Seeds And Their People - Ep. 11: Kai Delgado Pfeifer and Filipinx ancestral food and plant medicine

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

In this episode, we hear from former Truelove Seeds apprentice Kai Delgado Pfeifer in an interview from last fall 2021 when they visited our office and seed room in Philadelphia. There is also a short update from this week so we can hear the awesome things Kai is up to now and in the near future. This is the second of two back-to-back episodes featuring former apprentices, but we will certainly do more in the future. Kai Delgado Pfeifer (they/them) is a Filipinx/Mixed European descent earth tender activating ancestral food, plant medicine, and spirituality as mediums for healing and liberation. Kai is also an educator who moves with the belief that our children are the light beings who will re-awaken our lineages of wisdom for the liberation and regeneration of our Mama Earth.   SEED STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Smooth Bitter Melon Saluyot (Molokhia) Burdock Root Rice Beans (Tahores/Tapilan) Rice Peas Northern Adapted Pigeon Peas Hill Rice (South Trinidad)   MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: Interviewee: Kai Delgado Pfeifer Kai on Instagram:@lolas.apo Kinabuhi ang Pag-Kaon / Food is Life Class Resources and organizations mentioned: Bahay215: Filipinx traditions in Lenapehoking Neal Santos: Philadelphia friend and photographer, and former co-owner of Lalo, a fast-casual Filipino food stall Beatrice Misa Crisostomo, Global Seed Savers MASIPAG: Rice and freedom in the Philippines Kai Farms: A permaculture farm in the Philippines Farm School NYC Amirah Mitchell's 2021 seed keeping fellowship at Greensgrow GMOs and their Implications on the Filipino Peoples' Food Security, Lorelei Beyer Article: the Philippines has become the first country to approve the commercial production of genetically modified, nutrient-enriched Golden Rice   ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   SUPPORT OUR PATREON! Become a monthly Patreon supporter! This will better allow us to take the time to record, edit, and share seed stories like these.   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Tumblr  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden   THANKS TO: Kai Delgado Pfeifer Yawa

The Philippines is kind of like the main economic and political outposts of the United States in Asia. So our seed history has kind of reflected that. So when the U.S. gave over power back to the Philippines, one of the ways that they were able to continue controlling us was through our seed ways. Some of the first GMO experimentation projects that happened outside of the U.S. happened in the Philippines, starting in the 50s. and 60s with rice, funded by different foundations here in the U.S., like the Rockefeller Foundation and stuff.

So if anyone's heard about, like, golden rice and things like that, those seeds were patented in the Philippines in different labs there. And yeah, that really, like, threatened a lot of our indigenous seeds. I was just lacking at normal. Oh, my goodness. Welcome back to Seeds and their people. I'm Chris Bolden Newsom, farmer and co-director of Sancofa Farm at Bartram's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, Seedkeeper and Farmer at True Love Seeds.

We are a seed company offering culturally important seeds grown by farmers committed to cultural preservation, food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture. This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and now also you. Thank you so much to the 25 of you who support our Seedkeeper. and storytelling work through our Patreon at patreon.com backslash true love seeds in the last week alone seven new members signed up we are grateful to welcome john lourdes jesse jillian jennifer sophy and kaya wrote this special note i appreciate all that you do for the movement i've been loving listening to your podcast while farming and so grateful to be able to support even just a little thank you Thank you, Kaya. Our current goal is for 100 more people to sign up as monthly contributors, which would cover the cost of editing these episodes.

Patrons have access to videos and other resources we create for our growers and apprentices. We got another really sweet testimonial this week from Zhe Hussain, co-founder of Cultural Roots Nursery, an East and South Asian Heritage Plant Nursery located in Oakland, California. Zee first learned about us while listening to our second episode, featured. featuring our dear friend Kristen Leach of Namu Farm. Zee says, I love so many of the seeds that y'all offer, and I use many of them for the nursery.

This past spring, the Lebanese Zatar was appreciated by so many. People drove hours to come pick up a few plants from us when they found out we were carrying it. I would also like to personally thank you for offering the Indian okra. This has been a food I've heard my mom and grandmother talk about, but never actually tried myself. Typically, we are able only to get the Clemson Spilance variety. I immediately planted some of the seeds, and I've been enjoying making so many of my familiar meals with the harvest these past few weeks.

Thank you so much, Zee. We're excited to connect more with you and your nursery. This episode features an interview with Kai Delgado Fifer. I first met Kai in 2018 when they were a farm school in New York City student during my last time co-facilitating the Training of Trainers course. After over a decade leading that multi-day popular education focused course for farm school, just food, and beyond, I decided to focus entirely on true love seeds. Kai became a true love seeds apprentice the next year, driving down to our farm weekly from North Jersey. Kai is particularly focused on indigenous and heirloom seeds from the Philippines as part of a larger practice of honoring ancestral traditions, connecting in sacred ways with the earth, and naming and releasing colonialism and oppression. This is the second of two back-to-back episodes featuring former apprentices, and we'll certainly do more in the future.

