August 19, 2019 • 54 mins
The tale of two yogurts and the fight to protect Goa’s fishing villages and waters, it’s all about preservation. It keeps us alive and teaches how to live.
Our inaugural episode features guests Amrita Gupta of the Food Radio Project, Sana Javeri Kadri of Diaspora Co. and food writer and cookbook author Priya Krishna.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Make sure that you know the origins. Like as long
as they're saying this is not something that Wynett Paltrow invented,
rather something that comes from Irabadic tradition. Are you suggesting
that when the Paltrow did not invent to work. I
can't believe I said that out loud. We might need
to come. Welcome to Point of Origin, a podcast about
(00:26):
the world of food worldwide from the makers of wet
Stone Magazine. I'm your host, Stephen Saderfield. Over the past
two years, I've had the tremendous fortune of making magazines
and films about food, but more specifically about how it
teaches us who we are and how we came to be.
And for those who have had the privilege of moving
(00:48):
about the world can attest. When we travel, it's hard
to keep our minds fresh enough to avoid looking for
familiar signals. Signs of home when you're far away from
yours can be grounding. But in our exploration of global
food ways, what we found is that enlightenment, despite your
mind's best intentions, isn't found in the familiar, because it's
hard to imagine what we've not yet seen, and when
(01:11):
we see, what is it that we see well almost
always in our purview is the processed and the packaged,
the pre wrapped and the manufactured. Point of origin. The
podcast and the notion is about deepening our understanding by
going to the source. It's about learning to unlearn and relearn.
It does not promise certainty, but that's okay because that's
(01:33):
not what we're pursuing. And since we're just meeting, we
wanted our inaugural episode to properly reflect who we are
and the work we make. Without much difficulty, we identified preservation,
both in a literal and cultural sense, as the best
way to do that. Our work affirms our belief that
women are the architects of preservation. So befitting of this theme,
(01:56):
we begin today in India with three women and entrepreneur,
a food writer, and a journalist, all embodying in their
work the essential nature of preservation. Our first guest, the
complete Original, the Essential third generation mun Biker Sonna Javerry
Cadre Sanna is a dear friend of Whetstone. In addition
(02:20):
to being a massive fan of her as a human being,
we've also been the beneficiaries of her outstanding photography as
the image of a fistful of her company's very first
Tumeric harvest Grace the cover of our third volume of
wet Stone, the Spice Importer photographer Tumeric icon Sanna Javerry Cadre.
(02:45):
And then by the time I took the photo, so
much because it's exclusively for turmeric, so so much turmric
had been milled there that the walls have turned permanently yellow.
And that's Anna, I'm honored to be. Year. Before we
get into wet Stone, let's learn about you, and I
would like to know if you could tell us where
(03:07):
you were born and how you arrived to where you
are today in Oakland, California. Yeah. So I was born
in Mumbai, India. In India had just been neoliberalized in
the early nineties. So right before I was born, my
parents went to graduate school in Michigan. They went to
(03:27):
ann Arbor and that was my mom's first international flight
ever and ended up in the snow of Michigan. And
did your parents grew up in Mumbai too? We did. Yeah,
so I actually have a I'm a third generation mumbaiker
u biker biker. That's the new term. I mean, usually
people would actually say I'm a third generation Bombay snob
(03:48):
because I live in the southern krusty part of the city. Um,
but yeah, their generation from Bombay and they came to
ann Arbor and we're basically like crunchy hippies. My dad
had long hair and a beard. My mom was all
about I mean, I didn't discovered feminism for the first time.
(04:09):
And they then moved out to Berkeley right after they graduated.
When you talk about the neoliberalization of India in that period,
can you say in more specific terms what was happening
what that dynamic. Yeah, so basically India shortly after independence
became a protectionist state, which meant that very little of
(04:32):
the outside world came in. So capitalism that was happening
in the rest of the world didn't really touch India.
There were no large brands, there was no multinational corporations.
And then in the early nineties, uh, not a sim Harau.
I don't remember what his position was in the government,
but he was responsible and really opened up India and
so suddenly India became the world's like youngest democracy that
(04:57):
also had like rising capitalism coming in, and so every
brand was just like, let's get in there. As capitalism
loves to do. So I really feel like my childhood
was defined by Coca Cola adsum, because I saw them
coming in for the first time trying to figure out
the market as a kid, and then by the time
I got to my early teens, they had really figured
(05:19):
it out, um, and they were now marketing to India.
So I know that I've always looked at my childhood
and my life through this lens of consumption. I remember
the summer that like Nestley bought up all of the
airtime because before that every family you went to for
lunch had their own yogurt, and like everybody had homemade
(05:40):
that he like yogurt. Yeah. Um, Like I knew that
my grandma on my dad's side was a bit wealthier
because she used like full fat buffalo milk yogurt in
her that he my grandma, my mom said, did not.
She used like the skimmist ship and it was really running.
But there was like all of these regional differences between yogurt.
(06:03):
And then Nestley bought up all this airtime, um. And
I think it was the summer of my fourth grade
and convinced the middle class that if you weren't buying
nestle that he in a plastic tetrapack and not made
at home in a ceramic pot. You were choosing the
less sanitary option. And so by the time school reopened
(06:26):
in June, which is when our summer ends, everybody at
home would make this big show of peeling open their
nestle that he and I think that's how. That was
the lens through which I was looking through a lot
of my childhood. But I have digressed, so no, no,
and no, let's say there so was that? I mean,
you were absorbing this, this new phenomenon in the marketplace,
(06:47):
the way you were being marketed to as a child.
And it's it's a very common tactic with these corporations,
the way in which they will shame indigenous foods or
native foods or foods of our ancestry and use this
let's just call it western solution, this capitalistic solution, which
(07:10):
is about sanitation and cleanliness impurity. So that that dynamic
is a familiar one we see over and over. Were
you getting those messages where your parents kind of helping
you process or makes sense of this dynamic, or were
you sort of learning this all on your own. I
think if I'm being honest, I was buying into it,
(07:32):
Like I remember multiple tantrums where I was like, we
need nestlate the at home, otherwise we're not going to
be cool and the other stuff just taste disgusting. It
did not taste disgusting. Um. And I remember, I mean
especially my mom. Her whole worldview has been about like
how do we support India from the grassroots, and she
was like anti est from day one. Um, So we
(07:56):
didn't exactly talk about how I got to the Bay Area.
So I graduated college, I broke up with my college boyfriend,
who to this day is my best best friend. I'm
going to be the best man in his wedding, and
followed a girl to the Bay Area. She was like, oh,
I live here, and I was like okay. And I
mean I had just started working at by Right. I
(08:19):
love the folks at by Right. But I was also
sitting there being like my family gave me the best
education ever. I was sent, you know, to Italy and
then America and now I'm photographing oranges. So you follow
a girl here and by Right. For people who don't know,
the Bay Area is a very famous multigenerational grocery store
(08:41):
that's been around for about eighty years and I think
best known for being uh not just a champion, but
a massive purchaser of local food. They have their own farm.
It's like the best produce I've eaten, and some of
the best this day. It's the really legit. So it's
it's not just like working at some grocery store if
(09:03):
you're in the Bay, so you work at by Rights,
It's like, wow, it's a thing. Yeah. Through that photography
and also being embedded in the world of food, did
that start to give you some more clarity about what
kind of work you wanted to make. Yeah, I think
in more than in what work I didn't want to
make Initially, where I was like, I love photography, but
(09:25):
I really don't want to be taking photos of oranges,
especially if I'm not telling deeper stories around it, like
someday I will tell the story about like the sun
Kissed Empire here in the in the Inland Empire, and
you know, the citrus history of America. But the food
marketing aspect of it and was just falling really flat.
And I realized that whilst I have photography as a tool,
(09:48):
I'm really a supply chain nerd. Like what what I
love so much about by right was understanding how they
were changing supply chains from like the farm all the
way to the con humor what price points they were
doing it at, whether there were some products that they
could do it at a lower price point. And when
you say changing the supply chain, what do you mean
(10:09):
by that? Yeah? Okay, So, like a good example is chocolate, right,
Chocolate for a long time was just a commodity thing
that big companies grew and farmers got the cheapest price.
They got the daily kind of almost like a stock
market for chocolate. Um. And then when the bean to
bar chocolate movement came in, suddenly farmers in multiple chocolate
(10:31):
growing countries now get much higher prices for it, were
able to negotiate higher prices because there was a demand
for like what varietal of cocao is this? Like when
was it actually harvested? Was it from two thousand fifteen
or sixteen? So suddenly understanding that it's not just bulk beans,
but putting effort into what those means are and where
(10:51):
they're coming from, and in doing that, making the supply
chain more transparent, making it more equitable. And I was
seeing that firsthand at By right, from everything from chocolate
to produce to coffee, but also seeing when it was
an elitist product and when or like a very expensive
product that only very few people had access to, which
is basically everything in their store, basically everything, even with
(11:13):
that thirty employee discount, I was still like, this is
nuts um, and when you could actually do something that
could sit and whole foods and being like the whole
three sixty line, you know. And I wasn't seeing very
much of that. I wasn't seeing like transparent, ethical stuff
that was able to be a regular good and not
(11:35):
a luxury good. And I was more just curious. I
was like, is that possible? Can somebody do that? And
I kept asking people, I mean especially By I had
access to all of these buyers, right, and I kept
asking them like okay, so rice okay, so spices okay,
so lentils, Like everything I knew that came from India.
I was like, where are you getting it from? How
much do you pay them? How when did it get here?
(11:58):
And nobody had answers for me. They would all kind
of look at me sheepishly and like it's made in India.
We don't know it must be great. That must have
been a really difficult thing to accept because they're so
rigorous on the one hand on everything else. Right, Yeah,
when it comes to honestly, when it came to like
(12:19):
the ethnic food section, anything goes, and that just felt
like bullshit. It was like, it's two thousand sixteen. Trump
got elected. Here's the exotic corner of Yeah. If somebody's
not changing this corner, it sounds like that's what led
you to start diaspora. I think so, No, I definitely
think so. Okay, So what is diaspora? Codaspara CO is
(12:40):
a direct trade um spice collective and so we work
between India and the US. And the idea is that
we so we work in collaboration with the Indian Institute
of Spice Research. And they are really so far have
been the folks like spearheading it for US where they
work with farmers and an Institute of Spice Research. I
(13:02):
s r. Okay, can I get like an honorary degree
or something? I don't know if you want to. It's
like a really sleepy institution that nobody has visited in
forty years. They looked at me and they were like,
I think they had never seen somebody under the age
of like ever forgot. Yeah, they were just looking at
me like you have no wrinkles? Wow? What how did
(13:23):
you get hooked up with them? I harassed them for months,
So you found them online? I found them on the internet.
