I find strength in your presence.

This season can be difficult. It is dark more than it is light, and many of the seasonal rituals that help us cope with this time are stark reminders of what I have lost this year. It has become easy to focus on the void and loss.
I decided to be kind to myself today and take it a bit easy and take advantage of the day’s light – which started with a run around our little lake with the rising sun.
I stopped in front of a birch tree on the lake’s edge and looked out at the water – where a very thin layer of ice had formed over night. The icy stillness gave way to a dark silhouette of pine forest on the other side, reaching into a dull orange sunrise. My perspective from warrior pose drew my gaze to the birch branches, whose frosty contours shimmered brightly against the dark pine silhouette in concentric rings – an ephemeral eternity. I was reminded then that you are with me.

And I find strength in your presence.

“With Our Own Hands” arriving home

Latofat, a school principle in the most remote valley of the Pamir mountains sometimes wondered if the two foreigners who 4 years showed up at her door unannounced saying they were collecting recipes about Pamiri food would ever return. She was also a bit skeptical about whether there would ever be a book. When she heard on Monday that we were returning to Siponj village, with books in tow, that very day, she said she simply could not wait to see the book.

“With Our Own Hands: A celebration of food and life in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan” has arrived back in the Pamirs, and 1500 copies have been started be distributed to every community in the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs. The book began as a simple recipe book, to fulfill a promise to a grandmother and to document the rich unwritten knowledge about the unique agricultural biodiversity in the Pamirs. Over the course of 5 years, the book became much more. Nearly 700 pages of English, Tajik and Dari text and many photographs, describe the domestication of the mountains, the influence of the silk road, the importance of wild food, the resilience of transhumance and bring into sharp focus conflicting futures of the region.

5000 kg of book traveled from the Netherlands over land to Tajikistan. They arrived in Dushanbe two days before our own arrival last week. Here, Frederik and I are sitting on the 5 tons of book in storage at the Ismaili centre in Dushanbe.

While this felt like a small victory in itself, the next challenge was to get the books in a Kamaz for the multiple day trip to Khorog over precarious mountain passes. In the meantime, we took off in a taxi-jeep with 20 books on top of the car.

Latofat is the Principle of the school in Siponj village in Bartang Valley. The village is often completely isolated in the winter months when snow closes-in the valley. Perhaps because of this isolation, the valley maintains a ‘pure’ Pamiri language and is home to some of the strongest traditions in the Pamirs. The school in Siponj celebrates an annual national food day, where students ask their grandparents and elders how to make traditional foods from the unique agriculture all around them. 4 years ago, we ate many different dishes, like Baht, Khomnigul, and Boj.  We took some photos of the beautiful and proud children, and with those, we conclude the book. This day brought us a lot of hope – that food, tradition and knowledge have a place not just in preserving the past, but also in imagining the future of the Pamirs. Naturally, we decided to return to this village first.

Initial reactions were often of surprise and sheer glee!

Why the title, “With Our Own Hands”? First is because the Pamirs would be a desolate wilderness, the way Sir Francis Younghusband described it to the Royal Geographical society in 1892. People make life-giving soil with their own hands. One thing that was never in question was the title of the book.

But another reason became much more apparent as we saw people react to the book. People were reacting to the knowledge that cannot be spoken, but is expressed through ‘doing’, in their own hands. Bobbi, who drove us to Siponj, admitted to us that he thought this was an impressive volume ‘about’ the Pamirs, but didn’t really know what it was all about. He spent the next few days, while waiting for us, going through it page by page, and then told us that this was a great service to the Pamiri people – it captured invisible knowledge.

He asked, how is it possible that two foreigners wrote this book? Why was it not Pamiris?

We often asked ourselves this question while writing the book – why us?

First, it was not just us. It was supported enormously by a group of dedicated Pamiri scientists who collected recipes, verified information and made all the connections for us. And the knowledge of course, is entirely from the Pamirs. All we did was pull it together.

The other answers are maybe more complex. Because we are outsiders, so we have the luxury and distance to observe.

And we didn’t only do it for the Pamirs. We also did it for ourselves. I grew all up all over the place – the Pamirs are as much home to me as the other places I have spent meaningful time. The pamirs are an intensely special place. Yes, intensely. One cannot visit the Pamirs without being overwhelmed by the grandeur of the mountains, the blue of the sky, the force of the rivers… the diversity of seeds, language and culture. From a purely functional perspective, we will need the seeds in the Pamirs as the climate continues to change for human prosperity. But more importantly, I want my children and grandchildren to grow up in a world where the Pamirs exist.