So as we always do, I wanted to ask you, Chris, for some reflections what really stood out from this interview. You know, I'm always very fascinated by connections between African and Asian seed ways, you know, sort of the historic ways that we are connected. And I think I see that a lot in a real special way in Filipino culture. I'm always learning about new foods, new to me, that is, and new recipes that I find out, to my pleasant surprise, use foods that I also shared in my own African diasporic culture. So hearing about the bitter melon and the different ways that it's used, the pigeon peas. I know that okra is eating a lot in the Philippines. And then some of those, you know, varieties that are newer to me, but are still a part of the broader Afro-Asiatic world of food and agriculture

like the Seleuot or Egyptian spinach, aka Molokia. I think that that's really fascinating to me and always exciting to think about the history and how those seeds moved. And I'm also very intrigued by sort of this notion that was touched on a little bit in the conversation, but really sort of opened up a door for me to think about how when we start to consume, you know, to eat rather our traditional foods again, how they can be a remedy to some of the modern problems that have been the result of colonial oppression in the form of wiping out our food ways or replacing our, food ways, replacing our agricultural ways, and to hear Kai talking about eating bitter melon as a remedy for the diabetes and protection even during pre-diabetic conditions was really

powerful to me because Filipinos, like a lot of African-descended populations as well, do deal disproportionately with diabetes. I know that in Filipino community is similar, especially out in the diaspora, the Filipino diaspora, I don't know what the situation is in the Philippines, but I know that often it's almost like expected that at a certain age a person will get diabetes, and that's very similar in black communities that I've grown up with. So just sort of thinking about how our ancestors can reach into the future with these gifts or these foods these seeds that they made ancient packs with in order to heal us

from problems that are the result of our new lifestyles that was very fascinating to me and just really placing the seeds and their stories in a spiritual context which I think is something that you know I know we do obviously

it's getting more coverage and I think finding different ways to do that for me is is always very exciting great and I know that we will eventually do a whole episode on the African-Asian

connection with food but I wonder if you could in a nutshell talk about the history of that kind of connection I can't know about it in a nutshell the fact that we share a lot of these seeds and a lot of

even the traditional ways of being in relationship with them, growing them, you know. I remember noticing one time with fascination how one of my students and mentees many years ago who was a young man from Bangladesh, I noticed how he was preparing a row and he was sort of like, you know, sort of straddling the row and with the whole, you know, sort of working the soil. So, but he was standing over, you know, with both legs on either side of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, may have been a year or two, I noticed, uh, another student, an African student from Liberia doing the same thing. And this was a stance in, in, in the field that I hadn't seen, you know, but I mean, they were working the exact same way, separated, you know, by years.

were different ages and by continents, obviously Liberia and West Africa and Bangladesh and the subcontinent of Asia. And yet they both work the field this, you know, exact same way. And that just sort of got me to thinking, you know, about these connections that we have. And then how those connections get lost, you know, when we are displaced outside of our places of origin because I, you know, I'm the son of African-American farmers, and we didn't work the role that way. You know, I hadn't seen it. And anyway, so I recognize that that stance probably helped to protect your back while

working that role. And so it made a lot of sense. And so, you know, even in this techniques and our relationship to the land, you know, what is shared, I don't even know. if a young man from Bangladesh had ever heard of Liberia, honestly, and vice versa for the Liberian fellow. So just that and the seeds, obviously the seeds, the material, you know, evidence of our connections, you know, have traveled over oceans and who knows how they got to these places. But when they arrived from Africa to Asia or however those exchanges happened, you know, they become.

such deep, you know, members of that community that they are also, so there are shared relatives, I shared green relatives, and for me that's very powerful and it's a way to connect to our history is a way to look beyond also all the intervening wickedness of centuries of colonization and land grabs and attacks on our cultures and spiritual systems. You know, this is something that we can hold together and, you know, sort of go back there and hopefully move forward from that. So really do a Sankofa type of experience with these seeds holding on to these seeds together. You know, there's universes of possibilities in just beholding those seeds and working with them and renewing the pacts that our ancestors made with them. Great.

Thank you. I guess one thing I'll say really quick is that, you know, even just hearing you describe the mentees in your field learning how they hoe, I'm thinking about how much we learn from and with our apprentices and mentees and how much they bring to our farms and to our kind of collective knowledge at the farm. And I just want to express gratitude to Kai, who were hearing from this week and Chris Keeve from last week and the, you know, probably dozens of apprentices that have come through our farm who've all brought

pieces of themselves in their culture and their knowledge and learned alongside and taught us while learning from our farms as well. So just thank you to the people who come and share their energy and knowledge and curiosity with us. In this interview, Kai and their friend Yawa, who was actually also apprenticing with us this year, were visiting us last fall at our office. We started the interview in a room pulling seeds from dried corncobs upstairs and then walked down to the basement seed room,

looking at seed jars, and then across the street to Greens Grove farms where our once co-worker and now seed grower, Amira Mitchell, was running a seedkeeping fellowship. And actually I took a photo during this interview that's on the wall calendar, that many of you may have hanging in your home if you have our seed-keeping calendar just for a couple more days you'll see kai's face there this month and then we go back to the

office so we'll take you on that seed adventure now thanks for listening What are you doing? We are, what's the word we're looking for? De-cerneling these Lenape Pooem corn with my friend Yawa. Hi. And who are you? My name is Kai Delgado Pfeiffer and I am a farmer and former apprentice of true love seeds. It's so nice having you back for a little time, back with the seeds and us.

