Six on History: Food
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
"AS WORLD WAR II APPROACHED, Thailand was in a precarious position. For years, the country’s leaders had clutched their independence closely, worried about the French and English, who had colonized neighboring Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. Now, Japan was expanding imperially into East Asia, having invaded China in 1937.
In response, Plaek Phibunsongkhram’s government took action. As part of a national campaign called “Noodle is Your Lunch,” the Public Welfare Department gave Thais free noodle carts and distributed recipes for a new national dish: pad Thai.
At the time, the dish was little known, and no one called it “pad Thai.” In rice-centric Thailand, then known as Siam, the dish seemed more Chinese—similar noodle dishes likely arrived in Thailand centuries earlier with Chinese traders. But Thailand’s prime minister, who first rose to power as part of a military coup against the longtime monarchy, had spoken. As part of his strident nationalism, he wanted all Thais to eat pad Thai.
A noodle project may seem trivial in the context of world war. But Phibunsongkhram, better known as Phibun or Pibul in the West, thought it was the very seriousness of the situation that demanded this response.
Phibun believed that a strong national culture, including pad Thai, was key to Thailand remaining independent. Thailand was surrounded by colonies that European powers had justified on the basis of civilizing and modernizing their populations. Plus, Japan, which coveted control of natural resources, was creating an empire in East Asia. “We must be as cultured as other nations,” Phibun told his ministers in a speech. Otherwise, “Thailand would be helpless and soon become colonized. But if we were highly cultured, we would be able to uphold our integrity, independence, and keep everything to ourselves.”
This was the highly charged atmosphere in which Phibun pursued his noodle project. Phibun, who liked to compare himself to Napoleon, cast himself in the mold of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and mandated fawning coverage of himself as “The Leader.” As noted in Priceonomics, he pursued Thai nationalism by banning the Chinese language from schools, removing ethnic Chinese people from prominent posts, and having Chinese food vendors kicked off the streets.
A new national dish was just one part of the revolution. Eager to signal a break from the country’s feudal, monarchical past, he made sweeping changes that ranged from switching the country’s name to Thailand to dictating how Thais should dress. Wearing traditional Thai clothing, instead of the trousers for men and hats for ladies that Phibun preferred, could result in a fine. (He had thoughts on color choices too.)
Many national dishes represent long histories of local ingredients, immigration, and symbolism. But pad Thai’s culinary coronation was more a matter of chance. According to Penny Van Esterik, author of Materializing Thailand, Phibun “simply had this particular version of a Thai noodle that was made by his housekeeper in his kitchen, and he really liked it.” Phibun’s son, Nitya Pibulsonggram, told Gastronomica in 2009 that his parents “actually made pad Thai popular during the War.” While he doesn’t recall who exactly introduced the dish to the household, he said that his father and the government “thought it would be useful to popularize it because it is so nutritious.”
In Thailand today, there’s little sign of pad Thai’s origins as a bureaucratic project.To Phibun, ensuring Thailand’s greatness required raising its standard of living, and officials were concerned about the Thai diet. Pad Thai, with its hearty mix of ingredients and the emphasis on cooking it in clean pots, fit the nation’s updated, modern nutritional guidelines. Like many Asian leaders, Phibun had studied in Europe. He associated Western ways with modernity, hence his desire to stamp out traditional Thai clothes in favor of European suits and skirts. But he also aimed to unify his diverse country around national pride.
Generations later, the Thai government found itself once again promoting pad Thai. To boost international awareness of the country and promote tourism, Thailand made it easier to export Thai ingredients, gave loans to Thai restaurateurs abroad, and established visas specifically for Thai chefs in countries such as New Zealand. The smashingly successful Global Thai program sent tourism soaring and dramatically increased the number of Thai restaurants globally.
"At around noon on Friday, firefighters were dispatched to a neighborhood in Australia’s capital city to hunt for the source of a potential gas leak after reports of a pungent smell wafting around the area.
At the time, Canberra resident Phuong Tran jokingly remarked on social media that the cause was probably someone eating durian, a spiky fruit from Southeast Asia that has a decidedly divisive reputation. Haters say it has an odoriferous smell; those who like the durian, on the other hand, call it the “king of fruits.”
