In a Pickle: Eliciting Food System Adaptation Stories from Peace Corps Volunteers

The question which guided this research was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? Systems theory was this research's conceptual framework. Food stories from Returned Peace Corps Volunteers were elicited through story circles, a non-directive method of qualitative narrative enquiry in which my participants got to know one another, talked about their food experiences in Peace Corps and afterward, and then told their whole, individual Peace Corps food journey stories. Two story circles were conducted, and their transcripts analyzed through emergent coding for narrative themes in common. These narrative themes in common included-from encountering a community food system, adjusting to it, and re-entering the Global Industrial Food System-first, experiencing a loss of control due to both the food environment and community-ness of food within a community food system; second, adjusting by reclaiming control, and experiencing a widening of what counted as food; and, third, the necessity to reconcile being a changed person with re-entering the Global Industrial Food System, experiencing intense overwhelm from the food environment, and experiencing a new narrowing of what counted as food. These findings were explained and contextualized within coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism, some of the dominant narratives or the root causes of the global crises of our age. Finally, inferences for community leaders working to build community food systems were drawn from these findings.

RUNNING HEAD: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES In a Pickle: Eliciting Food System Adaptation Stories from Peace Corps Volunteers Kelton N. Whittaker Westminster College A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Community Leadership Westminster College Salt Lake City, Utah August 2023 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Abstract The question which guided this research was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? Systems theory was this research’s conceptual framework. Food stories from Returned Peace Corps Volunteers were elicited through story circles, a non-directive method of qualitative narrative enquiry in which my participants got to know one another, talked about their food experiences in Peace Corps and afterward, and then told their whole, individual Peace Corps food journey stories. Two story circles were conducted, and their transcripts analyzed through emergent coding for narrative themes in common. These narrative themes in common included—from encountering a community food system, adjusting to it, and re-entering the Global Industrial Food System—first, experiencing a loss of control due to both the food environment and community-ness of food within a community food system; second, adjusting by reclaiming control, and experiencing a widening of what counted as food; and, third, the necessity to reconcile being a changed person with re-entering the Global Industrial Food System, experiencing intense overwhelm from the food environment, and experiencing a new narrowing of what counted as food. These findings were explained and contextualized within coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism, some of the dominant narratives or the root causes of the global crises of our age. Finally, inferences for community leaders working to build community food systems were drawn from these findings. Keywords: Global Industrial Food System, community food systems, story circles, coloniality, capitalism, developmentalism, The United States Peace Corps ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Dedication For everyone, the world over, who’s fed me, and helped me grow. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Acknowledgements I entered the Master of Arts in Community Leadership program exhausted, disenchanted, and isolated, and found there amazing people in my professors and in my classmates, and answers to burning questions. The MACL program is everything I needed but had no idea existed, so first, I offer my gratitude to Peggy Cain, for making this program real, for making it deeply relevant, and for giving it to each of us. You put me back together. I have gratitude for my family next: Raquel, Norman, Rosie, and Nalani, thank you, you got me here and kept me going. Sarah and Daryn, thank you for opening your home to me, in the pandemic no less. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been in this program. Cathy, thank you for listening to me, and affirming me. My professors: Shelley Erickson, Shawn Coon, Sean Crossland, Jamie Joanou, and Jess Roadman, each of you taught me so much academically, professionally, and personally, and you have my sincere thanks for it. Thank you too for investing in me and cheering me on. My MACL classmates: You know who you are, and you know how special you are to me. We made it through graduate school during a pandemic, and created a community together so compassionate that I can still barely believe it is real. Each one of you gives me hope. Thank you. Amanda, my subject matter supervisor and dear friend, you got me through Peace Corps, and now this. It means a tremendous amount. Greenhouse Effect, you have my gratitude for giving me the space I needed to write, so comfortable and cozy. Thank you for the caffeine, the custom teas, and the profound hospitality. For all of my other friends, teachers, family, acquaintances, and strangers, thank you for supporting me. Please receive my gratitude. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Table of Contents Chapter I: Introduction.................................................................................................................1 Introduction........................................................................................................................1 Research Question.................................................................................................2 Introduction to the Root Causes of the Global Industrial Food System.......................3 Coloniality...............................................................................................................4 Capitalism...............................................................................................................5 Industrialism-Developmentalism...........................................................................5 Conceptual Framework.....................................................................................................6 Study Context.....................................................................................................................7 Significance.........................................................................................................................7 Community Organization.......................................................................................9 Positionality Statement......................................................................................................9 Conclusion........................................................................................................................11 Chapter II: Literature Review....................................................................................................13 Global Industrial Food System.......................................................................................14 Global Industrial Food System as Grown from Coloniality, Capitalism, and Industrialism-Developmentalism.........................................................................15 Coloniality..................................................................................................15 Capitalism..................................................................................................17 Industrialism-developmentalism------------------------------------------------18 Some Harms of Industrialism-Developmentalism in the Global Industrial Food System..................................................................18 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Conclusion.............................................................................................................19 Systems Theory................................................................................................................20 Primer on Systems Theory....................................................................................20 Understanding the Root Causes of the Global Crises through Systems Theory....................................................................................................................21 Conclusion.............................................................................................................23 Community Food Systems...............................................................................................24 Overview of Local Food Systems..........................................................................25 The Narrative Underlying the Entangled Dominant Narratives........................26 White Supremacy.......................................................................................27 Patriarchy...................................................................................................27 Heterosexism..............................................................................................27 Rationalism................................................................................................27 Anthropocentrism......................................................................................28 Ableism......................................................................................................28 Outline of Community Food Systems...................................................................28 Conclusion.............................................................................................................29 The United States Peace Corps.......................................................................................30 Personalizing the Critique....................................................................................30 Hegemony and Peace Corps Volunteers..............................................................32 The Premise of the United States Peace Corps and its Basis in Problematic Dominant Narratives............................................................................................34 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES The Role and Day to Day Lives of Peace Corps Volunteers.............................................................................................................36 Conclusion........................................................................................................................38 Chapter III: Methods..................................................................................................................40 Research Context.............................................................................................................40 Participants.......................................................................................................................41 Recruitment......................................................................................................................43 Informed Consent and Confidentiality..........................................................................44 Data Collection Methods.................................................................................................45 Data Storage.....................................................................................................................47 Data Analysis....................................................................................................................48 Challenges.........................................................................................................................48 Validity..............................................................................................................................49 Ethical Considerations....................................................................................................50 Conclusion........................................................................................................................52 Chapter IV: Results.....................................................................................................................53 Introduction......................................................................................................................53 Encountering a Community Food System: Loss of Control........................................54 Experiencing Loss of Control Due to Variety, Quantity, and Quality of Food in Food Environment................................................................................................55 Variety........................................................................................................55 Quantity......................................................................................................60 Quality........................................................................................................62 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Experiencing Loss of Control Due to Community-ness of Food........................67 Adjusting to a Community Food System: Reclaiming Control and What Counts as Food...................................................................................................................................76 Reclaiming Control Relevant to Variety, Quantity, and Quality in Food Environment..........................................................................................................76 Variety........................................................................................................76 Quantity......................................................................................................80 Quality........................................................................................................81 Reclaiming Control Relevant to Community-ness of Food.................................83 Widening of What is Appetizing and What Counts as Food...............................87 Re-entering the Global Industrial Food System: Reconciling, Handling Overwhelm, and Less Counts as Food.................................................................................................92 Reconciling Being a Changed Person with Re-entering the Global Industrial Food System..........................................................................................................92 Experiencing Overwhelm Due to Food Environment.......................................107 New Narrowing of What Is Appetizing and What Counts as Food..................111 Analysis: Contextualizing Explaining and the Themes through the Dominant Narratives.......................................................................................................................114 The Role of Systems Theory in this Analysis.....................................................114 Context Explained: Too Much and Too Little Variety and Quantity of Food.117 Food Hegemony Explained: What Food is Appetizing, What Makes Quality Food, and What Counts as Food........................................................................119 Analysis Recapped...............................................................................................121 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Conclusion......................................................................................................................122 Chapter V: Conclusion..............................................................................................................124 Inferences for Community Leaders Working to Build Community Food Systems............................................................................................................................126 Community Organization.............................................................................................126 Future Research.............................................................................................................127 Conclusion......................................................................................................................128 References...................................................................................................................................130 Appendices..................................................................................................................................136 Appendix A: Consent Form and Resource List..........................................................135 Appendix B: Story Circle Guides.................................................................................140 Appendix C: Recruitment Scripts................................................................................146 Appendix D: IRB Approval Form and NIH Certificate.............................................148 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 1 Chapter I: Introduction Introduction What sort of world would you want to live in? Would you like to have your needs met, and be able to meet the needs of your loved ones? Would you like to be able to thrive, even as you support the thriving of other people? Relevant particularly to this research: Would you like to be able to eat delicious food, and know that such food will always be available, for yourself, your community, and for all of your children and their children? I want all of this, who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, we live in a world full of complex, interacting injustices, social problems, ecological crises, and disasters. These are large, even global, and yet perpetuated by the daily actions many of us take. Many are perpetuated by how we feed ourselves, particularly those of us who live in the Global Industrial Food System. This system is how capitalism does food. Under it, food is a commodity produced for profit. This system capitalizes on uncorrected structures and power imbalances put into place during colonialism and relies on industrial processes that damage ecosystems even as industrialism-developmentalism spreads these industrial processes and tools. Yet despite these harms, those of us who live in this system largely must get the bulk of our food from it. We go to the grocery store and support the Global Industrial Food System because we have little other choice. If we do manage to do something else, what substantive difference does that make? Should we throw up our hands, and give up? It can certainly be daunting to consider just how much is going on and disempowering to know that in the face of all of it, you’re just one person. Here is where I’ll interject: are you, really, just one person? Or are you, perhaps, part of a larger group, community, system? I will argue that you are, whether you realize it or not, and that belonging to a larger system is ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 2 powerful. Perhaps the most salient power is not power to control other people, or to shape the world how you would like it to be regardless of what others want. Rather, it is power to join together with other people to live collectively how you all want to live, among other people, embracing the impact that living your life has to inevitably influence other lives, and of your collective lives to influence all that many more people. Living your life tells your story to everyone you encounter, and when that story is a deliberately shared story, lived out with others, your impact can become that much larger—because you do exist within a system, within a community, and one which, perhaps, could be better. Communities comprised of people deliberately living a shared story still exist around the world, and they feed themselves through food systems which have not yet been entirely supplanted by the Global Industrial Food System. Many Peace Corps Volunteers adjusted to life in such systems, returned to the Global Industrial Food Systems, and incorporated their learning into their currently lived stories. It may be that this learning and the stories these people can tell around adapting to unfamiliar food systems have value at a time when we must change how we eat. Research Question The question this research explored was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? Chapter I will continue to present this research’s examination of and relevance to Root Causes, as well as its Conceptual Framework, Study Context, and Significance, and conclude with my Positionality Statement. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 3 Introduction to the Root Causes of the Global Industrial Food System This research, again, focused on food, and in particular the Global Industrial Food System, which about half of the people in the world live in, as well as alternatives to that system (Amin, 2012). It is relevant because the Global Industrial Food System perpetuates social crises even as it is destroying our planet’s capacity to support life, and must be fundamentally transformed (Amin, 2012; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). It was designed to control and exploit some people and privilege others, and so justice also demands that it be fundamentally transformed (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Gonzalez, 2011; McMichael, 2013). It operates the way it does due to being based in coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017). These are the Global Industrial Food System’s root causes, its dominant narratives, or the ideas through which we have and arguably continue to organize ourselves, our structures, and our institutions (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Systems theory, which explains how people organize themselves and manifest structures, institutions, and systems, shows us how this works, and offers insights into how we might go about transforming the industrial food system as well as other systems (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Meadows, 2008). It comes down to learning and living out new food stories, resisting the old systems as they act on us, and transitioning to new food systems by redesigning our processes, structures, and institutions by imbedding these new stories into them. The current root causes of the Global Industrial Food System—coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism—are themselves simply dominant narratives made real by people, and we can make new narratives real or reclaim old ones (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 4 Coloniality Coloniality is the world-state in which the power imbalances and hierarchies imposed under colonialism not only remain uncorrected but are perpetuated or even grown (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Grosfoguel, 2002; Quijano, 2007). Coloniality also privileges colonizer ways of thinking and discovering over those of people who were colonized, up to the fundamental exclusion of many knowledges and ways of knowing from legitimacy or even existence (Mignolo, 2007, Quijano, 2007). This relates to cultural hegemony, in which few people are able to control the ideas of many people to the degree that these controlled people do not know what they do not know, and, in their lack of knowledge, may even actively support their own harm (Mayo, 1999; Mignolo, 2007). Relevant to food, the structures which were put in place to mass produce food in colonized spaces for the consumption of colonizers still exist (Gonzalez, 2011; Grey & Patel, 2015). Those countries which colonized other spaces and people are often referred to as the Global North, while those places which were colonized and have been enclosed into the nation state system as the Global South (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; McMichael, 2013). As such, much of the Global South still produces single, non-staple food crops or non-food crops (such as coffee and tea) rather than food crops, thereby ensuring continued dependence on the Global North for imported food (Gonzales et al., 2010). Additionally, alternative methods of food production and non-commodity conceptualizations of food have been sidelined and delegitimized (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Gonzales et al., 2010; Grey & Patel, 2015). Please see Chapter II for more ties between the Global Industrial Food System and coloniality. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 5 Capitalism Capitalism is the dominant economic system within coloniality and is defined as the increasing domination and exploitation of people, animals, and planet to maximize profit for a small number of people (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Tilzey, 2016). The more exploitable people, animals, and planet are—both in quantity and degree—the better capitalism works (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015; Tilzey, 2016). Under capitalism, food is a commodity to be created as cheaply as possible and sold for as much profit as possible rather than life-giving sustenance produced by communities in tandem with nature (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Holt-Giménez, 2019). Please see Chapter II for more information on the Global Industrial Food System and how it is driven and was created by capitalism. Industrialism-Developmentalism Industrialism is defined as maximizing the efficiency of exploitation of people, animals, and planet through technologies and bureaucracies and corporate structures designed to endlessly extract human labor and earth’s resources to create and sell commodities (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Industrialism pairs with developmentalism to popularize and spread these structures and processes across the world, and both can be thought of as the tools of capitalism. Notably, linear growth and progress as goals themselves—and these goals having a particular shape—is also enclosed within industrialism and developmentalism (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Industrialism-developmentalism manifests in the Global Industrial Food System by driving land-grabbing, dispossessing peasants, and ultimately turning these people into cheap labor easily exploited (Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015; Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Amin, 2012). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 6 After the Global Industrial Food System dispossesses people from their land and ability to feed themselves, and in a real sense strips them of their autonomy, they are forced to buy their survival and must engage in whatever work they can find as surplus, cheap labor ripe to be exploited, often within the Global Industrial Food System itself (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; AlonsoFradejas et al., 2015; Amin, 2012). Please see Chapter II for additional harms of the Global Industrial Food System and industrialism-developmentalism. Conceptual Framework The conceptual framework is the theory through which I understood my topic and the literature on my topic, as well as how I understood how to successfully investigate my research questions. The conceptual framework was also the lens through which I made sense of the experiences and stories of my participants. For my conceptual framework I chose systems theory. Systems theory breaks down the complexity of reality, illuminating what it is comprised of and how it works, and notably, how it can be changed (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). It encompasses how people learn, how people organize themselves, and how people create structures and institutions and even cultures (Korten, 2015; Reinsborough & Canning 2017; Taylor & Marienau, 2016). System theory recognizes the connectedness and contextualization of people, ideas, structures, institutions, and really, everything (Meadows, 2008). It explains how most of these things are adaptive, and as such will change and respond to new inputs—such as new stories (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). For these reasons, it was extremely helpful and relevant to my research of eliciting food system adaptation stories from Peace Corps Volunteers who have placed themselves into alternative, community-based food contexts, and returned to eating within ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 7 the Global Industrial Food System. For more information on systems theory, please see Chapter II: Literature Review. Systems theory additionally informed my decisions around the methods I used. The following section introduces these methods and the context in which they were used. Please see Chapter III: Methods for more information. Study Context The design of this project elicited stories from Peace Corps Volunteers who grew up in the industrial food system, adjusted to living and getting food in community food systems, and readjusted to eating in the industrial food system. These stories were shared in a virtual meeting, called a virtual story circle, with other Peace Corps Volunteers (Roadside Theatre, 1999). Participants joined a Microsoft Teams meeting from wherever they were currently living. Each virtual story circle consisted of three rounds which included brainstorming and story sharing, respectively, around adjusting to a community food system, readjusting to the US, and then what food stories they were currently and/or would have liked to be living out. Significance We live in a time when the Global Industrial Food System has already contributed to the violation of multiple planetary boundaries—which means the planet is already sufficiently destabilized that life will be destroyed—and so this system must be fundamentally changed, its harms discontinued, and repair accomplished (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Amin, 2012; Gonzalez, 2015; Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). Given this state of impending apocalypse, and the imperative to change the food system perpetuating it, stories from people who have lived and grown up in the industrial food system and adjusted to community systems and back may be valuable—as well as the lessons these stories hold—precisely because stories can clarify values and build new paradigms on which ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 8 new systems can rest (Meadows, 2008; Reinsborough & Canning, 2017; Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). It is important that in building new food systems we do not merely recreate or repackage the same harms built from the same ideas. Notably, having lived in a community food system for a little over two years does not make Peace Corps Volunteers experts on those community food systems. Peace Corps Volunteers are not qualified to explain what these systems should look like. Better qualified, of course, are those who have been perpetuating community food systems for generations— especially if those communities have themselves been in community with nature (FigueroaHelland & Raghu, 2017; Gonzales et al., 2015; Grey & Patel, 2015; Holt-Giménez & Altieri, 2013). Despite colonialism and coloniality’s erasure of knowledge, there are still people who know how to live and feed themselves not just within planetary boundaries but regeneratively, supporting ecosystems rather than damaging them through exploitation and/or the creation of harmful side-effects (Gonzales et al., 2010; Grey, & Patel, 2015; Grosfoguel, 2002; Tilzey, 2016). For example, Indigenous groups in Central America and Southern Mexico retain understandings around how to grow and maintain entire rainforests as food-bearing ecosystems; indeed, they and many other Indigenous groups never were “hunter-gathers” but were and are designers of ecosystems (Aguila-Way, 2014; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Grey & Patel, 2015). What these Peace Corps Volunteers have, and could tell stories around, is lived experience first of living within the Global Industrial Food System and then adapting to community food systems and back again, as well as potential learning born from these experiences which may inform the food stories they currently live, and/or would like to be, living out. Granted, immediate movement from the industrial food system into a community food ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 9 system is a sudden change, different from the gradual changes that, hopefully, our food systems in transition will continue to go through. However, after that sudden drop into a new system which Peace Corps Volunteers undergo, the period of acclimation can be long. These stories of a sudden embodied shift in context followed by a longer adjustment may still be valuable, with a secondary benefit of the potential for generating new perspectives on the Global Industrial Food System from people who lived and grew within it. Many people are currently working to understand how to build better food systems and/or to shift themselves and their communities toward them (Blay-Palmer et al., 2015; Diekmann et al., 2020; Enthoven & Van den Broeck, 2021). The findings produced from these rich experiences and subsequent learning may be useful in particular to precisely such thinkers, movement builders, and organization leaders at precisely the time when transition is so necessary (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). Community Organization This research, the stories it has elicited, and the lessons from those stories have the potential to share learning around undergoing food system change with community organizations and their partners who are making it their mission to create and support such change. Therefore, I partnered with the San Antonio Health Department as I conducted this research in order to ensure that I stayed on track to produce helpful, relevant research for this organization and other community organizations. Positionality Statement In April of 2016, I left the United States to live in a small, mountain village in Eastern Europe for Peace Corps. The villagers all grew the bulk of their own food and preserved it for the winter. They tended to animals and created a lot of food from the products these animals ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 10 produced. There were no grocery stores in the village, so I found myself immersed in a community food system where my only option was to eat what my host family and neighbors had grown and preserved themselves. This was a considerable adjustment, which involved changes in multiple ways that I did not and could not have expected. As I approached this research, my position as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer myself was relevant. It allowed me to participate in the stories circles rather than simply facilitating, which kept me at a level with my participants, and made the story circles something created by all of us. My proximity to the research additionally meant I had to be mindful about what I know that potential audiences of this research may not know. To achieve coherency, I had to work to be mindful of this insider knowledge and add clarity around it so that non-volunteer readers could follow. Being a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer also shaped my perspectives as a researcher, which I had to acknowledge and navigate. I knew something of the organizational culture of Peace Corps, what the role of a Peace Corps Volunteer is like, and my experiences helped me better understand more of what my participants experienced, although this shouldn’t be oversold. It was at least as important to note the ways in which I am different from my participants. I am a white, gay, cisgender man. This shaped my experiences in profound ways, especially during my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer. My participants’ experiences were mediated by their own intersecting identities, and I needed to be mindful that many of these identities and lived experiences were not my own. This was relevant in our story circles as we worked together to share our stories through the framework I designed, and it was relevant as I coded their stories. Member checking so my participants could weigh in on my interpretations was vital, as was the ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 11 care and consideration I put into tending to each story. These stories are not my stories, but theirs. It must furthermore be noted that the stories we shared were our own stories, rather than stories from the people who hosted us. We were merely guests, and it is not for us to purport to relay their stories, or to be representatives of their culture in any other way. We learned a lot when we were immersed in our Peace Corps communities, and that learning was mediated by the cultural contexts we found ourselves in, but we made sure that this learning was carefully understood to be, and represented as, our personal learning. The knowledge we gained around the stories which undergird the societies we were in, cannot approach the cultural understanding, let alone the generational knowledge, which members of these societies possess (FigueroaHelland, & Raghu, 2017). Of course, our personal stories had to be contextualized within the food systems in which they took place—for the sake of coherency—but we were careful to be honest and mindful about our limitations even to accurately convey these contexts. We didn’t understand the land itself like the communities we lived with do, nor the food systems they built with that land. For these reasons, this research focused tightly on our rich experiences transitioning from food systems, through new ones, and back again as well as how these experiences inform, if they did, the food stories we live out now and/or would like to be living out. Conclusion We have inherited systems, structures, and institutions which are manifestations of problematic root causes and or dominant narratives. One of these systems is the Global Industrial Food System, and the narratives in which it has its roots are coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism. This system must be transformed, and in that necessity, ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 12 perhaps, is the potential to grow a new food system which meets more of our needs and is able to continue to do so sustainably. People all over the world live out sustainable food systems and have done so for countless generations. It is not for this research to speak to these systems specifically. Neither I nor my participants, merely as Peace Corps Volunteers, can be spokespeople for them, but having lived in such systems and learned to live and eat within them, we have valuable knowledge about adapting to such systems. I gathered this knowledge by holding virtual story circles to elicit stories. This research is significant at the time of writing because we must transition to sustainable, community-based food systems. Finally, as I conducted this research, I was mindful of my positionality. In the following section, Chapter II, I have reviewed the literature relevant to eliciting food adaptation stories from Peace Corps Volunteers. Chapter III lays out the methods I chose to elicit these stories. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 13 Chapter II: Literature Review The Global Industrial Food System is complex, and systems theory can help us understand it. It, like other global entities, has its basis in problematic dominant narratives. To build a better food system, we need to understand these narratives and the harm they create, as well as understand that alternative food systems still exist based on different narratives. Many Peace Corps Volunteers have adapted to such food systems, particularly community-based food systems, before readapting to eating within the Global Industrial Food System once again. As it is imperative that we transform the Global Industrial Food System and adapt to this transformed system, their stories of food system adaptation may be beneficial. Beyond the imperative and without backgrounding the very real challenges of adapting to a new food system, such stories may even highlight the opportunity for sustainable abundance that community food systems could create. Therefore, the question this research explored was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? Chapter II will continue to cover the Global Industrial Food System explained through its root causes as well as its harms. Following these sections, an overview of systems theory will explain more about the root causes or dominant narratives and outline how Systems Theory provides insight into addressing these to manifest better systems built on better narratives. The next section on Community Food Systems will discuss local food and touch on community food alternatives (as they are best left for the people living them out to speak to as the experts they are). Finally, Chapter II will conclude with a section discussing Peace Corps to provide background on the organization and the experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers, as well as ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 14 discussing Peace Corps’ own complexity and contextualization relevant to the root causes or dominant narratives. Global Industrial Food System The Global Industrial Food System was grown through the faulty, dominant narratives which are the root causes of all our global crises. As such, the Global Industrial Food System is itself a global crisis, contributing to the further violation of five planetary boundaries as well as others not yet violated, and must be transformed in order for life to continue (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Grosfoguel, 2011; Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). The five boundaries already violated are the nitrogen biogeochemical flow, phosphorus biogeochemical flow, biosphere integrity as measured by extinction rate per million species years, land-system change, and climate change (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). The root causes or narratives most directly responsible for the Global Industrial Food System are coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism. These are entangled with one another, and with more root causes still (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Grosfoguel, 2011). Please see the section on systems theory for more information about entanglement and the section on Community Food Systems for more information on these other root causes. This section will explore these three root causes and how they show up in the Global Industrial Food System because, in order to transform this system, it is imperative to understand these dominant narrative root causes so as to not merely recreate the old system, repackaged. It is also important to understand some of the specific harms that the current system is perpetuating, which is outlined following this next section. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 15 Global Industrial Food System as Grown from Coloniality, Capitalism, and IndustrialismDevelopmentalism Coloniality. The current world system was built through colonialism (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Grosfoguel, 2011). Colonialism is a period where colonizers conquered and dominated most of the Earth to consolidate power and wealth by setting up systems of oppression and exploitation (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Grosfoguel, 2011). Those countries which did the colonizing were largely from the northern hemisphere, while those who were colonized were largely in the southern hemisphere—leading to the shorthand of the Global North and Global South (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Grosfoguel, 2011). The Global North consists of North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, notably Japan, Russia, and China, while the Global South is the rest of the world which was colonized (Akram-Lodhi, 2015). Notably, colonialism sought to extinguish entire ways of life, ways of knowing, and ways of gathering and collecting food (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Grosfoguel, 2011). Colonialism spread the mental models/stories/narratives which are now the root causes of the global crises of the world, even as it sought to extinguish alternatives (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Grosfoguel, 2011). Colonialism as a political state and process may be over, but the structures which were put into place to enrich the Global North through the exploitation of the Global South do still exist in many global systems, and the Global Industrial Food System is no exception (Grosfoguel, 2011). The unaddressed and continually perpetuating state we live in, born from colonialism, is coloniality (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Coloniality continues to perpetuate the model through which nation states in the Global South were forced to grow and export single, non-staple food crops or non-food crops while importing the food they needed to survive (Gonzalez, 2011; Gonzales et al., 2010; Grey & Patel, ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 16 2015; Holt-Giménez, 2019). This new system replaced the food systems which existed before, and which had, in some cases, been permaculture food ecosystems carefully evolved and cultivated by Indigenous people (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Blay-Palmer et al., 2015; FigueroaHelland & Raghu, 2017; Grey & Patel, 2015). Permaculture systems are those which are grown as part of an integrated ecosystem, in contrast to agricultural systems which pave over ecosystems through the use of monocrops, chemical fertilizers and pesticides along with other technologies (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Blay-Palmer et al., 2015; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Grey & Patel, 2015). Indeed, many Indigenous peoples denigrated as “hunter-gathers” were in fact ecosystem designers who had designed their own niches within ecosystems which were not just sustainable but generative (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Grey & Patel, 2015). Coloniality continues to perpetuate colonial structures even as it grows and forces more small-holders, peasants, and Indigenous people from their lands and foodways for the benefit of the Global North (Amin, 2012). One mechanism driving this is that industrial food producers in the Global North are subsidized by their governments which allow them to produce food more cheaply than the producers, generally small-holders, in the Global South (Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015; Altieri & Nicholls, 2012). Governments in the Global South are often blocked from providing similar subsidies to their own producers through various trade agreements and processes put into place by international organizations including the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015; Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Holt-Giménez, 2019; Tilzey, 2016). Producers in the Global South simply cannot compete. This relates to the root cause of capitalism; again, these root causes are entangled. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 17 Capitalism. Capitalism is defined as infinitely growing exploitation of people, animals, and planet for the profit of a few people (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016, Tilzey, 2016). Capitalism undergirds the Global Industrial Food System in land grabbing. This occurs when, through various means, land is taken by large, international corporations, sometimes merely fronts for powerful nation states most commonly from the Global North, and converted to industrial food uses (Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015; Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Amin, 2012; Tilzey, 2016). It bears repeating that this land belonged to peasants, small-holders, and Indigenous people who used it to feed themselves and their communities through sustainable, ecologicallysound methods (Amin, 2012; Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Gonzales et al., 2010). Seeds have been and are being enclosed within and commodified by capitalism. They are being patented by corporations, genetically modified, and then sold and put out into the world to pollinate and pollute the gene pools of plants which have evolved, often guided by humans, over countless generations within co-evolving ecosystems (Aguila-Way, 2014; Gonzalez, 2011). People who use these patented seeds, or even seeds from plants whose genomes have been polluted, have been prosecuted as encroaching on corporate intellectual property (Aguila-Way, 2014). Another tactic is the removal of seeds’ capacity to reproduce (Aguila-Way, 2014; Gonzalez, 2011; McMichael, 2013; Mignolo, 2007). Capitalism goes further by commodifying food itself and makes it something which people must earn by participating in capitalism (Tilzey, 2016). The global food system dispossesses people from their land and their ability to feed themselves, and in a real sense strips them of their sovereignty over their food, and then forces them to try to survive by finding whatever work they can as surplus, and, therefore, cheap labor ripe to be exploited (AkramLodhi, 2015; Alonso-Fradejas et al., 2015; Amin, 2012). The Global Industrial Food System ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 18 itself steps in here to exploit some of these people further, sometimes on plantations or in food factories, and sometimes by paying them starvation wages and ignoring their human rights (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Amin, 2012; Gonzalez, 2015). Industrialism-Developmentalism. Another root cause particularly evident in the Global Industrial Food System is industrialism-developmentalism—which is the technologies and organizational structures through which capitalism exploits people, animals, and planet and also is the ideology that such are progress toward which everyone ought to develop and/or be developed (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Industrialism-developmentalism relies on ideas of linear growth and progress, and privileges this as movement toward lifestyles which demand extraction and commodity production (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Endless growth on a finite planet is not possible and developing the entire world to also endlessly extract—notably without care for side effects created through this extraction—is terribly, terribly destructive (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018). This is why we must adapt to different food systems, ones which are not built on extraction, and additionally why, toward this end, stories from people who have left the Global Industrial Food System and adapted to such systems, before returning and readapting, may be valuable. The following section explains some of the harms of the Global Industrial Food System, all of which result directly from industrialism/ developmentalism. The sheer amount of harm cannot be contained within this literature review, and much is still being discovered and quantified (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). Some Harms of Industrialism-developmentalism in the Global Industrial Food System. The Global Industrial Food System—driven by coloniality, capitalism, and especially by industrialism-developmentalism, as well as the other root causes—is a growing crisis which ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 19 creates numerable harms. The Global Industrial Food System currently produces more food than the people of Earth need, yet many people still go hungry—and even those who are able to eat within the system are increasingly getting less nutrients as the quality of nutrition in industrialized food declines (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Gonzales, 2015; Holt-Giménez & Altieri, 2013). Pesticide use is poisoning the earth’s waterways and oceans (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023). The microorganisms in water and in soil are being destroyed (Cavicchioli et al., 2019; Gonzalez, 2011). Nutrients are being depleted from topsoil (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Holt-Giménez & Altieri, 2013). Topsoil itself is being lost through land-use practices which break up the earth, and which, notably, also release carbon into the atmosphere (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; McMichael 2013). The Global Industrial Food System does not just produce food through agriculture, but from animals. Industrial livestock is the largest land use sector in the world, supporting the production of feed, food products derived from animals (e.g., milk, eggs), and animals themselves which are harvested for food to a greater degree now than ever before. This trend is expected to continue to grow and shift further toward industrial methods which are more cruel, polluting, and resource-consuming (Herrero & Thornton, 2013; Mekonnen, 2012; Weis, 2013). Conclusion The Global Industrial Food System was grown through and continues to rely on the dominant narratives of the root causes of the global crises. Coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism are particularly relevant, but they cannot be separated from the others. The following section lays out systems theory, and how it provides insight on addressing global crises, including the Global Industrial Food System, by building alternate systems and/or transitioning the current system to operate through alternate narratives. Next, the section on ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 20 Community Food Systems will complicate the term local food and distinguish local food from community food. The final section will discuss Peace Corps, outline the lived experience of Volunteers, and explore its relationship with the root causes. Systems Theory Systems theory holds that reality is complex. This understanding can help us identify points of intervention in systems, which is exciting because it is imperative that many systems be changed. It helps us understand that the Global Industrial Food System, like other global crises, has roots in dominant narratives, and that changing these narratives—and the structures in which they are imbedded—can change the system. This section explains systems theory further as well as how dominant narratives are the root causes of the global crises of the world. Primer on Systems Theory Systems theory holds that reality is made up of nested networks of complex systems (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). Everything is made up of similar units which form larger units which, together with other similar larger units, form even larger units, and so on. From particles smaller than atoms, to atoms, to molecules, all the way up to galaxies and universes and beyond, reality is organized through small things making up large things making up larger things and so on. Each group of like things is called a system, and our reality is made up of systems made up of and making up other systems (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). Here is where it gets interesting: most systems are also adaptive. Adaptive systems can and will react when they are acted upon and will do so, notably, in different, often unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. Furthermore, when they react, because they are complex—made up of and making up other systems—their constituent systems and those they comprise will be ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 21 changed too (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). Take fish, for example. They form superorganisms when they school, or groups that act and behave as if they were one organism. They do this by each simply fleeing prey, moving toward food, and maintaining constant distance with their neighbors. Just one fish seeing a shark and fleeing will cause the entire school to flee. The same happens if just one component fish spots a snack. The whole school reacts based on input from just one fish (Meadows, 2008). Alternatively, those systems which are not adaptive, perhaps something like a stone, will react the same way every time they are acted upon by the same stimulus. However, due to so much of their context being comprised of adaptive systems, these non-adaptive systems will frequently be acted upon by varying, difficult-to-predict or control stimuli from adaptive systems, and so are enclosed by and subject to these complex adaptive systems to the degree that they can also not be easily predicted or controlled. Chaotic, right? This does not, however, leave us powerless, because systems can be changed—and, sometimes, dramatically (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). In fact, the rapidity of change that is possible can itself be something that should be of concern, just consider the fall of the Soviet Union and the hunger, various other insecurities, and violence that followed (Meadows, 2008). Understanding the Root Causes of the Global Crises through Systems Theory Humans are also complex adaptive systems, situated within networks that are constantly adapting. Additionally, our communities, our institutions, societies, nations, cultures, and worldviews are complex adaptive systems (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Meadows, 2008). We comprise, perpetuate, and/or grow all of these, and they also act on us. All of the different sorts of structures we create are complex adaptive systems, and we imbed into them our values, norms, and/or stories for how things should be (Korten, 2015; Meadows, 2008; Reinsborough & ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 22 Canning, 2017). When these are widely held enough to saturate cultures, they become the dominant narratives which organize and create the world. When these dominant narratives are problematic, they create crises. The Global Industrial Food System is one such crisis, undergirded by flawed dominant narratives, three in particular, which I spoke to in the previous section. This section will explain how the Global Industrial Food system is situated among other global systemic crises, all of which are created by entangled, problematic dominant narratives. The dominant narratives behind all of the global crises themselves comprise a system with one another, and it is important that they be named because they are entangled with one another, perpetuate one another, and cannot successfully be addressed individually (FigueroaHelland & Lindgren, 2016; Grosfoguel, 2011). Systems theory itself is about recognizing and holding up all the connections between a system’s composite parts and understanding that these connections are at least as important as the parts (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015). In order to situate the three root causes or dominant narratives which I have already explored, I will add that the system of root causes also includes white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, rationalism, anthropocentrism, ableism, and more (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016, Grosfoguel, 2011). I will define these further in the next section on Community Food Systems. Each of these root causes or dominant narratives is inherently problematic—as in they literally create problems when they persist. The longer they go unchanged, the larger the problems they create grow (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Meadows, 2008). Considering this and taken together, it’s easier to see how they can manifest the complex, interconnected global crises of our age, sometimes referred to as wicked problems (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; FigueroaHelland & Lindgren, 2016; Grosfoguel, 2011; Mignolo, 2007). