KAYTE YOUNG:  From WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  Food is about kinship. Food is about love. Food is about generosity and hospitality. Food is about cultural identity - and all of those factors were neglected when they were given macaroni.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This week on the show, we're rebroadcasting an interview with Elizabeth Cullen Dunn. She's a food scholar, professor of Geography and International Studies at Indiana University, and she'll be leading IU's newly-formed center for refugee studies. In this interview, she shares stories with Producer, Alex Chambers, from her fieldwork in refugee camps in Georgia, after Russian aggression pushed ethnic Georgians from their homeland. Later, we share a set of umami-rich recipes from Chef Arlyn Llewllyn. And, so much more coming up this hour, so stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This is Earth Eats, I'm Kayte Young. Across much of the U.S., winter is not as cold as it used to be. In Indiana, the average winter temperature is about five degrees warmer than it was in 1970. As St. Louis Public Radio's, Shahla Farzan reports, warmer winters are changing how some farmers grow their crops.

SHAHLA FARZAN:  On a frigid winter morning, Liz Graznak cracks open the door of a greenhouse, letting out a rush of warm earthy-smelling air. She carefully peels back a layer of cloth on the ground, revealing rows of tiny sprouts.

LIZ GRAZNAK:  That's the delphinium plants. These little dudes right there.

SHAHLA FARZAN:  This is just one of four greenhouses that Graznak has at her organic farm near Columbia, Missouri. Inside, she's able to grow delicate high-value crops, like flowers and spinach. Graznak says, these greenhouses help protect plants from extreme swings and weather - something she's noticed is happening more frequently.

LIZ GRAZNAK:  We don't get a couple of inches of snow, we get 18 inches of snow all at once. And then in five days, it's 70° again, like, that's devastating to a vegetable farm.

SHAHLA FARZAN:  Data show extreme weather is just one of the many effects of climate change across the U.S. For farmers like Graznak, another major change is warmer winters. The four hottest Januarys on record have all occurred since 2016. Amy Butler, is a Climate Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She says winter is warming faster than any other season, based on data going back to the late 1800s. But, she says, cold weather will still happen.

AMY BUTLER:  Less cold does not mean never cold. It just means that really cold weather will happen less often, and be less severe or persistent in the future.

SHAHLA FARZAN:  These warmer winters have ripple effects in agriculture, says Dennis Tody, Director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub, in Ames, Iowa. One of the effects is on soils. Tody says, Midwestern soil is fertile, because historically it freezes every year which stops bacteria and other organisms from breaking it down.

DENNIS TODY:  As the winters warm, we have a longer period of time where that is unfrozen or we have more of the area that it never freezes. So, the soils can kind of break down. So we start losing more of that good nutrient value in those soils.

SHAHLA FARZAN:  When soils don't freeze, it can also help crop pests survive the winter, and allow them to expand into new regions. But, when it comes to agriculture in the Midwest, one of the most noticeable results of climate change, right now, is longer growing seasons. Richard Oswald's family has been farming in Northwest Missouri on the Nebraska border since the 1840s.

RICHARD OSWALD:  When I was a kid, my Dad had a firm rule, you don't plant corn before the 12th May. And the reason for that is, the right time to plant corn is when oak leaves are the size of squirrels ears. That's when the season starts. [LAUGHS]

SHAHLA FARZAN:  Now Oswald says, he and other farmers plant corn a month earlier in mid-April. That's partly because they're planting hardier varieties now. But, he says, the weather also warms up a lot sooner than it used to. These longer growing seasons can result in higher yields. Still, Oswald says, he worries climate change will make farming much harder in the future. He's been thinking about it more and more since 2019, when catastrophic floodings swamped his farm and childhood home. From his pick-up truck, he points to where the water stood for months.

RICHARD OSWALD:  From the Nebraska Bush behind us, to the Missouri Bluffs in front of us, it was all water.

SHAHLA FARZAN:  Oswald lost about 26,000 bushels of corn in that flood. Some of which is still rotting on the ground at his farm. He says, farmers rely on science and data everyday to grow their crops. And the data show climate change is happening. But in his community, not many people will discuss it.

RICHARD OSWALD:  They don't want to use the word "climate change". "Yes, it's been hot, but I don't want to call is climate change." Or, "It's been wet, but I wouldn't say it's climate change."

SHAHLA FARZAN:  "Having these frank discussions is hard," he says, "but it will help them better prepare for what's coming." For Harvest Public Media, I'm Shahla Farzan.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Harvest Public Media is a reporting collective covering farming and rural life across the Midwest. Find more at harvestpublicmedia.org.

