Hanna Garth is the author of Food in Cuba: In Pursuit of a Decent Meal, editor of Food and Identity in the Caribbean, co-editor of Black Food Matters, and author of the forthcoming Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement. She is a professor at Princeton University.

Alicia: Hi, Hanna. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Hanna: Hi, thank you for having me. 

Alicia: First of all, I just wanted to say, Food in Cuba has been such a great book to read for a million reasons. Academic writing can be so difficult, as we all know, and you really create characters and scenes. And you draw the reader in, and you do that work to bring the reader into a place where they can really engage with what you're saying. And I just wanted to say thank you for that. [Laughs.]

Hanna: Thank you for saying that. That's so nice to hear. That was one of my goals with this book, was to be able to have non-academic people feel that they could be pulled into the book and get a lot out of it, even if they don't care at all about the nitty-gritty or the academic concepts.

Alicia: Right, right. 

No, you really do a great job. And I've been reading so much academic work ’cause I'm working on my own book. And I've had to read so many books about meat that are just very, very dry.

And I’m like, ‘Just give me something.’

But anyway. [Laughs.] Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Hanna: Yes. 

So I grew up in a relatively small town in Wisconsin. So, I'm from the Midwest. And I lived in town, but it was kind of a rural community. So a lot of farmers in the area. 

And in my household, we ate what I thought of and probably still think of as standard American lower middle to middle class fare. So for lunches, we would have Kraft mac and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches with Campbell's tomato soup, ham and cheese sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My dad always made lunches ’cause he was—he worked nights and he was at home with me during the day. So he would always include carrot slices and apple slices next to those things to have a little variety. 

And dinners, we would have probably more traditional Midwestern stuff. So I don't know if you know about tater tot hotdish or hotdish. So it's basically just cans of a bunch of stuff poured together into a casserole dish, and then put tater tots on top of it and cheese and bake it. So it's really bad for you. But it's pretty delicious. 

So yeah, we would have stuff like that. And I remember both of my parents making fried chicken. They made it in different ways. My dad would make a beef stew. We would have tuna casserole, a lot of casseroles. Spaghetti with Bolognese sauce 

And we mostly ate at home. And we didn't really go out to eat very much. And when we did, it was to the same three or four local restaurants. That was basically what I ate growing up.

Alicia: I love hearing about casseroles, because I don't—I grew up on Long Island. So it was more Irish, Italian, Greek people. And so, I didn't grow up with a casserole. So I'm always like, baked ziti is the closest thing I understand to being a casserole. But I love to hear about them, because it's like this fascinating world that I never got to experience. [Laughs.]

But what made you interested in food as an area of study?

Hanna: Yeah.

Well, so it's something that has been kind of always a part of my life. So like I said, I grew up in a town that although we lived in town, it was surrounded by rural farming communities. And for instance, there on the local news every night, there's a farm and agricultural report. And it was common for people to be talking about things like the price of milk or the price that a farmer could get for selling milk and the price of a gallon of milk in the store. Or for people to talk about, like, ‘How is the corn crop doing this year? Is it too short or too high? Is there going to be a flood that's gonna ruin the crop?’

So those kinds of conversations and that kind of thinking was always part of my life growing up. And although we lived in a town we, for instance, I purchased my — my parents bought my clothes when I was a kid at a store that also sold tractors. So, an idea of how farming was an integral part of my life. 

And then also my mother and my grandmother were really into gardening. My grandmother gardened for subsistence, so she was hardcore about making sure that she took care of her garden all summer long so that she could have enough food to last through the winter. And I experienced helping her a little bit with the garden. I wasn't that active in it, but sort of thinking about connections between food cultivation and what we eat. 

I became interested in thinking about it more intellectually, kind of more as a personal interest. I started reading these food books that were coming out in the 2000s. So books by Michael Pollan, his book, Omnivore's Dilemma was really influential for me. This book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was also really influential. I also started reading chef's biographies at the time. So I was particularly interested in women chefs and how women were sort of breaking into this masculine space to sort of take over in a different way. 

It wasn't really until I started graduate school that I realized that these things that I was personally interested in and passionate about could be the thing that I studied for my doctoral work. And once that all clicked together, I was like, ‘I want to pursue a PhD. And I want to study food and study how people sort of integrate food into their lives.’

But then also, I was really interested in food access and food inequality. There were times when I was growing up when my family went through periods where we didn't have a lot of money. Sometimes we would have no money, and he would go to the change pile and count the, count out coins. And then we would go to the day-old bread store and buy—you could buy a loaf of bread there for like 50 cents or 25 cents, and then go somewhere else and buy a pack of bologna. And he knew where you could find a pack of baloney for like $1, $1.25. And that would be our household’s lunch for the day. 

And as a kid, I was like, ‘That was just kind of a normal thing.’ And it wasn't until I got older that I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that was kind of intense. That's food insecurity.’ But also, I was always really impressed with how resourceful my dad was in sort of getting it together and making sure we had something to eat. That's the kind of question that I became interested in studying.