I emailed them, I called them. The head scientist was
at lunch for four months. Um, he read my WhatsApp.
He read my WhatsApps repeatedly for months and no response.
(13:45):
And so finally I bought a plane ticket and was like,
excuse me, Hi, I'm here now, why did you have
so much conviction that they were the people to start with?
I visited a bunch of farms across India. So because
I grew up there, because my family is there, I
think I have an ease of mobility there, but a
lot of Indian Americans don't necessarily have. And I was
(14:07):
visiting these farms and realizing that I was being screwed
where a lot of the time a farmer's cooperative actually
means that like a rich trader realized that the European
organic market likes it when the word cooperative is added on,
and so he's still paying the farmers nothing, but now
he brings the like Italians and German buyers every year
(14:27):
to trot around the farms to meet farmers with language
they don't speak um and take photos with like brown people.
And I was visiting these farms and realizing that where
I was like actually talking to the farmers and they
were saying, oh, yeah, the commodity price for this is
thirty five rupees. This dude gives us forty two. A
seven ruby difference is like three cents. Language are you speaking? Uh?
(14:52):
In this case, the nice thing is I speak good rati,
and most traders speak goodrati like a are the wildiest
capitalists who have ever exist. And because of that, a
lot of farmers have learned caudrati in order to work
with traders. Um. So that's why I was able to
(15:12):
communicate with them. Because I don't speak any of the
South Indian languages, got me through perfect. And so when
you met up with the Spice doctors, yes, after they
got over the shock and saying old show up at
their dollar or how did you guys go forward? I
think they were honestly super stoked. I think the first
(15:33):
thing they were like, ma'am sonna, we've been waiting for
you for so long, and I was just like, you're
full of ship. But I think they realized that for
the past twenty six years they have been seed saving
these beautiful heirloom seeds and then licensing them out to
farmers for either free or very little money, depending on
the situation, and then the farmers have no market for it.
(15:56):
So the farmers are growing these gorgeous seeds, but then
are selling it back on the commodity market, right, which
loses the magic of it. It's like selling a gorgeous
like peak seas and cherry tomato to Walmart in the
like shitty tomato section. And they didn't know how to
access the market either. Like the niche urban organic market
(16:16):
in India is so small that a farmer sitting in
the brades he has no chance of getting to that market.
And so I think this Dr Prest the scientist was
really smart and being like, Okay, this home girl has
the market. I have the farmers if I match, make
like my problem of not being able to market is
(16:38):
solved by somebody else. So are you working with single
varieties of yeah? So so my undergraduate thesis was on
food and colonialism, and I like went down a six
month bender of like the ways that colonialism fucked up
Indian agriculture, and that became like my deep life anger.
(17:02):
I could talk for hours about it. And Dr Press
had basically explained to me that the Indian spice trade
has not changed since the eighteen fifties, because we take
term eric as an example. When I started looking, everybody
said that Alabi term eric was the best term eric
out there, and so I was like, okay, I gotta
find alloby term eric. And I was like, well, I'll
(17:23):
go to Albi. Alobi is a sleepy tourist town on
the back waters of Kerala, which is on the west coast. Um.
It's kind of like going to New Orleans looking for
like a beautiful French farm because that's where the French
like the party. Um kind of equivalent makes absolutely no sense. Um.
But I showed up anyway, ever, you laughed me out
(17:45):
of the town basically, and I was like, okay, Um,
what I understood is the British. I mean, here's the
power of naming right where they created these colonial brand names.
So Saigon cinnamon, Albi, term eric, Aleppo pepper because are
all colonial brand ams. So Alexi, turmeric, basically meant they
took a shade card from light yellow to dark orange.
(18:06):
Any turmeric vital that met the bright middle orange shade card,
they were like, that's alp and you've got a premium
price for it. So farmers literally lost their seed varietal
understanding because they were growing for color and size. And
so to this day, other than the I s R,
there's no real understanding of seed varietals in spices um
(18:29):
and a lot of Indian agriculture and what Dr Press
was literally challenging me. He totally baited me where he
was like, you can basically turn it around and turn
Indian like single varietal heirloom vitals into brand names. And
I was like, okay, I learned food marketing before, but
(18:49):
now it has a whole different meaning. Like the patriot
in me was just rising. I was like, okay, I'll
do it, Dr Press. So the thing, the nerdy thing
about term RII is it's a rhizome, and so it's
like a genetic clone of the one that came before it.
It's very hard to come up with new varietals. And
so the vital that we use as a varietal called progaty,
(19:11):
which means progress which I love, and it's this really
rich color you've seen it um And what's really nice
about it it's a short duration crops so it doesn't
take a long time and the farmers can then grow
something nitrogen fixing in between, rather than just leave the
land follow for a month and then regrow. And what
(19:31):
do they put for that fixer? I think it's like
a cousin of the fava bean. It's like a it's
an Indian fava a situation. But then they also inter
crop the term marigolds. Oh, it must be so beautiful,
which is stunning where you gotta bust out your photography.
It's like, Hi, so are you working? Are you anticipating
(19:52):
new varieties coming to the market? Are you working? Yeah?
There there's another varietal car that's also a really beautiful
bridle and has a higher Kirkman content, which is Kirkman
is like the anti inflammatory good stuff that America chases. Basically,
it's like the Woo woo Gwindeth Paltrow stuff. You knew
(20:13):
a new group was going to come up. I can't
not just like bubbles out of me? What bubbles out
of you? How do you feel? So goop? Now stocks
our term eric, which is hilarious to me. I don't
know how I feel about that, because, like, in so
much honesty, my rage at group is what started this company.
(20:35):
But I've kep to this point where I'm like, you
know what, anybody can consume term eric and do whatever
they want with it, as long as the right people
are making money. In this case my farmers, you're making
them money. They're able to you know, grow and live
their best lives, drink all the term gotts you want.
But you've got to care enough to buy the right thing,
(20:56):
and in wet Stone style, like make sure that you
know the origins. As long as they're saying this is
not something like Winnet Paltrow invented, but rather something that
comes from Arabithic tradition. Are you suggesting that when the
Paltrow did not invent to I can't believe I said
that out loud. Um, we might need to cut the
(21:20):
We've we've lost all credibility. I do want to give
you a chance to say whatever you want. I think
what I did want to talk about was about the piece. Okay,
let's talk about the Muslim peace. Let's talk about it.
I showed it to my grandfather. Rather, my parents showed
it to my grandfather and he's the one from m
the Bud and he grew up Muslim and m the
(21:42):
Bud and I think when he moved to Mumbai, he
kind of deleted the idea that his culture would be represented.
I think for him, the gamble on moving to Mumbai was,
my career will grow, and I'll visit where I come
from every now and then, but I'll keep my head down.
Not really advertised my Muslimness, not really advertised where I
(22:05):
come from. And I think it was kind of wild
and emotional. He's non emotional dude. If you think my
dad is a chiller, this dude like has a nap
for two hours every day, maybe for the whole five
years that he was alive. Um, it's like on some
four months lunch. You know, men in India, they really
(22:25):
haven't made for them. Sounds like it. But I think
it really got really emotional because two generations later, like
his granddaughter was able to go back and proudly document
a culture that he never thought was documentable. These images
are phenomenal. So we drop into this story about Gujarati
(22:47):
Muslim food. We're obviously talking about the region on a
religion exactly, So what are the implications of the region
and religion being discussed. So Muslims have always had a
very tenuous relationship in India, obviously since partition, but especially
so in good Good I mean most recently in two
thousand and two there was a huge genocide that the
(23:10):
current Prime Minister was um sort of party two to
this date like should be convicted for. And so the
Muslim footprint in good Draw just gets smaller and smaller.
Like over the years of going back, what I've just
witnessed is our neighborhood gets tighter and tighter and tighter,
(23:30):
and it stays further and further back in time while
the rest of the city develops like this neighborhood still
feels like pretty much the neighborhood my grandfather grew up in.
When the rest of good Draw is meant to be
like the bastion off like Indian development to big highways,
and it's not a culture that's talked about because Good
Draw these like I said, like best capitalists, good Roth.
(23:52):
The Jans usually have the ability to emigrate, have the
ability to leave good The Muslims stay because they're never
going to gain the means to leave, and especially has
Muslims like which country is going to take them? And
so that culture hasn't been documented. And every time I
went back it would feel super Walking the streets behind
(24:14):
our house where the samosas and the briani and a
lot of the meat essentially is prepared, always felt really
precious because I didn't see it anywhere else. And I
mean these photos, I haven't seen these photos anywhere else.
They're truly remarkable. Thank you for all that you do,
all that you've done are doing. Thanks for having me next.
(24:41):
Amrita Gupta is a journalist and podcast producer from Bangalore
who has been writing about food and the food system
in India for ten years. So, Amrita, you went to
go and met a group of fishermen who, to say
the least, are facing an uncertain future. Can you give
us an example of what they're up against? Yeah, So
(25:02):
one of the fishermen I spoke to broke down the
math for me of why they often don't break even anymore.
Suppose you had a boat, he said, and you employed
twenty five people, and you have to pay for fuel
and for food and for ice, and so you hope
you'll recover your cost. But the boat goes out and
looks and looks, and sometimes they don't find any fish.
(25:22):
So what do you do? What exactly are they fishing
for and how are they fishing? Yeah, so many of
these perst signed trollers targets surface schooling fish like mackerel,
and the method that they're using is rightfully controversial for
reasons you will hear. But according to one boat owner,
they can bring it around fifteen tons in a few
(25:44):
days out fishing. Wow, it's quite a lot. Yeah, So
this troller was out for a week, it had thirty
five people on it and it brought in only three
tons of micerel. We st on ponder point just done
that this is the high speed boat. It damages a
(26:04):
lot of fishesis nearly ten fifteen says comes as damage
to the scrap. So the boat owner was pretty open
about the fact that it's a high speed boat and
it damages a lot of fish and brings in a
lot of scrap or juvenile fish. And if they didn't
use high speed boats, he said that a greater number
of fish could survive and grow up to become bigger fish.
