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I learned from talking with the group that wrote and researched Guaraní, that I do not have to worry about how I make yerba mate, traditional requires a Bombilla, which is like a metal straw with a filter at the bottom, so I have derived my way of making Yerba Mate for drinking without a Bombilla.

You will need:

Yerba Mate

One cup of Milk

Bamboo or natural coffee drip filter

A drinking straw

Steps:

1: heat milk

2: put filter into cup and fill halfway with Yerba Mate

3: cover cup with hand and shake, then snort the Yerba dust off your hand

4: put cup on an angle and shake slightly

5: pour hot milk into yerba mate, then insert straw on the other side of partition.

6: drink, share and enjoy!

 

Filters can be reused until they fall apart.

eat-a-fat-cuy-kymosaby

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https://blogs.ubc.ca/runasimi/

First and foremost, that above blog is where I have learned so much about Runasimi and Quechua food. I will comment on ayni and ayllu in a separate post.

I went to Peru in 2018, and long story short, I got a fatty liver from eating everything I could for twenty days. We packed a lot into those twenty days, visiting a a huge family and taking 10 days to tour the country south of Lima by bus. Our trip took us all the way south to Arequipa, up to Puno, then down through Cuzco and back to Lima, and only as far north as Churin (Baths of iron, farmed trout and pachamanka).

 

I had no money during this travel, everything was a gift from the family I was travelling with. We saw the Paracas islands, we visited Ica where we tasted and bought pisco, we flew above the Nazca lines and visited Necropolis, I am making two separate blog posts: one on pre-incan archaeology and what dialogue I experience therein (A trip to Spiral Castle), and one on the food I ate with a critical reflection on globalization impact on Quechua foodways, the cebiche of Cerro Azul is the greatest thing ( I had ceviche at every oportunity and had to return to Cerro Azul in Pucasana several times to eat this particular dish made fresh on the beach.

Eat a fat cuy kymosaby, thats what the uncle who hosted my trip to Huacanna said. At night in Huacanna we had to wait for the one street vendor selling dinner to feed all the locals before he would serve us, during this time kids waiting for their food ran around shouting and laughing chasing off scrounging dogs, most of them had never seen a gringo and it was hilarious for everyone.

That was the night after I had my first cuy, the next day I would drink alchohol distributed from jerry cans while toasting salud with family at the mothersday market, my vission went blurry and before the end of that day I would take the oldest mans alchohol away, in the vain hope that he might actually remember that day which meant so much. Ayllu does not get together often enough, the world gets away from us. Pictured below is the Kuchi which gave me the tastiest chicharron.

Wherever I went in Peru, I fell in love with every dog, and embraced them.

dog from Cerro Azul

Momma dog from Huaccana

Dog in Churin

The last thing I will note quickly, is that the food which Quechua people access is mind blowing for me, after visiting peru my favourite fruits are all unavailable to me: Chirimoya is number #1 best fruit I can imagine, followed closely by pitihaya (not pictured). I ate so much fruit, drank so much inca kola, and finished every plate of food I was presented, until on my final two days I literally couldnt stop puking whenever I drank water. I cant imagine doing anything differently, I would get fatty liver all over again just to taste a second fat cuy. And that feeling of needing to have cuy has led me to debate the ethics of raising cuy internationally, which has led to an endless conversation about globalization and foodways.

unhashed thoughts that need rehashing

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Food is immediately local, but money is valued relative to global economics. The North American Free Trade Agreement created a definite set of characteristics which were imposed into the regional politics of Mexico: specifically, Mexico had to agriculturilize its regions without allowing socialism to take hold, NeoLIberalism is the official TriNational ideology of NAFTA: exchange of “capital” is good and desirable in and of itself, “what is being exchange between whom” is designed to be an unanswered question left to “Public Choice” (public choice theory, Mafeo Panteleoni and proto-Fascist-economics). Public choice is an illusion, a legal term used to obscure responsibility. It isnt “public choice” which eliminates diversity in corn species.

Mezcal is booze, drinking booze changes time. Some Mayans drink booze, Ancient Mayans consumed Honey wine. The Mayans are also the greatest astronomers of ancient history. There is a relationship between drinking and watching the stars, Mayanism has nothing to apologize for. Mayanism, the human engagement with Mayan traditions and Mayan artifacts, is a holistic new-age superposition which cannot be pinned down (western origins in Burroughs etc etc) The obsession with eschatological thinking, there is so much to unpack at Chichen-Itza, I dont think I will ever get tired of it.

