Taste of Place

Episode 1

What is Pepper?

[00:00:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A taste of place, of time, of space, of memory. How do we find a way to belong, a way to look at the past and to build a future? My name is Dr. Anna Sulan Masing and I hope to answer those questions as we explore taste and memory throughout the series. Welcome to a Taste of Place, a Whetstone Radio Collective podcast.

[00:00:36] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: A little about me. I'm a writer, poet and academic. My PhD looked at how identity changes when space and location change. I am Iban, an indigenous community from Borneo and I'm a New Zealander, but I've lived most of my life in the UK. This podcast searches to give place meaning. We will unravel our sense of nostalgia and understanding of [00:01:00] spaces

[00:01:00] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: we have existed in, tasting our way through time and place. Throughout the season, we will be discussing pepper, an ingredient, plant and crop that is integral to cultures across the world.

[00:01:18] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper is also equally important to my personal history. I grew up seeing it grown on my family's farm in Sarawak Malaysia on the island of Borneo. To me, pepper was a plant that we grew. I wasn't familiar with it as an ingredient. Pepper was a place of home and childhood and of the greenness of jungle and the rush of rivers.

[00:01:44] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We'll begin our conversation with the origins of the global pepper trade dating back to the East India Company. Then we'll follow the journey of Sarawak pepper from farm to table. We'll learn about the science of flavor down to the [00:02:00] molecules and what makes us crave the foods we do. We'll explore the psychology in neuroscience behind how food is one of the most powerful tools for creating memories. And through the lens of pepper,

[00:02:13] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: we'll travel together from London restaurants to a Scottish castle, to the rivers and markets of Kapit and finally return home to London where we'll cap off the season with a little party and discussion on nostalgia and a delicious meal with good company. On this first episode of Taste of Place, we answer the question: what is pepper? Dr. Patricia King, an associate professor at the university Putra Malaysia and part of the Sarawak Pepper Farm Project tells us how pepper has grown and what makes Sarawak pepper so special. We'll then hear from food historian, Julia Fine, about how pepper changed history, connecting the east and west and how plants have shaped our [00:03:00] past and present identities.

[00:03:02] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Join me in this deeply personal journey, looking at how we use taste and nostalgia to create our world.

[00:03:16] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper is specific to my personal history and my own migration story. It is also ubiquitous to so many cultures, including in the global north where it isn't grown, that it feels part of every day. Through pepper, I will be tackling our personal relationships with nostalgia and the past, and how to address our own relationship with home.

[00:03:41] Kimberley Wilson: Listening to the elders, my grandparents, talk about the foods that they would eat back home that they couldn't get here. There was always a sense for me of food being about place. And if you had the opportunity, some of it could come with you or come to you. 

[00:03:56] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This is Kimberly Wilson, a psychologist who [00:04:00] studies the intersection between psychology and food.

[00:04:04] Kimberley Wilson: It's quite difficult to pin down what nostalgia is. The easiest way to think about it is a kind of sense of longing, but kind of aching for home. So if we use that as our basic understanding of nostalgia, then there are lots of ways and reasons that smell and taste, take us to those places. The primary one is that your sense of smell,

[00:04:27] Kimberley Wilson: so the nerves in your nose and the olfactory bulb are the only sense that has a direct connection to your hippocampus and your amygdala. The amygdala is about recognizing novelty. It's about galvanizing the rest of the brain and the body to say, oh, we need to act now. And the hippocampus is the part of the brain that is central to memory and memory consolidation.

[00:04:52] Kimberley Wilson: So we have this way that smell and taste because most of taste is smell, have a direct highway to your [00:05:00] memory center. 

[00:05:03] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: While exploring this series and to understand the space of home and childhood and how that has affected my understanding of my identity, I went back to Sarawak and visited pepper farms run by indigenous Iban communities in the Borneo jungle.

[00:05:20] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I had to challenge the way I saw the spaces of Sarawak, which to me, is one of childhood comfort and holidays and resee it as spaces of labor. I grew up seeing pepper being grown on my family's farm in Sarawak. And my mother has many memories of working in those gardens. 

