Hi friends,

Writing to you from a post-election cycle feeling heavy. It should be no surprise that I wanted to wake up in a world where the long-term health of our people and planet were prioritized. Where a Black woman can be president and our reproductive rights (and so many others) are not at stake. No amount of stress baking can avert this shifting timeline. (Don’t think I haven’t tried.)

I am disappointed. But I refuse to be discouraged. I encourage us all to take time to disconnect, find grounding, and small moments of comfort as the political dust settles. Turning inwards to check-in with our communities and take care of ourselves is of utmost importance. Only then can we find solace in doing the work that best supports people and planet.

Resiliency in the face of uncertainty. Collective action and community care. We’re continuing our climate action work through grassroots + local organization efforts because we can’t wait for the pendulum to swing.

And if you’re reading this, you are already on your climate action journey, and I thank you for it. The more we elevate mindful eating and sustainable practices the more we advocate for impactful change. Every plant-based meal is an act of intention. Every small garden is a belief in a better future.  Every local purchase is a vote for circularity. This work is vital and we are a collective force in shaping our future.

To remind us of the value in this work we have a fantastic interview with regenerative farming enthusiasts and researchers at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management–Meg Resler and Yvonne Socolar.

Take care this week and remember, community starts where you are. 

As always–

Stay hungry,
Hawnuh Lee | Founder, Closed Loop Cooking

Cozy, carby goodness - potato + leek soup.

• Consider supporting the Loveland Foundation to help defray the cost of therapy for Black women and girls as post election backlash grows.

• Listening in on this de-stress podcast episode and taking point on important tips.

• I deeply appreciated AOC’s discourse and call for community on the outcome.

• I am in awe of this baroque, culinary abundance that celebrates anyone who bleeds.

• A list of 7 climate positive ballot measures that were passed.

• I am finding cozy, carby comfort this week in this leek + potato soup. Making package-free veggie stock and tender chickpeas from scratch to add in and finishing off with the best, cast iron skillet bread you can dip in. Trust me on this crusty goodness, it’s much needed.

• I just hosted my first cookbook club with The Magnificent Book of Vegetables, highly recommend this seasonally inspired read. Interested in a virtual version of this community? Reply back.

• Don’t go it alone. Find a mutual aid or organizing group in your area.

Crusty goodness in cast iron skillet bread.

Change making, hot tomatoes, and school infrastructure with Meg Resler + Yvonne Socolar

Interview by Maia Welbel

As a newly minted East Bay resident, I’ve been seeking out community the best way I know how — finding the food and agriculture nerds and insinuating myself into their plant-filled spaces. Recently, this strategy brought me the pleasure of interviewing Meg Resler and Yvonne Socolar, two deeply knowledgeable regenerative farming enthusiasts and researchers at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. I talked to them about their work on the evaluation team for California’s Farm to School Program, what it means to be an agroecologist, and the creative projects powering their passion for sustainable food. Read on for our conversation, and if you too are yearning for community in a new place, I encourage you to join me in following the plants. 

California is responsible for over 33% of vegetables and 75% of fruits and nuts grown in the U.S. Its abundant soils produce 400 unique commodities each year, from citrus, to pistachios, to tomatoes, to avocados, making it the country’s leading agricultural state. But beyond its pure bounty, CA has also become a national leader in providing fresh, nourishing produce to students in the state’s education system. The CA Farm to School Incubator Grant Program has been awarded nearly $100 million in funding through the CA Department of Food and Agriculture, and since the program’s inception in 2020, hundreds of schools and counting have received fruits, veggies, and more, direct from local farms. 

Yvonne and Meg work on a team of experts from UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Food Institute, and other CA institutions, tasked with evaluating to what extent the grant program is meeting the goals laid out in the 2022 report called “Planting the Seed: Farm to School Roadmap for Success.”

Program goals:

Cultivate Equity

Create opportunities for those who have been historically excluded to improve the health and well-being of the people, places, and communities that define California’s food system.

Nurture Students

Engage students with nutritious, delicious, culturally relevant meals that nourish their bodies and minds.

Build Climate Resilience

Leverage school buying power to support California producers and incentivize agricultural practices that promote climate resilience and environmental sustainability, including organic systems, while educating students on the importance of environmental stewardship and agricultural sustainability into the future.

Create Scalable and Sustainable Change

Implement policies and dedicate funding to create lasting impacts for local communities.

What is agroecology?

Agroecology is a bottom-up, context-specific approach to building better food systems for people and the planet. Yvonne and Meg’s research incorporates the ecological, socio-cultural, technological, economic, and political dimensions of sustainable food systems. Taking a holistic viewpoint is more vital than ever in a climate where these factors are inextricably tugging at one another all the time. As a CLC reader, you probably already think a lot about how food influences every part of our lives. Agroecology is one way to look at what that means on a systems level. FAO’s Agroecology Knowledge Hub is a great jumping off point if you want to explore more — many rabbit holes (mycelium threads?) to follow down from there.

Can you start by telling us a little bit about the Farm to School program? 

