The Pacific Ocean is one of the things we miss most, living far away from where we grew up in Western Canada, so it seems fitting that as we write this Letter from the Editors for our SEA issue, we’re both back home breathing in the salty coastal air — just as we were right before the issue started. Every time we return to these rugged shores, we’re struck yet again with a feeling of awe at all that these waters can encompass and evoke. 

This time, we’re additionally grateful to the contributors of our SEA issue for offering us new perspectives on these waves. This issue was about so much more than the title suggests: seas (and oceans and water more broadly) served as a portal to interrogate family and identity, food choices and appetites, climate change and gender, migration and movement, loss and longing. If we do say so ourselves, we think this was one of our best issues yet, and we encourage you to catch up on any pieces that you missed.

In our SEA issue:

Tender Seas* | Megumi Koiwai

Sea Moss Panna Cotta  | Elise Schloff

A Fistful of Salt | Zoya Naaz Rehman

Fishing for a Future  | Mélissa Godin and William Martin (video)

Kasila's Dream | Foday Mannah (originally published by Wasafiri)

Vera Town* | Isabela Vera

As Vast and Hungry as the Ocean | Branca Lessa de Sá

Whale politics | Isabela Vera with Troy Bright (podcast and short essay)

BONUS: Free divers, tsunami ladies, and fishy rituals (premium subscribers only)

BONUS: Fish farming and food colonialism | Amelia Cookson at Feedback Global

*Premium subscribers also get access to audio versions, read by the authors

Oceans of feeling

The first waves of SEA rolled out in September with a piece from Tokyo-based writer Megumi Koiwai titled “Tender Seas”. Reflecting on the short feature “nowhere to go but everywhere” — a film about one man’s 13-year quest to find his wife after she was swept away by 2011 the Tsunami in Japan — Megumi explores the concept of nurturing and who is “responsible” for it. She looks back at how the gendered expectations of care, including through food, shaped her relationships with her parents. Her candid descriptions of her childhood disdain for her mother and reverence for her father reveal just how insidious gender norms can be — but also offer us hope that things can change.

Mwegumi’s piece seemed a fitting beginning for an issue that ended up delving quite deeply into the complex relationships between children and their parents, and the oceans (literal and figurative) that both separate us from and bind us to our families. In “Vera Town”, Isabela Vera tells of her 600-kilometre pilgrimage to an eponymous town in the south of Spain — in part a quest to better understand her father — reflecting on the ways her family’s history, identity, and relationships have been shaped by migratory journeys across oceans.

In Branca Lessa de Sá’s “As Vast and Hungry as the Ocean,” she describes how the poetry of Anne Sexton (and Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, Marge Piercy, Anne Carson, and Adrienne Rich) helped her understand her mother, and in turn herself through their use of food and oceans as emblems of female desire. We love these pieces for the way they leverage such personal stories to provide profound insights into the broader politics of gender and identity.

Oceans of change

The thoughtful essay that accompanies Elise Schloff’s recipe for "Sea Moss Panna Cotta”, pulls on similar threads relating to family and identity, while also tackling some of the pressing issues related to the extraction of resources from our waters. Elise describes how the “scant happy memories” she has about her father from her childhood involve fish. In this piece, Elise reflects on the sentimental challenges of her choice, as a feminist, to become vegetarian, and later vegan, because of the ways it undermined her connection to the sea — and in turn her connection to home and family. In reconceptualizing seafood to include vegetal bounty, Elise’s recipe for sea moss panna cotta challenges us to think about the creative ways food cultures might evolve in the name of justice and care.

Isabela’s podcast “Whale Politics”, featuring a self-taught orca researcher Troy Bright, also touches on how lives — terrestrial and aquatic — are impacted by extractive industries. The accompanying essay offers a short meditation on climate grief. In the podcast, Troy shares his knowledge about orcas’ rich matriarchal societies, their unique food cultures, and their vulnerability as a result of our human food system. From there, the podcast draws links between the historical treatment of Indigenous women in the salmon canning industry and high levels of food insecurity among Indigenous and racialized women in British Colombia today. 

That Indigenous women’s labour is critical to food systems is also picked up in Zoya Naaz Rehman’s well-researched essay “A Fistful of Salt”. This piece is about salt production the India, the world’s third-largest salt producer, and is set in Gujarat’s salt flats, where Indigenous Agariya women produce much of the salt in artisanal ways. Zoya looks at how socially and colonially constructed caste categories, economic liberalization, and wildlife conservation policies have compounded to marginalize Agariya women, and notes that their battle to be recognized as rightful tenants of the land is still ongoing.

We finished SEA with a guest post by Amelia Cookson at Feedback Global on the geopolitical dynamics and unequal harms of industrial aquaculture. In “Farmed Fish and Food Colonialism”, she provides us with a synopsis of the gender issues highlighted in Feedback’s latest report, Blue Empire. It highlights the big business involved in overfishing small fish rich in essential micronutrients from the coast of West Africa to turn into feed for farmed salmon in Norway. These dynamics create a new form of food imperialism that harms women's health and livelihoods in the so-called Global South in the name of feeding consumers in the Global North. Just as “food-feed competition” is a critical issue when it comes to industrial livestock, it is for aquaculture, with global implications.

New formats for FFJ

We’re reminded of the gendered stakes of overusing our planet and its waters in “Fishing for a Future” through the heart-wrenching story of a young girl named Fanny. Growing up in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Malawi, Fanny’s life and future are being shaped by climate change and the lake’s dwindling fish stocks. This is the first-ever video piece published by FFJ, and it came to us from the makers of Daughters of Drought, a documentary film project by Mélissa Godin and William Martin. It offers a powerful reminder of the tens of thousands of lives that are irreversibly changed each year that we fail to meaningfully confront the climate crisis.

SEA also included our first-ever piece of fiction! "Kasila's Dream", an enchanting short story by Foday Mannah, was shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, and first published at wasafiri.org by Wasafiri, the magazine for international contemporary writing. The story begins when Halima’s father, an esteemed fisherman, is swallowed by Kasila (the Water Devil) as payment for the village’s fishing exploits. In turn, Halima’s mother coaches her to enter Kasila’s dream and fulfil her family’s legacy: to become one of the powerful women to whom Kasila reveals her fish recipes. We were fascinated by the way women’s dexterity in the kitchen is portrayed not as something forced upon them by societal norms (as described by Megumi about Japan), but as something cultivated and revered — a superpower. 

We’d love to hear your thoughts on SEA. What pieces did you love? What other topics do you wish we’d covered? Let us know in the comments below.

Coming up next: MEAT, and another very exciting project

As some of you may have seen on social media, FFJ is very excited to be taking on a new kind of project in the months ahead. We’ll be collaborating with Wedu and AGREA Foundation to deliver the 10th U.S.-ASEAN Women's Leadership Academy for YSEALI. For our part, we'll be working with the more than sixty program participants — young women leading food security in Southeast Asia — to produce a digital zine tracing the lifecycle of a grain of rice at each stage of the food value chain. We’ll share more on that as it progresses!

In the meantime, we’ll be taking a month-long hiatus to put the finishing touches on our next issue, MEAT. We promise it will be worth the wait: we have deliciously challenging content on cannibalism, queerness and cookouts, masculinity and meat consumption, Zambian perspectives on Carol J. Adams, and more coming your way. And you can still expect some archive content from us in the weeks ahead! We have some WAR pieces that we’d love to finally see the light of day, aka your inbox.

Thank you, as always, for being part of our community.

It was picked up in a major investigation by the Financial Times (“The hidden cost of your supermarket salmon”) and by Norwegian business daily Dagens Næringsliv (“Europeisk miljøorganisasjon slakter norsk oppdrett: – Matkolonialisme”). And it immediately caught our eye due to the links it makes between food colonialism — the transfer of food and nutrients from so-called Global South countries to Global North countries, or from food insecure to food secure countries — and women’s livelihoods in West Africa. In this summary piece, campaigner Amelia Cookson breaks down the gender dimensions of siphoning fish from the Eastern Central Atlantic to feed farmed salmon in the North and Norwegian seas.

By Amelia Cookson at Feedback Global

For many people a trip to the supermarket can become a maze of sustainability and ethical considerations: carbon footprints, animal welfare, food miles, human rights, ultra processed food, and packaging. The list goes on. But one area that tends to swim under the radar is farmed fish.

More than half of the seafood we eat globally is farmed. As the world’s fastest-growing food-production sector, farmed seafood will account for 60% of global fish consumption within the next 10 years. It is often presented as a sustainable source of protein and a solution to relieving the burden on ocean life. But do these claims really stand up? 

Feedback has spent the best part of a decade examining the impacts of industrial aquaculture, focusing in particular on the salmon farming industry’s voracious appetite for wild-caught fish, which is driving a damaging “food-feed competition”. It’s a little-known fact that farmed fish such as salmon consume millions of tonnes of wild-caught fish in their feed, in the form of fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO).

Each year, around one-fifth of the world’s annual marine catch is used to make FMFO. As industrial aquaculture expands, and demand for wild fish to feed farmed fish rises, companies are keen to secure access to the highly nutritious fish used to make FMFO, the vast majority of which are sourced from the Global South. This production model creates a problem: fish that are or could be a vital source of food and income for coastal communities are instead being used to feed the fish consumed by high-income consumers in the Global North. 

Norway is the world’s biggest salmon farming country, with Norwegian companies occupying eleven out of the top 20 slots in the list of global producers of farmed salmon. Our latest report, Blue Empire: How the Norwegian salmon industry extracts nutrition and undermine livelihoods in West Africa, uncovers how, beneath Norway’s promises of a “blue revolution” through sustainable aquaculture lies instead a “blue empire”, whose industrialized and extractive practices represent a new type of food colonialism. These dynamics are harming West African communities by fuelling hunger and unemployment whilst entrenching the existing power imbalance between richer and more economically vulnerable countries. In many respects, it is women, who have traditionally played a central role in fish processing and selling throughout the region, who bear the brunt of the damage. 

Norway’s farmed salmon industry harms women’s health

Industrial aquaculture is gobbling up valuable micronutrients in a region where millions of women suffer from anaemia, and hunger is on the rise. In Blue Empire, we calculate that in 2020, nearly 2 million tonnes of wild fish from Western Africa were required to produce the fish oil supplied to the Norwegian farmed salmon industry. This is equivalent to a staggering 2.5% of global marine fisheries catch — just to supply fish oil to Norwegian salmon farming.

The small fish targeted by the FMFO industry contain key nutrients including iron, zinc, and calcium. These nutrients are critical for children’s cognitive development and for women’s health in West Africa, where more than half of the female population suffer from anaemia.

The extraction of small fish is happening whilst hunger is rising across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). New research shows that of eight global regions, SSA is the one most severely impacted by lack of micronutrient availability. This relates to fishing as until now, small fish have been an important component of people’s diets. In 2020, the number of undernourished people in the region rose to 274 million, with 84% of people unable to afford a healthy diet. Fish consumption in Senegal alone declined by 50% in the 10 years between 2009-2018, driven by a reduction in the availability of small pelagic1 fish.

Norway’s farmed salmon industry harms women’s livelihoods

In West Africa, it is mainly women who process and sell fish they source from nearby fish landings. They dry, salt, ferment, and smoke fish, then store and sell them for local consumption. This craft is handed down from mother to daughter across generations and is a source of pride. 

In recent decades, however, increasing scarcity of fish stocks has driven more and more women out of business as they are unable compete with ever increasing prices per crate of fish. The Financial Times quoted Fatou Thoiye, who lives in a Senegalese fishing town:

“A case of yaboi [round sardinella] used to cost 3,000 francs [5 euros], now it costs 50,000”. 

To survive, Senegalese women processors came together in so-called economic interest groups (“groupements d’intéret économique”, or GIE) to ensure purchasing strength through numbers. But in recent years, more and more GIEs have lost a substantial amount of their members who, despite mobilizing, could no longer make a living through fish processing and sales. 

