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

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DIANA MINCYTE:  It's not about simply that protectionism and nationalism that we only want to make sure that we eat Lithuanian food. It is a much deeper sense of urgency that as a state and its political sovereignty depends on the ability to produce food and feed its population for a long time.

KAYTE YOUNG:  This week on the show, a conversation with sociologist, Diana Mincyte, who studies food systems in post-socialist Eastern European states like Lithuania. And a story from Harvest Public Media about efforts from indigenous tribes to bring back Wild Rice in the Great Lakes region. That's all just ahead. Stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG: Support for Earth Eats comes from Mallor Grodner Attorneys, providing legal services to clients and the community. Mallor Grodner Attorneys: understanding, expertise, results. Bloomington and Indianapolis. On the web, at lawmg.com.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Thanks for listening to Earth Eats. I'm Kayte Young. Wild rice grows in shallow waterways in the Great Lakes Region and parts of Canada. It’s a plant that holds important ecological and cultural significance for tribal members and residents in the region. But as Harvest Public Media contributor Katie Thoresen reports, wild rice has been in decline since the early 1900s.

KATIE THORESEN: Sitting in the stern of a canoe, Nathan Podany tosses handfuls of wild rice seed into the air, letting them fall into Spur Lake and sink to the bottom.

It's just some of the more than 400 pounds of wild rice seeds reseeding this northern Wisconsin lake.

NATHAN PODANY: Maybe we do a basic 50 pounds over there.

KATIE THORESEN: Podany is the hydrologist for the Sokaogon Chippewa Community. He says wild rice hasn’t grown on this lake since the 1990s. The tribe is working with a lot of partners and volunteers—including tribal youth—to restore the wild rice at events like today’s .reseeding

NATHAN PODANY: The goal, or the dream, is, in a few years, to have them harvest out on the lake and kind of return that activity to spur lake.

KATIE THORESEN: On Spur Lake and other waterbodies across the Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, people have watched as wild rice beds disappeared. A study published in 2012 found that watersheds with wild rice have declined by 32% over the last century. Wild rice is important in the Great Lakes region. It helps water quality and wildlife. And it’s a food source that has huge importance to the Ojibwe people.

KATHY SMITH: It's a big spiritual component of who we are and how we came here as a people.

KATIE THORESEN: Kathy Smith is a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Michigan and works for the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. Her title is Ganawandang (Ghana-wing-dong) Manoomin… which means ‘she who takes care of the wild rice’ in the Ojibwe language. Smith says her ancestors came here because of wild rice.

KATHY SMITH: that prophecy, it was, you know, told to our people to go where the food grows, on the water. So, you know, not only has our people, you know, really relied on manoomin because of our faith and our belief system.

KATIE THORESEN: There’s no one reason wild rice is declining. Changing water levels… extreme weather… and human activity all seem to be playing a role. Gretchen Gerrish is the director of the University of Wisconsin’s Trout Lake Station in the northern part of the state. Over the last four years… she’s studied rice beds… looking for reasons why some are doing better than others. 

Wild rice seemed to be more abundant on lakes that had continual water movement. She noticed that in the struggling rice beds… there were nearly always competing plants like lily pads. That left her with a lot of questions.

GRETCHEN GERRISH: Is this a natural transition of plants that we're seeing in some of these spaces? Is it something that's proliferating more due to climate change, and is it something that, historically, in the past, has been managed by people who have cultivated wild rice?

KATIE THORESEN: At the Bois Forte Reservation in northern Minnesota… last year was one of the best rice production years that anyone can recall on Nett Lake in the last 30 years.

But Chris Holm—the natural resource director for the tribe—says heavy rains and hot spells have meant little to no harvest in other years. Still, he says the seeds are resilient.

CHRIS HOLM:  that sort of allays my fears, a little bit about, you know, climate and weather changes that we're seeing more of. 

KATIE THORESEN: The push to protect wild rice has grown over the last decade.

And there’s evidence restoration projects between tribes and conservation organizations and agencies are working. 

Kathy Smith has seen that work pay off in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She helped reseed the Net River. This year Smith harvested the rice with her son.

KATHY SMITH: That's what, you know, restoration is all about, is to be able to pass that knowledge on to, you know, our young ones. Our future ancestors, is how I like to kind of put it.