Well, we're starting here because it's a beautiful sound and activity, hearing the kernels drop into this bucket. Can you describe like what you're experiencing right now with your senses and what does this look like yeah i don't know like doing things like this with seeds always feels very therapeutic and sacred so for me right now it's like just this texture of the seeds almost massaging my fingers and giving me some of its its energy yeah and they're just like piling up it's really beautiful to see how much abundance of corn there is right now Yeah, I think that's what comes up for me when I am working with corn, is that theme and prayer of abundance. Yeah, and now that I'm saying that, I'm also thinking about the connections between corn of this land and corn in the Philippines, because corn came to us through Mexico.

Yeah, so it feels nice to honor that seed memory while we're doing this. Beautiful. I've never thought about corn in the Philippines. Do you have any thing you want to say about that? Not really. I mean, it's not a staple crop for us. It's grown a lot in like the mountain sides and poor indigenous communities. But a lot of the corn, it's mostly like yellow and it's often genetically modified corn.

genetically modified corn, which is the case for a lot of staple grains in the Philippines now. Corn and rice and wheat are those really beautiful, sacred crops and staples that are being kind of disoriented from their original source and lifeways. So it's cool that we're shelling this corn right now because it's from the indigenous people of this land who've stored it. So that feels too. Beautiful. And I know that you have a deep connection with a lot of plants, ancestral plants, especially. And I'd love to kind of talk, visit some of them together and hear your meditations and thoughts on them and connections to them. Cool.

Let's do it. Okay, cool. We're going to walk into the basement seed room because we're at the office and seed room today, not at the farm. And we'll start down there and then we'll go out for the farm. that's next door. We're down where there's two dehumidifiers running. I'm going to turn them, turn them off. We're down here with Julia cleaning off the work area, where they label and re-jar and organize the seed room. Hello. Have you been down here yet? No, I haven't seen these ones. I've only seen the

at the other place. I'm at the farm. Oh yeah, our old seed room was right next to the farm. Your first time at our farm was last year? Yeah, it was last year at the beginning of the pandemic. That's crazy that we started doing that work right during the middle of that. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That was the beginning of your apprenticeship, which kind of spanned most of the growing season last year. Yeah, definitely. I was there what became starting in May, May or June. May or June and then we kept on coming through December yeah so we got to see that whole season of crops which is really wonderful yeah and many of those crops that you were in relationship to at the farm are now in front of us okay so these are seeds from that we grew last year exactly okay yeah so I mean name a name a crop and it's probably here we could we could open up a jar and kind of revisit last summer through exploring the jar yeah I mean

And I see one right here. It's the smooth bitter melon. I can grab it. You want to pull it out? Yeah. One of my favorites. Yeah, this is the smooth bitter melon, the Chinese. Right.

Yeah. This is the same variety we grew. But this one actually was grown by Viet Leed. We already moved through the ones we harvested together. Yeah. But it's the same variety and we got ours from them originally. Uh-huh. Yeah, I mean, the seeds that I've been growing have come from you.

so that's kind of the source of the seed for me yeah I love this crop it's bitter melon in the Philippines we call it umpalaya and it's used primarily as a food but it has a lot of medicinal qualities to it in food it can be like pickled like a vinegar and like palm sugar and like chili ginger garlic type of pickling solution or you can like stir fry it with eggs and tomatoes and then you also they stuff it sometimes with like ground pork which is really good you had to try that sometime ask the folks at Baha-i-215 to make that sometime it's called Rayenong Ampalaya which came from the Spanish that's like

that I know yeah stuffed bitter melon so it's kind of like taking our colonization and putting it on its head but the medicine is really power powerful because and actually one of the first crops that I came in to touch with because of its medicine. So it's really good for folks who have pre-diabetes or diabetic already. It helps like regulate glucose and blood sugar. And Filipino immigrants suffer disproportionately from diet related illness because of like really high fat diets and processed foods and sugars. So bitter melon is one of actually our ancestral foods that we can use to. to help us fight diet-related illness in our communities, which is part of why I got into food in the first place.