KAYTE YOUNG:  For Farmer Health and Safety Programs, the past two years have been busy. And one area of wellness, has become especially important. Josephine McRobbie talks to one such program in North Carolina.

FEMALE FARMER 1:  Farming solo can be isolating. I just had a lot of learning to do and I didn't know this land yet.

MALE FARMER 1:  It's getting the infrastructure to produce food. That's the hang-up of farming.

MALE FARMER 2:  The fact you generally only get one crop per year, has just made the learning curve just very steep.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  For two years, I've interviewed North Carolina Farmers for Earth Eats. And even at successful thriving farms, there are still huge challenges.

FEMALE FARMER 2:  I call it "compounded stress", because there are many stressers.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Dr. Robin Tutor Marcom, is Director of the North Carolina Agromedicine Institute, an organization working towards farmer safety and health.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: And just when I think that I've heard them all, I hear another one. Farm finance, the volatility in markets, family pressures, intergenerational farm transfer, regulatory pressures, developmental encroachment. We're a state that has a lot of hurricanes, a lot of tornadoes. So, the stressers are endless.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Institute staff do everything from helping farmers find health insurance, to developing grain silo safety programs. But a decade ago, Dr. Marcom realized that they had a gap in their services.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: I had lunch with a farm woman, who had suffered a fatality of a worker on her farm. And her husband had suffered two serious injuries. And she looked across the table during lunch with me, and she said, "You know that I believe in the work you do, that I understand the importance of farm safety and health. But if you don't do something about the stress that farmers and their families are under, then the other work that you do is not going to mean anything." And so, I made her a promise that day, that we would work on farm stress, and try to do something about it. So, it's been a very slow uphill process, because farmers are very private people. And we don't believe in talking about stress, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, alcoholism, we keep all those things inside.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  The Institute now runs a peer help program called, Farmer to Farmer. Interested farmers sign up to be trained as a sort of peer counselor, and are matched with those who might need mental health or emotional support.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: I'm from a farm family. Both of my sons are farmers. But it's one thing for me in a professional role, to talk about those things. And for a farmer to have someone who looks like him, who lives the day-to-day like him, who experiences those same internal thoughts about, "I'm barely holding on, what am I going to do?" It's very different to have another farmer to talk to.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  To get involved, farmers take Mental Health, First Aid and Suicide Prevention courses, and they participate in discussion groups about the subtleties of what struggle can look like out in the world.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: What are the causes of farm stress? What does it look like when someone is depressed or anxious? What are the signs that someone might be contemplating suicide? We talk about listening skills and communication skills. We talk about what to do if someone is in crisis.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  Meanwhile, nurses working at the Agromedicine Institute, do intake to determine if the peer program is a good fit for farmers who request help.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: They find out a little bit more about their background, about what commodities they're farming, about their family. If they have a faith community. And also, they screen them for anxiety and depression.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  They screen for mental health issues before and throughout the program, to determine if a farmer might actually need crisis intervention, or, professional counseling. They also monitor to see if the peer match is continuing to be a good fit.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: We have both men and women who are peer farmers, along the age continuum. So, we have someone who just graduated with their Master in Crop Science. And then we have someone I call, "our seasoned farmer". Someone over the age of 60 who's a farmer, with different commodities. So, a cattleman, a Christmas tree grower, a row crop farmer.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  This kind of service where commonality or comradery is leveraged to improve public health, isn't exactly new. To develop her program, Dr. Marcom consulted with a Diabetes Prevention peer support service. But the stigma around emotional struggles, especially in a field like agriculture, makes it tricky to get the word out. So, people often come to her in a roundabout way.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: Because we have established those relationships over the years working on other issues, then people are more likely to reach out to us and say, "You've helped me before, can you help me with this?" The most important thing they want, is to make sure that when we're matching farmers, that we genuinely have people who can listen, that they can interact with. But they don't want to be matched with another farmer who's in their own county, or maybe the county over. That was the most important thing, because of the privacy issue that I talked about, the privacy and the pride. And so, we have taken that quite seriously, so that our matches so far, have been on opposite ends of the state.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  One of Dr. Marcom's research interests, is women in agriculture. And so, she's been especially excited to make those connections.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: The farm woman who challenged me to do the Farm Stress work, she said, "I can be dressed in professional dress," she said, "and I can go into a meeting and people say, `well, what do you do?'", and she said, "I'm a farmer." And she said, people look at her like she's a white elephant. That they just could not relate to her. Farm women can talk to farm women and they understand one another.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  There's something about the mirror-like quality of farmer to farmer, that has made it stick.

