Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
My name is Gina ray Less Serva, and I am
a geographer and environmental anthropologist and the author of the
book Feasting Wild in Search of the Last Untamed Food.
I think I got into the field of environmental anthropology
because I've always been very curious about how humans interact
(00:25):
with their environments, and food, particularly wild foods, are a
really interesting entry point into studying the intersections of nature
and culture. When I think back to the years I
spent researching this book, one of my strongest memories is
eating caterpillars in a roadless village in Borneo. They were
hot and burst in my mouth with this sort of watery,
(00:47):
eggy flavor, and they reminded me so much of the
caterpillars I had eaten in the forest of the Congo
Basin many months before. That flavor was like a magical
portal between space and time, connecting people and ecologies half
a world away. Really felt like a transcendent, almost spiritual moment,
(01:08):
and I still laugh that it was brought on by
eating bugs. Welcome back to point of origin. I'm your host,
Stephen Saderfield, and the voice you just heard is that
of Gina ray Leserva. Gina ray is, as she said,
the author of the recently published book Feasting Wild in
(01:31):
Search of the Last Untamed Food. What drew us to
Gena's work was her research as an environmental ecologist, geographer,
and anthropologist, which got us thinking, what do we mean
when we say anthropology, and specifically food anthropology. We're talking
(01:55):
to Gina A today because we're talking about a word
that we use often, a word embedded in wet stone
lexicon in ideology, but a word that we have never
really defined. It is a framework that we adopted liberally
and early as editors, but also as people who are
(02:16):
curious about food. It is a generous term that at
its core is about the relationship between human beings and thorold.
And while we've discussed food anthropology as a cornerstone of
our work, in doing so, we recognize and acknowledge, though
(02:38):
perhaps not enough, the problematic history of the genre, one
historically comprised of white male academics who brought their biases
with them into the field. After all, anthropological scholarship is
tied to a university, which is an institution, and racism
and discrimination is one of the central features of institutions.
(03:03):
So what do we mean when we say anthropology and
specifically food anthropology. On today's episode, we aim to answer
that question with all of its complexities and hopefully shed
light on a critical form of research in understanding because
the story of food is the story of human beings. January,
(03:27):
I would love to hear from you a framework of
the origins of anthropology and then for you yourself, how
you have navigated all of the baggage that comes with
that terrain in academia. Sure, I am an environment anthropologist
also geographer, through sort of overlaps in those disciplines. Both
of those disciplines really started out in service to empire
(03:51):
and to colonialism, and was very much based in going
out and scientifically studying people and cultures and so as
you can imagine, while that idea sounds, you know, very noble,
once it's within the context of empire and colonialism, if
it becomes degraded pretty quickly. So so much of early
anthropology was about going out and recording these cultures in
(04:14):
a way that was not necessarily was It was definitely
not good for for actually capturing the cultures. You know.
The earliest in some ways anthropological literature that I was
looking at in the US was French Jesuit priests, and
so they weren't necessarily trained as anthropologists, but they came
to the Eastern seaboard and they were writing down about
(04:34):
the Native American tribes there, the Wabanaki up into Canada.
So they were essentially taking what was a lived culture
and primarily in oral tradition and writing it down based
on their own lens of what they were seeing. And
obviously when we leave these accounts, there's a lot of
that lens being this sort of primitive, savage culture, and
so how do we even trust those accounts in many
(04:54):
ways to have any sort of truth to them when
the priests came with already such a heavy burden of
sort of cultural ideology with which they were viewing people.
And then in you know, the kind of later nineteen
to the Empire is looking a lot in um the
Democratic Republic of Congo and the way that the Belgians
(05:17):
used science in order to do understand the cultures that
they were coming in to basically enslave and decimate resources.
So again it was kind of under this lens that
science could be this very objective practice, and yet so
much of it was already had this background to what
they were trying to succeed um through the capture of resources.
(05:40):
So the apology has gone through all these different phases.
There's been periods where I think it's called the Great
Turn and the last twenty years and anthropologists really had
like a reckoning moment, like what are we even doing?
Is this work makes sense? We're always positioning the cultures
we're looking at as the other. We're never looking at
ourselves as a potential either. How can we even come
to this from a place that is objective or useful
(06:02):
given that always positioning the sort of exotic other in
terms of the cultures that we're looking at. What I
was particularly interested in with how humans and nature interact
within culture, and so both geography and anthropology have space
for looking at those relationships, and that was what I
(06:24):
was really interested in when I started looking at wild
food was how have humans impacted the environment but also
how the environment impacted our own culture And really surprised
to discover that without wild food, so much of the
global economy wouldn't have function. We probably wouldn't have had
the slave trade without the abundance of wild turtles in
the Caribbean that was used to feed enslaved people, both
(06:46):
on the Middle Passage and once they were on plantations.