Oh, beautiful. You want to take out a few and just tell us what you see? Let's go to the light. Definitely. I was teaching a class once about seeds, and I didn't really know too much. I was still beginning my seed journey, but I asked people to look at the seeds and tell me what,

like they didn't know what the plants at all so I just gave them a bunch of seeds and then they looked at them and just kind of formed a relationship based on how they looked and felt and a lot of people described these as ancestors because they look like dinosaur eggs almost they have this almost like ancient looking quality to them with the really ragged edges and these like line formations in the seed yeah I don't know how to describe it visually but yeah they feel ancient they have this like pointed tails on each end hmm like these pointy tips i like thinking of

that as a tail yeah they almost look like turtles actually maybe that's where like the resonance of like ancient comes from like they look like a turtle shell in a way if you look at it long enough beautiful well we'll also visit these plants outside because a mirror has some growing oh some bittermelon We got the farm outside across from our office. Okay. Yeah, is there anything else here that we grew last year? That might be familiar? Yeah, the Saluyot is here.

Let's find that. Oh, here. They just kind of like, hey, I'm here. They're speaking to you. Yeah, they're just like, they whisper almost. Yeah, these ones are cool. They're like emerald jewels. Very tiny.

tiny almost like a mint seed size right yeah and it's more of a shape to them they're like diamond shaped that's why i call them jewels can you tell us about this crap most people won't know it they're listening yeah with that name so it's known more popularly as molagia or egyptian spinach right but yeah african origin crop made its way to the philippines and it's called saluyot and we use it like in soups like sinigang which is like a tamarin sour soup you can also put it in a soup called tinola which is like a chicken ginger soup and it's like a musilogynous slimy food and it's really good for your digestion kind of like okra cuts in the same mallow family yeah and the pods kind of look like okra too yeah they're really yummy to eat when they're raw

have you used it much yourself yeah i well it's hard to find here honestly i mean i'm sure that's why palestinians get so excited when they find out that you have this because most of the time you can find this in filippino markets but it's always frozen which just doesn't taste as good you know yeah but you know you do it with what you have yeah but i'm planning to grow this this year because i'm living in california now it's where it's where it's quite warm so I'll have a longer season and hopefully can get some seeds for this next year beautiful yeah yeah what other plants last year did you really connect with on the farm i remember we processed those burdock seeds together yeah on my mom's side we're not only filipino but

chinese and burdock is really important part of chinese cooking it's not something that i'm super familiar with of how to cook with but it's something that my great-grandfather definitely cooked with and I'd love to learn how to use because it's great medicine. I know that the maringa malangay. Yeah malangay was super important and obviously we can't get seeds here so there's none in front of us. We always have to get them from someone else. We've been trying to find someone in the U.S. that grows it before seed. But you had a, I don't know, you were part of some beautiful experiences with the melangay. Yeah. There were, what did we planted some, And I think I saw yours flowering, right?

It was the first time that you were able to get the Meringa to flower here. That was pretty beautiful to witness. I think the other really cool thing, it's not about Malungai, but we got to plant that tarot together. It was like you, me, Neil, and what's her name from Puerto Rico? Oh yeah, Tanya. Yeah, Tanya. I think that was Meringa. Was that Moringa?

I think, oh, we did that with Nio. We did plant a Meringa with Neil. And then on another day, we planted the tarot, which was really beautiful because we all shared that as an ancestral crop. I just love Malungai so much. It's such a good medicine. I'm always reflecting on these foods that are both like culinary and also medicinal, which is a lot of our foods, actually. Do you have anything you could share about Malangai in the Philippines? Yeah.

Well, Malungai, I love the story about Malangai, because Malungay. because Malungai is a great, like, anti-cancer medicine. Also really good for folks with diabetes. But what I like about it, it's not only medicine for people, but it's medicine for the earth. A lot of indigenous communities in the Philippines that have faced deforestation through corporate logging, a lot of their ancestral lens.

You could see it on the hillsides when we were driving by on the motorcycle, and you'd see just like patches of forest gone. but some people will plant maringa seeds because they grow really fast. They can thrive in eroded soil. And then they actually have this taproot type of structure, right, that penetrates really deep down and helps stabilize those hillsides that have been kind of just like taken apart.

Yeah, so it's not just our medicine, it's also medicine for the earth. And they grow really fast, so they help reforest areas, yeah, which is beautiful. It's really beautiful. Yeah. It's really beautiful. Maybe let's go connect with the earth now outside. Let's go do it. I'm going to turn this dehumidifiers back on, keep our seeds dry.

I was thinking about also that rice seed that you were... Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean that's more recent. Yeah, we don't... We don't have that in the catalog yet. catalog yet. Yeah. Maybe I can help make that happen this year.

That would be great. The mic wasn't facing you. Can you say what you said again? Yeah, I want to grow that Tahore rice pea that was given to us by Beatrice, right? From the Philippines, who is, I think, the board chair of the, what is it? Global Seed Savers or something in the Philippines. She has a deep relationship with our native seeds and bringing back our heirloom varieties in the Philippines because a lot of our heirloom varieties are kind of gone or not in common circulation.