(26:28):
He feels that the industry would be better off if
they had fewer boats or smaller boats, but that isn't
what the government's encouraging. So before we look into exactly
what it is the government's encouraging. For context, let's get
some background on how Indian fisheries evolved. For some perspective,
we speak with the Via Karnad, a marine conservationist who
(26:51):
grew up on the Indian coast and spends her adulthood
protecting it. So initially we had very few fishermen who
were fishing at whatever rates using traditional old forms of
fishing gear. And then over the years that has changed,
both due to the increase in the number of people
fishing as well as changes in the fishing technology. Once
(27:14):
trall fishing became a very important form of fishing in India,
like in the nine eighties and nineties while that was
still booming, people could afford to, you know, choose the
fish that were really of high economic value and then
discard whatever else was of low economic value. This is
(27:35):
because trall fishing is an indiscripted form, so you can't
really select which species or which size of fisher so
on gets caught in the net. And particularly because we
were using bottom trawling, which is where the net scrapes
the seabed in the near shore areas, and most of
our fish actually come to breed in the near shore areas,
(27:57):
and many of them, many of the young juveniles and
so one hang out near the seabed. So as a
result of this, all these juveniles and young of the fish,
as well as other species like clams and muscles and
all these little animals that live towards the bottom of
the sea, we're all getting caught in the nets and
(28:18):
they don't really have a very good economic value as seafood,
so they were being discarded. But once the troll fisheries
stopped being economically profitable, so once we went to a
point where the seeds were being over fished, then people
realized that they were actually throwing out more of their
cash than they were actually keeping and selling. So they
(28:41):
had to try to find new markets for these uh
this huge quantity of catch that they were discarding, and
they realized that there was this possibility of using it
for animal feed feed. Now we're moving into the crux
of the story. Current industrial fishing practices under mine the
livelihoods of coastal communities and the welfare of the ocean.
(29:04):
A lot of what's landed today doesn't feed its citizens.
It feeds other animals, and this is a system that's
bolstered by government subsidies. Ve yet told me about one
study from the state of Tamil Nadu which showed the
link between fish meal and poultry farms. People were more
dependent on income from fish meal than the actual seafood
(29:26):
that they were catching. Our oil sardines get targeted like that.
In India on the west coast, you will find a
lot of sardine processing facilities. The oil is extracted and
then the meats made into fish meal, and sardines have
long been an important source of food for fishing communities themselves.
(29:54):
Aaron Lobo is a marine conservationist in Goa. He told
me that over fishing and trawling in particular has resulted
in less high value fish in just a few decades,
and since the poultry industry buys higher volumes of lesser
quality fish, it isn't exactly the same. Many of us
think that the demand for animal feed is what's driving
(30:16):
declining catches, but Aaron says it's more complicated than that.
So the whole thing of the poultry industry and animal
feed is one thing, but they're doing it because they're
adapting to you know, a dire time in a way,
you know what I'm saying, So that the industry, the
industry is doing like for example, landing low value catch
(30:37):
for the poultry industry. That's the market is just one driver,
but the main driver is declining catch. The things which
we used to describe, we don't describe them anymore. That's
my rage Gong a marine researcher. If you lend them,
then of course our landing would look bigger. In many
parts of India, including goer their fish down the food chain,
(31:02):
landing more trash fish, which is to say, not for
human consumption but for fish meal. And that's why when
we see statistics on fish landings, we need to remember
they're not telling us the full story. The highest value
things would be things like you know, tiger shrimp that
you can see a lobster, which is so they're so
like tiger shrimp and lobster are really a lottery catches,
(31:24):
you know, so uh yeah, their catches are really sort
of decline. But while they have declined, you can imagine
some of the higher trophic um species, like the group
of snappers that are they have really sort of taken
a deep you know what I'm saying, So seeing anything
I don't see. You're seeing snapper, you're seeing a lot
of mangrove jack, you're seeing red snapper. But you know
(31:46):
what you're seeing is basically probably a lot of effort
that's put into catch that fish. You know, probably at
one point in time you could say one troller brought
in like enough four or five, but now probably it's
ten trollers that have brought in those four five species.
So coming to a fish market can be it's safe
to assume that the fish harvest is not sustainable at
the moment, and the idea it's to go to words sustainably.
(32:12):
What the stats show is just the catch. They're not
looking at how much effort people are putting in to
get that catch. What ecologists like the Via Karnad and
Iron Lobo are talking about is that given the effort
that's put in, the catch is actually reducing. We see
people going out for longer and fishing deeper, and each
time the industry is growing less viable, and no one
(32:37):
is more aware of this than the fishermen themselves. Now.
I have been working with fishermen for quite a long
time now, and it's been um interesting to like go
to them and see the kind of innovations that they
are doing and the kind of concern that they have
for the environment, and to think about how as ecologists
(33:01):
of conservationists, we are constantly thinking that the problem lies
with the people who are harvesting it. Yeah, so we
are taught to, you know, go to the fishing villages
and do these sort of conservation outreach campaigns or education
or awareness or whatever it is, when in fact, these
people are already making the change, and they are already
(33:22):
concerned about the environment and they want to do something,
but they feel like they are tied down by the
supply chain. So I'm ready to this sounds like a
pretty dire situation. We have fishermen who are increasingly having
a difficult time selling what they catch, and what they
do catches inferior quality fish. The cost of the boats
(33:43):
are really high, and when they go out, they're spending
more and more time on the water, more fuel, which
of course means more money. But this issue isn't just
something that's confronting fishermen in India. It seems the industry
worldwide is destined to fail. Is there any reason for
optimism at all or anything that can be done? What
(34:04):
I learned while working on the story is that India
is willing to pay more for its fish domestically then
the price it would fetch if it was exported. So
most of the consumption is actually within the country. And
that's why many researchers in the field believe that a
change in seafood eating habits within the country will help
address the problem. Because if you look at restaurants right now,
(34:26):
they may be serving six or seven species of fish,
but that's about it. In fact, there are over a
hundred species that are edible I see. So can we
then apply the adage that we must eat what we
want to say? Is that applicable here? That's the framework
we use when we're talking about conserving heritage meets right.
(34:47):
But I think that what the crux of it is
in this context is that we need to be more
aware of seasonality and fish breeding, which stocks are overexploited,
which fishing methods are more destructive. We need to diverse
a via seafood diet so that there's less pressure on
just a few species. But consumers who vote with their
folk can only do so much. They can't address the
(35:09):
structural aspects like industrial fishing subsidies. So while they definitely
can choose more sustainable seafood, I'm not sure if we
can frame it as a fix, you know, right, Yeah,
in individual consumers alone aren't going to be able to
solve for this, okay. So that means that we have
work to do as consumers um but that work is
(35:33):
not adequate. We will also need to push for policy
changes and really a reframing of the way that we
think about the role of government in our food systems.
In this case, we see government not only in India
but all over the world that subsidizes greater volumes at
(35:53):
the expense of sustainability. Thanks a lot, Amrita, Thanks Steve.
Amrita Gupta is the founder of the Food Radio Project.
To see more of her work, go to Food Radio
Project dot com. Before our next story, a quick programming
(36:16):
note here that we actually have produced a short film
about this very topic, and if you've not yet seen it,
particularly after listening to this story, please do search the
Anchovy Project to see how this very dynamic is playing
out in our home state of California. Our next interview
is with the food writer and author of the newly
(36:37):
released cookbook Indian Ish Recipes and Antics from a Modern
American Family, Priya Krishna. We're back with more point of origin.
(37:01):
I want to start off by asking how the hell
you are so prolific, because every day I'm on the
internet reading food articles, and every day I see your
name pop up for a different publication with an incredibly
rich story, and I'm wanting to know how you are
able to write so much. I feel like lately that
(37:23):
has not been the case. I feel like I've been slacking.
I don't know. I get eight I get good sleep.
I treat my work days like they are work days,
like I don't do a lot of like mid day
lunches or breakfasts. I feel like that always messes up
my day. I just like try to be highly efficient
(37:44):
with my time. And I do work on planes, which
I realized like a lot of people can't do work
on planes. I thrive doing work on planes, which I
feel like it's the best time for me to get done.
Either way, Kudos to you. Such a pleasure to see
so much of your work in the world. And the
most meaningful work to date. Indian Ish will be hitting
(38:05):
shelves nationwide. How are you feeling, I don't know. I
feel equal parts excited and anxious. Like you just this
book is like one of the most vulnerable things I
feel that I've ever done as a writer. Like it's
three pages of just like straight up honesty, like the
good and the bad, and you're kind of putting yourself
out there and hoping that people like it. And it's
(38:28):
almost it's like this very weird feeling and that like, Okay,
if people don't like these recipes, like this is what
I grew up with, it's like saying you don't like me,
which I mean, obviously it is probably not true, but
it's still it's still like kind of a mind buck
this whole process. I mean, did you have any sense
of how deeply personal this would be in advance of
beginning or was it only once you started the process
(38:51):
did you realize that you were really opening yourself up.
I mean, I've written about my family a lot, and
so I didn't expect it to be any to feel
any different writing of whole book about them. That it
that it really did, Like I think like seeing the manuscripting.
It being sort of like four hundred pages of my
family brought to life in a book form felt like
(39:15):
a unique level of exposure. Like my personal stories on
my family are like you know, usually eight hundred to
a thousand words. It's just it's focusing on a story,
a moment, but this is almost like all of those
moments come together with recipes. Um. And yeah, that was
(39:35):
that was scary. It was a lot scarier than I
thought it would be putting that all down. Yeah, and
the recipes are of course a composition of your childhood
and your youth and Texas, but also your ancestry from India. Um,
can you tell us about what your experience was like
growing up in Texas? I mean I had a I
(39:57):
had a lovely childhood, but it was like, I mean,
it was hard in the way that like being a
kid of color in the nineties and early two thousand's
was like, you know, everyone on TV was white. All
of like the major y A novels written for kids
our age featured characters who were white. Just constantly feeling
(40:20):
like I didn't fit in, just like desperately, I like
desperately wanted to have like straight brown hair and be
Jewish because that was close to the people. That was
like the look of most of the girls in my grade.
