FoodLove: The Space Between Terroir and the Tao of Food

Meet Sue from The Cocoa Forge, an alchemist of cocoa beans from around the globe. Revel in her pursuit to make the highest quality chocolate that expresses terroir as beautifully as fine wines. Learn how cocoa beans will soon sail into port!

Tables turn as accredited American Culinary Federation Executive Chef Kevin, an Escoffier Culinary Institute instructor, interviews Rufina about her insights into terroir, culinary leadership, and FoodLove.

Meet Jessica Plumb, producer and director of Return of the River, writer and storyteller of scientific secrets of salmon forests, and portraitist of the Elwha River and the centrality of salmon as food and in the culture of the Lower Elwha tribe.

Velda Thomas is a multi-faceted, creative, tour de force--a writer, a sound and somatic healer, poet, and steward of the land in Port Townsend, Washington. Be inspired by her words, her relationship to land, and her reimagined relationship with bees.

Meet Trevor and Lauren Koch as they navigate essential worker transitions from sous chef to grocery deli manager, depression, anxiety, & alcoholism to self-awareness, and identities as White people who believe Black Lives Matter.

Acting As Though

By Rufina C. Garay

Acting as though I’m not disappointed in people or disgusted with a few makes me tired.

Acting as though disconnection could be made whole by Zooms and infrequent phone calls that have less and less meaning and more and more performance, makes the struggle of extroverting my daily stumbling block,

Because I need what little there is to get from the halo of it all.

Acting as though I don’t have rage over the egos of

gatekeepers held up with ivory hands

to win prizes for excellence 

makes me exhausted,

even terrified 

the way certain seers imagined— 

knew what atomic bombs going off 

would do when they struck inhabited land, 

rupturing, then melting skin that wasn’t theirs—

didn’t look like them, 

to protect something very important.

Acting as though it doesn’t bother me that people pat themselves on the back

for attending this training, 

doing this good and recognized deed, 

reading this or that book, 

when they forget that relationships with real people

actually matter, 

makes me realize that I have grown older. 

I would hold each person, including myself more accountable, with or without hashtags. 

I ask 

how I can contribute in, 

how can I collaborate from an authentic place?

I won’t give up until the real women of excellence show up or are given access to the stage. 

I have to hold on to the identity I know, resting below the surface

of the blood boiling. 

Wind invading wood phase produces imbalance, anger in the liver, 

but not just anger. 

Rage. Rage over a number of years. 

Rage over a White woman talking to me through her misperceptions of my point of view while I wait patiently. 

She is ready for everyone else to be wrong.

Rage over the righteousness she wears like a blazoned red cape. I gently explain that she has assumed something incorrectly. 

She assumes everyone is always talking about oppression.

My first generation cousin who is of no blood relationship to me would tell this activist that she has made an “Ass-(out of)-u-(and) me.”

As if, my focus on hierarchies of access to foster empowerment was her idea. 

She is blind to the entanglement of her ego in the work. 

She isn’t ready to pass the mic to our dark sister,

or to pay her to lead. 

She is comfortable as the voice, the leading “do-gooder.” But her challenge is simply to be better.

She is the younger version of the gatekeeper. These women of excellence know a lot. If you are from my parents’ country of origin, you will know what I mean by this.

As if, she had my lived experience. 

Only the wind of tsunamis can imagine the destruction I could produce with my tongue.

I hold it. 

I promise to breathe in his honor instead.

I see no stranger*, but the more you laud yourselves, the less I can feel the spirit of this great work, and the more I see the return of self-absorption.

That momentary pause for reflection in that original pivot slips away. The terror of 

“I can’t breathe” 

is yesterday’s news to you.

Couldn’t you hold on to it for one moment more

before saying goodbye? 

Kiss that lover who melted every ice wall you put up

who soaked in your vulnerabilities as if they were shared, lived-in skin whose bruises and sores were not too much to handle, and who tended to those wounds with every gentle caress?

No. You are back to surviving in the literal wake of others not like you.

My elders dying on the streets from hate crimes are simply foreign to you, distanced by how you take refuge in focusing first on one thing. You abdicate your responsibilities to see and share from your seat of authority, from your place of privilege.