KATIE THORESEN: While they harvested just enough for a couple of meals, Smith says it was a meaningful success; one she hopes others will get to experience across the region.

For Harvest Public Media, I’m Katie Thoresen.

KAYTE YOUNG: Harvest Public Media is a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. Find more at harvestpublicmedia.org.

KAYTE YOUNG: When examining our food system, it's easy to get myopic, focused only on local issues or even just limiting our understanding to the policies and the forces here in the United States, but it can be illuminating to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, or to focus on a different part of the world. My guest today is doing just that.

DIANA MINCYTE:  I am Diana Mincyte. I am an associate Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. I teach environmental sociology, but my research is more in focusing on food and its environmental and social dimensions. I'm particularly interested in questions of food sustenance and how do we create a system of food that provides access for everyone to have culturally appropriate healthy food. Also, how do we have a system where workers are paid justly and that environment is also taken care of. This very environmentally and socially holistic view on the food system is my interest.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Can you tell me a little bit about some of the kids of research that you've done and places that you've been doing research in these areas?

DIANA MINCYTE:  Most of my research is in the Baltic states in Lithuania in particular. Eastern Europe is considered very post-socialist area that has undergone major social and political changes in the last 30 years, in particular. Being part of the Eastern Block during the Cold War, they became part of the European Union. That means not only just transitioning from one country, becoming part of a different country, but also major reforms where the socialist agriculture, collectivized agriculture had to be privatized and it became subject to all rules and regulations for health and hygiene and became subject to global food markets. Lithuanian farmers now have to compete on the global market with producers in other parts of the world that might have better technology and access to easy access and transportation costs to consumers.

DIANA MINCYTE:  It's a very dynamic space and that tells us a lot about how that system works. I find that things that happen in the Baltic States are a precursor of what we are about to see in other parts of the world just because of this being a place on the edge between these explosive different forces.

KAYTE YOUNG:  One of the areas where change takes place in agriculture is around regulations and standards.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Regulations and standards are something that we take for granted, that these are important for consumers to know that food is safe and healthy. This puts a lot of pressure on farmers who have not only to comply with these regulations, they also have to file paperwork, get inspections, be knowledgeable and gain skills in areas that they did not have to do before. They become accountants and fill books in ways that they were not aware they needed to do before, which is a very steep learning curve to go through the process.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Also, joining the European Union alongside selling to Russia for a long time, there's been the largest consumer of food and dairy in particular in Lithuania and Russia. It raised a lot of issues for Lithuanian farmers because they were becoming dependent on different countries. A lot of economic pressures that Lithuanian farmers are facing have brought them to realization and the need about questions related to the concept of food sovereignty. With the start of the war in Ukraine, in the Baltic States there has been this interesting debate about how to ensure food security for all. It's not about simply that protectionism and nationalism that we only want to make sure that we eat Lithuanian food. It is a much deeper sense of urgency that as a state and its political sovereignty depends on the ability to produce food and feed its population for a long time.

DIANA MINCYTE:  In addition to experience an understanding of this fragility of the economic system and the implications, gas prices, refugees, cutting off fertilizers coming from the war in Ukraine, that put extra pressures on and stresses on the economy, it was also very clear that environmental crisis is also happening and this year in particular we are seeing drought that will undermine dairy economy. There is just feed is very limited and this compounding crises have brought to the fore the issue of the longterm sustainability of the food system that will ensure that everybody has food and as part of that there will be social order and life will continue.

DIANA MINCYTE:  It goes to this very profound sense of importance of food. That is this particular sense of urgency in terms of food sovereignty that we have seen in the context of the war in Eastern Europe in general and the Baltic States in particular that may be different in other parts of the world what that food sovereignty looks like. It has the national security implications in ways that it may not be visible in other countries. In general, food sovereignty is understood as a movement of farmers, indigenous groups, peasants, who seek to claim their right to produce environmentally, socially and culturally appropriate foods that would provide them also with livelihoods and power to shape the food systems and ensure that there is food security for local communities and regions.

DIANA MINCYTE:  That additional understanding of the importance of food sovereignty for national security is something that, I think, is very new for understanding food sovereignty movement as well.