And I kind of like tried to downplay my Indian
heritage as much as possible. I really I did classical
(40:40):
Indian dance. I had a big Indian family, but I
kept my life with my friends at school and my
home life and my culture really compartmentalized, which, as you say,
is once you get older you realize quite a common
kind of assimilation or coping mechanism for young people of color. Yeah,
(41:01):
like it sucks because like you grew up, you were
you were born and raised in the US, just like
everyone else, but you're still made to feel like somehow
you don't belong. And is that kind of exacerbated at
all in Texas given all of the overwhelming and prevailing
narratives about like the state of Texas and everything that
(41:24):
that represents. It's funny people asking that all the time,
I grew up in a liberal bubble, Like, yeah, my
school was the school that people who weren't Republicans sent
their kids too. It was super super liberal, really open
it like and if but it almost made it, I
mean it would have been shitty feature, like experiencing like
(41:49):
overt racism, but it was like the discrimination was more subtle,
Like it wasn't explicitly racist. It was more of a
subconscious bias, and like us hurts more because you're like,
I can't pinpoint why I'm being excluded, but I am.
Let's talk about that from a culinary perspective. Obviously you
(42:10):
had segregated your own worlds and your own lives. But
what was it like when the two worlds collided around
the table. What are some of your earliest memories of
those convergences. You mean, like my mom sort of coming
up with more hybridized dishes. Is that even exactly? Yes, yeah,
I mean it's it's funny. It's sort of just it
(42:31):
just happened naturally. It wasn't something that I think was conscious.
Like my mom was dealing with, you know, having to American,
very American kids who are product of American culture, and
she herself was living in the US, so it yeah,
it sort of came very organically. Like my sister and
I kept demanding pizza, and my mom was so annoyed
and didn't want to make pizza, and so she decided
(42:53):
to make pizza using ropeti. And you know, my mom
would travel to London and she would eat baked potatoes
and pubs and loves the idea of like a baked
potato soft top with sour cream, so she made a
version with sour cream and choppen massala and onions and cilantro.
Or we went to California and we ate California sour
dough and thought it was the greatest thing ever. So
(43:15):
we made these like Indian Ish like these like grilled
cheese sandwiches with stuff with yogurt and cilantro and onions,
and talked with curry leaves and mustard seeds, and we
use sour dough bread because the tang was so such
a beautiful marriage with like the intensity of the curry leaves.
So it's just it was just things like that. We
were discovering new ingredients and new new dishes, and my
(43:36):
mom was really curious and so was I, and so
that we kind of did everything but did it our
way to our tastes with what we had in the pantry.
And your mom, we discover in the book, is kind
of a superhero. Yeah, which tremendous woman? Can you tell
us more? About your mother. Yeah, I mean yeah, I
(43:58):
feel like superhero. It is a total understatement. Um, my
mom not only is an amazing cook, which you know,
I feel like a lot of a lot of mothers
are amazing cooks, but she was an amazing cook while
also being a like high powered executive for a software company,
which she still is. She has a hiking group where
(44:21):
she like literally hyped Machu Picchu with no training. She
co founded a film festival that showcases works by South Asians.
She knows a lot about wine. She's an amazing hostess.
She is really put together, has great taste, loves theater
and art and travel. She's just kind of this amazing
(44:46):
renaissance woman. And more most importantly, like she was an
amazing mom. She taught me that you don't need to
be a mother who's always around like you by being
super ambitious and I think by leaning into her interests
and her work, she sort of led by example for
my sister and I and we didn't really we didn't
(45:08):
need her to be around to know that she was
an amazing mom because she was sort of showing us,
you know, what it means to do it all. And
I think as i've gotten older and sort of contended
with balancing various things in my life. I've come to
appreciate that more than more and more right, and I think, actually,
I'm now realizing what a foolish initial question I had
(45:30):
and asking how you managed to be so accomplished and
prolific as a writer. Clearly you are your mother's daughter.
That is very nice. I definitely am not. I'm like
I would say, I'm like ten percent of the person
ore is. It's like one of those fundraising thermometers. I'm
just trying to work my way up to maybe be
like the way there, you got plenty of time. Do
(45:51):
you see your work as um as a calling or
as a way to honor that maternal relationship. I don't
know by explicitly c is a way to honor that
maternal relationship, but it's also like the only way my
mom taught me to be, you know, to have work
life balance, to hustle really hard, to not take no
(46:11):
for an answer, you know, to set extremely high goals
for yourself and then do everything you can to achieve them.
You know, I entered this industry with zero connections just
by sending like sixty cold emails and hoping that people
would respond. I feel like that's kind of how my
mom broke into her industry too. She kind of had
(46:32):
to like elbow her way in, but she did and
she's super successful. All right, let's transition a bit. I
want to talk about your one of your recent New
York Times articles about yogurt, and it seems like, at
least in our little corner of the food world, this
was a pretty widely circulated article because the condensed version
(46:54):
of the story is that your your family has had
a starter, a yogurt starter that is almost as old
as you are, or maybe older older than you are,
which is just really in a world of fast food
and prepackaged consumption, really boggles the mind. So can you
(47:15):
tell us not only about your your own famili's relationship
to this yogurt and starter um, but also Indian sort
of culinary culture at large. Yeah, I mean, I was
thought it was somewhat unique that my family had this
yogurt culture growing up, and that we kind of just
perpetuated the same yogurt starter. And I was excited to
(47:37):
find out that no, we were not unique, and there
are a number of families that did this. But it's
it's very common in Indian culture to make homemade yogurt.
I've learned. You know, yogurt is such a fundamental part
of Indian cuisine, which is you know, so divided across
regional lines, but yogurt is sort of this through line
that you'll find, you know, in cuisines from the north, south,
(48:00):
east to west. And so it was so amazing like
hearing all of these stories and sort of understanding how,
you know, when people immigrated to other countries, the way
that they stayed connected to their Indian heritage very often
was by transporting this yogurt culture from India and then
perpetuating it in the US. Like I heard all these
(48:20):
romantic stories about smuggling yogurt culture through customs and dipping
it in the folds of your sorry like, you know,
I just thought it was so beautiful. And to me,
my dad's yogurt that's as good of a taste of
home as any And you know, I hope that eventually
I'm I get to perpetuate that yogurt culture for my kids.
(48:42):
It's sort of a way of passing down a family legacy.
And I just found that so special that there are
so many families who had that shared experience. Oh, I
mean it's so beautiful. It's say, it's a living heir loam.
I mean it's so beautiful. Did you get any like
love letters from different corners of the world or people saying, oh,
(49:04):
this is how we do it or this is an application. Yeah,
I did, Actually, um I got. I got a lot
of notes after that article came out. I mean even
more interesting was when the article was being written, I
was sort of curious to see if my experience matched
with other people's experiences. So I put out a call
on Instagram and I was like overwhelmed with the response
(49:27):
of people with amazing stories of their families you og culture,
and then once article came out, even more people email
me being like this really speaks to this speaks to
my experience growing up. And I mean that was so
powerful to me that you know, all of us South
Asian kids, you know, our parents sort of all valued
(49:48):
the same thing. And I think you're totally right, Like
it is this living, breathing heirloom, and it's something that
you know, can transcend generation and transcend time, and and
it's a food. It's just you know, I feel like
there are very few foods that are capable of doing
that totally. Yeah. So my last question for you is
(50:09):
really just a big picture question, but it's about just
kind of how you view um the work that you're
making in the world right now. When when you talk
about your work or when you think about your work,
is there kind of a prevailing thing that you are
hoping that people take away from it, or is it
that you just people will take whatever they will take
(50:30):
from it and you just keep producing it. My beginning
is a food writer kind of coincided with the election,
and you know, at first I didn't want to be
defined by writing about a certain thing, but you know what,
I really do feel like I tried earnestly to focus
my writing on the communities that I feel are underrepresented
(50:54):
in food media. People who are, you know, making change
in the food world, but you know, haven't been written about.
And I guess that to me that means people from
cities that don't get covered often women, immigrants, communities of color,
members of the LGBTQ community. I just feel like it's
really important that we normalize a more sort of inclusive
(51:17):
world of food writing. And I feel like whatever small
part I can play in that. I'm happy to amen
to that and to all that I mean. And the
truth is, these are the stories I'm most interested in,
Like as a kid of immigrants, like, I feel like
it makes sense that I'm interested in in stories that
that relate to people who are underrepresented. So it feels
(51:39):
very natural to me. Yeah, and yet so far away
from your experience and growing up and consuming media that
not at all reflected your culture. So it's really beautiful that, Um,
we're in a moment in which we can hear from
more people, but for you in particular, I'm sure this
must be particularly thrilling, Um that you are creating part
(52:03):
of this new new paradigm. You're very much a part
of that, honestly. Yeah. Well, um, that's pre A Krishna
food writer and author of indian Ish recipes and antics
from a Modern American Family. I loved our conversation today, Priya,
Thanks for talking to us, of course, thanks for having
(52:25):
me on all right. The tale of two Yogurts and
the fight to protect go as fishing villages and waters.
It's all about preservation. It keeps us alive and teaches
us how to live. It feels really important to tell
(52:46):
you that origins are not definitive. Though it is language
we use to describe our work, it is in no
way comprehensive. The same is true of food anthropology, another
way we describe our work. And though the language we
have is inadequate to look at food in terms of
the study of past and present, well, that part of
food anthropology that feels like the right way to think
(53:08):
about our food, and so ultimately that's how we talk
about our work. The study of food is always past
and present. We'd like to thank our guest today. I'm
read to Gupta of the Food Radio Project, Sonage a
very cadre of Diasporaco, and Pria Krishna, author of Indian Ish,
for joining us today. Special thanks to Kat Hong and
(53:30):
Adam Lamport in Los Angeles, California for your editing and
production support, and to Roast and Post Studios in Oakland,
California for engineering this podcast. Point of Origin is a
podcast from my Heart Media and wet Stone Magazine Executive
produced by Christopher Hasiotis and hosted by me Steven Sadderfield,
and a very special thanks to my business partner, wet
(53:53):
Stone co founder Melissa she who helped produce this podcast.
Thanks Mel. You can listen to more a Point of
Origin on the I Heart media app or wherever you
listen to podcast. Thanks for listening to our very first
edition of Point of Origin. We hope you enjoyed it.
(54:15):
In our next episode, we pay homage to a country
that puts the ice and ice cream and in the land.
