Taste of Place

Episode 6

A Taste of Home

[00:00:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look to the past and to build a future. My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste in memory throughout the series. Welcome to Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Food has always been a way for us to connect to culture and create a sense of belonging. Our first meals are shared in our homes, and the things we eat are an integral part of our identities, representing our upbringing, our heritage, the parts we accept about ourselves, and even the parts we reject. Over the past few decades

[00:00:55] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: globalization has caused the world to become smaller, and as diaspora [00:01:00] communities continue to form, our ideas of home have also shifted. But the food we eat will always be one of the strongest tethers to the places we are from.

[00:01:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: In this episode, a Taste of Home. We look at how we carry the idea of place with us wherever we travel, and the joy of gifting and giving food. I speak with food writer and cook, Melissa Thompson as well as community organizer Jenny Lau about the flavors of home and what food means to them as members of diasporic communities.

[00:01:38] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Then I talked to anthropologist David Sutton about the act of cooking as an act of remembering place. Finally, Diaspora co-founder Sana Javeri Kadri teaches me about her spice business and how to build supply chains with equity at the heart as she brings taste of home to [00:02:00] those in diaspora. The gifting of food has always seemed to me like such a ritual within diaspora communities.

[00:02:09] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Every time I return to London from Sarawak, I come home with a suitcase full of noodles from aunties, rice from the family farm, tuak (which is a local rice wine), and of course pepper! All of which I disperse amongst friends and family in the UK. Pepper is how I carry home with me, the gift of home I give to others.

[00:02:31] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: But during Covid 19 Lockdowns, I couldn't go home to Sarawak and I ended up running out of Sarawak pepper. I was despondent. One of my favorite foods as I've stated countless times on this podcast, is a peppery Laksa. I can't imagine being without pepper. Fortunately, my friends in London came through. Okay. I may have panicked on Instagram about my situation, but as a result, my friends Melissa Thompson and [00:03:00] Jenny Lau stepped up and became my emergency suppliers of Sarawak pepper.

[00:03:05] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The taste of home is a taste of place where place means people. Landscape, the hot sun on your arms and sweat prickling your upper lip. From across London, Melissa and Jenny sent me envelopes filled with home. I wanted to learn what connections Melissa and Jenny themselves had to pepper. First up is Melissa who provided me with a precious parcel of black Sarawak pepper.

[00:03:36] Melissa Thompson: My name is Melissa Thompson and I am a food writer and I'm a cook, and I sometimes I do a bit of campaigning and I'm speaking to you from a very sunny southeast London. Well, when I went to uni I was pretty skint and I'd go to the canteen and try to fill myself up on a breakfast and they had those awful scrambled eggs, which for some reason I quite like and I would just grab a [00:04:00] massive handful of pepper sachets.

[00:04:01] Melissa Thompson: I would just cover my scrambled egg with so much pepper and it almost made it quite enjoyable. 

[00:04:08] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Melissa then explains the ritual aspect of this meal, which is quite striking to me. 

[00:04:14] Melissa Thompson: You get the sachets, they're sort of doubled up, right? And so I'd fold them in half and then I'd rip the top off both of them at the same time.

[00:04:20] Melissa Thompson: You'd have to hold them on the edge so you don't wanna kind of block them and then kinda slightly open them up and then just pour the pepper over. So it was just quite a mindful exercise, even though it only lasts, what 10 seconds or something. I get quite excited about the idea of pepper because I think it is relatively accessible.

[00:04:33] Melissa Thompson: I think it means promise and it means flavor and, but you can have something that's quite ordinary and just give it a bit more nuance, or you can base a whole dish around pepper. I think it's such a beautiful spice, and I know relatively so little about pepper. There's a whole massive world that I'm still yet to discover, which is quite exciting.

[00:04:51] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I love that, that it's promise and flavor, and you are right about accessibility. It means that anyone can have a play in experiments. [00:05:00] So during lockdown you sent me some Sarawak pepper. Where did you find it? 

[00:05:05] Melissa Thompson: I saw it in Natoora and I was like, Oh my God. And it just stuck in my head. 

[00:05:09] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: My Instagram post pleading for a Sarawak pepper connection had been quite desperate.

[00:05:16] Melissa Thompson: And so I got a couple of bags. One for you and one for me. It's quite nice when someone's looking for something and then you find it cause you, you know, that's gonna bring a bit of joy. 