Yvonne: When I think of Farm to School programs in general, they are about getting food from local farms and ranches into schools and school meals. This grant program is trying to do that by giving money to producers and distributors, and supporting organizations and schools to try to streamline that whole process. And I think it’s an exciting moment that this grant is taking a really holistic approach. In the past, Farm to School programs have focused more on the school side of things — giving money to schools, thinking about how schools can incorporate food and farming into education, etc. And I really like that this grant is looking everywhere on that supply chain and figuring out how to grease the wheels of the whole system in order to help it function better.

What does it mean to be part of the evaluation team?

Meg: It’s a big team, and we're kind of segmented into different groups with different focuses. So I'm on the case studies team and Yvonne is on the environment team, and we’re looking at how to answer these questions from different angles and from different research backgrounds. The roadmap was defined ahead of time in terms of what areas that this program is trying to support, so a lot of our work is looking at each of those areas and trying to figure out what impacts and outcomes we see.

Yvonne: It is a very interdisciplinary team, which is really fun. And also, of course, has its challenges, but it's cool to work with folks from all over. I think you can even see in the methods that we use — we're collecting survey data, and also doing interviews and analyzing those, analyzing publicly available data, and everyone is just sort of drawing on everything we can and mixing that all together to try to figure out what's actually going on here.

That’s a perfect segue to ask about your backgrounds — what experiences are you coming to this project with?

Meg: It's interesting because I think there are only probably three self-identified agroecologists on the team, and you've got two of them here. But yeah background is agroecology with an interest in the more social and political dimensions of food system transformation. My PhD is from the University of Helsinki in Finland. I’ve worked in environmental education before, in school districts, so I feel like that's been a really interesting context to bring into some of my interviews with environmental educators who are doing some of these curriculum that the grant program has funded, and talking to food service directors, kind of to see it from that perspective. I've also been a park ranger! I've done all sorts of things. But I’m really enjoying working on this project right now. 

When I first learned about this grant program and this team, I was really excited about the potential for leveraging institutional buying power. There's a lot of money that goes into running the meals programs in school districts across the state, so leveraging that buying power to change supply chain structures, and change where money is going, and what type of food production is being supported, and who gets to eat what… The ripple effects are just so vast and compelling for me. 

Can you tell me more about what exactly agroecology is?

Yvonne: Totally, I think every agroecologist probably has their own personal definition of what it means to them. The classic way to describe it is that agroecology looks at the science, practice, and movement of sustainable food systems. So that includes researching diversified farming practices, and also farmers actually doing that in their fields. And then also sociopolitical movements that are required to increase the adoption and legitimacy of those methods of farming. It is inherently very interdisciplinary. And so it's not surprising to have someone like me who's more on the natural science side of things, and someone like Meg, who's very interested in the social aspects, both calling themselves agroecologists and working on similar projects, maybe just from different angles.

I studied biology in undergrad, and I worked on farms, and did AmeriCorps, and have also done food stamps and healthcare education and outreach. And I feel like the trajectory of my career went first into direct service, and then sort of swerved over into natural science and looking at  soil microbial ecology on farms. And now I'm sort of getting back into the middle — like what is happening in the ecology of farms, and then also, what are the broader sociopolitical contexts in which that's happening, and how do those actually get married together to make a functional food system? At the end of my PhD, I was going to do more interview work, and also I have a master's in nutrition and did more education stuff with that. So I feel like this is a job that really pulls together lots of different aspects of my background in a way that I really appreciate.

Has anything surprised you or been particularly exciting to you in your findings so far?

Yvonne: The first thing that comes to mind that I've been not necessarily surprised by, but pleased to see is I think the application process is working well. From what we've seen so far, it looks like priority groups — which include everything from BIPOC farmers, to limited resource farmers,  veteran farmers, women owned farms and organizations, etc. — all of these groups seem to have been successfully prioritized in the application process, which is really exciting to see. 

A lot of my work focuses on “climate smart practices,” or a term I feel more aligned with is biodiversity based farming practices — basically ways of farming that lower inputs and are more sustainable environmentally — and farmers that use those practices are also prioritized in the application process. And we're seeing that, lo and behold, all of the farms that have these grants are ones that are thinking about farming more in terms of ecological systems. And so it's really cool to see that from the very beginning this grant is supporting farms that I think could really use some extra support in the state.

Meg: Coming from the case studies team, we've been focusing on the supply chain as the unit of our analysis. So looking at all of the actors involved in getting food from the farm or ranch to the cafeteria tray, the different factors along the supply chain that ease that path, and what challenges stand in the way. It's still early in the analysis, so I don't want to say too much that I can't back up, but it does seem that there are many challenges that this grant program is doing a good job at solving; like for example, helping with infrastructure investments or facilitating network building, helping connect farmers with food service directors and forge those introductions. 

Yvonne: Yeah, from the producer side, what we've seen in interviews so far absolutely backs up what Meg is saying. It’s interesting to think about what can persist after a grant, like infrastructure is awesome, right? Because, if you are not supplying the schools because you don't have a refrigerated van, and so you can't follow food safety protocol, then getting a refrigerated van could solve that for a very long time. When it comes to something like labor, maybe you hire a farmhand for the duration of the grant, but does the farm now have enough access to capital to sustain that position in the long term? Those are questions that I think are less clear. 