[00:05:39] Fiona: I remember numerous times we would harvest the pepper and it was all on the stalk. And then we would have to trample it to get the peppercorns off the stalk.

[00:05:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The Iban are farmers, and a crop that sustains small, independent family farms often deep in the interior is pepper. In Kapit, the area of Sarawak that my family are [00:06:00] from, pepper is one of the very few, if not the only crop that has grown that gets exported internationally.

[00:06:06] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And it has become renowned globally for its high quality featuring on Michelin starred restaurant menus, French farmer markets, and local neighborhood joints in the global north. The story of pepper is one that is woven into my history with threads that thicken, or at times are barely there. In my childhood, it was not an ingredient, but a feature in a landscape that plotted space, lime green pepper trees on the hillside up river. Through my PhD field work, also upriver and in and around the town of Kapit, pepper was out of focus, but the relationship to farming, ritual and people was center.

[00:06:47] Dr. Arielle Johnson: What is culture? You could define it as things that you do a lot that you have positive associations to, with people that are near you. 

[00:06:58] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This is Dr. Arielle [00:07:00] Johnson, a flavor scientist. 

[00:07:02] Dr. Arielle Johnson: So on a more like macro level, there's thousands or millions of people doing the same thing. So they form the same positive associations, but from person to person, you cook a dish, you create an aspect, an instance of a culinary item, and then share it with somebody and then 

[00:07:17] Dr. Arielle Johnson: they're both drawing up their positive connotations to that and building them stronger. 

[00:07:24] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And now finally, the last few years I have taken the pepper grown in the remote jungles of Sarawak, dried under the equator sun, into my hand and looked at it hard. I've begun to think of it as a food and as a commodity, but I've wrestled with this idea.

[00:07:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper's tinged with my nostalgia ingrained as memory and emotion. And it is hard to resolve that identity into economics. Even now, as I talk about the place of Sarawak, the town of Kapit and traveling to get there, I'm aware of my predominantly global north audience and my desire to talk about [00:08:00] the tropical beauty and the difference of place with a sense of romance and even exoticism.

[00:08:06] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: To really understand personal nostalgia, especially when it comes to food. It is also important to interrogate the systems we exist in. How did I come to London? And how is pepper part of that story? 

[00:08:18] Dr. Arielle Johnson: In terms of our personal histories, histories within families or other like close ties, you can't really recreate a feeling.

[00:08:26] Dr. Arielle Johnson: But you can recreate or create another instance of a flavor and communicate something to somebody that goes beyond words right to their emotional centers. An enhancement to understanding history in addition to the ways we might typically do that.

[00:08:41] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We are decolonizing our understanding of the past diving into our nostalgia and memory to better build our future.

[00:08:50] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: But first this story starts with pepper. What is pepper?[00:09:00] 

[00:09:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: When I speak of pepper, I'm talking about peppercorns, the dried black kernels that are cracked over scrambled eggs and are kept on many dining room tables beside the salts. My experience in understanding of pepper, particularly the last few years is through the lens of Sarawak pepper. Pepper is a fruit that has grown on a vine, picked just before ripening and dried often under the sun until black to create the peppercorns.

[00:09:26] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Believed to be native of Kerala, and in particular, the Western Ghats in the southwestern part of India, one of the wettest regions of the country. The pepper plant botanical name piper nigrum, is an evergreen plant and when cultivated uptakes can grow up to 10 meters, but are usually only half of this. The berries grow in a stem and look a little like a string of pearls about 10 centimeters long, and the leaves are beautiful, elongated hearts, almost lime green in color. They're quite bushy vines and are planted about three meters apart. Pepper grows [00:10:00] well in tropical humid climates and is propagated from stem cuttings. It has often grown beside other crops. In Sarawak, I've seen pepper gardens surrounded by pineapples. It isn't only black peppercorns that are used.

[00:10:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The unripe green berries are picked, boiled or freezed dried to keep them green. They have a fresh flavor with less heat. Red peppercorns are the ripened berries used in a similar way as green peppercorns. They're slightly sweeter and juicy. White peppercorns are made from ripe berries with the outer layer washed away.