To counteract this problem, processors and fishmongers have been calling for a recognition of their profession which would grant them a better place in decision-making and policy-making processes to defend themselves against powerful fishing and FMFO industries. However, their call has yet to be acted upon despite the economic, social and cultural significance of their work. Ultimately Norway’s and other countries’ appetite for FMFO is creating relentless pressure on West African fisheries, making it increasingly challenging for people in West Africa to defend their livelihoods.

Norway’s international development goals are at odds with its industrial strategy

In 2022, the Norwegian government published Norway’s strategy for promoting food security in development policy, which has a strong focus on promoting food security in Africa as well as the empowerment of women. In the foreword, Anne Beathe Kristiansen Tvinnereim, Minister of International Development, noted that “an overall objective of the Government’s development policy is to fight hunger and increase global food security.” The strategy identified malnutrition and undernutrition as critical global issues, highlighting the importance of seafood as a source of micronutrients. To add to this, it underlines the key role women play within the industry: “Of those employed globally in fishing and aquaculture, 21% are women, a proportion that rises to more than 50% when the rest of the value chain is included.” In light of this, the government of Norway pledged to invest in targeted measures that strengthen women’s position as food producers. 

However, our findings point to a shocking disconnect between the Norwegian government’s development policy and its industrial strategy, under which salmon farming is set to expand massively by 2050. This blatant gap between what the government is saying, as opposed to doing, with regards to food security in Africa is as alarming as it is ironic. 

What are we calling for at Feedback? 

In light of our findings, we’re calling on Norwegian decision-makers to stop further growth in salmon farming, mandate genuine transparency throughout the supply chain, and ensure that Norwegian companies’ activities and feed sourcing practices do not run counter to its own development policy.

How can you get involved? 

Sign our petition, in partnership with Eko and Wild Fish, calling for restaurant chain Wagamama to drop farmed salmon from its menu.

At FFJ, the capacity constraints are real: we’re a two-woman (plus two pooches, but they don’t work much) show, and last June we received over 200 pitches for the four formal editorial slots that we had available. Making these decisions caused us near-physical pain as we had to say goodbye to ideas we knew would be stellar in final form and writers that we would have loved to work with. It also meant that the original vision we had for the issue inevitably shifted as we gave up on the hyper-specific topics we were hoping to see covered to make way for fresh proposals.

As SEA comes to a close (we’ll be back next week with our usual Letter from the Editors to officially wrap up the issue), we thought it could be fun to take a look back at some of these untold and/or un-commissioned stories. We have links to where you can find out more if they pique your interest the way they did ours.

The rest of this newsletter is for paid subscribers only; please consider upgrading if you can. This will also give you access to our WhatsApp group, where the coolest (if we do say so ourselves) food-minded people share resources and ideas galore.

Read more

Listen now in the player above, on our podcast on Substack, or visit Feminist Food Stories on Apple or Google Podcasts.

We’re concluding our SEA issue with a podcast episode about a beautiful and beguiling creature found under the waves: orca whales. Sighting an orca from the deck of a BC Ferries ship — gesturing to your family to come quick with smudges of leftover Triple O’s sauce from an over-priced White Spot burger on your chin — is a quintessentially West Coast experience. In the depths of my homesickness for the land often referred to as British Colombia, my imagination always conjures kaleidoscopic blue-and-green images: firs and spruce and hemlock carpeting land that rises out of water of the deepest blue you’ve ever seen. The splice of a black dorsal fin reminds me there is much in this world I will never fully understand.

I know that with each passing year, these still-frames are becoming more of a fantasy. These days British Colombia burns, brutally, for most of the summer; the vibrant Pacific colours of my childhood wash out to greyscale. The province was burning in the summer of 2018 when I first met Troy Bright, a self-taught orca researcher, on the beach at Bere Point, near Sointula on Malcolm Island. I wasn’t having a great trip; my asthma was acting up and my eyes wouldn’t stop watering. We saw the famous Kwakwaka’wakw totem poles of Alert Bay under a red sun that bled feebly into the noxious haze. In such a sparsely inhabited and remote corner of Vancouver Island, I felt strangely claustrophobic.

Meeting Troy provided a much-needed distraction from the snowballing climate grief. We happened to walk by his camp on the beach, where he tracks the Northern Resident orcas who mysteriously come to rub themselves on the bay’s smooth stones. Here was someone whose life work was driven by care; he knew the whales so well he could recognize each one by ear using his hydrophone. For me, who at age five watched Free Willy on repeat and told anyone who would listen that I wanted to be a marine biologist, meeting him was a window into a world that had long enraptured me. I pitched an article about his work to a local magazine, giving me the chance to speak to him in more detail a few months later over the phone.

Five years on, it’s been a joy to reconnect with Troy for a podcast for Feminist Food Journal, this time with a specific focus on gender and food. In our interview, he shares his knowledge of orcas’ rich matriarchal societies, their unique food cultures, and how our human food systems are jeopardizing their way of life. The danger originating from human food choices includes the over-extraction of salmon, a key food source for orcas which Indigenous nations managed sustainably for thousands of years before colonization. After my conversation with Troy, I take a look at the links between the historical treatment of Indigenous women in the salmon canning industry and high levels of food insecurity among Indigenous and racialized women in British Colombia today. In a nutshell, this podcast seeks to make connections: connections between human and non-human animals, dynamics of gender and culture across species, and patterns of food insecurity in the water and on land, arguing that in many ways, we are orcas, and orcas are us.

Coincidentally, last week, the New York Times Magazine featured a long-form story by Ferris Jabr about Hvaldimir, a formerly captive beluga whale who escaped from the Russian Navy and now mainly inhabits the waters around northern Norway, unable to fully reintegrate into the wild. Despite much (and controversial) advocacy done on his behalf, his life is continually at risk, and there is no easy solution to secure his welfare.

There is so much heaviness in the world, coming at us incessantly from our screens, and sometimes it feels like a fight just to still be able to feel. But in some unexpected moments, the weight of the damage that we have done is simply overwhelming. It sneaks up and levels us when we least expect it, like scrolling through the NYT at 11 pm on a Sunday when we know we should be going to bed. This was a mainstream piece about a Nordic celebrity cetacean, but I’m not too proud to admit I found myself mopping at my cheeks with my duvet as I came to the piece’s conclusion (warning — long pull-quote incoming):

Like many celebrities, Hvaldimir has lived a life defined by other people’s desires. Almost everyone he has met wants something from him: a snapshot, a story, a lifetime of submission. One of the most tragic aspects of his predicament is the discrepancy between how much he is adored and how little has been accomplished to secure his long-term welfare. Hvaldimir ostensibly offers our species a chance at redemption: a formerly captive whale, already moving freely through the ocean, requiring only some redirection to reunite with his kind. But the enormity of what we have done to him and so many other sentient beings like him severely complicates — and in some cases prohibits — such a reversal. Hvaldimir is so far displaced from his origins — geographically, ecologically, culturally — that it’s not clear whether a homecoming is still achievable.

From ocher bison painted on cave walls to the elephants in Europe’s medieval menageries to ongoing killer-whale shows and interactive dolphin pools, humans have long been enamored with other large, social and intelligent animals. We love them because they are simultaneously familiar and exotic — because they both mirror us and represent ways of being beyond our ken. We have often expressed our passion for such creatures by trying to possess them: by fitting them with collars, roping them into circuses and placing them behind glass. Even the military conscription of marine mammals is a kind of admiration, or at least recognition, of their extraordinary abilities. Yet the closer we have pulled such animals toward us, the more difficult it has become to deny the torment that our proximity inflicts. Perhaps the purest act of love is to leave them alone in the first place.

The idea that we humans are so inherently destructive that the best thing we can do for flora and fauna is to leave them alone is devastating to me. It runs counter to Indigenous wisdom and environmental thought that knows humans are not separate from nature but an irreplaceable arm of it. After all, what does it mean for humans to “leave them alone” — orcas or any other species on this planet? To leave something “alone” suggests turning your back on their struggles and washing your hands of responsibility.

I hope, that like Troy Bright, we choose not to leave whales alone in their fight to survive. Even if we aren’t getting in the water with them or using them as fodder for a tear-jerker documentary, the ways we eat, and the ways we travel, impact whales and the many other animals whose survival is at risk. How can we live well on this planet together? How can we see our own struggles — like food insecurity and its racialized and gendered impacts — reflected in non-human societies, and envision common solutions? Thinking about orcas gives us a whale-sized window.

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Isabela Vera is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.

Further reading

Muszynski, A. (1988). Race and Gender: Structural Determinants in the Formation of British Columbia’s Salmon Cannery Labour Forces. The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, 13(1/2), 103–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3341027

Siegel, L. (n.d.). Indigenous women in canneries. British Colombia: An Untold History.

Stiffler, L. (2011). Understanding Orca Culture. Smithsonian Magazine.

By Alice Souza

As a teenager, I was ashamed of my own appetite, both literal and figurative. Like many young girls, I desperately attempted to track, deny, and curb all feelings that were visceral and instinctual: hunger, anger, lust, ambition. To be a woman, I believed, was to be dispossessed of such crude emotion, such strong gravitational pulls.

A lot of this stemmed from my perception of the women around me, including my own mother. She has always been a doting, loving mother. But in my teens, I felt punishingly distant from her. She was, to me, an unreachable figure, her own wants and needs elusive and mysterious.

She was also a poet. I knew this only vaguely; having little interest, back then, in the art form. Though I loved novels and fiction, poetry was to me what it is to most teenagers: stuffy, overly formal, not at all corresponding to the reality of human feeling. Everything changed, however, when my mother introduced me to the poetry she liked. 

The first poem she showed me was by the American poet Anne Sexton. It is called “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward”, and recounts a mother’s first moments with her newborn. My mother read it aloud by my side like a lullaby. She has a particular knack for reading out loud, the kind only mothers who have spent an entire lifetime telling stories do, the kind that makes didactic tales sound like thrilling adventures, and poetry sound like song. 

I didn’t get the poem, initially. I found it unwieldy and contradictory, at once intimate and ruthlessly cold. 

“Your lips are animals/ you are fed with love”1, writes Sexton, from the perspective of the new mum. In the following lines, we witness the delicate, fragile choreography of mother and newborn: their bodies, codependent, “moving to [each other's] touch.” The ending, then, comes abruptly, violently. “Go child,” she writes, “Who is my sin and nothing more”. The maternal figure, heretofore so tender, so “full” of feeling and child, is turned to stone: “I am a shore/ rocking you off.” 

Reality has hardened like a shell. She is an unwed mother; the daughter, a bastard. 

When I told my mother I didn't like it, she asked me to give it another go. She explained, patiently, that its contradictions were precisely the point. This was about both the fragility and barbarity of motherhood, of womanhood. 

I read it and re-read it until I came to love it; not only this poem but the vast collection of poems by Sexton that my mother owned. I read and loved Her Kind, In Celebration of My Uterus, The Touch. What drew me to Sexton’s poetry was the sheer force of feeling, the candour with which she expressed emotions. 

A lot of this is conveyed through images of the ocean: powerful, restless, and ever-flowing. Sexton's is a feminine sea, “flashing breasts made of milk-water", full of “unkillable lust”2. Like the breastfeeding mother, it is a source of nourishment. In one poem, she calls the sea “the kitchen of God”. In another, titled “Oysters”, she eats its food — “running with lemon and tabasco” — in order to become woman. With its internal rhymes and hypnotic rhythms, her verse seemed to move, too, with the force of the sea, surging and crashing, washing over and consuming you. Hers were poems, in essence, about female hunger: about raging, yearning, aching, lustful, and wayward women; women who eat, and masturbate, and make love. 

I was shocked that a woman like my mother could feel an affinity with such violent longings. 