The concept of respecting mezcal and which Enrique Olvera presents is economic. I agree with it nonetheless, mezcal is something I have never tasted so it remains mystified to my self. A place can be representing in the yoke it produces, and alcohol is the ideological manifestation of a cultures yoke. The ideology of “good booze”, this concept that an alcohol can spiritually embody the taste of a landscape, is palatable to me. Celebrating food and booze is something that everyone actually does need to do ritualistically, and I understand that what Enrique accomplishes with a sauce is to remind anyone of this essential necessity.

Mezcal and NAFTA and Enrique Olvera, I know theres a worthwhile blog post on these subjects, but this aint it.

A food by any other name

7 Replies

Tea is a food, I would argue. I would argue it doesnt matter what we argue. Smoke is food, I would suggest, eating the tar and oil of multiple joints is a real meal. The shamanic rituals of the Shipibo represent a world view, a hermeneutical horizon. The food is a gateway, eating is something we do in the PHYSICAL world that can move our position METAPHYSICALLY. By consuming wisely, a landscape that is unseen can be FELT and REALIZED, and even SEEN or SENSED, but I have no experience in these matters. Food unconceals what is real in our bodies and outside of our selfs. The process of mixing tea leaves into hot water is analogous to an animal EATING anything. As above so below: the shamanic healing is a healing of the world, not some petty personal use (by being precisely a petty personal use in the literal sense, it is an end to itself, treating the individual as a means to achieve the ritual and not vice versa).

 

When it comes to consumption, as a teenager I have done isolated camping with minimal supplies on a diet of wild mushrooms and weed, I rarely eat wild mushrooms anymore. The sensory heightened experience of the adrenaline from being alone in a windstorm on the westcoast is itself enough to create a desire to return to that experience. Being from where you camp is different from adventuring in the wilderness. Gabore Mate has an interesting approach to using ayahuasca for therapy, but in my anecdotal knowledge this does more to validate the upper class drug addiction to ayahuasca, I have a growing suspicion that Vancouverites actually do BECOME “lifecoaches” etc in order to justify their personal use of ayahuasca and appropriation of indigenous aesthetics. I have no doubts that ayahuasca can help heal, but I have no respect for the guise of healing used to mask personal excesses. I would love to consume coca tea all day everyday, but I dont live in the Andes. I have never done ayahuasca, but if I was going to do it, I would do it in secret. Ayahuasca is a secret, just like any experience. That is the irony of seeking a guide to the mysteries of your mind. The concept of guiding is very much too settling for me to accept, I dont like the idea of guiding. I like the idea of art though:

Without asking for a guide, we could reflect on why anything has VALUE. What makes an experience valued and sought after? Its all in the MYTHIC, blowing smoke is to unconceal.