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 23 The complexity and size of crises can be daunting, as can the prospect of changing systems while living within them, but again, systems can be changed, and that change can be carefully achieved. Some ways to change systems include changing the rules which govern them, changing the goals of the system, changing their self-organization, and, most notably, changing the paradigms in which the entire system is rooted (Meadows, 2008). New stories—making them, sharing them, living them out—can change paradigms (Korten, 2015; Meadows, 2008; Reinsborough & Canning, 2017). We need new ideas, new stories, clarified values, and better narratives, and, notably, we also need to be able to make these real (Korten, 2015; Reinsborough & Canning, 2017). This is complicated by the oppressive nature of our structures and systems, but, just as these were made by humans, they can be changed by us as we tell and live out new stories and update our structures and institutions (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Meadows, 2008; Reinsborough & Canning, 2017). It is important to highlight as well that the dominant narratives have already changed in that in many cases they are no longer widely held, but simply hold their power in that they are still imbedded in structures and institutions which can be resisted and redesigned (Reinsborough & Canning, 2017). Conclusion This research does not purport to tell stories around how we should eat differently, but rather leaves that for the people who have been living out sustainable food stories and foodways for sometimes countless generations. Rather, this research has elicited stories about what it is like to adjust to alternative food systems—those not based in these problematic dominant narratives—since we all must adjust to such food systems in order to preserve life on the planet. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 24 Systems theory helps us understand how the world works, which helps us identify avenues to change it. We live in a time where global crises are threatening the continuance of life and desperately need to be addressed. These crises are complex and undergirded by dominant narratives which, when identified, can be changed. Each dominant narrative contributes to each global crisis, and while it is beyond the scope of this research to consider all of these dominant narratives or root causes in depth, the next section will define them, draw a connection between them, and discuss how alternative systems might be grown without them. Community Food Systems Since I have elicited stories from people who have lived in and adapted to food systems removed from capitalism and based in narratives different from those of the Global Industrial Food System, it is important to understand more about these food systems, which I have called Community Food Systems, and about the food systems being created currently as attempted departures from the Global Industrial Food System. The first section will discuss the Local Food System Movement as such an attempted departure. The following section will define more of the entangled root causes or dominant narratives and draw a connection between them, and discuss what true departure from them might look like as well as briefly examining what Community Food Systems, particularly those perpetually co-created with nature by Indigenous people do look like, and in what narratives they are based. Notably, I am not Indigenous and Indigenous people and their knowledges, foodways, and community food systems go above and beyond anything that I can speak to. Similarly, my participants are not qualified to speak to these systems. There is however valuable literature from scholars who are Indigenous which I will present and honor to the best of my ability. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 25 Overview of Local Food Systems Alternative systems to the Global Industrial Food System within the Global North, are varied and yet most often are lumped under a single term: local food systems (Enthoven & Van den Broeck, 2021). These systems often show up as farmer’s markets, where farmers are able to bring food and sell it directly to community members, or as community assisted agriculture (CSAs) where community members effectively buy subscriptions for food from farmers, usually to be picked up or delivered every week or every second week, throughout the growing season (Diekmann et al., 2020). Both of these models have been shown to promote stronger community, new social ties, food education, and increased democratic civic engagement (Diekmann et al., 2020). The term local food also includes farmers who focus on selling directly to consumers to shorten or eliminate the food supply chain, but who may transport food long distances to reach customers. It also includes farmers who concern themselves with how far their food travels and so sell within a defined radius from where the food was produced, but who may utilize a long supply chain between themselves and their customers (Enthoven & Van den Broeck, 2021). This matters because longer distances and longer supply chains are each untenable and perpetuate some of the same harms as the industrial food system (Akram-Lodhi, 2015). If food can be local, and therefore be seen as better than food from the Global Industrial Food System, but still be being transported long distances direct to customers or go through a long supply chain within a small geography, then the usefulness of the term is seriously jeopardized (Enthoven & Van den Broeck, 2021). Food’s local-ness in different forms does matter—the emissions from transporting food alone are catastrophic, as are those from wasted food which rots in landfills— but it may, unfortunately, also miss the point (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Gonzalez, 2011). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 26 Undeniably, how a farmer grows their food is relevant to the harms that growing that food spreads. Being at a small scale might reduce the harm a single farmer can perpetuate, but a lot of small farmers competing with one another to produce the cheapest, quickest food may very well create the same issues that the Global Industrial Food System does. It seems that a small farmer would be less willing than corporations to destroy the long-term viability of their own land, but, depending on the ideas on which they are drawing and the situation they find themselves in, it could very well happen, and happen at a large scale. There’s also the possibility of them not minding if their run-off, or other externalities from their farm work, destroy their neighbors’ land, or the land of people down river, or even ocean life further down river still. A review of twenty years of local food system research conducted in 2021 found that many local food systems do still perpetuate harm (Enthoven & Van den Broeck, 2021). This, frankly, is why thinking about the root causes of crises is so important because these narratives are imbedded in how we think and how we do things (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Meadows, 2008). Actions taken by different people and across different scales may very well result in the same problems when these actions are manifestations of the same old stories (Korten, 2015). We can do better than local food systems and their repackaging of dominant narratives, and we must in order to save the planet. The following section outlines more of these old stories/dominant narratives which continue to cause crises such as the Global Industrial Food System, and whose replication must be avoided in the creation of alternative systems. The Narrative Underlying the Entangled Dominant Narratives In addition to and entangled with coloniality, capitalism, and industrialismdevelopmentalism are white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, rationalism, anthropocentrism, ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 27 ableism, and more, and these matter because they are entangled and perpetuate themselves through the systems which they undergird, such as the Global Industrial Food System (FigueroaHelland et al., 2015; Grosfoguel, 2011). For a food system to truly be alternative and not merely a repackaging of the same problematic narratives, each of those narratives must be understood and addressed simultaneously (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016, Grosfoguel, 2011). For this reason, to convey what an alternative system would truly look like, is important the I acknowledge each of these, but to fully engage with each of these would be beyond the scope of this thesis. It focuses on exploring experiences of adaptation and readaptation rather than how to build alternative food systems free of the problematic, dominant narratives which are the root causes of the Global Industrial Food System. The following are definitions drawn from a foundational source for the MACL program: What Goes Around Comes Around: From the Coloniality of Power to the Crisis of Civilization by Figeuroa-Helland and Lindgren (2016). White Supremacy. White supremacy is the globally dominant discourse and matrix of power and oppression which relies on appearance and/or essentialized ethno/cultural attributes to hold white people above all other people who are considered non-white. Patriarchy. Patriarchy is the globally dominant discourse and hierarchy which privileges male or masculine people and behaviors deemed masculine (such as domination) over non-male or non-masculine people and behaviors. Heterosexism. Heterosexism globally prescribes binary, male/female identities and relationships, and privileges these identities and relationships over all others. Rationalism. Rationalism presumes that reality is static, intelligible, observable, and exists separately from observers of it, and that it can be understood as made up of discrete ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 28 collections or series of causes and effects which can be discovered in order to make control possible—and legitimates this perspective only while delegitimizing and excluding all other perspectives, ways of knowing, and ways of thinking as valueless and unfounded. Anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism holds that humans are separate and higher than all of the earth and its life and that the earth and all of its like exists to be dominated and used by humans. Ableism. Ableism draws on a matrix of aesthetics, age, body-type, race, ethnicity, culture, background, knowledge possessed, perspective possessed, and cognition to define particular qualities and/or abilities as useful and/or valuable, especially within capitalism, and privileges people with these over people without them and those just considered to be without them (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016). Each of these dominant narratives and root causes themselves, as well as the structures in which they are imbedded, contain and/or justify the same foundational narrative: dominating, controlling, and violating or even denying autonomy (Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Grosfoguel, 2011). A food system which doesn’t perpetuate or repackage these root causes or dominant narratives and their harms, then, should be one which does something other than dominate, control, force, extract, profit from, or otherwise exploit people, animals, or planet. What might life like that look like? It would look like community. Outline of Community Food Systems Community food systems are made up of people living out food stories, and life stories, that run counter to the root causes of the global crises of the world (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018). Perhaps the most significant of these have been co-created by people in connection, and community, with nature as well as themselves—people who are ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 29 Indigenous, and connected to their Land. Indigenous people are diverse and exist all over the world and the term Indigenous should not be used to erase this diversity, but rather as a descriptor of what they have in common, their connection to their Land, as well as what distinguishes them from people in the rest of the world: that their existence defies colonialism and attempts at different forms of erasure, both past and present, of them, their knowledge, and lifeways (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005). Despite these attempts at erasure, Indigenous people have and continue to create the most life-dense, rich, abundant, and sustainable food systems that exist (Altieri & Nicholls, 2012; Blay-Palmer et al., 2015; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Gonzales et al., 2015; Grey & Patel, 2015; Holt-Giménez & Altieri, 2013). They do this by living out narratives that do not include the root causes or dominant narratives and by not dominating, controlling, forcing, extracting, profiting from, or otherwise exploiting people, animals, and planet (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu; Grey & Patel, 2015). In a departure from academic norms, I am leaving my discussion of Indigenous knowledge and lifeways here, and urging readers to read these sources first-hand so that these scholars may speak for themselves. I am not qualified to paraphrase their words or able to curate quotes to accurately represent even part of their wisdom. In keeping with this, this research as well as been designed to focus narrowly on stories of adaptation to such systems and the learning from adapting and readapting between food systems, rather than attempting to represent such systems filtered as they would be through people who were merely guests in them. Conclusion Food which is local may include food which is problematically sourced far away and transported, or which makes its way through a problematically long supply chain, and, if based in ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 30 the same pervasive and problematic narratives as the Global Industrial Food System, may furthermore perpetuate many of the same problems. Community Food Systems, based in narratives which are not problematic, have long existed and do still exist. Indigenous scholars provide much information on these systems and on the alternative narratives in which they are based. For my part, I will say that it is possible to live on and eat from Earth without destroying its ability to sustain life. People have done it for countless generations. Doing so now is possible, and imperative, and stories of people who have adapted to such systems are deeply relevant. Many Peace Corps volunteers have undergone such adaptation, as well as readapting to the industrial food system afterward. The following section discusses Peace Corps, the experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers, and Peace Corps’ own complexity and ties to the root causes. The United States Peace Corps In order to explore experiences of food system adaptation and readaptation, my research elicited stories from Peace Corps Volunteers. Peace Corps Volunteers are well suited to share such stories because they are placed into communities all over the world and adapt to the food systems that these communities cultivate, before largely returning to eating within the industrial food system after Peace Corps. While it is these experiences of adaptation that are valuable, they cannot be separated from the context in which they were lived. This section will explain what Peace Corps is and lay out the daily lives of Peace Corps Volunteers. This is openly ideological research, and I must also critique Peace Corps due to its ties to the root causes of global crises, or the dominant narratives. Personalizing the Critique Before laying out what Peace Corps is and how volunteers live, and especially before critiquing Peace Corps, I owe it to my participants to make it clear that Peace Corps service is ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 31 life-defining, deeply personal, and extremely difficult. I will do this by being open about my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer and by explaining the significance of that for me. I want to be explicit that Peace Corps Volunteers do what they do believing that it is deeply meaningful work and that, especially after having undergone so much, it can be extremely difficult to confront the flaws within the premise of Peace Corps. To be a Peace Corps Volunteer, I sacrificed a lot. I left my life here behind, suspended, for two years, setting myself back financially and socially. I sacrificed a lot by staying and continuing to volunteer. Through much of my service I had to choose between not eating or eating food that made me sick. I walked a line between both and was frequently both underfed and sick. In the winters I struggled to stay warm in an icy mountain village where the buildings did not have insulation to retain heat. After the wood stoves went out at night, I slept in temperatures well below freezing. I did not know how to thrive in these conditions. Furthermore, I made every interaction with other people through both language and cultural barriers, and, while it became easier as I learned more, the lack of ease in communication and understanding became profoundly draining until I was so isolated by the end that my body ached from loneliness. I did all of it because I thought it was the right thing to do to make a difference for good in the world. I am not alone in having endured a lot and given a lot in the hope of contributing at least a little bit toward a more peaceful future. I would go so far as to say that every Peace Corps Volunteer sacrifices quite a lot and endures hardship. I also had some of the best times of my life in Peace Corps. I made ties with my host families that are as real as those with my family here, and I made friends for life. I ate incredible food, learned a lot from my community, and I taught a lot of kids English. I left an impact that ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 32 my counterparts at my school continue to grow, and English language ability is vital for fighting oppression (Mayo, 1999; Mayo 2014). I learned a tremendous amount about myself and about the world, and, importantly, learned how little I know. As I lay out the harms that Peace Corps perpetuates due to its birth from and ties to the root causes of all systemic global crises, I will put forward that the good and the bad of my experiences and all I sacrificed is relevant, as are those of my participants. Moreso, there was consent for my being there at all levels from my host family, to my school, to the education ministry in my community, to the country government, and that I was welcome in my village. I do not know if such consent is universal, or if it could be, and have been personally told of cases where Peace Corps Volunteers are in communities where they are not welcome. Notably, much of the consent that there is also likely would have been complicated by hegemony, which I will discuss next. Hegemony and Peace Corps Volunteers Additionally relevant is volunteers’ and their host community’s situatedness within hegemonic dominant narratives. Hegemony describes when knowledge and ideas have been systematically sidelined and erased, and a possible or legitimate knowledge created and superimposed over all other ideas and knowledge; notably, hegemony is a direct result of colonization and an ongoing symptom of coloniality (Grosfoguel, 2002; Mayo, 1999; Mayo, 2014). Hegemony is frequently powerful enough that people under its influence are blinded to the harms they create even to the point that they actively support their own harm (Grosfoguel, 2002, Quijano, 2007). For example, the Global Industrial Food System is hegemonic, which is why we continue to shop in grocery stores for food whose production and transportation further violates planetary boundaries. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 33 As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I did not know that development was largely a rebranding of colonialism and a product of the coloniality of power and knowledge (Grosfoguel, 2002, Quijano, 2007). I was open to learning everything I could from the people I was there to serve, wasn’t interested in proselytizing the US, and I was certainly open to serving them how they wanted to be served and teaching them English but also whatever else they wanted to learn from me. I had not, however, thought critically about the value of what I had to teach. I had not stopped to think, “Hmmm, whose way of life is currently ushering in apocalypse?” I did not know that the instances where I shared my culture, especially with children, capitalized on unresolved power imbalances and interfered with the replication of their culture (Grosfoguel, 2002). I did not know that a lot of what I had to give them was the spreading of—among other ideas—capitalism and industrialism-developmentalism. It is the fundamental nature of hegemony that doing the best you can often results in harm anyway--because the systems we live in include our systems of knowledge which fundamentally affect us, even to the point of enclosing, defining, excluding very particular ideas of what “good” is (Grosfoguel, 2002; Mayo, 2014; Quijano, 2007). I did my best every day, as do almost all volunteers, to make a difference for good. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know what you don’t know, especially when everyone around you knows only the same. Notably, it was living with my host community which opened my eyes to how limited and unexamined my ideas had been, and I wouldn’t have been there and gotten that if not for the flawed premise of Peace Corps. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 34 The Premise of the United States Peace Corps and its Basis in Problematic Dominant Narratives President Kennedy created the Peace Corps in 1962 with the vision of sending an army of peace, comprised of US citizen ambassadors, skilled and willing to help, to countries across the world (About Peace Corps, 2022; Rice, 1985; Schwarz, 1991). It was created with a mission consisting of three goals: 1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. 2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. 3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. (About Peace Corps, 2022) The presumption is clear, especially in the first goal: The United States is qualified to provide skilled workers to countries in the developing world—because this developing world should eventually look like ours, probably because the US is better, and as if the world were the United States’ to shape as it sees fit (Busch, 2018; Rice, 1985; Schwarz, 1991). This is little different from colonization, perpetuates coloniality, and directly spreads other dominant narrative root causes such as capitalism and industrialization/developmentalism (Busch, 2018; Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Grosfoguel, 2011). Since its founding, this mission, its goals, and their underlying presumption continue although progress certainly has been made. During my orientation to Peace Corps, I was given a summary of how these goals have been differently interpreted, and their execution improved, since its inception. (M. Sheehan, personal communication, April 2016). When it started, the first goal was understood as license to do development on people rather than with them, for their own good, according to how ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 35 volunteers saw it. The second goal was written to mean that volunteers should teach their communities US culture, and early volunteers set out to do just that. The third goal was the work which started largely after volunteers finished their service and became Returned Peace Corps Volunteers in the US, opening people’s eyes here to the ways that people live in other places, with varying degrees of self-appointed authority as spokespeople for cultures and people of which they were not a part (M. Sheehan, personal communication, April 2016). It was explained to us that since then Peace Corps has evolved and its goals reinterpreted. Acknowledgement grew that volunteers should not be there to develop host communities as they saw fit, but to serve their communities and the goals those communities defined (M. Sheehan, personal communication, April 2016; About Peace Corps, 2022). The flaw in the premise of Peace Corps persists however in that volunteers have been raised within dominant narratives that are the root causes of the crises of the world. What expertise can volunteers bring in support of these communities’ goals but our own skills and knowledges? How can we keep ourselves from spreading these narratives, especially when we have not seen their flaws and the damage they inject into systems? Volunteers have latitude to define their own projects and are explicitly meant to follow their host community’s lead and to do nothing without a counterpart, yet the standard projects almost always show up as teaching employability skills to youth, financial and strategic planning to organizations, and otherwise “modernizing” all sorts of organizational and industrial processes (About Peace Corps, 2022). It is a tall order to support other people to grow to be more themselves, especially without knowing much at all about them, and that is provided they even want to grow at all. It may be possible to do it, I hope so certainly—what a gift of affirmation—but Peace Corps barely touches on doing it. If volunteers are able to affirm their communities, and inspire them to come up with ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 36 their own vision and their own answers, they probably didn’t learn to do it from Peace Corps. A world of peace should not be one where everyone is the same, and certainly, not one where everyone is like the US—all which I am confident most Peace Corps Volunteers would wholeheartedly agree with—yet Peace Corps and its volunteers still do development (About Peace Corps, 2022). In the next section I will provide an overview of the current role of Peace Corps Volunteers as well as their day to day lives. The Role and Day to Day Lives of Peace Corps Volunteers Once in country, Peace Corps begins with orientation. This usually lasts about a week and consists of a crash course in the language, introductions to all of the Peace Corps support staff and overviews of their roles, and interviews with supervisors. During orientation I received an overview of Peace Corps’ history of reinterpreting its mission and goals and was told that our role would be as advisors, not as decision makers. It was explained to us that we would be paired to a host country national counterpart within our community for our primary assignment. Primary assignments are the roles to which we applied when we joined—the most common are English teacher/teacher trainer and community/economic development specialist (About Peace Corps, 2022). Our role was to arm people with what they would need to continue what we built together after we left. We were encouraged to work with our communities to develop secondary projects as well and were told not to do or push anything without finding a host country national to be our partner or our lead. To emphasize this, we were told that development itself was merely an excuse to justify our more important work of forming deep connections with the people—and that this was the true work of peace. