Latest / The Future Herd / 26: Agroecology Is the How-To of Food Sovereignty with Charles Levkoe

Transcript

26: Agroecology Is the How-To of Food Sovereignty with Charles Levkoe · The Future Herd

• 0:00
  Jesse Hirsh: Hi, I'm Jesse Hirsch.
• 0:03
  Welcome to the Future Herd.
• 0:11
  Not only is food where the action is, food is where the whole system confesses,
• 0:17
  where the secrets come out onto the table.
• 0:21
  That's the thread running through this conversation with Charles Leko.
• 0:25
  We begin with the future, but Charles immediately brings us back to the
• 0:30
  past, to the histories, theories, movements, and lived practises
• 0:35
  that explain how we arrived at the food system we currently have.
• 0:40
  And from there, the conversation opens up, agroecology, soil,
• 0:46
  indigenous knowledge, colonialism, urban and rural interdependence.
• 0:51
  School, food, food policy, councils, and the culture of convenience
• 0:56
  all become part of the same larger question, what would it mean to
• 1:00
  understand food as a living system?
• 1:04
  Charles challenges the narrow version of food literacy that asks
• 1:08
  people what they should buy, what they should eat, or how they should
• 1:12
  behave as individual consumers.
• 1:15
  He asked us to look instead at the structures that shape those choices,
• 1:19
  the policies that work against each other, the land relationships we've
• 1:24
  inherited, and the people whose knowledge is too often ignored.
• 1:29
  This is a conversation about food, but it's also a conversation about power,
• 1:34
  memory, education, and imagination.
• 1:38
  It's about why the food system works the way it does, who it works for,
• 1:43
  and how it might build something more, just more ecological and more alive.
• 1:50
  Now, this is the second of what I'm calling a trilogy
• 1:54
  in Canadian food Studies.
• 1:56
  The first was a couple of episodes ago with Alyssa over end.
• 2:00
  This is the second with Charles Lev Co.
• 2:03
  And stay tuned for the third, a conversation with Elaine Power.
• 2:08
  But for now, let's join Charles.
• 2:14
  Charles, welcome to the Future Herd.
• 2:16
  Charles Levkoe: Hi.
• 2:16
  Great, thanks, Jesse.
• 2:17
  It's, uh, it's great to be here.
• 2:20
  Jesse Hirsh: Now, I love to start, uh, every episode with, uh, what
• 2:24
  I'm calling my Rorschach test, uh, which is really meant to evoke
• 2:28
  a, a kind of intuitive response.
• 2:31
  does the future mean to you?
• 2:34
  Charles Levkoe: What does the future mean to me?
• 2:36
  Well, um, I, I guess I would have to start by just saying, I think it's hard to think
• 2:42
  about the future without also thinking about the past and where we've been.
• 2:46
  I think, you know, I, I, you know, as a, as a teacher, uh, I, I spend a lot
• 2:51
  of my, my time with students trying to bring in some of the historical
• 2:57
  and, you know, context of like why we are where we are, um, whether that's
• 3:03
  theoretical and some of the thinkers that have like, got us to this place.
• 3:07
  Um, but I think even more important, maybe as important as the theory is the practise
• 3:11
  and, you know, why people do what they do.
• 3:13
  So, you know, it's, it's one thing to say, oh, you know, Karl Marx was
• 3:17
  an old white man who is irrelevant.
• 3:20
  But it's another thing to look at, you know, the kind of history of
• 3:23
  economics, for example, uh, that got us to this place that we are to be
• 3:26
  able to kind of even dream and imagine of what the future can look like.
• 3:30
  And, you know, I, I, I, I do, I mean, and not to, not to jump too deep into
• 3:35
  it right away, but I, I do sometimes worry that with a lot of, um, as we move
• 3:41
  away from like the long form article or, or, or, or really, or books or
• 3:46
  even lectures, you know, we kind of get into these choppy ideas of, of what
• 3:51
  things look like and what we want them to look like without actually spending
• 3:53
  time, uh, trying to understand again, what, where, why we are, where we are.
• 3:58
  So again, so maybe just to, again, to directly answer your question, when I
• 4:01
  think about the future, um, I, I, I, you know, I do, I do have a lot of,
• 4:06
  um, uh, I, I, I, I, I hesitate maybe saying hope, but you know, like optimism
• 4:12
  of the, of the will maybe to, to, to really, you know, believe that, you
• 4:16
  know, we, we collectively can do better.
• 4:20
  And, you know, I think there's lots of examples that I like to point to and, you
• 4:24
  know, really draw, and I'm sure we'll talk about that today of, of some of those,
• 4:27
  some of those really amazing initiatives that are kind of, you know, run, created
• 4:34
  for people by people, uh, and collective.
• 4:37
  So I, you know, I see the future.
• 4:39
  I, I think about the future as, as, um, something I, some place I want to
• 4:44
  be, I wanna live in that, you know, is, is more maybe equitable and just, and
• 4:49
  sustainable, you know, in all of those terms, we can break down and talk about
• 4:52
  what they actually mean, but, um, you know, better, better for people, better
• 4:56
  for all people, um, around the world and, and the non, non-people as well
• 5:01
  on the, the non-human elements as well, because we're all deeply interconnected.
• 5:06
  I.
• 5:07
  Jesse Hirsh: Well, and living systems is part of the domain, uh,
• 5:10
  of AgriFood and not just humans, uh, as part of those living systems.
• 5:14
  And of course, as I was researching our, our conversation and looking
• 5:17
  at, you know, at least the list that I had of your published articles,
• 5:22
  uh, on the one hand there was lots of stuff I want to get into today.
• 5:25
  So I, I will certainly do my best to get to the stuff I'm interested in.
• 5:31
  I, I did see that you have this kind of a big picture view, kind of system
• 5:36
  level critique that kind of suggests to me that as a researcher you could
• 5:41
  have gone into any discipline and had fun, you know, uh, a, uh, causing
• 5:45
  shit and, and, and bringing up, uh, uncomfortable arguments and, and insights.
• 5:51
  So I guess, you know, my first question to get into the kind of
• 5:54
  lore and origin story is why food?
• 5:57
  You know, and I
• 5:58
  Charles Levkoe: Mm-hmm.
• 5:59
  Jesse Hirsh: it strikes me that as, as a radical, as someone who's a critic,
• 6:03
  there's a lot of ways you could have came at it, food really seems to
• 6:07
  resonate with you in terms of a, a, a, an avenue to make sense of society.
• 6:13
  But to your point, to think of an alternative society,
• 6:16
  a more equitable society.
• 6:19
  Charles Levkoe: Mm-hmm.
• 6:20
  Yeah.
• 6:20
  And I think that that is absolutely a good place to start.
• 6:23
  Um, I often, I often get pigeonholed.
• 6:26
  I think a lot of people who study food and agriculture get pigeonholed
• 6:29
  into a very narrow place because people think about, oh, you're, you,
• 6:35
  you do nutrition, you do, you know, you do soil, you do all these things.
• 6:38
  And I think, you know, while yes, we do that, like, and I'm not just
• 6:42
  speaking of myself, but those of us who kind of study food systems as
• 6:45
  systems, um, of course, you know, I, I often tell people I actually, I, I,
• 6:50
  you know, I often give lectures or, you know, do workshops and people and
• 6:54
  by saying, well, what should I eat?
• 6:55
  Can you just tell me what to eat?
• 6:56
  And my answer typically is, I don't care what you eat.
• 6:59
  I like, I actually don't care.
• 7:01
  You should eat whatever your culture, your, your belly is
• 7:05
  telling you is good to eat.
• 7:06
  But I mean, really, you know, I study.
• 7:09
  And I'm interested in everything as you kind of note everything around food.
• 7:14
  And you know, for me, I come to this work as, I would I always say
• 7:18
  an activist, um, a practitioner.
• 7:21
  I worked in the nonprofit sector for many, many years, uh, including
• 7:26
  with an organisation called The Stop Community Food Centre, which is now
• 7:29
  mushroomed into a, uh, national, uh, a network of, of community food centres.
• 7:35
  Um, I, I, I was a farmer, an agroecological farmer for many years
• 7:39
  out in Nova Scotia, um, and, and did farming work all, all over the,
• 7:43
  well, different parts of the country.
• 7:45
  Um, and you know, I, I think for me getting into food, I, I, I kind of
• 7:50
  tripped over it when I started my, my, some of my academic work by actually
• 7:54
  meeting people similar to myself who, you know, were kind of using food
• 7:59
  as a bit of a, a tool or a vision, a lens to understand the social, the
• 8:03
  political, the economic world around us.
• 8:06
  And you know, I always say like, I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm interested and I have
• 8:09
  a, you know, as you know, I have a lot of interests, but sometimes when I try
• 8:13
  to stand up and talk about, you know, some big, you know, big hard issues,
• 8:17
  like, I dunno, set settler colonialism or capitalism or racism, you know, I
• 8:21
  mean, there's always people who like, know exactly and get excited about that.
• 8:24
  There's a lot of people who their eyes glaze over and things go over
• 8:27
  their heads and they're just like, I don't even know what those words mean.
• 8:30
  And I think for me, talking about food is like, is a, is in agriculture is
• 8:35
  a really invaluable entry point for people because I can stand, you can
• 8:40
  stand up in a room in front of hundreds of people and say, who here eats?
• 8:44
  And everyone shoots their hand up and everyone has an opinion.
• 8:46
  Everyone thinks about this, everyone's trying to read about it,
• 8:49
  they're trying to understand things.
• 8:50
  So it's a, it's, it's just such a valuable entry point to be talking
• 8:54
  about big, complicated, I mean, complex, messy issues, um, but also
• 9:00
  the interconnection of those issues.
• 9:02
  And I'm, you know, again, we'll talk more about that today, but the, I
• 9:05
  think the interconnection is key.
• 9:07
  I, I am, and I, and I'll keep emphasising this probably throughout
• 9:10
  our conversation, but I, I, I think one of the biggest challenges in this work
• 9:15
  is when we start to look at things in isolation, um, from, from other aspects.
• 9:20
  So we say, oh, this is just about, I mean, the big picture, this is about
• 9:23
  humans or just about the environment, or just about the non-human entities.
• 9:26
  I mean, or, or we talk about it's just about policy or
• 9:29
  it's just about agriculture.
• 9:30
  It's just about harvesting, whatever.