1. ROBIN TUTOR MARCOM: We have one pairing, and they had been able to meet - even though it's a very busy time of year for them. They meet virtually and have established consistent conversations. And our peer farmer is just excellent, and she's able to offer very simple small things, that the farmer she's working with, can do that are really making a difference for that farmer. So, I think that knowing that we have some matches that have established comfortable relationships, that's very important.

JOSEPHINE MCROBBIE:  For WFIU's Earth Eats, I'm Josephine McRobbie.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Thanks for listening to Earth Eats, I'm Kayte Young, and now it's time for a recipe, or rather a set of recipes. We're visiting today with Arlyn Llewllyn. She's been the Chef at Function Brewing for eight years.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Hi, Arlyn, what are we going to make today?

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Hi Kayte. We are making a series of things which all starts with umami paste.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Arlyn is also the mom of twin toddlers. She says that over the pandemic with increased demands on her time, she's looked for ways to be more efficient in the kitchen.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  I like to do something that is really impactful, but then can be repurposed in several different dishes throughout the week very easily. And so we're going to make a umami paste, and then we're going to translate that into a Vegan Banh Mi. But the umami paste itself when we make that, I'll give you some ideas about how we can use that and turn it into some other dishes as well.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Can you say a little bit about umami?

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Umami is the fifth taste, and it's the sense that a food is really savory and satisfying. It is a mouth feel, but it's also just a genuine sort of impression, that something is filling and satisfying. I think there's a really primal aspect of ourselves that it taps into, that makes us feel like, okay we're going to be safe, we can get through the harsh winter night in our cave. Because we're eating something that's really filling us up. And so, when you're thinking about ways to bring a lot of satisfaction, with a short amount of time, I always like to tap into umami. So, we're going to use a lot of things, which naturally have a lot of umami flavor to them. And so we're going to make this really concentrated paste. Now you're not going to eat by the spoonful, because it makes this really strong punch that can get interpreted lots of different ways. So, we're going to use a blender. When possible, I will try to use a high-powered blender. If you have a more traditional home blender, I would try to mince and chop things up as much as possible before you put it in there. Because you really want to force these ingredients to come together, as much as possible.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  So we're going to start with a head of garlic of peeled cloves. It's approximately two ounces. I'm going to use two ounces of oil-packed sun dried tomatoes. If you don't use oil-packed, I would recommend adding some additional liquid to this mixture. Because it contains a lot of hard and dry things, so every little bit of liquid here is helping. So, even that little residual oil on these tomatoes - even though they've been drained - is going to help bring this together. And do not discard the oil, because we're going to use that here, in just a second with a different recipe.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  And we want two and a half ounces of drained capers. And we want one and a quarter ounces, or approximately one and a half tablespoons of miso. So, this ingredient list is just either things that naturally have the savory quality in them automatically, or things that are fermented, like miso, which on fermentation brings that complexity and that savoriness. Miso being fermented soya bean paste. It's extremely salty, if you haven't worked with it before, which is why we're not going to add any salt to this.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Again, we're trying to build flavor, that's another trick which is to avoid salt and only add things that are very salty and also bring a lot of flavor, like soy sauce or miso. Because then it's doing some of that flavor work for you. And we want two tablespoons of Dijon mustard, and a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar. I like to use apple cider vinegar in the raw. It's a living ingredient, so again it's adding that extra complexity. So add a tablespoon of that. A tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and we're not going to blend it up. I like to start really low and increase the speed once I feel like it's getting universally broken down.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  So we end up with a very thick reddish-brown paste, which packs so much flavor. However, you don't want to use this as it is, if you can avoid it. It's better if you can let it sit for several days, and develop a further flavor as all those ingredients work together. So, I've made some so we can try the brand new batch against the one that's aged for several days, to see what the brings to the party.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Okay.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Seven ingredients, each one of them serves a really strong purpose. We have only one vessel that we're dirtying, the blender. It's going to bring so much flavor we an incorporate in lots of different ways.

KAYTE YOUNG:  It's not a lot of chopping or anything fussy.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  And this freezes beautifully too if you want to make a batch and tuck it away, and then have it as a flavor powerhouse waiting for you in your freezer.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Arlyn set up two tasting plates so that we could sample the aged umami paste next to the freshly-made batch.