[00:10:35] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: There are various methods to do this. But for the one I have seen in a farm just outside of Kapit and the one that is most common in Sarawak, the berries were left in a soft bag and washed for a week by a fresh, free flowing stream. The quality of the water is of course, key to the quality of the peppercorns. For me, white pepper corns are my favorite.

[00:10:58] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: They are [00:11:00] incredibly aromatic. It is the scent that hits you first. And I like to put it in a broth or a soup, and often right at the end.

[00:11:16] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: To get a little more detail about pepper farming, I spoke to Dr. Patricia King of the Sarawak Pepper Farm Project. Every country has a slightly different way of farming and approaching pepper. But by looking at Sarawak pepper, we can get an idea of the labor involved, the issues that affect global farmers and an insight into the little corner of the world that I call home. In Sarawak, there are three varietals of pepper grown, the Kuching which is the traditional cultivar, Semengok Perak which was introduced in 1988 , Semengok Emas in 1991 and Semengok Aman in 2006. One of Patricia and her team's key aims is to support the farmers and to find ways for the industry, which is predominantly small holders, to be sustainable, both [00:12:00] environmentally and economically.

[00:12:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This is a challenge for a lot of different reasons of which you'll hear. But for example, the traditional method is to use bilion wood - or Borneo iron wood, for the stakes that the vines grow up. This is important because the stakes last then for generations, which are sustainable for that reason, but the trees are protected as they take equally as long to grow and therefore aren't replaceable.

[00:12:21] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: So how do you use and or find equivalent robust materials?

[00:12:28] Dr. Patricia King: I'm Patricia King, I'm born in Bintulu, Sarawak and, I'm calling from Bintulu, Sarawak. I'm associate professors in the University Putra Malaysia, and I'm leading the Sarawak pepper projects. This project actually was initiated in 2018. We are fear that the industry is not sustainable. Number one, so talk about the challenges they faced by the Sarawak people.

[00:12:52] Dr. Patricia King: Farmers is that one thing is the frustrations of the price. The price is keep on frustrating. So the farmers profitability cannot be predict. [00:13:00] Another one of course is big pest and disease. So we have three project looking at three different main pest and disease problems mainly is a, an root problems, the fungus infections, how are the ways that we can actually help.

[00:13:13] Dr. Patricia King: And in Sarawak, we still wanted to maintain, not using any chemical treatment. And that is the beauty of Sarawak peppers. Mostly everything is still organic. Therefore we wanted to maintain this. How can we control the pest and disease with more environmental friendly methods? Pepper is actually one of the Sarawak's oldest exports and it has been named one of the most popular and all rounded peppercorns..

[00:13:41] Dr. Patricia King: And the spice is the major commodity crops of Sarawak. Why we love pepper so much it's not only because we are well known of the good quality of the pepper, it's something that we are so used to have in every meal that we have. It is a very important spice. The [00:14:00] spice out our life. 

[00:14:03] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Pepper in Sarawak is so integral to life in rural spaces.

[00:14:07] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Sometimes it is the main crop of a farm and other times it is almost an afterthought. Pepper features in Sarawak cooking, but mostly pepper is considered a cash crop to be exported like rubber used to be. This doesn't make it any less important. It is a strong pulse in the life of Sarawakians. Pepper money puts children through school, feeds families, creates connectivity and trade routes throughout the state and beyond. And it is a key flavor in one of my most favorite dishes. A dish that has heralded in Sarawak is known worldwide and featured in the late Anthony Bourdain shows - No Reservations and Parts Unknown, where he called it the breakfast of gods.

[00:14:53] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And it is a key part of my identity, the Sarawak laksa. The excellent Singaporean [00:15:00] cookbook author, Brian Koh's recipe calls for a whole tablespoon of peppercorns for serving for just two people. Because of pepper's role in the everyday lives of Sarawakians, Patricia goes on to explain the process of farming and the elements important to the plant's success. 