• 9:32
  I mean, any, any time we isolate things, I think we actually create
• 9:36
  much more complicated problems.
• 9:39
  And the only way to think about this is, is, is the interconnection through
• 9:43
  the, what I, you know, we talk about the systems lens, but for me, I, you know, my,
• 9:49
  my, my background, my, both my academic training, but also my prac, my practical
• 9:53
  training, uh, has kind of really.
• 9:56
  Kind of led to a point where I do food and like food is what connects
• 10:00
  a lot of what I do and food systems.
• 10:01
  But you know, I, I'm, I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not a dietitian,
• 10:05
  I'm not a soil scientist.
• 10:07
  I'm a generalist, you know, so I, I'm interested in all that stuff and I'm
• 10:10
  reading about it, but I think it's, it's, it's, again, it's that interconnection,
• 10:14
  it's that connection between things, between people, between ideas, that,
• 10:18
  again, going back to we started help us understand kind of where we've
• 10:21
  come from, but also where we're going.
• 10:24
  Jesse Hirsh: And part of, part of what I'm trying to do with this podcast
• 10:27
  is build a, a knowledge base and, and try to really map out a lot of the
• 10:32
  concepts and even the vocabulary in our kind of contemporary food systems.
• 10:37
  A and you're the first guest on the show to throw out the word
• 10:40
  agroecology whi, which is a phrase I'm particularly fond of.
• 10:45
  Uh, so I'd love for you to unpack it, especially in light of what
• 10:49
  you just said in terms of the interconnection of all the different
• 10:53
  Charles Levkoe: Mm-hmm.
• 10:54
  Jesse Hirsh: that kind of come back to food and how we think of food.
• 10:59
  Charles Levkoe: Mm-hmm.
• 11:00
  Yeah.
• 11:00
  So that's, yeah, there's a lot of different ways to come at this,
• 11:04
  but let me just, let me actually come at it on a personal level.
• 11:07
  Um, when I was farming out in Nova Scotia, um, we had an organic farm.
• 11:11
  We were certified for a while.
• 11:12
  We, you know, we did, we did, we did the, did the thing, the things
• 11:16
  where you have to document everything and you have a certifier company.
• 11:19
  Um, and even here in Northern Ontario where I'm talking to you
• 11:22
  now, you know, there's, there's real, there's not many organic farms.
• 11:26
  There are a few.
• 11:27
  Um, and it's always been, I think in my experience, it's always
• 11:31
  been a bit of a contentious issue.
• 11:33
  You know, in many ways I do support organic, I think
• 11:35
  is a really valuable thing.
• 11:36
  But it's complicated in the sense that, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot
• 11:40
  of good history written on, on the kind of politics of organics, and especially
• 11:44
  in the US when the organic law came into place, um, and some of the shifts that,
• 11:49
  that, that happened from moving from what I would call a movement, a social
• 11:53
  movement of people who truly believed in values and, and, and ideas around,
• 11:59
  around farming to what became a bit of a technical kind of list of things you
• 12:04
  can't do and things you have to record.
• 12:06
  And, you know, and of course when we scale things, you know, there's
• 12:10
  this need to, um, to standardise.
• 12:14
  Because, you know, what you don't want is, you know, somebody, you know,
• 12:18
  calling themselves organic, where actually, you know, they're dumping
• 12:20
  tonnes of pesticides in the land and they're, you know, doing all kinds of
• 12:23
  things that we, that aren't organic.
• 12:25
  But, you know, if there's no standard, how do we, how do we tell?
• 12:27
  So, you know, there is now obviously a, an international set of standards.
• 12:31
  You know, US has a set of standards.
• 12:32
  Canada has a set of standards.
• 12:34
  But with those standards come all kinds of, like, and this goes back
• 12:38
  to my point about when we start to kind of like isolate things and say,
• 12:41
  well, we do this and can't do this, then we create more challenges.
• 12:44
  I think what happened is people started to recognise that, um, you know, different,
• 12:49
  different, different places required different kinds of farming practises.
• 12:53
  And of course.
• 12:54
  You know, farming in an ethical and sustainable way is not in a, I guess
• 12:58
  a socially just way, is not just about not using this and using that.
• 13:02
  It's also about how you treat the land and how you treat the animals and how you
• 13:06
  relate to the land, those relationships.
• 13:08
  So anyways, for, so for me, we, you know, when I think about ology, I
• 13:13
  think about it is a much more kind of process-based approach to farming.
• 13:18
  And I would actually expand that to all to, to, to lots of ways that
• 13:23
  we, what we often call food getting.
• 13:25
  So harvesting a fish of, of, of, of things.
• 13:29
  You, you, you know, uh, plants and, uh, you know, animals,
• 13:34
  um, but also also growing.
• 13:35
  So, you know, so there's that approach to agroecology that we
• 13:38
  can think about it as more of an ethical, um, practise of, of systems.
• 13:44
  Now that's, that's coming at it from a, a personal perspective.
• 13:47
  I'll just say a quick word about the kind of broader approach to
• 13:50
  agroecology and how it's used.
• 13:52
  Um, agroecology is a concept that has been, uh, is being used by,
• 13:56
  by peasant communities and farming communities around the world.
• 13:59
  Um, uh, it's been, you know, the way my understanding of it comes from some of
• 14:04
  the world, uh, the, the, the gatherings of the, um, the lanni gatherings where
• 14:10
  farmers and peasants have come together.
• 14:12
  Uh, there was just a, just one that happened very recently,
• 14:15
  just in fall last year.
• 14:17
  Um, and one, one of the things that these gatherings have done is kind of talked
• 14:20
  about both what is food sovereignty, um, which just a point of note is, is,
• 14:24
  is the idea of, you know, uh, you know, healthy, sustainable, um, you know,
• 14:30
  environmentally sustainable and, and just food systems, but really talking
• 14:33
  about control, uh, of food systems by the people who produce and harvest our food.
• 14:38
  And agroecology, uh, was also described at those gatherings as the
• 14:43
  kind of how to of food sovereignty.
• 14:45
  So these, so I think it's important to talk about food
• 14:47
  sovereignty and ology together.
• 14:49
  So agroecology in a nutshell is really about the, the, the
• 14:54
  practise of food sovereignty.
• 14:55
  It has three kind of pillars.
• 14:57
  The way I think about it.
• 14:58
  It has, um, the pillar of, uh, the science and research.
• 15:02
  So this isn't about going back to some historical system where we
• 15:05
  didn't know a lot about soil microbes and, and, and, and, and you know,
• 15:09
  how, how the cloud climate works.
• 15:11
  But it's really about, it is about the science and the research, but
• 15:14
  it's also as important as that.
• 15:16
  And parallel to that is the farmer or, or grower or harvester
• 15:20
  knowledge and experience.
• 15:22
  So the experiential knowledge.
• 15:23
  So saying, yes, science is important, but experience is also important.
• 15:26
  And often experience gets.
• 15:29
  Push to the side, especially when you talk about indigenous experience, indigenous
• 15:32
  knowledge, ecological, traditional ecological knowledge or farmer knowledge.
• 15:36
  When farmers are being told to do something and they're saying, well,
• 15:38
  that doesn't make sense because that's, you know, we're seeing the
• 15:41
  soil, we're seeing the climate.
• 15:42
  Um, so it's about the, the research, but also the, the experience.
• 15:46
  And the third pillar, which I think is also as important is, is, is I, I would
• 15:51
  think of it as like the movement, um, of, of, of people, the, the policies,
• 15:55
  the governance, the trying to engage with systems in a way that we wanna
• 15:58
  create, create, enabling environments for these kinds of things to happen.
• 16:03
  So it's one thing to say, well, we have all the knowledge, uh, from a
• 16:06
  research and a experience perspective to have socially just, and, and
• 16:10
  ecologically sustainable food systems.
• 16:12
  But if the policy environment, if the governance structures don't support
• 16:15
  that, then, you know, we're kind of banging our heads against the wall,
• 16:18
  which we are, many of us anyways.
• 16:20
  But, you know, to say that, you know, the goal of, when we talk about
• 16:24
  radical social change or radical environmental change, you know, that
• 16:28
  doesn't happen in our local communities.
• 16:30
  It doesn't happen only in our local communities.
• 16:32
  It doesn't happen only in our region.
• 16:34
  It has to happen at kind of a, at multiple scales with the, at the, at
• 16:38
  the provincial scale, at the, at the national scale, the international scale.
• 16:41
  And there's lots of examples where that happens.
• 16:44
  But ultimately just to, sorry, wrap this up.
• 16:46
  Your, these are big questions you're asking.
• 16:48
  Um, but I think with agroecology, again, it is that it gives us a
• 16:51
  bit of a direction and a, and a way to think about some of these big,
• 16:55
  how to make these bigger changes.
• 16:57
  And again, uh, these don't come from me, these come from, you know, the way that
• 17:01
  like growers and harvesters have, have been thinking and talking about this,
• 17:04
  again, going back to like the theory about this, but also the practise and, and, and
• 17:08
  people have been working on these issues.
• 17:10
  So I think agroecology is a really important way to think about food systems,
• 17:13
  um, that goes beyond, just simply do this, don't do this, but it brings a set of,
• 17:18
  of ethics and values and, and, and that history, uh, to this, to these questions.
• 17:24
  Jesse Hirsh: Uh, and you know, to your point about the, the questions I'm
• 17:28
  throwing at you, one of the things we try to do here on the future
• 17:31
  Herd is not just invite the best and brightest such as yourself, but create
• 17:36
  questions that really try to challenge and push your ideas and thinking.
• 17:41
  I say that because I would love to hear you kind of elaborate on the indigenous
• 17:46
  angle, uh, either in terms of the, the research or activism that you're doing,
• 17:51
  uh, either around us as a society, valuing indigenous knowledge when
• 17:56
  it comes to agriculture or literally empowering indigenous communities when
• 18:01
  it comes to their own food production.
• 18:04
  And, and I I say this because in a past episode, we kind of talked about
• 18:09
  what I think is a really interesting idea that you have, on the one hand,
• 18:14
  the ageing demographics of Canadian agriculture, the idea that so many
• 18:18
  farmers are old and are really getting close to wanting to move on.
• 18:23
  And yet you have First Nations communities across the country, which
• 18:26
  are really young potentially have a whole lot of, uh, labour and expertise.
• 18:33
  Uh, again, the, there were, I, I'm drawing very loose connections
• 18:37
  between two different phenomena.
