Earth to Tables Legacies: Multimedia Food Conversations across Generations and Cultures

This volume will resonate with many folklorists in its approaches, methods, and subject matter. It describes a project based on collaboration, not just in research, but in developing the project itself, identifying issues and potential results, and recognizing different, sometimes conflicting, ways of knowing and interests. The collaborative perspective appears in the transmedia character of the final products, with a variety of formats, including video and lesson plans for schools and community groups, accessible for free via the internet (Earth to Tables Legacies, earthtotables.org), and a colorful printed book that includes poetry, photographs, transcribed speeches, transcriptions of interviews, and community commentary along with standard academic text. Collaboration is also evident in the emphasis on connections among groups divided by space and time, nationality, ethnicity, class, age, urban-rural, and gender.Folklorists have long examined food as a cultural and social domain through which individuals and groups construct and perform meaning and identity, express creativity, and mark group boundaries. We tend, however, to leave analyses of the food system—the larger systems of production, distribution, and consumption—to those in the social sciences and applied fields. This volume demonstrates that this domain connects to folklorists’ concerns around the wielding of power and control, the uses of tradition, and the call to provide platforms and voices for those not usually heard. It illustrates how food sovereignty, the ability of a community to define and control its own food system, relates to larger issues beyond eating—and describes some of the strategies developed by various Indigenous groups. In many cases, solutions have meant a return to traditional ways and changing, even challenging, external structures that have posed obstacles in maintaining or adapting those traditions.One of the lead researchers is Deborah Barndt, a professor in Toronto since the 1970s. Barndt impacted folklore studies of food through her presentations and book Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail (2002) in which she traces the journey of tomatoes from production in Mexico to processing in Indiana to sales in Toronto. Like a folklorist, she tells the stories of individuals and how these global movements affect them. She also offers an insightful analysis of the industrial food system, going back to René Descartes and John Locke, to understand the distrust of nature that led to an ethos of dominance over it and the embracing of technology. This ethos is the foundation underlying farming today with its dependence on chemical fertilizers and herbicides, machinery, single-crop farming, and the thinking of crops as commodities rather than food.The Earth to Tables Legacies project in this volume involves 17 individuals from Canada, Mexico, and the United States, who have engaged with food activism and studies for decades. The project is not a new one, riding on the coattails of recent trends, although those global trends can help the general population see the value of the project. The longevity of this work gives it a wisdom and sense of humanity sometimes missing in other food systems analyses that overlook the complexities of people and food.The volume consists of three parts, opening with a foreword by Robin Wall Kimmerer, known to many folklorists as the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013). Part I describes the motivations and experiences behind the project and explains the organization of the book. The volume follows Indigenous cultures by ceremonially framing the main text, marking the beginning of this section with a Thanksgiving prayer in Mohawk and English.The COVID-19 pandemic provided the opportunity to get the project underway, a process described in this section. The lead researchers in the project learned from individuals on the ground, so to speak, most of whom were Indigenous. They agreed to focus on the stories of 13 individuals involved in addressing the destructive legacies of colonialism and of the industrialization of the food system.“Part II: Setting the Table” outlines the theoretical frameworks for the project. This includes a discussion of popular education, a phrase used in Canadian scholarship to refer to what many of us will recognize as sharing principles with public folklore. Many folklorists will also respond positively to this suggestion: “Perhaps we need more poetic forms of language to express this world view rather than the academic discourses that often reflect Eurocentric ways of knowing” (p. 31). In that spirit, the authors attach the imagery of pollination to the processes of collaboration used in the project.“Part III: Storytellers” is the heart of the volume, telling 13 stories through photo essays organized around four themes: ways of knowing, earth, justice, and tables. Links to videos on the website, as well as biographies and photographs of the storytellers and four members of the production team, provide much useful information. In keeping with the ceremonial framing, the volume ends with acknowledgments thanking others who contributed.Folklorists interested in any cultural form, not just foodways, will find much to learn from and to contemplate in this volume. The stories themselves illustrate the wealth of knowledge and wisdom held by Indigenous peoples—and the obstacles posed by traditional Eurocentric mind-sets—that can help to rebuild healthier relationships with others and with the Earth through our food. The commentaries provide theoretical perspectives that illuminate this wealth and shed insights into the natures of food, eating, commensality, community, research, and scholarly pursuits. Perhaps of more importance to our field is that the volume recognizes that food is a cultural system that cannot be reduced to numbers and formulas, and that, as with folklore, it is a medium through which individuals and groups create meaningful connections. By recognizing this potential, the project suggests a way to move forward toward healing.

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