An hour later, the regional Emergency Services Agency confirmed Tran’s quip. While searching the area, first responders were advised by the owner of a property above neighborhood shops that the source of the smell was likely to be a durian.
Tran said in an interview that he made a guess once he saw the report originated from Dickson, a neighborhood known for its many Asian restaurants and grocery stores.
Multicultural Australia has a sizable Southeast Asian population, many of whom have some roots in Malaysia, which is a major exporter and consumer of durians. Despite this, Friday was not the first time Australian residents mistakenly called for first responders after smelling the tropical fruit.
In 2018, nearly 500 students and teachers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology were evacuated from a campus library after a chemical hazard alert. The culprit turned out to be a piece of rotting durian left in a cupboard.
But its popularity has slowly spread beyond Southeast Asia. China, for instance, imported $2.3 billion worth of the fruit in 2020, United Nations data show. The chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain reportedly once remarked that the taste of durians is “indescribable, something you will either love or despise. … Your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”
Tran, the Canberra resident, is decidedly a fan: He is going to pick up a pack of durians after work on Friday."
Lobsters, oysters, and one-pot meals have long been associated with New England. But there’s a direct link between these foods and the enslaved people who lived in Rhode Island
"PROVIDENCE — Growing up in Rhode Island, Adena Marcelino didn’t think that sweet potatoes were anything special. She and her family, who can trace their roots back more than 200 years in Rhode Island, called them “candied yams.” Marcelino remembers sweet potato biscuits and sweet potato pie cooking in the kitchen, but never realized the vegetable’s true connection to Africans that came to the states hundreds of years ago until she researched it herself.
“It was always just ‘Black food.’ The origins, though, were never talked about,” said Marcelino, who owns Black Beans PVD restaurant.
The sweet potato originated in Peru, but when Africans arrived in Rhode Island, victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (which Rhode Island played a central role in), the root vegetable was the closest substitute they could find for the yams they were more accustomed to eating. Food historians say the first sweet potato dessert that was cooked by an enslaved African was roasted in the embers of a dim fire, which gave it a “glassy,” caramelized look that was described as “candied.”
Marcelino says she thinks a lot about food. A psychology major and former advocate in social services, she examines how food connects people from one generation to the next and how it has influenced cuisine across continents.
Food historian Tonya Hopkins is the co-founder of the James Hemings Society, a nonprofit dedicated to “serving, unearthing and illuminating” the contributions of food and drink professionals of African descent, including James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s classically French-trained chef. She said African and other Indigenous cultures are often overshadowed in the culinary world, which is dominated by the stereotypical “white male chef in a pressed white coat and hat.”
Hopkins focuses her research beyond “Soul” food and slavery, looking into the development of fine dining dishes in the Upper South and Chesapeake Bay’s “plantation kitchens” to those in the North, mid-Atlantic region, and New England. Much of fine dining is “Black culinary creation that gets folded into American food ways,” she said.
“In New England, people don’t even know how much the region benefitted financially because of slavery. They think they are so far removed from that history,” said Hopkins. “But it’s complicated. You have this group of people that have a huge influence on fine dining, but are excluded from partaking in it. They couldn’t even eat in these restaurants.”
Marcelino said there are many reasons why the roots of certain popular foods have been forgotten.
“I honestly believe in all my heart that in Rhode Island, it’s not all because of racism. I think a lot of it is because no one’s ever had that conversation locally,” said Marcelino. “When I say polenta, people in Rhode Island know its Italian. But I say grits, which is similar, they’ve never had it. When I say sweet potato pie, baked macaroni, collard greens, and corn bread, they say it’s Southern food. Not Black food, when that’s what it really is.”
According to Chef Neath Pal, a Johnson & Wales University instructor who teaches classic cuisines of the world (including many African dishes), the influence of African Diaspora can be found in New England cuisine in multiple ways, from ingredients like sweet potatoes, peanuts and peanut butter to methods of preparation like those one-pot dishes and stews and fried foods. And those plant-based meal plans that seem to be everywhere nowadays, didn’t derive from a fad diet— it was a method of survival for enslaved people because for them, meats were a luxury.
Oysters, which now sell for more than $1 each at fancy raw bars and beach-side shacks, have a similar history, said Pal.