• 18:40
  that as a general intro, I would love to hear your thoughts or your work, uh,
• 18:45
  uh, around indigenous agriculture and First Nations farming, uh, across Canada.
• 18:50
  Charles Levkoe: Yeah.
• 18:51
  I also a really, really important issue, and I, I always, when I talk about these
• 18:55
  issues, I just need to preface my co my, my comments, but, but with a few things.
• 19:00
  One is that I am not indigenous.
• 19:02
  I am a second generation Canadian.
• 19:03
  My family came, uh, came as, uh, uh, you know, fleeing violence
• 19:10
  of their own to this place.
• 19:11
  And, um, uh, you know, and I'm, I'm also, I, so I grew up in Toronto.
• 19:16
  I'm new to Northern Ontario, relatively.
• 19:18
  I've been here about a decade.
• 19:19
  Um, and you know, I, I think it's really, and it's important to say that because
• 19:23
  I think, uh, you know, it's important that indigenous people and all, all
• 19:29
  communities get to speak for themselves.
• 19:30
  You know, I never would want to speak for an indigenous community.
• 19:33
  Um, and, you know, being up here the last 10 years, one of the most wonderful
• 19:39
  things about being in this place is I have been exposed to and become very connected
• 19:45
  to many indigenous, urban, indigenous communities, many first nations.
• 19:50
  And I'm just, I feel like, I mean, the beauty of being an academic is you get to
• 19:53
  learn probably way more than you teach.
• 19:55
  I mean, whether people admit that or not, that's, that's the best part about it.
• 19:59
  So I have been, you know, kind of, you, you think, you always think
• 20:03
  you know lots, and then all of a sudden you come somewhere and
• 20:05
  you meet new people and they're teaching you all kinds of new things.
• 20:07
  And, you know, there is so much knowledge and history and wisdom, uh, to, from
• 20:13
  communities up here who have been in this place for, you know, since time
• 20:17
  immemorial, they, they've been here, and they, and that, that, that, that
• 20:20
  there's that oral knowledge and oral traditions, uh, and experience that,
• 20:23
  that, that, that, that I've been kind of learning some of it, some of it,
• 20:27
  um, you know, so that, that's, I mean, that's, that's one thing to preface.
• 20:30
  The other thing to preface, which is also partly an answer to the question is,
• 20:33
  you know, there's a really complicated and problematic history, uh, in this, in
• 20:38
  this place about, uh, the way indigenous people have, uh, been treated and how
• 20:44
  they're, how, how, you know, the, the, the, basically the situation they're in.
• 20:48
  And that is, you know, that is the reality of colonialism and now settler colonialism
• 20:52
  where, you know, indigenous people since, you know, early contact, um, indigenous
• 20:57
  people have been pushed off their land.
• 20:59
  Um, land has been stolen.
• 21:01
  Um, I think there's very, there's extremely compelling evidence that
• 21:05
  there's been a genocide in this country.
• 21:07
  There still is an ongoing cultural genocide of indigenous people.
• 21:11
  Um, you know, and that comes not only from the separation from land, but
• 21:15
  also from language, from family and all of that, you know, and, and more is,
• 21:20
  is the knowledge and the experience.
• 21:22
  So, um.
• 21:23
  So, you know, that, and that has kind of led to a place where these
• 21:27
  rich histories of agriculture in some communities, like ADE communities,
• 21:32
  um, of, of, of, um, of, of gathering, of, of, of harvesting, uh, especially
• 21:38
  up here in the, um, in the anishnabe communities where I live, um, that that
• 21:42
  rich and really textured knowledge and experience has been dramatically dis
• 21:48
  not just disrupted and well disrupted.
• 21:51
  They'll say very deliberately disrupted.
• 21:52
  And that's what I mean, you know, when we talk about genocide,
• 21:54
  this isn't just a, a consequence.
• 21:56
  This is, I think, very much a part of, um, the, the fabric of, of how colonialism
• 22:02
  works and how it's still working here.
• 22:04
  So, I mean, that, that said, um, you know, the, the impacts of all these food systems
• 22:10
  problems are extremely disproportionate for indigenous people, whether it's,
• 22:13
  you know, food security, food insecurity rates that are, you know, three, four
• 22:17
  times higher for indigenous communities.
• 22:19
  You know, we see First Nations even in this area where, um, you know, food
• 22:24
  insecurity can be up to a hundred percent, you know, where, and we, you know, a lot
• 22:27
  of them don't have potable drinking water.
• 22:29
  And these are not, again, these are not accidents.
• 22:31
  This is their direct result of people being pushed onto, onto reserves that
• 22:36
  isn't always their traditional territory, uh, Indian act rules that don't allow
• 22:39
  people to fish and, and, and, and, and grow food and kind of share that and,
• 22:44
  and sell it or whatever they need, whatever they want to do with it.
• 22:47
  Um, but also the pollution of waterways and soils and the toxicity.
• 22:51
  So anyways, I mean, all of this, I, I, I don't wanna harp on the, the negative,
• 22:55
  but I think again, as we started, when you asked me about the future, we have
• 22:58
  to understand where we are to talk about.
• 23:01
  So it's, you can't, I I think it's not, you can't just talk about, you
• 23:04
  know, the put the potentials and the proba, the po prospects of indigenous
• 23:07
  agriculture or, or, or food systems without kind of naming these realities,
• 23:11
  because this is, you know, it's easy to look up and say, Hey, there's so much
• 23:14
  land, and why aren't people farming?
• 23:15
  They're hungry.
• 23:16
  Like, there's, there's a lot of reasons for that.
• 23:19
  And this is part of what I'm just kind of touching on here a little bit.
• 23:24
  And that said, there are some, you know, a lot of my work up here, I'm,
• 23:28
  I do community-based research, meaning that I don't necess, I don't sit in an
• 23:31
  office and come up with ideas on my own.
• 23:33
  I work with people, I work with communities, and I take direction
• 23:36
  from them and the kind of research that needs to be done.
• 23:39
  So, um, a lot of the work that I've been doing since I came up to Northern
• 23:43
  Ontario is working with First Nations and trying to understand, um, their, their
• 23:49
  experiences, their knowledge, their, their interests, what they want, and
• 23:53
  working to support them in getting there.
• 23:55
  So, um, you know, and I, I mentioned before, the honest ADE community
• 23:58
  in Northwestern Ontario is not, uh, traditionally a farming community.
• 24:01
  They have, they do garden.
• 24:03
  Uh, there, there are, there is lots of history of growing, but they're not,
• 24:05
  you know, not in the, any, in, in the kind of large scale farming the way,
• 24:09
  you know, UDE has have done with corn.
• 24:11
  And, you know, some of these, some of these be, you know,
• 24:14
  some of these beautiful, um.
• 24:16
  Like what I would call agroecology for agroecological forms of farming.
• 24:20
  Um, but you know, that said, uh, there's, there's a lot of interest, you know, and
• 24:24
  I think, you know, food systems for an in, from indigenous perspective, agriculture
• 24:28
  is not just about growing things in a kind of, in the, um, what I would call colonial
• 24:34
  farming structure, kind of British farming model or French farming model where we're
• 24:37
  kind of growing, you know, single crops in, in large, on large tracts of land.
• 24:41
  But there is this integration of different ways of food getting, whether that's,
• 24:47
  again, harvesting, uh, and keeping and all, but in, and the relationship
• 24:51
  there is taking care of forests, taking care of land to make sure that there
• 24:55
  is, there's lots of stuff available.
• 24:57
  Um, yes, some gardening.
• 24:58
  Um, you know, and, and we've been working with some of the communities
• 25:01
  around things like doing fish emulsion or, you know, working
• 25:04
  with, um, you know, different crops.
• 25:07
  We're, you know, we're doing a project right now with, we have a lot of First
• 25:09
  Nations involved with where we're trying to, uh, it's a form of seed breeding
• 25:13
  called land, race seed, um, breeding where we're actually, you know, planting,
• 25:17
  we're doing watermelon, uh, and squash, but we're kind of planting intercropping
• 25:23
  together, different varieties and allowing the plants to kind of do their thing.
• 25:27
  So we're not isolating the way most seeds are produced.
• 25:30
  We're actually allowing those seeds to, to inter interbreed, and
• 25:33
  we're choosing the best ones in partnership with all these communities.
• 25:36
  And, you know, they tell us what they like and the ones they like, we regrow and we
• 25:40
  plant again, and we're actually having a lot of the communities grow out some of
• 25:43
  these seeds as well, and then send back the ones that they like and mixing them
• 25:46
  into the batch and doing that all over.
• 25:48
  So we're in our third year, that project.
• 25:50
  Um, and, you know, again, but, but again, it, it's this, it's this way of kind of
• 25:54
  trying to learn from these histories, trying to, you know, take advantage of
• 26:00
  the, of, of what people want to do and, and doing things with, with communities.
• 26:04
  So it, so it's not just about kind of, you know, we're gonna grow our perfect
• 26:08
  seeds and send it over to them, but it's about this engagement because again, the
• 26:13
  learning, I think that comes from that, that work is, uh, is really valuable.
• 26:17
  And, and as a result, you know, I mean, we've done, we've had some incredible
• 26:21
  events where we're, where we, we will, you know, have, you know, we'll, we'll
• 26:25
  bring up some indigenous chefs and they'll, you know, work with them.
• 26:28
  So we've had things like some amazing, like salads and berries and, you know,
• 26:33
  even animals we with, with beaver and moose and, um, and different ways of
• 26:38
  cooking things, um, to really, you know, represent not just the delicious
• 26:43
  foods of the area, but again, that, that relationship to the land, which is so
• 26:47
  key to all of this, the relationship to each other, which is again, so key.
• 26:51
  Um, so, um, that's, you know, again, I think that that, that that relationship
• 26:56
  relation based agriculture, we can call.
• 26:59
  And again, I think that's all part of Agricul as we described it, as I
• 27:02
  described it, um, as a way to really let communities take, take advantage of, uh,
• 27:07
  and take leadership in that, in that work.
• 27:09
  And again, I should also mention, uh, Mann, uh, wild Rice.
• 27:13
  I mean, that's, that's another, that's a native, that's a crop
• 27:15
  that has been grown here forever.
• 27:16
  And we, we do have a project, we're working with communities.
• 27:19
  Um, you know, there's a lot of flooding that's happened, a lot of
• 27:22
  pollution where communities haven't been able to, to grow that Mann.
