateful to be in dialogue at times with their words or them.

What do wild brethren and the secrets of what tracking them have to do with conservation? Sarah Spaeth has devoted 25 years to the preservation of lands and waters we love as part of her life’s legacy. She is also a baker with the mind of a chef.

Meet “fire starter” Chef Arran Stark. He put “hospitality” into Port Townsend’s Jefferson Healthcare “hospital” with flair. He wants a new kind of cooking school for our destination- hotel-tourist-and-agrarian economy where terroir is at its core.

This spoken word tribute to a handful of slain Asian Americans and elements of my Chinese-Filipino American heritage begins with appreciation for a scallion.

Nothing Wasted

poem by Rufina C. Garay

What gives southern comfort food its soul? Grace Love talks about Nadine’s Kitchen, the interplay of food and memories, and explains what comfort cooking means to her. Her kitchen has new digs and wheels for more mobile Love and is awaiting a new team!

What’s the fuss about game hunting, meat-eating vs. laboratory-made, plant-based food, the pandemic and the food industry, and the Tao of Food? Listen to Francis Tapon, WanderLearn podcast host and author of Hike Your Own Hike and make up your own mind.

How do food, culture, and travel intersect? Listen to Francis Tapon, podcast host of WanderLearn and Hike Your Own Hike. We volley questions at each other and catch up on the two decades in which he traveled to more than 120 countries.

Meet Will Harris of White Oak Pastures. He’s a cowboy and regenerative, intergenerational farmer. Long ago, he became an observer of the health of the animals on his farm. Then, he became a listener to the health of the soil. In the process of growing White Oak Pastures, Will has created a dynamic, agrarian ecosystem that has also brought to life a thriving community in rural Bluffton, Georgia. With steer, cows, sheep, turkeys, lamb, pigs (for Iberico ham), and abbatoirs (slaughterhouses on property), Will has achieved a gastronomical Noah’s Ark on land.

Built up by a larger-than-life personality that beams under that all-American cowboy hat with a new vision for farming, Will talks straightforwardly about how every farmer can commit to a method of farming that is beyond sustainable—one that adds value to the soil and can make the agrarian food supply systems more resilient at scale. As he speaks, he talks about natural cycles. Everything he says about his understanding of these cycles is the Tao of Food, the connectedness between all things, that oneness in that agrarian ecosystem that promotes health and longevity.

What he does at White Oak Pastures is phenomenal and could cure what ails us in American farming today. He has even started a nonprofit that helps to educate others about regenerative farming.

In fact, Will has a message for Bill Gates who is buying up farmland, people today don’t know how to farm the land to keep it healthy. So, if we care about the quality of our food in this country or the resiliency we need in our national food system, then please spread the word and share this podcast until it reaches him. There is an invitation in this podcast for Bill Gates to start a dialogue with Will about being a steward of the land. Cultivating the abundance of land might result in the most positive of unintended consequences, if a genuine relationship with it is built instead of a transactional, extractive one. The hope is that rich dialogue like that could become the core of better policy-making and legislation related to farmland and related to food in schools.

I met Will Harris after I graduated from New England Culinary Institute when I worked as a Whole Foods demo chef. I knew from the flavor of the beef he produced that he was doing something special with the quality and health of the steer. I’m amazed by how much White Oak Pastures has expanded the food grown on its 3,200 acres in the time since. He was only offering beef back then.

I would encourage you to taste the quality and the “qi” force and vitality of what White Oak Pastures offers. You can order direct from the farm and have the White Oak Pastures experience shipped to you within ground ship distances for frozen foods.

If you are in the South, you can find White Oak Pastures grassfed ground beef at all Publix supermarkets, Kroger stores in Atlanta.Whole Foods offers White Oak Pastures grassfed steaks, roasts, offal, ground beef, and chickens in the Mid-Atlantic and South Regions. Pastured eggs from White Oak Pastures can be found in Whole Foods Market locations in Atlanta and select restaurants.

Will is a model for farmers across the country and his conviction to a right relationship with animals and the soil makes sense. In the Pacific Northwest, we have a number of farmers doing the same. In my immediate region of the Pacific Northwest on the Olympic Peninsula, that work is being done on a different scale and with some varying methods. Locally, however, our cattle farmers can’t get the U.S.D.A. slaughterhouse they need to serve the number of them. That is another podcast in itself.

I hope that the more these regenerative farms and other farms that care about the soil and environment are networked, the more they will share what they have learned from observing and working the soil. That network could lead to an opportunity to shift how we grow food in America. Who doesn’t want to have better holistic health for our environment, the livestock and food supply, and our bodies that are nourished by all of it together? With less commoditization and a greater focus on natural cycles, we’ll have greater quality and flavor in what we grow and eat. From listening to Will’s story, you’ll learn that we’ll also get stronger communities as a byproduct. If you are a farmer and want to learn more, see the workshops offered by White Oak Pastures here.