East Side Food Stories
Cooking, Storytelling, and Documenting At Urban Roots
Astrid Berger
Background
This past summer I partnered with Urban Roots MN and centered my work around land-based education, generational storytelling, and youth empowerment. Urban Roots is a Saint Paul based organization that employs youth, who face barriers to employment, in one of three programs; land conservation, market garden, and cook fresh. Youth interns work alongside staff educators and mentors with the common goal to build cohesive and resilient community on the East Side.
When I met with Urban Roots director, Hayley Ball, for the first time, I emphasized my interest in storytelling as a tool for community resilience and the preservation of intergenerational knowledge. Immediately, she thought of Nethmi Bathige, a previous Macalester OCSE intern and recent graduate. Nethmi had begun to collect community recipes and an accompanying food story with the intention to create recipe cards that could be distributed at the weekly Urban Roots Farmer’s Market stand. Coming onto the project, I had many dreams of how these stories could take on new life, and gratefully I was able to talk with Nethmi about ways to honor her intentions with this work.
I spent my first few weeks with Urban Roots attending meetings, visiting the farm and conservation sites, digging up displaced grasses, planting squash, and weeding raspberries with summer school students. I floated my ideas around with people I met, telling them I was here to work on a storytelling project with my school. Every time I suggested a cookbook, staff and youth alike would exclaim their curiosity and excitement about being a part of this project, how that had been something they had always wanted to do with Urban Roots.
Cookbook Formation
Following the excitement of our community, I dived back into Nethmi’s work with the new intention to interview community members, Urban Roots staff, and Youth Interns, ask them to share a recipe, and a written or oral first-person story to accompany. We sent an email to all interns, asking if anyone would be interested in working on this project – which is what began the Food Stories Crew. I brought guest chefs in, both community members and staff, to work with the crew and myself. Together we chopped vegetables, discussed ingredients, shared stories of food, and sat together over the meal we made. I was able to check out multiple professional cameras through the Macalester DRC which allowed youth to take photos of our chef experiences that would later be added to the cookbook.
We discussed at length the personal underpinnings of food and culture, how living in the United States has shifted, diminished, or sometimes even erased familial practices surrounding food. These conversations took place over the course of the cooking, eating, and cleaning – and youth continued to ask thought provoking questions which made my educator hear soar.
Young people in the Cook Fresh program brought recipes from home to add to the youth intern section of the cookbook. We met individually to discuss their accompanying story and work together on their writing confidence. In these meetings I focused on their intentions in sharing the story, taking the perspective of the reader, and descriptive language — the pedagogy of show not tell!
Food is complicated. This simple but provocative message resonates with young people especially when in tandem with discussions of diet culture, fattness, colonization, and whiteness. These underpinnings are at the heart of young people’s everyday experiences in schools, homes, and in their own bodies. Bringing these conversations to the forefront is an articulation of my theory of change in enacting Food Justice in our communities.
Over the course of the fall, I continued to bring in guests from partner organizations such as CLUES, Karen American Partnership, the East Side Freedom Library and more! As I move into a full time staff position at Urban Roots, I am focusing more of my energy on lesson planning for this summer – but I am excited to say that another fellow will be joining us from Metro State University to continue the work of Food Stories. Recently, we were even able to secure funding from MHealth Fairview for the program, production of physical copies, and an accompanying Zine. There are many exciting things coming this summer!
I am very grateful to Urban Roots and Macalester for giving me the opportunity to do this work. It has been so incredible to see the joy, pain, connection, and history in these stories — and that they were shared over a good meal is such a blessing. I am excited to continue my work with Urban Roots as we work towards making physical and accessible copies of the East Side Food Stories Cookbook.
Preview of the Cookbook -- Scroll Around for a Sneak Peek!
Urban Roots Cook Book.pdf