Perhaps my favourite reaction was when Akorbirsho, the father of a good friend and ethno-botanist collaborator, read the first recipe he recognised “Noshkukpa” and started shrieking with laughter. He then went through every page of the book.

What next?

The books arrived in Khorog by Kamaz on Thursday. I was already on my way to Dushanbe by car. Frederik and a Dutch film maker were there to capture it! Supposedly a line human chain of 30 people formed from the back of the Kamaz to a basement where 5,000 kg of books were passed from hand to hand.

Everyone who has seen the book, whether in the police, the bus stop or bazaar, has immediately asked how to get one. The Mountains Societies Development Support Programme will help distribute them to every community, to ensure that at least one copy is accessible in a public space.

The book should live, it is not a monument set in stone. Already we have received critiques: mistakes in spelling, which differs from valley to valley based on pronunciation; differences in recipes from grandmother to grandmother, village to village and certainly valley to valley; and discontent about showing some of the less appealing sides of the Pamirs (like the opium addiction especially on the Afghan side). We would love to find a way to facilitate the making of the book into a live forum for discussion, to capture these differences and nuances – to open up a space for imaginings.

Seeds and Ideas: Food as a method in development practice

Where do ideas come from? is the fundamental question we address in this ‘Thought for Food’ publication by Hivos and Oxfam. We explore how new ideas that exist outside the mainstream discussions about development can be brought into its narrative and influence its course. And how food in general, and agricultural biodiversity in particular, can help facilitate this process.

Seeds & Ideas: Food as a method in development practice. Haider & van Oudenhoven 2015.

You can download the pdf here. We hope it’s of interest! And here’s a short summary

1. How do endogenous ideas emerge?

Drawing from an exchange between Nietzsche and Foucault, we argue that norms, behaviours, actions and ideas become established when the serve a certain purpose, when they are useful. The purpose, and therefore the utility, lies in the eye of the beholder. In a development context, problems are defined by external agencies and responses designed as one-liners: poverty alleviation, market development, combatting malnutrition. From this perspective, the utility of field lies in its productive function (to combat malnutrition for example). To a local cook and farmer, the utility of the field is broader still. We draw on the example of lashak mack (rye pea field), and the soup  that is made of it in the Pamir Mountains.

To the Pamiri cook and farmer, the function of lashak-makh is broader still. They use the harvest from these fields to make a flour called hazorza, which means ‘mix of a thousand’. The crops are not separated, but harvested and milled together, and the hazorza flour is used to make bread or a nutritious noodle soup called osh, which is rich in protein and energy and has a cooling quality when working the fields in summer. Many kinds of osh exist, made with different mixed flours that come from different combinations of crops grown at different altitudes, and many songs and poems are recited about Osh. The soup and the cultivation system are interlinked; the agronomic utility of the cultivation system is connected to the nutritional and cultural utility of hazorza and osh, and strengthened by it.

Many (agri)cultural norms and practices have functions that are not readily apparent. Is it possible to know which knowledge, practice or idea that seems irrelevant now will be useful at some future point in time? And if it is possible, who are the people to decide on what practices should remain and which ones could go? Who decides on change?

We bring in a few more examples of how introduced seed varieties can become ends in and of themselves, especially when so much scientific legitimacy stands behind the improved varieties. To move the locus of power from outside organisations to people and communities who receive development assistance means, firstly, to shift the responsibility of who defines problems and solutions to those very people and communities. The ‘inevitable gap’ becomes less inevitable when the perspective on development is derived more from within, becomes more endogenous. Food may be one way to achieve this.

Food as a Method Part 1: Food is intimate and unimposing, it is a common vocabulary and it is simple but not simplistic.

During the course of our work in the Pamirs, ‘food’ proved to be a useful tool to break down or at least circumvent power relationships and help gain a deeper understanding of this place and its culture. With ‘food’ we simply mean the act of cultivating and preparing food, of eating together and speaking and thinking about it. But the experience of working on a book by no means proves that this tool would necessarily be useful in other hands or for the exploration of other questions in different cultures. Would it be something that is useful for development practitioners for their work in agricultural communities? Would redefining and redirecting development efforts around food (in its broadest sense) be meaningful? We will explore a number of qualities of food that suggest it might.