So yeah, it's awesome that she sent that to us. Yeah, it's a beautiful. It's my first like Filipino native lagoon that I've ever encountered outside of the other common beans that I know. Yeah, it's beautiful. Could you, well, let's move into a quieter. quieter space here and maybe you could describe the rice pee a little more it's a very slender papery brown pod I've only seen it as like a dried pod because we were harvesting it for seed but yeah they're really tiny they're really thin it's long it's

almost it's smaller than like a French bean if people know what that is like one of those really fine thin French beans it's very small bean maybe maybe they call it a a rice pea because it's the size of a grain of rice almost. I bet that's why. Yeah, I think that that makes most sense. I was like, oh, yeah, it's the size of a rice grain. I haven't cooked with it yet, but I was thinking it could be a really good replacement for pigeon peas, like our black native pigeon peas in some of our common soups. Yeah.

Oh, beautiful. I guess I forgot that was a plant in the Philippines also. We have Amira has some of that growing here too. maybe we could visit here let's go in here avoid the wind I can't believe they're still growing yeah we're describe what you see so we're in a greenhouse right now and the bitter melon is vining from the ground up against the sides of the greenhouse and then trellising to the top of the greenhouse and so there's a bunch of bitter melons some babies some flowers some really big ones that are turning orange

ready to give us some seed they're just like dangling over us yeah there's a couple feet above our heads yeah they're really up high like they're like eight feet high yeah they're really really lovely a deep green look very I'm sure Amira wouldn't mind if you took a couple. Yeah? Okay. I mean, sorry Amira if you're hearing this and that wasn't okay. But I think they've mostly finished harvesting the seeds for the season.

Yeah. We stopped, we have the same. This is the smooth bitter melon also from Viet Leed. And we've stopped at our farm partially, I think, due to Amira's urging it to be the end. So I think you could definitely take some of these fruits for food. Cool. I'll definitely make it. make some pickles or something on Sunday with my mom.

That's perfect, actually, for Day of the Dead, too. This is, like, we're supposed to put offerings of our ancestral foods on the altar for our ancestors. So I think they'll appreciate this. Yeah, beautiful. So have you made these pickles with your mom before? Yeah, well, I've made them for her. My mom always tells me that she hated bittermelin as a kid.

It's just not, like, something that kids, like, to eat because it lives up to its name it's very bitter but there are ways that you can cook it that like extract some of the bitterness and make it more palatable but i made her the pickles about a little bit before i moved to california and she really enjoyed them she ate them with like fried fish and rice yeah how do you make them so you take the bitter melon you cut it in half lengthwise and then you cut them into half moons like thin half moons and then you can lightly salt them and then like kind of massage the salt into them let the juices come out for about 30 minutes strain it and then you can julienne some like red peppers some carrots some red onions ginger garlic

and chili and then you make a little pickling solution with palm vinegar palm sugar, a little bit of fish sauce and salt. Yeah, and then you just combine all of that and let that sit for about a week. And that's really good. That like kind of like bitter, sweet, salty. Yeah, it really hits the spot. That sounds awesome. All right, who else should we visit here?

Do you want to see the pigeon peas? Yeah, sure. In the Philippines we call them Kajos, and they're black. Like completely like a dark black pigeon pea. Wow, someone once gave me black gondulets or pigeon peas from Puerto Rico. And it's interesting because they're, I don't know if I'm going to say it right, but their Latin name is Cajunus Cajun. And you called them what?

We called them Cagios, K-A-D-Y-O-S. Okay, so it's spelled really different, but it sounds kind of similar. Cajunus. Are those, those are cow peas, right? Yeah, these here are a Goligichi pea. I think this is also called, this is actually called the rice pea. Okay, cool. We got the seeds from Matthew Rayford in Georgia.

Okay. And let's open one up. Yeah, they're like tiny little. Oh, yeah. Oh, these ones are more round. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah. So also called rice, but this one's called rice pee. And they're actually much bigger than the rice bean that we were just talking about. Yeah, much bigger. But they're small for a cow pee or a field pee.

They're about the same length as that rice pee, but they're like, these are much plumber. The rice pee, the from the Philippines, it's much more slender, like a grain of rice. Right. Yeah, it's very much rice shaped. All right, and here, down here are the Cadjos. Yeah, Cadios. Yeah, and we put that in, I don't know if that's the name all across the Philippines, but in my family's province in the Philippines called Iloilo. That's what we call it.

And it's part of this soup called Cadios Baboy at Lanka, which is the pigeon pea, pork, and jackfruit. and that's like in a pork broth with like fish sauce and like garlic and onion and ginger it's really good now would you use the dry beans for that or yeah you soak the dry beans or you could use fresh ones I suppose too but it won't it probably won't be that same black that's characteristic of the recipe well this year they're very cool very abundant so these are the pigeon peas Right, these ones are the northern adapted pigeon peas bred by, I wish I could remember his name right now, but an Indian man, university professor in Georgia, to flower and go to fruit in our latitude, in our climate.