KAYTE YOUNG:  I can see as you're talking that this obviously has just probably become a really glaring issue in the Baltic States and I think there was a similar awareness about the fragility of food systems around the pandemic here in the United States. When we couldn't access the same markets that we always had or supply chains were broken down, suddenly people started thinking about "what kind of food is produced locally, and how do we get it to each other?". It became more important than just a quaint local food movement.

DIANA MINCYTE:  In fact, it's very, very similar that the idea of local food provisioning as being this front and center of food security and food sovereignty in this shadow of the war that is similar to the pandemic. What also became clear, I think, in the Baltics is also how a lot of these local economies really depend on women's labor. That food sovereignty is actually a very gendered project. In Lithuania and Latvia, almost half of farms in the countries are managed or owned by women. This is very unusual. They rank some of the highest in the world in terms of percentage of farmers and that is historically specific for the reasons of particular experience of socialism and balance in rural economies that put men in the back seat of running rural households.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Women have access to land, but they very often do not have enough recognition for the kinds of additional challenges and additional work that they are doing for maintaining these local food economies and being so central for that food sovereignty and, by extension, national security. In some ways, one of the realizations in this process of doing this research was just getting to see how women are important for national security. Women farmers are central for that project of enabling a diverse spatially distributed food economy that is very resilient.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Can you say how it came to be that men took a back seat in the rural household or the farms?

DIANA MINCYTE:  That goes back to the history of World War II. Right after World War II, when the Soviet army rolled into Lithuania and the Baltic States and made them part of the Soviet Union, they went through collectivization that was even more brutal and more violent than it had been in Russia and Ukraine at the same time. Because of that, there was a lot of resistance and local resistance movements that tried to overthrow the Soviet regime with hopes that the world will intervene and they will not be allowed to forcefully join the Soviet Union. But that did not happen, so a lot of men went into forests. It's not a civil war, but it was a resistance war taking place and, as a result, the demographic simply meant that most households were ran by women. But also men, to a certain extent, were seen as more dangerous when they were talking to collective farms.

DIANA MINCYTE:  When the collective farm state came to pick up the requisitions of food, women were negotiating just because of this fear that men would be taken away, they would be considered as possible fighters. That was in the period from 1948 to '53, '56. What that meant is that women increasingly transitioned into being administrators and office workers in collective farms, accountants and they gained jobs that in some cases would have been taken by men. At the end of the fall of the Soviet Union in the early '90s, with the restoration of property rights to the owners of the land who lost it in the reforms of 1940, women were the ones who just went to the offices and claimed their land.

DIANA MINCYTE:  This very messy, at times very unjust and complicated process of creating property out of land, resulted in a very strange configuration where women do have land access which is very unusual. Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, they have under 10% of farms are ran and managed by women, but in the Baltic States and in Latvia and Lithuania, it's 46. That's very close to what is happening in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa as well. It's interesting how these violent colonial histories in some ways create these unexpected changes and all of these processes are uneven and contradictory to say the least.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Thank you for explaining that because that's not a history that I'm familiar with and I know a lot of our listeners probably aren't either. I'm also just really getting a sense for why this is such an interesting space to study. It just sounds like so many different forces going on at once, and to look at it through the lens of food is just really, really interesting.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Through the lens of food, but also just thinking about the food itself gives an understanding of the experience of what it means to be in these transitions, constant instability and very dynamic economically, politically worlds that increasingly every place becomes much more dynamic as well.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes. Do you specifically have a focus on dairy and dairy farming and dairy products?

DIANA MINCYTE:  One of the areas for me is the focus on milk in the Baltic States and somewhat increasingly looking at the United States as well, that both parts of the world undergoing major structuring and loss of dairy farms and increasing concentration and industrialization of dairy making.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Are women also involved at the level of production of dairy products? Like, I'm thinking of cheese and maybe even large scale operations? Or is it mostly in the farming realm?

DIANA MINCYTE:  Women are very much involved in dairy production and from the 1990s, almost most of the farms were actually dairy producing, not necessarily selling, but the idea of a cash-cow has been very popular, precisely for the reason that cows provided the much needed access to cash at the times where pensions or any other kind of social security system was not around. Having a dairy cow or two or three meant that you would be able to consume food, the much necessary protein, and your family as well. If you have surplus, you can sell it or exchange it for what you needed and if that fails, you produce cheese and you can sell it for more or store it.