“As people progress, really get in touch with their culinary past and heritage, and well-trained chefs tie the fundamental parts of cooking with the history of food, I’m hoping we see more acknowledgement” of a dish or ingredient’s influence, said Pal, who is originally from Cambodia and had owned Neath’s New American Bistro in Providence. Former New York Times food critic Bryan Miller had praised Neath’s as a “giant leap eastward” for the city’s food scene because of the way its chefs combine cultures on a plate while also paying homage to them.
While the Rhode Island Black food scene has expanded with the opening of Kin Southern Table + Bar by owner Julia Broome and The AI Vegan (AI stands for Afro-Indigenous) founded by Bree Smith, Marcelino said it’s only recently that Black people started opening restaurants in Rhode Island to “serve Black food for other Black people.”
“We can’t have more food whitewashed. When it becomes the ‘the state’s’ food, it doesn’t give props to how it was created outside of this country,” said Marcelino. “It takes more people of color to say ‘Listen, that’s our food. We have rights to that, we created that, and we have history behind that.’”
She added, “So give us credit where it’s due.”
" ... He also seeks out plants with medicinal benefits, including sassafras, that relatives introduced to him as a child. But it’s hard to tell what exactly Native people historically gathered in a given location, Smoke-McCluskey says, because of the US government’s attempts to purge Indigenous cultures.
“We’ve lost foodways by being moved a thousand miles away to a completely different territory,” Smoke-McCluskey says. “We’ve lost our knowledge of the woods that we managed where we originally were living.”
Before the law prohibited it, foraging also provided enslaved Black people with a means of survival. They gathered food to supplement the paltry meals provided by plantations and, after emancipation, some made a living off hunted and gathered foods. But during the Reconstruction era, Southern states undermined former slaves’ self-sufficiency by reversing centuries-old laws that previously allowed public access to unfenced lands.
Private property laws expanded throughout the United States and became standard by the mid-20th century, allowing landowners to stave off foragers and hunters. The burgeoning conservation movement, built on exclusion and discrimination, also threatened this tradition: In the 1890s, wealthy New Yorkers advocated for the creation of the Adirondack Park to restrict rural white residents and the Iroquois people from hunting and foraging within the region. These “outside elites,” Linnekin says, didn’t trust rural inhabitants as “wise stewards of the natural world.”
Distrust toward foragers also spread to burgeoning urban centers. As a result, most US cities currently prohibit the practice entirely or address it with ambiguous regulations, Linnekin says, but specific rules vary by municipality.
Nowadays, city and park officials commonly cite human safety and environmental concerns as reasons not to allow foraging. Overharvesting is a concern, particularly in urban parks, but studies based in Baltimore and Seattle show that experienced foragers tend not to take more than they need. Toxins in soil are also an issue, particularly in low-income areas that have been exposed to industrial waste at higher rates. But rather than banning foraging altogether, researchers with UC Berkeley Food Institute suggest that municipal governments accommodate foragers by conducting tests on public lands to make sure the soil is safe.
In practice, West Coast cities tend to be the most lenient, Linnekin says, perhaps because local governments and parks departments are more cognizant of foraging communities. In Los Angeles, trees plop goodies like figs, oranges, avocados, and passionfruit onto public sidewalks; if a tree grows in a public space, these are fair game. But within county parks, the legal code explicitly prohibits picking fruit. ... "
"IT IS A SWELTERING AFTERNOON in Curtorim, South Goa, and Santano Rodrigues is arguing with his friends over when to eat lunch. He’s spent all morning supervising machinery and inspecting large mounds of grain with farmers, and he is now zipping around the office he shares with the village library. He is looking through maps, making lists, as the others in the room converge around a table with noodles and bottles of lemonade.
“He never eats!” his friend Michaela Pais tells me. “No time for wasting,” he shouts back. “My mother, she eats for me!”
Rodrigues’s restlessness is not misplaced. It is an important day, one that he’s been anticipating for months. Rodrigues is overseeing the inauguration of a new mechanism, a metal rice boiler two agriculture students developed. He hopes the boiler will become a new harvest ritual in the village. In Curtorim, rice grains, especially those of indigenous varieties, need to be plucked, sorted, threshed, and then boiled for the skin to separate from the grain, after which they are stored. This process is usually done in metal pots on wood fire and supervised during the process. The new boiler is designed to ease these tasks, the students tell us onlookers. A large barrel with an inbuilt electrical drainage system, the instrument, which is two hundred liters in size, can boil ninety kilograms of harvested rice at once, requiring less water and labor and keeping farmers from the hazards of wood fire and coal. “Now no one can make excuses!” Rodrigues says.