What is a key word if not a search for a secret locked

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Food chains refers to ideology of “the great chain of being”, a teleological world view concretely put forth by Aristotle. Food CHAINS, it SHACKLES us by forcing us to adhere to a food pathway, Food CHAINS, it Condemns us, the substance of a meal will create the body our minds and souls rely upon. FOOD CHAINS, it Links us like a shirt of mail, a finely woven fabric of neigh irreducible bonds. Chains in our food make our food FOOD, the molecular structure of sugars, proteins, carbohydrates and fatty acids, are all Chains which our FOOD is. Chains food, change food, food pathways can only be temporary. Change food Chains, path-find food pathways.  The cosmopolitan, in its original literally cynical (dog-like) usage, is the individual truly in-touch-with food chains and food pathways, the individual who as a citizen of the world, has no home of which to call their own, the indigenous individual whos notion of home and notion of world do not need interrelation because they coincide with a word and a place. Food pathways have eliminated entire food chains, that is an uncontroversial “western” fact. We can change our food chains, by not just questioning, but outright ATTACKING AND REJECTING, adamantly REBUKING the ideology of “the great chain of being”: teleology is really very stupid. AT THE SAME TIME, teleology is extremely useful for critiquing infernal systems which plague our world, so I would encourage anyone to apply teleology and the great chain of being as an ideology against the status quo: CORVIDS and WORMS are at the top and the center respectively of an anti-being great chain (diagram pending). ANTI-DASEIN or anti-western being-in-the-world, is a radically unsettling approach to western philosophy: there is legitimate reason today to say “we as academics steeped in an essentially western ethos need to stop being where we are today, and start being how we should have been yesterday”, anti-anachronistic nostalgia. I believe food is our philosophy, even if you have never read a book or heard a lecture, every person has a distinctive philosophical way of life included in their everyday food pathway and conception of “food chains”. Now, if western consumers can acknowledge that how and what we eat is both IDEOLOGICAL and REAL, we can take responsibility as a CULTURE and enact policy that effect nuanced and hypercritical adaptations which reshape food pathways in a post liberal world that acknowledges the post scarcity of our food production. a friendly reminder that forest fragmentation is easy to visualize, and that this is one place we can begin in a Descartes meditations tabula rasa moment as a starting place for our interpretation of FOOD CHAIN and FOOD PATHWAYS. Forget everything you know about food chains and food pathways, and relearn these keywords from a perspective besides an academic one. What can a food chain even be, when the pollinators food supply (wild flowers in the forest) is nearly eradicated? Can our food pathway to salmon exist while a anthropocentric food chains run roughshod over herring roe and ocean waters?

You are what you eat, from your head to your feet.

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Forgetting what we are, what we eat is where we can find our first MEMORY of SURVIVAL. What we do to survive is how we can be before we do philosophy. Therefore, what we eat and how we eat is essential to understanding how we think and understand anything. There is a world of difference between foraging and running an errand, and there are plenty of people who forage in vancouver, though perhaps we can call that scrounging…

In Dantes comedy, Satan is located at the center of our earth, the greatest density of SIN residing on earth is what holds our bodies down. “Food matters. It has weight, and it weighs us down” Belasco p2. Food is here represented like the satan at the center of the earth, the gravity which holds us down the original sin which itself is the process that unifies what is above with what is below, what comes from the earth and what comes from either ancestral knowledge or a sort of inspiration from being-in-the-world ( a recipe). The idea of a recipe and an ingredient is what formulates any aesthetic, and the invention of new ingredients that are in not ‘ingredients’ or ‘new’ has created a virtual-space of SIMULATED food ideology. The idea of a food pathway is only understandable from within a food pathway, so to relate to food is to know how we ‘get’ food. What I do to get my food in my home is sometimes walk to the store, and then I get whatever ingredients I need that day and I cook them. I have a background that doesnt really have any disciplined cooking habits, and acquiring those habits is a different place to operate from. I am still an unskilled cook. The sin of eating is no sin, it is the choice to stay grounded and be in the world. focusing on indigenous ideas is the only thing that interests me, I believe that in the last few decades but more so the last few years, the Academy has had to scramble to recognize the actually existing doctoral knowledge in indigenous communities in order to contextually legitimize the Academic establishment. In other words: it is becoming unconcealed that knowledge about the world is more knowledgeable than knowledge about knowledge about the world. A recipe is best when it is made. The food is not the recipe, the ingredient is not the ingredient named. Thats the kinda meme Im going for.

What is Point Grey and who occupies that horizon?

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I am following Jay T. Johnson’s call to develop a critical consciousness by engaging with placed-based pedagogies grounded in indiginiety. This essay focuses on his secondary conception for ‘place’: “the embodied location of the everyday struggle for meaning” (Johnson 830). The place I am concerned with is the street corner of cəl̕qʷas (facing inland) and xʷsel̕c̓əχən̓ (going around the outside perimeter of a building). These hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ signs on campus were added a few years ago, in order to represent and preserve the linguistic heritage of this unceded territory. These hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ names show a connection between language and land: wherein locating a place is done relative to natural geography, rather than with cardinal directions (e.g. “facing inland” contesting “east”, etc). The fact that several other hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ street names are approximate translations of the pre-established english street names is a tangential line of inquiry. This essay will analyze the design of the aforementioned street sign, present my interpretive metaphor of it, and illustrate the beginnings of a storied geography.