[00:15:20] Dr. Patricia King: In Sarawak, basically majority of the pepper farmers are actually small holders, and then they planted in a hilly landscape. We use lot of traditional methods. Sometimes they do this shifting, but mostly there will be in one place. So, what they do is that they could clear the land and after that they were allowed two to three months

[00:15:40] Dr. Patricia King: and then after that, they will start to plant. The hilly landscape will help to make sure that there is no water retentions. So there is the traditional methods. They don't really use a lot of fertilizer. They don't have any pesticide, things like that. So basically it depends on the land itself, the soil condition.

[00:15:58] Dr. Patricia King: I think that is also one of the [00:16:00] things that makes Sarawak pepper so interesting is because the soil of Sarawak, that's why Sarawak pepper is protected under geographical indications because the, soil itself the profile that give a certain aromas test to the pepper. And in terms of harvesting, they also use hand pick that is very labor intensive.

[00:16:18] Dr. Patricia King: And then mostly now the old generations are still doing it. And then a lot of young generations, they already move out from those rural areas. They go to the cities and towns. This is also one of the problems, the labor shortage, the challenges in this industry nowadays. 

[00:16:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: One of the key aspects of growing pepper, which I mentioned earlier is that it has grown with other crops. Pepper farmers are small holders and they don't mono-crop. Pepper is farmed alongside palm oil, and rice, and many fruit trees, often grown for personal consumption.

[00:16:53] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: One of the things that really struck me when speaking to Dr. King was how unwieldy harvesting is. She spoke about how [00:17:00] one vines berries might ripen at different times, meaning that it can be quite hard to plan harvests and can result in yields being low. What this means is that usually harvesting happens when most of the berries on the plant begin to ripen. The Malaysian Pepper Board confirmed the black pepper in Sarawak is produced from the fresh ripe berries, plucked from the pepper vines, and then usually dried under the sun for about three to four days.

[00:17:25] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: This is a little different to the other research I have done from other places which use unripe berries. In Sarawak, all harvesting is done manually. As well as the labor of harvesting, the farmers are at the mercy of supply and demand in the global markets. When there is a significant difference in price between the black and white pepper, Sarawak farmers may select more berries to be turned into white pepper.

[00:17:48] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The process of soaking, cleaning and drying of pepper to become white typically takes about two weeks. 

[00:17:54] Dr. Patricia King: The price is actually determined by the demands and the supply. So that is one thing, not only does pepper, [00:18:00] all the food have a lot of challenge because of the COVID pandemic. So the logistic disruptions has causing a lot of, uh, prices to increase or skyrocket. 

[00:18:09] Dr. Patricia King: Most of the pepper exported mainly as for spices. 

[00:18:14] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The history of pepper cultivation in Sarawak, Patricia explained to me, was started first by the Chinese, before the indigenous people, collectively known as the Dayak, started to take up farming when the Chinese moved out of rural areas into urban spaces. And so pepper farming has remained on the outskirts.

[00:18:30] Dr. Patricia King: Based on the history that we read is in the 1840s, something like that, a lot of Hakka Chinese in Bao district, they are the first Chinese settlements that started to plant this paper. The reason being is that at that time, the Rajah Brooke, the Charles Brooke. 

[00:18:48] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I just wanted to quickly explain the history of Sarawak and who Rajah Brook is.

[00:18:53] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: James Brook born and raised in India under the Company Raj of the British East India Company, served in the east India company [00:19:00] army before leaving due to an injury. He then set sail on his schooner, the Royalist, to Singapore to try his hand at trading. He struck up a deal with the Sultan of Brunei, where he would quell an uprising led by indigenous peoples, particularly the Iban, and an exchange would receive land. Successful in his endeavors, he was given the title by the Sultan as Rajah of Sarawak. He acquired more and more land, which would eventually become the modern day Sarawak. And his family ruled for three generations as the self-titled, The White Rajas of Sarawak. Charles Brook was James's nephew and successor, and his government gave a lot of incentives to promote the growing of pepper so that they could export it to Europe.