When we moved from Brazil to England as a family — my brother and I still young — my mother dealt with our stubbornness and fear while studying, working, and attempting to build a life in this country. Despite the incessant demands of motherhood, she always kept her calm, never let her anger seep through. She was generous, it seemed to me, truly generous, and endlessly patient. But if she enjoyed this kind of writing, I thought, she must have felt these things too. My mother remained her discreet self, but it was as if I had discovered some small secret of her being in those lines. 

***

For me, Sexton was a gateway to a whole world of other writing by women. After her, I discovered Plath: the defiant rage of her verse and the intense ambition of her journals. “I want to taste and glory in each day,”3 she writes in one well-known entry. In another, she bemoans in palpable longing: “I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. To be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night”. Much is said of Plath’s woe, of her heartbreak and sorrow. But reading her journals, it was her appetite for life that stood out; the impossibility of satiating it often the root of her despair.

Plath frequently cites food in her diaries. “I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else,” she writes in one joyously frank passage. Seafood in particular seems to be a source of pleasure for her; the sign, often, of a particularly indulgent meal. In The Bell Jar, there may be bad crabs, but here there are “great lobster[s]”, and “huge fish soup[s]” and the “freshest ever cod-fish”. In one passage, she recounts her love for the fish market, which she describes as "a fresh adventure every day". She goes on to examine how the fish tell a story, one of boats dipping and shining out at sea, and fishermen bringing their catch back to land. The fish themselves are “strange” and meticulously described. In her appetite for its food, Plath also conveys her fascination with the sea, for its mystery, its vastness, and its promise of adventure. 

After Plath came Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, Marge Piercy, Anne Carson, and Adrienne Rich: all women who wrote about female hunger in its various forms; who followed its winding contours with their words. I went on to study Literature at university, where I could trace female desire as far back as ancient Greece, in the words of Sappho. “Because I prayed this word: I want”4, she writes in one of the earliest testaments we have to the enduring, aching pulse of female appetite. In another, she compares an unconsummated desire to the hunger one feels for a “sweet” and “redden[ed]”5 apple which is too far to reach. 

As I grew up, I practised giving in to my hunger. I fell in love for the first time and, almost concurrently, began properly eating again. I let myself enjoy things that had been previously riddled with shame, like food and sex. It would be facile to say poetry alone allowed me to do this. But poetry put into words that which I’d been so fearful to recognize, let alone express: hunger, anger, and desire. 

I began to borrow my mother's recipe books and make big, hearty meals for myself: sweet buttermilk chicken curry, mushroom risotto with crispy pancetta, Nigella’s creamy fricasse . I fell in love with the process: the flicking through stained pages until I landed on something I liked; the noting down of the ingredients — beautifully named spices and vegetables and large quantities of meat; the finding of them among the crowded aisles of the supermarkets. And then, of course, the cooking itself, the messy indulgence of it, the smells and sounds of the kitchen, and the warmth that envelops you in it. I was surprised to discover how loud and unruly this process could be, this seemingly mundane domestic chore, how full of feeling. 

*** 

In the space between poems and recipes, my mother and I grew closer. She wouldn't just share others’ writing with me, but stories, too, of her own. There were tales of love and heartbreak, of frustrated ambition, of selfish acts and unbridled anger. She wasn't, I realized, the impenetrable rock that I had envisioned growing up, that so many of us envision our mothers to be. 

In her poem  “The Consecrating Mother”, Sexton articulates that which I took so long to understand about my own mother: that her capacity, to nourish others didn't annul her own hunger. In the poem, Sexton compares the ocean to a mother, rolling “like a woman in labor”. She goes on to think of “those who had crossed her/ in antiquity, in nautical trade” and wonder “how she had borne these bulwarks”. The image of the sea captures the paradox of the maternal figure, who is both strong and tender, restless and firm. 

Eventually, I mustered the courage to ask my mother to show me her own poetry. I'd been reluctant to read it — out of fear, perhaps, that it'd constitute some breach of the implicit agreement between mother and daughter, reveal to me a side of hers I was not ready to see. But she was glad that I asked and lent me a small book which I carried home like a cherished secret. The collection, published in 1997 in Brazil by Sete Letras, was full of love poems, mainly; passionate lyrical verse devoted to my dad. 

What struck me in my mother’s words, as it had struck me in Sappho's and Plath's and Sexton's, was the force of feeling, the immersive power of her desire. The title of the collection, Água Rara, literally translates to “rare waters”. Like in Sexton's and Plath’s verse, water dominated my mother’s poetic imagination, an emblem of feeling and desire. The ocean, with its violent lappings and hidden depths, seems to contain within it the same stirrings of the longing and want that pulsed through these women, including my mother. 

***

For a long time, I knew nothing about Anne Sexton's biography, bar the few lines written in the introductions of her books, and the well-known fact that she had committed suicide at the age of 45. I was shocked and disturbed to discover, during the research for this piece, that Sexton had been abusive to her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton. It was a painful irony, that someone whose art had brought me closer to my own mother had been an abusive maternal figure.

The following day, I called my mother to let her know. She picked up the phone the way she always does, full of questions and anecdotes. “How are you? Have you been eating?” she asked. She told me about a recipe she'd just made, a chocolate mousse made with — “would you believe it — tofu!”6. I asked her to send it to me, and then slowly, tentatively, told her about Anne Sexton. She didn't know about the abuse. There was a mournful silence on the other end of the line,  “Well, she was a deeply tormented person. That much I always knew,” my mother said finally. 

I explained that I was writing a piece about how the hunger of Sexton's verse had led me to accept my own. “Oh!” she exclaimed, as if coming back to life, and asked if I had read a poem by Carolyn Kizer, the American feminist poet. “I read it when I was young,” she went on, “and was so deeply affected that I just kept coming back to it.” The poem was called “Food of Love”, she told me. I opened it on my phone as she spoke. 

Kizer uses cannibalistic imagery to speak of an all-consuming desire. “I’m going to murder you with love;…Then I will dine on your delectable marrow”7, she writes. She seems to delight in visceral descriptions of food and eating, as if the act of writing itself were a feast, a cannibalistic tearing apart. Her speaker is assertive and self-imposing. At one point, she compares herself to the “Mediterranean”, stroking her partner's “dusty shores”. “You’ll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,” she vows. The woman here is as vast and hungry as the ocean, which feeds and waters and “devour[s]”. 

“I love it,” I told my mum when I was finished. Despite the disturbing truth I’d learned about Anne Sexton, it was clear to me then that what her work represented to me wasn’t lost. Here it was — vast female oceans and ravenous womanly appetites — in so much other verse, verse I had yet to discover. 

On the other end of the phone, I could hear my mother fiddling about in the kitchen, shifting pots and pans, turning the oven on, getting things ready for dinner. “I've got to go,” she said. After we hung up, she sent me another poem by Kizer and the recipe for chocolate mousse, leaving me then as she so often did: full of poetry, and love, and food. 

Alice Souza is a journalist and writer based in London.

By Isabela Bonnevera | Paid subscribers can listen to an audio reading of this piece on our podcast.

My much-awaited first meal in the town of Vera, known locally as Vera Pueblo, wasn’t even in the town itself. It was just under ten kilometres away at Vera Playa, a seaside resort also known as Europe’s largest nudist colony. When we pulled into the town earlier that day, after a short car ride from Granada and under the cast of the golden late afternoon sun, it had felt largely abandoned. Whether that was because it was a Sunday or just the middle of August, I wasn’t quite sure. There were a few signs of life; announcement boards plastered in flyers for music nights and heritage walks, church bells ringing at 7 p.m. with a few diehards filing in for mass. But we couldn’t find anywhere to eat aside from a kebab shop, and so to the more animated playa for dinner we went. 

The beach bar we chose was bustling, the belly button of place; Believe by Cher pumped from the stereo as teams of naked, hairless volleyball players dove around nearby, their glistening bodies slick with tanning oil that soon picked up zebra stripes of sticky sand. I ordered a Caesar salad only to find the emperor’s tang sorely missing, a tasteless lump of mayonnaise dumped in its stead. I was already bloated and greasy in the 40-degree heat; the impulse to order something so creamy immediately felt like a mistake. But I had fantasized so much about this trip that it seemed silly to let a bad meal or imminent indigestion spoil the mood, so I focused on sipping my tinto de verano, narrowing my eyes in the hazy evening light to people-watch. There were no tourists; the only foreigners seemed to be people who had bought the nouveau-California-like developments along the coastline. 

By dusk, grey clouds fat with the threat of rain had started colliding. Eager to escape them and my half-eaten salad, we drove home to our hotel. I made my partner promise to get up early to visit the town’s museum even though I knew there was no way we would be awake before 10 a.m. The museum was the real reason we had come, to this town that shares my family name.

When we stumbled into the museum around noon, its sole employee was collecting data on visitors. Where were we from, how long were we staying? Dos noches, I told him, flashing a peace sign in case my accent was unintelligible. Fielding that question was easy enough. But describing where I came from felt a bit like unravelling a roll of string. You can put me down as Canadian, I said, but we live not so far away, in Barcelona. And I think I have an ancestor who came from this town, whose son then sailed to Chile, a few hundred years before my grandparents moved to Canada.

Verdad? He was suddenly animated. Sabes su nombre? Do you know his name?

***

Jeronimo de Vera was born in 1607. His son, Bartolome Vera Velasquez, was born in 1635 in Seville but died in 1690 in Santiago, Chile, making him our first ancestor in what is now commonly referred to as the Americas.

This is relatively new information for me. A few months before visiting Vera, I had received an email from my paternal grandfather to let us know that his nephew recently completed our family tree using the Ancestry App. It presented the following lineage:

On the list’s oldest name, my grandfather quickly sent one additional follow-up:

In the case of Jeronimo de Vera is interesting to observe that by 1600 in Europe it was usual to have the first name only and the second name referred to the city of origin, For Example Leonardo Da Vinci was Leonardo who came from Vinci a small Italian town. In Andalucia, Spain, there is a small town Vera, so Jeronimo probably was born there.

-JHV

I was intrigued. Until then, I had known much more about my ancestors on my paternal grandmother’s side. They left for Chile at the turn of the 19th century, an era of industry, machine, and noxious smoke on the horizon that was easy enough to imagine. But the birth of Jeronimo in Vera in 1607 felt harder to conjure, as did the voyage made by Jeronimo’s son, Bartolome, to Santiago sometime in the next decades.

Having moved to Spain just seven months before my grandfather’s revelation, I quickly decided that I wanted to visit Vera for myself; anything less would be a slap in the face to these long-departed, little-known ancestors whose faces and stories faded across the seas. (Also, a quick Google search revealed that Vera Playa holds the Guinness World Record for “Largest Skinny Dip”; after reading that, the trip was all but sold to the highest bidder.) It was late spring, and everyone said we shouldn’t go to Andalusia in the summertime, but of course, I booked tickets to go during our next available vacation slot in August. We flew first to Granada and after a few days of sweating across the Alhambra, we rented a car to get to this town to which I had no prior connection beyond a diagram provided by the world’s largest for-profit genealogy company. 

As soon as the signs for “Vera” started appearing on the highway — 60 km to go, then 16 — I was overcome by a sense of connection to the place, tiny magnets in my skin tingling with anticipation of the upcoming thud of reunion. But anyone who watched the plight of the Di Grasso family in season 2 of The White Lotus knows that expecting a warm welcome from distant European relatives is folly. I was already aware of my own overbearing North Americanness in sending an extremely detailed booking request to the town’s only hotel back in April. (They replied something along the lines of “Señora, we don’t care about your ancestor, but we do have a room available.”) I kept mum about my family history as we slid our passports across the check-in desk. But my sunburned cheeks fell when the receptionist didn’t comment on the serendipitous matching of names, and my behaviour probably did appear slightly peculiar. I wanted to absorb every detail of the place, remember the thick, faintly cheesy smell in each breath taken around the glistening legs of jamón dangling from the hotel restaurant’s ceiling. The hotel had walls lined with promotional posters for bullfights gone by and I took photos of them from every possible angle. I told my partner that we were living the Andalusian dream.