I'm talking about Iceland, y'all. And in our next episode,
we meet a chef turned geothermal salt maker and a
farmer who's making an extremely regionally specific dairy product, Icelandic
(54:36):
food Waves of yesterday and today. Next time on Point
of Origin podcast
Make sure that you know the origins. Like as long
as they're saying this is not something that Wynett Paltrow invented,
rather something that comes from Irabadic tradition. Are you suggesting
that when the Paltrow did not invent to work. I
can't believe I said that out loud. We might need
to come. Welcome to Point of Origin, a podcast about
(00:26):
the world of food worldwide from the makers of wet
Stone Magazine. I'm your host, Stephen Saderfield. Over the past
two years, I've had the tremendous fortune of making magazines
and films about food, but more specifically about how it
teaches us who we are and how we came to be.
And for those who have had the privilege of moving
(00:48):
about the world can attest. When we travel, it's hard
to keep our minds fresh enough to avoid looking for
familiar signals. Signs of home when you're far away from
yours can be grounding. But in our exploration of global
food ways, what we found is that enlightenment, despite your
mind's best intentions, isn't found in the familiar, because it's
hard to imagine what we've not yet seen, and when
(01:11):
we see, what is it that we see well almost
always in our purview is the processed and the packaged,
the pre wrapped and the manufactured. Point of origin. The
podcast and the notion is about deepening our understanding by
going to the source. It's about learning to unlearn and relearn.
It does not promise certainty, but that's okay because that's
(01:33):
not what we're pursuing. And since we're just meeting, we
wanted our inaugural episode to properly reflect who we are
and the work we make. Without much difficulty, we identified preservation,
both in a literal and cultural sense, as the best
way to do that. Our work affirms our belief that
women are the architects of preservation. So befitting of this theme,
(01:56):
we begin today in India with three women and entrepreneur,
a food writer, and a journalist, all embodying in their
work the essential nature of preservation. Our first guest, the
complete Original, the Essential third generation mun Biker Sonna Javerry
Cadre Sanna is a dear friend of Whetstone. In addition
(02:20):
to being a massive fan of her as a human being,
we've also been the beneficiaries of her outstanding photography as
the image of a fistful of her company's very first
Tumeric harvest Grace the cover of our third volume of
wet Stone, the Spice Importer photographer Tumeric icon Sanna Javerry Cadre.
(02:45):
And then by the time I took the photo, so
much because it's exclusively for turmeric, so so much turmric
had been milled there that the walls have turned permanently yellow.
And that's Anna, I'm honored to be. Year. Before we
get into wet Stone, let's learn about you, and I
would like to know if you could tell us where
(03:07):
you were born and how you arrived to where you
are today in Oakland, California. Yeah. So I was born
in Mumbai, India. In India had just been neoliberalized in
the early nineties. So right before I was born, my
parents went to graduate school in Michigan. They went to
(03:27):
ann Arbor and that was my mom's first international flight
ever and ended up in the snow of Michigan. And
did your parents grew up in Mumbai too? We did. Yeah,
so I actually have a I'm a third generation mumbaiker
u biker biker. That's the new term. I mean, usually
people would actually say I'm a third generation Bombay snob
(03:48):
because I live in the southern krusty part of the city. Um,
but yeah, their generation from Bombay and they came to
ann Arbor and we're basically like crunchy hippies. My dad
had long hair and a beard. My mom was all
about I mean, I didn't discovered feminism for the first time.
(04:09):
And they then moved out to Berkeley right after they graduated.
When you talk about the neoliberalization of India in that period,
can you say in more specific terms what was happening
what that dynamic. Yeah, so basically India shortly after independence
became a protectionist state, which meant that very little of
(04:32):
the outside world came in. So capitalism that was happening
in the rest of the world didn't really touch India.
There were no large brands, there was no multinational corporations.
And then in the early nineties, uh, not a sim Harau.
I don't remember what his position was in the government,
but he was responsible and really opened up India and
so suddenly India became the world's like youngest democracy that
(04:57):
also had like rising capitalism coming in, and so every
brand was just like, let's get in there. As capitalism
loves to do. So I really feel like my childhood
was defined by Coca Cola adsum, because I saw them
coming in for the first time trying to figure out
the market as a kid, and then by the time
I got to my early teens, they had really figured
(05:19):
it out, um, and they were now marketing to India.
So I know that I've always looked at my childhood
and my life through this lens of consumption. I remember
the summer that like Nestley bought up all of the
airtime because before that every family you went to for
lunch had their own yogurt, and like everybody had homemade
(05:40):
that he like yogurt. Yeah. Um, Like I knew that
my grandma on my dad's side was a bit wealthier
because she used like full fat buffalo milk yogurt in
her that he my grandma, my mom said, did not.
She used like the skimmist ship and it was really running.
But there was like all of these regional differences between yogurt.
(06:03):
And then Nestley bought up all this airtime, um. And
I think it was the summer of my fourth grade
and convinced the middle class that if you weren't buying
nestle that he in a plastic tetrapack and not made
at home in a ceramic pot. You were choosing the
less sanitary option. And so by the time school reopened
(06:26):
in June, which is when our summer ends, everybody at
home would make this big show of peeling open their
nestle that he and I think that's how. That was
the lens through which I was looking through a lot
of my childhood. But I have digressed, so no, no,
and no, let's say there so was that? I mean,
you were absorbing this, this new phenomenon in the marketplace,
(06:47):
the way you were being marketed to as a child.
And it's it's a very common tactic with these corporations,
the way in which they will shame indigenous foods or
native foods or foods of our ancestry and use this
let's just call it western solution, this capitalistic solution, which
(07:10):
is about sanitation and cleanliness impurity. So that that dynamic
is a familiar one we see over and over. Were
you getting those messages where your parents kind of helping
you process or makes sense of this dynamic, or were
you sort of learning this all on your own. I
think if I'm being honest, I was buying into it,
(07:32):
Like I remember multiple tantrums where I was like, we
need nestlate the at home, otherwise we're not going to
be cool and the other stuff just taste disgusting. It
did not taste disgusting. Um. And I remember, I mean
especially my mom. Her whole worldview has been about like
how do we support India from the grassroots, and she
was like anti est from day one. Um, So we
(07:56):
didn't exactly talk about how I got to the Bay Area.
So I graduated college, I broke up with my college boyfriend,
who to this day is my best best friend. I'm
going to be the best man in his wedding, and
followed a girl to the Bay Area. She was like, oh,
I live here, and I was like okay. And I
mean I had just started working at by Right. I
(08:19):
love the folks at by Right. But I was also
sitting there being like my family gave me the best
education ever. I was sent, you know, to Italy and
then America and now I'm photographing oranges. So you follow
a girl here and by Right. For people who don't know,
the Bay Area is a very famous multigenerational grocery store
(08:41):
that's been around for about eighty years and I think
best known for being uh not just a champion, but
a massive purchaser of local food. They have their own farm.
It's like the best produce I've eaten, and some of
the best this day. It's the really legit. So it's
it's not just like working at some grocery store if
(09:03):
you're in the Bay, so you work at by Rights,
It's like, wow, it's a thing. Yeah. Through that photography
and also being embedded in the world of food, did
that start to give you some more clarity about what
kind of work you wanted to make. Yeah, I think
in more than in what work I didn't want to
make Initially, where I was like, I love photography, but
(09:25):
I really don't want to be taking photos of oranges,
especially if I'm not telling deeper stories around it, like
someday I will tell the story about like the sun
Kissed Empire here in the in the Inland Empire, and
you know, the citrus history of America. But the food
marketing aspect of it and was just falling really flat.
And I realized that whilst I have photography as a tool,
(09:48):
I'm really a supply chain nerd. Like what what I
love so much about by right was understanding how they
were changing supply chains from like the farm all the
way to the con humor what price points they were
doing it at, whether there were some products that they
could do it at a lower price point. And when
you say changing the supply chain, what do you mean
(10:09):
by that? Yeah? Okay, So, like a good example is chocolate, right,
Chocolate for a long time was just a commodity thing
that big companies grew and farmers got the cheapest price.
They got the daily kind of almost like a stock
market for chocolate. Um. And then when the bean to
bar chocolate movement came in, suddenly farmers in multiple chocolate
(10:31):
growing countries now get much higher prices for it, were
able to negotiate higher prices because there was a demand
for like what varietal of cocao is this? Like when
was it actually harvested? Was it from two thousand fifteen
or sixteen? So suddenly understanding that it's not just bulk beans,
but putting effort into what those means are and where
(10:51):
they're coming from, and in doing that, making the supply
chain more transparent, making it more equitable. And I was
seeing that firsthand at By right, from everything from chocolate
to produce to coffee, but also seeing when it was
an elitist product and when or like a very expensive
product that only very few people had access to, which
is basically everything in their store, basically everything, even with
(11:13):
that thirty employee discount, I was still like, this is
nuts um, and when you could actually do something that
could sit and whole foods and being like the whole
three sixty line, you know. And I wasn't seeing very
much of that. I wasn't seeing like transparent, ethical stuff
that was able to be a regular good and not
(11:35):
a luxury good. And I was more just curious. I
was like, is that possible? Can somebody do that? And
I kept asking people, I mean especially By I had
access to all of these buyers, right, and I kept
asking them like okay, so rice okay, so spices okay,
so lentils, Like everything I knew that came from India.
I was like, where are you getting it from? How
much do you pay them? How when did it get here?
(11:58):
And nobody had answers for me. They would all kind
of look at me sheepishly and like it's made in India.
We don't know it must be great. That must have
been a really difficult thing to accept because they're so
rigorous on the one hand on everything else. Right, Yeah,
when it comes to honestly, when it came to like
(12:19):
the ethnic food section, anything goes, and that just felt
like bullshit. It was like, it's two thousand sixteen. Trump
got elected. Here's the exotic corner of Yeah. If somebody's
not changing this corner, it sounds like that's what led
you to start diaspora. I think so, No, I definitely
think so. Okay, So what is diaspora? Codaspara CO is
(12:40):
a direct trade um spice collective and so we work
between India and the US. And the idea is that
we so we work in collaboration with the Indian Institute
of Spice Research. And they are really so far have
been the folks like spearheading it for US where they
work with farmers and an Institute of Spice Research. I
(13:02):
s r. Okay, can I get like an honorary degree
or something? I don't know if you want to. It's
like a really sleepy institution that nobody has visited in
forty years. They looked at me and they were like,
I think they had never seen somebody under the age
of like ever forgot. Yeah, they were just looking at
me like you have no wrinkles? Wow? What how did
(13:23):
you get hooked up with them? I harassed them for months,
So you found them online? I found them on the internet.