As the young men set up the boiler in the yellow courtyard, Rodrigues ushers in a group that he introduces as the Curtorim Biodiversity Management Committee. Elderly locals sit down to drink tea and eat samosas, and the room brightens with noise. An English schoolteacher from the village tells me a story about a determined millipede who counts its legs every day. “Santano,” he says to me, “he is our millipede.”
I watch Rodrigues as Pais pours large quantities of rice into the boiler. He looks nervous. “If it spoils, I am to blame,” he frets. The others are optimistic, clapping their hands in anticipation. Rodrigues won’t stop chewing his nails. Pritesh Mayekar, one of the students who set up the boiler, tells me that Rodrigues chased him for months to inaugurate the device. “Uncle really pushed us to finish,” he says with a shrug. “Young people don’t farm that much. It’s still people my parents’ age. He wants to make things easy for them.”
Curtorim is a predominantly rice-farming village, sometimes known as the “Granary of Salcette” due to its history of rice production. Rice is a culture here, not merely a livelihood, grown over several systems of land and irrigation that have been sustained over centuries. In Goa, rice is grown in morod (or uplands), kherlands (midlands), and khazans (low-lying wetlands), the most challenging to farm. As we wait for the rice to boil, Rodrigues rolls down a wall-size map of the village’s various land systems, and Pais points to the khazans: seven in all, both big and small.
“This is the wisdom of our ancestors,” she says. “You will not find them anywhere else.” Then she points at me and says, “She has never seen them before,” and the others look at me with concern.
Khazans are predominantly rice and fish fields. They are formed out of reclaimed wetlands, salt marshes, and mangrove areas where constructed embankments and sluice gates regulate tidal influence and the influx of seawater. They are a heritage, but a dying one in a rapidly urbanizing Goa, whose rows of shark-faced villas and apartment complexes with swimming pools have replaced most of the area’s ancient trees and marine ecosystems. Swaths of gentrification have recently robbed the state—a tourism hot spot for decades—of its biodiversity. This has led to a direct assault on its agriculture and the diversity of both its farming systems and the crops themselves. For within each khazan exists its own special varieties of rice that have evolved over thousands of years to suit the sites. The predominant khazan variety found today is known as Korgut—a plump, brown grain resistant to salinity and nutritious to eat.
Rodrigues shakes his head when I ask if he plans to feed any Korgut into the boiler today. “It’s precious. I’m not going to put it in there,” he whispers, as if it were a secret that no one else knows.
It is Korgut that I came looking for in Curtorim. Khazans and their rice varieties had intrigued me when I first read about them in 2018. It struck me as miraculous that rice could be grown in saltwater. I wondered what it would taste like—would the rice itself be salty? And I wondered why agrarian cultures like these were sidelined for more cosmetic, aspirational food cultures.
When I first arrived, I drove around North Goa, asking farmers, supermarket workers, neighbors I met at tea stalls, whether they knew about it.
“Have you heard of Korgut?” I asked Sumana Kerkar, a farmer from whom I bought a pineapple every morning. “Of course,” she said, cutting the fruit’s large head and dropping it in my bag. “I grew up eating it. There are songs of Korgut, so many stories. It is the real rice. The Goan rice.”
AGRICULTURE HAS BEEN a mainstay in the region for centuries, and in every corner, a different climate, temperature, and soil quality establish what people have grown and what they can eat. During my time in Goa, locals would teach me to note the difference in climate and terrain. “Here you can see lilies, so it is sweet water, and we can grow green vegetables,” someone told me as I drank tea near a river. “Coconut grows there. The reddish soil is rich in aluminum,” a friend informed me as we drove around the region, rice fields giving way to hilly forests, covert rivers appearing and disappearing.