DIANA MINCYTE:  There are all these ways in which dairy allows you to ensure your food security, access to cash and just the livelihood that in some ways the sense of identity, being in the world where you do things and you see results. A lot of farming is about seeing the meaning in process of doing that.

KAYTE YOUNG:  My guest today is Diana Mincyte. She's a sociologist at City University of New York. We'll have more from our conversation after a short break. Stay with us.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Kayte Young here. This is Earth Eats. Let's return to my conversation with sociologist Diana Mincyte. I asked her about the talk she gave when she visited the IU campus in 2023.

DIANA MINCYTE:  I was talking about the decline of dairy farming that is really troubling because of the growing consolidation in dairy production. This year, in particular, in Lithuania, just to get a sense of how stressful and dire the situation is, because of the war gas prices and energy prices have gone up significantly. The country does not have natural resources that it could use for energy production, so everything is imported and with very limited production of hydro energy and biomass burning, basically. Today, gas price is over $6 a gallon in a country where the average salary is just over $1,000 a month.

DIANA MINCYTE:  That means two things. That farmers, even when they don't do everything by hand and they don't need electricity, they still need to drive that product to the city or to buy food. The price of food has gone up because of the gas prices and inflation in Lithuania. At the time when in the US it was nine, it was 25% for a long time. So, the consumers cut all things they could cut and the producers production prices went up no matter what they did. Even to run to get fodder, to get hay, you have to have a tractor and if you don't you will have very little. Added to that is droughts, the cycles of drought seasons that we have had in the last, in 2018 across the entire EU, but also this year in Lithuania.

DIANA MINCYTE:  In the first seven months, we lost over 1,000 dairy farms in a country that there are 2.7 million people. From 21,500 farms, it became 20,400 or something along these lines. The expectation is that many more will be lost once the season when cows can be in the pasture will end and they will need to be eating fodder and feed. That will be basically the time that a lot of cows will be either sold to the large farms or they will be going into the slaughter houses. To be observing these kinds of transformations, it really raises these questions of where we are going and how to change that.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Of course, there are cases where farmers have figured out, those who live closer to big cities and they are able to deliver shorter distances, they have the consumers near by and they have established connections with consumers. They are doing well. Larger farms are doing much better. That's why the consolidation has taken place because there is really economic pressures to either get big or get out. Without saying that it is happening on the ground.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Very strangely to be in the United States, there are also trends of dairy consolidation. The levels that had not been seen in a long time. That's something that raises an interesting question of what kind of landscape do we want to have around us? What kind of economy? What kind of system we want to have? Food being supplied and the breeds of animals and what is the goal of this, kind of, food system?

KAYTE YOUNG:  Would you say that the conditions that you just described about Lithuania would apply to many of the other states in the area?

DIANA MINCYTE:  Definitely, but it also has another dimension that tends to be overlooked is the level of co-operation. Cooperatives, for example, in Poland where more than 73% of all milk produced and sold is produced by farms that are cooperatives, part of cooperatives. In Lithuania, it's 12%. So, they do have the bargaining power. Smaller farms are able to continue to operate because they have the collective bargaining power to get to processing. Sometimes some cooperatives will have their processing facilities, so you do not have to sell your milk to a processor who is able to then lower the costs. And as a result, dairy production is growing in Poland, while it's in such a steep decline in Lithuania.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Okay. So each country has its own systems and forces in play. Okay. But it just sounds like some of the supply restrictions and energy difficulties as a result of the war are probably touching all of those countries, but maybe in different ways.