***

I’m fascinated by long-standing cultural traditions like bullfighting and curing ham, probably because I didn’t grow up with many. My father was born to a formally baptized but relatively secular family in Chile, and my mom to an overtly atheist Jewish one in Montréal. We lived in Vancouver, far away from more pious Jewish relatives on the East Coast and even further from Chilean ones way down south. No teacher ever called out my name on attendance lists for Saturday School or Hebrew lessons. My mom came into my elementary school to make latkes for a few token Hannukah events, but otherwise, our main family food ritual was to go for Cantonese on rainy Sunday nights.

We also made up new traditions at home. Back when I was shorter than the kitchen table, my mother worked on Sunday nights as a server at a seafood restaurant in East Vancouver. Those nights, my dad would be in charge of dinner. His specialty was Toxic Tofu — marinated tofu steaks fried to a crisp. These remain top of his repertoire to this day, along with frozen burritos and hard-boiled eggs, made in a six-hole egg cooker that announces their readiness with a whine.

A propensity for cooking simple meals. Here lies one intersection of our myriad similarities: a Venn diagram with a bulging middle that has, somehow, never seemed to be able to compensate for a few antipodes on the peripheries. I’ve become much more inspired in the kitchen, but for much of my life, if left to my own devices I ate much the same as my dad does now. Chickpeas from a can onto some spinach; peanut butter straight from the jar onto a rice cake. Even Bartolome Vera and his 15th-century seamen might have turned their scurvy-white noses up my (ahead of their time) girl dinners. It is always a battle of taste versus convenience; such rapid-fire foods lend themselves to my incessant puttering. If I’m eating alone, I’m immediately distracted by a million things in the house calling out for me to attend to. Eat with one hand, rearrange cutlery drawer with the other. My dad is like this, too. When we watch TV shows, he is always working on something else — laying out fishing rods, tying flies, repairing waders. “So she’s leaving him for his uncle?” he’ll ask at the conclusion of a pivotal scene, looking up from tying an intricate knot. “No, she’s asking his uncle for his blessing,” my mom and I will reply in unison, if I haven’t been scrolling through my phone too compulsively to keep up.

After a few evenings of tinkering in front of the TV, my dad will pack up his gear and head out to the water. He’ll either go on foot into a river, wrapped in waders, or to the local estuary in a small boat he stores in the garage. Some days the catch is good, the water hopping like popcorn with mouths that can’t wait to impale themselves. On others, the surface stays as impenetrable and smooth as glass. In my younger years, I was limited to catch-and-release outings for my refusal to club (or be present for the clubbing of) any creatures we brought up to the boat or the shore. These years coincided with my dad buying me a collection of books by Dave Barry, a humorist who has one recurring schtick on how the fish you need to kill are always painfully cute — something along the lines of them blinking up at you in a way you could imagine rendered on a cover of a children’s book called Billy Bluegill Learns The True Meaning of Christmas. 

Given that I now live so far away, my dad’s motorboat is only a prop on summer holidays, when we’re out in the beating hot sun to fish or catch crab. I’ve grown the stomach to close my eyes during the final moments of aquatic vertebrates, and on occasion, I even get to steer the boat. But I still can’t bring myself to kill any fish. Instead, I run my hands through the cold salty water and dream of how refreshing it would feel to dive in, if not for the deadly currents. I feel that every moment spent on the boat with my dad is precious. Fishing is neutral ground, something we can share without controversy. Once I’m away, with oceans of distance between us, our communication historically dries up.

I know I should call my dad more often. My whole life, he’s been infallibly present. After dinner, on the Sundays my mom was working, he’d turn the lights off in the living room and lead us to dance around in the dark to the B-52s. Later, weekends that could’ve been spent wrestling salmon on the shore of a wild river instead unfolded on the sidelines of what must have been painfully mediocre soccer games, cheering for hours before patiently loading muddy teammates into the green family minivan to carpool them home. He taught me how to throw a football, helped me master algebra, and bought us computer games designed to hone our critical thinking skills. When I was 21 and started my first summer desk job across town, I no longer had my own car. My dad would load my bicycle into his hatchback in the mornings and detour from his usual route to work to spare me a roundtrip commute on body-powered wheels. To this day, there remains no problem that he won’t help me solve. 

But our ways of relating to each other more deeply have always seemed to clash; attempts to connect, tragically misunderstood. 20 years of conflict have left us tip-toeing over cracked ground. Our conversations are cordial, but clipped. I sometimes hear myself use a voice normally reserved for customer service situations. There’s a mutual understanding that the peace we share is fragile. I know I should call him more often, yet an instinctive impulse holds me back, fear that an attempt to reach out may end up rocking the boat. 

And so I go looking for clues, context and places that help me to feel closer to my father and his life. Vera Town is one such place; so is his birth country, Chile. My grandmother still spends part of the year there, and I’m trying to forge better-late-than-never connections with other relatives, which isn’t straightforward when you have a shaky grip on the language and a limited understanding of the culture. A few second cousins are my age, and I’m mortified when we have to switch to English to converse meaningfully.

Beyond confusing ser and estar, I fear that I’m getting the chance to know and love some of the people in Chile later than life would’ve liked. A great uncle in Santiago with whom I’ve spent quite a bit of time on my trips and feel particularly close to has cancer; the prognosis is unclear, not due to medical failures but rather the (I suspect purposefully) vague language that my grandmother uses when talking about it. On my grandfather's side of the family, a few relatives who remember my dad as a child seem to be in poor health, but they beam as they welcome us into their homes with plates of empanadas, as if we were old friends and not meeting for only the first or second time. As we eat together, I listen to their stories like a recording device.

Thankfully some memories were exposed to light, their replication on film taking a load off my brain. It was during my first visit to Chile that my grandmother sat me down to flip through photo albums cataloging her family life in Viña del Mar and my father's early life in Santiago. One photo immediately stood out: a portrait of my dad as a kid, wearing a wide-brimmed suede hat and beaming with unbridled joy at a fishing rod he was working with. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t help but beam too. More clues. I realized then that my father’s love for the water must have been fated; my grandmother’s maiden name, after all, was Marin. People of the sea, joined in matrimony centuries and continents from where they started. 

In this family, though, starts and ends are ambiguous. When Jeronimo’s son Bartolome left Spain, he implicated himself and all of his descendants in a colonial regime of expansion, dispossession, and genocide. Ancestors skipped World Wars and built cabins on stolen clearings, only for my grandparents to leave Chile fearing for their lives, driven by dictatorship to become settlers in further unceded lands. These are uneasy trajectories, stalked by blood-tinged footsteps. My parents, living in an easier time and place, decided to travel westwards from Montréal, away from their families but towards better job opportunities and warmer weather. The land now commonly known as Vancouver was meant to be our family’s last stop, but in 2014 I took off with the privilege and naivety of wanting an adventure, one that has not ceased to end for nearly a decade now, and keeps me in a form of permanent limbo, always between people and places. Perhaps due to our shared experiences of movement, I feel increasingly absorbed by my family’s history, thirsty to learn more even if some of the truths may make me never want to drink again.

***

A few of the Chilean photo albums have since come back with my grandmother to Canada and we flip through them together from time to time. I try to keep up with the faded faces she points out, but aside from a few recognizable characters, it’s hard keep everyone straight. As age takes its toll on many of the people staring at me from behind in their plastic sheaths, I grieve for what might get lost forever. So much wisdom, so much history, all these generations of family members with their worlds of hopes and sorrows and eccentricities. I’m not sure if getting to know them is a way of trying or avoiding getting to know myself. Regardless, I’m going to try.

In Vera, my oversharing with the museum curator was rewarded with an impromptu appointment at the town archives around the corner. I wanted to know if Jeronimo de Vera had really been born here, if I was really on my ancestor’s trail. Like everyone we met on the trip, the archivist on duty was extremely friendly. He sat us down and explained that he was going to look through folders of the town’s birth records. The records were “digitized” in the sense that the five hundred years of the Church’s ledgers of handwritten scrawls had been scanned to PDF, but still required someone to look through them entry by entry. 

1607, 1607, he muttered. He went quiet for a good 15 minutes, brow furrowed, leaving me trying and find something to do with my hands.

Aha! He finally exclaimed. 

¿Lo encontraste? I looked at my partner with wide eyes. It seemed too good to be true.

Not Jeronimo, he told me. But I did find someone named Juan de Vera, born in March of that year.

Juan Vera — the name of the paternal grandfather who forwarded me our family tree in the first place. Could this far more ancient Juan have been our Jeronimo? 

The archivist seemed to think that he almost certainly was, but I still don’t know. When I tried to ask in my fumbling Spanish if Juan could have become a Jeronimo, and how my great-uncle could have found him then as Jeronimo in the first place, the archivist merely repeated the name of Juan de Vera’s parents and his birth date, and I was too embarrassed to rephrase the question.

After giving the archivist my email address in case he uncovered anything further, we hopped into the car and went back to the nudist beach, shedding our clothes on the frying pan sand. The gleaming volleyball players were back, and the beach bar with the tragic Caesar salad was a choir of lunch-drunk voices, its patrons merrily sitting bare-bummed on towels draped over plastic chairs. Looming in the distance was a magenta and navy oil tanker, the exact kind I grew up seeing anchored all around Stanley Park — my favourite place in Vancouver, and maybe in the world. All the day was missing was a meticulously rigged fishing rod, and someone to tell me about the precise ebbs and flows of the tide. 

I smiled to myself imagining if Jeronimo — or Juan, for all we know — could see it now, the southern horizon that called his son to a future in the Americas but now being lazily watched by an 18-generation descendent in a bucket hat with her A-cups out. Could he ever have had an inkling that one day a Vera daughter would be back on the town’s scorching main avenue, holding up a pocket-sized screen machine with a small blue dot showing her the direction she should walk to trace his footsteps? If so, he would probably tell her to use it to call her dad. 

Isabela Bonnevera is a founding editor of Feminist Food Journal.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my father, Felipe Vera — software wiz, fisherman extraordinaire, and, as it turns out, talented editor — for his thoughtful feedback on this piece. Love you Dad. 

The first time Halima heard about Kasila’s Dream was after her father drowned.

Her father had been an esteemed fisherman, his dexterity with the nets forming the foundation for the family’s al fresco cookery shop, a collection of bamboo benches arranged around low tables underneath a mango tree in the dusty expanse in front of their pan-body house.

The village showed little surprise at the drowning, since it was known that Kasila, the Water Devil, swallowed two males every rainy season in return for the fish the village had access to.

On Mama’s instructions, Halima sat on a rattan mat in the mango tree’s shade during the week of mourning. Between serving food to those who had flocked to offer condolences, Mama reprimanded her daughter for excessive crying. “Embrace courage and wipe that snot from your face Halima! It is the will of the spirits that your papa was swallowed by Kasila this year!”

***

Choosing an afternoon of long shadows after the week of mourning, Mama boiled lemon grass, black tumblers, and monkey apples in a squat pot. She then cracked open a young coconut, adding the water from within the brown shell to the bubbling mixture. After emptying the pot into a wide calabash to cool, Mama offered Halima a cup of the fruit concoction to drink. She then washed her daughter’s face and hands with the rest of the mixture.

“This water grows intelligence and will fill your head with the knowledge of food needed to enter Kasila’s Dream. Never forget that you walk in the legacy of powerful women whose hands control the embers that glow beneath pots!”

***

Halima took the responsibility of preparing for Kasila’s Dream very seriously. On Saturday mornings, she would accompany Mama to the distance-flung Sababu Market, a sprawling space which convened under thatch baffas erected at a junction where roads to the surrounding villages met. Before departing, Mama would explain the nuances of the market to her daughter.