And so you start to realize how these sort of
wild foods in many ways were invisible to historical records
because they were not considered part of the larger economy.
They were free for the taking. But I was very
very aware going into this project of how how to
be a quote unquote anthropologists, but also insert into the
(07:08):
narrative this sense should you even really trust me? Like
should you trust my perceptions of as a white woman
in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Am I ever capable
of fully understanding this country, this culture, these people, And
so really trying to bring that sense in that even
our historical knowledge there's something untrustworthy about it because of
how it was written down primarily by white colonialists, right,
(07:29):
and a lot of that knowledge was doolen from indigenous
and enslaved peoples and repackaged as scientific knowledge. Yeah, there's
a lot in the book about what does it mean
to be an anthropologist? So, you know, I think what
got me started on this book was the fact that
human history we hunted and we gathered, and that was
(07:52):
how we got our sustenance. And really this kind of
period of civilization is so short compared to our long
history of evolution and culture and existence as a species.
And then really in the last probably a hundred years,
with credible rise of industrial agriculture, most people will never
eat anything that's wild, you know, that's truly kind of
(08:14):
a free living being. And then gathered from that, seafood
remains the one area that people still eat wild food
more regularly in their diets. But I just was like
struck by how weird that is that for most of
our history we ate wild food, and now it's kind
of reserved in some ways as a luxury item, you know.
And at the same time, I was listening to all
(08:34):
these environmentalists basically saying there's no wild nature left. We
have impacted every square inch of the planet. This idea
of the wild is even false in a sense, because
humans are now, whether it's through climate change or destructions
to the resource patterns, we have impacted every square inch
of the natural world. How did we get to this
point where wild food, which was often associated with subsistence
(08:57):
or poverty because you couldn't afford anything else and you
have to go out and toutch your own dinner had
now become something that was elevated enough to be served
at the best restaurant in the world, and was something
that you really had to have the time or the
money too to go out and eat. About a billion
people still rely on wild foods around the world, and
for those people, you know, things like roads and deforestation
(09:18):
are really rapidly impacting our ability to source these foods,
so increasingly wild food is just not an option for
the majority of people who rely on it. So I
felt like wildfood was really an interesting way to talk
about our relationship also to wild nature at this moment
of kind of extreme environmental crisis, um extreme industrialization of
(09:39):
our food system, you know, and the sort of disconnect
and in many ways, I think grief that we're all
feeling at this moment around our food just how much
diversity we've lost. So as ideas of kind of eurocenter
(10:00):
cuisine have spread over the earth and we started growing
crops based on those ideas, we lost so much incredible
crop diversity and and wild game diversity in our diets.
Species as creatures who are bacteria or whatever, we really
create that diversity and we don't realize even that we're
missing it. In terms of the food that we eat.
So January, this is a two part question. I want
(10:22):
to ask if you think there is any way for
us to be consumers of wild food as part of
an environmental mitigation strategy and also as eaters. Do you
think that it's even possible, in light of the policing
of stolen land to ever ethically consume wild foods? Yeah,
(10:45):
I mean that's such an important, complicated question. So, like
this spring, I got so up on my stuff about ramps,
you know, because everyone's posting ramps that they're a wild
onion on the past. I'm sure you're familiar with them,
but historically the colonists associated ramps with poverty, so the
smell was actually associated with poverty. Meanwhile, many Native American
(11:05):
tribes or indigenous peoples, they used ramps as it was
very spiritually significant. It was one of the first plants
to pop up in spring, so really important to diets
and nutrition. You know. There was like this list of
like thirty different things that it would treat in different
ways that you could use the plant. And Cherokee tribes,
the Eastern brand of the Cherokee, are still having problems
being able to access their traditional harvesting grounds because they
(11:28):
lie within Smoky Mountain National Park and you're not allowed
to harvest from national parks. Meanwhile, the Eastern Cherokee you're saying, yeah,
we we sustainably been harvesting this stuff for thousands and
thousands of years before you even got here, and now
you're saying that we can't do this. And then because
of the kind of desire by foodies for ramps, they're
now a super expensive ingredient, and you have people going
(11:50):
out into the forest and just ripping them up indiscriminately,
not being mindful of the fact that these plants take
five to seven years to grow from seed. Takes a
really long time of this plant to grow. If you
harvest them sustainably, you can allow the bulbs to split,
kind of like other alien species like garlic and chalice,
and they'll propagate that way. So I think that's a
really perfect example of what you're talking about, which is
(12:12):
that our country was founded on stolen land, and wild
food takes a lot of land. The beauty and the
and the problematics with wild food is that it takes
more space, so you have less abundance, but more diversity
of natural creatures, So they're sort of an inherent rarity
built in. But I think the beauty and the hope
(12:33):
potentially in eating wild food is that it inherently connects
it to a place. And there's also this like unruly
nous to the vegetables, they don't come out or to
the plants, they don't come out looking uniform. And capitalism
very much because of its need to kind of have
the smoothness and this sufficiency often requires that symmetry and
that aspires that commodity to look the same everywhere. But
(12:54):
what's interesting is that in this sort of late stage moment,
it's actually now elevating what weirdn and the unruly nous
of wild foods. And so having a mushroom that looks
very strange being served on your plate is actually more
of a commodity, a higher luxury product than sort of
like the button mushroom you can get in the grocery store.