Hundreds of cues point out the complexities of ecological wealth in Goa. Every creek, river, and stream is drawn into local rituals and called by its name. Rice, too, is part of these anatomies. Although the primary food group of the region, rice is not homogenous. Through the history of Goa—perhaps all of India—it wasn’t a single grain that fed people but scores of varieties developed to meet the distinct demands of the region’s climates and terrains. Today, Goa has twenty-eight types of indigenous rice that can be patented and grown. However, in the last forty years, indigenous seeds like Korgut have been almost completely replaced with hybrid, high-yielding varieties such as Jyoti and Jaya, which now make up around 80 percent of all grains grown in the region. The remaining 20 percent includes other varieties, with khazan varieties forming a negligible percentage of what is farmed.
I’m discussing this with horticulturist Miguel Braganza, whom I meet one morning for coconut water and biscuits on his veranda in Mapusa. “If you cut me open right now, you would find rice, fish, and cashew,” he says. “This is what Goans are made of; it is what constitutes us.”
Braganza and I talk about the liberation of Goa, wherein Goa went from being a Portuguese territory to seceding to the Indian mainland in December 1961. Prior to that, an economic blockade on the region was enforced which means that food imports stopped. “Everyone, regardless of who they were, farmed,” Braganza remembers. His father, a teacher, would return home in the evening and tend to the fields. “Varieties of millets adapted to coarse rock: rice, finger millet, cowpea, horse gram,” he says. “Food was grown everywhere, so there would be no shortage.”
Braganza reminisces about rice dishes he ate as a young boy that have faded away over the years. “Kanji, or rice gruel, was a morning treat—we ate it with coconut or pickle,” he says. “Bhakris made from rice. Sweets like godshe, which is a dessert made from rice, jaggery, and lentils, a delicacy. But they would taste different. Indigenous Goan rice has tastes and textures of its own. We are now so used to milled, polished rice, many cannot tell the difference.”
Vince Costa, a filmmaker from Curtorim, tells something similar on the phone. “If you made a Goan rice cake with basmati, would that really be Goan?” he asks. “Would it taste anything like the rice cakes we eat, the same dish made with the food from the land?” Costa’s film Saxtticho Koddo is an effort to capture the contemporary rice cultivation in his hometown, and the processes and hierarchies involved in placing food on the Goan plate. Although Goan cooking may be simple, determined by agrarian appetites and robust flavors, it is anything but simplistic.
Every creek, river, and stream is drawn into local rituals and called by its name.
On Costa’s instructions, in the morning markets of the region, I started to ask about gaonti, the “food of the village,” which is produced in small farms and house gardens. Among gaonti are hundreds of varieties of yams, aubergines, and okra. Each home could have a mango that tastes different, each family a cashew tree distinct from the next. Gaonti is more expensive than genetically modified produce from neighboring Maharashtra, but these vegetables disappear before the sun rises on the bazaars. Locals flock to inquire about large pumpkins, frizzy yams, and sour tamarind pods the size of toddlers’ legs. I have to sprint to the markets at six a.m. when I want my share of gaonti, queuing up for a pumpkin variety I have become besotted with—creviced and wonky, a small vegetable sweeter than any I have eaten before.
Even as gaonti resists erasure, rice varieties have not managed the same feat. Indigenous rice seeds have begun to dwindle, and are almost nonexistent in the market. “We took it for granted,” Costa tells me, “which is why I started making this film. I wanted to document the multiplicity of what we have, and also who works for it.” Costa talks about how the new generation of Goans may not know the wealth of their own home; how farmers, though they form the backbone of the Goan economy, have been turned into scapegoats to support the tourism industry, pawns in the Technicolor dreams of Goa, in which the region becomes reduced to an object of desire. “Rice is an issue of land, and in Goa, land is volatile, land moves at an astounding pace,” he says. Biodiversity is a tricky concept—the lack of it is borne by the human desire for more, for plenty, for outside products, for aspirational foods. “There are many cultures of greed at play here. And they destroy the abundance that may be right in front of us, at our doorstep.”
BACK IN CURTORIM, Rodrigues and a farmer named Alan Menezes wait for their friend Matthew Oliveiro on a road swathed on both sides by fields. They look at me gravely when we disembark our scooters. Rodrigues tuts at me in annoyance. It is the middle of the afternoon, and the temperatures have risen. I stare at the large piece of land in front of us, flat as an iron slab. Somewhere around us, I smell water. Before I understand why Rodrigues is upset, Oliveiro arrives, greeting me with dazzling familiarity. “Hello, Miss!” he says in Konkani with his hands spread apart. “Welcome to the khazans!”
“Where are they?” I say brightly.