[00:19:39] Dr. Patricia King: Because that time pepper is one of the major commodity and is very sough after spices. So Rajah Brook wanted to make sure that a lot of peoples are planting this pepper. I think he also see that the weather and the soil conditions is good. So therefore they have promoted this. 

[00:19:56] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And what dish or food do you think of when you think of pepper?[00:20:00] 

[00:20:00] Dr. Patricia King: Sarawakians, we eat Western too. So black peppers, you know, the beef, things like that. It's a Chinese, I'm a Chinese and we, we also use a white pepper to put into the soup and it to spice up things like that. 

[00:20:13] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: What do you think makes Sarawak pepper so good and how do you see the future of Sarawak pepper? 

[00:20:21] Dr. Patricia King: They say that Sarawak pepper is actually very balanced in terms of the heat and then the flavor and the pungency is a very balanced.

[00:20:31] Dr. Patricia King: So when you put it with other spices or things like that, herbs like that, they will maybe too overpower the rest. So I think that Sarawak pepper is very good is because number one, we actually maintain the quality. And then the varieties that planted by Sarawak farmers, all these have very, very citrus spicyness and the flavor is very strong.

[00:20:57] Dr. Patricia King: That is why Sarawaks are very [00:21:00] proud of our own pepper. 

[00:21:03] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The combination of distinct flavor, it's history in Sarawak and the integrity with which it has farmed is all why pepper is a proud part of Sarawakians' identity.

[00:21:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: As pepper moves from the farm setting, the meaning of it changes and the relationship pepper has with the people around it shifts. But before we can begin to understand this changing identity, we need to have a framework with which to work in, to contextualize the crop. The plant and the ingredient. For this, I spoke with Julia Fine. 

[00:21:43] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: First and foremost, please introduce yourself in any way that you would like to be introduced and explain what you do. 

[00:21:49] Julia Fine: My name is Julia Fine and I'm a food historian. And right now I'm working at Dunbarton Oaks, which is a museum and library in Washington, DC. I'm working on a project there called the Plant [00:22:00] Humanities Initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.

[00:22:02] Julia Fine: So I'm basically researching kind of the cultural histories of lots of different plants, particularly edible plants. So I've looked at tumeric and rice and maize and hops and all sorts of things. And I'm moving to California in the fall to start my PhD in history at Stanford. 

[00:22:17] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: What does pepper mean to you? 

[00:22:19] Julia Fine: So pepper is kind of, you know, the ubiquitous spice on American dining tables with kind of salt and pepper.

[00:22:25] Julia Fine: But I think it also, at least for me kind of emblematizes, you know, the importance of why I study food history and kind of understanding how something that ubiquitous can have this really violent and really critical history to study. So growing up I'm from the US, I saw pepper on my dining tables. I thought pepper was from the Americas, just cuz that's where I was growing up.

[00:22:46] Julia Fine: Um, and it was everywhere I looked and I didn't really begin to understand why it was that way or why it was so important or significant until I studied the history of colonization. There's this amazing quote I really loved, [00:23:00] um, by Solomon Rushdie and it talks about how, if it hadn't been for the pepper corns, then what's happening in east and west might have never begun.

[00:23:08] Julia Fine: And, and it talks about how it says that India was not so much subcontinent as subcondiment. And so I think it really gets at kind of how pepper and other spices, like nutmeg and cinnamon really spurred on the beginnings of the Imperial project. 

[00:23:24] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: When speaking with Julia, I was particularly interested in the framework she used when looking at plants, how can we try to make that connection between plant a farmed crop and food, belonging, and identity?

[00:23:34] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: How do our lives intersect with plants on a daily basis? 

[00:23:40] Julia Fine: We always think about botany in terms of a framework for investing in plants. We think about this kind of scientific, you know, quote unquote improvement of plants and all those things. But I mean, of course, plants are also deeply, deeply cultural from the clothes we're wearing to the food we eat to the literature we read, which also features plants to, you know, the energy we use.

[00:23:59] Julia Fine: [00:24:00] I'm just reading a new book by Omni Top Ghosh and he talks really, really beautifully about how oil and coal are also botanical matter at their core. And so, so what I do in my job with The Plant Humanities Initiative is we look at the science and the botany and the biology, but we look at that in tandem with the humanities.