So in many ways, it's like I always think of
capitalism like eating its tail, like it's gone full circle
(13:16):
and now it's trying to com modify, like the very
weirdness that shouldn't fit into capitalism, and so something that
comes starts out as a resistance movement, which in many ways,
you know, gathering your own food could feel like to
go out and like resist the system and connect to
the land that's taken in by this like beast and repackaged.
And suddenly that resistance is you know, being spread by
(13:38):
Coca cola or whatever it is. You know, I've been
telling people, if you want to learn to forage, go
to the same place for a year, Visit it through
all the seasons. Start to identify what plants are there,
learn whose land it used to be, Like have a
relationship with a place, because I think, in its best
and most helpful way, eating wild food is about relationship
with non human species and then on human world that
(14:00):
we share this planet with. I see the relationship in
your foraging research akin to what a lot of indigenous
folks in this country have to endure, which is the
policing of their native lands for the purposes of foraging,
and so even the cultural erasure that accompanies the ways
(14:21):
in which land is policed and protected is obviously a
huge detriment to the foraging and wild foods being a
part of our staple diet as it was not so
long ago, and most of history gena A. Can you
tell us a little about the notion of fertile crescent
(14:41):
cities or agricultural cities and how that connects to your work. Um,
I've been talking about this a lot in connection with
the coronavirus and sort of the rise of these novels
zoonotic diseases that we're seeing in the world. So people
keep asking me, like, how can you advocate eating wild
animals given that that is what likely lad to the
coronavirus which has you know, paralyzed the entire world. But
(15:03):
part of what I like to do as an anthropologist
anthropological thinking is understanding humans and non human species within
sort of like one big ecological systems, and we create
our own ecologies with everything that we're doing. So when
you had the first agricultural cities, it was one of
the first times that you had you know, like fleas
and rats and domesticated animals and grain and crops and
(15:26):
humans all kind of living together. And as a result,
you had the rise and the spread of diseases like
plague and smallpox, many of which actually hits derived to
the America's with the colonists and then eventually decimated a
large part of the indigenous American population. So if you
think about those cities as being their own sort of
ecological configuration, what we're seeing today is very similar. You know,
(15:48):
I haven't been to any wet markets, but I spent
a lot of time in the Democratic Republic of Congo
looking at sort of the source of a lot of
these wild animals and the the trade and wild meat there.
You know, what we're seeing is that in these markets
in China you have creatures from African forests, Southeast Asian forests,
and they're all stacked up together in a way that
they would never normally interact out in wild nature out
(16:09):
in the forest. And then a lot of these forests
are under attacked from deforestation, changes in the climate, and
so we're not even sourcing healthy animals to begin with.
So the fact that these kinds of zooonotic diseases are
on the rise is really not that surprising. When you
think about the idea that these new mega cities with
massive amounts of people, creatures from all over the world
living on top of each other, stressed out and scared,
(16:32):
it's kind of obviously you're gonna have the rise of
new you know, viral outbreaks like this. Every action is
an ecological action, whether we realize it or not. Every
meal that you sit down has you know, ecological ripples
that ripples out through the food chain, through the resource,
through the ecosystem. So I think that's really important to
(16:55):
remember that it's not just eating wild animals is bad.
I mean, we've been doing that for hundreds of thousands
of years without these kinds of impacts. So not not
(17:15):
all convolese people eat you know, scientists called bush meat.