KAYTE YOUNG:  The aged one definitely has more of a rich taste, and just unified.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Unified's a great word for it. Because that first one you get, it hits, you can taste the garlic, you can taste the capers and taste that apple cider vinegar and the balsamic. And I don't mind that, but-- [NO AUDIO]

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  ...which I think is really going to serve us. Because again, we're not eating straight as is, we're going to move it on to some other aspects within our vegan Banh Mi. At this point, we just want to build the most sort of complex flavor we can.

KAYTE YOUNG:  It definitely has the umami like you said though. It's savory, but it's got a lot of acidity too. So, it's also still quite bright.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Yes, some tanginess, which is going to be intentional, because when we put on a Banh Mi, we're going to surround it with a whole lot of bread. You want that brightness to cut through, or otherwise the sandwich can eat a little flat.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  In an of itself, umami paste can just be a great staple in your household. Like I said, you can pop it in the freezer or just keep a jar in the fridge for a week. I like to make an umami pasta. So, you're going to cook your pasta of choice, and you're going to add umami paste to it, and tossing it with a little bit of extra pasta cooking water until you're creating a really well-coated pasta that's really saucy. And you can serve it with Parmesan and fresh basil leaves. Umami ramen. So you would cook your ramen noodles, you take some roasted or steamed vegetables, put them in a bowl. And then you'd mix hot vegetable broth with that umami paste, and then you can garnish it with your protein of choice - baked or fried tofu, poached egg, braised pork, they're all great options. And another option is an umami salad dressing. So you're going to dilute that paste with equal parts oil and vinegar. You can also season it to taste with extra Dijon mustard, garlic powder and salt, as you prefer. So, it makes for a really versatile team player in the back of your kitchen.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  In this case though, we're going to take this dish a little further, and we're going to make a vegan Banh Mi.

