Shifting Habits

Using Traditional Foods to Imbue Joy into the Low Waste Conversation

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I've been thinking a lot lately about climate change, particularly as the fight for Atlanta's forests has continued to make national and international headlines. The situation can feel hard and hopeless, and has left me thinking about how we talk about climate, our environmental stewardship (or lack thereof), and our personal practices, on a larger scale.

Many of the conversations we have are, understandably, centered around eco-grief and around fear for the future. I feel these feelings deeply, ever more so as I continue to learn from and be in awe of the natural world. The more you are able to understand even a fraction of what you're losing, the more the loss stings.

I find this translates down to smaller-scale responsibility too: Each of us have encountered advice (or just our own internal monologues!) that uses guilt to drive sustainable practices like low-waste cooking and energy conservation.

Educating people about sustainability is critical, but I also know that approaching my own kitchen habits purely from a place of grief, and loss, and fear, will only make those habits feel like a chore. All those difficult emotions get wrapped up in my kitchen practice, sucking the joy out of something that sustains me physically and spiritually

Add a layer of fear, or worry, or guilt to the practice of cooking: am I really being as sustainable as I can? Do I need to feel guilt because I bought grapes in a plastic clamshell that one time?

Like guilt-driven sustainability narratives, separating our low waste food practices from their nuance and tradition makes them harder to swallow. Bulleted lists of zero waste ideas often carry the same sort of guilt (e.g., I should feel bad about using any unsustainable resource, rather than centering excitement around learning about and incorporating more sustainable ones). But just describing a technique as 'zero waste' without looking at the other roles it plays in our lives decontextualizes it from the things that make it more interesting and more fun.

I think for example about saving scraps to make stock. Yes, it is 'zero waste' (and is one of the things I'll talk about next week), but it's a lot more than that.

It's a measure that many people have employed over the course of generations, in many countries, to make something new out of what might have gone bad. The first time I encountered stock from vegetable scraps was working in restaurants, but many people also make it at home.

And it's an ever-changing flavor experiment, too: The stock I made yesterday tastes radically different than the one from last month, simply because I used different scraps to make them.

When decontextualized from this joy and from their past, our traditions become utilitarian: Purely a way for us to meet a certain standard or check a box. When we think of traditions only in terms of their benefit, we run the risk of stripping them of their humanity, and of overshadowing the ancestors who created them.
It feels moralistic but also mechanical rather than fluid and fun, which then makes it harder to stick with low waste cooking as an ongoing habit. Is a sustainable practice really sustainable if you don't  want to keep doing it?

Guilt-driven low waste advice feels like a capitalist way of viewing our approach to our carbon footprint, distilling our relationship to waste down to input/output: A creative, multigenerational, multicultural practice boiled down to outcomes expressed in terms of resources used or saved.

Sustainability is a joy

What if, instead of treating low waste cooking habits as a set of techniques we learn towards a certain goal, we connect with what actually makes those habits joyful? What if, instead of removing the humanity and history from our techniques, we instead imbue them with both?

Perhaps low waste would become a natural part of our lives, something that happens automatically. Rather than feeling like a set of tasks we have to do, it becomes more joyful hobby than the drudgery of a habitual chore.

This is why I teach people to reduce food waste through an emphasis on low waste techniques as living traditions, ones we can plug into and carry forward. When we learn about the traditions, we are able to spark our curiosity and feel connected to process. We are able to find our humanity through the acts passed down from those before us. And when we adapt a process to fit our kitchens, we're able to do so with an eye towards its context.

I find that this approach is fun and imaginative and generative. Recognizing my culinary landscape is different, in tangible, practical ways, than those of most of my ancestors, I still can adopt aspects of their approach to food.

For example, thinking of how to work with each usable part of a vegetable rather than just the part we're used to (I like to point to carrot tops and peels).

This means approaching everything we eat from the point of view that each ingredient is a source of abundance: Rather than creating more waste by only using the parts we're used to, we can approach each ingredient we eat from the point of view that it has multiple gifts to offer us (I call my low waste cooking class Preserving Abundance for this reason).

Another possible benefit is not only a more resilient pantry but also more resilient people: Eco-grief is a real and very common issue, one increasingly common as the impacts of climate change make themselves ever more apparent. When we approach solutions, personally and collectively, from a place of joy, we can appreciate what we have but also maybe, just maybe, not feel like the weight of the world is on our shoulders.

Finding joy where we can, even in grief, is an important way to keep grief from becoming your whole world. As someone who has felt her fair share of grief, it's in locating those moments of joy and expanding them that has been critical to me being able to see outside of it. When we look at an issue from a place of love and joy (to the extent we can) we can begin to see solutions: To embrace joy is to embrace possibility, in our kitchens and beyond.

Bringing joy and love into the food waste conversation, then, is revolutionary because it asks us to envision a world that could be, not only the one that is.

This makes me think back to fermentation, which has a millennia-long global history, and is a practice that dramatically enriches my life with each new ferment. When I make kimchi or sauerkraut or mead or bread, I can put my own practice in conversation with the millions of other people who have made that food or drink across time and place.

I find joy in the kitchen in part because I find community in it too. And thinking of traditional foods through the lens of community helps me feel guided by those fellow makers: I can ask questions like 'how would you use this?' 'what can I add to this dish?' and feel out the results. It allows my imagination to play, but perhaps lets me tap into a well of knowledge I otherwise may not have accessed. 

I wonder what else we can frame through the lens of tradition and reconnect to the many generations of hands and hearts who passed on skills and knowledge to us that we often take for granted?
Textiles (like those from Whetstone) come to mind: Buying from smaller producers and buying less, rather than succumbing to fast fashion. In other words, quality over quantity.

The edict of "buying from small producers and buying less," though, is a good one for just about anything, and is one I've been working to adopt throughout my life, not just in my kitchen.

In the next issue I'll be sharing some of my favorite low waste cooking tips with you. I hope they'll help make your kitchen a place of abundance and joy, too.

News:

·      Please join me and Sandor Katz on April 5th for "Between Past and Future: Fermentation as a Living Tradition" through MOFAD.
Sign up here (and US attendees have the option to purchase a copy of Our Fermented Lives, too!)

·      I'm excited to be cooking for the Ancestral Mothers' Retreat in Eigg, Inner Hebrides, Scotland. Join us for crafts, healing, nature time and some good meals.

·      It was a joy to talk with KCRW's Good Food about my book, Our Fermented Lives, and all things fermented.

Read:

As I continue to daydream and search for land in Cork, I'm inspired by Eoghun Daltun's work rewilding on the Beara peninsula. Read more about his work at the Beara Rainforest site or in his book, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest.

I love Vittles, including this article on food tattoos.

If you remember my newsletter issues (here and here) or my Atlanta Magazine article on synesthesia, you might also be interested in this piece in the Public Domain Review, on early research into associations by synesthetes.

I'm fascinated by this workshop on turning research into artists' books, which is a topic I've been grappling with in my own work. If you happen to be in Maine this summer, it's worth a look.

I enjoyed reading this piece by Aílín Quinlan on a bean pie recipe written in Ireland and made with cans of baked beans, a bit different from the bean pie we know here in the South.

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