Just chiming in here to say his name is Dr. Sharad Patak from the University of Georgia, Tifton. May he rest in peace. Since they're daylight dependent to go to flower, usually if you'll, like if we took those, seeds from the Philippines or the ones that I got from Puerto Rico, they all get big and beautiful, but then they have a flower or fruit here. And the professor that bred these, you know, has obviously done an amazing job because these are loaded with flowers and fruits. So is that all pigeon peas? As far as I know, this is the only one I've heard of that we'll make fruit here. There may be others, but this is the first time I've seen it or heard of it. And we've been

lucky to work with East New York farms in Brooklyn who got the seeds from. Cornell who got the seats from that breeder and so now this year four four farms are growing them for our catalog including East New York Farms and our farm and Amiris farm here at Greensgrove and the former director David from East New York farms is in California growing them also for the catalog oh cool I can connect you yeah you want to visit him maybe I can try to find some cajo seeds and see if they'll they'll flower out in Oakland I think they would Oh, that's a good idea.

Yeah. Definitely get longer days. Mm-hmm. Cool. Well, let's find an actually quiet place just so I can ask you about your seed-keeping journey. Sure. The sorghum is beautiful. That's the sorghum, right?

That is, yeah. You're going to have a lot of sorghum seeds. I know. It's a good sorghum year for us. Yeah. We're back in the corn room. Thank you for sharing some. Thank you for sharing so much about your food ways through your seed friends.

You know, the podcast is mainly about seed stories, and we've been there and done that now. I'd love to know if there's any others you want to share, and then also just hear about your journey with seedkeeping in general where you've been, what it's meant to you and where you're going. There's so many plants that I'm just still getting to know, and I really want to be able to spend more time in the Philippines. and get to learn who our plants are. A lot of the things that we want to eat here in the U.S. are not available to us because it's a tropical country. And yeah, the other thing that I want to share is that, you know, the Philippines is like this kind of like some political context

is that the Philippines is kind of like the main economic and political outposts of the United States in Asia. So our seed history has kind of reflected that, So when the U.S. gave over power back to the Philippines, one of the ways that they were able to continue controlling us was through our seedways. Some of the first GMO experimentation projects that happened outside of the U.S. happened in the Philippines,

starting in the 50s and 60s with rice, funded by different foundations here in the U.S., like the Rockefeller Foundation and stuff. So if anyone's heard about, like, golden rice and things like that, those seeds were patented in the Philippines in different labs there. And yeah, that really, like, threatened a lot of our indigenous seeds. So here's that clip that we started this whole episode off with. I'm chiming in here to say that for any of you saying, oh, GMOs weren't started in the 60s.

It's true. What Kai is referring to is the International Rice Research Institute, which was started in 1960 and laid the groundwork during the green. revolution for what would later kind of focus on golden rice and GMOs. But back in the beginning, when they were funded by the Rockefellers, their focus was on high-yielding varieties, taking indigenous varieties, and working with lots of chemical inputs and monocultures to kind of create rice as an export. And later, that same institute is the one of the players bringing in the GMO rice and the golden rice. So just to throw that in there for any of you wondering about that. Back to Kai.

It is kind of like the dark side of seed history, but I feel like people should know. And I think that's something that I'm wanting to reclaim and why I need to spend more time back home in the Philippines is because a lot of these like native heirloom seeds, even farmers here who are Filipino, don't have those things because they don't have the seeds from back home. So it's, going to take some time and work and building relationship with farmers there and indigenous people who haven't experienced the same level of colonization that peasant farmers have faced now yeah so that's something i feel really passionate about and i look forward to when this pandemic kind of calms down so that i can travel there and meet farmers who are doing this work

nice are there any that you already know of that you kind of give you hope yeah i want to shout out an organization called Masipag. It's some acronym, but the word Masipag means like hardworking or like steadfast and it's a farmer-led research organization that does recovery of heirloom native rice varieties and they're also doing experimentation and breeding of new upland dry rice varieties that are climate resilient and can stand up to things like typhoons and droughts and heavy erosion and different mountainous areas. So yeah, that's that's an organization I want to shout out because it's a farmer and

peasant-led work. And another organization that I know is growing heirloom food Filipino vegetables is Kai farms ironically because my name's Kai. And they're based in the central Luson area and they're friends with Beatrice too. Yeah, it's a very small community out there of folks who are, they're like a permaculture farm that does native Filipino vegetable growing and seed keeping. Yeah, I love to visit them when I get a chance. Nice. Well, I'd love to hear about your journey with seed keeping, like I said, where you've been, how you got into this, and where you, like, what have been the powerful moments for you and where you see it going. Yeah. Well, I mean, I have to give a lot of credit to you, Owen. Not to be. I don't know.

