Nayantara Sen in Conversation with Tammy Johnson and Julie Quiroz
Our Around The Table series features informal conversations between RFRS community members with thought leaders, elders, organizers, and friends. Together, we take a deep dive––sinking our teeth into the juicy stories, live questions, and critical conversations buzzing in the food and culture space.
What does it mean to transform our organization in service of deep, sustainable culture change? And what does it take to cultivate a worldview of plenty? These were the questions RFRS Director of Programs and Cultural Strategies, Nayantara Sen, brought to the table in an expansive conversation on abundance and cultural strategy with long-time friends, guides, collaborators and mentors Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations and Tammy Johnson of TMJ Universe.
In a previous Notes from The Test Kitchen journal piece, Executive Director, Jovida Ross, shared that as immense transformations churn around us, Real Food Real Stories is stepping into an evolution of our purpose. One major, invigorating change is that we are embracing a new identity as a culture change organization with a new mission: to democratize food culture to feed our collective healing and transformation. Central to this mission is a commitment to cultivating what we’ve coined “worldviews of plenty”––an understanding of the world, and vision for the future, grounded in shared abundance and nourishment.
In an Around the Table conversation held in early August, Tammy and Julie joined Nayantara and an intimate group of community members to share their journeys into cultural strategy work and insights into how we might cultivate an intentional relationship to abundance. We learned so much––from how cultural strategies shape how we know and come to relate to the world around us (and how we are all participants in their creation), to the central role of embodiment and the importance of cultivating a felt sense of abundance, to how a yearning for wholeness and belonging gets to the heart-of-the-heart of the question.
What follows are some highlights and excerpts from this wide-ranging conversation, as well as some reflections and thought-weaving, on how we can all integrate these stretches of imagination and experiences of embodied abundance into our everyday lives.
Some quotes have been edited for length and clarity. To view the full, unedited transcript of our conversation with Tammy and Julie, click here.
Can you share a transformative food moment from your life?
We began our conversation with Tammy and Julie by hearing their personal memories of transformative food experiences, which took us from grappling with mortality and baking guaguas de pan to memories of care, comfort, coffee, and biscuits at the feet of a beloved grandmother.
What is cultural strategy?
After grounding ourselves in story, we dug into shared learning about cultural strategies and the journeys that have brought us all to the messy, deep-tissue, and rewarding work of culture change. Julie kicked us off by sharing her take on cultural strategy:
Julie: I think culture is basically about: what is our relationship to the universe––to the ecosystem of humans and beings. So, what is our relationship to our ecosystem, and how do we behave in our understanding of that relationship? I know anthropologists will say worldview, ideology, la-la-la. So I'll just merge it into: what is our relationship to each other, and our ecosystem, and our universe, and what are the behaviors and practices that are then shaped by that.
A strategy is a collective plan through time and space and conditions to accomplish something, right? Like, we want to do this, and collectively here's how we're gonna do it. So I would say that if you're trying to do something collectively to achieve something, you're never not doing cultural strategy. Either you're aware of it or you're not aware of it, those are the two options––either you are deluding yourself that there isn't a cultural aspect going on, or you're trying to figure it out and trying to move with it… Every strategy is either deluding itself that it's not, you know, reinforcing the cultures that are pushing humanity off the cliff, or they're developing something else.
As we shape RFRS into a culture change organization, we’re aware that we are joining a vast field of practice and a rich, intergenerational arc of movement history. We’re energized by Julie’s reminder that culture shapes everything and our strategies can either intentionally account for how culture affects our conditions, or we can miss crucial opportunities to work with culture to change our conditions.
In hearing Julie and Tammy’s own life stories and journeys, we also learn how diverse backgrounds, sectors and practices that are reflected in cultural strategies —from policy and organizing, to research and movement building, to performance art and poetry. Because cultural strategies encompass the myriad ways in which relationships transform, the inroads to cultural strategy are everywhere.
Cultural strategy involves intentionally shaping culture. This includes shaping culture to affect worldviews, values, relationships, power and resource flows, and practices and behaviors. Like food culture, which exists on many scales (from the food culture of your family of origin, to a neighborhood, to an ethnic group, to a city or region), cultural strategy also works on many scales. Sometimes it reaches mass audiences through pop culture, and sometimes it works through the small, intimate ways in which we socialize norms and behaviors in our families and communities.
Julie also reminds us that cultural strategy in itself isn’t neutral:
Julie: Healthy culture...is about wholeness, right? And wholeness in that relationship to your ecosystem...I'm sure you could do a cultural strategy for fascism, but that's not what we're talking about, right? So, cultural strategy in the direction of wholeness needs to really center people who are yearning for wholeness and have an insatiable desire and taste for it.