Yesterday, those hate crimes were your post-election, ineffective hashtags.

Then, you let him, the White terrorist whose face you’ve already seen multiple times, slaughter my sisters. He is your progeny. 

It matters that I, as an Asian (as you call me), or rather,

as a Chinese-Filipino-Spanish American (as I know me), want to focus first on

the fundamental truth that 

Black Lives Matter. 

It matters that we model for others what it means to show up

and take a stand for each other, 

how we do that with the different colors and 

shades of skin we inhabit.

It matters too that my dark and sacred sister will know how to speak of my precious elders,

even if you cannot. 

In grace, her blood boils too, and she will give space to it.

She knows the sorrow of my silent sisters, their sons, daughters, and children.

But you women of excellence, must you show up brightest at the table with the greenest adornments, gleaming gold now in the shroud of my sisters? 

Must you be the arbiter of whose mind matters, whose hearts we care about, and whose spirits we crush? Why do you show up with so little appreciation for others?

Must all the people of color line up in a neat and orderly queue 

so that you can handle it, 

so you can process how to focus?

The earth in all her complexity does not tell the grass to stop growing in order for the apple, pear, plum, and quince trees to bear fruit. 

There is a time and season for it all. 

There is a time and season for us all to bear fruit.

Follow mother nature to know endless bounty, 

remembrance and respect for every living being 

and a resting place for that which is dead.

Having no place to put this dis-ease of discontent with humanity

where once I had such unbridled and deep love,

I can only offer it to the magnificence of water. 

Pull it away from me in low tide, 

wash me in imagined forgiveness 

until rage runs shallow

leaving only jutting rocks and pebbles

until the emptiness becomes as real as the sun’s violet rays

reflecting its intensity at dusk at that perfect angle 

where the blurred brightness below opens like a peaceful portal to the hidden beauty and danger of what could swallow us up.

*“see no stranger” is a concept from the Sikh Muslim tradition shared by activist and civil rights lawyer, Valarie Kaur, who advocates for revolutionary love.

© 2021 Rufina C. Garay, J.D. All Rights Reserved.

Meet Dr. Darshan Elena Campos, a former Stanford professor and current decolonizing activist. Through indigenous ways, she heals herself from domestic violence and marginalized communities through land, seeds, trees, and business in Borikén.

Episode 4: Mackenzie Grinnell, Keeper and Teacher of Traditional Foods, and Two Hooligans Cider businessman

Listen to Jamestown S’Klallam tribe’s Mackenzie Grinnell, a Two Hooligans Cider businessman. He teaches traditional foods and ancestral love of the land to area high schoolers despite the tragedy of U.S. history with his tribe. At the heart of it, Mackenzie says, “My ancestors have always been part of this landscape with everything from the mountaintops into the waterways with the salmon and the seal that when we were removed, we weren’t the only ones getting sick eating this lard and eating this white flour, and getting diabetes. We didn’t have diabetes until the 1940’s. Now Native Americans have the highest diabetes rate.” 

In the 1940’s on the Olympic Peninsula, indigenous peoples were severed from their food sources and forced to remain on reservation land unable to hunt and gather in ways to sustain themselves with proper nutrition.

Out of love for the land, his tribe, and people, Mackenzie offers kindness and grace to help others forge their own relationships with the land to gather sustainable nourishment. His work is the embodiment of FoodLove: The Space Between Terroir and the Tao of Food. 

Learn more about Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal history.

Note: I’ve written to Gather Victoria for her Lemon Balm Stinging Nettle Cake recipe. If I hear back, I will share it. In the meantime, please go to her page and support her Patreon Account. She is a wealth of knowledge too.

Rufina talks with Adrian Chitty, a former IT guru turned artist-photographer. His artist-in-residency captured the making of wine at Rex Hill in Newberg, Oregon. Adrian discusses his unique portrait of wine-making processes.

In this episode of FoodLove, meet Crystie Kisler, femme phenom of the innovative cider beverage business, Finnriver Farm and Cidery. She is the visionary behind many important organizations and movements in food security and land equity.