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Oral History Project Preserves Black and Indigenous Food Traditions
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BY LIZ SUSMAN KARP • June 4, 2024
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Traveling through Appalachia, Tessa Desmond and her team kept hearing the seed stories. As interviewers with the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project (HGP), they spent more than two months talking to home gardeners, cooks, farmers and local historians, learning about seeds that had become part of family lore: the fistful of crowder peas discovered in a late grandmother’s bible, a place of importance to her, or the rare collard greens seeds now named Nellie Taylor collards, which were offered by her
son-in law, who plucked them from the freezer where they had been stored in a plastic bag for 30 years since her passing.
Agriculture has been a way of life and a source of meaning and pride for Black and Indigenous people for centuries, shaping rituals, beliefs, and traditions. Slavery and colonialism exploited their agricultural knowledge and shattered their lives. The heirloom gardens project, a collaboration between Princeton University, Spelman College’s Food Studies program, and Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, aims to memorialize their long-held expertise and culturally meaningful foods.
For two years, students and faculty are collecting the oral histories of community members in the southeastern United States and Appalachia who are preserving their agricultural, culinary,
and medicinal traditions. Oral history as a vehicle for these stories honors a tradition of the past, too: For centuries, most Black Americans were denied learning to read or write, and passed information through the spoken word instead. Read the full story.
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On Farms, ‘Plasticulture’ Persists
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BY GREY MORAN • June 5, 2024
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In 1948, E.M. Emmert, a horticulturist at the University of Kentucky, was tinkering around with how to build a cheap greenhouse. He decided to use polyethylene sheets in lieu of the glass sides, bending the plastic film around a wooden frame. The plants thrived in the new environment; the plastic let in enough light while trapping in warmth.
This is commonly regarded as the first introduction of plastic into agriculture, a move that would transform modern farming—and inadvertently deposit an
untold amount of plastic in the soil.
In the decades that followed, this cheap, pliant material spread through farms across the U.S. and world, becoming so widely used that plastics in agriculture gained its own name: plasticulture.
Today, it’s common to see farms covered in plastic. It lines the sides of greenhouses, blankets fields as “plastic mulch,” covers hoop houses, and winds through farms as irrigation tubes, among other forms. In satellite images, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has observed the typically golden and green agricultural fields turned white, as though dusted in
snow, from all of the plastic.
Agriculture is responsible for 3.5 percent of global plastic production, a figure that may seem small until you consider the sheer volume of plastics produced: around 400 million metric tons per year. Read the full story.
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Can AI Help Cut Plastic Waste From the Food System?
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BY LISA HELD • June 3, 2024
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In April, representatives of more than 150 countries traveled to Canada to hammer out the details of an international, legally binding treaty to tackle the plastic crisis. It was the fourth of five negotiation sessions, with the process set to be completed later this year.
If all goes according to plan, the result will be a Paris Agreement for plastic.
Just like during international climate summits, the companies driving the crisis are showing up in numbers to try to shape the outcome of the
negotiations. Also familiar: Many advocates and experts say that treaty progress is not moving fast enough given the urgency the situation demands. In a press release commenting on the April meeting in Ottawa, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International pointed out that more than 15 million tons of plastic entered the ocean during the week of negotiations.
“Countries have made important progress in Canada with constructive discussions on what the treaty will actually do, but the big decisions still remain: Will we get the strong treaty with common global rules that most of the world is calling for, or will we end up with a voluntary watered-down agreement led by least-common-denominator values?” said Eirik Lindebjerg, WWF International’s global plastics policy lead. “Negotiators need to
recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”
Nivedita Biyani, an expert on plastic waste, was in Ottawa attempting to provide policymakers with data they could use to make smarter decisions. Read the full story.
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