Conservative and alt-right movements have been funding and propagating cultural strategies to successfully foster social division for decades. The question we are faced with is how to produce cultural changes that unequivocally birth and sustain justice and liberation.
Importantly, the field of cultural strategy affirms and centers culture-keepers, artists, storytellers, media makers and cultural influencers as agents of social change and cultural transformation. For RFRS, this means that we will be working with food culture-keepers who are the stewards and caretakers of foodways and whose labor is often rendered invisible. We are beginning to lean into the fertile intersection of food, story, media and art, as these four entwined arenas produce and transmit culture. Transforming how food, story, media and art work together, for whom, and to what end, can turbo-boost cultural changes in our society.
To learn more about cultural strategy, we encourage you to dig into Julie’s Elements of Transformative Cultural Strategy and Nayantara and Tammy’s work on the Cultural Strategy Primer.
What’s the role of embodiment in culture change work?
We know that culture changes when we move together, and that unlocking healing requires honoring, witnessing and adapting our bodies to new ways of being. But we have to ask: how do these smaller attempts to move our bodies in unison, with intentionality, actually scaffold to transformative culture change?
At RFRS, we are beginning to integrate embodiment practices into our work. This includes breathwork and body-based movement exercises that we do with our team, but also leading embodied practice with our broader community. As an example, at our last Grief Medicine seasonal storytelling gathering more than 50 attendees joined in in some collective breaths and movement exercises between stories, grounding us in what was a deeply moving and healing storytelling experience.
Tammy’s life work as a professional belly dancer, facilitator and arts educator involves deep embodiment, and Julie worked for years at the Movement Strategy Center to infuse transformative embodied practice in a critical mass of movement leaders. Embodiment, as Tammy articulates, is essential to culture change because felt experiences are fundamental to shaping our understanding of ourselves:
Tammy: After spending 11 years working for a group that was about, you know, partially research––one of the things, especially in the last five to six years [I was there], that we really learned is that data does not change minds. Facts do not change minds. Reality sometimes does not change minds. It's how people feel. It's how it lands here, in their body. And you know the pandemic is telling us — get your body, because that's where the information and wisdom is at.
This information also influences our shared experiences and understandings because embodiment is felt both on the scale of the individual and the collective:
Tammy: Even within groups there's a collective embodiment that always happens of some sort, you know. You see it at protests, right? Where there's this energy from people chanting and singing, or then the energy can shift when the police show up in full gear, right? That's not just the mind thinking, that's our animal brain kicking into our, you know, our vagus nerves and psoas that tell us fight, flight, freeze, right?
There's always something that the body is trying to tell us. And if we're not listening to it––whether we're individually or in groups––it's usually to our detriment, right? It's information.
What is the role of embodiment in cultivating abundance?
Abundance is not just the opposite of material scarcity — it is a felt, embodied, and remembered experience:
Tammy: What is this experience of abundance that we want people to have? We could intellectualize it or we could talk about, you know, what does that mean in a day-to-day life when you move through life––from the time you wake up in the morning, to the time you go to bed––with a felt sense of abundance, versus not? Because it's that felt sense that's going to be the motivator around what you will and will not do.
...We're at a really sacred crossroads, I feel that in my bones right now, right? And if we want a world of abundance and plenty, and we're leaning into each other's liberation, then we gotta give people a felt sense of that. You know, it has to be seen and modeled in the imagination and felt in the body some kind of way...The de-conditioning is a different experience. The de-conditioning is not about logic and facts.
Cultural strategies alchemize these raw materials of change—feelings, immersive experiences, emotions, embodied sensations, innate wisdom of our bodies, and the implicit meaning under our stories. Together, these help us understand, navigate and transform our realities.
Transformative embodied practice is essential for cultural strategy because it allows us to de-condition and shake off habitual, oppressive patterns and to change in our bodies. And food is, of course, the primary embodied source of transformation in our bodies — what we eat literally changes our emotions, energies, rhythms, even our cellular makeup — on a daily basis.
When we combine strategies for food, story, embodiment, and culture, powerful and catalytic transformations are possible.
What’s the scale of our culture change work?
Democratizing food culture can feel like a daunting proposition, because food culture is so varied, adaptive and complex. And, influence over mainstream food narratives and culture can feel really inaccessible. In these conditions, we are wrestling with what it means to democratize food culture and wondering what’s the scale of cultural change that we should organize for?
Reflecting on this question, Julie shared an inspiring nugget about her work with community wealth building through Full Spectrum Capital Partners.
Julie: A big part of my role there is having people tell the story of how they build community wealth. My colleague, Rosa Gonzalez, in that project was working with a community artist around how to get people to talk about vision. So I’ll share what Rosa said to me, which is you start by asking community members, “what do you have in your pocket?”
And I share that because I think when we go vision! we go big, when we should go small, we should go inward.