to toot your horn, but yeah, no, seed keeping was introduced to me through you, pretty much. It wasn't something that I knew about, like, seed saving and heard about this, but when I started farm school, that's when I started to really see the importance of seeds. And that's, like, a point of really deep reconnection for many of us who are living in the diaspora. It's, like, that's where it starts, right? Like, if we can have access to the seeds, then we can have access to our food and to our medicine. And that's something I feel really passionate about is reconnecting my people to our food and to our medicine. And not only like in the physical sense, but also the spiritual sense that we're able to reclaim a part of ourselves that's been lost through colonization

and migration. Yeah, so I went to farm school in New York City. You were my mentor or teacher for training of trainers, right? Yeah, so that's how we met. And then it was my second year of farm school and we do an apprenticeship. And so I wanted to work with True Love because someone who works with True Love now, Zainab, lived in Newark and so we were neighbors basically

and we were commuting down together. So that was really beautiful. Like in the middle of the pandemic also when so many people were passing away and there was this huge focus on the loss of life that was happening. We were like creating life and growing seeds and reconnecting with the possibility of our ancestors, foods, and medicine. So yeah, for me, that's like, it's a very deeply spiritual journey. It's shown me how much work there's still to be done in reclaiming. Because I

felt like so fascinated watching folks reclaim, especially like African diasporic seeds and seeing like how much diversity they're reclaiming. And then to look at Filipino seeds, and I was like, okay, there are a few that I can identify, like the bitter melon and the maringa and the salooa that we can grow here, and some folks have grown here. But I want to find more of those, like, native seeds.

Yeah, that have, like, the deeper story and relationship to the farmers and to the people who originally stored at them. So, yeah, it's a journey, and I'm looking for it. forward to all the possibilities yeah and it sounds like you've inspired or mentored maybe in informal ways some of your friends can you talk anything about that yeah i think it's really beautiful right i mean we were in jersey city and when was that that must have been what

like july when we planted the kikina yeah and you were really nervous you were like i don't know like am I doing this right and how many things do I put in a row how many do I put in a row how many they space them is okay if they're like this many different plants in the same bed yeah yeah all those beautiful questions and I think the thing that I wanted to remind you about is like to also trust your relationship with them and like even though you've never physically held them, like your ancestors held these seeds. And so that memory is like also in you. And so just like assisting you like, oh yeah, like this is how you space them or this is how much water they're going to need. Like this plant likes more sun. So we should put those

seeds in that part of the bed where it gets more sun. But that part of like just you watching them grow, it's like something that that was that's your relationship. And I feel like grateful that I could connect you with that and help you find confidence that you could do it on your own yeah and have what did you say I said I love you I can only hear where the mic is facing I love you do you mind if I ask you a quick question can you just tell people your name and and what we're talking about right now like what what did you do Oh hi everybody, my name is Yawa, my use them pronouns, and we were just talking about how Kai helped me start growing this summer for the first time in a plot in Jersey City. So I planted some seeds that were native to the America as a way to trace back some of my history, which Kai mentioned a little bit earlier.

And I planted, you have another friend here. The Wakatai, the Bekao, Kishkinia, and Aztec sweet herb. And I think it's actually, it affirms what Kai said that the seed that I was most sort of like intuitively like attracted to was the Wakatai. And it's the plant that grew the tallest. Like I remember looking really close and it was like spotted almost and I was like, wow, like this is incredibly beautiful. Like I've never seen a seed like this. and then it just is now like taller than me. Beautiful, thank you for sharing that.

Great, and so now you've moved across the country. You're very far from us. What's kind of next with your seed journey? Yeah, well, I started working for a really awesome organization called Agroecology Commons, and we're going to start sorting a two-acre piece of hillside land in the Bay Area and that's going to be very much driven

by like our ancestral backgrounds in terms of the food that we're growing so I'm really hoping that we'll be able to grow some seeds that I want to grow this year I'm thinking specifically yeah the saluya the um the rice pea

and something I really want to do is grow some rice like I don't know how I can get access to Filipino like dry land for varieties over here but I'm sure someone has them. And there's this other seed that Kristen Leach has been sorting. It's a Filipino eggplant, an heirloom eggplant called the Mestisa eggplant. It's ironic that it's called Mestisa because Mestisa means mixed and it's an heirloom seed. But yeah, it's this really beautiful like

Chinese style eggplant so it's somewhat slender but it's down like maybe like three or four inches long and it's like a white base with like these beautiful faint like purple stripes on them and I've never really seen that eggplant in Filipino markets in the Philippines you almost always see the pretty standard like dark purple Chinese eggplant yeah so I'm really excited to grow that and hope I can create like new generations of that seed yeah so those are I think the ones that I really want to focus on especially since it'll be my first time growing seed kind of on my own or with other

people but I'll kind of be leading that so I kind of want to start with just a few and really learn how they pollinate and all the things that they need to really like live full healthy lives so the seeds are healthy when we send them to other people yeah awesome well I'll have to if you were be open into it, I'll send you with some of the Maruka Hill rice that we grow, which is an upland rice, and it's from Trinidad, but it's a start. And you could grow multiple rice varieties together, not that far from each other, and they don't cross too much.