“What do you mean, where?” he asks, laughing. “You’re on them!”
“City people,” Rodrigues says, making sure I am in earshot. “Always looking ahead, never around.”
As we walk, I notice the landscape in front of us, my brain taking its own time to adjust to the breadth of it. The flatland is guarded at the back by mangroves. Behind it lies the River Zuari, which I can now hear and smell. Khazans constitute agricultural lands, Oliveiro tells me, slightly elevated by mero, inner embankments made of mud, straw, and bamboo poles that prevent the fields from eroding. They are protected by bundhs, outer embankments guarded by mangroves that act as natural tide breakers. The architecture regulates the movement of water around the farms, channeling it by way of manos, or sluice gates. The manos are made with the wood of matti, a local tree that is resilient to water erosion, and are positioned between the inner reservoir and the estuary.
“The manos are the most important,” Oliveiro says as we approach one, “which is why you will see that they are guarded by a shrine.” There is water on both sides of the gates. On one side is high tide, Oliveiro tells me, where the water is deeper, held in place to keep it from entering the fields. I try to refrain from banal questions, but they come anyway.
“Why is the water not released?” I ask.
“Because we were harvesting,” Oliveiro says. “Once the seeds have been planted, all this water will be sent their way.”
I hurry after the farmers as we pass by the dense foliage, the thicket of mangroves. I forgive myself for not recognizing the khazans. I expected farmlands, raised plateaus whose primary purpose is to grow food. But these lands where we stand are more than just farms—they are animal habitats, clusters of estuaries, the pit of a river, a hub of tropical trees. Here is the intersection of many things at once.
We keep walking as we reach another connecting khazan, where farmers work on a manual threshing machine. They put long stalks of rice under the wheel, separating the grain from the stalk. “Korgut is strong,” a farmer named Hipolito D’Costa tells me. “It doesn’t fall off that easily, so it really has to be yanked!”
But as hard as they’re working, none of this rice will reach the market. Traders only want polished rice, shiny long-grained rice that they can package and sell with ease. Korgut is harvested and stored in homes, distributed to families, sold to other villagers, kept for special treats to eat. “It is the food of our childhood,” D’Costa says. “This is what my parents ate.” He elaborates that, although he loves to eat Korgut, his children have no liking for it at all. “They want to eat sweets and masala food,” he says in resignation. “With the cultures of the land, appetites change as well.”
I ask about the intense labor involved in harvesting the rice, and why they keep farming it if it’s losing its appeal. “Nobody minds the work,” Oliveiro says. Rodrigues nods in agreement. “Farmwork is our heritage. It is not a burden. But the problem is, [farmers are given] no incentives from the government.”
We sit down for tea in the shade, where we talk about the “comunidade system,” a system of communal ownership that once allowed the local governments to own the khazans. The comunidades existed until legislation in 1961 transferred land to the tiller, making private ownership the default system. “Because of the migration of people outside Goa, people are able to sell land easily, which disrupts the khazans,” Rodrigues says.
But many like Costa caution me not to romanticize the systems that used to run through the comunidade. “The comunidade was efficient, but also profited elite castes and classes. It was not always democratic,” Costa had said. But Rodrigues iterates that coordination is important. “Which is why these khazans still run on a community-farming system. This way, gates, auctions, and other repairs are taken care of together,” he says. I learn that Korgut cannot be stored for more than one season, like many indigenous seeds, so it needs to be planted every year to preserve.
The farmers tell me about other varieties that have gone extinct—Shitto, Babri, and Patni—fat red and brown grains, sweet and starchy. When they ate them, they felt content and full. “Light, but filled up, like a balloon,” says D’Costa.
These lands where we stand are more than just farms. . . . Here is the intersection of many things.
We are walking through their garden, plucking tiger-striped eggplants for lunch and talking about the varieties they have encountered—some medicinal, others nutritious, and others sweet rice varieties for desserts. “This is more like a forest!” I say, and Krishan laughs. “It may seem so,” she says, “but it’s all very planned. We had to make sure to place the seeds where they may flourish, situate them next to others that will not hamper their growth.” As we walk, Krishan plucks small red chilies and shows me the large leaves of her turmeric plants. “We try to disrupt people’s biases that are ingrained in their palate by changing their minds about indigenous foods. Slowly, we want to bring around a discussion as to how they eat,” Krishan says.
