Unplated: An Interview with Nickawanna Shaw

On philosophy, health, and identity, and the power of a good fridge clean-out

This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.

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Nickawanna Shaw (she.they.yall) is a professor at Citrus College in the division of Kinesiology, Health, and Athletics. While she is a certified yoga and Thai massage therapist, her passion is empowering others through teaching hands on food exploration and US immigrant food history as they intersect with seen and assumed identities.

We met through the fermentation community, and I quickly fell in love with her expansive and multi-faceted approach to health and food (her interview, interwoven into Our Fermented Lives, is one of my favorites of the whole book), and her pandemic fridge cleanouts have inspired me to reconnect with the abundance that's already right in front of me (we're both guilty of making way more kitchen experiments than we usually eat!)

In this interview, we talk about the philosophical grounding of her work, how food and Buddhism and Ayurveda and kintsugi all inform her teaching practice, and about her magical fridge cleanouts.

JS: First of all, tell me a bit about who you are and what you do. How would you describe your work? 

NS: My name is Nickawanna Shaw and my primary profession is teaching. I teach about the body, how the mind works, and try to scratch the surface of why those topics, when they intersect around food and sport, makes us human. And by human I mean: flawed and capricious while also being brave and gloriously imperfect.

JS: I love your approach to teaching because it's very interdisciplinary, and you focus on bringing in what's important and relevant rather than what's bounded by a specific field of study. Can you tell me a bit about your pedagogical philosophy?

NS: (I love big words!)

My philosophy is derived from a riff on two different Buddhist concepts and one Japanese artform. 1. To eat like a vulture, not like an eagle. 2. Central to the Vajrayana tradition, you are essentially whole as you enter this world and we learn to break ourselves to fit the brokenness of a human life, suffering being a condition of living embodied and separate from our interconnectedness. And 3., kintsugi, which is the practice of making beautiful what is broken.

This speaks to my pedagogical approach because one can't learn without questioning. If I only eat curated research or texts I'll never know how what I teach works. You have to be up to your knees in the swamp with people,  allow yourself to be up close, to eat everything as if it can all be medicine. And you question/pay attention to when truth becomes fiction as new ways of knowing are discovered. 

As for being essentially whole, my interest in teaching is to empower others to see their capacity for action in their own lives, be that at a personal level within their arms reach or at the 30k foot level taking on their community's needs for leadership.  I can't tell them what to do, but I do have tools to help them discover who they are. Sometimes that's through the physical because literal movement can reconnect our bodies that have disconnected through experiences of trauma. Sometimes that's through the mind and imagination in sharing meditation space, where they can safely embrace and question their doubts and what appears broken.

Lastly, when learners can have direct experiences of themselves, they can hold tenderly those apparent fissures, reparenting themselves and honoring those places where they are stuck as lessons of resilience. 

JS: Your work intersects heavily with food in a number of ways. What is the significance of food to you as a teacher, and in your work writ large? 

NS: Food is about justice. I didn't come to this idea directly.  It started many years ago as I sought to improve my overall teaching. What I discovered was the tip of the iceberg because I hadn't asked "What aren't my students learning?" outside of my presumption that a new slide deck could fix everything. That exploration led to exploring how the brain and stress effect learning, how the physicality of unencumbered people is different than those with ongoing experiences of grief and oppression, and that food and food sovereignty place a huge role in the lives of my students who are currently primarily from BIPOC households. 

When teaching about food it is fundamental to teach it with an eye to its intersectionality. In teaching about nutrition and eating patterns, it is my job to repatriate foods back to the people and cultures to which they belong. Most of the staple, commodity crops in the US belong to the people of Turtle Island, the indigenous from whom many things were colonized including their food. 

Potatoes are not from Idaho. Tomatoes are not from Italy.  It is my job to remind students especially those colonized by the Spanish that they have and are feeding the world. Without them, the Renaissance wouldn't have happened. Without cacao Europe would have stayed on the messy teat of long beer for a while longer before tea and coffee made their way west. We owe such a debt to these cultures and I work to remind these students of their heritage. Without their ancestors would we have had a DaVinci? Would the scientists of the middle millenias have bucked the church and come back to the path of empirical truth? 

In so many ways facts seem negotiable in this world.  Food is political and it's something that is undeniable. If we can show honor to the cultures of the world that feed us, we can see that those people are like us and that we love many of the same things. Food is a place where hard conversations about who matters and why can be had without political affiliations. 