2. In autonomous spaces, where do ideas come from?

Through listening and trying to learn these skills from farmers, mothers and shepherds, our conversations with them created a space where we could speak as equals. Where power relations, if not absent, were less apparent than if we had been there as researchers or development workers. This, we felt, was a space far away from the ‘problems and solutions’ defined by the outside world of development, a relatively endogenous space in which people could speak freely and ideas could emerge. And often they did.

At times, however, we were struck by people’s seeming lack of endogenous ideas about their future; a lack of initiative in changing things that weren’t working, or protecting things people were proud of. Where were those ideas and where had the energy gone? A strange contradiction in a conversation with a wealthy shepherd in the Wakhan valley of Afghanistan suggested we ought to look at power in yet a different, more subtle way.

Food as a Method Part 2: to excavate memories and inspire ideas. Food is evocative, tangible, requires action and is a vessel of values fundamental to identify.

Food is a vessel of many things. It is not by accident that preparing it evokes memories and ideas that are otherwise buried. Using food as a method helps create a space in which novel ideas emerge and can be expressed, and where old ideas can be excavated, dusted off and become part of an endogenous perspective on development. The question that remains is how, once ‘small’ local ideas emerge, they can take root and thrive alongside or in competition with more powerful ones.

3. How do ideas take root?

To cook food with people and to eat together from a shared dish allows us to understand ideas and solutions for rural development practice as springing from the relationship between people, their communities and their landscape. Just as plants and animals are part of an ecological system, and seeds need to be understood in the agricultural system of which they are a part, ideas about food and the development of agricultural landscapes need to be understood in relation to, and as a result of, other ideas and the people who carry them. This way of understanding how ideas interact has been called an ‘ecology of ideas’ (Bateson, 1972).

In such as an ecology, as an idea becomes established, it increasingly connects to other ideas until, eventually, the idea becomes crucial to the survival of the system as a whole. Throughout this paper we have discussed some of the ideas that Pamiri farmers shared with us about their future: raising their children to maintain a connection to their land and traditional livelihoods, growing grains and pulses together in lashak-makh fields, using food and local plants for medicine. In other words seeking and adopting a type of development that does not destroy important local and traditional values. But if these ideas find no soil, no social or institutional network into which they can be incorporated and nourished, they cannot flourish and survive. Ideas are not singular entities and cannot exist as such; they need a support structure, or an ecology of which they become a part.

The reason that, viewed from the perspective of an ‘ecology of ideas’, food has such evocative power, and that phrasing ideas in the language of food may help them spread and gain relevance, is that food touches on most elements that make up daily life: health, livelihood, agriculture, science, spirituality, trade. The more such linkages are allowed to persist, the more these elements remain seen as integral parts of the food system, and the greater the power of food to help new ideas connect to an existing ecology and take root.

Lashak-makh. A field of rye, barley, pea, grass pea, lentil and faba bean. A mess, traditional ecological knowledge, or something else? Photo by F. van Oudenhoven.

Yet unfortunately this is not usually the way development programmes introduce their ideas (or their seeds). The way in which the organisations and donors behind these programmes are organised requires that the building blocks of human life be compartmentalised into sectors that can be managed within the framework of projects: productivity, income generation, health, culture, thereby severing the same linkages that make food such a holistic and overarching concept. Imagine how an improved seed variety, designed for monoculture, would fare in the colourful chaos of a field of lashak-makh? It would not survive its difficult soils without a substantial dose of fertiliser, or competition from other plants without the use of herbicides. The agricultural system must change if the newly introduced seed is to succeed; it must be compartmentalised. And so the seed becomes divorced from the soil and the traditional practices that connect farming and communities, such as seed saving and selection. It will no longer have its place in prayer, in food and in social networks of exchange—the very things that give a local seed its relevance and that enable it to adapt to changes in its environment and culture.

The same risk exists for ideas. Let’s return one last time to the dichotomy between ideas as singular monuments and ideas as networks and interactions. Even though external ideas are part of networks as much as local ideas are, we have in this paper pictured them as more ‘monumental,’ as one-liner solutions to problems whose conception often occurred elsewhere. In many ways they are more monumental—and they take root as a plant’s taproot might: central, singular, and straight. In being monumental and more rigid, they are less able to adapt to a new home, and less sensitive to it.