[00:24:17] Julia Fine: And so we bring plants from the realm of the garden and the laboratories to inside the museum and the archive, and also kind of just the lived experience because they are really everywhere. And so when we're looking at plants, I think it's really important to adopt this kind of interdisciplinary perspective and think about the cultural history of plants.

[00:24:35] Julia Fine: The role of plants in art history and anthropology and literature, and all of these other disciplines in tandem with these kind of quote, unquote scientific disciplines. 

[00:24:44] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Already, you've kind of quoted novelists in this sort of short span of time we've been speaking. How does a stories and novels and literature play a part?

[00:24:54] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Is it accidental for you or just something you are interested in, but I'm really curious about that. You've quoted two [00:25:00] authors. 

[00:25:01] Julia Fine: That's funny that I've quoted novelists so many times. There's this term that I kind of bristle at because it's quite an ableist term, but it it's called plant blindness. Scholars use it to describe kind of the cognitive bias that humans have, where we don't see plants in our everyday life. And I mean, I think about myself growing up, and even now there are trees and flowers and all these plants just, you know, in my everyday life. Before this, I really couldn't name a single one of them.

[00:25:28] Julia Fine: And you just don't notice them, at least many people don't. And I think when you're creating a world, whether that's through literature or through other forms of art or what have you, you really do have to notice them because they're so intrinsically related to human life. And so you have to focus on the plants and the trees and all of these things, and it becomes not just a background, but maybe the foundation. I think novelists, including the ones I've mentioned, but also many others are really doing a great job of using plants in this way, but also tracing their long histories as part of these histories of colonization and other important historical [00:26:00] events. 

[00:26:02] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Plants, food, and dishes migration is mapped onto the movement of people, which is something I wanted to discuss with Julia along with the idea of value. The shifting nature of what is important and of value. 

[00:26:17] Julia Fine: So for us at Dunbarton Oaks, we call this the fundamental paradox of plants. So like you said, we tend to think of plants in human society as unmoving and quite literally rooted to the ground.

[00:26:30] Julia Fine: And I think subconsciously we might think of them as therefore unchanging, but of course there's so much movement and we see both in these traditional histories of what scholars call the Columbian exchange, where crops from the Americas were transferred to Europe. But we also see this in terms of, you know, other colonial and pre-colonial exchange routes.

[00:26:48] Julia Fine: And by looking at the movement of plants, I think we can really understand these histories of colonial exploitation, of economics, of trade, of knowledge transfer. We can understand the histories of, you know, nation [00:27:00] building of markets and ideas surrounding taste which I think are often really obscured when we think of plants as naturalized, whatever that means to their surroundings.

[00:27:09] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Totally. And I think sometimes as you're saying, you know, disconnecting plants with food and ingredient and flavor, and also disconnecting it to trade, and yet they are all those things and they occupy all those spaces. The idea of pepper being grown somewhere, that will have absolutely have had value in place of origin is an ingredient and to cook.

[00:27:29] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And then as soon as it moves, it becomes this commodity, which is still happening now, maybe not so much with pepper, but other things, but I also see that it is happening with pepper. Once we start talking about this specific and suddenly Sarawak pepper becomes this commodity, that is both exciting because it has amazing flavor for sure.

[00:27:47] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And the Providence of that is important. But then it sort of gets traded on that, the exoticism or the difference. And I just wondered how we think about plants and ingredients and societies and [00:28:00] value, I guess. 

[00:28:01] Julia Fine: Yeah. That's a really wonderful question. And what I think is really interesting, especially about ubiquitous crops, like pepper, is that, you know, we talk about the flavor, but I think a lot of scholars now are kind of showing the way flavor isn't global or the same everywhere.

[00:28:16] Julia Fine: Christy Spacman and Jacob Lane are two scholars and they have this really, really great essay, arguing that bodies aren't just molecular interfaces, right? As we see the rise of food chemistry, I think there's this impulse to say, well, you know, pepper, these are just molecules. These are just chemical reactions.

