 Good afternoon, everyone. So good to see your beautiful faces. Good afternoon. Hello. Sure, sure, sure. Excellent. So good afternoon. My name is Erica and my family, my people, in addition to being in this room, include Urban Growth Collective, the largest urban ag organization in the state of Illinois, the Hyde Park Art Center, Woo-hoo, Tomorrow's Our Gala after party, definitely be a part of that. The University of Chicago and the Chicago Art Department also represented here in this room and I'll say a little bit first that like what I do. I am an organizer. I was a community organizer for many years and I basically think that I organized through the arts and food justice and so I'm particularly interested in how we see ourselves as a community and how we tell stories and so many of the things that I heard today resonate with the work that we do individually and collectively and I will pose a few questions and so by and large I don't know that I have any answers But I do have a lot of questions So one of them being Can everyone see the beauty of when diasporas are intertwined? Is there a relationship with the earth and sacred seeds? I also wonder Can we even begin to talk about Decolonizing our plates without talking about power, but now I'm thinking energy I was thinking power but now of course. I'm thinking energy. Can we can we do that without talking about power and Then what does it mean to emphasize our interdependence? especially as we think about Decolonizing our plates and Then finally I'm thinking about how this particular quote resonates and then tell me if you've heard this For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and Touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here See whose face it wears Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices Audre Lorde think about that all the time like what does it mean to see difference instead of trying to kind of flatten and Disown difference and instead what does it mean to see that difference and kind of bathe and enjoy that difference And see it as a way of connecting with each other So then I'll say that Thank you. I care. My name is Girlie loyal I'm a food writer from London and I'm hugely honored to be here today and being conversation with you Erica About this. Hopefully very joyful delicious conversation about food. I My work and my practice explores Questions around migration race and diaspora through the lens of food So although food is very much my medium what I'm trying to do with my Food and what I do and my cooking and my creativity within the kitchen is very much Explore and explode these questions and get people to think about the narratives around diaspora identity in a different way and I Have a very interesting sort of Approach to this whole idea of decolonizing the food narrative because there are a lot of contradictions in my own story I'm British Indian So when I'm thinking about decolonizing my own food narrative, I am both colonizer and colonizee So it's really interesting and equally I don't feel half Indian and half British I feel 100% Indian and I feel 100% British. I'm 200% I'm 100% queer I'm 100% wearing a green jacket right now. I am a multitude I'm all of these things and every one of all of these things and so for me there is food is a wonderful way of exploring the Multitudes of identity and the different facets of identity and the fact that these identities are these facets to identity are always in constant Evolving dialogue with each other. They are not binary There's very much a kind of queer sort of sensibility to my food and what I do And why I'm so excited about being in conversation with you today is because one of the things that I think connects us and our work And our practice is that we are uncompromising in our celebration of joy through food And so what we wanted to do today was to talk to you about Three plants in particular that we are both Extremely sort of emotionally and physically connected to talk about how we play with those in our practice and Explore the connections between what we do on other sides of the world in some ways Should we start with our first one? Let's start. Let's go. All right I think it might be kind of obvious, but we'll start with the plant that you see on the left okra Who loves okra? That's all I'm gonna ask That's okra. And so we both in our practices. I Am a chef and food writer as well We both include okra as a kind of essential ingredient to the work that we do So leave that there for a second. Would you like to share anything about okra? Yeah, I would so I I wrote a book recently called mother tongue. This is the book and what the book does is it explores this whole idea of I suppose when you're when your Cultural heritage is in one country, but you're born into another my question is what is the truest expression of the food that is me and How do you honor your traditions in your heritage? But also ensure that they're always evolving and I begin my book actually with a quote from the composer Mahler who I adore I'm a musician as well and the quote is Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire So it's this idea that to evolve a tradition and to keep the traditional life You can always be adding new fuel to it and you always should so one of the things that I really like to do with my food is to think about what is seen to be as contradictions and Share them and to kind of say well actually that only contradictions if you view them from one lens to really Decolonize that food narrative actually what you need to do is to view it from a different lens And so for me as a sort of British Punjabi in in London One of the things that people often say to me with okra is I don't like okra because it's slimy and That my immediate response to that is well first you're not cooking it right Secondly, yes, sometimes okra is slimy and that is delicious like who's to say that sliminess as The facet of food is not something to be enjoyed But the other thing that I do and this is the very first recipe of my book is I Flip the narrative and I say well actually did you know that okra can also be extremely crunchy and extremely crispy so this is the first recipe in my book which is a Crunchy crispy okra belpuri and I've kind of opened the book with this because what I want to say is Okra like British Indian people like all people of diaspora contains multitudes You think it's slimy. Well, I'm gonna give it to you crunchy So you still don't like okra. Well, that's on you now. So that's sort of One of my ways of sort of, you know, really playfully really joyfully Taking this incredible thing, which is, you know, a huge part of my Punjabi heritage Bindi like Masala Bindi is one of the dishes that I grew up eating and Related slightly to Okra is bitter melon, Karela as we call them, which I absolutely adore and I love the flavors And I love it when okra goes slimy, but you also play a lot with okra and okra Right, so I love okra and I love when it goes slimy, but I too play around with it by pickling it So that's what's happening here These okra were grown on the South Chicago farm at 8900 