[00:05:24] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: That's what it reminded me of the care packages you get from home. It was quite emotional and so I bought a special pepper grinder for it.

[00:05:31] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I've used it every day, but it still feels special and ritual cause it has its own pepper grinder for it. During the pandemic, even short distances between people felt very long. How did you navigate distance and access and being able to eat your favorite foods or not being able to eat your favorite foods?

[00:05:49] Melissa Thompson: What I was doing at the time, I was working in restaurants, hospitality, those things, lockdown happened, all my business went overnight. And my daughter, her child minder, had to close my partner who is a [00:06:00] medic, so carried on going into work. So it was just me and my daughter. In the morning, she would go down for a nap.

[00:06:04] Melissa Thompson: I got back in the kitchen and I realized that it was the first time that I'd had time to get back in the kitchen, or even the inclination to get back in the kitchen since I'd been pregnant, because I was running a popup for the first three months of being pregnant. I felt really sick all the time, really nauseous and really tired, and then all I wanted to eat was mainly chips drenched and vinegar.

[00:06:21] Melissa Thompson: I realized I never really got the mojo back. So I really went to comfort dishes. Dishes that not only took me somewhere geographically, but in terms of my memories and tapping into nostalgia. It wasn't an active decision but I pray for things that brought me comfort and speaking to my parents and asking them about, you know, dishes that they would've cooked for me.

[00:06:39] Melissa Thompson: How I might make those. I really went into Jamaican cooking a lot. 

[00:06:44] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Melissa recently wrote a book called "Motherland, A Jamaican Cookbook," which looks at the roots and history of Jamaican food and addresses the relationship between diaspora and home and how one's idea of home might not be where one lives.

[00:06:58] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I asked Melissa [00:07:00] what she thinks home tastes like. 

[00:07:03] Melissa Thompson: Whenever I go back to the Caribbean, and I've been to Jamaica before and Antigua to Bermuda, and even though I, I was born in Britain, there's always an element of homecoming and it's nice being in a country where the majority of people are black. I, obviously, I stand out in a different way and being British, but it's just quite nice.

[00:07:21] Melissa Thompson: Having a child, you end up thinking more about your place in the world and your place in time and how you are quite a small part of a massive continuum of things, and I think that's really interesting in food. The book that I've written, Motherland, which is looking at Jamaican food throughout the ages and Jamaican history and the idea food is always evolving and we are just part of that evolution.

[00:07:42] Melissa Thompson: I mean the evolution in food since the internet, the fact that you can travel so much without leaving your home with terms of food and getting hold of ingredients is mind blowing. What I've been researching with my book, the Indigenous Jamaicans were pretty much wiped out by the Europeans. Um, lot people say it was through disease, the majority of it was [00:08:00] through violence, right?

[00:08:00] Melissa Thompson: And that's just massive whitewashing. Everything was just destroyed. In terms of like language, we have a few bits, but because there wasn't a written language, then we don't have a full concept of, of how people were and how they lived. It's been gone through archeology and historical anthropology, but then actually there are dishes that have survived like Bammy, you know, cassava

[00:08:19] Melissa Thompson: flatbreads, a direct connection with the indigenous Jamaicans. And you can have that today. And I think a lot of people will just eat some and not think about that. And you don't need to think about it all the time. But for me, wow, that's incredible that this is a dish that has survived, this is a connection between us and them.

[00:08:35] Melissa Thompson: I think if you're interested in food, a 360 view of food, but I find all that sort of stuff really, really interesting. 

[00:08:43] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Food travels through time and space and forms a connection between where we are and where we are from, between the past and the present. Like Melissa, I think exploring the history of foods allows us to see the hidden histories, many of which [00:09:00] are integral to our personal histories and who we are today.

[00:09:04] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Next up is my good friend Jenny Lau who provided me with some much needed white Sarawak pepper rescuing me from my predicaments. Like Melissa, I wanted to know what the taste of home means to her. 

[00:09:19] Jenny Lau: My name is Jenny Lau. When people ask me what I do or who I am, I say I'm a British Chinese Londoner with roots in Hong Kong and Malaysia.

[00:09:29] Jenny Lau: In my spare time, I am a passionate community organizer, writer, and now what I call a gentle food activist. Everything I explore is around identity, personal and collective identity, and building connection in the diaspora through the lens of food. 