JS: Watching your work, I get the sense that 'health' is an expansive term: You're thinking about physical health and nutrition and movement, but you're also thinking about mental health, rest, and about curiosity and play (I love seeing that when you talk about your travels!) How do curiosity and play connect to health? How can we use food to connect us to a more expansive understanding of health and well-being?

NS: This question is so layered.  I could probably write too much here. So I'll try to be very focused. I think "health" like "diet' is highly individual. That is, for me, a very Ayurvedic way to look at the work. 

Curiosity and play are ways we feed the soul.  Every choice made in our lives is a part of a larger diet that feeds the many koshas, or sheaths. The physical body needs food, water, and air. The prana body needs energy to move either with thought, breath, or movement. We feed ourselves through our senses and, if we are mindful, we can hear what we crave and feed ourselves a healthful helping. 

For me that healthy diet includes traveling.  My eyes need to consume different sights while my body learns new ways to react, tuning my nervous system to novel stimuli. Making we more flexible, less fearful of change. For others, my exploration could be poison to the constitution because they need more stillness. 

Health, with a capital H, is holistic. We eat many things through our senses that can preserve us or do harm. And in the world we live in, being aware of what we're consuming is as important now as ever in the media drenched info-supermarket.

Specific to food, let's focus on the beginning and end of food's journey:  the farm and your mouth. Being a conscious eater is the simplest way to use what we ingest as a bridge to greater well-being. Paying attention to where your meal comes from and how those who shepherd your food from field to fellow humans is a place we mostly forget.  Many were reminded of these unseen hands during the pandemic, but in afraid we're sliding back into amnesia. Remember your money governs the practices of agribusiness, not the other way around.  

And at the mouth end, practicing mindful eating and gratitude can be helpful practices to generate compassion inside a good system that sorely needs it. Be grateful for the workers, the animals, the plants, transportation, etc.  And also grateful for each bite. Be present to taste and savor your access to food. And in a concrete way, mindful eating can help us consume what we need versus eating for appetite which leads to overeating and long-term poorer health when one eats to self-medicate.  

JS: How can we use our own practices of teaching and sharing knowledge to help people personalize their connection to what's on their plate? How can the intersection of food and pedagogy make use more intentional, aware eaters? 

NS: In 100 years we've basically lost thousands of years of food knowledge. The boon of technology supplanted the need for traditional food ways across many cultures. The idea of "sanitary food" barred indigenous and cultural food practices the world over especially as it pertains to fermentation and herbalism. 

This is why we need to teach more classes on traditional foods and food history. You can't have intentional eaters who can't grow a plant or make fermented food. You can’t make locavore or an orthorexic by teaching selected western food practices and biomedical ideas. But one needs to learn skills carried forward many millenia along with "counting macros". It's hard to appreciate something you can't do and you've been trained to see as labor that is beneath you.  

JS: I want to wrap up by talking about your fridge clean out meals, which are one of my favorite things to see on social media. You're so creative with your combinations, but you also use them to talk about life philosophy, stress management, and other things well beyond the act of cleaning a fridge. Can you talk a bit about this? How did fridge cleaning become an act of, I don't know, I want to say intention or mindfulness, for you?

NS: Fridge Cleaning was a beautiful act of desperate boredom during the pandemic. My partner commented on the fullness of the fridge,  due largely by my stress management food creating activities.  

So to keep the peace and take responsibility for the abundance, I set out to cull the clutter and eat it. I could see that the abundance was also me trying to manage the stress of our life situation(s) in that moment. Being able to quiet that distracting chitta vritti (mind chatter) with focused activity that engages the sense works like sitting to meditate for me.

 When I dove into the fridge project, what I discovered was that I felt more creative and willing to try new combinations because I had to use everything up. During those sessions with my head stuck in the fridge,  I'd have an aha since another meditation for me is the mindful and methodically present mindedness require to safely play with food. The fridge and its content held space for me to have these deeper quieter thoughts amidst the disquiet I often felt watching black lives lost and friends falling ill. Each jar was a trip away from my dead end rumination, forcing me to act and do differently. I had to be present for my life, not frozen in worry.  The endless jars were just that: worry personified. The projects allowed me to tackle those fears.

You can find Nickawanna’s adventurous food experiments at @Nickawanna on Instagram.  

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