In contrast, what we have called endogenous, or local ideas, are the ideas that spring from everyday processes of innovation and learning; the way a farmer learns when working her fields. Having no one source or origin, and, perhaps, also no fixed goal or direction, they evolve and adapt when faced with something unknown, drawing on a reservoir of related ideas, whether prayer, technical knowledge or folklore.

We do not argue that all ‘small’ local ideas are good and all external ‘big’ ideas are bad. Both are needed, but they need to be able to interact on a more equal level. It is in facilitating such interactions, through engagement and experimentation, through the collective interrogation of ideas, and through being modest about introduced ideas and judging them against the wisdom of ancestral knowledge present in the places where they work, that we argue development organisations have a very positive role to play.

How worried should we be about the growing population of Afghanistan?

I am not really on top of the latest news, in fact, I’m usually a week behind since I like to slowly digest The Guardian Weekly (which arrives sometime between Monday-Wednesday in Stockholm rather than Saturday)…. But a friend recently introduced me to the idea of slow news, so here is my hand at that.

A trend I’ve picked up in the past months which worries me are the interconnected stories of Afghanistan’s and specifically Kabul’s growing population.

Kabul is one of the world’s 5th fastest growing cities says this article from Dec 11. 

Though exact data is impossible to obtain (the last official census was conducted in 1979), Kabul is estimated to be the fifth fastest growing city in the world, with a population which has ballooned from approximately 1.5 million in 2001 to around 6 million people now. The rapid urbanisation is taking a heavy toll on a city originally designed for around 700,000 people. An estimated 70% of Kabul’s residents live in informal or illegal settlements.

Kabul’s economy is primarily driven by illicit business, such as opium trade, which hit an all time high last year. Having seen slums amidst ‘poppy palaces’ this hits home hard!

And following the Peshawar massacre, Afghans have taken some of the blame and are being driven out from homes they’ve lived in for decades, as described in this Feb 7 article.

Pakistan is home to at least 1 million Afghans without official documents, who are exposed to the risk of sudden eviction. Another 1.7 million Afghans are registered refugees in Pakistan. The provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has announced plans to expel all undocumented Afghans from the province. The authorities did the same in 2012, but backed down after international pressure.

More recently, this has been fuelled by the outcry against Sharbat Gula, the woman behind the iconic National Geographic photograph, who illegally obtained a highly sought after Pakistani ID card.

I worry about what this means for the safety and security of the 5 million people living in Kabul beyond its capacity (population of 6 million in a city designed for 700,000, with an estimated growth to 8 million in coming years), with a strengthening insurgency in many of the rural areas, and growing hostility from Pakistani neighbours. I worry what discontented and poverty stricken homeless million in Kabul means for ISIS recruitment which is on the rise in Afghanistan. 

Most of all, I wonder why our governments spent billions of dollars on the war without thinking of its effects. Like ensuring that a few urban planners were hired?

But to end with some encouraging news following women’s day: Afghan men wearing Burqa’s in solidarity for women’s rights in the streets of Kabul.

New Paper: Applying a capitals approach to understand rural development traps

New Paper: Applying a capitals approach to understand rural development traps. Check out reflections from the Ideas for Sustainability blog, or download our paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837714002415

Ideas for Sustainability

In an increasingly globalized world, rural areas are confronted with enormous development challenges. Agriculture, and in particular smallholder farming, often provides the backbone of rural livelihoods, but the future viability of this sector is threatened by a rising integration of rural areas into the global economy, and thus an increasing exposure of primary product markets to liberalized trade regimes. As a result, rural residents often need to diversify their incomes, specialize, or shift away from traditional farming activities – a set of changes that is closely linked with the notion of rural development. Several models of rural development have been proposed, but they do not always adequately explain why development stagnates in certain regions.

In our new paper we provide a possible explanation for such stagnation, illustrated by a case study from Central Romania. Based on qualitative interviews with over 350 inhabitants from 66 villages, our aim was to understand…

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Agricultural Biodiversity Community video link now out!