[00:09:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I met Jenny through her amazing Instagram account, Celestial Peach, which documents her work, including her projects, A to Z of Chinese food, and interviews with various people in the industry.

[00:09:59] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Her [00:10:00] writing and research around food and identity is superb, and I would recommend everyone reading it. 

[00:10:05] Jenny Lau: To give you a bit of background, I grew up in Hong Kong until the age of 11, and that was when I moved to the UK. I think with Hong Kong, Cantonese cooking, you don't really see seasoning on the table.

[00:10:19] Jenny Lau: The food just comes out as it is. There was definitely pepper in the food that I ate, but I just had no idea what it was. I think my first encounter with pepper was at Pizza Express where they had those sort of ginormous caricature shakers and their waiter will come around and say, Do you want pepper on that?

[00:10:36] Jenny Lau: I've never really liked pepper because I think the pepper that you got at Pizza Express was a bit gritty and bitter, and it wasn't until a few years ago when I was learning to cook Chinese food, specifically Cantonese, and my mind was blown when I realized that there's white pepper. White pepper exists in this finely ground form and

[00:10:59] Jenny Lau: it's [00:11:00] not on the table. So I started learning to cook properly and learn to use seasonings to create balanced flavors. I recently heard this interview with Brian R. Dott. He wrote, "The History of the Chili Pepper in China," and he said that before the chili pepper existed, the definition of spice or spicy was associated with ginger and pepper.

[00:11:24] Jenny Lau: I think it was Sichuan pepper. I think that changed the way I looked at pepper when I learned that. 

[00:11:29] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I ask her about where she got the pepper she sent me. Melissa had sourced hers from Natoora, and I was curious where Jenny had found hers. 

[00:11:37] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: That was 

[00:11:37] Jenny Lau: a gift from either an auntie or a cousin. I think anyone who has relatives in another country knows that there's this exchange of goods that takes place in suitcases.

[00:11:48] Jenny Lau: I actually have an auntie coming from Cuching this Friday, which is very exciting. I haven't seen her for three and a half years, and the first thing she messaged me was, Jenny, I'm bringing you Pepper, I'm bringing you kalami, I'm bringing, you know, [00:12:00] And I was like, Oh, you know you don't have to. But secretly I did want that stuff.

[00:12:04] Jenny Lau: There's just a random assortment of stuff that my relatives have given me and it's very nice. It's very thoughtful as well, I think. How do you use Sarawak pepper? 

[00:12:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I use it just as I use normal pepper to be honest. Over the pandemic, I was very careful with it. I don't think I can be careless with Pepper ever.

[00:12:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I don't ever want to run out of Sarawak pepper again. Jenny explains that her mother was originally from Sarawak and we discuss how through food we can learn about our heritage, pepper being that culinary point for both of us. 

[00:12:38] Jenny Lau: Her family are descendants from Chinese immigrants from the Fujian Province. So they settled in Sarawak, I think early 20th century, like a lot of Chinese immigrants did. That side of the history

[00:12:53] Jenny Lau: it's very murky because no one really wrote anything down, so everything's hearsay. You ask an [00:13:00] auntie or an uncle and then they tell you some kind of. Everything seems to revolve around my great-great-grandfather having walked from China to Malaysia, which I think is true. A lot of people were walking all the way.

[00:13:13] Jenny Lau: My mom is one of 12. She came to London in the late sixties, seventies. The British government were sponsoring nurses to train, and that's where she met my father, who was from Hong Kong and had me and my brother. She's actually the one out of all the siblings who has the least connection to Malaysia because she left when she was 18.

[00:13:35] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Her memory of Sarawak then is is always childhood. You've written about nostalgia and you have quite a lot of thoughts around your relationship with nostalgia. 

[00:13:45] Jenny Lau: I have this propensity for nostalgia. I'm not sure if everyone does. The further away your childhood or your youth is, think the greater that feeling is.

[00:13:56] Jenny Lau: But I also recognize the sort of [00:14:00] dangers of being in that nostalgic kind of mindset because often you are misremembering a lot of details. And I see nostalgia is not just about this, this act of remembering. It involves that act of longing or desire for something that's gone perhaps and not something that's in the future.

[00:14:17] Jenny Lau: And I think for me, it's because I grew up in one country, I left it, I call it a schism cuz I left behind half my father, my brother. It was just me and my mom. So everything from my past life is very much boxed up. So for me, nostalgia is almost this tool if I want to try and go back and access those memories. I think everyone also wants to have this consistent linear narrative about their lives.