“You must remember that most food traders have false tongues that produce sweet talk. They cannot be trusted to speak clean truth; therefore, you must examine what they sell to you with the sharp eyes of a night bird.”

They would travel to the market on the back of a spluttering okada, Halima wedged between Mama and the driver, a rag of a man whose smell was a collage of sweat, roll-up cigarettes, and gasoline.

Halima loved the market, a pulsing arena featuring a vibrant collection of confident hawkers who spoke the language of food in lucid colour. They would bellow for attention, thrusting samples of their merchandise into the faces of customers: breadfruit and pawpaws bigger than Halima’s head; slim fingers of okra bound with strips cut from dried banana leaves; miniature plastic packets of ogiri and kaindah, advertised as being able to lift the flavour of any sauce.

Mesmerised, Halima would inhale the market whilst listening as Mama switched tongues to haggle with the traders, seamlessly adapting to the languages they spoke.

“These big peppers are not fresh and have termites living inside their stomachs – surely you cannot charge me full price for them Kortor Manso!”

“But this is not real red palm oil Aunty Rugi; it has the rogue colour of the masankay brand that is no good for frying fish!”

***

Mama would prepare food for the cookery shop in the mornings. Halima would rise also, her first responsibility being fetching water from the river in the company of a gaggle of other children. She would then spend time observing Mama’s interactions with the pots, studying the intricacies of each recipe. Possessing the slight frame of a termite, Halima was shielded from the heavy kitchen tasks like pounding native rice in the big mortar or chopping stout logs into firewood. She would instead occupy herself with assignments commensurate to her size, such as using a pint-bottle as a makeshift rolling pin to grind groundnuts into paste for stew.

As her skills progressed, Halima graduated to adding ingredients, flitting amongst the pots which were erected on multiple stone tripods in a corner of their yard. Mama would keep a roving eye on her daughter, gently explaining the significance of the food they prepared.

“All the food we sell in this cookery shop is revealed to us by Kasila through dreams, and is built on a foundation of fish. The hippopotamus and the crocodile have no fixed identity and wish to live both in the water and on land; the leopard rips out the impala’s throat on the ground and then carries the carcass into trees. The fish though is a creature of pride that does not cultivate confusion; it stays in the water where it swims with grace and elegance. And so only the purest of ingredients are allowed to swim in the same pot with them!”

As the meals drew to simmering conclusions, Halima would put on her uniform and undertake the two mile walk to the local primary school.

***

Halima only spent six years at the primary school.

Her class five teacher, a hassled man who wore the same ash-coloured safari suit every day, followed her back to her house at the end of the school year to point out to Mama that her daughter would be receiving double-promotion.

Mama, who had just finished serving boiled bananas and fried tilapias to a collection of local court messengers, presented the teacher with a plate of bonga fish and bulgur. The teacher attacked the meal with gusto, whilst explaining what double promotion entailed.

“Halima has a strong brain in her head, and I am recommending that she jumps over class six and proceeds straight to class seven. She will then attempt the selective entrance exams which will take her directly to secondary school. After marking her shining schoolwork, I have realised that to get her to sit in class six would be a waste of time – it would be like asking a frog to pass a swimming test!”

***

Halima took to the work of class seven like a red ant to spilled sugar. As a means of augmenting her knowledge in preparation for Kasila’s Dream, she began writing the food Mama prepared in a narrow exercise book. Every evening, after she had washed the utensils and swept the cookery shop with a frayed broom, she would dedicate time to collating the recipes, her face furrowed as she struggled to think of compromise spellings for the ingredients that did not have English names.

Yebeh – dried herrings with boiled sweet potatoes, cassava and yams.

Acheke – snapper fish with garri fried in coconut oil, mixed with, jiblox, peppers and onions.

***

At the end of the class seven school year, Halima received a big scholarship to the prestigious Annie Walsh School in the capital city, Freetown.

When Mama got news of her daughter’s success, she danced and ululated across the cookery shop, the diners cheering and clapping in solidarity.

The following day, for the first time in over a decade, Mama did not sell food; instead she and Halima caught a crowded poda poda into the nearby town of Blama. Using a week’s ingredient money, Mama instead purchased important items her daughter needed for boarding school, including stationery, a pair of brown shoes, and green material for her new uniform.

***

As Halima waited for her head to be filled with Kasila’s Dream, letter reading became a key function she performed in the cookery shop. The few villagers who were lucky enough to have relatives who had travelled overseas often received blue airmail letters festooned with fascinating stamps, which they would bring to Halima when she returned during the holidays.  The villagers somehow believed that her extensive boarding school education endowed her with a deep knowledge, which was essential for an understanding and appreciation of things that happened in white countries.

The letter reading sessions soon became public affairs, with people understanding the importance of sharing private news of life overseas with the rest of the village. Even those who could not afford food attended, positioning themselves on the margins of the cookery shop, the cadence of Halima’s voice animating the letters, casting whatever news they bore in an alluring light.

Halima, who had by this time acquired the curves of adolescence whilst also inheriting Mama’s regal height and deep copper complexion, would gauge the mood and rhythm of the cookery shop. She would then lean against the trunk of the mango tree, striving to maintain the clipped English accent of the nun who taught her Shakespeare. She would pause periodically to translate the words into the languages of the village, her eyes level with the owner of the letter, her voice, however, strong enough to carry across the cookery shop.

Mr Sullay, a local hunter who traded in bush meat, was one of the first to bring a letter.

“Your son has got a new job cleaning trains on the London Underground,” Halima explained. “He has also met a good woman whose name is Meltina. She hails from Makeni, and your son would like you to go to her people on his behalf to declare an intention of marriage by presenting them with kola nuts.”

Another letter-reading session saw Halima break news to Mama Sondima about her husband who had travelled to Canada five years previously.

“Pa Sondima says the snow on the ground in the winter lies higher than a giant anthill. He says he will send money for the boys’ school fees before the rains start in August. He says he now works in the kitchens of a big conference centre where they cook for thousands of people. He says he cries every day because he has to throw away huge amounts of leftover food.”

***

In the harmattan season of Halima’s fourteenth year, Mama received the visit from the district’s Paramount Chief. He arrived complete with an entourage of elders, all of them swathed in resplendent traditional ronko outfits. Halima, who was home for the Christmas holidays, scurried to receive the guests, sorting out seating arrangements before serving them food on special glass plates brought out of a padlocked chop-box from under Mama’s bed.

When he was sated, the Paramount Chief spoke, his sedate voice reducing the crowded cookery shop to a hush.

“As you know Mama, the spirits have stopped smiling on our village. Our fishermen return from our river with weak finger-sized fish and dirty crabs which are good only for feeding to stray dogs. Kasila is angry and has decided to put his foot on the throat of the river.” The Paramount Chief paused for a sip of palm wine, murmurs of concurrence from the crowd filling the gap in his speech.

“After putting our ears into the river, the voices of our forefathers have spoken up to us. Our traditions say that the person who enters Kasila’s Dream must be a girl-child who has never been touched by a man. Your daughter, Halima, has always represented sharp intelligence and modesty. She has also been to the white man’s school and speaks their language like a radio. She has also inherited your strong eyes, and therefore has the power to see Kasila. Once appeased by her, he will give permission for his fish to lie in our nets again!”

After the Paramount Chief and his retinue departed, Halima added the special food Mama prepared for them to her exercise book:

Lafidi – Mina fish with wallah rice, palm oil, okra, pepper, eggplant, maggi cubes and kaindah.

Pemahun – Kuta fish with steamed native rice, crain crain, sweet potato leaves, okra and jakato. 

***

Kasila’s Dream climbed into Halima’s head exactly twelve days after the Paramount Chief’s visit. The Water Devil had always been a spectre in her background, the malevolent entity that had swallowed her father when she was a child. Beyond that, she had only ever thought of Kasila when she joined the other children to fetch water from the river. Back then, the embellishments of childhood imagination had seen one of the boys describe Kasila as a thundering presence with a rusty chain as a tongue, used to yank hapless fishermen to the bottom of the river.

However, in the dream, Kasila was a woman with riveting turquoise eyes and hair set in neat corn rows which flowed like dark raffia. She sat at the head of a long table cut from the dark bark of a marula tree, the legs of the table carved in the shape of high elephants. On the table were a collection of ivory trays on ornate place mats made from yellow lace material.

After testing Halima’s food knowledge, Kasila talked her through the new ingredients in the trays, her voice a rich whisper.

***

Mama rose on the morning of the appeasement ceremony to again wash her daughter’s face and hands. The ablutions complete, she sat Halima on the ground between her knees and arranged her hair into six neat ox-folds. She then wrapped her daughter in a flowing white lappa that swept all the way to the ground.

Halima then, without Mama’s assistance, cooked the meal that had appeared to her in the dream.

Once the food was ready, it was dished into expensive aluminium containers Mama had bought at the Sababu Market from a Wolof trader visiting from Senegal. To maintain the food’s heat, the containers were wrapped like newborn babies in thick country cloths, and were then placed on a bright tray, which Halima carried on her head.

Using a ceremonial canoe adorned with charcoal inscriptions, Mama rowed Halima to the centre of the river where she spoke into the water.

“I draw strength today from your guidance and declare that the person here with me today is my daughter, Halima. She is of me and from me: as a baby, she sucked milk from my chest with her eyes open and slept strapped to my back with her eyes closed. Her hands are today extended towards you with that which you gave to her in a dream.”

Mama then instructed Halima to descend into the dark river, with only her head and hands visible above the water. She then gently placed the tray of food on her daughter’s head.

“Since you have now seen Kasila’s eyes, this water has no power to hurt you. When she accepts that which you have cooked for her, you will swim like a fish back to me.”

Mama then rowed the canoe away, her daughter’s bobbing head a mere dot in the faint distance by the time she reached the shore.

***

Halima returned to boarding school in the new year. Before departing, she wrote the meal she had cooked for the Water Devil in her exercise book.

Baguda and Aborbor – Catfish and boiled cassava eaten with black-eyed beans cooked in nut oil.

Foday Mannah hails from Sierra Leone and currently lives in Scotland, where he is employed as a teacher of English. His short story, Amie Samba, was shortlisted and published in the 2019 Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology.

This week’s SEA offering is a short documentary (our first-ever video) about the impacts of climate change and overfishing on the livelihoods of girls living along Lake Malawi. We’d love to hear what you think about video as a new medium for FFJ. - IV & ZJ

Film by Mélissa Godin and William Martin; text by Mélissa Godin

When we first met Fanny on the southern shores of Lake Malawi in 2018, she was preoccupied by one thing: the lake’s fish stocks.

Fanny’s village, Zomba, is a small town built upon the orange sand of Lake Malawi. Here, a few dozen people spend their entire lives fishing, catching enough to feed their families and to sell at the local market. We found ourselves here in the late summer of 2018 while shooting a documentary called Daughters of Drought, which explores how ecological destruction is affecting women of all ages in Malawi. Within hours of arriving, we noticed Fanny swimming in the water, using a small plastic bag to catch fish. 

Over the past few decades, Lake Malawi, Africa’s third-largest lake, has seen its fish stocks decline by more than 93% due to overfishing and climate change. Malawi’s population has increased fivefold in the last 60 years. This has driven up demand for fish, which is a primary source of protein for Malawians, and put impossible pressure on the lake’s fish stocks. Meanwhile, a drier climate means that water levels in the lake have dropped. This loss has had devastating impacts on lakeside communities. While fishermen used to be able to spend only a few hours out on the water to catch enough to last a village a week, today, they have to spend whole days fishing for food that sometimes, barely lasts a day. 

In Fanny’s village, Zomba, virtually the only topic we heard discussed between people was fish. Many people were debating whether they should move, leaving behind their families and communities in search of work. But while this was of concern to everyone, it was particularly alarming for young girls like Fanny. At only twelve years old, she already knew that just one bad fishing season could be the difference between her finishing her education and being forced to marry in order to survive.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, with over half of the population living in poverty. Over 80% of people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, making the country extremely vulnerable to climate change. When crops fail or fish stocks decline, families lose their income and food source. Left with no other choice, young girls are often pulled from school and married off by their parents who see marriage as the only way to ensure their daughters are fed. 