Suddenly she points at a small patch ahead of us. “There it is!” she says excitedly. Korgut! The thing that has held my attention for so long. It is a worthy participant in Krishan’s garden, a small haven of indigenous seeds that nestle among one another, determined to thrive. Krishan flings a stalk of Korgut across her shoulder like a light log of wood. I kneel down, studying its small grains that sit firmly on the stalk, and put a stray seed in my pocket by instinct.
We pluck a few more seeds and carry them to a small room, which the duo use as their office. “Because it is a khazan variety, I am not sure if it will grow here,” Krishan tells me. “But I want to try and propagate it so we have the seeds. We can store them and share with those who need or want to grow Korgut.” Ghosh Dastidar walks into the room in her chef’s apron. She picks up the grain and peers at it. “Indigenous grains have different shapes, and can also be different colors when they are harvested because they haven’t been homogenized,” she says.
As Ghosh Dastidar cooks us lunch, Krishan and I talk about the aftereffects of the Green Revolution, a set of technology transfers headed by American seed scientist Norman Borlaug, which industrialized the Indian agricultural system in the 1960s. The initiative looked to multiply production in the country by introducing foreign hybrid seeds and pesticide-based crop cultures to the subcontinent. Although quantities were increased, the mechanization of procedures pushed many indigenous seeds to the periphery. “It brought in a seed-and-crop culture that farmers did not understand,” she says. ... "
"I spent 15 years pretending to be a White guy.
For more than a third of my life, I wrote restaurant reviews under the pseudonym Jean Le Boeuf — as one in a long line of Le Boeufs at the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. The name dates to 1979 and has been handed down critic to critic. Le Boeuf could, in theory, be anyone. That was the point. But if my inbox served as indication — where emails started “Dear Sir” and “Cher Monsieur” — most readers assumed Jean was a dude. A French dude.
Being who I am in a place such as where I’m from can lay the groundwork for one hell of an identity crisis. And with the 2020 U.S. Census numbers showing more people counted as multiracial than ever before — 33.8 million, compared with just 9 million in 2010— I’m confident I’m not alone in having experienced one.
“I just really like food,” my father and I told her.
Cooking turned to catering, which led to a part-time job at the News-Press. When a prior Le Boeuf left, I pounced. When I got the job, I was overjoyed. I’d always been seen as Brown, as mixed, as never quite enough. But as Le Boeuf I could wield the ultimate power: Whiteness.
“One of the greatest underrecognized privileges of Whiteness might be the license it gives some to fail without fear,” the critic Adam Bradley recently wrote. I get it. As Le Boeuf, I was fearless.
I railed against rubbery deviled eggs and tired fusion concepts. I did so knowing no one would mansplain to me what eggs should “really” taste like or troll me with some “Stick to Chinese food!” nonsense. I told people where to eat, and they listened. This was power as I’d never known it.
But this power came at a price: my identity. That price felt cheap at first. I’d never embraced my identity. Why start now?
Over time, though, I began to see how steep the price was. I spoke to Rotary clubs who listened politely before asking: “But do you know Jean Le Boeuf?” On my seldom-used résumé, I wrote “restaurant critic*” then tried to succinctly explain why I wrote under the name of a fake Frenchman.
When the News-Press acquired the neighboring paper and added a second Le Boeuf position, I waited for reporters to pounce as I had. The only person to show interest asked the question that had never crossed my mind: “Why can’t I use my own byline?”
At first I wanted to tell them how much the name means to this town. How we all grew up reading and loving Jean. But at some point, I realized no one needed him more than I did. The name’s power and privilege had consumed me. I’d gone from never being enough, to being no one.
So earlier this year, I did something that struck pure fear into me: In an essay, I revealed myself as Jean Le Boeuf. I waited for readers to unleash on me, to accuse me of killing a local icon. The first email I received was addressed: “Dear Ms. Tometich.” The next: “Hi Annabelle!” I didn’t get hate mail. People wrote “thank you” and “great job.”
For the first time in my professional life, I felt like I belonged.
Belonging, connecting — that, I have learned, is true privilege. I’m not exactly fearless in this new life, but I’m no longer afraid to be myself. To my fellow multiracial Americans, I say: four stars. I highly recommend it."