[00:28:32] Julia Fine: So pepper must taste the same for everyone, but of course that's not true. And a lot of sensory historians have shown why that's not true. How what we experience today doesn't necessarily mean that's how people experience it in the past or how I experience it, where I'm living isn't necessarily as someone across the global experience.

[00:28:49] Julia Fine: And so I think it's really interesting and important to look both at value and how people may place these ideas about exoticism on pepper, but also their broader imagination of community or the nation state and [00:29:00] how that's kind of transposed onto pepper. I also think it's really important to look at how the act of eating might have been experienced differently by different people in different historical contexts, both because of, you know, environmental factors, how it was grown, how it was transported, how it was preserved, how it was cooked, but also just in terms of cultural factors and how different contexts means different sensory experiences.

[00:29:23] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: The research you're doing, there is a garden that you can be in, right. So you get to be touching and feeling and part of those plants as well. And how does that physical contact, and then also with the very kind of thinking and research side, how does that integrate and how do you work with both of those?

[00:29:41] Julia Fine: Yeah. I love that question. So at the museum I work in, there's a historic 16 acre garden. So I'm literally working on site of the garden. So many of the plants, which I write about are preserved in this garden. And what I think is interesting is many of the plants that are in this garden are not necessarily native to Washington [00:30:00] DC, where the garden's located.

[00:30:02] Julia Fine: And so it shows, it emblematizes this movement of plants, but you're right, you see the plants in context of other plants, but you don't necessarily see them in what would be called their quote unquote natural context. This project only came about four years ago. And so the garden was there for so much longer.

[00:30:18] Julia Fine: And so we had to really stop and ask questions of, you know, what are the histories of these plants? How did these plants get here to this exact site? What does it mean to be putting these plants in conversation and next to other plants that they might have quote, unquote, no natural relationship with. And I use that in quotes because we should really interrogate these ideas of what is a natural relationship.

[00:30:38] Julia Fine: So it really forced us to ask these questions, but it also really allowed us to think about the material importance of these plants as you kind of gestured to. 

[00:30:46] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Yeah, I think that's wonderful to be able to feel the sort of waxy leaves of like the pepper plants when I'm there. It makes it a totally different theory when you see it.[00:31:00] 

[00:31:01] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: We are all capable of losing the thin thread of where an ingredient comes from and who has had a hand in that story. The complication of food is that it fits into many parts of our existence. Not only does it offer convivial enjoyment or nourishment, it is also integral part of rituals and ceremony and community.

[00:31:22] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: And therefore we often look to its immediacy, what it means to us now in this moment. But ingredients have a history of time and space. Looking at the way ingredients migrate and travel across the world and find their way into different cultures, they tell stories on their journey. Through these stories, we get to understand our own relationships with the ingredients.

[00:31:46] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: I want to explore stories to demystify, to find forgotten voices, to give context to the ingredients. We need to tell better stories about our food. And I do believe that to do this, we need to address [00:32:00] our nostalgia and romance to unpack its complications and to build a better future.

[00:32:16] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Thank you so much for listening to episode one of Taste of Place. Thank you to my guests today, Dr. Patricia King and Julia Fine. I'd like to thank my producer, Catherine Yang, audio editor, Dayana Capulong, researcher Caroline Merrifield and intern Ashley Choi. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder, Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone Radio Collective executive producer, Celine Glasier, sound engineer, Max Kotelchuck, music director, Catherine Yang, managing producer, Marvin Yueh, associate producer, Quentin Lebeau, production coordinator, Shabnam Ferdowsi, production [00:33:00] assistant, Maha Sanad and publicist,

[00:33:03] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: Melissa Haughton. Theme music created by Catherine Yang and cover art created by Whetstone art director, Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast on WhetstoneRadio.com. On Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, on TikTok @WhetstoneMedia and subscribe to our Spotify and YouTube channel Whetstone Media.

[00:33:25] Dr. Anna Sulan Masing: For more podcast content, you can learn more about all things happening at Whetstone at WhetstoneMedia.com.