Although Fanny’s mother, Janette, was determined to make sure her daughter stayed in school, one night when the cameras were turned off Fanny told us that she knew it was out of her mother’s control. “She cannot put more fish in the lake,” she said. 

The short video we’ve shared here captures Fanny at a critical period in her life: straddling childhood and adulthood, she is dreaming of what kind of person she wishes to become. Yet it also portrays a sobering reality: the gendered impacts of climate change and environmental destruction may prohibit her from realizing those dreams. 

In the years since we left Malawi, we’ve been unable to reach our local contact who is in touch with Fanny. Meanwhile, the country has been hit with devastating storms and cyclones made worse by climate change, which has forced millions of people into displacement camps. In those camps, we know there are many girls like Fanny, watching as a changing climate and poor resource management steal from them the opportunity to define themselves — a reminder that every year we fail to meaningfully confront the climate crisis is a year that tens of thousands of lives are irreversibly changed.

You can watch the Daughters of Drought documentary in full here.

Mélissa Godin is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker telling character-driven stories about climate change, culture, identity, and human rights. She has previously reported for Time Magazine, the Guardian, and the New York Times.

William Martin is a BAFTA-nominated documentary filmmaker focused on gender inequality, immigration, queer rights, and climate change. His video journalism is currently featured in Time, Teen Vogue, The GroundTruth Project, BRIC Media, and Al Jazeera. 

In trying to trace it, I discovered that it’s known loosely as “Love Like Salt” and variations of it are told all over the world, from Italy to Pakistan to Hungary. Ernst Meier’s “So lieb wie das Salz” from Deutsche Volksmärchen aus Schwaben: Aus dem Munde des Volks gesammelt (Stuttgart: C. P. Scheitlin's Verlagshandlung, 1852) offers the story particularly concisely:

As Dear as Salt

Germany

A king once asked his daughter how dear he was to her.

"As dear, as dear — as salt!" she said.

The king thought that this was very little, and he was very unhappy with his child's answer.

Soon thereafter he sponsored a great feast. The daughter saw to it that every dish was brought to the table unsalted, and thus nothing tasted good to the king.

Finally the daughter explained everything to him. He then recognized how important salt was, and that his daughter had spoken very positively. Thus he loved her again as dearly as before.

Other versions set the princess into competition with her sisters, or off into the forest to find a prince, or cast into exile as an innkeeper to learn the value of hard work, but the core message always remains the same. Salt, often overlooked and under-appreciated, is the mineral that brings taste to life; without taste, there is little joy, and without joy, there is little life. Salt, essentially, is ourselves — societies, civilizations, and sweating, crying, metabolic bodies.

As the following contribution by Zoya Naaz Rehman demonstrates, salt isn’t merely a currency of the emotional labour done by women to placate men in their lives. On the western coast of India, where the burdens and benefits of salt production are highly gendered, it’s a product of their physical labour as well. The story of the women who make much of India’s salt is notable for what it shows about artisanal labour, technological advancement, and nation-building. It also highlights how conservation policy, whatever its intentions, can disenfranchise local and/or Indigenous populations, separating them from their ecosystems and resources — again, with highly gendered outcomes. - IV

Salt plays an important role in both India’s political history and its economy, with much of its salt being produced in Gujarat. The women whose labour underpins the industry continue to preserve and innovate upon their traditional harvesting practices despite systemic discrimination.

By Zoya Naaz Rehman

Gujarat, 1930. Salt protest events are taking the coastal areas of colonial India by storm, a snowball effect of a recent mass pilgrimage, led by Mahatma Gandhi, to the seaside town of Dandi. Here, Gandhi and his followers made their own salt, in resistance against the British Empire’s Salt Act of 1882; the law prohibited Indians from collecting and selling salt, forcing them to rely on heavily taxed imports instead. 

The Salt March, in which Gandhi’s contingent travelled over 386 km to reach Dandi, was met with police privy to their plan, attempting to thwart the soon-to-be salt revolution by crushing deposits of the mineral into the ground. Undeterred, Gandhi reached down to fish a small lump of crystal out of the mud. Just like that, the law was broken. An Indian man had collected his own salt. Soon, thousands of supporters across the country followed his lead. Even women, who were discouraged from being a part of the March, manufactured contraband salt in their homes. This act of satyagraha — determined, but non-violent resistance — formed part of the chain of salt protest events around coastal areas of the country, culminating with the birth of an independent India in 1947.

Part of the protest’s power stemmed from the symbolism that salt, in many ways, is life. Without salt, there is no preservation, no flavour, and no sustenance. Salt continues to be essential in India, both in the national imagination and in terms of economic might. In the last 60 years, India has not only become self-sufficient in salt production but also exports a large surplus. India is now the third-largest maker of salt in the world after the United States and China, producing around 300 tonnes of the crystal per year. 76 percent of this salt is produced in Gujarat.

Just like in Gandhi's day, salt production in Gujarat remains deeply political. Much of India’s salt is produced by marginalized women, who have been falling through the cracks of the social protection system for generations. They have also been impacted by conservation policies that separate them from their ancestral land. Yet they continue to preserve and innovate upon their traditional harvesting practices.

Life in Gujarat’s salt flats

“He makes me dig salt wells, pull the mud from the well and toss it out,” young women in Agariya Agnani sing about their salt-farming husbands. This is one of the many pieces of folk music that illuminates the harsh lived experiences of the women from the Agariya community, an indigenous Indian people who have for centuries been producing salt in the Gujarati region of the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK).

LRK is an uninhabited and seemingly never-ending stretch of cracked earth. It is a desert for eight months of the year and flooded for the remaining four when the seawater from the Gulf of Kutch on the Arabian Sea turns the dry surface into wet marshes over briny water. At the beginning of the farming season in October, around 60,000 members of the Agariya community leave behind their homes in the towns surrounding the marshes and travel to the desert to undertake the backbreaking work of harvesting salt until June, living all the while in temporary shelters.

Their circumstances are precarious. Firstly, until 1952, the Agariyas were classified as a “Denotified Tribe” according to the Constitution of India, a category informed by a colonial-era law as a way to criminalize entire communities who resisted British rule. Although this label is no longer used, it birthed persistent social and administrative biases that still haunt the Agariyas and other indigenous groups to this day. Secondly, LRK — part of the ancestral homelands of the Agariyas and the area that they traditionally occupy during the salt farming season — is sometimes referred to as Survey Number Zero, because it hasn’t been surveyed since India became an independent nation in 1947. In other words, the government has sought to learn nothing about this essential community of food providers for nearly a century, and for that reason, has struggled to understand how many people depend on the salt harvest for their livelihoods.

The Agariyas have also fallen victim to independent India’s efforts to spur domestic industry. India’s Salt Commissioner notes that the Government of India has played a key role in the development of the country’s salt industry, having shed the need for small producers — who make up 88 percent of all salt makers — to obtain a license for their work back in 1948. As a result, the majority of Agariyas, salt workers have been unlicensed and unrecognized, a massive disadvantage that deprives them of subsidies, insurance, or compensation in the event of natural disasters.1

Finally, the Agariyas, like many other nomadic or semi-nomadic indigenous communities in India, have been evicted from the lands they generationally occupied, without being provided definite alternatives. This displacement has been ostensibly conducted in the name of biodiversity: The Indian government’s 1973 decision to declare a large part of LRK a sanctuary for wild donkeys stripped them of any legal rights to the desert, eventually unleashing a process of negotiation that has stretched on for decades. In November 2006, state forest officials sent notices to salt workers directing them to cease harvesting salt, deemed to be an illegal activity, and leave the sanctuary, or face up to three years of imprisonment and a fine of Rs 25,000 (approximately US$300). In a newspaper article at the time, a member of the Agariya community said that Agariyas and the wild donkeys had been living in harmony with each other for centuries, with the Agariyas’ respect for the donkeys being a key reason the species had survived at all. Despite the threat of eviction, the Agariyas continued to harvest salt, but their work was termed “illegal” under the assumption that it threatens the survival of the wild donkey population. The product of their food work is fundamental to our nourishment, but they are shunned as obscure interlopers in its production.

These policy decisions have compounded to render the Agariyas indentured servants in all but name. Before the founding of the LRK wildlife sanctuary, the publicly owned desert land was leased to private owners with whom the Agariyas would negotiate the terms of their salt production. Since 1997, when the settlement process related to the wildlife sanctuary began to unfold, leases have ceased to exist, but the salt farmers continue to rely on the informal credit system called dhiraan: the former lease-owners provide the Agariyas with an advance payment for the salt they will harvest. The payment, however, is a discordantly small compensation for their labour. They earn about 0.30 rupees (or three-hundredths of a cent) for a kilogram of salt that is later sold on the market for 20 rupees a kilogram. By the end of the season, many Agariyas have spent about half on just fuel for the water pumps they use for brine collection, and most of the remaining funds on repairs, labour, and basic supplies for survival in the desert. This means they habitually leave LRK with almost no profits and often accrue debt.

Agariya women are at the forefront of innovation

Agariya men often die young as a result of the serious physical and mental health risks brought on by salt processing, including skin conditions and blindness. They also face the dangers of operating diesel-run pumps, which spew noxious fumes and are known to combust. The nearby town of Kharaghoda is colloquially called the “village of widows”, because of the unnaturally high number of widowed Agariya women it houses. The men die, but their debts live on, and the women — often arriving in LRK with children in tow — work to fulfill them.2 Meanwhile, alongside the salt harvest, they do the work of raising and caring for their families in the desert. The Agariya women occupy the position of food provider within their own families, but the ripples of their work are felt far beyond their homes, with India and much of the world benefitting from it. They also play a crucial role in keeping a traditional method of salt production alive.

Salt produced in Gujarat is primarily processed and sold industrially — you will not find it labelled “Product of India” at an upmarket grocer — but the methods used to extract it are surprisingly artisanal. On their arrival in the desert, before they begin farming, the Agariyas dig a makeshift production unit in the ground that collects underground brine in a well, and concentrates it in salt pans. Eventually, the Agariyas will use a pata, or a crystallization pan, to precipitate perfectly shaped and sized salt crystals as the captured brine evaporates under the sun’s burning heat. These pans have hardened bases to prevent the liquid from sinking back into the soil, and are moulded manually through the ancient practice of paglee — being stepped on with bare feet, usually for over a month — often by Agariya women. In fact, nearly every step of the salt farming process is manual, with the exception of the mechanized extraction of the brine collected in the well with a water pump running on diesel or crude oil. 

In other major salt-producing nations, the use of solar evaporation as a method is rapidly disappearing even though it is seen as superior in terms of its taste of origins, something akin to having merroir. But the Agariya women have doubled down on their efforts to protect the technique. In 2013, the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), an organization of low-income, self-employed women workers, tested a program to replace the typical fossil fuel-run pumps used by the Agariyas with solar energy-powered alternatives, based on the idea that solar-powered pumps would be less expensive, more efficient, and less polluting than their fossil fuel-powered counterparts. The scheme was eventually scaled up, with enormous benefits for both Agariya women and the climate. The Hindustan Times quoted Harinesh Pandya, managing trustee of NGO Agariya Heet-Rakshak Samiti, which works in the LRK and has about 6,000 Agariyas as its members:

There has been a drastic change in five years and the reason for this is solar energy. The quality of yield has improved, salt farmers can take multiple crops in a season with better byproduct recovery. Their requirement for working capital has come down drastically. Today, Agariya women are buying gold ornaments, renovating their houses in the villages, sending their children for higher studies to city areas and even inviting DJs for the wedding of their children.