• 27:25
  Um, and, you know, we're trying to work with them now to, to, to both document
• 27:30
  history, but also think about ways forward and, and, and, uh, support, uh,
• 27:34
  these communities in kind of growing and practising , uh, you know, learning from
• 27:39
  elders who still have that knowledge.
• 27:41
  Um, so we've actually had a few gatherings where we're, um, again,
• 27:44
  the communities are doing the work.
• 27:45
  We're just there to kind of be the backbone and support some of this.
• 27:47
  Um, but it's a good, you know, Mann is just a perfect example of,
• 27:51
  of a really important crop that has both environmental, spiritual,
• 27:55
  like spiritual ceremonial, identity based kind of relations to it.
• 28:00
  And it's, so, it's, you know, and it's, and it kind of manifests all
• 28:03
  of what I just talked about, terms of the problematic history, but
• 28:06
  also the potential going forward.
• 28:08
  Jesse Hirsh: And, you know, listeners of of the podcast sort of recognise
• 28:12
  that I have, uh, certain biases and, and one of those biases certainly
• 28:16
  is with regards to technology.
• 28:19
  And I've always seen agroecology as kind of a high tech approach to
• 28:24
  agriculture that begins, uh, uh, in the kind of wisdom as it were, of
• 28:31
  not just indigenous knowledge, but of agricultural practises as a whole.
• 28:36
  And community research strikes me as kind of high tech as well, uh, uh,
• 28:42
  even though it is ancient in terms of how it's been practised, but it
• 28:46
  is kind of an advanced methodology and it is interesting to hear kind of
• 28:51
  the results that you're able to get.
• 28:53
  I I, because you're allowing the community to lead the kind of, uh, to
• 28:58
  lead the inquiry, to lead the direction.
• 29:01
  curious, especially given, you know, your background in Toronto, but even now,
• 29:05
  the nature of how Northwestern Ontario works, you get the benefit of like urban
• 29:12
  and rural contrast or juxtaposition?
• 29:15
  it, it strikes me that community research is not urban or rural.
• 29:20
  It's both.
• 29:21
  And I'm curious if that affords you kind of different insights into how,
• 29:26
  you know, the, the way the nuances in our food system, the differences that
• 29:30
  manifest that are often lost on city folk or conversely lost on rural folk
• 29:36
  'cause it's an either or, whereas in your case, I suspect it's a, it's a both and.
• 29:42
  Charles Levkoe: Mm-hmm.
• 29:44
  These are, yeah, you're asking these big, these are all very big
• 29:46
  que These are great questions.
• 29:47
  These are big questions that I've been thinking a lot about in different
• 29:49
  ways, and you're kind of, you're.
• 29:53
  Poking at all.
• 29:53
  The good, the good bits that I, I, I have, I've been kind of wrestling with.
• 29:58
  But let me say this 'cause I, I, you know, in limited time, um, I think, you
• 30:04
  know, one of the things, I mean we, yes, there are, when we talk about rural,
• 30:07
  urban, there are definitely designations and what's an urban and what's a
• 30:10
  rural, but I think, you know, we really also have to think of these things.
• 30:12
  Obviously these are all socially constructed, you know, ideas
• 30:16
  and they're all relative.
• 30:18
  Right?
• 30:18
  I was in a meeting, uh, one of my, when I first got here within
• 30:21
  the first year, I remember, or I was sitting in a meeting with, uh,
• 30:24
  several indigenous and settler people.
• 30:27
  And this guy from a Northern First Nation, so you may know North Northwest Ontario.
• 30:31
  There's, there's a bunch of, several road access First Nations, but also
• 30:35
  many, uh, fly-in First Nations.
• 30:37
  And someone was coming in from a fly-in First Nation and they just
• 30:40
  said, we were sitting around, we're doing a, a sort opening circle.
• 30:42
  And he said, he said, I remember he said something like, um, I, when I come to
• 30:47
  Thunder Bay, it's just, it is the busiest.
• 30:50
  Like there's so much traffic and it's like, I just, like, I've, I can't get
• 30:54
  my head on because there's too so big.
• 30:56
  And, and then it came to me and I, I was kind of laughing.
• 30:58
  I said, you know, I just came up from Toronto and I'll tell
• 31:01
  you I have, I, there's Thunder Bay is, there's no traffic.
• 31:05
  It's so quiet.
• 31:06
  It's so, you know, and, but it's just like, it was a great example of
• 31:09
  this kind of like this clash of like both paradigms and life experiences
• 31:13
  and how we see things, right?
• 31:15
  And you know, of course, like Thunder Bay is, you know, where we are about
• 31:19
  750 kilometres from, from everything.
• 31:22
  Um, any other bigger town, Minneapolis is the closest city to us, um, which is
• 31:27
  about five hour, five hours south of us.
• 31:29
  Um, but you know, when you think of also places like Thunder Bay
• 31:32
  versus, versus Toronto, I mean, you know, thunder Bay is the big city
• 31:36
  and Toronto is the, the bigger city.
• 31:37
  But you know, even, so again, it's relative to those places, but I think
• 31:41
  it's, it's, it's important, it's valuable to think about that relationality
• 31:44
  in respect to food because, um, you know, in many cases it is the, it
• 31:51
  is the, the, it is the, the rural places that support the urban places.
• 31:54
  And you, you need those places.
• 31:56
  Um, you know, Toronto has some of the top class a, some of the most
• 32:00
  class A soil or had in the country, which is quickly being depleted.
• 32:04
  Um, I remember when we, when I was growing, I used to run community
• 32:07
  gardens in Toronto and um, worked on a bunch of farms down there and it,
• 32:12
  you know, there it is some of the best farmland in, in, in, in, in the country.
• 32:16
  Um, you know, and, and it's, and, and, and when we lose that, obviously we rely
• 32:21
  more on the, the, the, the, the, the rural communities to, to, to bring our food in.
• 32:25
  Um, with.
• 32:27
  Up here, you know, we're seeing a lot of, I mean, there are a lot of urban farms.
• 32:31
  There's a lot of farms on the periphery of Thunder Bay, um,
• 32:34
  in and across Northwest Ontario.
• 32:35
  But, you know, the, we, the soil is very different.
• 32:37
  It's, you know, we're on, we're rock.
• 32:39
  It's a lot of clay.
• 32:40
  Um, so what people can grow, how they can grow can be quite different.
• 32:43
  But again, I guess the, the point I wanna get to is that relationship between
• 32:47
  these places is, um, is really telling.
• 32:50
  Because when you're in Thunder Bay, you know, it's really a five minute
• 32:53
  drive to get outta the city, to be in some of those beautiful places where
• 32:56
  there are wild blueberries and, you know, there's, there is, you know,
• 33:00
  people are, are, are growing, uh, in, in those regions and we rely a lot,
• 33:05
  um, on those, on those relationships.
• 33:06
  So people can, and people can see those connections quite directly.
• 33:11
  Um, so they have a, in some ways a much better sense of that.
• 33:14
  You know, one of the other realities that, that kind of speaks to this
• 33:17
  is, um, there, there's, there's a bridge that comes across GaN.
• 33:23
  Um, and when that bridge gets closed, it's, there's, there's no road to get to
• 33:28
  Thunder Bay unless you go through the us.
• 33:30
  So, you know, that that has had a big impact too, on the way I think people
• 33:34
  think about food and when the pandemic hit and, you know, things were limited.
• 33:37
  And, you know, that bridge does get closed down sometimes, both because of repair
• 33:42
  and also I think some really wonderful protests that have happened a few
• 33:45
  times by, uh, the First Nations in that region, uh, to really make a point of how
• 33:49
  important that, that, that that area is.
• 33:51
  Um, but again, I think that people in Thunder base see how
• 33:55
  kind of, um, vulnerable we can be in terms of not having access
• 33:58
  to food that can be shipped in.
• 34:00
  Um, we actually just recently, as part of one of my projects with, uh, the
• 34:03
  Food Action Network of Northwestern Ontario created a emergency food
• 34:06
  plan, which is doing exactly this.
• 34:08
  It's thinking about, you know, what happens when we get cut off?
• 34:12
  What happens when, you know, there is an emergency, whether it's potential
• 34:16
  war, uh, war implications of war, or, uh, or, or, or a pandemic or,
• 34:22
  you know, lots of weather events.
• 34:24
  And so anyway, so I, I think that that thinking about those relationships
• 34:28
  to, to the, to the land around us and the places, both in terms of importing
• 34:32
  food, but also where food is being grown, uh, is, is, is maybe more present
• 34:38
  for folks in, in, in the region here.
• 34:41
  Um, but I, I, again, I go back to where I started and say it is relative because,
• 34:45
  you know, we, I mean people in Thunder Bay, like it is this the big city here.
• 34:49
  You know, people really see it as a, as a big unruly city.
• 34:53
  Even if, you know, the same way many people in Thunder Bay see
• 34:56
  Toronto as a big unruly city.
• 34:58
  Um, but those, I think those thinking about those relationships in, in
• 35:01
  respect to land and access to food, um, I, I, you know, again, I, I think
• 35:06
  to the short answer to your question is from my perspective, maybe there
• 35:11
  is more of that kind of, people see it here in Thunder Bay, but I
• 35:14
  think in like it is relative, right?
• 35:17
  In terms of the way people, um, interact with their food systems, right?
• 35:22
  Jesse Hirsh: Well, and, and let me throw another challenging question at you, uh,
• 35:27
  partly inspired by an anecdote you've sort of alluded to there in terms of,
• 35:32
  you know, Toronto at one point having the best soil, uh, in the country.
• 35:37
  it strikes me that certainly within the agricultural sector, and I think
• 35:41
  within some, uh, of the, for lack of a better phrase, intelligentsia, there
• 35:46
  is a growing awareness of, of soil, uh, of the, the value that soil, uh,
• 35:51
  plays in our life on this planet.
• 35:54
  The importance of biodiversity within that soil, the idea that not all soil is equal.
• 36:02
  Again, here, you and I were having this conversation and we sort of both
• 36:05
  understand that, you know, politically, economically, technologically, but then
• 36:11
  as I was listening to you, I thought, you know, but the voting, the, the
• 36:14
  general voting populace doesn't, right?
• 36:17
  The people who think about land use policies in Toronto don't.
• 36:21
  Right to, to what extent, and, and again, I, I'm babbling here.