[00:14:45] Jenny Lau: And actually the truth is it can just be totally random or disjointed and that we are multitudes and that we're very chameleonic. I think one of the, the strands in my work is around the taste of home and [00:15:00] obviously everyonehas firstly, a different taste of home, but also a different definition of home, and that's something I do with my potlucks where I host meetups for people of primarily east and southeast Asian background.

[00:15:14] Jenny Lau: We all bring a home cooked dish that represents our heritage, and we share and eat together and make friends and share stories. I also had an interview series that I used to publish every week with a different diasporic Chinese food lover. Not necessarily a food professional, but just a food lover. I tried to maybe find this thread that connects everyone around this question of what is chineseness?

[00:15:40] Jenny Lau: Can there be this diasporic Chinese identity? And I think ultimately there's no answer, but I came up with this idea that perhaps it's like unrootedness this that is connecting us. And I think when you are unrooted, you have a tendency to try and root yourself perhaps in certain flavors or feelings, notions [00:16:00] of comfort.

[00:16:01] Jenny Lau: You see a lot of either food writers or chefs or even just home cooks who are constantly trying to recreate flavors of childhood or flavors, you know, grandmother's recipes. And I think it's a futile attempt because you're, maybe you're mythologizing that flavor and it's not the flavor itself that you're remembering.

[00:16:23] Jenny Lau: It's the whole experience. It's the holiday that you were on. It was the sun on your face. It was the, the sea breeze at the same time.

[00:16:33] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Chasing the tastes of home is something that all diaspora communities have in common. We attempt to recreate flavors of home with what's readily available in our new homes, and while it's never really the same, what results is a beautiful tapestry of new regional cuisine that adds yet another link between where we are and where we are from.

[00:16:56] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: To learn more about how we build memory and place through the ritual of [00:17:00] food, I spoke with Professor David Sutton. 

[00:17:03] David Sutton: My name is David Sutton. I'm a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University. I'm calling from my home in Makanda, Illinois, which is just south of Carbondale. 

[00:17:17] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I want to contextualize these feelings and connections with home in a sense of place through food and flavor.

[00:17:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Why is it important to create these feelings of home and how do we do it? 

[00:17:28] David Sutton: Commodity fetishism is a process of forgetting, and so to reverse that, we have to remember the origins of food and the people who were involved in producing it. 

[00:17:42] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There was a line being on one of your videos or, or from one of your, your books where you talk about eating to remember place, and I was wondering if you could explain that a little bit further.

[00:17:52] David Sutton: When I did my initial research in Greece on this island called Kalymnos, in the eastern Aegean, it [00:18:00] wasn't about food at all. I was looking at memory and historical consciousness. Some point just struck by how many of the stories that people were telling that might be 40 or 50 years in the past, but they would include incidental food details.

[00:18:15] David Sutton: So it struck me, did people really remember food from 40 or 50 years ago? What role was food playing in these stories? And then when they knew that I was leaving, they would say, Here, eat this so that you remember Kalymnos. And I thought, what can we say about this anthropologically? And it's eat so that you remember Kalymnos rather than eat so that you remember Greece.

[00:18:39] David Sutton: And I think that in some interesting ways, the taste of place can get us away from the kind of identification of food with nationalism because it's often the specific place that matters, not the larger, encompassing place. What I found was that in places like Greece that have [00:19:00] what I like to refer to as robust food cultures, that connection of food and memory is

[00:19:07] David Sutton: reinforced by all kinds of everyday and ritual practices. People care to talk about their daily meals and give an autopsy on each meal to talk about what went right and what went wrong, and it creates a shared space in which those anchors of memory, certain cultural contexts will really validate and give value to that kind of food knowledge.

[00:19:33] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This idea of caring about the details of everyday food is so incredibly important to me. In Malaysia, you are less likely to be asked How are you when being greeted? Instead, Have you eaten is much more common. Food is baked into everyday activity and is a threat of connectivity. David goes on to explain about the ritual and cooking, which is also an idea that is very dear to me.

[00:19:57] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: In my PhD thesis I wrote [00:20:00] about how migrant women build a home through daily tasks such as cooking, which on the surface seems repetitive, but is actually a constant act of creativity. And through these actions, we are building a space of home, imbuing scent, flavor memory into spaces of newness until they become familiar.