Agricultural biodiversity is at stake worldwide. Monocultures are becoming ever more populair, with grave effects on biodiversity. We are losing plant and animal species every day. This loss has a big negative impact on food sovereignity of countries, it makes farmers dependant of seed corporations and it threathens a healthy food supply for the people living on Earth. The Agricultural Biodiversity Community is aimed at preserving and conserving the agricultural biodiversity worldwide. We build strategies and take action. Please join us and get involved. Click on the link!

Resilience self-assessment by communities

At the Agricultural Biodiversity Community (ABC) meeting in Boxtel, Netherlands at the beginning of October, practitioners, farmers, and researchers from Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America came together and created a process for “Resilience Self Assessment by Communities.”

This was the fourth meeting of the ABC, and three working groups worked over four days on i) policy outreach, ii) open source seed systems, and iii) resilience assessment (the group I was involved with).

Why did we have a working group on resilience assessment for agricultural biodiversity? This was my understanding prior to helping facilitate the workshop:

• There is an increasing demand from the international development community to ‘improve’ resilience of communities. Most communities, especially rural communities who are custodians of agricultural biodiversity, already have sources of resilience but assessment tools could help them identify and communicate this to external actors;
• The Resilience Assessment Workbook for Practitioners is seen as an important and useful resource but with limitations for communities in a development context to use this themselves;
• To share and synthesise knowledge and best practice amongst all the experts gathered here.

This matters because far too often external interventions, with altruistic motivations actually do the opposite of build resilience, and reduce diversity and erode local knowledge and culture that has maintained agricultural diversity for centuries (also the topic of my PhD).

Then there were two immediate contradictions to my initial understanding:

1. Bioversity International, Satoyama Initiative, UNDP have been developing a toolbox for resilience assessment in agricultural biodiversity contexts based on the Social-Ecological Production Landscapes indicators (See also van Oudenhoven et al. 2010), and was launched at the CBD COP last week. So, what was the value added of our exercise?
2. In the first session on the first day where we discussed setting the agenda as a group, many group participants said: “we don’t need a resilience assessment tool; we already do this in our communities and the last thing we need is some external perspective on what we already do.”

So, we threw our facilitation plans out the window.

In this first open session, many of the participants were asking what is Resilience anyways? The Thai and Ugandan farmer were saying that this is an English word and concept and might now be useful for them or their communities in their contexts.

We started by breaking down Why, How and What: resilience assessment?

WHY? We came to a shared understanding that what we wanted was a self-assessment by communities: for communities to a) identify and monitor sources and status of resilience in their communities for themselves, and b) in some contexts, to communicate to external actors and thereby possibly avoiding inappropriate development interventions.

HOW? Develop a process for communities to self assess resilience.

WHAT? The first part of this was to answer: what is resilience in agricultural biodiverse landscapes?

Angoli cattle farmer Elizabeth telling a narrative about resilience in her community.

We listened to the narrative of our Ugandan farmer colleague, who rears Angoli cattle and the group drew this story on large sheets of paper. She told us how if she loses one cow due to some misfortune, her community will give her five in return. And she will of course do the same if something happens to her friends’ cattle. Our Thai friend, an agro-forestry farmer, then told us how she does agro-forestry because ‘she is lazy’ and it’s so easy to let the fruit and vegetables grow without her input. Her livelihood depends entirely on her forest. In a community context, she depends a lot on the connections she has with her extended family and neighbours, who all specialise in different products and share their wealth with each other. Finally, our Indian colleague led a narrative of why we need to assess resilience.

The first day ended with a shared understanding of what resilience meant to us, and why we, in our own communities, wanted to assess it.

Identifying resilience attributes in agricultural biodiversity landscapes.

Our next steps as a group were to use the drawings to draw out attributes that were important to the custodians of the landscape. We used sticky notes on the big flipchart sheets for this. At the end, we had more than a list of attributes, but an understanding of what we valued in this community, and “what made it healthy and strong.”

 Taking a step back, we created a mindmap of the Process we were in the middle of, and what this might look as tool to share. Here is our mindmap:

1. Why is an assessment needed?
2. Who should be involved? How to achieve equitable representation.
3. Telling the Story
4. Identify attributes
5. Link to Action
6. Reflection

 

The Agricultural Biodiversity Community is now in the process of pulling together resources to populate each of these steps with the expertise of the members of the group. For example, from MELCA in Ethiopia, experience with Eco-Mapping, and SeaRice, with community mapping. We are preparing a web-launch of this tool early 2015, which will link to other great resources, such as the RA workbook, a new E-learning course on Resilience Assessment by SwedBio to be launched soon, and the Satoyama tools.