Alicia: Right.

And your writing really balances the frustrations of various food systems, but also that joy that people need to take in food in order to have a full life. And I noticed in your Twitter bio, you identify as a foodie. How do you personally balance your—that need for personal pleasure in food, that joy in food, and the way food has such a strong political and economic status and role?

Hanna: Yeah.

One thing that I've found in my own life, and it—with the families that I've worked with in Cuba and the families that I'm now working with in Los Angeles is that food across those settings is really important for people to connect with other people. So to connect with their family, whether that's their immediate family, people who live in their household, or to connect with their ancestors, their grandparents, great-grandparents, to connect with what, how they understand their ethnicity, their race, their nationality. 

And so what I argue in basically all of my work is that food is never just about caloric intake and nutrients, but it's always inflected with some kind of social and cultural meaning and importance. So for me, I understand that the ways that I connect to food are—so food’s political role is about my ability to be able to access the food that I connect to in this social way. And so, I take a lot of pleasure in making my grandmother's fried chicken recipe, but also making slight variations on it to make it my own and to make it more suited to the taste of my family. So this is the kind of thing that I feel balances this food as political and my identity as a foodie. 

I’ll also say that one of the things we did growing up was, I—although I lived in this small town, every once in a while, I don't know, maybe four or five times a year, we would go into Minneapolis, which was the closest city. And for my family, one of the really important things we did on those trips was to eat at restaurants that had foods that were unavailable in my town. So we would eat at Greek restaurants, Ethiopian restaurants, all kinds of Asian restaurants that we didn't have like Korean, Vietnamese, Thai. And for me, food then became this sort of vehicle of global connection, of cross-cultural appreciation of other kinds of ways of eating, other flavors on your palate that you don't experience in the food that you eat every day. 

And so, that's part of my foodieness. I'm always seeking out delicious food and delicious flavors, no matter where those things come from.

Alicia: Right, right. 

And you have a master's in public health I read, as well as your PhD in anthropology. And this gives you that, what you were just expressing, such a unique and multifaceted perspective on food. 

And in food media, in particular, we often shy away from discussing nutrition, despite how it's very significant when we're also discussing access, discussing systemic discrimination, food system inequities. Because there's this concern that if we talk about anything about nutrition, we're going to get into fatphobia. We're going to get into classism. I've been struggling myself with figuring out, ‘How do I address these sorts of things that are so significant without falling into getting criticism on that level?’ And I mean, I think it's possible, obviously.

But how, in your work, have you been able to address nutrition as an important matter around social equity and food when health is so personal for people?

Hanna: Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I appreciate your vulnerability, how, it just—it opens you up to a particular kind of scrutiny. 

So, ok, people think of nutrition as a ‘real science.’ But nutrition science actually is something that's constantly evolving and constantly changing. If we look back in the past just a little bit, we can see how wrong we were just like 20, 30, 50 years ago, about food consumption. 

And we can also see how much the food industry has influenced nutrition as a science. So we have early nutritional studies that were funded, paid for by food lobbying groups. So they might have been paid for by the dairy industry, they might have been paid for by meat producers. Those early studies really, really influenced the ways that we went for nutrition. So something as simple as thinking that red meat consumption would cause heart disease. That's something that's being torn apart right now. And it's something that we're starting to see that the science really was not very clear on. Or dietary fat consumption, for instance. 

I think about nutrition as something that is ever evolving and changing and that we're learning more and more about it. And that it's actually really important to understand the settings of people's everyday lives and what people are actually consuming, and how that contributes sort of back to our understanding of nutrition. 

So, I think it's just cool or tragic, depending on how you think of it, to see that nutrition is actually open to scrutiny. It's not this ‘you must follow the food pyramid’ or ‘the food plate,’ whatever the USDA is telling people now. 

But at the same time, I think it's also really important to have to be empowered with a little bit of basic nutritional knowledge. So to understand what our basic macronutrients are. So, what is a protein? What is a fat? What is a carbohydrate? And to think about the building blocks that we need in order to function on a daily basis. If I'm sort of assessing what someone's eating, I might make note that this—someone's eating a lot of carbohydrates, and they're maybe not getting enough dietary fat or protein in their everyday food consumption. 

Those are the kinds of things that then I can connect that with social equity issues and access issues related to health. Most of us know that eating refined carbohydrates is the cheapest and quickest way to fill ourselves up. But often, refined carbohydrates don't provide us with all of the nutrients that we need for basic functioning from anything from the ability to use our muscles to the ability to use our brains properly. 

So when I start to see families that have, that are unable to purchase the variety of macronutrients that they really should be having in order to be able to function, then I can talk about how the syst—the structural systems are in place that are making it so that they can only afford to subsist on and barely function on the cheapest foods that are available in our system. And that is linked to a whole long history of lobbying in our federal government, the way that our farming and price supports are structured, as well as what people are calling food apartheid, so a separate and unequal type of food system.