Our connection to each other, the building of kinship, family, food and culture is deeply planted in us, fueled by our need to belong and share love. This knowing fills us with lightness and happiness. We plate it and serve it.
Food and farming has become my focus for several years. Thinking and writing about food, a sense of home, our children, building the future and what it will take to get there.
I feel a great, deep relief — that I am following, at last, my true path. Years ago, I started talking to farmers, food producers, advocates and policymakers when I co-founded a company called BoomGrow. I also dug deeper in the course of my work as a sustainability consultant advising large companies on their sustainability strategies.
I am acutely aware of the ethics of food and the politics surrounding food. An understanding of food clarifies what it means to truly know a community. Personally, it is rooted to who I am and what I impart to my children.
A lot of our experience on food is sculpted by large corporations. This is a displacement of the highest sense and often, we are ignorant of it. It’s as if we given power to others as we stare at packaged produce in the supermarket aisle, trying to understand labels and prices.
This displacement is deeply worrying for it reflects how we have reduced our responsibility to the world and do not want to imagine our place in it. For all our talk about food, Malaysians are somehow disconnected with how food connects with their sense of place, their sense of belonging. We need to care enough about food to interrogate it further- its origins, growth and procurement.
We have also come to accept that industrial technology can solve all the problems of food production and as a result, forget about what actually goes on in the land, in our kampungs and fields. Our understanding of farms and produce, the dwindling number of farmers, the destructive ways of production and overproduction is further coloured by bigger and better machines, more toxic chemicals and exploited farm workers.
Food is wrapped in memory and culture, politics and history. I suppose this is what Planted and Plated is about.