KAYTE YOUNG:  When Arlyn calls this a "Banh Mi" sandwich, she's not talking about a traditional or authentic one. Banh Mi, is a Vietnamese sandwich that originated during the country's lengthy French Colonial era. The bread is a French baguette, soft on the inside with a crispy crust. And traditionally, Banh Mi would include a Vietnamese pate of salty duck liver. But here in the U.S., you'll often find them filled with thinly-sliced meats or fried tofu, plus pickled vegetables and sometimes fresh herbs and hot peppers. Capers, sun-dried tomatoes and Dijon mustard aren't typically found in Banh Mi, but it's open to interpretation. Arlyn's version strives to hit those savory salty notes, with a tangy punch that's typical for this type of sandwich.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  So, we've made our umami paste. Some of it is going to get used on our umami roasted mushrooms. And the other part of it is going to get turned into some umami pickled vegetables. So, if I was planning to eat Banh Mi in a few days, I would go ahead and make the paste today, and I would go ahead and take some of that paste, and turn it straight into pickled vegetables. And then a few days later, I'll have pickled vegetables that are good to go. I will have umami paste that has nicely aged a few days in my fridge. And then everything else comes together really quickly. To make the umami picked vegetables, you're going to want six cups of bite-sized vegetables. I like to use a mix of very soft, high moisture vegetables - in this case, zucchini and bell pepper. And then also some dense root vegetables - in this case, butternut squash, but I've done it with carrots and cauliflower. Because they create a mix of different textures, and also the moisture packed vegetables inherently will soak up a little bit more of that brine, and the root vegetables will not. So you get a little bit of that contrast.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  So, butternut squash.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Like a pro.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Wielding a big knife, we're going to peel it. When I'm doing something like this, we have a farmer who picks up our grain and our food scraps, veggie scraps. I always think about the pig that's probably going to end up eating these. Little butternut squash peels, I'm wondering if they will like them. So I would do a relatively small dice, probably about third inch base. I'm then going to mix up an orange and green bell pepper. Obviously if you like things spicy, you can throw a hot pepper in this mix. I'm going to add some zucchini, some bell pepper chunks and some butternut squash cubes. And we're going to spread them out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. That's sun-dried tomato oil. You can of course substitute any other cooking oil, but that sun-dried tomato's just going to add that extra punch of umami. So we're going to use three tablespoons, measure and pour it on and then you just toss it really well to coat them thoroughly. We're going to bake this in a 400° oven for about 30 minutes. Check it every ten minutes and stir. You're looking for caramelization to start happening.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  You want to make your umami paste first before you do this. Because as soon as we pull these out of the oven, we're going to add umami paste to them while they're still hot. So, we'll just pop these in the oven.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  So, after they have roasted, we're going to take them out while they're still warm, and go and add two-thirds of a cup of umami paste, directly to the veggies. The reason we roast these, obviously you're just trying to build more and more flavor. So, the Maillard reaction that occurs when something caramelizes, produces a lot of extra satisfying flavors in our mouth. And so, we're going to get both that as well as our umami paste. So this is basically creating the flavor of our brine. It's always great to add flavoring to something while it's still hot. I'm not a food scientist. The way I think about it is, when the food is cooking and it's super hot, it's pushing all of this liquid as it's steaming out. But eventually, as it cools down, it will take some liquid back in. And so, as you have added some more flavor right around it, that liquid, as it sucks it back in, it's going to get some of that flavor inside, in a way that you won't have an opportunity to do later. That's basically what we're doing with these pickled vegetables. We're getting some umami flavor on them right away while they're still hot. And then we're going to put them in a vinegar bath, and let it hang out for several days.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  So we want to let this cool down till it's cool enough to touch. We're going to add one tablespoon of Kosher salt, and one cup of apple cider vinegar. We're going to stir it all up. And we're going to cover that and put it in our fridge, and forget about it for a few days, and let it hang out and develop more and more flavor and really penetrate the innermost parts of those vegetables with that umami flavor.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Like the umami paste, the pickled vegetables are also quite versatile. Arlyn says you can toss them into salads, and layer them onto sandwiches. And remember, sandwiches is where we're headed. You'll want to make the paste and the pickles a few days ahead of time, so they can hang out and mellow and their flavors can mingle. On the day you plan to make the sandwiches, you'll be roasting a pan of mushrooms.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  I'm going to get a pound and a half of mushrooms. You can use any that you want. For extra flavor and complexity, I like mixing some exotic mushrooms and also wild mushrooms, because they each have a little bit more flavor and punch than the white or portobello or cremini that you would see at the grocery store. Some of the specialty stores have them where you'll find, oyster, or shiitake or typically the most common. Obviously at the farmer's market, you may find a local forager who has some really interesting things. Of course, if you can do this with really local in season, fresh foraged mushrooms that would be really great. In a pinch, you could definitely just get mushrooms from the store. So today I'm using baby portobellos and shiitakes. So, we're just going to slice these up. I like to slice them pretty thin.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Mushrooms just kind of on their own, have a strong umami thing going on.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Right, yes. I mean to me, the word that pops up most when I think of umami, is savory. There are lots of things that are delicious. Like ice cream is delicious, but it's not umami, because it's not savory. And it's funny how like once it's present in something, it doesn't translate into a dessert. We have fig onion jam on our menu, and it's so sweet, it's very sweet it's a jam. And it's got figs. And it's so sweet that it's easier to think of it as a dessert. We typically serve it with like goat cheese here on one of our sandwiches. My husband was like, "We should put it on cheesecake at home one night." And the presence of those onions, brought that like savoriness to it, that it was so unpleasant. Even though it tasted like it would be something that would be appropriate in a dessert context, it wasn't at all. So, I think that's part it, is unlike the other four tastes, they're more versatile, umami really isn't. It hangs out in the savory realm. And if you try to put it in a dessert it does not go well in my mind.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Then we add four tablespoons of vegan butter to this. If you're not a vegan and you've got ordinary butter at home, obviously you can use that. We're just going to chop up the butter in some cubes. You can either roast them in the oven, or you can saute them in a pan. Either way is going to be just fine. You're just trying to get the mushrooms to really give up the vast majority of their moisture. I'm going to do it for about 325°. It's probably going to need about ten more minutes after that. And then once the mushrooms are done, they've surrendered that moisture and they're just beginning to caramelize, and certainly to have really shrunk down significantly in size. Whilst still hot, we're going to add half a tablespoon of that umami paste, and one and quarter teaspoons of Kosher salt. And we're going to stir that in while it's still hot. These mushrooms are going to be really really satisfying. This is enough to make at least four sandwiches, and also it will be great on a big pile of pasta.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Your basic Banh Mi has crusty bread, some sort of rich condiment, a really satisfying savory base, and then pickled vegetables and fresh herbs. So, with that sort of blueprint, you can interpret it lots of different ways and make it your unique thing.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Finally, it was time to assemble the sandwiches. She starts by cutting the baguette open lengthwise, spreads on a layer of hummus which she says can be homemade or store-bought. And she's using the hummus here as a substitute for mayonnaise, and also to bring some protein to the sandwich. Next, she piles on the roasted mushrooms, followed by the pickled vegetables. Finally, she tops it with a thick layer of fresh herbs. Cilantro and Thai basil is a good combination.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  This is going to be a messy sandwich, there's no way around it. So now we're going to put it all together, and cross our fingers that it stays together while we cut it. I like a serrated blade, and I like to just put a very gentle pressure. You do not want to push, you're just trying to slide the knife across the surface of the sandwich. You don't want to be feeling like you're pushing down on it, until you get to the very bottom of the bread.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That's not too bad. It stayed together. Oh, that's gorgeous.