• 36:25
  You could figure out how to answer this however you wish.
• 36:29
  To what extent do we need to be raising soil literacy, for lack
• 36:34
  of a better phrase, uh, does soil need to be politicised?
• 36:38
  Do we need to help, you know, uh, people who see themselves as politically
• 36:43
  conscious or politically literate?
• 36:46
  Do we need to be educating them about the centrality of soil in our lives, or
• 36:51
  am I just nerding out when I identify someone else who's also into soil all.
• 36:57
  Charles Levkoe: Yeah, no, for sure.
• 36:58
  I, I totally, I like, I, I, I'm, I'm on, I'm on that page with you.
• 37:02
  I, you know, I have a, a, a friend who's a, uh, does, uh, agroecological
• 37:06
  beef, uh, and, you know, he raises cows and he often says to me like,
• 37:10
  I don't grow beef, I grow grass.
• 37:11
  That's what, you know, and, and really everything else just kind
• 37:14
  of happens because if you grow good grass, you know, your, the animals
• 37:18
  are gonna eat well, and they're gonna be well fed, and they're gonna
• 37:20
  take, they're gonna be taken care of.
• 37:21
  And, you know, I could, to your point, I could say, you don't grow.
• 37:25
  You're not agra, you don't grow grass.
• 37:26
  You actually grow soil and the soil does everything else.
• 37:29
  And, you know, it's, it's, it's, there's, it's a lot of truth.
• 37:32
  Like, I think when you, when you, you know, I mean, we can, we can talk about
• 37:35
  like the value of good soil, and you can literally go places and pick up
• 37:38
  the soil and someone who knows what they're looking for, even if you're
• 37:40
  not a bi, I, I'm not a biologist, but you know, I can pick, I can go to my
• 37:43
  backyard and dig ahead of soil and look at and go, oh, that looks like good.
• 37:47
  So it's dark, it's rich.
• 37:48
  There's things moving in it, like all these, all these good, good things, right?
• 37:52
  And I think it, you know, I maybe the way I would answer your question or respond to
• 37:56
  your comment, um, beyond saying I agree, is, you know, going back to that where
• 38:01
  I started around why I do food, right?
• 38:03
  Like, am I, like, do I study food?
• 38:05
  Like I could just as easily say, oh, I'm a soil system.
• 38:08
  Researcher or practitioner, like, that's what I do.
• 38:10
  Because I think, you know, when we start to think about the, the way
• 38:15
  that, whether it's soil or grass or, or food, you know, connect things.
• 38:20
  Um, and, and you know, because to have healthy soil, if you, you know, all,
• 38:26
  I think I would say almost all farmers know this, or if you dump a lot of
• 38:30
  chemicals into your soil, you know, even if you're doing it because they're, you
• 38:34
  know, you're, you need to increase this and it's gonna increase your yield.
• 38:37
  I mean, you know that it's not good for the soil over the long term.
• 38:39
  So, you know, soil is living and, you know, just like a person, you know,
• 38:43
  yes, we need medicine, but if you dump tonnes of medicine into us and just
• 38:47
  keep doing it and don't think about the other aspects of what we're eating and
• 38:50
  our energy, like our exercise and, you know, our social relationships, you know,
• 38:54
  it's not good for us and we know that.
• 38:56
  So, uh, you know, I think your, your comment about soil is a good one.
• 38:59
  In, in, in that, in, in, you know, to have good soil, we need good climate.
• 39:04
  We need good, um, we need to take care of the land.
• 39:07
  We need to have a good relationship with the land.
• 39:09
  Um, you know, all of these things could come, come together.
• 39:12
  So, you know, you can't fix soil by just adding one thing or doing
• 39:16
  one thing or taking one thing out, but, you know, we, you need to look
• 39:19
  at it from a systems perspective.
• 39:21
  So in that sense, yeah, we need better soil literacy.
• 39:24
  We need, we need better food literacy.
• 39:25
  I mean, I don't know if people, if I was in a, in a, in a talking to a group
• 39:29
  of people who were all into like soil, sure, I, you know, I would love to
• 39:33
  have a long conversation about all the different elements that, that would make
• 39:37
  a good, make soil healthy and productive.
• 39:39
  Um, but it's probably the same conversation I would
• 39:42
  have about food, right?
• 39:43
  In that we're talking about all the different pieces and the need to
• 39:46
  think about those pieces together.
• 39:48
  Um, you know, be beyond just, you know, one, one simple, quick solution.
• 39:54
  Jesse Hirsh: And as an educator, or equivalently as someone who I suspect
• 39:58
  believes in public education, how, how do we increase food literacy?
• 40:04
  Like, uh, you hear a lot of kind of fetching in, in the agricultural
• 40:09
  sector about how people don't know where their food comes from and,
• 40:13
  you know, a desire for people to know where their food comes from.
• 40:16
  And, and granted there's a politics to all of that, which is why I I, I
• 40:21
  think it often doesn't actually happen.
• 40:24
  But if you were given near infinite resources, how would you approach
• 40:29
  that issue of food literacy and, and broader public education, whether
• 40:34
  around soil as a, you know, particular keystone of it all, or just the general
• 40:40
  premise that people in cities should know where their food comes from,
• 40:44
  if, if only so they can participate more directly in that food system.
• 40:50
  Charles Levkoe: Yeah.
• 40:50
  Yeah.
• 40:51
  And again, again, to answer that question, I think I probably,
• 40:53
  probably, a lot of my answers do this.
• 40:55
  I, I think we have to think about.
• 40:56
  What are the challenges already we're facing with things like food, with
• 41:00
  food literacy, and what does that mean?
• 41:01
  So, I mean, just very briefly, I think, you know, when we think about
• 41:04
  food literacy, I often think about it as, and I see it as being quite
• 41:09
  narrow and quite limited, and often just supporting the status quo.
• 41:13
  So, you know, just, you know, as an example, things like,
• 41:16
  you know, individualism, right?
• 41:17
  We always talk, we talk to people literally like, oh,
• 41:19
  I'm gonna the grocery store.
• 41:20
  What should I buy?
• 41:21
  What should I eat?
• 41:22
  What should I do?
• 41:23
  And, you know, my answer is often like, I don't, I don't care.
• 41:26
  Like, do whatever you want, you know, because really, I mean, I
• 41:29
  do care of course, be too flippant about that, but you know, I mean,
• 41:33
  that's not the point, right?
• 41:34
  Because I think when we, when we individualise things so much, you know,
• 41:37
  we kind of lose the bigger picture of why things are the way they are.
• 41:40
  Right?
• 41:41
  Um, you know, I think there's a real challenge in food literacy with
• 41:43
  like this idea of healthism, right?
• 41:45
  Like this kind of reductionist approach to, you know, what's good tea, what's
• 41:49
  not good tea, and what has this nutrient new that nutrient, I mean that's science.
• 41:52
  And this goes again, back to agroecology.
• 41:54
  The science is huge.
• 41:55
  It's so val, we have to know.
• 41:57
  It's like we've, you know, we're living longer, mostly we're healthier mostly,
• 42:01
  I mean, and, and it, and it's great.
• 42:03
  But you know, when we medicalize everything, you know, we also create,
• 42:06
  at the same time, we can create a lot of stigma around like, oh, you eat
• 42:10
  that, uh, you know, that's not so good.
• 42:11
  And a lot of people are making choices not only what they
• 42:13
  like, but what they can afford.
• 42:15
  So, you know, that that's a huge issue.
• 42:17
  I think we're also, you know, I would, again, the isms we're also an
• 42:20
  anthropomorphizing, or anthropomorphism, if that's even a word, um, of, of,
• 42:25
  you know, really kind of making this all about us and humans and
• 42:28
  not proect to the soil conversation.
• 42:30
  You know, soil is a living thing.
• 42:32
  And if we're only thinking about soil, what we need from our perspective, you
• 42:35
  know, what's the problem with dumping tents of nitrogen into soil and, you know,
• 42:39
  kill, like, you know, killing all the living things, but how are most of 'em?
• 42:41
  But having, you know, tall corn that we can, you know, we can, we can
• 42:46
  sell and make a lot of money from.
• 42:47
  So it's those ki I think those are the kinds of challenges we face
• 42:50
  when we, when we don't think about these bigger pictures and we don't
• 42:53
  think about the interconnections.
• 42:55
  So, you know, when we think, when I think about food literacy, you know, I think
• 42:58
  we need to disrupt many, in many cases, those that dominant food literacy and,
• 43:03
  and really think about a food literacy that is, is critical and kind of can
• 43:08
  do that work, that hard work of, of kind of looking what's where we, where
• 43:12
  we are and what's happened and what the challenges are, but also, um, you
• 43:16
  know, looking, looking forward to, to different ways of, of, of thinking about.
• 43:20
  Um, uh, around, around food.
• 43:21
  So, you know, I mean, I, I, I, I believe very strongly in food literacy.
• 43:24
  It's been many ways it maybe defines what I do.
• 43:27
  Um, and, um, you know, thinking about, um, how we can have a more of a kind
• 43:34
  of coming back to where we started systems way of thinking about things.
• 43:37
  So the interconnections, um, really rooted in ideas of justice, in sustainability,
• 43:43
  in kind of valuing the human and the more than human world and seeing again,
• 43:48
  those interconnections in that work.
• 43:50
  So, um, and of course not saying, you know, I'm, I'm a I'm an academic, I
• 43:55
  have a PhD, so I have all the answers.
• 43:56
  I think far from that, it's, it's about working with, you know, farmers and
• 44:01
  harvesters, you know, fishers grow, you know, uh, first Nations, you know,
• 44:05
  indigenous people who, who have different ways of thinking about this stuff.
• 44:08
  And I think that is the kind of food literacy that I would promote.
• 44:11
  So, you know, even, you know, again, I would never, as I said
• 44:14
  before, I would never want to speak for any of those people.
• 44:17
  Like, I don't have that experience, but I can learn from them.
• 44:20
  I can bring that in.
• 44:21
  I mean, I love, the reason I I, we write, we do podcasts is because we
• 44:25
  wanna share these ideas and not as being the ideas or the right ideas, but
• 44:29
  about contributing to a conversation.
• 44:31
  Because, you know, one of the things I maybe should have said at the
• 44:34
  beginning, you know, we always talk about how broken the food system
• 44:37
  is, and I would say, I don't think the food system's broken at all.