Many of us left saying that we had achieved much more than we had ever expected. Farmers and practitioners left the workshop saying that this is definitely a tool that they can use in their communities. We will start field trials in Thailand, Uganda, South Africa, Peru, India and other countries early 2015.

As a researcher studying resilience in agricultural biodiversity landscapes, I left thinking that we achieved a milestone in co-creating a process that is accessible to communities and that we made a contribution in aggregating existing tools assessing resilience in agricultural biodiversity contexts, moving towards a specified assessment. We look forward to connecting this to the many other ongoing initiatives to assess resilience.

On a personal note, I found the workshop very challenging, but incredibly rewarding. Despite dedicating my work to smallholders, being a lover and advocate of wheats, millets, pulses and everything else, at the end of the day I am a young Northern female scientist. And my voice, especially at the beginning without any personal trust behind it, held very little legitimacy in this context. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. But, it makes it very difficult to contribute, let alone facilitate a co-creative process like this. Over time, as we got to know each other, these barriers broke down. But wow, it was humbling! I am so grateful for an incredible learning experience, where I also started a process of finding a space for my own voice in this critically important issue of conserving agricultural biodiversity that we all share a passion for.

Dutch farmer Jan at Eemlandhoeve.

Beyond Divides: Prospects for synergy between resilience and pathways approaches to sustainability

What does an (un)sustainable world look like? How might we ‘know’ and research (un)sustainability? How should sustainability researchers position themselves in relation to civil society, policy, business and academic communities?

These are some of the questions friends and I at the Stockholm Resilience Centre ask in a new paper “Beyond Divides: Prospects for synergy between resilience and pathways approaches to sustainability” (led by Simon West) which we think will be useful for young interdisciplinary scientists beyond the scope of resilience and pathways. We explore how resilience thinking and a pathways approach address such questions, untangling similarities and differences in their ontologies, epistemologies and areas of strategic action. Through examples such as the debate between Johan Rockstrom and Melissa Leach (documented here and here), as well as examples from our own research, we find that the most exciting areas of sustainability research lie in the boundaries between emerging trans-disciplinary research communities such as the SRC and STEPS centre.

Here are some highlights from our conclusions:

In this paper we discussed how the ontological commitments of resilience and pathways lead us to see the world differently. While both work within systems frameworks, the willingness in resilience research to draw firmer system boundaries enables researchers to establish functional relations and identities. In contrast, the emphasis in pathways research on the production of system boundaries enables researchers to uncover the discursive (and contingent) mechanisms that enable us to establish identities and relations in the first place. Given these ontological stances we then examined the epistemological strategies of resilience and pathways. We established that, generally speaking, the resilience emphasis on functionality leads to questions of ‘what works?’. In the pathways approach the emphasis on distribution leads to questions of ‘who’s losing, who’s benefiting?’. Therefore, while participatory governance structures are encouraged in resilience research primarily as a means of increasing the pool of knowledge available, in pathways oriented research they are promoted to facilitate deliberation and contestation between different knowledges. These epistemologies, supported by distinct methods, frame the role of the trans-disciplinary sustainability researcher in different ways. For resilience-oriented researchers, appropriate action for sustainability, conceived as maintenance of biophysical processes, may take the form of empowering ‘system-level’ resilience, engaging with a wide range of actors from the private sector, civil society and the state. Pathways researchers, conceiving of sustainability in terms of social inequity and inequality, are more likely to see their role as highlighting marginalised perspectives and subaltern narratives, in which case engaging with powerful private sector voices may not be so relevant. However, at the same time, we see pathways and resilience researchers acting in the same policy arenas, and, in some areas, supporting each other’s agendas. This suggests that these two visions for the role of the sustainability researcher may not be mutually exclusive but actually beneficial. The problem remains, however, how to work across these perspectives and produce trans-disciplinary, rather than simply multi-disciplinary, spaces.

We found the STEPS summer school to be an incredibly enriching experience, and are really happy to see a newly formed Alumni Association in which we hope to continue these dialogues.

Download the pdf by clicking on it

 

 

Excerpt from: You are what you EAT @ #SES_Link

“Are you happy? (asks Feike Sijbesma from DSM).