Okay. So, yeah, we'll send you with a bunch of seeds. Sweet. Very excited that you're continuing your seed keeping journey in such a meaningful and powerful and substantial way that you'll be able to grow these things. So it's just cool to see. I just can't wait to see how that goes this year and what comes of it. Yeah, I can't wait to send you some seeds, too, to share with other people.

Yay! From Apprentice to True Love Seeds Grower. Seriously. I hope, yeah, and other future apprentices are inspired by what they're hearing from past apprentices. Yeah. One season of learning, like, yielded so much. Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah, quite a blessing. Cool. Well, I'm so glad that you could come here in person. Yeah. And thanks for sharing so much of yourself with the people listening. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you also. Both of you.

No, thank you. The cat, too. So before we leave you with the end of the episode, I asked Kai to send a audio recording of an update on how they are doing now, since it's been a while since the interview. you last fall. So here you go. Peace, Owen. Here's a short recording for you for the Seeds and their People podcast. So first off, I want to offer some gratitude to you, Owen, for sharing this

space and documenting my own words and my story in relationship to seeds, food sovereignty, and reconnecting with our earth-based traditions as people in the diaspora. You asked for some updates about my seed journey, and I guess I will share that I moved to the Bay Area about a year ago in California with some deep intention to cultivate more deeply and to meet some Asian-American farmers who are doing the deep work of cultivating heirloom and native varieties of ancestral crops. I haven't been able to grow seed this year because I will be traveling at the end of the year through the fall and through early

winter of next year. And so I knew that I wouldn't be able to grow seeds in the way that I want too, but I know that's okay because seeds require patience. And so I'm planting the seeds of growing my ancestral seeds in the coming season. But this year, I've been able to grow some things in my home garden, including some Waxican corn, some long beans, some of the Salvadorian friehold rojo de seda that you shared with me as well as some medicinal herbs but during this time i've been doing a lot of teaching and weaving a lot of the earth-based indigenous knowledge that i've been fortunate enough to reclaim in my own life and sharing that with people in my community through some online classes that i've been teaching called kinabuhi unpaon which translates to food as

life in English. And this is a class where I've been teaching about Filipino food medicine, as well as seed sovereignty, and the impact of colonialism and imperialism on our ancestral food ways. So I have been doing a lot of work around the seeds, but talking more about the stories and empowering other people in our communities to take charge of their health. their ancestral food ways and to be able to prepare things in the ways that our ancestors did so that we can come back into a place of balance and health in our lives. I've also been working really deeply with young people and teaching them about spiritual

traditions of ancestral reverence as well as like environmental justice. and that has been really beautiful work and we actually did some seed saving exercises with tomatoes because it's something that's really easy to do and so we taught them about fermentation of seeds and they really loved that so that has been where a lot of my seed journey has been coming in and tending to the seeds of our people literally like the people seeds young people and making sure that they know as well about their ancestral food ways, their medicine, their spiritual traditions. And so that leads me to my last update, which is that I will be traveling to the Philippines

at the end of this year after some other travels to learn about ancestral spiritual traditions, food ways, as well as seeking out some heirloom. native seeds from the Philippines. I'm really committed to learning about rice and how that is really the foundational food crop of our people that has been like greatly disrespected over the years because of corporate agriculture and genetic modification. So for me, learning about rice and how to grow rice, it's like a sacred tradition and a sacred reclaiming that I'm entering into. And I'm really excited about. I'm also really looking forward to finding different varieties of beans and squashes and medicinal herbs that I can also grow here in the United States. I think it's going to be really

exciting to be able to reclaim a lot of these seed ways and finding ways to find just maybe even like four or five heirloom seeds that are not commonly cultivated by Filipino Americans in the United States. Even that little bit is like an act of resistance to, you know, many of these institutions in the Philippines like the International Rice Research Institute that pioneered the genetic modification of rice in Southeast Asia. And that is a organization that was founded in the Philippines and has greatly influenced agriculture all over Asia and even in other countries and continents in the world. So, you know, that's where my see. Seed journey has been. I haven't been able to grow the seeds themselves, but I feel really grateful

to take what I've learned from true love and to spread it out in different ways. So a lot of it has felt like wild seeds that just grow on their own. And I think that's really beautiful because that's what plants do. They propagate themselves and they spread across the lands. And that is a really deep wisdom that I think as human beings that we can really reclaim and integrate into our lives as we're moving through these difficult times. I think that is a really crucial key to our liberation and to reclaiming our indigenous ways in our diasporic cultures. Thank you so much to Kai for doing this interview with us and for all of your work.

And thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seeds and Their People. Please also subscribe and leave a positive review. Thank you also for supporting our seed keeping and storytelling work by ordering seeds, calendars, and more from our website. Trueloveseeds.com. And again, please sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com slash true love seeds. We could really use your support. And remember, keeping seeds is an action.

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