South Mackinaw If you're ever interested, please join us. We have goats, bees, orchards and lots of people dedicated to the land So you can see here like this beautiful, you know crimson okra But it's pickled. If I can see the next slide, please. I think it should be So you can see it on the left And it's kind of raw state and then it's preserved and I'm using that word preserved in every way that it's preserved It's pickled, you know with brine, but it's also I'm preserving those stories because okra Was its home initial home was the continent of Africa, right and even the word itself Okra and then something you might have had and sometimes isn't so slimy as gumbo, right? So that word comes from the West African West African term for for okra So I just want to put that out there, too Should we go on to our next one? Our next one is actually sugarcane Now I my family's heritage is Punjab in the north of India I grew up going to Punjab every year and for me the resounding memory of Punjab is a lot of bread a lot of ghee, but a lot of sugarcane and my teeth coming back being in absolute tatters What's interesting is that the thing that I have most memories of with sugarcane is sugarcane being pressed for its juice and then turned into incredible jaggery if you haven't had jaggery it is this incredible sort of Deliciously dark brown tree kaleesh sugar that sort of has flavors of molasses and honey and spice and cinnamon and cardamom it has all of these incredible things and For me as a British person one of the things when I talked to sort of fellow food writers who are I suppose looking at food for a white lens about why they don't think about jaggery is as something that is Useful or interesting to them in their patisserie work in particular a lot of them say well because it's refined it's unrefined and Because it has this murky Dark color So one of the ways I like to play with it is to celebrate that and say you think it's unrefined well Let me show you how delicious that unrefining can be The way that I do that is I combine it with chai spice in particular because the combination of unrefined I use that word in quotation marks Jaggery which has all of these incredible spicy overtones to it with added chai spices extraordinary And then this other thing about it being a murky brown when I say well why what's wrong with that? Why could we not celebrate that so I actually Combine it with something that's even more brown which is chocolate and I say I'm not gonna turn jaggery white I'm gonna make it even darker and this is one of my creations in the book, which is a chocolate chai pie which is a combination of jaggery Lots of chai spice Chocolate cream and I give this to my friends who say I'm not gonna use jaggery because it's unrefined and I say you tell Me what's unrefined about that and so this is one of the things that I love doing is kind of playing with What people's preconceptions are of an ingredient and saying well This ingredient contains multitudes and actually is a joyful celebration of everything that is me Which is British and Indian and very proudly all of these things and by the way these things are a spectrum. They are not They are not in any way binary and also they've ever expansive Do you want to talk about your? Yeah, especially that word expansive. I'm particularly interested in the Ways in which we can kind of interact and engage and ultimately taste Sugarcane so here on the left you see the giant kind of like stalk of sugarcane in the middle of the table and this is the smart museum 2015 I was an interpreter in residence for the year and on the right It's cut up and in this box in this idea of you taking as you want and really if you're curious and I focus a lot on curiosity and food and so like this idea that it might be unfamiliar to you in this way because we all know sugar Right, we all know sugar But many people are tasting and enjoying sugarcane for the first time that I could see the next slide Please after that and so we have this a little dark But on the right you see three people who are having a little sliver of sugarcane and this idea of doing it together in this kind of collaborative way Where we're cutting the stalk as we speak as we eat and then just enjoying it and then like Gerd I like to think about how If you cook it down the darker the better and so I actually use it to paint on rice paper And I give it as works of art, but also as tastes so you can just like lick off of the off of the rice cake So imagine twirling it up, but you know almost like a toffee, right? and so Thinking of it, especially in the expansiveness the joyfulness, but also Recognizing the long horrible histories of our relationships to sugar and especially sugarcane in the Americas With enslaved people from the continent again being doing the bulk of the work the process Putting their their sweat their tears and even their bones are brought into the process of whitening and refining the sugar that we eat or ate in the past So very quickly the last part that we want to talk about is one that I think we both love is it's actually ginger One of the things and it was it was something I was talking about with frenzy the day One of the beautiful things about ginger is that as a sort of rhizome It will you can uproot it from anywhere and put it with ginger somewhere else and it will take new roots it just will do that and I think anyone that is of a diasporic or sort of of a desi heritage will know that if you go anywhere with your parents They've got the scissors and they're ready to take the cutting and they're putting that in the suitcase And you're getting stopped by security and it's like what are you doing like anyway? This is one of the things I love about ginger is that it just has as a metaphor for the diasporic experience The fact that it will uproot itself and find new roots I just think is hugely beautiful One of the ways that I play with it is that a lot of my friends say I didn't like ginger because I find it too warming in My book I turn it into s'mores and I call them fiery s'mores And I'm like you think it's too warming well I'm gonna give you fire and so I make ginger s'mores, but I add cayenne to say embrace that heat Don't try to dampen it actually ginger has multitudes will take new roots anywhere Anyway, that's my my thoughts on ginger Similarly, I say you know you say it's warm. Let's go for hot. I mean maybe even hotter And so what I do is I'm riffing off of red drink. I'm not sure if anyone knows red drink and sorrel red hibiscus Infused drink that has ginger spices and citrus often associated with Juneteenth here in the United States and Is consumed in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas but take that and actually make caramel, right? So it's like this idea that instead of infusing their cream with like say cinnamon I will infuse it with ginger and hibiscus and then that becomes like the foundation for again It's kind of the sweetness the wonderful nature of the things that we have enjoyed, you know for generations Wonderful. Thank you, Erica And if you want to talk food afterwards come see us