That makes a lot of sense — especially with a grant this big, and with such diversity in the scope of what it addresses, I imagine it could go a lot of different ways. So it's cool to hear about the different ways you're thinking about it.

Rewinding to before this actually became your career, what got you interested in food and agriculture? 

Meg: Food is such an animating factor in my life, it kind of influences everything I do. I love eating, I'm an avid home cook, I love playing around with new recipes, and cooking with local food, and eating wild food. When I was in undergrad, I first want to be a sculptor and visual artist. And then I took one Environmental Studies class, and it opened my mind to all of these very basic truths about the world that were just so shocking about our food system, and how it operated, and how nonsensical it was. I was like ‘okay, this is fascinating and clearly flawed,’ so that's what started for me. 

Is art and sculpture still a part of your life now?

Meg: Yeah, I’m always thinking about ways to bridge the worlds. I think a project like an illustrated policy brief would be really fun! Actually, have you heard of Inktober? It’s a month-long art challenge that I’ve been doing this year, and it's been really nice start my day with 30 minutes of just free form creative expression with my morning coffee. Some of the prompts feature food, so some of it is food-related art, but a lot of it's just having fun with new techniques. 

What about you, Yvonne?

Yvonne: Similarly, I love food, and cooking, and foraging, and all of that stuff. Even as a kid, I was interested in natural landscapes and environmental conservation. I just feel delighted to get to work with food and food systems. And from more of a career or values perspective, I actually thought about being an MD for while because I love wellness and caring for people. And it took me sort of a surprisingly long time to realize that my interest in farming and agriculture also connects so beautifully into that. But I did get there eventually. I love food and agricultural production for the connections that it has to basically everything that humans do. 

Any fun food, foraging, or art things that you’ve been exploring in your own time?

Yvonne: The other main project that I'm working on right now is focused on dry farming and water resilience in California. Dry farming is basically growing crops over the course of the summer season here without using any irrigation inputs, which is just like, fundamentally great, and hard to believe that it actually works. I’ve worked with dry farmed tomatoes in the past, and now I'm working with vineyards, but I moved about a year ago to a house where I actually have my own garden and got to try dry farming tomatoes myself. I’ve been loving gardening in general, but it's been absolutely wild for me, even after having studied the system for years — like, wait a minute, I planted these tomatoes in the ground in April, and I literally haven't ever watered them, and am still harvesting tomatoes from my garden. It's just really amazing to get a little bit more personally familiar with some of these systems that I'm working with, and also just to get to be outside and gardening, and feeling like I'm more in tune with California's climates and what we have to offer here in my specific microclimate.

Okay I need to know more about how that works!

Yvonne: A lot of it just about building soils and using diversified agricultural practices to help retain water in soils. Lots of variety trials. My dream is that it'll become more about seed saving as well, to sort of adapt local varieties to very specific local contexts. But that's actually kind of hard right now, because a lot of the best varieties are hybrids, and you can’t save seeds from hybrids... I'm going off on a tangent here, I could talk forever about dry farming, but maybe that will be a different chat!

I’d be incredibly down for that. What about you, Meg?

Meg: This summer and fall, I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with different local foods that I get from my CSA. They send a newsletter with recipes and I've been having fun making new stuff. There have been a couple of things I didn't even know grew around here — lemon cucumbers have been delicious. And kiwi berries?? So good. 

My best friend and I are actually members of the same CSA, and this summer as we’ve been experimenting with new recipes, we've been sharing photos of the dishes we make, and updating each other on what worked well and what didn’t. So I’ve loved finding connection with local food in that kind of unexpected way too.

Coming from the Midwest, I don’t think it will ever cease to blow my mind how vibrant and abundant the produce is all year long here. And I love the idea of getting even more creative with how you use it by sharing the process with a friend.

Huge thanks to Meg and Yvonne for taking some time away from their scholarly days to talk food systems with us. You can read more about Farm to School evaluation team’s progress so far here, and browse through other rad contributors to the project here. Let us know if we should deep dive into dry farming, kiwi berry recipes, or anything else that tingled your tastebuds here in a future CLC weekly.

—

I’m excited to welcome back climate writer and longtime CLC supporter–Maia Welbel!

Maia is a writer and dancer whose passions lie at the intersection of art, media, and climate action. Her work has focused on regenerative agriculture, and ecological frameworks for social and cultural progress. Depending on the time of year, you'll most likely find her frolicking in the hills of the East Bay, swimming in Lake Michigan, farming in Sheldon, IL, or baking vegan desserts in any kitchen that will have her.  

maiawelbel.com | @mwelbel

I believe in this.

>> New here? <<

CLC might make a small commission from links in this newsletter. So we can keep crafting rad content for free!

Have an idea we should feature in the newsletter? Want to work with us? Drop a line at [email protected]. We can’t wait to see what y’all cook up next! #closedloopcooking