DIANA MINCYTE:  That is an important issue is that national governments within the European Union do have power to shape policies and tweak with the support funding that comes from the EU and set up criteria, but there are also these historical reasons. That particular history of resistance and violence in Lithuania create conditions for women to have access and yet then there is an issue of how they are representing and how the lack of co-operation is often because they don't have simply time because in addition to farming, they are also caring for their aging parents and they are raising kids and to work in the cooperatives is another dimension. There are these very interesting, to say the least, competing forces that shape production and the outcomes of the entire industry that very often get overlooked and we see just the big picture, but it's very specific historically in that respect.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That's a really interesting point you bring up is that about the other demands on women's time and energy. They can't be out fighting for certain, I don't know how to put it, rights or provisions or whatever, and they can't work on collectivizing because they're just too busy running the farm and taking care of these other people that they're responsible for.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Well, in fact, women are doing a lot of things and, in fact, environmental movements, women are usually the face of environmental movements and alternative agrafood economies. In the conditions of economic hardship, they carry the added burden of all this unwaged care labor that makes it really challenging to do anything else but to be able to try to meet the demands of immediate people who need care.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Right, right, so harder to focus on long-term changes that might need to happen. Did you want to say anything about the research that you're planning on doing with Elizabeth Dunn and other colleagues in Ukraine?

DIANA MINCYTE:  The new project is involving not only scholars who are working in the United States, but working directly with scholars working in Ukraine. That is of immense learning for everyone and it will focus on the dairy economy and the challenges that it is experiencing right now, but also how the post-war, that hopefully we're edging towards that outcome. Reconstruction will inevitably be bringing the reforms in terms of land reform that, in fact, will be happening starting January 1st where the first time since 1917 people will be able to buy land. It's not only people but also foreign companies also, all kinds of investment companies and that will inevitably create a very dynamic situation where there is going to be the adjustment process and in that process we would like to be able to go and understand what is happening on the ground. How the experience of the war, and how these impending reforms will impact the industry, the sector and the food that has been so central for the sustenance of rural economies and livelihoods, especially for the smaller farmers who really depend on dairy cows for their survival.

DIANA MINCYTE:  We are looking at the question of how they will respond and what can we learn from the lessons that took place in Poland and the Baltic States before, where these transformations took place so fast as well. We'll try to apply these lessons and hopefully provide some insights for policymakers and scholars and the public as well.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Those land reforms in Ukraine, those will go into effect in January regardless of whether the war is over or not? That's just already set in motion?

DIANA MINCYTE:  That is already set with the idea of ensuring that the economy is growing and there is interest in development and attracting the capital as well as part of the idea of the national security, will depend on having capital invested in the country. At the same time, one of the arguments that scholars of food sovereignty have proposed was exactly that food sovereignty relies on small scale farmers who provide food locally. So, there is a bit of a clash between these two ideas about the economic growth based on capital infusion and investment and land property versus producing food and distributing it through sometimes semi formal networks and ensuring that people do get it.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes, the smaller scale community food security, yes. It definitely sounds like there's a pretty good chance of losing a lot of that in this transition.

DIANA MINCYTE:  From the experience from looking at what happened in the Baltic States and Poland, a lot has been lost and what's, of course, it's very interesting looking back that there is a nostalgia for these small scale farming at the same time as they continue to disappear. People in the cities, people shopping at upscale markets and farmers markets that are expensive, everybody craves that manual, hand-milked cheese production, anything that's produced non-industrially with care and we just having figured out how to make sure that that doesn't disappear in its entirety. It needs to be built from the ground at the time when people will be gone and lost their skills and knowledge.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Yes, I mean I think it's very similar here. There's plenty of nostalgia and craving for that, kind of, farming. I mean you can see it in advertising and everything, you know, the images that show up on the industrial dairy products and egg products are usually very romantic and pastoral. And, you know, in the community like this, the farmer's markets and small scale farmers are pretty highly valued by a certain segment of the population.

DIANA MINCYTE:  It is unfortunate that we have that nostalgia and we have definitely put value onto these kind of farms. It is just that the same economy that makes it possible to buy products with these labels also contributes to making them extinct and reducing their place in the larger economy.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Well, I'm just really grateful that you came into talk to me today. It was really great to speak with you.