I emailed them, I called them. The head scientist was
at lunch for four months. Um, he read my WhatsApp.
He read my WhatsApps repeatedly for months and no response.
(13:45):
And so finally I bought a plane ticket and was like,
excuse me, Hi, I'm here now, why did you have
so much conviction that they were the people to start with?
I visited a bunch of farms across India. So because
I grew up there, because my family is there, I
think I have an ease of mobility there, but a
lot of Indian Americans don't necessarily have. And I was
(14:07):
visiting these farms and realizing that I was being screwed
where a lot of the time a farmer's cooperative actually
means that like a rich trader realized that the European
organic market likes it when the word cooperative is added on,
and so he's still paying the farmers nothing, but now
he brings the like Italians and German buyers every year
(14:27):
to trot around the farms to meet farmers with language
they don't speak um and take photos with like brown people.
And I was visiting these farms and realizing that where
I was like actually talking to the farmers and they
were saying, oh, yeah, the commodity price for this is
thirty five rupees. This dude gives us forty two. A
seven ruby difference is like three cents. Language are you speaking? Uh?
(14:52):
In this case, the nice thing is I speak good rati,
and most traders speak goodrati like a are the wildiest
capitalists who have ever exist. And because of that, a
lot of farmers have learned caudrati in order to work
with traders. Um. So that's why I was able to
(15:12):
communicate with them. Because I don't speak any of the
South Indian languages, got me through perfect. And so when
you met up with the Spice doctors, yes, after they
got over the shock and saying old show up at
their dollar or how did you guys go forward? I
think they were honestly super stoked. I think the first
(15:33):
thing they were like, ma'am sonna, we've been waiting for
you for so long, and I was just like, you're
full of ship. But I think they realized that for
the past twenty six years they have been seed saving
these beautiful heirloom seeds and then licensing them out to
farmers for either free or very little money, depending on
the situation, and then the farmers have no market for it.
(15:56):
So the farmers are growing these gorgeous seeds, but then
are selling it back on the commodity market, right, which
loses the magic of it. It's like selling a gorgeous
like peak seas and cherry tomato to Walmart in the
like shitty tomato section. And they didn't know how to
access the market either. Like the niche urban organic market
(16:16):
in India is so small that a farmer sitting in
the brades he has no chance of getting to that market.
And so I think this Dr Prest the scientist was
really smart and being like, Okay, this home girl has
the market. I have the farmers if I match, make
like my problem of not being able to market is
(16:38):
solved by somebody else. So are you working with single
varieties of yeah? So so my undergraduate thesis was on
food and colonialism, and I like went down a six
month bender of like the ways that colonialism fucked up
Indian agriculture, and that became like my deep life anger.
(17:02):
I could talk for hours about it. And Dr Press
had basically explained to me that the Indian spice trade
has not changed since the eighteen fifties, because we take
term eric as an example. When I started looking, everybody
said that Alabi term eric was the best term eric
out there, and so I was like, okay, I gotta
find alloby term eric. And I was like, well, I'll
(17:23):
go to Albi. Alobi is a sleepy tourist town on
the back waters of Kerala, which is on the west coast. Um.
It's kind of like going to New Orleans looking for
like a beautiful French farm because that's where the French
like the party. Um kind of equivalent makes absolutely no sense. Um.
But I showed up anyway, ever, you laughed me out
(17:45):
of the town basically, and I was like, okay, Um,
what I understood is the British. I mean, here's the
power of naming right where they created these colonial brand names.
So Saigon cinnamon, Albi, term eric, Aleppo pepper because are
all colonial brand ams. So Alexi, turmeric, basically meant they
took a shade card from light yellow to dark orange.
(18:06):
Any turmeric vital that met the bright middle orange shade card,
they were like, that's alp and you've got a premium
price for it. So farmers literally lost their seed varietal
understanding because they were growing for color and size. And
so to this day, other than the I s R,
there's no real understanding of seed varietals in spices um
(18:29):
and a lot of Indian agriculture and what Dr Press
was literally challenging me. He totally baited me where he
was like, you can basically turn it around and turn
Indian like single varietal heirloom vitals into brand names. And
I was like, okay, I learned food marketing before, but
(18:49):
now it has a whole different meaning. Like the patriot
in me was just rising. I was like, okay, I'll
do it, Dr Press. So the thing, the nerdy thing
about term RII is it's a rhizome, and so it's
like a genetic clone of the one that came before it.
It's very hard to come up with new varietals. And
so the vital that we use as a varietal called progaty,
(19:11):
which means progress which I love, and it's this really
rich color you've seen it um And what's really nice
about it it's a short duration crops so it doesn't
take a long time and the farmers can then grow
something nitrogen fixing in between, rather than just leave the
land follow for a month and then regrow. And what
(19:31):
do they put for that fixer? I think it's like
a cousin of the fava bean. It's like a it's
an Indian fava a situation. But then they also inter
crop the term marigolds. Oh, it must be so beautiful,
which is stunning where you gotta bust out your photography.
It's like, Hi, so are you working? Are you anticipating
(19:52):
new varieties coming to the market? Are you working? Yeah?
There there's another varietal car that's also a really beautiful
bridle and has a higher Kirkman content, which is Kirkman
is like the anti inflammatory good stuff that America chases. Basically,
it's like the Woo woo Gwindeth Paltrow stuff. You knew
(20:13):
a new group was going to come up. I can't
not just like bubbles out of me? What bubbles out
of you? How do you feel? So goop? Now stocks
our term eric, which is hilarious to me. I don't
know how I feel about that, because, like, in so
much honesty, my rage at group is what started this company.
(20:35):
But I've kep to this point where I'm like, you
know what, anybody can consume term eric and do whatever
they want with it, as long as the right people
are making money. In this case my farmers, you're making
them money. They're able to you know, grow and live
their best lives, drink all the term gotts you want.
But you've got to care enough to buy the right thing,
(20:56):
and in wet Stone style, like make sure that you
know the origins. As long as they're saying this is
not something like Winnet Paltrow invented, but rather something that
comes from Arabithic tradition. Are you suggesting that when the
Paltrow did not invent to I can't believe I said
that out loud. Um, we might need to cut the
(21:20):
We've we've lost all credibility. I do want to give
you a chance to say whatever you want. I think
what I did want to talk about was about the piece. Okay,
let's talk about the Muslim peace. Let's talk about it.
I showed it to my grandfather. Rather, my parents showed
it to my grandfather and he's the one from m
the Bud and he grew up Muslim and m the
(21:42):
Bud and I think when he moved to Mumbai, he
kind of deleted the idea that his culture would be represented.
I think for him, the gamble on moving to Mumbai was,
my career will grow, and I'll visit where I come
from every now and then, but I'll keep my head down.
Not really advertised my Muslimness, not really advertised where I
(22:05):
come from. And I think it was kind of wild
and emotional. He's non emotional dude. If you think my
dad is a chiller, this dude like has a nap
for two hours every day, maybe for the whole five
years that he was alive. Um, it's like on some
four months lunch. You know, men in India, they really
(22:25):
haven't made for them. Sounds like it. But I think
it really got really emotional because two generations later, like
his granddaughter was able to go back and proudly document
a culture that he never thought was documentable. These images
are phenomenal. So we drop into this story about Gujarati
(22:47):
Muslim food. We're obviously talking about the region on a
religion exactly, So what are the implications of the region
and religion being discussed. So Muslims have always had a
very tenuous relationship in India, obviously since partition, but especially
so in good Good I mean most recently in two
thousand and two there was a huge genocide that the
(23:10):
current Prime Minister was um sort of party two to
this date like should be convicted for. And so the
Muslim footprint in good Draw just gets smaller and smaller.
Like over the years of going back, what I've just
witnessed is our neighborhood gets tighter and tighter and tighter,
(23:30):
and it stays further and further back in time while
the rest of the city develops like this neighborhood still
feels like pretty much the neighborhood my grandfather grew up in.
When the rest of good Draw is meant to be
like the bastion off like Indian development to big highways,
and it's not a culture that's talked about because Good
Draw these like I said, like best capitalists, good Roth.
(23:52):
The Jans usually have the ability to emigrate, have the
ability to leave good The Muslims stay because they're never
going to gain the means to leave, and especially has
Muslims like which country is going to take them? And
so that culture hasn't been documented. And every time I
went back it would feel super Walking the streets behind
(24:14):
our house where the samosas and the briani and a
lot of the meat essentially is prepared, always felt really
precious because I didn't see it anywhere else. And I
mean these photos, I haven't seen these photos anywhere else.
They're truly remarkable. Thank you for all that you do,
all that you've done are doing. Thanks for having me next.
(24:41):
Amrita Gupta is a journalist and podcast producer from Bangalore
who has been writing about food and the food system
in India for ten years. So, Amrita, you went to
go and met a group of fishermen who, to say
the least, are facing an uncertain future. Can you give
us an example of what they're up against? Yeah, So
(25:02):
one of the fishermen I spoke to broke down the
math for me of why they often don't break even anymore.
Suppose you had a boat, he said, and you employed
twenty five people, and you have to pay for fuel
and for food and for ice, and so you hope
you'll recover your cost. But the boat goes out and
looks and looks, and sometimes they don't find any fish.
(25:22):
So what do you do? What exactly are they fishing
for and how are they fishing? Yeah, so many of
these perst signed trollers targets surface schooling fish like mackerel,
and the method that they're using is rightfully controversial for
reasons you will hear. But according to one boat owner,
they can bring it around fifteen tons in a few
(25:44):
days out fishing. Wow, it's quite a lot. Yeah, So
this troller was out for a week, it had thirty
five people on it and it brought in only three
tons of micerel. We st on ponder point just done
that this is the high speed boat. It damages a
(26:04):
lot of fishesis nearly ten fifteen says comes as damage
to the scrap. So the boat owner was pretty open
about the fact that it's a high speed boat and
it damages a lot of fish and brings in a
lot of scrap or juvenile fish. And if they didn't
use high speed boats, he said that a greater number
of fish could survive and grow up to become bigger fish.