–       yes! (Audience)

Oh. Did you hear about the horrible crisis today? Where 9,000 people died?

–       no.

That’s because nobody is talking about it. 1, 2, 3, 4… 4 seconds go by and another person dies from hunger.

9,000 will die today, and another 9,000 will die tomorrow.

So, Are you still happy?”

Yet, obesity and overweight kills more people than underweight. The richest billion people in the world consume 40% of the resources.

This is the global food crisis.

We were presented this dilemma during the EAT forum plenary. The first annual EAT Forum was hosted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Stordalen Foundation to bring together environmental and health impacts of the food we eat.This type of narrative may get people to act. It is certainly one approach, and undoubtedly a successful one if business leaders are using it. I’ve written a more comprehensive blog about it on our #SES_Link homepage.

But I found myself thinking: why should we be unhappy? I know the world is unjust and try to work everyday in small ways to reduce that inequity. But does it mean that I should be so miserable that I can’t act? To be honest, some days I am. Those days when the world feels too heavy, the problems too big, and my own contribution completely insignificant, or even worse, counterproductive. Speaking for myself, what I need  to hear are more positive stories, not horror stories.

A more important critique though, is that by always framing things in the negative, we may find solutions to those problems , but we won’t change the system in which the problems arose. Improving seed varieties may solve aspects of world hunger, but it won’t change the system which makes hunger pathological.

So back to my mantra, why should use food as a lens to talk about global food problems: 1) Food frames problems in the positive;  2)  Food is evocative; food is more than just calories that feed us, and more than just ingredient that create a recipe. Everyone has a story, an emotion, associated with food. This is what is behind the sovereign space in which ideas are created;  3) Food is simple and levels the playing field; everyone can talk about food.  You can read more about our approach on the SIANI blog, or on my own.

As Bill Clinton said in his keynote at the EAT Forum: “What kills people is believing that their tomorrows will be like today.” Maybe talking about food can open up new tomorrows.

Food Futures: Correction to my blog on SIANI

A few weeks ago I wrote this blog for SIANI about food. It’s a story of how our book “With our hands: A celebration of food, and life, in the Afghan and Tajik Pamirs” came to be, and why we think it’s important both for the preservation of beautiful cultural traditions in the Pamir Mountains, and also globally important for social-ecological response diversity.

Link to SIANI blog

The point if this current blog is to make a correction: A Pamiri friend who read the SIANI blog quickly pointed out that Pamiri people are not ashamed of their food, but that it is a much more complex story than that. Of course she is absolutely right and the last thing I would ever want is to misrepresent that. The blog has now been corrected, and here is a more detailed explanation of my own interpretation of ‘ashamed’ as an outsider to the Pamirs.

This Pamiri friend explained that she loves Osh, it’s her favourite food. But that her mother made it only occasionally because it takes a long time to prepare. Many women in the Pamirs work full time jobs, are more than full time mothers, often supporting their parents, or the parents of their husbands, and very often other extended family. Pamiri women are truly superwomen. And it’s very to me to not misrepresent this.

So, using the word “ashamed”, was absolutely the wrong one! However, I think the original rationale behind it is important. Pamiri people, we found, did not like to prepare traditional food for foreigners. They rather prepared modern Russian dishes, with meat preferably, which is a sign of wealth. This is of course not at all unique to the Pamirs. My own grandmother in Austria would never dream of serving a guest a meal without meat, even if she prepares ‘simple’ local vegetarian food regularly for herself. A second anecdote which informed my use of the word ashamed includes Pamiri peoples “second flour.” Many Pamiri households have at least two kinds of flour. The first flour, is (now usually bought) white flour usually from Kazakhstan. The second flour, is a locally milled mixed flour which is much darker in colour and much more nutritious (as it’s often mixed with legumes). Again as a guest, we would only ever be served the bread of the first flour, unless explicitly asking for the second, when it was only brought out with confused and shy manners. No restaurant in the main Pamiri city of Khorog sells local food (with the exception of one seasonal summer dish, and one thermos full of Osh at the local market!), because it is presumed that people will not buy it.

As a final note, an outsider’s perspective will never be complete or wholly representative, no matter how thorough we have tried to be. After three years of work and constant conservation with Pamiris themselves, I am hoping we are not doing the Pamirs a disservice! Dialogue is the way to get through this, so I am extremely grateful for the correction!