DIANA MINCYTE:  Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

KAYTE YOUNG:  That was Diana Mincyte, Associate Professor of Sociology at City University of New York, City Tech. She visited the IU campus in October of 2023 to give a talk on the decline of dairy farms in Baltic states, such as Lithuania and Latvia. You can learn more about her work on our website, EarthEats.org.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Earth Eats producer Alexis Carvajal grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but her family's roots on her dad's side reach back to Cuba. She recently set out to learn how to make a traditional family meal, and she put together this story.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Food is one of the strongest ties to our culture. For most families, there's a recipe that's been passed down through generations. A recipe that's made its way from one country to another, against all odds. My grandma emigrated to the U.S. from Cuba when she was young, and with her came a recipe, steeped in family tradition.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Pernil is a slow roasted pork shoulder dish that's typically made during Noche Buena, Christmas Eve, or any time you have your whole family gathered together. Although I've never had a family gathering with my dad's side, I know I wanted to learn this recipe. I may have never been to Cuba, or sat at table with my ancestors, but I can cook the same food they have enjoyed, and I can make that meal with the help of my family. There's a recipe I'm going to be preparing with my dad. A recipe that's traveled from Cuba to New Jersey, to Florida, and now to a tiny kitchen in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  But neither me nor my dad had ever made Pernil before, so I called up my grandma, she lives in Florida, and asked her how to make Pernil. Turns out, the process takes two days and five hours.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  The first thing you do is, you salt it all over, and then, you're going to prepare a mixture. You can use the blender, pulse it three or four times, and that mixture's going to be, cumin, a lot of cumin, black pepper also. It's very important. To mix that with all the stuff you're going to put in, you're going to need a little bit of olive oil and two bunches of green onions and one bunch of cilantro. This next item, I always have in my cupboard, because I use it all the time, and it's called Sazon Goya, it comes with or without asafran, but you want the one with the asafran, and you're going to be using two packages.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Sazon Goya is a seasoning which contains garlic, cumin, salt and turmeric, and importantly, asafran, which means saffron.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Once we have the mixture blended, it was time to prepare the marinade for Pernil.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  And also, for the Mojo, there is the liquid marinade, which is called goya marinade.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Mojo criollo or mojo for short, is a staple of Cuban cuisine. It's made from the juice of sour oranges and lime, garlic, oregano, cumin, salt and pepper. If you're feeling ambitious, you can make it from scratch, or you can buy it from the store. The word criollo refers back to Spaniards who sailed in Latin America and their descendants. A lot of Cuban cuisine has Spanish roots, like a lot of Cubans do, but with the added Cuban flare.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Right now, the garlic aroma is very strong.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Very.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  That garlic and the bit of citrus from the mojo, definitely.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Yep. Yes, the sour orange. Now, when I was a kid, grandma used to make it from scratch, we didn't buy it in the grocery, the mojo part because we had a sour orange tree. The citrus base of mojo is actually sour orange, it's not lemon, which makes a pretty big difference when you're cooking with it. But we had a sour orange tree in the backyard and grandma would go out there, pick however many sour oranges she needed, five or six, or whatever, go inside and make the mojo dead from scratch, which is all the seasonings and the garlic and the sour orange juice.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Is there a little bit of lime juice in it as well?

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Yes.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Okay. That's what I thought.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Yes. But most of it is sour orange, which is important in the use because it's sour, it's just a different sourness, a different sour flavor profile than what a lemon would give. The sour orange is a little bit more subtle.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Now that we have the mixture and our marinade prepared, we had to prep the meat.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  And then, you're going to make slits on the Pernil, but you don't want to pierce it all the way down, you go halfway. When you have the mix, that you blended in the blender, you're going to fill it, just put a whole bunch of them in all those holes. After that, you are going to rub it all over the outside of the Pernil, you're going to rub, rub, rub. Get a Reynolds kitchen oven bag and look for the size that says, "Turkey," and that's the one you want. After you did all that, you're going to put it in that bag.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  So, what I'm doing now,... is something that, if memory serves correct, my grandma used to do, she used to use bigger pieces of garlic like I'm doing, to actually cap the holes in the meat, where you put the marinade. So, okay.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Perfect.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  We're good. We'll wrap her up.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Yes, put the mojo in.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  Once it is in the bag, then you're going to pour the rest of the goya marinade mojo criollo inside that bag and tie it good, and you're going to leave it in the refrigerator for 48 hours.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  With that, we could leave the Pernil until it was finally time to cook it.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  It needs to be cooked on 350, 30 minutes cooking time per pound. When it's cooking, once in a while, maybe an hour and a half, you take a look at it. After the three hours, if you still see that you want it more crispy, then you cook more, but don't let it burn. Thinking about it already, I'm hungry. [LAUGHS]

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  [LAUGHS]

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Since Pernil takes five hours to cook, you can prepare some of your side dishes while you wait.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  So, what would you typically serve with it?