• 44:39
  I think it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, and it's, you know, it's
• 44:45
  the, so as a result, I think we need to be na like recognising that the limitations,
• 44:50
  the challenges, but also pushing back.
• 44:52
  And that's where I think food literacy is really about, again, bringing
• 44:57
  all these different ways of knowing together and not believing there's one
• 45:00
  right way or there's one wrong way.
• 45:02
  In many ways, you know, science and traditional knowledge kind
• 45:05
  of don't always fit together.
• 45:06
  You know, I just, a quick little echo.
• 45:09
  I'm doing some work on glyphosate right now.
• 45:12
  In first, a lot of the First Nations are very concerned about glyphosate
• 45:15
  spraying because it's been, it's used ubiquitously by forestry companies and
• 45:20
  the Ministry of Transportation, and it's, and it's, they spray it all over the
• 45:23
  place to take weeds down, um, up here.
• 45:26
  And a lot of First Nations are concerned about what that's doing
• 45:28
  to fish, wildlife, uh, plants.
• 45:33
  And they, there's lots of experiential evidence that this is a problem.
• 45:36
  Um, so again, the point is here you have this kind of clash where the science
• 45:40
  is saying, no, you can drink the stuff.
• 45:42
  Uh, and then the First Nations are saying, uh, it's, you know, we're, we're opening
• 45:45
  our moose, and there's like weird things in them that was never there before,
• 45:50
  before the spraying started to happen.
• 45:51
  So by documenting these things and by telling these stories through
• 45:56
  what I would call food literacy a critical food literacy, we can,
• 46:00
  i, we can identify that like these things, like, they're, like multiple
• 46:04
  things can be true at the same time.
• 46:06
  And, and that means that we have to wrestle with these things as opposed to
• 46:10
  simply, I think it's much easier and maybe much lazier to go, this is good, this
• 46:15
  is bad, this is right, this is wrong.
• 46:17
  But, you know, when it comes to food and we, when it comes to systems thinking,
• 46:21
  we're, we're, we're identifying these, these multiple truths and, and these
• 46:25
  and on, on lots of important ways of knowing, but not necessarily favouring
• 46:29
  one over the other and saying, th you know, this is what we're gonna
• 46:32
  believe and the rest is not true.
• 46:33
  So, you know, by documenting some of this, this traditional knowledge
• 46:37
  around glyphosate where people living and working on the land or seeing
• 46:41
  things, we can present a a perspective.
• 46:44
  We've written a little bit about this, uh, recently.
• 46:47
  Um, we can present this, this experience and this perspective, this knowledge,
• 46:51
  um, as a way to contribute to the conversation because we have to
• 46:54
  have conversations about this stuff.
• 46:56
  Um, so I think a critical food literacy, that's what it needs to do
• 47:00
  and that's how I would hope, that's how I think about my work and I would
• 47:05
  hope others would do do the same.
• 47:07
  'cause I'm excited to learn from them, even if I don't agree with them.
• 47:10
  Jesse Hirsh: And I'm the same.
• 47:11
  I, I'm an avid learner and, and I learn from everyone.
• 47:15
  I mean, I often seek out people who think differently than me to reinforce
• 47:19
  my learning and, and, and get a greater sense of the subject matter.
• 47:23
  And part of the mandate that I was able to obtain for this podcast was when I
• 47:29
  sort of asserted that the AgriFood system needs to be listening to dissidents
• 47:34
  and critics and, you know, people who normally they would try to ignore.
• 47:39
  And I said that partly 'cause I had been at so many conferences where
• 47:43
  I would hear them use the word activist in a very dehumanising way
• 47:49
  as if the activists were the other.
• 47:51
  They were the people who by sheer definition of being
• 47:54
  activist, we can ignore them.
• 47:57
  And obviously I don't agree with that.
• 48:00
  And part of what I'm trying to achieve in this podcast is to build is thorough a
• 48:06
  knowledge base of our systems is possible.
• 48:09
  I mean, for example, uh, a guest I have coming up in a couple of weeks
• 48:13
  is John Barlow, who is a conservative member of Parliament from Alberta
• 48:18
  and is the shadow minister of agriculture for the Conservative Party.
• 48:23
  So I, I am clearly trying to get as diverse perspectives as possible.
• 48:29
  And I say this, Charles, 'cause we're at the policy part of every
• 48:33
  episode and you've been knocking all of my questions out of the park.
• 48:37
  Your performance today is absolutely fantastic and entertaining.
• 48:42
  and, and you've had a very consistent kind of through line, which is that
• 48:47
  these are about systems and systems touch all sorts of aspects of society.
• 48:53
  So like, you know, if you wanna go narrow with the policy question,
• 48:56
  by all means, but I am trying to hope that you go big picture here.
• 49:01
  But again, you know, I've seized power, I've got the Prime Minister's
• 49:06
  office, you know, doing what I want.
• 49:08
  And we're like, Charles, come in.
• 49:10
  Uh, let's talk policy here.
• 49:12
  Uh, what do we gotta do?
• 49:14
  Charles Levkoe: Ah, yeah.
• 49:15
  Okay.
• 49:15
  So I'm gonna get on my list of policy demands.
• 49:19
  Um, it's, it's a, it's a tricky, it's a tricky question for me, and I will, I
• 49:25
  will answer it, but it's a tricky question because, and again, it maybe this is
• 49:28
  part of that through line is policy.
• 49:32
  Unfortunately, we, like, we, we make policy in silos, in isolation.
• 49:38
  That's the way policy works.
• 49:39
  And I, I, I don't think, you know, even the most loving person who
• 49:43
  loves the policies is a policymaker.
• 49:45
  I think they would, they would be the first to identify that, you know,
• 49:47
  the way government is divided, you know, think, let's think about food.
• 49:50
  We have a mini who, what, what ministries affect food, you know, is it environment?
• 49:54
  Is it climate change?
• 49:55
  Is it climate, uh, sorry, environment, is it education?
• 49:59
  Is it, uh, agriculture?
• 50:00
  Is it, uh, health, I mean, you know, et cetera.
• 50:04
  Et it's all of them, right?
• 50:05
  Not, there's probably no ministry that doesn't touch food.
• 50:08
  And I think that in and of itself, so when we make, you know, there's
• 50:12
  been lots of talk in this country of like, oh, we need a ministry.
• 50:15
  We should, we have a ministry of food.
• 50:16
  Do we need a minister of food?
• 50:17
  We need a round table on food.
• 50:19
  And, you know, I think from a policy perspective, it's complicated, uh, to,
• 50:24
  to do that and to think about how to engage policy and how to, how to think
• 50:28
  about it when we want to be careful.
• 50:29
  And I, I think this is where my weakness as an academic, because I
• 50:32
  can talk, you know, till I'm blue as I am right now, blue in the face
• 50:35
  around like systems and connections.
• 50:37
  And, but then when it comes down to it, well, what does that mean
• 50:39
  for like the Ministry of Health?
• 50:40
  I'm like, well, I don't know.
• 50:42
  How do you make health policy without making agricultural policy?
• 50:44
  How do you, and in many ways those ministries, I think it's, you know, not
• 50:49
  controversial to say they're actually working in opposition to each other.
• 50:52
  You know, you have a ministry of agriculture, AgriFood Canada that,
• 50:55
  you know, their mandate is to more stuff and more sales and more exports.
• 50:59
  Like that is the, that is the mandate of most agricultural departments.
• 51:02
  And then you have Health Canada who's saying, eat more, eat more fruit,
• 51:05
  eat more vegetables, eat healthier.
• 51:07
  And we're not growing that stuff.
• 51:09
  We're trying, we're producing more qua commodity crops, right?
• 51:11
  So we have these ministries that are kind of in, in, in conflict
• 51:15
  with each other in a way.
• 51:16
  And so, so from a policy perspective, I often look at, well,
• 51:19
  who's doing the work of thinking about policy in a connected way?
• 51:22
  And you know, I I, I think one of the places I look to
• 51:26
  that, I think there's a lot of.
• 51:29
  Again, I'm hesitant to use the word hope, but a lot of maybe optimism I have is,
• 51:33
  is around food policy councils and food policy councils are, you know, not new.
• 51:38
  They've been around since the eighties, but, uh, you know,
• 51:41
  they're really increasing.
• 51:42
  And, you know, I'm, I'm actually the chair of the board for our food Policy Council
• 51:45
  up here in northern, in, in, in the, in the northern northwestern Ontario region.
• 51:48
  And there's, you know, many that I work with on a regular basis.
• 51:50
  And what a food policy council is, is it's a place where people of from different
• 51:56
  sectors, perspectives, experiences, can come together, sit at a table and
• 52:00
  talk about food systems issues so that, you know, unlike, uh, you know, an
• 52:05
  environmental organisation where you're trying to bring all the environmentalists
• 52:07
  together or, you know, a social justice, uh, you know, a, um, I don't know, a,
• 52:12
  uh, a justice organisation where we're trying to bring the activists together.
• 52:16
  You know, you're really, I think, a food policy council.
• 52:18
  We want all of those people.
• 52:19
  And we actually, in our food policy council, and many do this, have a roster
• 52:23
  where they say, well, we want make sure we have someone from farming, someone
• 52:25
  from business, someone from, you know, education, you know, et cetera, health.
• 52:30
  Um, so having those people sit together is a really important way,
• 52:33
  I think, and valuable way to kinda have these kinds of conversations.
• 52:36
  So, you know, anyways, that said, I mean, some of the issues that I've
• 52:39
  been, you know, really excited about lately, um, is, um, school food.
• 52:45
  School food is a great example actually of one of these kind
• 52:49
  of systems issues, right?
• 52:51
  It's not, it's not just one thing.
• 52:53
  And, you know, there has been a lot of civil society work, uh, the, the
• 52:57
  Coalition on Healthy School food, um, which has been active for, for many
• 53:01
  years and has been really, I think is, is a, again, a really amazing model of,
• 53:08
  again, a network of people that came together and have worked together to,
• 53:12
  you know, despite their differences, despite the different perspectives
• 53:15
  they come from, have this goal of a universal school food programme in Canada.
• 53:19
  And, you know, it wasn't only because of their work, but as a result of
• 53:22
  much of their work in, uh, 2024, the government of Canada announced our
• 53:27
  school food policy and our school national school food programme.