(26:28):
He feels that the industry would be better off if
they had fewer boats or smaller boats, but that isn't
what the government's encouraging. So before we look into exactly
what it is the government's encouraging. For context, let's get
some background on how Indian fisheries evolved. For some perspective,
we speak with the Via Karnad, a marine conservationist who
(26:51):
grew up on the Indian coast and spends her adulthood
protecting it. So initially we had very few fishermen who
were fishing at whatever rates using traditional old forms of
fishing gear. And then over the years that has changed,
both due to the increase in the number of people
fishing as well as changes in the fishing technology. Once
(27:14):
trall fishing became a very important form of fishing in India,
like in the nine eighties and nineties while that was
still booming, people could afford to, you know, choose the
fish that were really of high economic value and then
discard whatever else was of low economic value. This is
(27:35):
because trall fishing is an indiscripted form, so you can't
really select which species or which size of fisher so
on gets caught in the net. And particularly because we
were using bottom trawling, which is where the net scrapes
the seabed in the near shore areas, and most of
our fish actually come to breed in the near shore areas,
(27:57):
and many of them, many of the young juveniles and
so one hang out near the seabed. So as a
result of this, all these juveniles and young of the fish,
as well as other species like clams and muscles and
all these little animals that live towards the bottom of
the sea, we're all getting caught in the nets and
(28:18):
they don't really have a very good economic value as seafood,
so they were being discarded. But once the troll fisheries
stopped being economically profitable, so once we went to a
point where the seeds were being over fished, then people
realized that they were actually throwing out more of their
cash than they were actually keeping and selling. So they
(28:41):
had to try to find new markets for these uh
this huge quantity of catch that they were discarding, and
they realized that there was this possibility of using it
for animal feed feed. Now we're moving into the crux
of the story. Current industrial fishing practices under mine the
livelihoods of coastal communities and the welfare of the ocean.
(29:04):
A lot of what's landed today doesn't feed its citizens.
It feeds other animals, and this is a system that's
bolstered by government subsidies. Ve yet told me about one
study from the state of Tamil Nadu which showed the
link between fish meal and poultry farms. People were more
dependent on income from fish meal than the actual seafood
(29:26):
that they were catching. Our oil sardines get targeted like that.
In India on the west coast, you will find a
lot of sardine processing facilities. The oil is extracted and
then the meats made into fish meal, and sardines have
long been an important source of food for fishing communities themselves.
(29:54):
Aaron Lobo is a marine conservationist in Goa. He told
me that over fishing and trawling in particular has resulted
in less high value fish in just a few decades,
and since the poultry industry buys higher volumes of lesser
quality fish, it isn't exactly the same. Many of us
think that the demand for animal feed is what's driving
(30:16):
declining catches, but Aaron says it's more complicated than that.
So the whole thing of the poultry industry and animal
feed is one thing, but they're doing it because they're
adapting to you know, a dire time in a way,
you know what I'm saying, So that the industry, the
industry is doing like for example, landing low value catch
(30:37):
for the poultry industry. That's the market is just one driver,
but the main driver is declining catch. The things which
we used to describe, we don't describe them anymore. That's
my rage Gong a marine researcher. If you lend them,
then of course our landing would look bigger. In many
parts of India, including goer their fish down the food chain,
(31:02):
landing more trash fish, which is to say, not for
human consumption but for fish meal. And that's why when
we see statistics on fish landings, we need to remember
they're not telling us the full story. The highest value
things would be things like you know, tiger shrimp that
you can see a lobster, which is so they're so
like tiger shrimp and lobster are really a lottery catches,
(31:24):
you know, so uh yeah, their catches are really sort
of decline. But while they have declined, you can imagine
some of the higher trophic um species, like the group
of snappers that are they have really sort of taken
a deep you know what I'm saying, So seeing anything
I don't see. You're seeing snapper, you're seeing a lot
of mangrove jack, you're seeing red snapper. But you know
(31:46):
what you're seeing is basically probably a lot of effort
that's put into catch that fish. You know, probably at
one point in time you could say one troller brought
in like enough four or five, but now probably it's
ten trollers that have brought in those four five species.
So coming to a fish market can be it's safe
to assume that the fish harvest is not sustainable at
the moment, and the idea it's to go to words sustainably.
(32:12):
What the stats show is just the catch. They're not
looking at how much effort people are putting in to
get that catch. What ecologists like the Via Karnad and
Iron Lobo are talking about is that given the effort
that's put in, the catch is actually reducing. We see
people going out for longer and fishing deeper, and each
time the industry is growing less viable, and no one
(32:37):
is more aware of this than the fishermen themselves. Now.
I have been working with fishermen for quite a long
time now, and it's been um interesting to like go
to them and see the kind of innovations that they
are doing and the kind of concern that they have
for the environment, and to think about how as ecologists
(33:01):
of conservationists, we are constantly thinking that the problem lies
with the people who are harvesting it. Yeah, so we
are taught to, you know, go to the fishing villages
and do these sort of conservation outreach campaigns or education
or awareness or whatever it is, when in fact, these
people are already making the change, and they are already
(33:22):
concerned about the environment and they want to do something,
but they feel like they are tied down by the
supply chain. So I'm ready to this sounds like a
pretty dire situation. We have fishermen who are increasingly having
a difficult time selling what they catch, and what they
do catches inferior quality fish. The cost of the boats
(33:43):
are really high, and when they go out, they're spending
more and more time on the water, more fuel, which
of course means more money. But this issue isn't just
something that's confronting fishermen in India. It seems the industry
worldwide is destined to fail. Is there any reason for
optimism at all or anything that can be done? What
(34:04):
I learned while working on the story is that India
is willing to pay more for its fish domestically then
the price it would fetch if it was exported. So
most of the consumption is actually within the country. And
that's why many researchers in the field believe that a
change in seafood eating habits within the country will help
address the problem. Because if you look at restaurants right now,
(34:26):
they may be serving six or seven species of fish,
but that's about it. In fact, there are over a
hundred species that are edible I see. So can we
then apply the adage that we must eat what we
want to say? Is that applicable here? That's the framework
we use when we're talking about conserving heritage meets right.
(34:47):
But I think that what the crux of it is
in this context is that we need to be more
aware of seasonality and fish breeding, which stocks are overexploited,
which fishing methods are more destructive. We need to diverse
a via seafood diet so that there's less pressure on
just a few species. But consumers who vote with their
folk can only do so much. They can't address the
(35:09):
structural aspects like industrial fishing subsidies. So while they definitely
can choose more sustainable seafood, I'm not sure if we
can frame it as a fix, you know, right, Yeah,
in individual consumers alone aren't going to be able to
solve for this, okay. So that means that we have
work to do as consumers um but that work is
(35:33):
not adequate. We will also need to push for policy
changes and really a reframing of the way that we
think about the role of government in our food systems.
In this case, we see government not only in India
but all over the world that subsidizes greater volumes at
(35:53):
the expense of sustainability. Thanks a lot, Amrita, Thanks Steve.
Amrita Gupta is the founder of the Food Radio Project.
To see more of her work, go to Food Radio
Project dot com. Before our next story, a quick programming
(36:16):
note here that we actually have produced a short film
about this very topic, and if you've not yet seen it,
particularly after listening to this story, please do search the
Anchovy Project to see how this very dynamic is playing
out in our home state of California. Our next interview
is with the food writer and author of the newly
(36:37):
released cookbook Indian Ish Recipes and Antics from a Modern
American Family, Priya Krishna. We're back with more point of origin.
(37:01):
I want to start off by asking how the hell
you are so prolific, because every day I'm on the
internet reading food articles, and every day I see your
name pop up for a different publication with an incredibly
rich story, and I'm wanting to know how you are
able to write so much. I feel like lately that
(37:23):
has not been the case. I feel like I've been slacking.
I don't know. I get eight I get good sleep.
I treat my work days like they are work days,
like I don't do a lot of like mid day
lunches or breakfasts. I feel like that always messes up
my day. I just like try to be highly efficient
(37:44):
with my time. And I do work on planes, which
I realized like a lot of people can't do work
on planes. I thrive doing work on planes, which I
feel like it's the best time for me to get done.
Either way, Kudos to you. Such a pleasure to see
so much of your work in the world. And the
most meaningful work to date. Indian Ish will be hitting
(38:05):
shelves nationwide. How are you feeling, I don't know. I
feel equal parts excited and anxious. Like you just this
book is like one of the most vulnerable things I
feel that I've ever done as a writer. Like it's
three pages of just like straight up honesty, like the
good and the bad, and you're kind of putting yourself
out there and hoping that people like it. And it's
(38:28):
almost it's like this very weird feeling and that like, Okay,
if people don't like these recipes, like this is what
I grew up with, it's like saying you don't like me,
which I mean, obviously it is probably not true, but
it's still it's still like kind of a mind buck
this whole process. I mean, did you have any sense
of how deeply personal this would be in advance of
beginning or was it only once you started the process
(38:51):
did you realize that you were really opening yourself up.
I mean, I've written about my family a lot, and
so I didn't expect it to be any to feel
any different writing of whole book about them. That it
that it really did, Like I think like seeing the manuscripting.
It being sort of like four hundred pages of my
family brought to life in a book form felt like
(39:15):
a unique level of exposure. Like my personal stories on
my family are like you know, usually eight hundred to
a thousand words. It's just it's focusing on a story,
a moment, but this is almost like all of those
moments come together with recipes. Um. And yeah, that was
(39:35):
that was scary. It was a lot scarier than I
thought it would be putting that all down. Yeah, and
the recipes are of course a composition of your childhood
and your youth and Texas, but also your ancestry from India. Um,
can you tell us about what your experience was like
growing up in Texas? I mean I had a I
(39:57):
had a lovely childhood, but it was like, I mean,
it was hard in the way that like being a
kid of color in the nineties and early two thousand's
was like, you know, everyone on TV was white. All
of like the major y A novels written for kids
our age featured characters who were white. Just constantly feeling
(40:20):
like I didn't fit in, just like desperately, I like
desperately wanted to have like straight brown hair and be
Jewish because that was close to the people. That was
like the look of most of the girls in my grade.