KAYTE YOUNG:  It was time to taste the entire ensemble.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That is a really good sandwich, I love it.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Thank you.

KAYTE YOUNG:  So much going on, but it feels like it all really comes together.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  The mushrooms are really savory. The pickles are really bright. The herbs are really herbaceous. And then the hummus just sort of tucks in there and adds a little extra sort of filling quality to the sandwich.

KAYTE YOUNG:  It's really balanced, like it, it doesn't feel too "bready", because you've got all this other stuff going on. So, yeah, it's really good I love it.

CHEF ARLYN LLEWLLYN:  Thank you for coming in and making it with me today.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That was Arlyn Llewllyn, Chef and Co-Owner of Function Brewing, in Bloomington, Indiana, which has recently changed hands. This recipe was recorded in the fall of 2021. Learn more at eartheats.org.

ELIZABETH DUNN:  I'm Elizabeth Dunn. I'm a Professor of Geography and International Studies at Indiana University.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Elizabeth Dunn is also a Food Scholar. She studies food in immigration. She's the author of the book, No Path Home - Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement published in 2018. In a compelling piece in the Iowa review, called, A Gift from the American People. Dunn writes about how food is so much more than a substance that keeps us alive. So much more than calories. She reflects on the misguided approach of Humanitarian Aid Organizations, that fail to understand this, when providing food aid to displaced people. Producer, Alex Chamber, spoke with Elizabeth Dunn in 2018. He asked about her experiences working in refugee camps in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. In 2008, Russian forces moved into a Georgian Province called South Ossetia, on the border between Georgia and Russia. I ran into Elizabeth Dunn on campus this week. I mentioned our interview from several years ago, and asked about the similarities between the situation in South Ossetia in 2008, and the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.

KAYTE YOUNG:  "It's the same," she said, "it's the same except this time, Europe cares." I thought it might be useful to gives this interview another listen this week, to help us wrap our minds around what it means to be driven from your homeland. So again, this interview is focused on Elizabeth Dunn's fieldwork in refugee camps in Georgia, in the years following the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. Conflict in the region had to led to an ethnic cleansing campaign, pushing the ethnic Georgians out of South Ossetia and into Georgia proper.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  Their homes were bombed, aerially bombed and then looted. Wires were ripped out, pipes stolen for scrap metal and roofs were ripped off. And then those houses were burned and then in some cases they were bulldozed to make sure that these people could never go home again. And they were shoved out across the border into Georgia proper, where they became internally displaced people. We talk a lot about refugees, but in a strict definition, refugees are people who've crossed an international border. But the overwhelming majority, two-thirds of the world's displaced people, are not refugees, they're internally displaced people - they have not crossed an international border. The people I worked with, with the help of United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, were put into camps. They were then told by the Georgian government were permanent, that they were going to be there for the foreseeable future. And these are camps right on the border.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Most of these internally displaced people - also known as IDPs - were farmers, and they were forced from their communities in the month of August.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  Which is right before the harvest season. So, they had nothing to subsist on, and so they were dependent on the World Food Program, which is actually the largest provider of humanitarian aid in the world. So they lived on World Food Program packages for more than a year, which meant macaroni three times a day every day for almost 18 months actually.

ALEX CHAMBERS:  What's the problem with macaroni?

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  So, let me start by telling you what the advantages of macaroni are.