[00:20:21] David Sutton: Repetition was really interesting to think about because at some level you think if you're eating the same thing over and over again, how is that memorable? What was interesting to me is that on Kalymnos, what seemed to me to be the same food wasn't necessarily the same because you were always trying to make each meal a little bit special, so you're making the same lentil stew, but this time you're adding a different herb or you're using water from the well, it's different from using water from the spring and all of these minute distinctions.

[00:20:55] David Sutton: It wasn't just a repetition. It was a repetition with [00:21:00] difference. And that's what became memorable. And I think that's reflected in their way of thinking about the past because people would often make analogies between the past and the present, but it wasn't the idea, just that history repeats itself. History is not a circle continually spinning.

[00:21:18] David Sutton: It's more like a spiral where each repetition is a little bit different from the last one. Because diaspora is so much part of the Greek experience, it really struck me how important it became to recreate those spaces of home and those tastes of home when you are migrating. And once again, it wasn't just a individual act

[00:21:44] David Sutton: of sustaining oneself, but it was something that was embedded in cultural practices so that it was very common for people to send care packages, packages of food to their relatives who had either [00:22:00] migrated to Athens from the rural area or migrated to Germany or the U.S. There was constant flow of foods that would bring back the taste of home.

[00:22:10] David Sutton: And when I looked into people's experience of receiving those packages, it was really striking to me how they contrasted the kind of alienating experience of living and working in another country under often difficult conditions and a feeling of wholeness or of restitution that came just from the experience of receiving these packages of food.

[00:22:36] David Sutton: And I got so many stories from people, but one that always stands out to me was this man who was in the Merchant Marines, in the 1970s. Then he had been away from Kalymnos for eight or 10 months, and he just had such a longing and people described this kind of burning desire and there was nothing he could do because in England in the 1970s, you couldn't [00:23:00] buy feta cheese or anything like that.

[00:23:02] David Sutton: So what he did was he went into a chemist shop and he bought a little file of olive oil which was sold not at the grocery store of the supermarket, but only these little medicinal files. He got it and he just walked out of the store and he drank the whole thing. Just as a reconnecting or retouching base. 

[00:23:26] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Tasting home and finding home in a bottle.

[00:23:29] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: These are acts we do, must do, when we are away from home. Peppercorns fit in the palm of my hand, can be tucked into crevices of a suitcase or posted across cities, countries, and the globe. They are small parcels of home. This act of bringing the taste of home to the diaspora is what Sana Javeri Kadri does with her company, Diaspora Co. 

[00:23:56] Sana Javeri Kadri: My name Sana Javeri Kadri. I am the founder and [00:24:00] CEO of Diaspora Co.. Me and my team are trying to build a more delicious spice trade that's rooted in equity. 

[00:24:06] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Diaspora Co. has ethics at the heart of their business model. Not only are they helping flavors traverse the world, but respecting and bringing attention to the labor and agricultural care behind these foods as well.

[00:24:20] Sana Javeri Kadri: I was born and raised in Mumbai. I was there until I was 16, and then I was very lucky to get a scholarship to go to high school in Italy. And then I came to California now a decade ago. I've been here for 10 years, but I currently, I go back and forth, so my whole family is in Mumbai. We're third generation Mumbaikers.

[00:24:37] Sana Javeri Kadri: I do six months back and forth. My pepper journey has honestly been really transformative because I grew up hating it. I grew up thinking that it was this sharp, dull thing that my grandma sprinkled from a pre powdered little device onto tomato soup. And it was on the modest middle to upper middle class home as like a symbol if we have [00:25:00] arrived and we are westernizing and globalizing.

[00:25:03] Sana Javeri Kadri: So my connection to pepper was, you're gonna like sprinkle some pre-ground pepper on top that doesn't taste like anything but this book from London tells us that that's how it is. Which is hilarious, right? That it comes full circle. We are the region that grows pepper, where Pepper is indigenous to. But as an urban Indian, I grew up with a British understanding of pepper.

[00:25:23] Sana Javeri Kadri: Now, pepper to me is proof of real intergenerational, beautiful care-taking and land stewardship. That's what it's become a symbol for. That's because of the farms we work with. 

[00:25:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Why did you start Diaspora Co? 

[00:25:37] Sana Javeri Kadri: I was raised in a lot of ways in the American food industry. That was my introduction to working life, and I knew that I wanted to work in food in some capacity, but I didn't know how to connect the dots between where I come from and home.