I think that has some racist connotations, so I tend
to just call it wild meat or game meat because
that's essentially what it is. You know, it's now different
from a white man hunting an elk or deer, So,
you know, actually looking at that history of how it
kind of got these racist connotations was really interesting, and
of course it's tied up in colonialism. But for people
(17:37):
who eat wild meat, it's often related to having ancestors
who lived in the forest. And when the Belgium's came,
it was one of the most brutal colonial regimes in Africa,
and they restricted people's access to the forest. So wild
meat started to have this sort of like mystique to
it because it had been so much a part of
the diet and then suddenly it was restricted by the
colonial government, and you know, it kind of started to
(17:59):
some realized power. So it's very much wrapped up in
ideas of masculinity and power, and wild game meat is
very much associated with celebrations, with weddings. You know, if
you have your in laws coming and you want to
impress them, you might serve wild game meat. I've met
a bunch of pregnant women in the markets and it
was it's kind of associated with health and wellness, just
as we might choose organic meat or something like that.
(18:22):
But as a result, people who are living on the
edge of the forest are relying on game meat less
and less and more often selling it into this large
market trade for cash um in order to support themselves.
And so you can go to restaurants in Conchata and
sit down for antelope or bush pig in a you know,
fancy meal. And then I did end up tracing some
(18:43):
of the meat to Paris, where there's a large Congolese
diaspora and people import things like you know, pangulin, and
a lot of it is smoked. So it's actually quite
preserved because of the humidity of the forest. The meat
has to be smoked, and then every few days kind
of resmoked, and so when you turn it into stews,
it's like really incredible, just sort of falls to pieces
in your mouth. So I really wanted to kind of
(19:05):
demystify this food because there's so much there, you know, environmentalists,
I mean, it's it's a problem environmentally. Absolutely, it's affecting
the whole ecology of the forest. Certain trees are not
reproducing because the animals that would disperse the seeds have
been wiped out to such an extent it's scientists called
the empty forest syndrome or the quiet forest syndrome, because
you've just really taken out this huge number of wildlife
(19:27):
from the forest. But I also feel like we have
to understand what is driving this trade, and it's not
just you know, something like these people are bar war barbaric,
Like there's really deep cultural roots there, said Gina A.
(20:04):
Thank you so much. You've left us with a lot
to think about, especially the ways in which anthropology, nature
and ecology are so firmly related. And also there's the
notion of human beings belonging to part of a wilder
broader world and how imperative that is when we're talking
(20:24):
about wild food. And also there's the reality that for
non white people we must continue to reconcile and absorb,
and especially for black people, to reclaim our relationship to
nature which has been altered through colonization, and our relationship
with the wild foster is a sense of belonging, which
(20:48):
in itself is a feeling that has been colonized. Our
(21:09):
next guest to help us continue to contextualize and decode
anthropology is Dr Hannah Garth. Dr Garth is a socio
cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of food.
Her work addresses issues of inequality and structural violence, with
regional interest in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the US.
(21:32):
So I should put the caveat on it that there's
a bunch of different kinds of anthropologists and there are
many many different ways that people think of the field,
and so the way that I think of it might
not be the way that you know, the next anthropologist
that you talked to thinks of it, because it's a
very broad field and people come into it from different angles. Um,
(21:53):
Like you said, it is fundamentally about studying humans. But
other fields are also about studying humans. It's a human biology.
It's about studying humans, but that's quite different from ant
apology UM. To me, it's about studying humans through the
lens of culture and through the lens of their social, political, religious, linguistic,
(22:20):
and other relationships and ways that humans interact with one
another UM, as well as how they interact with with
systems like the food system UM. So I think, to me,
studying food it's not just about studying how humans consume food,
but looking at how people consume food reveals things about
(22:46):
human life UM. And that's sort of what is fundamental
to me about UM the anthropology of food as a field.
I think, you know, anthropologists, some ethropologists look at this
through a historical lens, right, so they take maybe more
(23:07):
of an archaeological take on it, where they're UM looking
at prehistoric origins of human relationships to food through consumption
patterns that they find in UM the archaeological record. I
look at contemporary humans, right, so I study people that
are alive and I have conversations with them about their
(23:28):
everyday lives the ways that they imagine and understand the past.
But I also observe what they do on the ground
in their everyday lives as well. Early on in anthropology,
people didn't consider food to necessarily be an important part
of culture. They thought of food as more of a
(23:48):
just fundamental basic biological necessity of humans, um, which it is,
But they did not take it as something that was
related to humans called really and socially um. Some did.
There were a few exceptional anthropologist early on that did
that kind of work. We think the study of food
(24:09):
is as essential to human existence as food itself, but
only within the last few decades as food as an
anthropological theory and research been advanced. Food studies illuminates human behavior.