• 53:30
  Um, there's still some work to do to get that in place, but it's a great example
• 53:34
  of, of a pol of a policy shift, you know, for a long time, Canada, well still,
• 53:39
  where Canada's the, one of the, one of the only, uh, developed countries or
• 53:44
  majority world minority world countries that, um, that, that, that doesn't have
• 53:49
  a national school food programme to feed kids, uh, to make sure that every
• 53:52
  kid, regardless of income, uh, you know, class is gonna have access to, to, to,
• 53:57
  to good food in their, in their schools.
• 53:59
  And the school is a great place for that because they all go to school.
• 54:02
  So, you know, anyway, so there's, without saying too much about that, I think that's
• 54:05
  a really fantastic, um, policy advance.
• 54:08
  You know, another one I've been thinking about a lot is basic
• 54:11
  income, uh, universal income, which is another one that you know, is.
• 54:16
  Is, is an opportunity I think, within the food system.
• 54:19
  And actually I've actually written a little bit about this with, with
• 54:22
  others, um, of what it would look like, what the, what basic income
• 54:25
  could look like in farming, in fisheries, uh, for food security.
• 54:30
  And, you know, again, we think of farmers who are, um, the way farming works.
• 54:34
  You know, often farmers don't get paid for a lot of what
• 54:36
  they do, um, as you well know.
• 54:39
  And, you know, I think, you know, a basic income could not that it's a, it's a,
• 54:43
  it's a silver bullet solution to anything, but it's, it's one of a tiered kind of
• 54:48
  way of thinking about, um, essentially addressing some of those, sort of, those
• 54:53
  deep inequalities within Canadian society.
• 54:56
  Anyways.
• 54:56
  I mean, I, you know, I'm not gonna give you my laundry list of policy things,
• 54:59
  but I would say things like sick pay for work for food workers, um, you know,
• 55:04
  uh, making sure that, you know, social security, we have better social security.
• 55:09
  Um, you know, I mean, there's, there's lots of things that, you know, yeah.
• 55:13
  Jesse Hirsh: you are doing what you said you wouldn't do and that
• 55:15
  you said, you know, I, I, it's like
• 55:16
  Charles Levkoe: I,
• 55:17
  Jesse Hirsh: Awards.
• 55:18
  I only have a few people to think, and then you pull out the long list.
• 55:21
  But what I like about the interview methodology I employ
• 55:26
  is by throwing out that policy question open-ended at the end.
• 55:30
  It is interesting to me, the kind of policies that people keep mentioning
• 55:35
  and the school lunches is, is one that, that keeps hitting home.
• 55:40
  And to your point, it is kind of shocking that that low hanging fruit is not already
• 55:46
  operationalized across the country.
• 55:49
  we are, uh, running out of time here on our first, uh, uh, uh, conversation.
• 55:55
  But I, I have to ask the second last question, uh, which I offer to guests,
• 56:00
  although in your case, I, I do have to frame it with, and we are running out
• 56:05
  of time, so don't go too nuts here, Charles, is there anything that you
• 56:10
  think we should touch upon that we haven't touched upon that you would
• 56:14
  like to bring up before we conclude?
• 56:17
  Charles Levkoe: in a short amount of time.
• 56:19
  That's a, I I I, I, I'm hesitant to, to really get into
• 56:21
  that, get into that answer.
• 56:23
  'cause there's lots we haven't touched on that I, I'd love to talk about.
• 56:26
  Um, but I, I think, you know, maybe just
• 56:29
  Jesse Hirsh: worry.
• 56:29
  Charles Levkoe: going back, yeah, yeah.
• 56:31
  I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail, but, you know, one of the things
• 56:34
  I've been thinking a lot about.
• 56:36
  I know we're not gonna have time to get into this, but when we talk
• 56:39
  about these kind of, this, this exactly where we started, like
• 56:42
  how do we get to where we are?
• 56:43
  I think, you know, there's a lot of issues that we often don't talk
• 56:46
  about in food, in food work because it's just not considered food work.
• 56:49
  'cause it doesn't deal with the nutrients and stuff.
• 56:51
  But, you know, I think we have to talk about economics, uh,
• 56:54
  capitalism and how we, you know, how we kind of got to this place.
• 56:57
  'cause food plays a really interesting role in that, right?
• 57:00
  In terms of, you know, for a long time and even when, you know, in the 15
• 57:05
  hundreds, like when, you know, we're kind of thinking about, you know, where do
• 57:08
  farmers fit in this, in this move in, in this, in, in, in, in the state system.
• 57:12
  And there's a lot of good debate on that.
• 57:14
  And, you know, I think that's, that's an issue that I think is always interesting.
• 57:18
  I think we talked a bit about colonialism, but I think we can't think of the
• 57:21
  food system without thinking about, you know, land and colonialism and
• 57:24
  settler colonialism conflict is a big one that we didn't really talk about.
• 57:28
  But you know, we're talking like the Iran and the straight of Mout is
• 57:32
  everywhere in the news and the price of fertiliser and the price of food.
• 57:36
  I mean, we've talked about Ukraine for a while.
• 57:38
  Um, so there's those impacts on the global system.
• 57:41
  I mean, issues of, you know, uh, Gaza, you know, and the what that, what
• 57:45
  conflict does to people and the kind of like food security rates and, you
• 57:48
  know, famines that have been ha caused.
• 57:50
  Um, you know, and, and, and, and, and maybe the last one that, you know, we
• 57:54
  didn't really talk about, but I think is really important is, maybe this is more
• 57:58
  of a cultural piece, but like the, just the way of the convenience has shaped our
• 58:03
  food system so deeply in that, you know, it, you know, I think Raj Patel, once I
• 58:09
  listened to something he said where he said, um, our food, like we, we, our food
• 58:14
  system isn't being shaped for us, but we're being shaped for our food system.
• 58:16
  You know?
• 58:17
  Um, and you think about even things like you talked about, I remember you talked
• 58:20
  about like cars and like, you know, I remember like when I was a kid, like
• 58:23
  cars didn't have drink holders, right?
• 58:25
  That just wasn't a thing.
• 58:26
  And now you would be hard pressed to find a car without a drink hold, like
• 58:30
  without two drink holders or four, there's ones on the door, you know?
• 58:33
  So this is, I, because people are eating in their cars.
• 58:35
  They're not sitting and eating anymore, right?
• 58:37
  I mean, the, the drive-throughs, I mean, drive-throughs were like an
• 58:40
  anomaly, you know, 50 years ago, not even, it didn't even exist, you know,
• 58:44
  it was like, but now, you know, I mean, they're basically building, you know,
• 58:48
  every time a Tim Hortons goes up, they have to put in a new streetlight for
• 58:51
  the drive-through and they have to do.
• 58:52
  So, you know, it's like that issue of convenience I think is
• 58:55
  really an interesting one to think about and how like, our culture
• 58:58
  has shaped our food system.
• 58:59
  So anyway, again, I've said I wasn't gonna go into these things, but like,
• 59:02
  I just think there's a lot of these drivers of our modern food system that
• 59:06
  we kind of just push aside because we're like, oh, we're not talking about that.
• 59:09
  We're talking about agriculture, we're talking about soil,
• 59:11
  we're talking about nutrients.
• 59:12
  But it's again, like all these bigger picture pieces that help us understand
• 59:17
  where we are, why we're here,
• 59:19
  Jesse Hirsh: Well, and to your
• 59:20
  Charles Levkoe: and how to do something about it.
• 59:22
  Jesse Hirsh: Oh, absolutely.
• 59:23
  And, and to your point, I'd love to have a conversation on kind of the
• 59:27
  curse of convenience and the opportunity of participatory design it comes to
• 59:34
  thinking about how our food systems work.
• 59:37
  And, and I say this, you know, we're closing, so I I ain't open no new threads.
• 59:42
  No, please don't mistake my rambling here for invitations.
• 59:45
  But in a recent episode we had, uh, with Alyssa Overin, I kinda asked her the
• 59:52
  question, you know, is calling for public owned grocery stores aiming too low?
• 59:58
  Like, should we be thinking beyond the grocery store as a cultural
• 1:00:02
  construct of distributing food?
• 1:00:05
  I highlight that as a future, future herd conversation for curious
• 1:00:10
  listeners, uh, uh, to tune in.
• 1:00:13
  But the last question I, I throw to our guests, Charles, and again, I,
• 1:00:16
  I'm asking for restraint on your part.
• 1:00:19
  uh, this is the shoutout part of the show.
• 1:00:22
  Who, who are the leaders that you look up to that you think we
• 1:00:25
  should pay, be paying attention to?
• 1:00:27
  I mean, Raj Patel was one you sort of leaked, uh, but who are the other
• 1:00:31
  people that you think we should be, uh, uh, following or, or at least,
• 1:00:35
  uh, uh, getting a sense of how they're contributing to the larger discourse?
• 1:00:40
  Charles Levkoe: You're, you're, I'm, I'm restraining myself not to speak
• 1:00:42
  to your grocery store question, but I'll just say yes to your, I'll
• 1:00:45
  just say yes to everything you said.
• 1:00:47
  We do need to be thinking, uh, beyond grocery stores.
• 1:00:51
  Um, but I won't go there.
• 1:00:53
  Um, yeah, it's a great question about the who.
• 1:00:55
  And actually, you know, I, I'm gonna restrain myself, but there's
• 1:00:59
  two, I think there's two groups.
• 1:01:01
  There's multiple pe multiple groups.
• 1:01:03
  But, you know, I think I started actually by saying this, I'll say it again.
• 1:01:06
  I worry that in the age of, in our, in our modern age, we forget, and maybe this
• 1:01:13
  is a, a, a product of all generations.
• 1:01:16
  I think we often lose a lot of our, what I would call elders,
• 1:01:20
  uh, in the small e um, you know, people in, in our movements, right?
• 1:01:23
  People who have really like, done things, you know, in a very unique and
• 1:01:28
  different way that like, they're just kind of old white people and most of 'em
• 1:01:31
  aren't even white, but, you know, older people that we just kind of push aside.
• 1:01:34
  And, you know, I think there's a, there's a, there's a generation before
• 1:01:38
  me and maybe, you know, kind of, I'm in a bit of a sandwich, but that really
• 1:01:43
  started to talk about food as a system.
• 1:01:45
  And, um, I think those people are so important to kind of hear from and learn
• 1:01:50
  from because they're getting older.
• 1:01:52
  Some of them are not alive anymore, and they just come at this from such a.
• 1:01:57
  What maybe isn't so unique now, but they were really like unique in their moment.