Beginning my analysis, note that the sign is bisected with the names established by UBC ‘placed’ above the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ names. This positioning is the foundation of my metaphor, and it is firstly significant because in english writing convention, a title below another title is identified as the “subtitle”: a secondary option if the primary title does not suffice. English orthography appears as a subtitle to hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ only after hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ orthography appears as a subtitle to english.

The UBC crest sits in the top left, opposite the Musqueam crest in the bottom right. The fact that the UBC and Musqueam crests are placed in geometric opposition suggests there are other ways in which they may be in opposition, such as in the conventional coat-of-arms that perpetuates colonial symbolism, which UBC adheres to and Musqueam contests: the letters “UBC” are printed above the setting sun and western ocean waves characterized in the flag of British Columbia, all contained within a typical coat-of-arms style shield; by contrast, the Musqueam crest has no letter symbols: a Salish salmon is above the pattern of a fishing net, all contained within the same approximate teardrop shape, but distinctly a downturned arrowhead.

 Here I present my interpretive metaphor: taking notice of the colours, above a dark blue and below an earthy orange-brown hue, imagine a cross section of concrete with clay below it. The blue is taken to symbolize the “concrete” structures of the place “UBC campus”, and the brown underneath it symbolizes the “clay” as the place of the unceded territory that has been metaphorically, linguistically, and geographically paved over. The geography of the UBC campus, its concrete buildings, places, and names, are all constructed above unceded territory; the former effectively invisibilizes the later, and only by passing through the concrete does the clay become represented. Since concrete is expensive to pour, whereas clay could presumably be dug up almost anywhere, capitalism makes it a priority to preserve the concrete before considering what underlies it. Thus, the clay can either break through, contesting the concrete, as was done outside of Brock Hall in 1947, or it can cooperate with the concrete in finding a place where clay could be ‘dug up’ and displayed without damaging the concrete, as with the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ signs.

Therefore, the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ place names are presented as a subtitle to the (un)questionable names established by UBC. The english/hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ sign at xʷsel̕c̓əχən̓ and cəl̕qʷas embodies a storied geography of contestations mediated through cooperation: here UBC campus is located as a colonial/english place, on top of a Musqueam/hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking place.

 

What about the “first” tree replanted outside Geog building?

What do the graduation trees represent?

 

 

Works Cited

Johnson, Jay T. “Place-Based Learning and Knowing: Critical Pedagogies Grounded

            in Indigeneity.” GeoJournal, vol. 77, no. 6, 2012, pp. 829–836.

            www.jstor.org/stable/23325391.

I am from irish settler

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I am from barley,

from pre-Cambrian rock,

and the lake all around.

I am from the kettle,

boiling, pouring,

patiently.

From cooled magma carved by glaciers,

from Wolfie,

and Clancy.

From balsam sap,
and Juniper bushes.

I am from the scythe,

reaping,

Whiskey or wine,

through morning glories hydra head vine

and bonfires built from brushwood.

… ..Like many people, and most every bird, I consider myself from the transition between different places. I grew up between living in west vancouver and living on Lunnys Island, I had freedom from school as a child and instead chose to spend as much time alone and in nature as I possibly could. This led to many of my summers and autumns being rooted in place on Lunnys Island.

I attended the last S.E.E.C semester led by Steve Dunsmuir and then graduated highschool at Windsor House School, a democratic student led program originally founded by Helen Hughes. These backgrounds largely influenced me to attend university on the basis of studying the intersection between teaching and nature, between method and chaos, play and presentation, memes and mimesis. So I started UBC with Arts One Authority and Resistance in 2017. Then summer 2018 I had the experience of traveling in Peru with a family of indigenous Peruvians who allowed me to see a way of being in Peru that a white monolingual tourist would not normally have access to (at least not with simply paying out of pocket, as this vacation for me was a gift from my then and current partner). The impact of travelling in Peru and eating my first Cuy in Huacaña is surmised in my first spanish poem:

I then took Natural Resource Studies at Haida Gwaii in 2019, and more recently studied Latin American Revolutions this spring as Coronavirus started. My goal is to complete an interdisciplinary degree, I have specifically attended university in an attempt to discuss, develop, and encourage ideas of unsettling and decolonizing the academy. This may seem impossible now, but a Renaissance of Infernal Geography may allow new ideas to gain hold and effect material patterns. Food patterns are first.