Other headlines abound with claims of the solar panels’ unprecedented socio-economic success; Hilary Clinton even visited LRK earlier this year, attending SEWA’s 50th-anniversary celebration and using the opportunity to announce the creation of a Global Climate Resilience Fund to disburse US$50 million in the region to support women fighting climate change. 

Progress risks being lost

But these newfound gains are being threatened, by both a large-scale infrastructure project potentially coming to LRK and further administrative rulings related to conservation. The Indian government is currently evaluating a 2019 proposal by Jaysukh Patel, an Indian business magnate, to build a freshwater lake in the area called Rann Sarovar. The lake would be built by damming the creek that allows LRK to flood with seawater, creating a source of water that could be used year-round. In theory, the project has already been approved by the central government’s water agency; the Gujarat government is meant to have formed a committee to study the project’s social and environmental feasibility. When asked about the livelihood of the Agariyas, Patel suggested they be given 10 acres of agricultural land where they can be “rehabilitated”, continuing:

Inland salt making is a dying profession. The Agariyas are the poorest people in Gujarat. I have proposed that they be employed to run the water-sports and boats when the Rann Sarovar comes up.

Patel has since been arrested in connection with the mishandling of a renovation project that led to the collapse of a bridge in Gujarat, killing 135 people; it’s not clear where the Rann Sarovar project currently stands.3 Meanwhile, in February 2023, the state’s forest department again notified the Agariyas that their salt-making on protected land was an illegal activity. It claimed that all Agariyas whose land rights are not recognized by an official survey would be evicted; the government had a record of just 600 Agariyas in the region, meaning the remaining 6,000-7,000 families would be severed from their livelihoods. This notification was reportedly followed by forest department officials ransacking areas of salt production, breaking over 50 of the very solar panels that had been introduced to support and modernize the Agariyas’ work, ironically subsidized in part by the Gujarat government. 

This situation reveals the intricate links between land rights, conservation, and gender. Communities that face discrimination, like the Agariyas, are often disproportionately dependent on natural resources and services that ecosystems provide for free, like salt. If displaced from their land, they lose access to these services and grow even more vulnerable. Women, who generally possess less capital, land, and access to resources than men, are even more dependent on the ecosystem resources; a 2006 report by the Government of India’s salt commissioner found that women salt workers on average earned less than male salt workers, and in Gujarat, only 14% of women salt workers were literate, versus 28% of men. In essence, their ability to withstand shocks is poorer, and their opportunities to adapt to new forms of employment are slimmer. If Agariya women were to be displaced from the land they’ve farmed for centuries, in the name of either infrastructure or fortress conservation — two areas where designing gender-sensitive policies is essential but in this case, has been overlooked — few options would be available to them.

As recently as September 2023, the Gujarat government reneged on its announcement to evict the community from LRK and decided to permit all salt workers holding leases up to 10 acres to continue salt production in the area. At the start of this October’s farming season, Agariya women entered LRK with something new in their luggage: identity cards issued by the Gujarat forest department, confirming that they belong to the community of salt workers. After decades of restriction, the department has officially acknowledged the role of the Agariyas in wildlife conservation, including wild donkeys. It also recognized that salt production is not an illegal form of mining, but a “traditional occupation practiced for centuries” — granting the Agariyas legitimate access to financial markets. A decision on their land rights, however, has yet to be taken. Without formalizing the Agariyas’ land rights, the cycle of insecurity risks continuing, particularly as the government’s recognition of the Agariyas’ status has come with a host of new conditions — some very challenging to meet — on how the community can harvest the salt. Negotiations appear to be ongoing.

Perhaps, if given an out, some Agariya women may choose different lives and have different dreams for themselves and their children, a choice worthy of being respected. Traditional practices should not be synonymous with oppression, because a sustainable food system can’t be built on the foundation of exploitation. However, neither should women be forced out of ancestral practices that they have worked hard to innovate. Solar pumps have given them the opportunity to take part in this microcosm of the food system with dignity, this progress remains precarious; any form of labour is thought to be able to take salt’s stead. Yet, they persevere. Once again, salt is pivotal in the fight for the freedom to choose how to live in India, but it is not Gandhi who is marching. This time, the rebellion is led by resourceful and resilient Agariya women, who for centuries have been the leaders of a traditional cultural practice. Perhaps, like salt on our food, we wouldn’t fully appreciate the essentiality of the Agariya women unless they were gone. 

Zoya Naaz Rehman (she/her) is a student and food scholar whose worldview is informed by her feminist, Muslim, and Indian identities. For her thoughts on food, public health, and everything in between, follow her on Instagram @kohl.lined.perspectives.

By Elise Schloff 

When I was a child, my father worked a lot — and was at the bar just as often. Most of the scant happy memories I have of him from my childhood involve fish; we lived on the coast of Virginia, and seafood was an important part of our family’s food culture and identity. After a long day working as a contractor, my dad would spend nights working on a commercial fishing boat. He would return in the morning with hands bloodied from pulling up huge nets laden with fish, indiscriminately scooped up from the Atlantic. I remember him deftly cleaning and fileting tuna, mahi, and snapper, the raw flesh of which I waited — mouth agape like a baby bird — for him to drop onto my tongue. When I was five, he helped me to catch my first fish.

My dad’s seasonal work as a commercial fisherman meant our household income ebbed and flowed. When he was flush with cash during fishing season, we could afford to live a bit more lavishly. Growing up in the early 2000s, during the soaring popularity of sushi amongst white middle-class Americans, that meant getting takeout sushi. I was besotted, never content with simple California rolls but desperate to try the most obscure (to me) items on the menu: baby octopus, eel, unagi. My dad was delighted by my adventurous appetite, and his encouragement is likely why I have an open mind towards food and still find myself ordering the most unfamiliar item on the menu or gravitating toward unique produce at the farmer’s market. 

When I declared myself a “vegetarian” at the age of fourteen, it didn’t even cross my mind to exclude fish. Seafood wasn’t addressed in Food Inc., the documentary that connected my vegetarian aspirations — born out of a desire to participate in what I interpreted as a “cool” subculture — to a moral framework. I didn’t know anyone else who was a vegetarian, and I had yet to identify myself as a feminist or an environmentalist; I just knew that I was too viscerally disgusted to eat the lasagna my mom had prepared for dinner that night. Not only was I horrified at the mistreatment of livestock animals and the impact of factory farming on the environment, but the idea of eating industrial, conventional meat produced under those conditions made me sick to my stomach. Yet fish was such a cultural and culinary mainstay that it didn’t occur to me that any of the environmental or ethical concerns that I had about the meat industry and factory farming could be applied to the fish that my father caught. When I started my first job as a hostess at a seafood restaurant, I assured my coworkers that of course I still ate fish. 

***

Definitions of vegetarianism vary across time and place. When vegetarian eating became more mainstream in the US and UK in the 1960s and 1970s, some vegetarians continued to eat fish. For example, when Bloodroot, Connecticut’s famous feminist vegetarian restaurant first opened in 1977, they included some fish dishes on their menu, which remained until 1980. Then in 1993, the title “pescatarian” emerged to describe those who eat fish but no other meat — although many pescatarians continue to use the vegetarian label. 

People’s reasons for choosing vegetarianism also vary widely, making it difficult to make generalizations about the motivations for excluding only meat, or also fish from one’s diet. But what is interesting is the distinction itself: what makes sea creatures different from land-dwelling animals? In the Western world, perhaps the influence of religion has played a role in creating this dichotomy. For instance, fish is permitted during Lenten fasting, which enshrines it as separate from meat — a cultural norm that is reinforced by the physical distance between humans and marine life.

It is easy to feel a kinship with cows, with their large, pleading eyes, or with pigs, who are extolled for their high intelligence. In contrast, the vast depths of the sea and those that inhabit it feel otherworldly. Could it be that we just don’t empathize with fish? As Kenny Torrella writes:

They live underwater, so we rarely interact with them. They can’t vocalize or make facial expressions, so it’s much harder to understand them than mammals and birds. And research has shown that the further animals are from us on the evolutionary chain, the less likely we are to try to protect them.

Maybe this is why animal welfare and “humane” slaughter regulations are not nearly as stringent for fish as for other animals (in places where they exist at all). A growing movement of fish welfare activists is working to improve this, armed with evidence that fish are sentient beings capable of feeling pain as much as animals farmed on land. 

Thinking about this sentience and the impact of other animal-sourced products, in college, I went fully vegan. I was learning about the Combahee River Collective, reading The Sexual Politics of Meat, and researching feminist restaurants like Bloodroot. I started feeling like it was my responsibility as a feminist to live out my values to the best of my ability and avoid supporting agribusiness that harms the environment, workers, animals, and consumers. 

However, when I moved to Portland, Maine in 2021, I began to prioritize a more malleable version of sustainable eating over a strict adherence to veganism. Like my coastal Virginia hometown, so much of Maine cuisine revolves around seafood. Not eating seafood began to feel like I was depriving myself of a deeper connection to my past and current home, so I started eating it selectively. Through foraging and eating seasonally and locally I began to feel connected to Maine. 

Eventually, though, the minefield of trying to eat fish and other seafood responsibly became overwhelming. Despite the abundance of claims in either direction, there is no clear consensus about whether farmed or wild-caught fish are better for the environment. A lot depends on what kind of fish you’re eating and where and how it was harvested (which can also be difficult to accurately ascertain). While there are some ways to consume seafood sustainably (I still eat oysters), I grew tired of wading through disinformation to determine what is truly sustainable. Today, I rarely eat animals from the sea.

***

Given my upbringing — and having spent most of my life living by the ocean — I still feel sentimental about seafood. So, I’ve decided to search for ways to be fed by the sea without contributing to overfishing or factory fish farming, forging an even greater connection to my home by making choices that protect local ecology. What happens when tradition and nostalgia are deprioritized and we instead opt for a utopian vision when constructing the food culture of a place? What culinary possibilities emerge when we reconceptualize “seafood”?

To me, one answer was seaweed. While seaweed may not be an exact nutritional alternative to seafood, it does serve as a sentimental one. As a forager and long-time vegetarian, I was already familiar with seaweed as a way to add umami to my food, but discovering an essay on sea moss and a recipe for sea moss pudding in The Salt Book (Maine’s equivalent to the Foxfire books), led me to look at seaweed in a new light.

Sea moss — also known as Irish moss or carrageenan — is a species of red algae that grows in rocky inlets throughout the coast of the Atlantic in Europe and North America. Sea moss is used to produce carrageenan for commercial use as a thickener in products like toothpaste and infant formula. The FMC plant in Rockland, Maine is the largest producer of carrageenan in the world. The prominence of the carrageenan industries in Maine, as well as Ireland, means that in both places sea moss is commonly used in cooking, including various versions of sea moss pudding, wherein milk, sometimes with the addition of eggs, is set to a gelatinous consistency with sea moss. When I discovered a recipe for sea moss pudding in The Salt Book, I knew that I could adapt it to make a vegan version of one of my favourite desserts, panna cotta.

To make sea moss panna cotta, I gather sea moss at a beach near me then clean and dry it for long-term storage, but it can also be purchased dried online. Most vegan panna cotta recipes I encounter call for agar, a vegan gelatin alternative made from another seaweed, but I find that it sets up much firmer, while sea moss produces a pleasantly smooth and jiggly panna cotta.

Foraging for and cooking with seaweed allows me to explore the true definition of “seafood” and maintain a culinary connection to the sea without compromising my values. I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do.

Sea Moss Panna Cotta

Adapted from The Salt Book

Serves 4-6, depending on preferred serving size

Ingredients

• ¼ cup or 0.1 oz sea moss

• 600ml (2 ½ cups) soy milk (or any milk of your choosing)

• 60g (¼ cup) sugar 

• A pinch of salt

• 10g of neutral oil (optional, see notes)

• Your choice of flavouring (see notes)

Method

1. Soak the sea moss in cold water for about 10 minutes. Drain. 

2. In the top of a double boiler, combine the milk, salt, sugar, and sea moss. Cook the mixture over gently simmering water for about 30 minutes, whisking occasionally. 