The field has long been dominated by researchers from Europe
and the US, who brought with them their ideas and
(24:32):
strategies into the field, and in doing so dismissing food
and culinary history. Themes, people and perspectives related to food
were largely ignored as anthropologically irrelevant, consequently making food and
culinary anthropology all the more essential subject to study now. UM.
(24:54):
But I would say that the the thing that made
anthropologists starts take food more seriously was when human relations
to food shifted um so early on, there were some
anthropologists that studied famine. So when you lack food and
(25:15):
it becomes something you cannot take for granted, then it
becomes an important object of study or inquiry um. So
that was in in the early stages. It was conditions
in which basically crisis conditions. Um. And then we start
to have anthropologists that are studying the role of food
(25:35):
in um in the industrial revolution and in everyday life,
so understanding how groups of people are able to basically
shift everything about the way that they live, so shifting
from being subsistence agriculturalists to being people that work and
live in cities where you know you can't grow all
(25:58):
of the food that you consume and you have to
rely on a food system. UM. So then we start
to see a rise in anthropologists that are studying the
relationship between people and food and beginning to see it
as a cultural phenomenon. Um. And we've there's always been
anthropologists that have been interested in food for ritual purposes, right,
(26:18):
Like we know that there are special foods for different
rituals and people consume them in particular ways. UM. So
that has always been important. But seeing sort of how
the everyday food consumption is related to cultural and social
human relations. UM was something that slowly developed over time
(26:40):
for at least the last For the last couple of decades,
UM scholars have understood that there is enough food on
the planet for everyone to eat, and the problems that
we face our problems of distribution. UM So, even even
(27:00):
in cases where there's a famine in one place, there
is still you know, there's still enough food on a
global scale to be able to feed people and not
have people start. Um. So this is something that's commonly accepted,
and so I've been interested in thinking through how people
experience those forms of inequality and how people understand that.
(27:30):
We'll hear more from Dr Garth later this season in
a follow up conversation that you will not want to miss.
It's about her research on Cuba's socialist food system and
the ways in which it differs from the complications of
our own food system here in the US. There are
some really, really incredible parts of that episode, but for
today we're keeping it focused on her anthropological and ethnographic work.
(28:02):
I really enjoyed this episode, and I'm really glad that
we finally got to have this conversation. I feel like
we're moving closer to the innermost thoughts of my own
personal dialogue, which is really just a series of obsessive
thoughts that is all about food origins, and which is
basically the basis for this entire media company. Sometimes I
(28:25):
even surprise myself thinking so much about it, but I
don't think I can never stop. I love to learn
about other humans by first learning about the food they eat.
I believe that love is bound to empathy, and empathy
cannot be achieved without understanding. Understanding is easier among commonalities,
and food remains the only thing that we all have
(28:47):
in common. The story of food is the story of
human beings. The study of both is food anthropology, and
therefore food origins is my religion. Religion is full of contradictions,
and so that too, is part of this particular pursuit. Anthropologists,
(29:08):
mostly white, have historically studied communities that they themselves are
apart and separate from. The research has not always been fruitful,
and the conclusions have not always been written truthfully and
certainly not without bias. But on the other hand, anthropology
as a way of engaging with the world's brilliant and
(29:29):
the academics in the space today, like gena Ay and
like Dr Garth, are giving us even more reason to
be excited about the trajectory of food anthropology. We hold
these contradictions to be self evident, but it must be
said that food has the potential to bring that feeling
of belonging to as Gina Ray would say, a wider ecology.
(29:52):
Speaking of I'd like to thank our guest today Gina Ray,
Lesserva and Hannah Garth. You can learn more about their
work and their books at what Stone magazine dot com,
Backslash podcast or on I G at what Stone Magazine.
That's w h E T S T O n E Magazine.
We'll be back next week. Thanks for listening to point
(30:14):
of origin piece. We'd also like to thank our incredible
podcast producer Selene Glazier. Selene, you are the best. To
our editor and wet Stone partner and director of video
(30:37):
David Alexander in London. Appreciate you, Dave. Thanks to our
wet Stone production intern Quentin le Beau, and last but
not least, my business partner, Mel She who makes all
things at wet Stone possible. Thank you Mel. We'd also
like to thank our partners and production at I Heart
Radio to Gabrielle Collins, our supervising producer and executive producer
(31:02):
Christopher Haciotis. We'll be back next week with more from
the world of food worldwide Point of Origin listeners. As
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(31:25):
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