[00:25:51] Sana Javeri Kadri: So I wanted to work in South Asian agriculture, and I had a hunch that there are incredible responsible regenerative farmers here in the U.S.. Obviously that [00:26:00] exists in South Asia. I assumed that that generation would be an older generation. I assumed that it would be the grandparents generation who like remembered the old ways of farming and there was a little bit of my nostalgia and actually the younger generation was the one saying, yields are dropping, climate change is coming

[00:26:16] Sana Javeri Kadri: this doesn't make sense. How can we farm better and how can we grow things for flavor, which was so revolutionary to go to a farm in Andhra Pradesh and have a farmer whose access to media was through WhatsApp and through his smartphone, and have him having the same conversations that I was learning about in California with much more depth and nuance, quite frankly.

[00:26:36] Sana Javeri Kadri: And so that was the impetus, realizing that there was this generation of farmers who are my generation, who wanted to do things differently, and the one thing they were missing was access to market and access to that home cook that would really savor what they were doing. The story of spices has been told from the lens of the colonizer. How can we tell stories about culture and archives and heritage [00:27:00] in a way that's deeply rooted, where we as the company are acknowledging that we're middle men, but we're equitable translators, and we're translating not just the product, but also the culture as equitably and thoughtfully as we can. 

[00:27:12] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Throughout the history of the pepper trade, there has always been the middle man procuring pepper from rural communities at low prices while selling high to consumers and pocketing the difference as profit.

[00:27:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The most infamous, of course, was the East India company who did that work with an added touch of brutality. Sana and her team know there's a more equitable way and are trying to become the visible middle man and take responsibility for the stories that are being told by the spices they distrubute. 

[00:27:40] Sana Javeri Kadri: It starts on the farm.

[00:27:41] Sana Javeri Kadri: We work at a price with our farm partners, and it's usually set by our partners. What does it take to produce this product that it is sustainable and your farm will thrive. You get to define what thriving looks like, and we will build our supply chain and our math on top of that. 

[00:27:58] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I of course want to know the [00:28:00] details of the pepper they source.

[00:28:02] Sana Javeri Kadri: We do tastings for almost every spice we bring on board. I will procure samples. I think in this case it ended up being 14 different farms and their values align, growing regeneratively. The next step, does it taste good and what does it taste like? And it used to be just me sitting at my dining table. Now it's a group.

[00:28:18] Sana Javeri Kadri: We all do it and we talk through it, and we usually send samples to industry people and get their thoughts. With the pepper tasting, I was intrigued by what are the peppers that are hitting my senses and hitting my full palette. And this pepper from the Parameswaran family Farm. I had had a conversation with Akash.

[00:28:36] Sana Javeri Kadri: He was like really confident. He was a little bit arrogant almost, and we rubbed each other the wrong way on that first call. We laugh about it now because he's a beloved friend and it was the only pepper that wasn't uniform black. All the other pepper samples that I had were this, Pitch black color of night, which was beautiful.

[00:28:53] Sana Javeri Kadri: It looks so sexy when it's pitch black, but his pepper was purple and dark red and a little bit gray on some. [00:29:00] And what I later realized is that his pepper was the only one that wasn't flash boiled right after harvest. So he was picking at peak ripeness and then he was sun drying. So there was this tremendous amount of labor that him and his workers were going through to get it to that point where he was proud of the variation and it just had a fruitiness and florality that I had never encountered before.

[00:29:20] Sana Javeri Kadri: I really thought of jammy figs and nutmeg, and when I visited the farm in 2019, it's just beautiful. People obviously have this romantic idea of, of spice farms. I've seen some of the best farms that they're ugly too. There's spaces of industry where food is being produced at a pretty efficient scale. I don't think we need to overly romanticize the beauty of a farm.

[00:29:42] Sana Javeri Kadri: This farm is beautiful and I'm gonna romanticize it. I was just very smit enough to that first visit and all of my apprehension about Akash just like washed away, where I realized that him and his dad have been doing this for 35 years. They get to be arrogant. 35 years, you can say whatever you want. You know you're the best. 

[00:29:59] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: [00:30:00] Sana is very reflective of the work Diaspora Co. Does though. 

[00:30:04] Sana Javeri Kadri: We don't always succeed, I don't wanna sit here and give this preachy story about, wow, we're changing the world guys. Sometimes we've really messed it up and there's ways that we wanna do better and grow. We're very transparent about our turmeric, I believe is 650 rupees per kilogram. That is about six to seven X the market price at any given time.