ALEX CHAMBERS:  That would be great.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  So macaroni is really useful for the World Food Program, because it's a durable staple which is light and easy to transport. It's much lighter than wheat flour and lighter than rice, and it's more durable actually. So, it's really for wheat eating populations, it's really a preferred substance. So, the World Food Program also has a target number of calories that every displaced person should get every day, which is something like 2,340. So, macaroni is like a caloric filler, it gets them up to the number of required calories. And one of the things that's really interesting about that approach to providing food to people, is it takes a purely biological approach. It assumes that the goal of aid is not to restore people socially, or to integrate them into local communities, or to give them back their professions and their kinship relationship which have been literally blown apart. It assumes that the point of aid is for people to survive another day. And it's like groundhog day, everyday is the next day. You are thought of - once you're a refugee or an IDP - you're thought of only in biological terms.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  You have no distinguishing characteristic, everybody gets the same amount of food, no matter if they're working hard in the fields, or, they're invalids laying around. Men and little babies get the same 2,340 calories a day. So, it reduces people to the biological minimum. The Anthropologist, Peter Redfield, has referred to this as "biopolitical minimalism". And that's what people were confronting. But food is so much more than that. Food is about kinship. Food is about love. Food is about generosity and hospitality. Food is about cultural identity. And all of those factors were neglected when they were given macaroni. The interesting thing was that for Georgians, macaroni is sort of not food. I mean, they had macaroni. It was an import from the Russians, but it doesn't have a place in the grammar of Georgian cuisine, which is exquisite by the way, which is just like so good. Pomegranates, walnuts, really deep beef flavors, steamed dumplings the size of your fist that are full of soup. This is Georgian cuisine, it's exquisite. So, macaroni, because it's a Russian import, it's either eaten boiled, plain, sometimes sprinkled with sugar. Or, it's cracked into soup.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  But those are the only two ways you eat macaroni in Georgia. Macaroni is the food that you eat when you are too poor to eat anything else. So, what was really interesting to me was that I started interviewing people about the aid they were receiving. And they would say over and over, "Nothing!" "What have you got in here?" "Nothing!" And I'm like, wait a minute, I see the bags of macaroni under your bed, and I see that you're in this little cinder block cottage and I see these ratty little stools that you were given and bare pine floorboards, it was not luxurious, but it's something. And for them, it was nothing. It didn't count for anything. And macaroni - because it's not food that you can host other people with - Georgians have a long tradition of a ritual banquet. And these banquets spontaneously break out at different moments. But they're extremely ritualized and they demand certain kinds of food. And you can't host people at a banquet and serve them plain boiled macaroni, that's absolutely a shame.

ALEX CHAMBERS:  What would the foods be?

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  At a big supra, the goal is to make sure that you cannot see the table. That the dishes are piled up in so many layers, balancing the edge of one plate on the other. That you literally cannot see the table underneath it. So, Sulguni cheese, ghomi - which is a corn pudding with smoked cheese in it. There's an eggplant pate, that's molded into balls, and a beet greens pate which is molded into balls with walnuts, which is delicious. It's a kind of a paste of walnuts and beet greens. There is Badrijni Nigvzit, which is strips of fried eggplant rolled around a paste, made of parsley, cilantro, walnuts, herbs which is fantastic. Amazingly at many supras, I have eaten until I could burst. And then they say, well that's it for the cold food, here comes the hot food. So, the food is elaborate and it's really culturally and religiously important to them. And when the banquets had to stop, that was in many ways, a real detriment to their kinship relations, to their attachments to their neighbors from their villages, to their familial relationship - inside the nuclear family - religion. This is a religious event every time it happens, one of these banquets.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  So, that's detrimental, you can't practice your faith with macaroni. So, macaroni posed a lot of existential problems. And peoples response to that is, generally negative. They see it as degrading, which it is. They see it as disempowering because you don't even have the choice to choose what you eat. I asked my students, "Imagine if you were in an earthquake and the Japanese came to provide aid. And what they brought you was a really common Japanese snack, dried squid heads. How many dried squid heads would you eat?" So, I think people really really rebelled against the macaroni. They really felt that it marked the erasure of their entire social identities. It was nothing food, because they were nothing people.

ALEX CHAMBERS:  You say at one point in the article, that the Humanitarian Food Aid keeps people in limbo in camps.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  Well so, camps in general keep people in limbo. Camps are meant to be temporary, which is why they very often have tents. Now, the average length of stay in a refugee camp, is 17 years. That's the average length of stay. Of course the record holders are the Palestinians, they've been there 70 plus years. So, what they are is permanently temporary. In a camp, you're always waiting to go back. You never really settle into a camp, it's always just until we can go back. And yet, that "just until" can last decades, it can last generations. So, the way we think about camps really has to change. The food in the camps is a part of that limbo. Largely because the food aid does not do much to respect their culture, their traditions. It does not do very much to leverage what they grow or produce themselves. And I think because it's aimed just at biological reproduction, it is, for most people, food that is without meaning.

ALEX CHAMBERS:  Yes. And worthless.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  And worthless, yes.