3. When most of the sea moss has disintegrated, add your choice of flavouring. If using, blend oil into the mixture. 

4. Strain the custard through a fine mesh sieve into the serving dish(es). Chill until firm. This should take at least one hour if you’re setting the panna cotta in individual ramekins, or at least three hours if you’re preparing one large dish.

5. When the panna cotta is set, garnish with caramel, fresh fruit, or whatever you like!

Notes

Because I typically use soy milk, which is lower in fat than cow or coconut milk, I like to use an immersion blender to add a bit of deodorized coconut oil to enhance the richness. If this feels like too much fuss for an otherwise quite easy dessert, you can skip it and still get a nice result.

Most base recipes for sea moss pudding call for vanilla extract. The vanilla industry is rife with ethical concerns, and in the interest of valuing it as the precious commodity it is, I want to move away from treating it as a default or background flavour. Instead, I love to add homemade rose water, infuse tea or herbs in the pudding (strain out with the sea moss), or use a vanilla substitute made from sweet woodruff. 

Elise Schloff is a cook, food writer, and domestic care worker. Her work is inspired by foraged foods, feminist traditions, and her background in art history.

We’re getting the waves rolling with this beautiful piece on nurturing, parenthood, and loss by Megumi Koiwai, a freelance writer based in Tokyo. Coming up, we have so many other exciting stories: windows into the fraught world of salt production, deep dives into oceanic poetry, new ways of honouring coastal foodways, and much more. Whether you dip just a toe or dive in all the way, we’re thrilled to have you with us.

- IV & ZJ

The short feature film “nowhere to go but everywhere” shows the essence of nurturing, within and beyond traditional gender roles in Japan.

By Megumi Koiwai | Paid subscribers have access to an audio version of this piece on our podcast.

In a film called “nowhere to go but everywhere”, the sea swallows a man’s life whole.

Directed by Masako Tsumura and Erik Shirai, the short documentary depicts Yasuo Takamatsu’s life after losing his wife, Yuko, to the tsunami that hit the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011. The film is heartbreaking and submerged in tenderness all at once. It starts with the cameras shooting from beneath the sea. The surface glistens with the reflections of the sun. It feels like something or someone is looking towards us — trying to reach for the air above the surface. 

The camera switches to Takamatsu, gearing up with his hooded wetsuit, getting prepared to dive into the cold waters. He flips into the ocean, fins up and face down, diving one step closer to the seabed with his flashlight. The water is murky. You can only hear him breathe slowly and the sound of his oxygen bubbles floating around, as he starts his routine search.

13 years before, the tsunami had swept Yuko off the roof of the bank where she worked. Initially, Takamatsu started looking for her on land, searching from morning until evening, but had no luck for two and a half years — that’s when he turned to sea. In September 2013, at the age of 56, he decided to get his diving license to search for his wife, diving into the place that took her away from him. So far, he hasn’t found her, but Takamatsu remains committed. Part of his new life involves figuring out a way to nurture his love for her in her absence, and diving is one way to do that. Takamatsu knows that Yuko is out there somewhere, but he also confesses with anguish in the film that if he does end up finding her, that will be it — the reality will sink in that she is, in fact, gone. But until then, he dives, combing through debris from the tsunami that still sits underneath the sea, tangled in seaweed and forgotten by the rest of the world.

Flashbacks show their previous life together, awash with tenderness. “Say Happy New Year to your dad,” Yuko tells her children in one festive home video. It feels like a classic “mother” type of moment: with Yuko herding, cooking, bringing the food to the table and taking care of everyone; multitasking at its best. Takamatsu rolls his camera towards her. The footage portrays the essence of what it means to nurture: to provide a feeling that is warm, cozy, familiar. In Japan, this type of nurturing is usually seen as a feminine domain, the job of women in a family or relationship. But what happens when the woman is out of the picture — literally and figuratively? In a country like Japan, what is a man urged to feel when he loses his wife? 

***

I was born and raised in Tokyo and I only knew the world in one way — where you don’t question other possibilities for your life beyond the path laid out. Women take care of their husbands and children and the men go to work; that was just how my household was and I didn’t know anything better. Tokyo is huge, but my community was very specific. Middle-class to upper-middle-class families, with traditional gender roles attached. 

I was a rather observant kid in elementary school, and I started noticing that some of the moms were too busy to go to school events because they were working. I didn’t understand why those moms were working. Who took care of the children? Who fed them? Surely, they can’t cook for themselves, I thought. In the world that I knew, mothers were the ones constantly surveilling and caring for. I assumed that men, husbands, and dads were unavailable all the time. The dads were never seen on school premises, and even if they were, it was for sports day or any other event day. I remember that dads presented some kind of authority to me because of their lack of presence: strong, scary, mysterious. My mom didn’t scare me. My dad did, even though he was absent for most of my childhood. 

At age seven, I witnessed something that caught me off guard — a family dynamic I wasn’t familiar with. I went to a friend’s house for her birthday party, and I met a dad who seemed to also be playing the role of a mother. I didn’t realize the impact it had on me until later on in life, but it was one of the first times I realized that fatherhood or motherhood is not so much about gender but a primitive instinct — to love and care for your child no matter the circumstances. I knew that my friend had lost her mom to an illness, and so she just had a dad and a little sister. The birthday cake came to the table, we blew out the candles with her, and then her dad came in and started cutting some slices for us. He said to my friend, “Let’s give a piece to your mom, too.” 

He placed a slice on a plate and took it to the butsudan, a small Japanese Buddhist shrine that is in dark wood and cabinet-like. It’s used in some households to honour the dead, allowing people to pray for them at home, and is usually decorated with the deceased person’s photos. The dad placed the cake in front of the mom’s picture and said, “It’s your daughter’s birthday today. We’re eating some cake with her friends.” 

I went home and told my mom immediately what I discovered. I was stunned by the fact that a dad was taking care of us — that a dad was attentive. He was cutting this sweet and delicate strawberry shortcake filled with whipped cream on top and placing it carefully on our plates. He was constantly present in the room. It wasn’t the tough love that I thought dads were supposed to play a role in, but it was tender love, a kind of love I’d never seen before from a man. 

***

Gender roles in Japan are not a blurred line; people are loud and clear on what they expect from men and women. Japan enacted a law in 1999 on the Basic Act for Gender Equal Society. Every couple of years the government issues a poll on what people think about the topic. On page 19, there’s a question that asks the public how a household is supposed to be. 

“What do you think of the idea of ‘men working, and women staying at home protecting the household’?”’

In 2019, 35% of people answered ‘agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’. In 2016, 40% did. While the numbers are slightly declining, these figures indicate that there is an expectation for Japanese women to stay at home and take care of household matters while men go to work. 

There’s a Japanese phrase that still makes the rounds in our daily lives, haunting the progressive awakening of feminism: “Jyoshiryoku (女子力).” The kanji literally means “girl power”, but not in the context familiar to most English-speaking countries. When people use this word in Japan, it means if you have the right abilities as a woman — that you are woman enough for men. The word is not subjective, and it has very specific responsibilities attached to it: Can you cook? Can you clean the house? Are you not a messy person? Do you take care of your nails, hair, and other things? Do you have enough makeup on? Do you have bandaids on you? Because, well, you never know when a man will need a bandaid and you can take it out to show off that you are prepared for emergencies. It is a sign of care in our Japanese social language.

Another common phrase in Japanese, totsugi-ni-iku, or oyome-ni-iku, translates as “to become a wife somewhere” and is still a thing that many families suggest to their daughters, especially in rural areas in Japan. To become a wife somewhere, there is a checklist you need to cross off. My mom is an American who married a Japanese man in the 80s. My dad is from a rural area of Japan and my Japanese grandmother taught my mom how to cook Japanese food. You must learn how to make miso soup and rice for your husband. My mom mastered Japanese cuisine: the delicacy of making the perfectly rolled tamagoyaki, homemade hijiki (seaweed) that has just the right amount of dashi and soy sauce, and a perfectly cooked fish on the grill. She successfully learned the intricacies of one of the most difficult cuisines in the world, perhaps to show that she was now good enough as a Japanese housewife.

Ironically, women in Japan put much effort into proving their abilities in these arenas but their labour is most of the time unseen, unappreciated, or even deemed to be disliked or disrespected. My mum is the one who cared for me constantly as a child and yet I, like many children, often treated my mum with disrespect for it. My dad wasn’t involved in the rule-making and breaking of my early years, but I saw him as much more of an authority figure. 

This is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon; in my favourite TV show, Motherland, protagonist Julia says to her mom on Mother’s Day: “It would just be so lovely if my family could pretend to like me for one day.” 

“You don’t have children to be liked, Julia.”

“Then what’s the blinkin’ point of having kids if they don’t like you?”

The scene is funny because even someone who’s not a mom can understand the absurdity of it all. I find motherhood and being a woman unbelievably remarkable for its indefinite shape-shifting. It can mean all sorts of things to us, but regardless, it opens us up to being tested by society — to see if we are selfless enough. To see if we will put all of our needs aside, to be instinctively mothering, loving, and caring. 

***

These days, fatherhood is establishing a new place in Japanese society. Traditional and social media are generating a new narrative, that men can also be caregivers. It feels like themes related to fatherhood are always making media headlines — being a father nowadays demonstrates bravery. Dads who take paternity leave are praised for their participation in parenting and collaboration with their wives but it shouldn’t be like this. The other shouldn’t be more important or less than the other. 

As I date in my early 30s, I realize the type of men I gravitate towards are the men who are so-called “homely” types, the ones who can take care of things and people in their most vulnerable form. Like the dad who was cutting cake for us or Takamatsu who is diving into the sea for a greater purpose — nurturing others not to show off their excellence but from an inherent instinct to take care of a loved one. My judgment in prior years was cloudy, with my upbringing leading me to believe that men should be the ones leading and that women are there to serve the men in the name of jyoshiryoku. But now I find it attractive, unrulily so, when a man has “domestic traits”. I recently went on a date with a pattern maker and finding out that he can use a sewing machine and patch up anything made my heart squirm with excitement. He was kind, observant, and engaging. His affection wasn’t forceful but tender. 

I then can’t help but wonder: What is the difference when it comes to men who possess the selflessness to care for someone? What does it take for men to allow themselves to be perceived as fearlessly vulnerable, tender, and caring? I think of Takamatsu and “nowhere to go but everywhere”. For Takamatsu, bringing Yuko’s body home is essential; bringing someone he loved into their home once again allows him to nurture that love even in her absence, his search an open display of tenderness and grief.

Around 2,000 victims of the 2011 tsunami are still missing. In Japan, we cremate the bodies of the dead. We then honour them by picking their bones up one by one. Some cultures may find it jarring, but for us, this ritual allows them to rest. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese people had a saying: “Hirou-hone-mo-nakkata.” It meant that we didn’t even have any bones to pick up because all of the bodies turned into ashes. For some people, continuing to search for their loved ones 12 years after the tsunami is too painful, but there are also people like Takamatsu who say, “It’s too early to give up.” Despite Takamatsu’s years of effort to find his wife, her grave is still empty — no body nor bones. I understand the importance of bringing just even a fraction of her body back, and how painful it must be for him to not be able to do so. 

In the most striking scene of the film, Takamatsu comes up to the ocean surface, takes off his face mask, and floats. A beautiful blue sky and the sun shine over him, and he just floats there for a while. Vulnerable in his affections, he is one with the sea but more so, he is one with Yuko. You wrestle with a strange feeling while watching it: The sea took her away from him, but it seems like the sea is his happy place. I like to think that she is watching him from the sea somewhere and that she feels his warmth while he floats, absorbed by his tender love every day.

Megumi Koiwai is a freelance writer based in Tokyo. She likes to write essays about her life and curate cultural recommendations on Substack. She is always plotting the next place to eat.