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  Rice. It could be any kind of rice you want. White rice is what we usually eat. We also have the beans. Cubans actually use a lot of black beans. There are different ways to make the beans from scratch. And that comes from Spain, my grandma used to be able to do those and I loved them. Besides that, you can also make tostones.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Tostones are fried plantains, and one of my absolute favorites. They're perfectly crispy on the outside and just a little bit softer on the inside. I've only ever ordered them in restaurants, but making them is actually pretty easy.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  To prepare the plantains, you cut the ends and then, with the point of the knife from one end to the other, slice down and go back and forth with the knife at one point, you'll just be able to peel them by hand that way. After you've got that, I usually cut it, maybe an inch, or less than an inch, but you cut it in pieces. If you don't have a plantain smasher, you can also do it with the back of a glass. First you fry it in chunks like that. The oil has got to be very hot.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Yes.

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  You put them in, and when you put them in, they're not cooked, so they look more like pinkish, or something like that. To know that they're cooked, they've got to be yellow. When they turn yellow and you see the consistency, take them out, and that's when you're going to smash them one by one, just smash it down. Once they're smashed, then you have to put them back into that hot oil, but not for long. You can tell more or less how crispy you want them and then you take them out, and just salt them. I love those.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  By the time the tostones were perfectly fried, our rice and beans were done. Now that we had finished combining all those flavors, it was finally time to taste the fruits of our labor.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  All right.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  All right. Moment of truth. Let's see what we've got here.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Time for the taste test.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  All right. Looking pretty good. Get her out of the oven here. All right. Oh, that smells proper.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Yes?

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Yes, that smells like my childhood. [LAUGHS]

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Aw, that's good.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Let's see. Let's taste test.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Let's taste now.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Shall we?

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Mm-hmm.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Mm! Yes, we definitely got the flavor right.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Yes?

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Mm. Yes, good texture, we definitely got the citrusy. Yes. Yes, we got it. I don't know that it's quite up to the caliber of grandma's but it's pretty good. It's not bad.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Yes?

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Yes. Here, try some.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Okay. Mm.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Yes?

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  Yes, they're actually good.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  Okay. I'm going to grab our rice and our tostones, and we'll be good to go.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  But it's not just about the amazing taste of the Pernil, since it's such an old recipe, there's many precious memories that come with this meal.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  What is your fondest memory surrounding Pernil?

RACHEL CARVAJAL:  Probably Cuba when I was still little and we would go to the country, that's where most of my grandma's family lived. There would be more than 20 people gathered together.

FERNANDO CARVAJAL:  I can just remember being a little kid, and being excited whenever my grandma made this, because it was the process. You know, you'd wake up in the morning, the day before, and there was grandma already in the kitchen. Granted, this was a big family, we had seven people living in this house so, it was a big pig. It wasn't the whole pig, but it was a big Pernil, so she had to start that prep early. You'd go in the kitchen and you'd just get the smells, the aromas of the garlic and the citrus from mojo and it's just kind of ingrained in the memory of sitting there with my grandma while she was preparing it, and just talking. I guess it's something I associate with my family.

ALEXIS CARVAJAL:  And to me, this is the real power of food, not just the flavors on your tongue, but the memories that flood your mind with that first bite. And, of course, the moments you share with the people you love. For Earth Eats, I'm Alexis Carvajal You can find this recipe on our website, EarthEats.org.

KAYTE YOUNG:  Alexis Carvajal is a producer on our show.

KAYTE YOUNG: There are so many ways to listen to Earth Eats. On the radio, WFIU, from our website, earth Eats dot org (where you will also find photos, links and recipes) on YouTube, through the WTIU channel, and from your favorite podcast app. 

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KAYTE YOUNG:  That's it for our show. Thanks for listening. The Earth Eats team includes Eoban Binder, Alexis Carvajal, Alex Chambers, Mark Chilla, Toby Foster, Daniella Richardson, Samantha Schemenaur, Payton Whaley and Harvest Public Media. Earth Eats is produced and edited by me, Kayte Young. Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from Universal Production Music. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.