[00:30:22] Sana Javeri Kadri: That's the average we try to stick to. Also, not wanting to reduce our partners stories to just their hands on packaging. Our black cardamom farmer is also an adventure enthusiast, and he loves to go ziplining and Prabhu who's our turmeric farmer, stays up really late into the night watching TikToks, which is what I do.

[00:30:42] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The power of story and whose stories are visible is a theme that continues through this series. Those in the diaspora are often thinking about how we tell stories of home in our new world. Stories that are separate from the myths that colonists told that reduced the people of the global south to [00:31:00] bodies to hands and packaging of products.

[00:31:02] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I asked Sana what her relationship with diaspora, home and belonging is as her company is called Diaspora Co.. Although sourcing only from South Asia, the spices she exports are tastes of home for so many of the global south diaspora. 

[00:31:19] Sana Javeri Kadri: It's been a journey. When I moved to the U.S., my friends and I joked about this concept of diasporic angst because we were all international students who for the first time were reconciling this feeling that by leaving, we were never gonna feel fully part of there anymore, nor here.

[00:31:36] Sana Javeri Kadri: And we were sitting in America, What is this place? Why do they have so many yogurt covered pretzels, I don't understand. It started from this very existential, angsty feeling of neither here nor there, which is kind of like diaspora 101, and I feel like we've now graduated to diaspora, I don't know, 5 0 1, which is what is the work and the responsibility of the [00:32:00] diaspora?

[00:32:00] Sana Javeri Kadri: How can we complicate those narratives of "immigrant leaves origin" due to necessity and therefore gets stuck in the time and place that they first left in and is desperate to hold onto shreds of their culture. And I think diaspora was this experiment of let's fold the world in half. And let's bring a spice on this end of the world to a kitchen and this end of the world quickly and make sure those people who are consuming it and producing those things are talking to each other.

[00:32:26] Sana Javeri Kadri: And like that's the work of the diaspora is we're actually able to because of technology and culture, be deeply connected to each other. So let's connect. And so home for me has meant that I feel deeply Indian. I don't identify with the term Indian American. But I also now feel deeply Californian. And I have a home and I have a community.

[00:32:45] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: That feels like a reclaiming or a reframing of the spice world. How does that work within decolonizing, I guess this space? 

[00:32:55] Sana Javeri Kadri: We used to use the term decolonizing a lot, decolonizing the spice trade [00:33:00] was our first tagline, and we walked away from that terminology I think simply because we work and live in the US where decolonization means land rematriation to indigenous peoples. We are not doing that work.

[00:33:13] Sana Javeri Kadri: We are trying to rebuild a system, but it was a system built for and by people that perpetuated harm. I would like us to be a floating orb of a magical spice trade. But we are still on the conveyor belt. We still use the same shipping lines that everybody else does. We still work with the same laborers at the port.

[00:33:33] Sana Javeri Kadri: We still get packaging from the same people everybody else does. There are ways in which we're turning that on its head, but it isn't a magical floating orb in a faraway land, right? It's within it. Therefore, I don't think it's decolonization, truly. 

[00:33:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Rediscovering roots and connections to home is a story of travel and threads woven across land and seas.

[00:33:55] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Finding moments of connection, tasting our way to a sense of [00:34:00] belonging, of creating our own rituals and memories, and it is seeing the systems we live in and finding ways to make them better. As diaspora, I don't think we can discuss food and flavor and ideas of home without interrogating the systems that brought the food and indeed us to new lands.

[00:34:31] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you for listening to episode six of Taste of Place. Thank you so much to my guests, Melissa Thompson, Jenny Lau, David Sutton, and Sana Javeri Kadri in helping me explore ideas of diaspora, home, belonging and pepper. I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio editor, Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi.

[00:34:57] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, [00:35:00] Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music director Catherine Yang, managing producer Marvin Yueh, Associate Producer Quentin Lebeau, production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production assistant Maha Sanad and publicist, Melissa Haughton.

[00:35:24] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Theme music created by Catherine Yang and cover art created by Whetstone Art Director alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio on TikTok @WhetstoneMedia, and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel, Whetstone Media for more podcast content.

[00:35:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: You can learn more about all things happening at Whestone at WhetstoneMedia.com.