AgriCultures: Liking 'Dubai Chocolate'

AgriCultures invites “feed to field” engagement with practices of consumption that also consume. To explore how media cooks humanity in this fall-winter-spring series of programs, we'll focus on how agricultural grift intersects with agricultural craft to create the possibility for regenerative media and food systems. From the processing of authentic Belgian milk chocolate, Kataifi pastry, and Italian pistachio cream to its viral production on TikTok, Dubai Chocolate (as both global trend and case study in Evergreen programs) seeds our inquiry.  Where, when, how, and for whom is eating an agricultural act?  Why have the vast majority of chocolate eaters never seen a cacao tree and an even vaster majority of cacao farmers never tasted chocolate? How do measures of sustainability, soil-to-society health, biodiversity, flavor, ethical sourcing, supply chain visibility, and traceability influence adaptive strategies for resilience, equity, and cultural continuity? As an intentional learning community, we’ll consider the histories of global foods and their mediatization. How might the seemingly universal tendency to absorb, transform or otherwise consume that which we identify as “not us” identify food’s power as medium and message?  Why did who transition from being what we ate, to being made ill by what our food ate, to having our attention consumed by “tweeting rather than eating,” to being consumers of TikTok cookbooks by influencers, rather than “authentic” cooks and authors?

With increasing intention and intensity we’ll move between experiencing how food is produced and consumed to reading about, watching, and seminaring on food in climate fiction and documentaries. Place-based learning during weekly farm and food hub practicums as well as field trips (The NW Chocolate Festival, Culinary Breeding Network events) will mirror the frame of AgriCultures. Why? As Wendell Berry puts it, “the circumstances, the place, knowing your place—is all-important. There's this thing I wrote, 'Eating is an agricultural act.'”