And I kind of like tried to downplay my Indian
heritage as much as possible. I really I did classical
(40:40):
Indian dance. I had a big Indian family, but I
kept my life with my friends at school and my
home life and my culture really compartmentalized, which, as you say,
is once you get older you realize quite a common
kind of assimilation or coping mechanism for young people of color. Yeah,
(41:01):
like it sucks because like you grew up, you were
you were born and raised in the US, just like
everyone else, but you're still made to feel like somehow
you don't belong. And is that kind of exacerbated at
all in Texas given all of the overwhelming and prevailing
narratives about like the state of Texas and everything that
(41:24):
that represents. It's funny people asking that all the time,
I grew up in a liberal bubble, Like, yeah, my
school was the school that people who weren't Republicans sent
their kids too. It was super super liberal, really open
it like and if but it almost made it, I
mean it would have been shitty feature, like experiencing like
(41:49):
overt racism, but it was like the discrimination was more subtle,
Like it wasn't explicitly racist. It was more of a
subconscious bias, and like us hurts more because you're like,
I can't pinpoint why I'm being excluded, but I am.
Let's talk about that from a culinary perspective. Obviously you
(42:10):
had segregated your own worlds and your own lives. But
what was it like when the two worlds collided around
the table. What are some of your earliest memories of
those convergences. You mean, like my mom sort of coming
up with more hybridized dishes. Is that even exactly? Yes, yeah,
I mean it's it's funny. It's sort of just it
(42:31):
just happened naturally. It wasn't something that I think was conscious.
Like my mom was dealing with, you know, having to American,
very American kids who are product of American culture, and
she herself was living in the US, so it yeah,
it sort of came very organically. Like my sister and
I kept demanding pizza, and my mom was so annoyed
and didn't want to make pizza, and so she decided
(42:53):
to make pizza using ropeti. And you know, my mom
would travel to London and she would eat baked potatoes
and pubs and loves the idea of like a baked
potato soft top with sour cream, so she made a
version with sour cream and choppen massala and onions and cilantro.
Or we went to California and we ate California sour
dough and thought it was the greatest thing ever. So
(43:15):
we made these like Indian Ish like these like grilled
cheese sandwiches with stuff with yogurt and cilantro and onions,
and talked with curry leaves and mustard seeds, and we
use sour dough bread because the tang was so such
a beautiful marriage with like the intensity of the curry leaves.
So it's just it was just things like that. We
were discovering new ingredients and new new dishes, and my
(43:36):
mom was really curious and so was I, and so
that we kind of did everything but did it our
way to our tastes with what we had in the pantry.
And your mom, we discover in the book, is kind
of a superhero. Yeah, which tremendous woman? Can you tell
us more? About your mother. Yeah, I mean yeah, I
(43:58):
feel like superhero. It is a total understatement. Um, my
mom not only is an amazing cook, which you know,
I feel like a lot of a lot of mothers
are amazing cooks, but she was an amazing cook while
also being a like high powered executive for a software company,
which she still is. She has a hiking group where
(44:21):
she like literally hyped Machu Picchu with no training. She
co founded a film festival that showcases works by South Asians.
She knows a lot about wine. She's an amazing hostess.
She is really put together, has great taste, loves theater
and art and travel. She's just kind of this amazing
(44:46):
renaissance woman. And more most importantly, like she was an
amazing mom. She taught me that you don't need to
be a mother who's always around like you by being
super ambitious and I think by leaning into her interests
and her work, she sort of led by example for
my sister and I and we didn't really we didn't
(45:08):
need her to be around to know that she was
an amazing mom because she was sort of showing us,
you know, what it means to do it all. And
I think as i've gotten older and sort of contended
with balancing various things in my life. I've come to
appreciate that more than more and more right, and I think, actually,
I'm now realizing what a foolish initial question I had
(45:30):
and asking how you managed to be so accomplished and
prolific as a writer. Clearly you are your mother's daughter.
That is very nice. I definitely am not. I'm like
I would say, I'm like ten percent of the person
ore is. It's like one of those fundraising thermometers. I'm
just trying to work my way up to maybe be
like the way there, you got plenty of time. Do
(45:51):
you see your work as um as a calling or
as a way to honor that maternal relationship. I don't
know by explicitly c is a way to honor that
maternal relationship, but it's also like the only way my
mom taught me to be, you know, to have work
life balance, to hustle really hard, to not take no
(46:11):
for an answer, you know, to set extremely high goals
for yourself and then do everything you can to achieve them.
You know, I entered this industry with zero connections just
by sending like sixty cold emails and hoping that people
would respond. I feel like that's kind of how my
mom broke into her industry too. She kind of had
(46:32):
to like elbow her way in, but she did and
she's super successful. All right, let's transition a bit. I
want to talk about your one of your recent New
York Times articles about yogurt, and it seems like, at
least in our little corner of the food world, this
was a pretty widely circulated article because the condensed version
(46:54):
of the story is that your your family has had
a starter, a yogurt starter that is almost as old
as you are, or maybe older older than you are,
which is just really in a world of fast food
and prepackaged consumption, really boggles the mind. So can you
(47:15):
tell us not only about your your own famili's relationship
to this yogurt and starter um, but also Indian sort
of culinary culture at large. Yeah, I mean, I was
thought it was somewhat unique that my family had this
yogurt culture growing up, and that we kind of just
perpetuated the same yogurt starter. And I was excited to
(47:37):
find out that no, we were not unique, and there
are a number of families that did this. But it's
it's very common in Indian culture to make homemade yogurt.
I've learned. You know, yogurt is such a fundamental part
of Indian cuisine, which is you know, so divided across
regional lines, but yogurt is sort of this through line
that you'll find, you know, in cuisines from the north, south,
(48:00):
east to west. And so it was so amazing like
hearing all of these stories and sort of understanding how,
you know, when people immigrated to other countries, the way
that they stayed connected to their Indian heritage very often
was by transporting this yogurt culture from India and then
perpetuating it in the US. Like I heard all these
(48:20):
romantic stories about smuggling yogurt culture through customs and dipping
it in the folds of your sorry like, you know,
I just thought it was so beautiful. And to me,
my dad's yogurt that's as good of a taste of
home as any And you know, I hope that eventually
I'm I get to perpetuate that yogurt culture for my kids.
(48:42):
It's sort of a way of passing down a family legacy.
And I just found that so special that there are
so many families who had that shared experience. Oh, I
mean it's so beautiful. It's say, it's a living heir loam.
I mean it's so beautiful. Did you get any like
love letters from different corners of the world or people saying, oh,
(49:04):
this is how we do it or this is an application. Yeah,
I did, Actually, um I got. I got a lot
of notes after that article came out. I mean even
more interesting was when the article was being written, I
was sort of curious to see if my experience matched
with other people's experiences. So I put out a call
on Instagram and I was like overwhelmed with the response
(49:27):
of people with amazing stories of their families you og culture,
and then once article came out, even more people email
me being like this really speaks to this speaks to
my experience growing up. And I mean that was so
powerful to me that you know, all of us South
Asian kids, you know, our parents sort of all valued
(49:48):
the same thing. And I think you're totally right, Like
it is this living, breathing heirloom, and it's something that
you know, can transcend generation and transcend time, and and
it's a food. It's just you know, I feel like
there are very few foods that are capable of doing
that totally. Yeah. So my last question for you is
(50:09):
really just a big picture question, but it's about just
kind of how you view um the work that you're
making in the world right now. When when you talk
about your work or when you think about your work,
is there kind of a prevailing thing that you are
hoping that people take away from it, or is it
that you just people will take whatever they will take
(50:30):
from it and you just keep producing it. My beginning
is a food writer kind of coincided with the election,
and you know, at first I didn't want to be
defined by writing about a certain thing, but you know what,
I really do feel like I tried earnestly to focus
my writing on the communities that I feel are underrepresented
(50:54):
in food media. People who are, you know, making change
in the food world, but you know, haven't been written about.
And I guess that to me that means people from
cities that don't get covered often women, immigrants, communities of color,
members of the LGBTQ community. I just feel like it's
really important that we normalize a more sort of inclusive
(51:17):
world of food writing. And I feel like whatever small
part I can play in that. I'm happy to amen
to that and to all that I mean. And the
truth is, these are the stories I'm most interested in,
Like as a kid of immigrants, like, I feel like
it makes sense that I'm interested in in stories that
that relate to people who are underrepresented. So it feels
(51:39):
very natural to me. Yeah, and yet so far away
from your experience and growing up and consuming media that
not at all reflected your culture. So it's really beautiful that, Um,
we're in a moment in which we can hear from
more people, but for you in particular, I'm sure this
must be particularly thrilling, Um that you are creating part
(52:03):
of this new new paradigm. You're very much a part
of that, honestly. Yeah. Well, um, that's pre A Krishna
food writer and author of indian Ish recipes and antics
from a Modern American Family. I loved our conversation today, Priya,
Thanks for talking to us, of course, thanks for having
(52:25):
me on all right. The tale of two Yogurts and
the fight to protect go as fishing villages and waters.
It's all about preservation. It keeps us alive and teaches
us how to live. It feels really important to tell
(52:46):
you that origins are not definitive. Though it is language
we use to describe our work, it is in no
way comprehensive. The same is true of food anthropology, another
way we describe our work. And though the language we
have is inadequate to look at food in terms of
the study of past and present, well, that part of
food anthropology that feels like the right way to think
(53:08):
about our food, and so ultimately that's how we talk
about our work. The study of food is always past
and present. We'd like to thank our guest today. I'm
read to Gupta of the Food Radio Project, Sonage a
very cadre of Diasporaco, and Pria Krishna, author of Indian Ish,
for joining us today. Special thanks to Kat Hong and
(53:30):
Adam Lamport in Los Angeles, California for your editing and
production support, and to Roast and Post Studios in Oakland,
California for engineering this podcast. Point of Origin is a
podcast from my Heart Media and wet Stone Magazine Executive
produced by Christopher Hasiotis and hosted by me Steven Sadderfield,
and a very special thanks to my business partner, wet
(53:53):
Stone co founder Melissa she who helped produce this podcast.
Thanks Mel. You can listen to more a Point of
Origin on the I Heart media app or wherever you
listen to podcast. Thanks for listening to our very first
edition of Point of Origin. We hope you enjoyed it.
(54:15):
In our next episode, we pay homage to a country
that puts the ice and ice cream and in the land.
I'm talking about Iceland, y'all. And in our next episode,
we meet a chef turned geothermal salt maker and a
farmer who's making an extremely regionally specific dairy product, Icelandic
(54:36):
food Waves of yesterday and today. Next time on Point
of Origin podcast
Host
Stephen Satterfield
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