• 1:02:02
  And I'm actually doing a small project so I can, you know, I can send links
• 1:02:05
  and stuff to, uh, we're doing a, a book where we're, we've interviewed about 29
• 1:02:10
  of these people, uh, who, and, and we're doing, uh, we have video interviews,
• 1:02:15
  but then we also doing some writing.
• 1:02:17
  But I'll just name a couple, like people like Mustafa coach, who was a
• 1:02:20
  professor at, uh, at TMU in Toronto.
• 1:02:23
  Um, a wonderful woman, Don Morrison out in who's, uh, uh, indigenous
• 1:02:28
  out in, out in the BC area.
• 1:02:30
  Um, uh, Dan Longboat, uh, at, at Guelph, uh, in, in the Peterborough area.
• 1:02:36
  Sorry, uh, well, Peterborough area.
• 1:02:38
  Um, rod McCray, who was like pioneer in ol, I didn't say pioneer,
• 1:02:45
  uh, really novel I'll say in his, in his work on food policy.
• 1:02:50
  Uh, and, you know, and, and you know, basically said, I
• 1:02:53
  don't wanna publish anymore.
• 1:02:54
  I want to just share my knowledge and created this
• 1:02:56
  incredibly interactive website.
• 1:02:58
  Um, Wayne Roberts who, who just passed recently, uh, who was really like, thought
• 1:03:03
  about food policy councils and was kind of the grandfather of that, that work.
• 1:03:07
  Um, anyways, I I, I'm not gonna go on, but like, I could, like, I think
• 1:03:10
  there's a lot of these people who have such knowledge and wisdom, uh, and to
• 1:03:15
  understand again, where we are now, just very briefly, I think there's a
• 1:03:19
  lot of young people, um, who are also equally as important to hear from.
• 1:03:24
  Um, and I don't know that a lot of them would necessarily feel comfortable
• 1:03:28
  doing a, an hour long podcast because they're, they're still, they're young
• 1:03:31
  and they're learning and they haven't, they're not always as, um, they're
• 1:03:34
  not able to articulate, but they are brilliant and they're, you know, I,
• 1:03:38
  I see some of them in my classes.
• 1:03:39
  I work with some of them in the communities.
• 1:03:41
  I, I, I'm in First Nations and, and non and, and settler communities,
• 1:03:45
  but I see them around the world.
• 1:03:46
  I read them, I listen to them.
• 1:03:48
  Um, but I think, again, like it goes back to exactly this
• 1:03:51
  thread that's taking us through.
• 1:03:53
  It's not just about the, the, the people who have all these,
• 1:03:55
  this historical knowledge.
• 1:03:56
  It's about the people who understand this current reality.
• 1:03:59
  That's why youth are so brilliant, because they understand today so
• 1:04:02
  differently than you do or I do, because I just don't interact in those worlds.
• 1:04:06
  I don't, I don't have a thousand, I don't have social media accounts
• 1:04:09
  that I, you know, am on all the time.
• 1:04:11
  So, you know, for good or bad, like, I just don't understand it.
• 1:04:14
  So I think like the, who is, you know, without going again into a laundry
• 1:04:19
  list, it's again, some of these people who have that historical knowledge,
• 1:04:22
  have that wisdom, but also these young people who are seeing things
• 1:04:25
  in a very new and different way.
• 1:04:27
  And again, there's a, there's often a paradigm clash there.
• 1:04:29
  And I think that's the exciting part is to get those conversations, to have,
• 1:04:32
  that's what we're trying to do with this, this project of interviewing
• 1:04:35
  people and sharing the knowledge.
• 1:04:36
  But, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's infinite.
• 1:04:39
  The, the, the people we could talk to or the similar to the people you could talk
• 1:04:43
  to and the knowledge that's out there.
• 1:04:45
  Jesse Hirsh: Right on.
• 1:04:46
  And I mean, this has been a, a tour to force.
• 1:04:50
  Uh, thank you so much, uh, uh, for taking the time, uh, to have this conversation.
• 1:04:55
  And a, as we've been talking, I've been kind of fantasising about, you
• 1:04:59
  know, what I hope the future herd kind of becomes, which on the one hand is
• 1:05:05
  a place to make these connections.
• 1:05:07
  On the other hand, uh, is, uh, potentially the kind of learning resource that
• 1:05:11
  allows these types of young people, uh, certainly young people who do not have
• 1:05:16
  the privilege of being your student 'cause Wow, that would be pretty cool.
• 1:05:19
  Uh, but still, nonetheless, to be able to access and connect and then
• 1:05:23
  start following rabbit holes around some of the research areas and the
• 1:05:27
  communities that you're active in.
• 1:05:29
  But I am hoping Charles, that uh, you'll continue to be a part of the future herd.
• 1:05:34
  'cause clearly this was only part one in an epic ongoing conversation.
• 1:05:40
  'cause I feel I'm only just scratching the surface of some of the radical
• 1:05:44
  ideas and concepts that you're working through as part of your research.
• 1:05:50
  Charles Levkoe: Mm-hmm.
• 1:05:51
  Well, and thank you so much for, I mean, having me speak with
• 1:05:54
  you and for all the work here.
• 1:05:56
  I think your podcast is phenomenal.
• 1:05:57
  And you know, I think, again, like there's, there's few places where we
• 1:06:01
  can actually have these kinds of really complicated, messy conversations.
• 1:06:05
  'cause often people want the 32nd soundbite, and you just from talking
• 1:06:09
  to me, you know, you're not gonna get the 32nd soundbite because it's,
• 1:06:12
  everything is kind of interconnected.
• 1:06:13
  You have to like, takes me a while to answer a question because I feel like I
• 1:06:16
  need to kind of give a bit of history and go, but, you know, to make space for that.
• 1:06:20
  And especially like within the food space.
• 1:06:22
  Um, and you've done, you're doing that really well and I think it's
• 1:06:25
  really valuable to, to just make space for that and, you know,
• 1:06:29
  bring some of that together.
• 1:06:29
  So thank you.
• 1:06:31
  Jesse Hirsh: A and part of my agenda I is to build upon it, right?
• 1:06:34
  You know, standing on the shoulders of giant.
• 1:06:36
  So if anything, that's why I want to have you back so we can start
• 1:06:40
  circling back to some of these topics and making the connections.
• 1:06:44
  'cause every interview I do influences the next interview in terms of my
• 1:06:49
  understanding, and I'm trying to reflect that in the knowledge that we build.
• 1:06:54
  So that's where your radical perspective is invaluable in terms
• 1:06:59
  of, uh, uh, being able to map out those kinds of systemic connections
• 1:07:02
  that I think a lot of people miss.
• 1:07:04
  Uh uh So thank you Charles.
• 1:07:06
  This has been fantastic.
• 1:07:08
  Charles Levkoe: Great.
• 1:07:09
  Next time we can talk about my book on Radical Food Geography,
• 1:07:12
  which really gets at this, uh, get this question of the radical part.
• 1:07:15
  I'm really interested in that idea.
• 1:07:16
  So another time though.
• 1:07:18
  Jesse Hirsh: Right on.
• 1:07:22
  What I loved about this chat with Charles is that he refuses to make food simple.
• 1:07:27
  Even though on some levels food is quite simple.
• 1:07:31
  Food is often reduced to individual choices, what we buy, what we eat, what
• 1:07:36
  we can afford, what we should know.
• 1:07:39
  But Charles keeps bringing us back to the larger system.
• 1:07:43
  Food is shaped by history, it's shaped by policy, it's shaped by land, labour,
• 1:07:48
  colonialism, education, culture, and the stories we inherit about what is possible.
• 1:07:55
  And that is also why this conversation feels like a beginning.
• 1:07:59
  Charles reminds us that the future of food cannot be built by novelty alone.
• 1:08:04
  It depends on remembering the elders, organisers, scholars, growers, and
• 1:08:09
  community leaders who helped us understand food as a system in the first place.
• 1:08:15
  It also depends on listening to young people who experience the
• 1:08:18
  present differently and who can see pressures and possibilities
• 1:08:23
  that older institutions often miss.
• 1:08:27
  Some of the most important knowledge in the food system does not
• 1:08:30
  arrive as a slogan or a soundbite.
• 1:08:33
  It arrives through relationships, through practise, through long conversations,
• 1:08:39
  and through the difficult work of making connections across difference.
• 1:08:44
  And that is part of what the future herd is trying to do.
• 1:08:48
  Perhaps futile, a place where those connections can be made visible.
• 1:08:54
  A place where the knowledge that does not disappear after the conversation
• 1:08:58
  ends a place where ideas can build on each other and where the people shaping
• 1:09:03
  the future of food can find one another.
• 1:09:06
  And, and that's where, I'll be honest, I have no idea how long
• 1:09:10
  this podcast is gonna last.
• 1:09:12
  My, my goal is not just to talk to the leaders in the sector, but to
• 1:09:17
  talk to people like Charles, who quite frankly, the sector ignores the sector,
• 1:09:22
  alienates the sector dehumanises.
• 1:09:26
  I mean, one of the things that I've found most disturbing about doing this
• 1:09:30
  podcast is the way in which some of our guests really dehumanise their
• 1:09:36
  opponents, marginalise them, call them, you know, activists or antis
• 1:09:42
  or whatever it is they need to do to ignore and dismiss legitimate dissent.
• 1:09:48
  And I ain't got no time for that shit.
• 1:09:52
  So, you know, this episode, really, if anything, is a challenge.
• 1:09:56
  It's a challenge to the industry to listen to people like Charles
• 1:10:00
  who's listening to other people.
• 1:10:02
  And that creates the kind of value chain that our industry requires.
• 1:10:08
  If for whatever reason, uh, the industry refuses to listen, to acknowledge, to
• 1:10:14
  hear the kind of conversations that Alyssa, Charles and Elaine offer,
• 1:10:20
  then quite frankly, they can go fuck themselves, uh, because I think
• 1:10:24
  food is more important than that.
• 1:10:27
  So my thanks to Charles for joining us and reminding us that food is never just food.
• 1:10:32
  It's a way of seeing the whole system.
• 1:10:34
  And if we don't start talking about that system, if we don't
• 1:10:37
  expand the voices who are part of that system, then what the fuck?
• 1:10:41
  Why are we doing this in the first place?
• 1:10:43
  All right.
• 1:10:44
  Talk to you guys soon.