Story is the perfect form that allows us to embody and internalize visions. Peering more deeply into each others’ stories (and hearts)—and really pausing to look and listen—helps us crack open possibilities for deep mutuality and interdependence. Through witnessing, we can begin to heal ourselves and each other.
As RFRS sets the foundations for place-based strategy in our work and figures out how we want to cultivate supportive practices within regional foodshed communities, we continue to think about our scale and impact. We honor the fractal nature of relationships and culture, and remember what Adrienne Maree Brown taught us in Emergent Strategies–––that “small is good; small is all. The large is the reflection of the small.”
How can we actively practice abundance to cultivate a worldview of plenty?
Cultivating abundance in times of fear and planetary crisis—a deep, embodied, felt sense of possibility and promise—is really hard work. So, how can we unlock liberatory imaginations and practice a worldview of plenty? And what does it mean for an organization like RFRS to rigorously practice abundance?
Tammy grounds this question in a beautiful story about her work with a Black Women’s Freedom Circle in Oakland, which for five years has brought Black women together to support, inspire, and care for each other:
Tammy: What that sparked in my mind was like conversations about abundance put people into binaries of prosperity versus scarcity, right? And when wholeness is in the mix, it feels like to me what we're really talking about is what is our relationship to each other, how do we have a sense of belonging? Because if I have a sense of belonging, I don't have a sense of scarcity.
You know I go back to my Black Women's Freedom Circle, it's amazing. When someone needs to find a plumber, or a therapist, or needs to raise money because they're caring for someone's children, there's abundance in that community of Black women. It's not about, "oh my god, how are we..." but like, "oh, I have these resources," right? I know that I have abundance, not because they have, but because I belong. And so I think some of this conversation in terms of cultural strategy and abundance is shifting the culture away from the binaries of abundance and scarcity [sic] to how do we belong to each other? And, in that belonging, how do we care for each other?
As Julie insightfully shared during the Q & A portion of our conversation, “If I was going to talk about abundance, I think I would ask people when they felt loved.” Tammy’s story and Julie’s words remind us that, at the root of it, scarcity is disrupted by acts of mutual caretaking and love. The work of cultural strategy is about shifting away from these constraining binaries to build cultures of belonging, abundance and care.
Julie also shared some inspiring reflections from her work with Birth Center Equity, which organizes and supports a network of BIPOC-led birth centers across the country. Part of this work, she explains, involves unlearning the internalized un-valuing of who we are and what we bring:
Julie: At Birth Center Equity, in working with Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian birth center leaders, the most striking part was noticing how much—even in the service of what they were doing—they didn’t value or see themselves and their incredible gifts. And so I think that [needs to be] part of [our understanding of] abundance––to value yourself, see yourself, step into your story.
Abundance is false if it doesn’t deeply value what’s intangible, what’s invisible, what is most necessary for the human project. The practices of birthing are probably the least valued and least seen.
Where do we begin? How do we move together?
As Tammy and Julie both echo, practices of abundance are not just about world-building and imagination––they are daily acts of mutual aid, of honoring and witnessing relationships, and of stepping into our stories and our power.
As RFRS works to cultivate a worldview of plenty, we’ll be thinking deeply about generating practices for abundance, belonging and wholeness, from the small to the big. Stories help bridge these scales:
Julie: Finding stories of abundance that actually capture what abundance is, which is really about abundance is about being in whole relationship to people and the universe. If you have stories [like] that––gentle, small stories that radically transform people's understanding of what abundance is––then you can have the conversation. Get people to experience, to remember what does abundance feel like.
In Tammy’s words, “the essence of cultural strategies is enabling culture to shift culture.” This is why cultural strategies are so essential in RFRS’s work, and to the broader work of transformation:
Tammy: We are shifting away from the world in which systems have conditioned us to the world we want to live in. It’s all the same world. But we are shifting towards focusing on relationships and belonging. Doing that allows us to lean into each others’ liberation.
To close our conversation, Julie offered up a breathtaking poem, The Way In by Chickasaw poet and environmentalist, Linda Hogan.
The Way In
By Linda Hogan
Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.
Immense gratitude Tammy and Julie for their willingness to wrestle with these live questions of how we lean into and deepen our work at RFRS. We left the session feeling whole, rooted, nourished, and wanting more. The tendrils of our learning are unfurling quietly still, but we are poised for our transformation into a culture change organization. As we continue to chew on their reflections on embodied knowledge, scales of transformation, and memories of coffee, foot rubs, and bread baked for the altar, we remember that we can start with the story, lead with the gut, and grow into the shift.
If you’ve read to the end of this blog post to the end and are finding yourself wanting more, please reach out to us! As we prepare to integrate cultural strategies and build new programs we’re actively seeking fellow collaborators and co-conspirators to walk this road with us.