ALEX CHAMBERS:  You talk in the article too, about some of the ways that people manage to bring back some of their living food traditions.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  So, one of the things that people in this part of the world, have done since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, is do a ton of home canning. And, one of the things that really really hurt when their villages were destroyed, is that they lost all their jars. And those jars are expensive. They're about lari a piece, and you need about 400 of them for a family for the winter. And nobody had 400 laris for this, I mean that was a very large sum of money. So, they really needed to get those jars back. And so, I have a really good friend - who in the book I call "Manana" - she says to me, "Oh look! You have your friend's car here. Let's go for a ride, let's go to my cousin's for lunch. I'll tell you what, let's go get my jam jars." And I'm like, "Okay, what are we doing?" So she leads me down the road, and I have no idea that what we are doing is driving towards the conflict zone. So we hit the Georgian checkpoint, and there's this guy. He's got an American M5, which a very very large gun! And he says, "What are you doing here?" And I start babbling in Georgian, like, "Oh, yeah I'm here with my friend and we wanted to make jam, and you know, her jars are there so we need to go get the jars. And, so, yeah so we're here, we're going to make jam, strawberry jam!"

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  And he looks at me like, God you are stupid. At first it's unbelievable. Like why would an American be driving into the buffer zone, to make jam. So he's like, "I can't authorize this, you're going to have to go see the Commander." So we drive kind of bumping down this rugged road, and we get to the village of Mereti. And this is the actual dividing line now between the Russian and the Georgian armies. And we pull up in there where there's a bunker make of sandbags with that camouflage netting over the top. Then out comes this guy in camouflage fatigues, and he's like a slab. Like one of those guys who is so muscle-bound, he can't actually close his armpits. So he comes out and he's like, "What are you doing here?" And we're like, "Oh yeah, we're here to make jam, yeah, jam, that's the ticket. You know how it is? Jam you've got to make jam, it's August." So, I'm just babbling away as fast as I can babble. And he looks at me, and then the light breaks over his face. And he realizes that we're not spies, we're just idiots. And [LAUGHS] he's like, oh, this is entertaining, because it's boring sitting there. The two armies aren't fighting, they're at a standoff.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  And so he invited us to sit down and have coffee with him, and tell him all about what we were doing. So at the end, he let us go and we went in the village of Mereti and there, Manana, goes into her cousin's house and goes down into the basement and reappears with this giant bag full of glass jars. I said, "Manana, where did you get these, how did you get your jars back?" Her house was across the border, inside the conflict zone, it was occupied by Russian 58th Army. If you cross that border and they caught you, they would either sentence you to a five year prison term, or they would shoot you on the spot. So, I said, "Where did you get these?" And she's sort of, like, la-la-la. And it turned out that her husband had managed to obtain a false passport. And he's a smuggler by trade, and he was moving things back and forth across the border. He had gone to the ruins of their house, and had gone into the cellar and the jars had not been broken during the war. The house was decimated the walls were torn down, the roof was off, but the jars were still there. She said he cried, he started weeping and then he got super super drunk and spent the night in the cellar.

ELIZABETH CULLEN DUNN:  In the morning he came out and brought all her jars out. And he had spirited them across the border to Mereti where we were picking them up. So, that's how important those jars were to them. I think what's really important about those jars, is that they enabled people to start making their own food by choice again. Food that had a provenance, food that was from a defined place and that would circle networks of kin and friends. And people trade jars so that they get different foods in order to vary their diet. And you know always when you open a jar, who made it, where it's from. That was food that connected people to one another, and it was super important.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That was Producer, Alex Chambers, talking with Elizabeth Dunn in 2018. Elizabeth Dunn is a Professor of Geography and International Studies at Indiana University. She's also the Director of IU's new Center for Refugee Studies, which formally opens in August of 2022. The United Nations says Russia's invasion of Ukraine could displace anywhere from three million to five million people. That would be the largest relocation of a population in Europe since World War II. More than one million people have left so far. Elizabeth Dunn is in contact with people assisting on the ground in Kiev, and across the border in Poland. In fact, she's headed there next week. Hopefully the conflict will end quickly, and those forced to flee can return to their homes. I'm not sure how the world will manage another refugee crisis, especially one of this scale and magnitude. Find links to more information and resources at eartheats.org.

RENEE REED:  The Earth Eats team includes: Eoban Binder, Mark Chilla, Toby Foster, Abraham Hill, Josephine McRobbie, Daniella Richardson, Payton Whaley, Harvest Public Media and me, Renée Reed.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Special thanks this week to Robin Tutor Marcom, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Alex Chambers, Aralyn Llewllyn and everyone at Function Brewing. Thanks for everything.

RENEE REED:  Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show, comes to us from the artists at Universal Productions Music. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our Executive Producer is John Bailey.