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 37 After orientation, volunteers are sent to their training sites for pre-service training which lasts about three months. Training sites usually consist of villages or suburbs around a larger central hub. Five or six volunteers are placed in each training site with their own host families and a language and cultural facilitator. Each group of volunteers is called a cluster. In the mornings clusters generally meet to study the language for four or five hours, and then in the afternoons are transported into the central hub to meet up with the entire cohort to study the technical skills for their primary assignments. Evenings are spent doing homework and practicing the language with their host families and neighbors. This routine continues throughout pre-service training, only interrupted for a visit to their permanent site to meet their host families and learn about life there. After training volunteers are sworn in and then move to their permanent sites. Most live with a host family for at least the first three months if not their whole service, although it is also common for volunteers to be placed in small apartments on school compounds. Life at permanent sites varies, but it is consistent that volunteers are expected to put more than 40 hours in a work week on their primary and secondary projects, and to remember that they are representatives of the United States 24/7. Time not working is meant to be spent integrating into the community, practicing language, and otherwise forming and cultivating relationships. Volunteers are, as much as possible, to be among the people living as the people do. They are paid a stipend equivalent to what their primary assignment counterpart makes and are discouraged from spending outside money. They are also expected to stay in site unless they have vacation time, although it is common that volunteers are allowed to leave on the weekends. The United States Peace Corps began by aspiring to send skilled United States citizens to countries all over the world as a project of development. While this has changed to become more ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 38 community lead, Peace Corps’ mission is still fundamentally one of development, with the role of Peace Corps Volunteer as an advisor to communities. Even as communities move toward developing themselves, the problem remains that Peace Corps Volunteers know only how to help them become more like the US and are trained to do so. Notably, volunteers do the work they do, despite all of the hardship and sacrifice it requires, because they are confident that they are doing the right thing. Conclusion We live in a world with many complex, global problems. Among them is the Global Industrial Food System. Since this system is complex, systems theory can help us understand it and the dominant narratives which are its root causes. This global food system perpetuates harms which have already violated planetary boundaries—which threatens life on the planet—and must be transformed. New systems must be based in alternative narratives in order to not merely repackage the current system and recreate its harms. Alternative food systems do exist, and community food systems are particularly promising—especially those which draw on Indigenous knowledges and lifeways to exist in harmony with Earth. Such knowledges and lifeways are not within the purview of this research, which focuses more narrowly on the stories of food system adaptation from Peace Corps Volunteers who have adapted to living within community food systems before readapting to the Global Industrial Food System. Chapter III lays out the methods through which these stories will be gathered and understood. This research is openly ideological, and I must note that Peace Corps itself is a project of colonization by way of development and rooted in the same problematic dominant narratives as the Global Industrial Food System. The nature of these dominant narratives is hegemonic which ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 39 leads volunteers to firmly believe they are doing the right thing even as they may be causing harm. Injecting further ideology, while of course volunteers are responsible for their actions, I prefer to hold hegemony and its narratives at least as responsible as volunteers who did not and perhaps in a real sense could not have known better even as they sacrificed and gave considerably. I believe that knowing is itself a privilege, especially in a world where much knowledge and many ways of knowing have been systematically sidelined, erased, and excluded from consideration. Simply put, a truly peaceful world, to which I believe an overwhelming majority of volunteers would agree, must be one made up of many different people and cultures able to successfully thrive through their own lifeways—one where coloniality has been rectified—rather than one in which everything has been swallowed up by capitalism and industrialismdevelopmentalism and made not just homogenous but uniformly self-destructive—such is not progress. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 40 Chapter III: Methods As a Peace Corps Volunteer living in Eastern Europe, there were times when I chose between eating foods that would make me sick and going without food. Notably, the food that made me sick was great food for my host family, their friends, neighbors, and their children. Their children flourished on it. I was far from flourishing, and neither were my Peace Corps Volunteer colleagues. We were struggling. It was then, one day when I had chosen to go hungry rather than eat this food, that I found myself wondering, was it a problem with the food, or was it a problem with me? It wasn’t just me. So, zooming out somewhat, I thought, was it a problem with their food system, or with the food system I’d been raised within? What a question! It is not within my means to answer, nor was it then. Contextualized by literature presented in the second chapter, the following is the question this research explored: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? Chapter III goes on to present the sections Research Context, Participants, Recruitment, Informed Consent and Confidentiality, Data Collection Methods, Data Storage, Data Analysis, Potential Challenges, Validity, and Ethical Considerations. Research Context To explore these questions, I recruited Peace Corps Volunteers who lived in community food systems and returned after Peace Corps to the US. The location of my research was virtual and national, although it could have been global had any of my participants been living outside of the United States currently. They were asked to join a Microsoft Teams meeting from where they were currently living to join a virtual story circle. Story circles are a qualitative research ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 41 tool in which participants with similar lived experiences meet one another, talk about their experiences to build rapport and jog their memories, and then attentively listen as each person shares a story (Denton, 2020; Roadside Theater, 1999; Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University, 2020). The story circles for this research included three parts: introductions, discussion and unstructured sharing of anecdotes, and then floor time for individual story telling of each person’s food journey as they adjusted to peace corps, continued and finished their service, returned to the US and readjusted, and how their experiences shape the eating story they’re currently living out. These were audio and video recorded through Microsoft Teams. Field notes were written after each story circle, and debriefing with my advisor. Then I transcribed the story circles and coded them. Participants I was interested in the experience of having lived and grown up in the industrial food system, before finding oneself living and eating within a community-based food system for long enough to adjust to this new system, and then what it was like, finally, to return to the industrial food system and readapt. Many Returned Peace Corps Volunteers have had this same general experience, while the community-based food systems in which they have lived exist in communities all over the world. With few exceptions, volunteers are placed within host families during their three-month pre-service training, and then are typically placed with a host family during at least their first three months at their permanent sites. Most volunteers choose to stay with their host families for the full two years of their service. Host families feed volunteers, teach them how to feed themselves in the local food system, and connect them with the broader community. Not all Peace Corps Volunteers have had the experiences I was interested in raising up as stories, but many have. Furthermore, there are few groups other than Returned Peace Corps ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 42 Volunteers whose members have had similar experiences of living in and adapting to community food systems while imbedded in host families and learning the local languages—with, additionally, these experiences having occurred all across the world in different communities within different countries. My entire sample included Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, not because I was interested in Peace Corps experiences specifically, but because many Returned Peace Corps Volunteers have had the experiences I was interested in and had them in communities all over the world. I included returned volunteers in my research whose eating context prior to joining Peace Corps was firmly within the industrial food system. I defined this as having gotten at least 80% of their food from corporate grocery stores and/or industrial food supply chains for the ten years prior to joining Peace Corps. I was also interested in returned volunteers who were immersed in community-based food systems in host countries, so I recruited volunteers who got more than half of their food from their community or other local sources rather than from corporate grocery stores/industrial food supply chains, and who lived with their permanent site host families for at least one full cycle of the seasons in their locale. My research looked at the experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers directly after returning to the industrial food system, so my participants needed to have returned to the industrial food system within three months post-service and lived in and eaten 80% of their food from this system for a period of at least one year. Peace Corps Volunteers have to be over 18 and US Citizens, so my research was limited to include only those who were over 18 and US Citizens. These were my only exclusionary criteria. For inclusion criteria, I sought as wide a sample as possible in terms of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender. Peace Corps has not done enough to address systemic barriers to service, and, for example, until recently put all the financial burden of medical appointments and ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 43 procedures for medical clearance onto prospective volunteers. They have also, until recently, required that their volunteers have a bachelor’s degree. Peace Corps also advises LGBTQIA+ volunteers to remain closeted until they get to know their communities and can assess—with guidance from local host country national staff members, and while taking local laws into account—whether and/or how to best come out. All of this has hurt diversity within Peace Corps and made it more difficult for me to recruit a sample as diverse as I would have liked. For example, I was not able to recruit any men for my study. Peace Corps organizes their host counties by region: Asia, Africa, Central and Southern America, Caribbean and Pacific islands, Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Volunteer Openings, 2022). In order to better achieve an illustrative sample and take advantage of the breadth of contexts in which Returned Peace Corps Volunteers have had their food system experiences, my study included at least one volunteer from each of these regions. My research utilized two story circles. The first included six Peace Corps Volunteer participants, excluding myself, and the second three so my sample consisted of nine participants. Recruitment I employed the sampling tactic of maximum variation in order to gain a wide degree of diversity through which I could seek common threads (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). In order to reach a wide enough pool of candidates to succeed in getting a richly diverse and variable sample, I recruited from Facebook groups after receiving permission from their administrators. The groups I sought to recruit within were Returned Peace Corps Volunteers for Environmental Action, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Association of Utah, Georgia Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, RPCVs, RPCV Jobs, RPCVs of Washington D.C., RPCVs of Seattle, and RPCVs of Colorado, RPCVs of Northern Texas, and RPCVs of Portland. These were selected based on ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 44 their total number of members and level of posts per week. I made a page through EventBright which allowed potential participants to express their interest and sign up to be placed on a waitlist, provided they met eligibility criteria. I posted a link to this to the Facebook groups, and when EventBright went down intermittently, I added a Google form document and linked that within my posts as well. In addition to this recruiting, I utilized a snowball recruitment method by encouraging those who read my Facebook posts and my participants to distribute my contact information within their circles. I also used a convenience method by recruiting among my circle of Returned Peace Corps Volunteer acquaintances, although due to being able to recruit everyone I needed through the other recruitment methods, I only secured one participant in this manner (Brewis, 2014; Noy, 2008). Please see Appendix C for my recruitment scripts. To sign up for the waitlist through my EventBright or Google doc, I asked potential participants to answer questions to verify their eligibility relevant to my inclusion and exclusion criteria and waitlisted everyone who qualified. Within the first month I had 24 people waitlisted and selected the most representative possible group for my first story circle. I retained those I did not select for my second story circle, and again selected the next most representative group possible. Informed Consent and Confidentiality After selecting someone from my prospective participant list to join a story circle, I emailed them my informed consent document and asked them to carefully read it, agree to or decline its different sections and, if they opted to move forward, to email it back to me signed. This can be found in Appendix A. It included an in-depth description of what they could expect, their rights as a participant, and the steps I would take to ensure confidentiality. This included ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 45 using pseudonyms which I asked them to choose themselves in the EventBright/Google docs questionnaire. I referred to them by these pseudonyms in the transcripts and in my thesis, and let them know that they could opt to use it within the story circle as well if they would prefer that to their real name. I provided the option for them to use their real names among themselves in the story circle in order to not impede the community building benefit which story circles can produce (Roadside Theater, 1999). At the beginning and end of each story circle, I reviewed informed consent with the participants, reminding them that their participation was voluntary and could be withdrawn at any point along with their words and actions removed from the transcripts, field notes, and thesis up to the publication of my thesis. Data Collection Methods I used virtual story circles to collect my data, and follow-up emails to individual participants to collect more information. A story circle consists of around five people sitting in a circle and telling stories to one another based on a common experience they have shared (Denton, 2020). Story circles have a defined, agreed upon purpose, are bounded by time, and are guided by structure such as even time for sharing (Roadside Theater, 1999). They require a facilitator to guide the group and keep the conversation on track and allow this person to also join in the conversation (Denton, 2020). Story circles are meant to be conversational and informal to begin with, with time provided before story sharing to chat with one another, warm up, and connect, and to share information to contextualize the stories to come (Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University, 2020). After the warm-up phase, story circles hold that the facilitator share their story first, in order to model the beginning, middle, and end structure, and to show that these stories need not shy away from personal or deeper subjects ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 46 (Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University, 2020). With the exception of the facilitator’s story which the facilitator will have had more time to think about, the stories should be created within a ten-minute break and delivered extemporaneously, rather than from notes or previously constructed plans— influenced by what the other participants have shared (Roadside Theater, 1999). Toward this end, deep, undistracted listening is paramount, as is allowing for silence after a story is told for quiet reflection (Denton, 2020). After storytelling, this reflection should be extended by encouraging participants to comment and share their feelings and thoughts around what they have heard and shared (Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University, 2020). The traditional model of story circles has been adapted for video conferencing. These virtual story circles operate like in person story circles, except they include brief technology primers to cover how to access the chat in the event of an audio issue, as well as the guideline that all participants keep their cameras on while displaying the view all participants option in Microsoft Teams (Denton, 2020; Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University, 2020). My research included two virtual story circles and follow-up emails. I used Microsoft Teams to host each story circle and provide participants with a link to join, after offering two Saturdays as potential dates to meet and coordinating with everyone to select the best date. I ran the first story circle in December and the second story circle in February which allowed me time to complete a transcription and preliminary coding after the first circle, as well as revise my story circle guide and structure with what I learned. My first virtual story circle was meant to include three rounds of story sharing with a session of warm up chatting to precede each round. The first round was meant to raise up stories ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 47 of what it is like to find oneself immersed in a new community and food system, the second to raise up stories of what it is like to return to the industrial food system, and the third to raise up the food stories that participants are currently or would like to be living out. Appendix B includes this story circle guide in which I planned everything down to the minute, but it did not go to plan. Rather, it was only semi-structured throughout as volunteers shared anecdotes and spoke with one another. I took what I learned and created a new plan for my second story circle which incorporated less structure. I also created a document which explained this new plan and story circles in general and sent this out with the link invitation. This second guide is also included in Appendix B. I allocated half an hour for introductions, between a half hour and an hour for freeflowing discussion and anecdote sharing, and an hour at the end for sharing of their entire food journey from adjusting to their host community’s food system, continuing and finishing service, returning and readjusting to the US, and concluding with what their currently lived food story consists of now. Both story circles lasted about three hours, were video and audio recorded with backup audio recorded on my phone, and, following each, I spent thirty minutes writing field notes before debriefing with my advisor. I was not able to take notes during either meeting because I was both facilitating and participating. Data Storage In order to ensure confidentiality, data was stored on Microsoft SharePoint and on Google drive under passwords which only I had. This included electronic transcripts and recordings. I stored local copies on my laptop, where they were also password protected. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 48 Data Analysis I transcribed each story circle recording after conducting the story circles. I began data analysis by first going through the initial interview and developing a potential list of codes through a process known as emergent coding (Saldaña, 2009). With each read through, and after my second story circle, I continued to revise and refine this list of codes until nothing new arose while coding. As I worked, I memoed connections between the codes I was finding, and created concept maps to consider how what I was finding fit together into overarching themes and connected to the literature I had already found, while also identifying areas in which I needed to conduct further research of the literature in order to better understand my findings. Challenges In my first story circle, I over-invited participants anticipating that not all of them would attend. We began with five participants and myself. My plans for the circle’s structure quickly fell apart. It became clear quickly that my timing was unrealistic and while I tried to facilitate the discussion to hold to this plan, it did not work. Despite this, my participants and I told many anecdotes, had compelling discussions, and everyone shared their personal Peace Corps food story around what it was like to adjust to the food systems in our host countries and continue our services. About an hour into the meeting a seventh person joined. We recapped what they missed, and they went on to contribute a lot to the story circle before leaving about an hour later. Another participant joined from an event they were involved in and left about half an hour further into the meeting when they had to leave their location. This meant that these two people were not able to share their experiences of returning to the US and readjusting to the Global Industrial Food System, although everyone else shared what they remembered. Two participants did not ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 49 remember very much, and we ran out of time before we could talk about how their experiences of adjusting and readjusting to different food systems affected their lives and eating since and currently. I suspect that the two participants who didn’t remember very much about readjustment would have had a lot to share about this, and regret we weren’t able to hear from them particularly on the subject. I took my learning from this first story circle and changed the structure for my second to allow more time for introductions and for free-flowing brainstorming and conversation, before everyone told their whole story at once rather than attempting to section this into multiple rounds. This worked quite well, and we were able to cover everything according to plan in the second circle. I emailed out follow up questions and was able to elicit a lot of what we did not cover in the first circle. Additional challenges were technological. A few times in both circles microphones went out and we handled this by letting the speakers know we couldn’t hear them. They were able to adjust and get their sound working again. One participant left the group briefly to change to another device after their battery died, and another lost internet connection briefly. When they came back online we paused to recap what they missed before continuing. Validity Research should be aware of and reflect on its own theoretical grounding, and research should employ methods which align with that grounding (Lather, 1986; Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). This research was grounded in the understanding that stories are the systemic building blocks of the narratives and the figured worlds through which we understand our realities and on which we draw when designing the structures in which we live (Gee, 2014; Korten, 2015; Meadows, 2008; Reinsborough & Canning, 2017). Research should also attempt to improve the ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 50 world (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). Storytelling is a fundamental method of communicating experiences and connecting individuals and has profound potential to change the world (Reinsborough & Canning, 2017). Narrative inquiry aligns with the systems-thinking view of reality in which this research was grounded and has the potential to change narratives to reshape the reality they create for the better. In addition to building my research on firm theoretical grounding, I employed strategies to help ensure validity within my study. When a comment or story a participant shared with me was not clear, and if the participant agreed to be contacted, I performed member checks by contacting participants and asking them to double check my interpretation and/or clarify what they said (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). In order to examine and be open regarding the biases which I will unavoidably bring into my research, I practiced reflexivity by paying attention to my own reactions and assumptions as they arose and noting them (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). Ethical Considerations I provided my participants with detailed informed consent, was clear at the beginning and end of my story circles that they could withdraw their participation at any point, as well as request that any part, including the whole, of what they have shared be removed from my transcripts up to the publication of my thesis. I asked that participants pick pseudonyms which I used instead of their names in my transcriptions and thesis. Additionally, I changed any mention of country of service or current residence to a regional descriptor in my thesis. Please see Appendix A for the informed consent form. There was potential that my participants might hold unresolved trauma around their service and/or around food. Telling stories of their time in Peace Corps and of readjusting to life ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 51 in the United States post Peace Corps could have brought this trauma to the surface in ways which may have been difficult and/or challenging. As I laid out what participants could expect in their informed consent, I discussed the possibility of raising up connected trauma and asked that participants be thoughtful about their participation. Additionally, I built time into my story circles for breaking so that participants could calm down if such should become necessary. Finally, I compiled a list of national resources for assistance with unresolved trauma, mental health, and difficulties around food, as well as 2-1-1 which is a free information and referral service for local resources in the US and parts of Canada. I provided every participant with this list attached to their informed consent document. Please see it in Appendix A. It is also notable that participation in story circles has been shown to be a means by which people are able to be heard and form connections with other individuals who can relate to their experiences. It is not uncommon for participants of story circles to form communities of support with one another, and for the participation to be a cathartic, relieving experience itself (Denton, 2020; Roadside Theater, 1999; Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University, 2020). It is this experience as well as the knowledge shared within the group and the connections made between members which will compensate the participants for their time and contributions. Additionally, I completed an ethics training on the protection of human research participants though the National Institute of Health (NIH), and this research was vetted for ethics and safety and approved by my institution’s review board (IRB). My NIH certificate and IRB approval letter are attached in Appendix D. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 52 Conclusion In this research, I used story circles to raise up stories of Peace Corps Volunteers as they transitioned into community-based food systems and back into the industrial food system, as well as the current food stories they have since been living out now or would like to be living out. I recruited for maximum variation in order to achieve rich diversity through which I could look for common threads as I coded. I planned contingencies for handling potential challenges and addressed the challenges which did appear. To help ensure validity, I chose methods which are well-grounded in my conceptual framework and conducted member checking and practiced researcher reflexivity. To attend to ethical considerations, I collected informed consent from each participant, asked them to choose pseudonyms to replace their names in my research, gave them the option to use these pseudonyms in the story circles, replaced specific locations with regional locations, made time for extra breaks in my story circles, and provided each participant with a resource list for mental health and food support as well as other resources local to them. As we consider how we could change our food system to save Earth, animals, and ourselves, perhaps these stories about what it is like to adapt and readapt across food systems can contribute something positive and meaningful. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 53 Chapter IV: Results Introduction The question my research explored was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? These stories were elicited through story circles, where a group of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, including myself chatted together, shared anecdotes, asked one another questions, and told stories of our Peace Corps food journey (Denton, 2020; Roadside Theater, 1999). First, we chatted and told stories about what it was like to adjust from growing up in the Global Industrial Food System to living in a community food system. Then we conversed and told stories about what it was like to return to the Global Industrial Food System. Third, while the others listened, we each shared our personal food journeys as we moved from the Global Industrial Food System, into a community food system, and back to the Global Industrial Food System. My role, besides lightly guiding the discussion to keep us on time (or attempting to do so in the first story circle) was to be a participant. This chapter will present the narratives in common across stories and story circles which arose through transcript coding, organized by the timeframes in which they occurred: encountering a community food system, adjusting to a community food system, and returning to the Global Industrial Food System. In order to ensure confidentiality, not only were participant names replaced with pseudonyms but host countries were obfuscated in participant quotes. This chapter will conclude by contextualizing these themes within the dominant narratives of coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism. More information can be found in ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 54 Chapters I and II on these dominant narratives and how they undergird the Global Industrial Food System and Peace Corps. First, when discussing what it was like to encounter a community food system from the Global Industrial Food System, nearly all of my participants shared that they felt a loss of control both due to the food environment itself and due to the community-ness of that food. Second, participants, unprompted, talked about adjusting to these new circumstances. Nearly all of them shared that they did so by figuring out how to regain control relevant to the food environment and community-ness of food. They shared that adjustment also included a widening of what was appetizing and of what counted as food. Third, as they discussed and shared stories around what it was like to return to the Global Industrial Food System, nearly every participant shared reconciling re-entering this system as a changed person, and experiencing intense overwhelm due to the variety and the quantity of food present. Participants also spoke about how they kept their wider appetite and classification of things as food, while encountering a new narrowing where things which were appetizing before were no longer appetizing, and in some cases where what had counted as food no longer did. The dominant narratives of coloniality, capitalism, and industrialismdevelopmentalism—and their larger presence in the Global Industrial Food System compared to community food systems—help explain these themes. Chapter IV will conclude with this contextualization and analysis of the themes. Encountering a Community Food System: Loss of Control Having grown up in the Global Industrial Food System, encountering a community food system was a serious change for each of my participants. Almost all of them talked about how food was no longer in their control like it had been before, due to the food environment itself and ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 55 also due to the food access being mediated through community. The next section will present the evidence of loss of control due to food environment. Experiencing Loss of Control Due to Variety, Quantity, and Quality of Food in Food Environment In sharing their stories of entering a community food system, nearly every one of my participants spoke about the change in the variety, quantity, and quality of food available, and how this felt like a loss of control over their food. Variety. Emily spoke of the contrast in variety of food available between the Global Industrial Food System in the US and the community food system she lived in: So, I think, just coming from America—where you can find anything at any time—when it's mealtime, somebody says, “Well, do you want this or do you want this?” Based on what we have in the refrigerator, or meal planning, or whatnot, but that's definitely not the situation. You like what you're given, and you eat it, and so that was the environment that I came into. Rather than being able to find anything at any time, Emily found that the food that was there was all the food there was to eat. Betsy describes a similar experience in her community food system: The village that I lived in, it was very subsistence farming and you just lived off of what was there from season to season, and just relied on what was in your weekly local market and tried to stock up. f days where it was just rice and tomato paste. In the village Betsy lived in, she ate what was there depending on the season and depending on what was in the local market, and sometimes that meant just eating rice flavored with tomato paste. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 56 Later Betsy went on to talk more about the limitations around variety in her village, and about tomato paste: Where my village was, it was in the middle of a rainforest. So, always very hot and humid. You’d think that tons of stuff would grow there, but it was pretty limited. There was a little stand that somebody would run, and so, there are these little tins of tomato paste all over the country. Everybody had tomato paste. Which is the weirdest thing, right? You're just like, “Okay, I'm in this teeny tiny little area, we've got nothing, but we've got tomato paste.” Due to the local environment, they could not grow very much of their own food, and the variety of things they got in from elsewhere was limited, largely, to tomato paste, and, as mentioned previously, rice. Rice played a large role as a staple food in many other community food systems that volunteers lived in. Halimatou also had a lot of rice, “The main thing that's eaten is rice. They eat a lot of rice.” Jay also described a predominance of rice well: I was solely dependent upon what they made for us at lunch and what my host family had, which typically was rice; every now and then it would be rice with some kind of oil. My food. It was rice for breakfast. We would have brunch. Rice. And then there would be rice for dinner. Jay’s family typically had rice, and they had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sometimes they had rice with oil. Jean described the food available in her community and how they ate this same food everyday with slight variations depending on availability.: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 57 I was like, “Oh man, you eat the same thing every day,” because the expectation was, when you're there, you have tea, you have Chai for breakfast, usually, maybe bread too if there was anything. Then lunch was something called githeri, which is maize and beans just boiled because maize and beans grow really well. As long as you keep it dry, it stores forever, and then you just have to boil it for hours and hours and hours. So, the students got that every day. So, you had your githeri in every single lunch. Jean found that breakfast was the same every day, mediated only by the varying availability of breakfast, and then lunch was always the same. The difference in variety went beyond not just having access to the same range of food participants had been used to previously, but also meant that they had to eat things that they didn’t want to eat. Jay described the daily evening meal, noting that one dish in the meal was an “acquired taste”: Every night, or the evening meal, was always sakuma and ugali. Best comparison to sakuma is collard greens here in the US. They're in the same family, that's not quite the same thing but the same family. So, collard greens, and then you get ground corn, and you boil the ground corn and it… It's not cornbread, but it's something similar, you just can't describe it. Ugali is definitely an acquired taste. Whether she liked it or not, and it is clear that she did not like Ugali at least at first, Jay had to eat it. Sylvia’s community tried to accommodate her preferences around cilantro, but only briefly, and then she, too, just had to eat it: “They had mentioned cilantro and so I also mentioned that I really did not like cilantro at all and, I forget if it was immediately or like the next day that they said, ‘You know what, you just have to eat cilantro.’” Ginevive spoke about ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 58 this as well when she described the conversations that Peace Corps Volunteers had with site placement staff in the country she served in: Some people would ask like, “Does food matter?” Like, “Do you have a specific diet restriction?” And I thought that was a funny question. I'm just gonna say this. Like, I have an eating disorder. So, I was like, “Of course food matters,” but for a lot of people they were like, “Send me wherever, I'm not picky.” And then three months in we're like, “Actually I'm very picky. I don't like peanuts.” And peanuts are everything. And then there were people that were like, “I'm a runner. I really care about this or that.” So, I just thought that was really funny. Ginevive described how some started out thinking they wouldn’t mind eating anything, but when they encountered a food environment that didn’t have the variety they were used to, to the point that they had to eat a higher concentration of some foods than they had before, they realized they were particular after all. Furthermore, Ginevive talked about how some people had food preferences based on their own lifestyle and health, such as the runners she knew. Onyiye spoke about this aspect of variety as well: At the time [when I started Peace Corps], I was pretty big into fitness to a healthy degree. I had lost a lot of weight. I was feeling good. For my body, I had certain stipulations, I guess you'd say, with rules that I followed. I wasn't eating dairy. I wasn't eating bread or anything with gluten in it. And I felt great. I felt amazing, the best I have ever felt in several years. And then I turned to the Peace Corps and I said, “Take me wherever you need my skills.” I landed in a country whose main vehicle for their meal was bread and cheese, all kinds of dairy. And I'm like, okay, all right. I can do this. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 59 She had to abandon all of the plans she had for her diet and, by extension, for her body. She did not have control of her diet due to the lack of variety in the food environment she found herself in. The next section discusses quantity of food and how that sometimes constituted food insecurity, but before we get there, variety in food also had implications for food insecurity. Betsy’s position as a Peace Corps Volunteer was as a food and nutrition educator, and she lived with a lot of people who had calories to eat, but did not have the variety necessary to get the nutrients they needed: I definitely worked with a lot of the different groups as far as nutrition went because a lot of the women, a lot of the children, weren't getting nutritional things to eat. So, a lot of times, when you see the distended bellies and the belly buttons, I think that's just from overeating carbs. So, it's a lack of nutrition even though there are big bellies, and people always found that weird when I would send pictures home. They're like, “Oh, they're not starving, there's no food issues, they're doing well.” I'm like, “No, that's malnutrition.” It's not just seeing ribs that people often think with malnutrition. Betsy’s community showed what she saw as visible signs of malnutrition due to eating too many carbs and not enough other food. Her host community also didn’t have enough variety, and, notably, they were not guests within this food system. Betsy went on to talk more about rice and about how, living in the same food system as her neighbors, she experienced the same issues. She talked about the environmental context and how that was relevant to the food system: And I just remember, I was eating a lot of rice, and I’m like, “This is super easy, there are a ton of variations.” But then I remember just being starving even after I’ve had this ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 60 heaping bowl of rice, and it just was not filling. And I remember just thinking, “This is all we have during dry season.” Rainy season we have lots of different fruits and variety, but during dry season, food was less to come by because you needed water to grow things. Betsy ate the rice and at first felt good about being able to cook it differently but was ultimately still unable to satiate herself on this one food alone, which was the only food they had, along with tomato paste, during the dry season. Almost all of my participants talked about encountering a difference in variety, specifically less variety, than they had been used to growing up in the Global Industrial Food System. This meant not being able to eat as widely as they were used to, but rather a lot of some particular staple foods and dishes. Beyond the staples, it also meant eating more of some dishes and some flavors they didn’t want to eat, but they had to because these were the foods they had. Finally lack of variety also had nutritional implications. Due to availability of food in the food systems, they were not able to control their diets to get variety. Relatedly, the following section will talk about how participants, due again to the availability of food within the food systems, were not able to control the quantity of food in their diets. Quantity. Jay spoke about the quantity of food she ate during her first three months in country, and how she was not able to control it simply due to the limited amount: “I remember journaling one day and I was like, “I think, I'm hungry,” and I was like, “I might be, starving.” It was just like this slow, just kind of building feeling, you know?” Jay talked about how going without enough food was something that grew until she reached a point where it hit her; she was starving. She describes that moment further: I used to wear waist beads and so when I came to [my host country], I was at my highest weight ever because the month before coming, I just lived my best life in America. I used ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 61 to wear these waist beads and then one day I was getting dressed and I looked down. Well, what's that on the floor? Like my beads had just come off of me because I was just not eating, like, during that three-month period, I lost 50 pounds. Jay’s waist beads fell off of her body because she had lost so much weight from not getting enough to eat. During those first three months, she lost 50 pounds. Onyiye described how the quantity of food they had had a hard cap, meaning there was no way to get more food: My family would eat like they'd make one pot of beans and have those beans the entire day for all meals. Because they used the money to pay for bills and other expenses, if we didn't have food, then we just didn't have food. Onyiye’s family had a certain amount of money for food which did not always go toward food, in which case there was no other food to be had. Ginevive spoke about how food varied in quantity considerably depending on the neighborhood one lived in, and how in certain neighborhoods food was rationed: I would hang out with my friends who lived in these other host families, and it was very much like we were only allowed one drumstick; we were allowed one chicken foot. Because a lot of things were like chicken foot stews and things like that, we were allowed one portion and we couldn't ask for more. We didn’t have enough, but we’d have had even less later on without the rules. The families in Ginevive’s neighborhood without enough food did their best to make what food they had go as long as they could by controlling how much each person ate. Betsy’s community also didn’t have enough food, at least in the dry season. Interestingly there were some circumstances when they did not ration their food: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 62 When someone dies, you feed the whole village, you’re celebrating someone's life, and that’s status in the community. If your family can really provide a great death celebration for you, that's everything. So, you'd have these moments of just overindulgence, and so much food, and all this abundance. Then, the next day, there would be no food left in the village because it was all used for this death celebration. So, then you had to go to markets that were even further away to even get food that week because even your local market was entirely cleared out. So, it was just this continually fluctuating discussion on, “You don't really have to cook every single thing in everybody's house in the village for this death celebration because, tomorrow, we have no food, and the next day, we have no food, and the next day, we still don't have food.” So, those were interesting concepts to just not have a comment on, and just allow because what was I going to do as an outsider? Betsy talked about not having control of the food in her food system because she was not a member of the community. The community chose to cook and eat all of the available food for a death celebration and be hungry together for days afterward, Betsy included. Quantity and variety of food both have a lot to do with availability of food within a food system. There was often not enough food at all, and/or not enough of different types of food. Sometimes there was food but it was not food that participants could eat without becoming unwell, which also had implications on the participants’ ability to control their own diets. The next section will discuss this aspect of lack of control due to the food environment. Quality. A common narrative also arose among the participants about getting sick from food more frequently while their host families and neighbors were able to eat it. Being new in the ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 63 food system meant that they were not ready for the food. Betsy spoke about encountering this on her second day in country and how she continued to have problems for the next few weeks: There were these things that looked like fish sticks. Still to this day, I don't quite know what they were, but we called them fish sticks because it's what they looked like. Everybody took a bite and just thought it was the most disgusting thing in the world, and so nobody ate it. The chef came out, and he looked like the most heartbroken person on the planet. He's just like, “You don't like my food, you won't eat my food.” I'm just feeling so awful, and so everyone started taking a couple more bites, and this guy next to me, I will call him Chris because he loved Christmas, he’s like, “Trade plates with me, trade plates with me,” because I'm just like, “Guys, we have to eat this food. This is our second day in country, we can't be those Americans.” So, he's like, “Trade me, my plate’s more than yours.” So, I traded him, and that night I was the most sick that I've ever been in my entire life. I couldn't keep anything down, volcano action kind at both ends. I could barely carry my stuff down because we were going to the training village the next day. I couldn't carry my bag down because I was so weak from just like being sick all the time that night. I had ziplock bags with me for my vomit bags, and stuff. So, they ended up keeping me back, not going to the host families because I was so sick. So, I was just lying in the Peace Corps tiny little medical bed, and their little medical office. Just being checked on every couple of hours, and just being given oral rehydration salts to sip because I was just losing so much fluid. And I started to feel a little bit better, and I did get a cushy ride out to our host families. I was eating crackers, then just very bland stuff. And my host family, they were so disappointed that I didn't come with everybody because they were there. They had this little sign, they were so excited. And they were ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 64 still waiting there as they were calling out names for people to go, and they're like, “Where is our volunteer? Where's our person?” They're like, “She's really sick.” So, they were just so sad. And so, they were excited when I came a couple of days later, and getting settled, and I was doing okay. Then again, I ate something, and I don't remember what that dish was, and it got worse, and worse, and worse, and worse. So, I ended up going to a hospital, a developing hospital, it was very scary. My little IV bag was on a rusty nail, and fell off several times, and got ripped out of my arm. And there was no toilet paper anywhere, I had a pile of leaves on the table next to me and… This is getting really graphic, I'm sorry. That was my first introduction to food, that I was just sick, and I was sickly too. Just super, super skinny, super gross. I didn't want any pictures taken of myself because I didn't look like myself. I didn't want to remember that time in Peace Corps because it was so awful. Two days after arriving in her country of service, Betsy ate food to please a chief and became very ill. She got better and then ate more food that made her sick to the point she had to be hospitalized. This “awful time” did end as she was able to continue service, but the food and her inability to eat food that sat well with her was a major difficulty before she was able to integrate into her community and receive their guidance and support. Jay also had a difficult time at the beginning of her service due to unwellness related to food: So, the beginning was really rough. And then I had the worst—because I'm just eating rice—y'all like, the worst digestive issues that one can think of. Like I was so sick during those first few months just from the lack of nutrients. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 65 Jay was very sick at the beginning, and she points out that part of nutritious food is food that your body can digest well. Emily talked too about the food environment and sickness, and how she believed food preparation in her community caused a lot of illness for her and for her community members: My service was marked with periodic diarrhea and vomiting, probably like everybody else. It kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about just the level of contamination during the food preparation process, flies everywhere, on everything. For two years, probably, I had dirt under my nails, just dirt in every orifice. And there's no closed sealed spaces, and so dirt will get everywhere, bugs will get everywhere. Then, you're killing animals, you're changing diapers, and with no running water, that makes things pretty dirty. A recipe for illness. When we didn't have diarrhea and vomiting, everything was pretty good, health-wise. There wasn’t separate space in Emily’s community to prepare food, and, without running water, food preparation involved a lot of contamination which created illness. I shared about being sick due to food not just from the beginning of my time in country but throughout my service, and about my difficulty identifying which or what foods were making me ill. Notably, the food that made me unwell did not make my host family unwell: Yeah, we made do with what we had, which was hard sometimes for me. It was not hard for them; they were good at eating whatever they had. It was a little bit harder for me because I wasn't used to it. I got really sick pretty often early on and I wasn't even sure what was happening, why it was happening, which was really hard because I knew it was from the food. I wasn't sure what was behind it. The first summer was okay. There was a lot of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables that I ate. And then the first winter was harder because ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 66 all of that went away. And then there were pickles that were left and sometimes they did not seal particularly well. There would be like growths on the top of the bottle, and they'd have to wipe all that out and I was like, well, I'm not gonna eat from that bottle. I would still get sick. There was a cabbage man who came and they bought probably 30 heads of cabbages and stored them as well as they could and they would chop off the rotten parts, like by the time it got to be February though, and they'd been bought, I think in September, the amount that was left after they chopped off all the rotten part was just the core, and then they made the most delicious, beautiful stews out of that. That was very good. But when they cook, they cook one thing, and they eat it until it's gone. I found myself having to make a lot of decisions. Am I just going to be hungry and offend them or am I going to eat something that's gonna make me sick? I ended up being hungry and sick mostly because I went right down the middle. I've since realized that I think another major contributor was the bread because I would eat extra bread to try to offset some of this other stuff, but it was slightly doughy in the middle and eating a lot of doughy bread is not a good idea. That was a major burden. And by year two, I think my microbiome was so screwed up that I was just chronically hurting. Due to the food environment of the food system I was living in, frequently throughout my service I had no choice but to choose between eating food that made me sick and pleasing my host family or not eating at all and upsetting them both because I rejected their food and because I was going hungry. My participants talked a lot about how they couldn’t control their own food environment. Coming from the Global Industrial Food System, they talked about differences in availability of food within their new community food systems. These narratives about loss of control showed ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 67 up in three ways relevant to the food environment they found themselves in: variety, quantity, and quality of food. As demonstrated in the last quote, they also experienced a loss of control not due to the food environment itself, but also due to how food was something mediated by community. The next section will discuss these findings further. Experiencing Loss of Control Due to Community-ness of Food In sharing their stories of entering a community food system, nearly every one of my participants spoke about feeling less in control due to being fed by their community rather than being able to feed themselves: Emily described this well as she talked about how she was fed during her training: Food-wise, every day, we would be sent into training with a lunchbox, with Tupperware, and pre-made food by our host family, which was very paternalistic, maternalistic, whichever way you look at it. So, right from the beginning, I had no say, no choice in what I was eating, and what was being prepared, and how it was prepared. I just knew that I had to get that Tupperware back to my host mom, or she was going to freak out because Tupperware was like a big deal. So, we ate what they gave us, we were never really given a choice, and that's something that was a theme throughout my service is you don't have a choice. You eat this, or you don't eat, really. Emily’s access to food was mediated by her community. They were in charge of her eating much more than she was. I spoke about a similar experience with food when I shared how meals were different from what I was used to: One thing was just being hungry when I’d never been hungry before. Dinner is not a thing in [my country of service]. They have a light breakfast, a big lunch, and then kind ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 68 of an afternoon tea, a very light meal around four or five, and that's all, then you're done. I remember I would get hungry about seven o'clock, and the food was gone. I would sneak down and grab some bread out of the pantry. I was part of a community, and apart from sneaking down to get food myself out of the pantry, I was subject to how my community ate. Besty too was subject to eating how her community ate with few exceptions such as when she cooked for them: I would do some cooking for my host family too so that they could try my food. Like for Thanksgiving dinner, and I made stuffing, and we had roasted chicken, and mashed potatoes. They really enjoyed that, but that was the only time I could control how my food was being prepared. Notably, the only time Betsy was able to control the how of her food was when she was able to prepare food for her community, which would also only have been possible when she had the quantity and variety of ingredients necessary. Part of food being mediated by community was the pressure that my participants told of having to eat what they were offered, often to a degree where they could not say no. Halimatou shared: “There was a very strong ethic that if you were given something to eat, it was extremely offensive to not eat what you were given.” If she didn’t eat what she was given, it would be seen as extremely offensive. Ginevive talked about this too, how accepting and eating food was just what one did: “Like you go to someone's house, you eat what they give you. Like, you don't complain. You just do it.” She ate what she was given, that was the only option. Jay spoke to this as well by recounting a story of an elder inviting her to sit down and eat, it turns out, grass: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 69 There was this culture of, you are always offered food, right? You can’t say no. They'll say, “Come eat. Come eat.” To somebody walking by. And so, on this particular day, an elder said, “Come eat.” I sat down with her and y'all, to this day, I truly believe that I ate grass. I think it was just straight up grass with oil. Because I am seeing the same greens, the cassava, the potato leaves. I've tasted all those and like this was none of that. I just ate it and said in my little pular, whatever I knew to her, and we sat and chatted, and it just was what it was. I just accepted it like, I'm just eating grass now. This is what I do in the Peace Corps. Like I eat grass. Rather than saying no, because she couldn’t, Jay sat down and ate that grass with oil while chatting with the elder. Betsy spoke about how it was so significant if she didn’t eat everything she was served, that she ended up always eating everything: You did not leave anything on your plate, otherwise, the entire village would hear about it, the neighboring villages would hear about it. People in town, people who were living in the United States would hear that there was a white woman in the town who didn't finish their plate at some party or something. It was so significant if Betsy didn’t clean her plate that even people who didn’t live in the community would hear about it. Halimatou told an entire story about how she had tried to be vegetarian and the event when she finally was no longer able to maintain this diet: My first journey, my first time out, I was being embraced with food, coming and sitting around a bowl. I'm with a group of elders and they prepared a special meal and it’s rice. We have our bowl and there's about six of us. You divide your bowl into the group of six ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 70 and there's a fire going and it's dark. I had been there a couple months and I had managed to pretty much stay vegetarian at that time with fruits and some vegetables and rice and whatnot. They had made a special meal for me. We're sitting there and I have my section, and how they'll feed you is, I'll project my hand up here, but you have your section, and you use your hand like this [curled her fingers together] and you make a little bowl, and you use your hand as your spoon. What a mother will do, or what they'll do is if there's something that they want you to have more of, often meat, they'll use their fingers and they'll kind of push it into your section. But they've already been eating. And then they're pushing food into your section. I'm sitting there, the elder across from me, pushes something into my section and it's kind of dark. I just very politely, sort of nudge it back and I take my bite and he nudges it again towards me and I just sort of politely skip it and nudge it back. The third time and I go, alright, this is it. This is it. Like he's nudging this towards me. I'm gonna have to eat this. And so, he nudges it towards me and I pick it up and… And it's a sheep eyeball. Well, it's now or never. I popped it in my mouth and it was like, you know those candies? You bite them and the goo pops out. The goo pops out and there's a real hard retina. I swallowed it and I'm like, “Oh, thank you.” That was the first food I had eaten, the first real meat I had eaten was this sheep eyeball. And that night I had a dream that I was an eyeball, watching myself being digested. Halimatou had to give up being vegetarian in order to accept the gift of food from an elder in her village. She made the choice to attend to her growing relationship with the Elder and her community rather than hold to her personal dietary convictions. Sylvia passed on a similar story from one of her friends who was also in Peace Corps: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 71 I have a friend who was in the Peace Corps, I think it was in [the Pacific Islands], and he was also a vegetarian until getting to his Peace Corps community where he had sort of determined that he was probably gonna have to eat meat in order to not offend people. The first thing he was given was they cooked a dog special for that community. That was how he stopped being a vegetarian for a while. Sylvia shared that her friend’s community would have been offended had he not eaten the dog that they prepared specially for him. Emily spoke about how in her community they were not so much offended when she didn’t eat the food, but worried for her: I felt like people, when I didn't eat what they were offering, automatically, it was something is wrong with me, and so they would… It wasn't that they were offended necessarily, but they were more concerned about me, and like, “Oh, something must be wrong with her. Psychologically she’s…” So, I think I started to identify as that a little bit because of that reaction. It seems like Emily’s eating was not something of her own personal concern, but something that her community was involved in and concerned about. Jay too talked about her community being involved in and concerned about what she ate: I can remember one day I was eating a cucumber and that sparked a village debate. They were like, can you eat that? And I was like, yes. I'm just eating it wrong. And there's another lady, she's passed on now, but I was sitting outside, cutting up carrots and cucumbers and she walked up, and she just looked like, what in the world is this girl doing? Because they eat vegetables like bread. I mean, not raw, like they would eat them in stews and things like that. So, for me to just be walking along, chomping on a ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 72 cucumber was like the craziest thing they had ever seen. And so, there was a whole debate about whether or not you could eat it. It was the community as a whole that was interested in Jay’s eating, not, notably, just a few people. Other participants talked about being fed by their communities because their communities either loved to feed them or because they were worried they wouldn’t be able to feed themselves. Sylvia talked about how they assumed she wouldn’t be able to feed herself without canned food: They understood that in the United States, people only knew how to eat food that came out of cans and didn't have a lot of food that came out of cans, so they just assumed that I'd be incapable of feeding myself. So, they started out making it all for me and probably like for a lot of people, the transition was a little hard adjusting to being away from family and friends and my culture where I was in control of myself. Being in a new community food system meant that Sylvia’s eating was a concern for the whole community, subject to what the community thought about her and what they thought would be best for her. Ginevive spoke about a very similar experience: “I got invited to go to eat at a professor's house all the time because they were like, this poor single girl needs a family, how can she cook for herself?” She was alone, and for her community that meant she would not be, or maybe should not be, cooking for herself. Halimatou talked about how her host family liked to feed her and encourage her to eat more: “My host family always was, ‘Oh, you gotta eat more. You gotta eat this or do that and ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 73 whatnot.’ So that was kind of funny how they like to feed you and share.” She found this involvement, sharing, and attention to be funny. I spoke about how my host family and the culture I found myself in was similar in how they loved to feed us, even without concern for whether we were able to actually fit the food into our bodies: There was incredible pressure to eat too, especially when they had feasts. They do feasts frequently, and as the guest, you were always there. They have an imperative for eat, Ch’ame. And you get like 20 people screaming at you, “Eat, eat, eat.” And it's this really harsh word, Ch’ame. And yeah, that was a lot. And there was no way to say that you're full because it had a connotation in the language that didn't make sense, so that was a lot to navigate. Just like this overbearing attention, and it was like love, but when you can't say no, it got to be a lot. Literally a lot of food and just so, so overwhelming. We all had to learn to always be eating at feasts if we didn’t want to get yelled at. The amount of food I ate, as a guest at a feast, was not something that I was able to control. Sylvia spoke too about how uncomfortable it was to be a guest and how she was treated very differently, and had to eat special food when she would have much rather preferred eating what everyone else was eating: When we'd have our meal together, everybody else would sit on the ground or sit on rocks, but they'd send one of the young men to run to a house and get what looked like it was probably the nicest chair in the community and bring it back and set it down for me to sit on like the queen. It felt so uncomfortable. But I know that it was coming from a place of hospitality and kindness. I felt like I couldn't say no, I don't wanna sit on your chair. And then sometimes it would be the same with food too. Everybody there, there ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 74 would be rice and beans and maybe some fish or something. And often I would get something special that not everybody else got. And again, I was grateful, but also a little uncomfortable, feeling like I was being held up above everybody else, which certainly, I didn't feel like I should be. It would happen with the drinks often as well. In [Central America], they drink what they call chicha, which is fruit, juice, water and sugar. I love chicha, especially when it's made with sugar cane. They squeeze their own sugar cane juice and make it into cakes of brown sugar and use that, and then mix it with the fruit juice in the water. It's really good. They'd wanna give me something special. Somebody would be sent to the nearest little kiosk to bring me back a Coke. And so again, I felt bad they were spending extra money to give me something special and then it was made worse by the fact that I would much prefer what everybody else was having, the natural fruit drink with the local sugar cane and so on, as opposed to some US soda company. But I wasn’t in control. At other times, I would try to talk about how wonderful the chicha was and how I felt so lucky that when I lived in [Central America], I got to drink chicha because that was a luxury in the US to drink things made from fresh fruit juices. And I hoped that maybe that would then kind of come back around in their thinking when we were all eating together. Yeah. No. They couldn't conceive that I wouldn't prefer to have a soda rather than the fresh fruit drink. So that was sort of two years. It remained an internal struggle for me, for the entire two years. But I mean, mostly, I was just grateful that I was treated with so much kindness and hospitality. Despite continually trying to get her community to understand that she really did want their fruit juice, they insisted on feeding Sylvia Coke because they felt like Coke was a superior gift for her—that she should enjoy as she sat in the best chair in the village. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 75 Jean also spoke about getting special food when she would visit community members: “I was visiting a student's family for the weekend, and mud house, dirt floor, stuff like that. And they had gotten meat just because I was there, it was a big deal, and I had to eat it.” Jean was put into a different category than the rest of her community and treated differently. Betsy spoke about how she was expected to eat differently than her community by using utensils instead of her hands: And then sometimes, everybody would get forks and spoons, and they wouldn't be eating with them, but they expected me to eat with them, but they want everyone to have them so that I didn't feel left out. So, sometimes, when I would eat without them, just because I was watching what everybody else was doing, there would be a lot of like, “We gave you utensils, why aren't you using them?” I’m like, “Well, none of you are.” They're like, “Well, we have them, we want you to use them.” During that first year, I feel like I did a lot of faux pas when it came to food. Betsy wanted to eat how the other people in her community ate and tried to conform, but she was not like them, and it was a faux pas when she tried to conform. My participants talked a lot about how they could not control their own eating in their community food systems. Coming from the Global Industrial Food System, where food is produced and accessed by capitalism rather than community, they were not used to other people being so involved in their eating. Other people fed them, and they felt pressure to eat things for their community that they did not want to eat. Being guests in their community also played a role in their eating, by putting them in a different category than their host families and neighbors. So far Chapter IV has covered the first theme that arose from my participants’ stories: What it was ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 76 like to encounter a community-based food system. The next section will discuss the second theme: adjusting to a community-based food system. Adjusting to a Community Food System: Reclaiming Control and What Counts as Food Having grown up in the Global Industrial Food System and then encountering a community food system, nearly every one of my participants discussed adjusting to life within the community-based food system. They did so by figuring out how to regain control relevant to the food environment and community-ness of food. Nearly every participant described adjustment as also including a widening of what was appetizing and of what counted as food. Reclaiming Control Relevant to Variety, Quantity, and Quality in Food Environment In sharing their stories of entering a community food system, nearly every one of my participants spoke about reclaiming control relevant to the variety, quantity, and quality of their food. Variety. Betsy spoke about how she learned to love the food that her community ate, and how she learned to love making it as well: Having been so sick, food was hard at first. But I learned to love the food, and I loved preparing it, and people would often come to my house and look at my pantry like, “You're cooking porridge plantains? You're cooking eru? You're cooking fufu and soup? This is our stuff, why are you cooking it, why aren’t you cooking stuff from your home?” And I'm just like, “Well, this is what you're eating, and I love it.” Her own community thought it was odd that she was embracing their food to the degree she did, but she embraced it anyway. She couldn’t change the food system so she had to change, and choosing to embrace their food was an important step in refusing helplessness and reclaiming ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 77 control. It was a way for her adapt to her new food system, which again, was not going to change. Jean spoke about accepting the difference in variety, but also learning how to do more with what she already had access to: At first, I didn't like that, having the same thing every day, but then, you just got used to it. Ugali is definitely an acquired taste. The first time you taste it, it's just plain, and there's no flavor or whatever, but then it's like one of my favorite foods still. Then I started learning how to cook some other stuff too, and that was really cool. Tomatoes were everywhere, so one day I threw leftover tomatoes out, they were starting to go bad. I threw them outside my house for the chickens to come and eat, and a little while later, I had tomato plants growing. So, I decided to try a little garden, and I planted some lettuce, because I really missed salad, because everything had to be cooked according to our Peace Corps nurse. Everything had to be cooked. I had this garden growing, I kill plants, that's what I do with houseplants, but I had this garden growing there and I planted some zucchinis and stuff. So, the students, my girls would come over and say, “Jean, what is that? How do you cook that thing?” I'm like, “You don't cook it,” and that just blew their minds, that you could eat uncooked food. Then I had weeds growing because everything grows everywhere there. The night watchman at the school and I were friends, and he came over one day and I was trying to remove this weed, he goes “Don't. Eat that, eat the leaves.” So, I learned around there it's like, almost everything that grows there, people eat. So, instead of having to buy my sakuma, now I could just pick the leaves off of this weed that was growing all over there, and I’ll cook that, just like sakuma, and eat it too. I loved, eventually, going there and doing that. So, adjusting to their food system, for me, ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 78 wasn't that hard because I had that expectation that I was going to, and I had eaten food from all over the world. Then I figured out how to cook my own Mexican food because I still, I love Mexican food, my heritage, or whatever. So, I learned how to take these simple ingredients, and make a lot of stuff. Jean got used to eating the same thing frequently, but she also learned to regain control and get herself more variety by gardening, foraging, and learning to do more with the ingredients that she did have access to. Betsy spoke about how spices helped her expand what she could make: “There were a lot of days where it was just rice and tomato paste. But then, you got very creative with what spices were there.” She learned to get creative to do more. Jay also spoke about getting creative to do more with what she had: I had to get very creative because I ended up finding this website that was supposed to be towards fitness. It was geared towards fitness, but it was like, okay, I wanted to find new ways to eat with the things that I had. I found these dishes with cabbage and once I got my groove y'all, you couldn't tell me anything. I would wake up, make my little café. I'd make my pancakes on my little single gas burner. I would have popcorn for dinner. I learned how to make all kinds of stuff, I was making potato salad and all kinds of stuff in that little grassroot hut, just having a little gourmet village experience. Once she figured things out, she was on a roll and eating well. She figured out how to reclaim control over her food within her community food system. Once she got her groove, you couldn’t tell her anything. Ginevive spoke about repurposing what she had, even taking already cooked food and recooking it to make it more what she wanted to eat: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 79 There were stands where you could get fried french fries, but not really like fried potatoes. They weren't french fries. And so you would get them and they'd be really greasy and soggy with a little like cold salad on top in a little plastic bag. So I'd get those, come home, chop them up and recook them to kind of get some of that oil off. But also, I would like to make an omelet out of it or something. Like, it was a lot like top chef moments of like, what can I find already? Kind of half. And then I could kind of like make my own and that was really fun. She took what was available, and she made it her own. Jean also took what was available and made her food her own: You learned how to get some peppers, because you could get peppers at the market, and you cut those up, you throw it in there, or you get some cilantro. Mix that in, or get some tomatoes and mix that in, or whatever, to make it a little different every day. Jean was able to make her food different every day, asserting control to get herself variety, instead of always eating the same thing. Emily spoke about how volunteers in her country, as in many others, made a cookbook as a resource for future Peace Corps Volunteers to be able to recreate familiar foods: The volunteers in [our country] had put together a cookbook, and I'm sure they do that in a lot of countries. It was basically like how to be an American in [South America], and how to make American foods. A lot of it was very resourceful. The cookbook helped them cook more food with what they had and helped them feel more American by cooking American food. It helped them exert control and adapt to living as themselves in their community food system, while helping future volunteers do the same. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 80 Some volunteers addressed variety by adding food from outside of their food system in small ways. Jean got M&M’s and savored them: Yeah. I had my family send me M&M’s because they would melt. Yeah, they would take three months to get to me, but they sent me that, and so, I would have a few every day so I could ration them out. It helped a lot. Getting M&M’s and rationing them out made a big difference for her. Similarly, Jay developed a routine that she said helped a lot: Once I got into my groove, once a week I would take an hour bus and I'd have a Coke. That was how I could stay sane. I'd go have my Coke. I'd go watch my YouTube videos, and then I'd go back to my village, or I'd have my British version of Pringles or whatever. Her weekly Coke and Pringles, and her YouTube videos, helped her adapt and stay sane. Jay and my participants spoke about accepting the variety they had, getting creative with what they had to be able to do more, and supplementing their food in small ways with foods from outside of their community. A few also spoke about supplementing in larger ways, in order to ensure that they had enough quantity, which the next section will discuss. Quantity. Jay had lost 50 pounds in her first three months in her community food system, and she made sure that would never happen to her again by increasing the quantity of food she had access to: So that was like my first time being in a situation where I couldn't control what I was consuming. That's just never gonna happen again. I was the last one back on the van after we went to the grocery store, I had three people coming out with boxes of food that I was ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 81 taking to my permanent site. I was just like, that’s never ever gonna happen to me again. Just not being able to cook for myself. On her way to her permanent site after training, she bought food so she would be able to cook for herself and never again have to be hungry like she had been. I spoke about how I took control over my food by setting myself up to be able to cook my own food that I brought from the capital city: The second winter, I was determined to make things better. I bought a stove, a little propane stove, and I fried pieces of wood in oil to make my own kindling so I could start my wood stove more easily with the wet, green wood that I had access to. And then I went to the capital at least every two weeks and bought ramen to bring back and cook for myself in my room. When before I had had to eat whatever food my host family had, and had had to deal with becoming ill pretty frequently, I was able to regain control over my eating by heavily supplementing my diet with food that did not make me feel unwell. Other participants spoke too about adjusting to the food environment that had been making them sick in ways other than increasing their quantity of food, which the next section will discuss. Quality. Some of my participants spoke about how they adjusted to the sickness they experienced due to food. Betsy spoke more about being sick than the other participants, and about how she adjusted: I finally started to get my strength back, and I could keep some things down, but the Peace Corps medical officer gave my host family a very strict list of things that they could feed me and how things needed to be prepared. I didn't have any raw fruits or ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 82 vegetables, everything was cooked. I ate a lot of spaghetti, had a lot of eggs too. I remember surviving off of these little cookies called sandwich, and it was just like a vanilla cookie and had vanilla center, and that is all I ate. I had a little spaghetti at night, and it had nothing on it, it was just noodles. Nothing else, just plain bland noodles. Then towards the end of training I started to get a little more adventurous, like trying avocados and bread. I was slowly building myself up to new things. I got better, I started to gain a little bit more weight. I did try and be more adventurous, and this is going to be TMI, but I think we've all been there, but I never had a solid stool while I was there in Peace Corps ever, and I just accepted that. Betsy got help from Peace Corps to get the limited foods she needed from her host family until she got feeling better and was able to carefully increase her variety. Peace Corps and her community got her back on her feet, and then she did the work to accept that she was not going to become fully well. Emily too talked about being chronically sick: “My service was marked with periodic diarrhea and vomiting, probably like everybody else. And it just is what it is. Everybody has it in my town, and so, it was normal, it's just part of life.” She was able to accept it and move on with her life. Jay had had digestive issues due to eating too much rice, but she spoke about learning how to address this as she adjusted to her food system: Once I got to my permanent site, I was able to cook for myself. I was able to know a little bit more about the country and know what I could buy at the market. There was one vendor who sold these small little green apples that came from [a nearby country], and I would just budget to get like seven. And so, I would eat one a day. And one of my ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 83 teachers, like the name they gave me is Joko, which means sunny. He's like, “Miss Sunny, you always chew apples. Why do you always chew apples?” I couldn't tell him, “Because I wanna use the bathroom.” Jay adapted to her food system by learning enough about her community that she was able to navigate it well and get control over her food and access to the food she needed to feel better. Reclaiming Control Relevant to Community-ness of Food Nearly every one of my participants spoke about adjusting to living in a community food system by figuring out how to regain some control of their eating relevant to the food being mediated through community. Participants also faced a lot of pressure to eat what they didn’t want to eat in order to preserve relationships. As their ties to their communities grew, however, they were able to draw on those ties to gain more autonomy around what they ate. Jay was able to re-gift food: I got offered the heart one day after my sister got married, so they killed a goat. They offered me the heart. I was like, “Da, that's all yours. I'm gonna let you.” Or they gave me like the innards of something one day and I took them, cooked them up because I knew what kind of dishes they like. I cooked them up really good and added them to this little rice dish and I just gave them back to my host family. Jay had a host family member eat a heart she had been offered first, and she cooked her family up a dish of innards that they’d first given her. She adapted by developing ties with her community so they understood her, accepted her, and supported her by not making her eat what she didn’t want to eat, and by not taking it personally when she found workarounds. Similarly, Jean was able to pass along food that she didn’t want to eat to a child in her community: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 84 So, it'd be like the midday, afternoon-ish, meal that would be really big. I know one of the times when one of the families was celebrating my birthday, they killed one of their chickens for me. So, whoever is the guest would get the chicken feet. Yeah. But luckily, by the time they did this for my birthday, I was really good friends with them, and they understood me more. So, one of the sons who was around my age was eating the chicken feet for me, so it was okay. I just ate the chicken, but he ate the feet. Not really ate the feet, I don’t know, it was weird, kind of like sucked everything out of them. Having developed strong relationships with her community allowed Jean to regift the chicken feet that her family had made special to celebrate her birthday. Sylvia, whose community had thought she was incapable of feeding herself without canned food to work from, was able to renegotiate her eating arrangements with her host family: So, they started out making it all for me and, probably like for a lot of people, the transition was a little hard adjusting to being away from family and friends and my culture and so on and so forth. And eventually I found that one thing that helped was I took back the preparation of my own breakfast and lunch and said, “Okay”—But I think they kind of liked also making some money by cooking for me—So I said, “I'll pay you what I was paying for the three meals, but that'll be for dinners, and I'll get my own breakfast and lunch.” And that just helped me feel more in control of my life. Being able to take back the preparation of her breakfast and lunch allowed Sylvia to feel more in control. I also shared about how I worked to retain autonomy around what I ate: “I was always the weird person just for eating what I wanted to eat. I tried really hard to try to retain some ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 85 autonomy around my food anyway.” I worked hard to retain my food autonomy, despite doing so making me weird. It was better to be a bit weird. Ginevive reflected on her time in Peace Corps as a food journey of doing things her own way: I look back at the food journey of it and where I started, where I was like, I'm gonna do things my own way. So okay, changing by thinking, ‘Let me let go of my ego and start learning’ to, at the end, being like, ‘Wow, not only did I learn about dishes and food and what you could do with a tomato and what you could do with like five ingredients on a rainy night to like really enjoying my body and enjoying myself and liking how I'm existing as a person.’ Ginevive learned to let herself learn new things such as how to cook new dishes, how to skillfully use ingredients, how to make do with a few ingredients, and how to reflect that, in doing these things, she learned to enjoy her body and how she existed as a person. Emily talked about the difficulty of everything but food for her, and about how she used food to keep a sense of control and autonomy from her community: So, I developed anxiety during Peace Corps, and I still deal with it, but I think a lot of it was food related and the fact that what I ate was the only thing I could control during my service. Everything else was just haywire, and chaotic, and incomprehensible, but I could control what I was eating, and so, putting in my body. So, we would have our big meal, which was like stew with some rice, or something, but I would always go to the store every day. The store, it's like this little, like a bodega, and get this little piece of chocolate, Peruvian chocolate. I would do my best to hide it from everyone in my town. So, the guy that runs the store, I was on really good terms with, but I would sneak it into ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 86 my room and eat it. That was my moment of pure joy and control over what was going on. And so, that was really… I ate chocolate every single day, a piece of chocolate, and it was like 30 cents, which was like my entire allowance, but that is the only thing I spent money on in the Peace Corps. Emily spent all of her extra money on that chocolate and the feeling of control it gave her, and she hid the chocolate from her whole community except for the guy that ran the store. Other participants also hid food from their communities in order to retain control over what they were eating. Betsy talked about a trunk that was very special to her for this reason: I used my Peace Corps trunk that they gave us to hide all of my food that was just like mine, like treats and popcorn kernels, and things like that. It was always locked, and when people would come over, they would be like, “Why is this locked?” I was like, “Oh, Peace Corps just wants us to keep this locked.” I made it all about Peace Corps, when really… And I brought Ziplock bags with me because ants were such a huge problem, and I got so mad when they would get into my cookies and eat them all. So, I had to zip everything, wrap it super tight, and store it there so that when I was having a really bad day, or really frustrated with what was going on, or if I had just eaten the most awful thing in the world, I’m just like, “I just need something to make myself feel better.” That was my private trunk of happiness. Being able to have her own, private food—her cookies—let Betsy make difficult days better. Betsy went on to describe how having her own kitchen and learning to use it when no one else was around also helped her retain autonomy: I had my own kitchen, and so, I often didn't cook until it was really dark outside because I didn't want anybody coming to my house and eating my food. Even if it was just ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 87 homemade tortillas and sliced onions with a bouillon cube, which was my favorite snack. Especially, I got very possessive over popcorn, and I didn't want to do popcorn during the day when people would be coming to my house to eat my popcorn because that was a saving grace throughout being sick, always having popcorn. So, popcorn and I just have this beautiful relationship. Betsy was able to learn how to take some control of her food within the community food system she lived within. Widening of What is Appetizing and What Counts as Food As I coded the stories my participants shared, it became clear that a major aspect of adjusting to living within a community food system was learning to accept and enjoy the food that existed within that food system. Things which were not appetizing became appetizing, and things which were not food became food. Jay talked about becoming used to the food in her community food system, and how she became a much more adventurous eater: There's a comfortability that you have to get, and my country’s biggest secret is that it’s a sandy country. It's full of this beautiful red sand. So yes, I've eaten sand and I've eaten grass. Sometimes the goat takes a nibble [of dinner] when nobody's looking. I think now, my experience with food in the Peace Corps has made me a much more adventurous eater. We're very like, “Oh, there's something in my food, turn it back.” And it's like, if you knew some of the things that I've eaten in [Africa], if you knew how many restaurants I've been in and like, “Was that a mouse? Yeah, that was a mouse. Okay.” I'm much more relaxed when it comes to food. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 88 Due to the experiences she had eating in her community food system, like eating sand and grass and sharing her dinner with a goat, Jay learned to worry less about what was in food and to be less picky about it. Halimatou, who had been vegetarian before she ate a sheep’s eyeball to please an Elder who offered it to her, spoke at length about how she learned to love the food in her community, even food she wouldn’t have liked or eaten before: I started to not be able to feel like I had enough nutrients and I started to really look forward to eating some meat. And so, as I lived there longer, I went from, okay, [to] well if I can find some meat, I'll get meat. One of the main sources of protein that I ended up really enjoying is what they cook in the sand. They'd get the sand hot, and they would cook termites and I would actively go and I would love to get those little termites and I'd sprinkle them on my salad and they tasted like a popcorn kernel. They’re really good. Like if I could find them again, I would buy termites for sure. If Halimatou could find the termites she had enjoyed, she would definitely buy some now. She went on to share how she enjoyed food even when she didn’t understand what exactly the food was: But I started to really look forward to when I could go into the big city. It was about a two-day bus taxi ride to get from where I was down to the main city, and we'd have to go down like every three or four months to check in with the Peace Corps headquarters and everything. I'd come in and they would have hanging meats. And so I would love it. I'd look forward to the meat that they would cut off. They called it poor man’s sheep. I'd love to go down and I would go to the city, and you could get mangoes and avocados and salad. I would look forward to when I'd go down there and I'd go to this place and I ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 89 would get a little sliver or slice of poor man’s sheep and I would eat it almost like a beef jerky, but it wasn't quite dried out and I really, really loved this. In my third year my language skills really developed, and I could speak better and everything, and I was hanging out one day and I had eaten this poor man's sheep quite a lot. I really looked forward to it. It was delicious. I was sitting there, and I was talking to the street vendor and I said, “I love coming down. I love this poor man’s sheep. It's just one of my favorite things. I am just wondering why is it a poor man’s sheep? Like what's the difference?” And he just said, “Oh, well, the poor man’s sheep is”, which I had learned the word for, “is a dog.” As Halimatou experienced new foods that were normal for her community, she discovered “poor man’s sheep” and loved to eat it as a semi-dried jerky before she knew what it was. She had expanded her idea of what foods were appetizing and what counted to her as food. After she did find out what it was, it was no longer appetizing to eat poor man’s sheep, but, notably, she had really enjoyed it up until then. Halimatou continued to talk about how she had grown to eat and enjoy a wider variety of food: We sat down and another friend had crackers and we took them, and we got the watermelon, then we got this cheese, and we reached into the cheese, and we took a bite and we're, oh, it's so good. And another rips a piece of cheese and takes a little bite and another rips off more cheese. And we're sitting there and we're just like, life couldn't get better. And my friend's sitting there like this and she has her hand like this. We look and I'm like, the cheese that's on her fingers is moving. So, we looked at what's left and we had eaten about, I mean, almost two thirds already. And we look at what's left. It's not ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 90 cheese. It's fried live maggots. It's swarming maggots, and the outside isn't cheese. It's just the crust. And we learned what they do is they'll take up blocks of maggots and they fry them. The inside is alive and it's like a delicacy. And we were like, “Oh, oh, oh.” But then we finished it. Halimatou was surprised when what she thought was cheese turned out to be live maggots, but after adjusting to her new food system, they were appetizing to her and her friends and they counted as food, so they finished eating the maggots anyway. Betsy talked about how she ate a lot of things without knowing what they were, especially meat, and how she often never found out what she was eating: There were a lot of times I didn't know what I was eating, I just ate. There was a lot of, ‘I don't want to know,’ but at certain points, it did come out. I do know that I ate cat and dog, not at the time. Some snake, frog legs, and fried termites were actually pretty good. Just things that you're just like… if prepared correctly... There was a lot of bush meat that you didn't know what you were eating, but porcupine became a favorite of mine, and goats. So, definitely, I don't quite know how I acquired the taste for anything, but definitely I became very acclimated and integrated very quickly into my community. Sometimes Betsy didn’t want to know what food she was eating, perhaps because she was afraid knowing would make the food less appetizing, but it did come out sometimes, and she really began to find many foods appetizing. As she became more acclimated to her community food system, new things started to count as food. Notably, Betsy credited eating these community foods, and her acquiring a taste for them, with becoming more a part of her community. Jean spoke about how she became comfortable eating food that was prepared around rodents: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 91 I would even ask students to bring me the food from the kitchen, and God knows what was in that kitchen. Well, I did know what was in that kitchen also: a rat that was bigger than the cat. It got to be normal, eating rice with rocks and stuff like that in it. Jean got used to eating food made next to giant rats, but also eating food that had non-food items in it. Jean went on to share a story about when she and her friends commented on how they had become so used to eating things that they would never have eaten before: One time, we were all together and we were talking about what we had been eating from host families, or families in our, for lack of a better word, villages. We decided we were going to make a book called, But I Ate It Anyway, from all the stories. We were just like, “Oh, yeah, you're eating rice and there's a rock in it,” and you're like, “Well, I ate it anyway,” or the mystery meat, sometimes with a little bullet in it, too. Fresh kill. You weren't always quite sure of what you were eating. Often, Jean and her friends did not know what they were eating, but they ate it anyway. Sometimes their food had things in it that would have kept them from eating it in the past, like a bullet, but they had adapted to the point where they ate it anyway. Jay, Halimatou, Betsy, and Jean all talked about how, as they adjusted to living in their community food systems, food which would not have been appetizing became appetizing, and food which would not have been food became food. After adjusting to their community food systems, my participants each re-entered the Global Industrial Food System, and had to deal with doing so as changed people. The following section will relate the narratives in common which describe what this was like. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 92 Re-entering the Global Industrial Food System: Reconciling, Handling Overwhelm, and Less Counts as Food Having grown up in the Global Industrial Food System and then adjusting to a community food system, my participants next returned to life in the Global Industrial Food System. Nearly all of them spoke about how they had to reconcile being back in this food system as a changed person, how they experienced intense overwhelm due to the food environment, and how some foods they used to like were no longer appetizing and sometimes no longer counted as food. Reconciling Being a Changed Person with Re-entering the Global Industrial Food System Halimatou described the experience of coming back succinctly: “For me, coming back was more of a shock than going there, which was, like, its own shock. I was like, “Wow, this is weird.” In addition to the shock of coming back, there was an additional shock that it was harder to come back than to go. I shared a similar sentiment: I tried really hard to manage the expectation that it would just be easy to come back, but I was so tired after my service, and I just really wanted things to be easy when I came back, and they were not easy when I came back, for a long time. For a long time, they were worse. Despite trying to not expect that coming back would be easy, I really wanted it to be easy, and it was not only not easy, but more difficult than transitioning there had been. After she finished her service, Ginevive traveled with her friend before coming back to the US, and shared a story about how a food tour she took was the beginning of realizing that she was no longer like other Americans: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 93 And then in the middle of the table, they put down these white little, like, they looked like french fries. They were these bright white little chips. They're like, this is the food and everyone's like, “Oooooh.” And [they’re] making it seem so scary. And then she and I are like, “What are we going to eat?” It was cassava. It was cut up and fried. We took a bite. And like, and I don't really like cassava. I didn't really grow fond of it, but like you had it. I'm like, “Is this cassava?” She's like, “Pretty sure it's cassava.” He's like, “Can you guess what it is?” And everyone that's like eating there, it was like a bunch of American and German tour groups and they're like, “Oh, this is disgusting.” “What is this?” “I hate the texture.” And we're like, “Oh god.” And my friend's like, “It’s cassava.” He's like, “How did you guess cassava?” And then my friend's like, “Literally most of the world eats this. Like, it's everywhere.” The table, like I guess there was like three chips per person, no one at our table liked it. Everyone got a little cup. They didn't like theirs. And my friend's like starving. So, she just starts eating hers and I'm like, “I'll wait for the snack we have on the bus. You can eat mine.” So, she eats mine and then everyone looks at her and they're like, “You can have mine.” “You can have mine.” But I think that experience was the first time we were like, “Oh no, the world hasn't changed. We changed and we gotta deal with it.” Ginevive and her friend had changed from living in their community food system, but the Global Industrial Food System hadn’t changed. This was a different experience from entering the new world of their community food system, because then they had had the thought to hold onto of being able to return home to what they were used to. Now they had nothing to hold onto, because being changed themselves made what had been familiar no longer familiar, and they realized ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 94 they would need to reconcile being changed people with re-entering the Global Industrial Food System. Ginevive went on to talk about how part of what had changed in her were her wants around eating and preparing food: The stress got worse, as [I was] starting to realize, like how a lot of what we choose to eat, what we choose to do with food is also defined by time. I don't have the time to do a full great dinner anymore like I did in [my host country]. I don't have this really great situation where I can share making a meal and have that be a social hour with people around me. Like making the meal isn't a social hour. You're cooking and then you eat with your friends. Like that reduces the time completely because, instead of the four hours you have of cooking the meal and then eating it together, you just have the eating. I mean obviously we can change that. We can invite them to join, but it's just different. It was just a different notion. Having returned to the US, Ginevive had to reconcile leaving her community food system and could no longer do food—the social buying, the group preparing and eating—how she had grown to enjoy doing it. Even when she tried to recreate the experience with family and friends, it wasn’t the same. It seemed as if she had learned a new script, and wanted to live accordingly, but no longer had the other people around her versed in it well enough to join her. She spoke more about missing the community-ness of food that she’d enjoyed when she was in Peace Corps: I miss my life. When people are like, do you miss the Peace Corps? I think they're thinking, do you miss washing yourself with a little plastic cup that used to be a butter tub and things like that. And I laugh about it because I don't miss that. That is my family's ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 95 life in Mexico. I can live that life. But I do miss my slow mornings and like having this house that I had, and my community, and I miss aspects that would be very hard to replicate here. And some of it is the food and… sometimes it's straight up, like, it's really hard to find xima, or shima, whatever, outside of like select African restaurants, right? It's very hard to find the moji that I used to get at sites with little spice packets. Part of reconciling re-entering the Global Industrial Food System for Ginevive was dealing with wanting but having to go without the community aspects of food, but also with wanting but going without the ingredients and food she got used to having in her community food system and which she had trouble finding here in the Global Industrial Food System. Halimatou talked about how she has continually worked to retain community and community food since returning the US: In Africa, we ate together and I've been a big supporter of eating together. I have four kids now. My kids are aged 16 to 9 and we've homeschooled them since our oldest was in preschool, so we've been homeschooling for 13 years. And I have always been very diligent. I love to cook. I love to cook from scratch. The kids help me cook. We do have time to make the meals and the things. And we do a lot of stuff and I've been very diligent about it. We eat together. We eat and we talk and we have conversations. In order to reconcile having learned to love community food with being back where it is less common, Halimatou has made preparing and eating food together a constant within her family, despite the pressures which make doing so difficult. So far in this section, the necessity of reconciling as well as methods of reconciling have been discussed. Several participants talked in depth about the sheer difficulty of reconciling, and about how they were very grateful to have had help as they worked their way through it. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 96 Ginevive shared about how coming back did not feel like real life, but rather like another of the short breaks in the city she had gotten used to thinking of as not real during her time in Peace Corps: I had my two lives, like the community life and the city life where once a month-ish, I would go into a really nice hotel and have a really nice breakfast waiting for me and have a dinner that was like a buffet. I was able to keep them compartmented like, “This is just for fun, this isn't real. This isn't actually the Peace Corps. This isn't actually your site. This isn't real. It's just like a fun little treat.” So, when I came back, I think that it still existed, like, “This isn't real, this is just fun. You're gonna go back to Peace Corps.” And having to like change my mind to be, “No, this is real and you're not like this. You have to make peace with this somehow. “ Ginevive had developed the habit of thinking of her life as a “not real, break-from-life” when she was in the city and “back in real life is Peace Corps” whenever she was back at site. She retained this habit when she re-entered the Global Industrial Food System and was eating foods that she’d only ever had when she was in her not-real-life, pocket universe. Still having this habit made her feel like she was back in that pocket universe, with a return to real, Peace Corps life shortly to follow. She had to reconcile this habit and these feelings with actually being back, with no impending return to her Peace Corps site. Ginevive continued by discussing how she also had to learn to process her guilt with different aspects of being back in the Global Industrial Food System: You have to learn how to exist with this. If you're feeling guilty about having so much, including so much food, and then remembering or reading about other things, how can you channel that? Is that gonna be advocacy work? Is that gonna be donating? What's that ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 97 gonna be? So, a lot of that is like processing. Okay, now that I'm here and I know that that's real and that was my reality and that's everyone else's reality still, what can I do? Ginevive was confronted by just how she had changed and how much processing she would need to do before she felt normal again. This processing, her learning how to channel the new feelings she had being a changed and back in this system, was an integral part of reconciling being a changed person with re-entering the Global Industrial Food System. She also spoke about how her father was a great help because he had visited her when she was in Peace Corps, and because he was able see similarities in how she was living with how he had lived as a child in Mexico. She spoke to his support when the world felt like it was spinning: So, when I moved, when I came back to the US, I'm glad he was there because there were moments where I think he could see me do that, like my was world spinning, like I was zoning out. He could like ground me and I feel like maybe it was because he had those moments. I don't know. I don't wanna assume, but he would either be like, “All right, take a breath,” or “Why don't we do this instead?” Or like, “You know what, let's just get the milk and the eggs. We'll send your brother to do the rest of the shopping.” Like, he was very gentle, but it was very much like the continuation of the guilt of, like, if my students were here, what would they think? So yeah, my coming back was helped by my dad, but then later on it really hit, and I had to help myself and figure out what those lessons were gonna actually be now in my real life here. Ginevive’s father helped her considerably, but, ultimately, she had to figure out for herself how she would handle the changes within herself. Reconciling being a changed person with reentering this food system was ultimately something that she had to do herself. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 98 Halimatou also shared about how she received a lot of help from family members when she returned to the US and struggled with how much she had changed: I came back and I moved from Africa to Laguna Niguel with my grandparents. So going from Africa to Laguna Niguel was a huge, huge cultural difference. My grandfather had just had a heart attack and they needed some help and I said, well, I'm coming back from the Peace Corps, and I can stay and help you guys out. They had a very nice house and so I would help around the house and my grandmother, she is actually Spanish, but she was born in America because her family was leaving Spain, coming to America to go to the Philippines where they had bought some land. And so, she was born in America, but she grew up in the Philippines. When World War II broke out, because she was an American citizen, she was interned as a prisoner of war and spent four years as a prisoner of war in World War II. So, my grandmother, when I went back and stayed with her, and me coming back and trying to process very high emotion, leaving Africa and missing my family and feeling this loss and this confusion, my grandmother was so good for me. She would paint for her PTSD from being a prisoner of war survivor. She was a prisoner of war for four years. She would paint and so she would have me start painting with her and she would cook from scratch, and we would just talk. My grandfather was very gentle. He served in the Korean War. He would see me get stressed out about something and he’d say, let's go for a walk at the beach. And he's not much of a walker. For him to suggest walking at the beach was funny because that meant let's go find a bench and sit down. And he'd just say, sometimes life is better said without words. And we would just sit and not talk. They really helped me readjust. Both of them had had such experiences with readjusting themselves. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 99 When the stress and shock of being back in the US and re-entering to the Global Industrial Food System as a changed person got to be too much, Halimatou’s grandparents were there to support her because they had dealt with similar, difficult situations in their own lives. I shared that I had family members who tried to give me a nice experience by picking me up from the airport and taking me directly to Costco, and how this experience brought up emotions for me which, like other participants’ experiences, required processing: My parents, they picked me up at the airport and took me directly to a Costco. It was a business Costco, they specifically had extra-large portions to sell to businesses. I had things that I didn't really even love beforehand, but I just craved the whole time I was gone, and peanut butter was one of them. I even made my own peanut butter, figured out there's special peanuts that are extra oily that you have to use, and substituted sunflower oil. I had sugar, did all these things to try to make peanut butter. I remember they took me to Costco, and there was probably a gallon, a gallon tub of peanut butter. And my brain was still involuntarily converting dollars into my country’s currency. I was like, “Okay, so that one jug of peanut butter would feed a family back home for a month.” And then I proceeded to want to throw up. It was like the whole world just tilted on its side. I was just honestly feeling like I was just floating, or probably in shock, frankly. I think my parents thought it would be a nice thing for me, and it's like, “No, I'm going to need a week now to feel normal.” It was just overwhelming, the variety, but also just so much when so many others, when all those people had been living on so little, and I felt really angry about how unfair it was. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 100 The quantity of peanut butter was a lot and the variety of food, both of which I speak about in another section, but so too was reconciling how expensive food was here compared to what I’d grown used to, and how people spent money here on foods which weren’t necessities. Emily talked about this too, about feeling grossed out by how expensive food here was compared to the food system she’d adjusted to, and about how people buy that food anyway: It just grossed me out having all these things, like a fridge full of things. We never had a fridge, there was no such thing as leftovers, you just give it to the dog, so I still do that a little bit. I don't think it's rationing, maybe it's just the process of going through the cost of, okay, what would that mean in the local currency and like, “Oh, yeah, I'd never pay that.” Everybody buys peanut butter, everybody buys milk. It’s been a long time coming back to buy any condiments for food. Anything that comes in a squeeze container or a jar took me a long time because I was like, “No, what? We don't need extra flavor for food that already has flavor. So that was a challenge for a long time. Reconciling how she ate in her community food system compared to how people in the Global Industrial Food System ate, took a long for Emily. People casually bought things that she now felt were frivolous and/or expensive. She came back as a changed person and had to come to terms with being in a food system that was very different from the community food system to which she had adjusted. Jean described this too, compared to her time in Peace Corps and also compared to other places that she’s visited since: I still think about the people that I've seen in Peru when I’ve visited, and in [my host country]. I spent a lot of time there in one of the [world’s worst slums]. Some people say it's the poorest square mile on earth, one of the largest slums in the world. They literally ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 101 didn't have anything to eat some days, and that was really hard. So, I still have a hard time spending a lot of money on food, like, going into a restaurant and stuff like that. That's just like, “You know how much this could buy? You know how many families this could feed in [my host country] for my one meal there?” So, I do financially support a couple of organizations that still work in that slum so, at least, I'm trying to help somehow with that. Jean has reconciled the food disparity she experienced when returning to the Global Industrial Food Supply as a changed person by supporting organizations that are working to help people have the food they need. Sylvia talked about how she had a hard time reconciling having seen people who were really hungry with all of the pet food that she re-encountered in the Global Industrial Food System: I think like most volunteers, it really struck me going to supermarkets and seeing rows of and rows of food so easily accessible and particularly seeing an entire row dedicated to pet food. It was so much coming back and seeing people spending what seemed like huge amounts of money on their pets in this country. All this while there's so many humans not getting enough to eat and not getting everything that they need. It was difficult for Sylvia to see so much food so easily accessible and so much money being spent on food for pets when she, having adjusted to living in her community system, now viscerally understood that people were not getting what they needed to eat in other places in the world. She had to reconcile being among people who had not been changed as she had been, and who just went on with their lives, spending money, not seeing things as Sylvia now did. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 102 Many of my participants talked about realizing that how they had learned to eat while in their community food systems was seen as strange upon their return. I talked about how I’d felt weird as I worked to adjust to my community food system, only to re-enter the Global Industrial Food System, changed by my community food system, only to be seen as weird all over again: I was weird when I was there, and then, I came back, [and] I was weird again because there are some things that I do that have carried over. I will strip a chicken and eat everything off of it, and use my fingernails and get in the back, in the ribs, things like that. Yeah, because that’s definitely normal for me now. When I came back, the normal that I had developed in my community food system was definitely not normal here, and I had to reconcile my new eating habits with the social expectations I found myself subject to again. Betsy talked about this too, how much she had changed, specifically about her inclination to eat bones, and how that change created social issues for her: Did you ever get in there, to the marrow from the chicken bones, or other bones? That’s the big thing that's not okay here. You get a Costco chicken, those things are delicious, but I would just start eating the bones. Luckily, I'm really happy that my family came over, my parents and my younger brother came over because they're just like, “Oh, yes, she does this,” but it was really hard to get back into socially acceptable things here because it just became such second nature, and especially around food. Like going out to eat, and who's paying, and this and that, and yeah. And the chicken bones were my, like, problem thing. People wouldn't invite me back to dinner because I was chomping on chicken bones. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 103 Betsy’s family and friends worked to explain her eating when she did so around others, but even then, her enthusiastic eating of bones was so unusual that she was not always welcomed back to eat with other people. She had to reconcile her second nature eating of bones with the social context that did not approve of it. Emily spoke to having changed—having become very relaxed—about the environment that food was stored in and how it was prepared. She spoke too about how other people were alarmed by this casualness: I got really used to having flies around food, flies around everything, such that, when I came back, I didn't realize it was a thing. You don't have a fly in your kitchen, if you do that's like, you're dirty, and you’re a social outcast. No one's going to come eat at your house, but I just realized how that [non-concern] became part of my life, and my eating experience, and my experience in general. It’s just like flies are a part of life. Having flies around had become normal for Emily without her having realized it, and she had forgotten that it really bothered other people because for them flies in a kitchen made someone a dirty, social outcast. She realized that for others, flies present meant that people wouldn’t come back to her house to eat and had to hold that up against her own casualness when it came to flies. Betsy talked about this as well, with ants, and about how she realized that her ideas of what was fine with food had shifted: Even a lot with the ants. Now, when you see an ant in your sugar, you throw all the sugar out because it's all contaminated. I'm just like, “No way.” I would take my little Gatorade pouch that Peace Corps would send when I needed to rehydrate, and it's like full of ants and I’m just like, “I’m just going to drink it.” The standard of… What's it’s called in English? Does anybody else have this problem where you just forget a word of English? ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 104 You’re like, “I know, I know what it is in Eja Gham, in Bayani, in Pidgin, but for the life of me… Sanitary, like things… Is it sanitary? Jean answered, “Probably,” and Emily added, “Standards of hygiene.” Betsy continued: Hygiene. Your standard of what's acceptable. “Oh, there's a dead fly in my porridge plantains, and I'm just going to scoop it up and not eat it, but I'm going to eat the rest of that.” Here, they'll just throw it all away, it's been contaminated, and you're just like, “You know, I saw it as extra protein that week or something. There's got to be some nutrient I'm going to get from that.” Rather than ants or flies being seen as dirty and the food they were in as contaminated, Betsy’s time in her community food system had changed her so that she just saw their presence as extra nutrients, scooped them out, and still ate whatever food they’d been in. She was no longer how she had been before and had to face that. Emily spoke to how she had gotten used to her food environment being very dirty and how she also had also gotten used to not washing her hands: Everything was so contaminated and just gross when I think about it. The way food was prepared, the way it was served. My host grandmother had a dirt floor, a dirt hut where she prepared food and a kitchen inside. Like a small stove kitchen with guinea pigs running around on the floor, and just barefoot. A knife that's half broken and barely works, and everything with her hands. Then she goes to the bathroom, doesn't wash her hands, comes back, and keeps preparing the food. So, I got really used to not washing my hands, as gross as that sounds because it was the least of our problems. And it took me a while to get back into washing them here. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 105 Reconciling being back here as a changed person for Emily meant unlearning, eventually, her lack of concern over food contamination and her habit of not washing her hands. Now she sees both as gross, but before, when she first re-entered the Global Industrial Food System, she was still in the mindset where such things were the least of their problems. Alternatively, Jean talked about reactions she developed to the food environment she encountered on returning to the US, and about how these linger even now: Yeah. I still don't eat much red meat because, when somebody's cow would die, or whatever, no longer give milk, they sent it to the butcher and got their money. Just that smell of raw meat still, 30 years later, still makes me want to puke. And this is just the last time I went to King Soopers, so a week ago. I went to King Soopers, and I was walking by their fresh meat department. I thought I was going to throw up. I just remember that smell of red meat, the flies, walking by the butcher was something I couldn't do. I could eat the meat because they cooked everything very well. It was very, very well-done meat, and now when we have a roast for Christmas, or whatever, I'm like, “Give me the very, very, crispy part.” I can't eat red meat at all still. The butcher shops Jean encountered were bad enough that, even now, she can’t always tolerate the meat departments in grocery stores here in the US. She still can’t eat meat that is anything other than well-done. She was changed by her experiences around meat in her community food system, and those changes and the reactions they cause in her are still present. I too had food impacts that lingered after I returned, and shared these with the others in a story circle: I was super sick when I came back, from the problems that I had there. I think my microbiome was just completely not in good shape, and all I could think about was ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 106 when… Literally, all I could think about was when my stomach would be empty again, so I could put more food in it. I ate a lot of lasagna, and things like that, and just sat on the couch for two months trying to get my body back to where I didn't have a chronic, terrible ache in my stomach because I developed one while I was in Peace Corps. I think I gained probably 30 pounds in two months, at least. I wasn't paying attention to that then or to other things, I was foggy and everything else. But yeah, super, super different to be back. Due to the food environment I had been immersed in, I was so sick when I came back that I thought about eating almost all the time, and about when my stomach would be empty enough again so that I could eat more. Jean and Betsy shared that they still think about food a lot, and that doing so results in rationing. Jean still rations M&M’s: “It's funny, M&M’s are the one thing that I would still ration out. In my pantry, I have two bags of M&M’s, but I only eat a few at a time, or every day, or whatever.” She went on to talk about how she wished she still ate less at once, how she had when she was in her community food system. Over the thirty years since she returned, her habits aren’t completely what they were in her community food system, yet they remain. Betsy too still thinks a lot about food due to the changes she underwent in her community food system. She not only rations but still hides food: I still ration things out like, “I'm just going to have one sour patch watermelon today,” and I keep it going. There's still some things that I think, psychologically, are still there. Now it's like, “Go to the store again? I’m not doing that, this is going to last me,” but still that rationing, or even hiding things that I don't want other people to eat, is still like a big ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 107 part of it. I don't have a big trunk, I wish it did, that'd be funny. Keep my locked trunk of private everything. Betsy still has food habits and feelings about food that she retains. She calls them psychological things, and notes that they are still there. She too, having adjusted to her community food system, retains those adjustments. Nearly all of my participants talked about how they were changed by their time in the community food systems they lived in. Furthermore, the narrative in common was that they not only changed but had to learn to deal with those changes as they re-entered the community food system. The following section discusses a related narrative they shared in common: experiencing intense overwhelm, having adjusted to community food systems, when re-encountering food in the Global Industrial Food System. Experiencing Overwhelm Due to Food Environment Nearly all of the participants talked about feeling very overwhelmed by the food environment when they came back to the Global Industrial Food System. Emily went to the capital city of the country she served in for a year before coming back to the US: My coming back was a little bit tapered, I guess, because I also married a [member of my host community], and we stayed in [the capital] a year after my service. So, the culture shock for me was coming to [the capital] of like 9 billion people, and you can basically get anything you need. I had a hard time reconciling that this is the same fucking country, and people who live here are so just westernized and different from… Do they even know what it's like to live in the countryside? So, I was kind of dealing with that. And I ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 108 selectively, I really wanted a hamburger my whole service. So, there's hamburger places in [the capital], and so, I went there, but in very small doses. I’m like, “Hey, it would be nice to have some peanut butter and sour…” No, they don't do sour cream. I don't know, tortillas or something, and they had a massive chain grocery store in the capital that I could go and find that. That was really tough. The good news was that I still had the option because I was living with his family, his family still cooked for me, and I ate their food. And it's [capital city] food, it's not my food but it's still sort of in the same vein, it wasn't so much of a shock. Notably, her time in the capital was not a community food system, but part of the Global Industrial Food System, although more similar to the food that she had in her community food system than the food that she encountered a year later when she returned to the US. That she explained, was a shock on a whole other level: Yeah, absolutely coming back to the States. Aside from the grocery store overwhelming, needing to vomit sensation, the food was just very, very, very, very, everything. Very hot, very cold, very spicy, very flavored. I was so used to such a bland palette, and just the same temperature everything. We didn't have ice and so coming back to… Everybody puts ice in their drinks, I don't do that anymore just because it's gross. Why do you need that much cold in your drink? So, I had a really hard… My tongue had to adjust a lot to even accommodate those additional, the scale, the range of the flavors, which also tasted very fake. Everything was just so much more real and tasteful, I think, in [my host country]. Even though Emily carefully planned out her return to eating industrialized food and had a year in her host country in its capital city, a part of the Global Industrial Food System, it was still ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 109 incredibly overwhelming. She had trouble adjusting to how different foods tasted, how powerful the flavors were, and even how different the food temperatures were. She noted the foods in the Global Industrial Food System tasted very fake, and they were nothing like the real and tasteful food she’d learned to enjoy in her community food system. The section following this will discuss more reactions to manufactured food, and how it now seemed fake. For now, though, there is much more about overwhelm to lay out. Betsy shared how she had trouble with restaurants, and how many choices she was faced with when she ate in them: I think the most overwhelming thing to me was just the amount of choices. Cheesecake Factory menu still throws me through the roof, I'm just like, “It's 13 pages long, and I just want one thing,” or going to a restaurant. In your community, it was one thing, you never had a choice. Here, we are just inundated with choices, and that's a really hard thing to kind of balance and level out, it is making peace with the fact that this is here, and still a part of you. That this experience is still very much a part of who you are moving forward, and how you make decisions in your life too. Betsy put it simply when she said that Peace Corps is something that will always be with her and coming back meant making peace with that. She had to come back and just like reconciling the rest of what had changed in her due to her time in her community food system, she had to find a way to cope with the overwhelm she encountered. Ginevive described her difficulties in grocery stores with too much of different types of stimulation: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 110 Going into a grocery store and just seeing things was like overexposure. I didn't need to hear about the grocery store. I didn't need to hear the songs and I didn’t need to hear the little cash register. The visualization was enough. Just the visual overwhelm was too much for Ginevive and adding in the music and the sounds made the experience something that much more overwhelming for her—too overwhelming for her. I found it to be overwhelming as well, “Certainly, it was really hard to go grocery shopping, not just Costco, but anywhere.” It was difficult for me to go somewhere large like Costco, but really, it was difficult to go into any grocery store. Jean spoke to this too: Yeah. I don't think I could go to a grocery store, and this was back in ‘94. The grocery stores were even smaller than they are now, but just all the variety. I literally stepped inside a grocery store once. I walked in, and turned around, and had to leave because it was just… The choice in the bread aisle, it blew me away. It probably took me two or three months before I could even go to a grocery store. I was lucky I was living with somebody who would do that for me, so yeah. I had even come home twice over the course for Christmases, because that's a long break there too. I could not go into a grocery store just because of the selection. The fruits and veggies were fine, that's like a little market, but when I looked at the bread aisle, and there was more than one choice, I didn't know what to do and I left. Despite having come back twice to visit, grocery stories were still so overwhelming, with the exception of the fruits and vegetables, that Jean had to remove herself from them. Jean spoke too about how this isn’t something that was easily unlearned, and that she still has difficulty: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 111 Sometimes, every once in a while, it'll hit again, even 30 years later, it'll hit again, when I'm going through a grocery store going, “There's too much stuff here.” Or Costco. Oh my gosh, Costco is hard. Thirty years later and Jean sometimes still gets overwhelmed in grocery stores. As she shared her story, notably, the others in her story circle all nodded vigorously. It is clear that the narrative in common, having adjusted to eating through a community food system, was experiencing intense overwhelm when confronted with manufactured, marketing, food and re-entering the Global Industrial Food System. The next section will lay out a further narrative in common in my participants’ reaction to manufactured food. New Narrowing of What Is Appetizing and What Counts as Food A few participants, when merely prompted to share what it was like to come back into the Global Industrial Food System, shared how industrialized food was no longer appetizing, and sometimes no longer considered to be food. Onyiye came back to the United States to attend her brother’s wedding, and recounted what it was like to open his pantry and look inside: When I opened my brother's cabinet, I just remember seeing, it was like I was in The Matrix. Instead of seeing the actual foods that I normally would buy, I started seeing just like soybean oil. And then, I actually saw it for what it was, and it was just sugar. And I was like, wow, like we really eat this stuff. On the other side of the world, I went to the market every single day, and got this fresh stuff for pennies on the dollar. I'm like, man, this is crazy. Onyiye no longer saw the foods that she used to buy, but actually saw them for that they were, ingredients like soybean oil and sugar, and was shocked that people in the Global Industrial Food ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 112 System actually eat these manufactured foods. Furthermore, she was shocked at how much these foods cost compared to what better, fresh food cost in her host country. Betsy shared about having made a list of foods she wanted to eat when she returned to the US, and how that turned out to be something she regretted: I had made a list all throughout service of foods that I wanted to eat. And as I was coming back, I honestly didn't realize how used my body had become to fresh foods. I got really, really sick when I got back just because of all the processed chemicals in the foods that we're eating. So, after day number four of making it through my list, and eating out three times a day, I'm just like, “I can't do this anymore, I'm super sick, I’m not keeping anything down.” So, I really just ate fruits and veggies, and even that was really hard for me, so I lost a ton of weight coming home because my body was just rejecting all the… Now I'm good, give it all to me, but it was really hard, and everybody wanted to have me over, and have me over for dinner, and hear all about my stories. So, that reintegration was really hard because I'm like, “I can't eat anything, I'm so sorry. I'm happy to come over and just like chat while y'all eat, but I can't keep anything down.” So, that put a lot of pressure on me to get better and I'm like, “I don’t know how to get better from this.” Betsy could not finish making her way through her list of foods or have meals with her friends and family. She was just too sick to finish her list or to eat what her friends and family made for her. She credited all of the processed chemicals that are present in industrialized food with her being unwell and noted that it made reintegrating back into her community quite difficult. Jean’s health was also affected by her return to the Global Industrial Food system. She shared that she lost a lot of the health she’d gained in her host country: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 113 I consider that I got very healthy in my host country because I was eating all fresh fruits, and veggies, and walking everywhere, or riding my bike or whatever. Nothing was easy, but it was delicious. I felt so healthy, and then, you come back, and you start eating all the processed foods, and everything is not fun to eat. I gained so much weight. I felt healthy before, but not anymore, not here in the US. After coming back to the US, Jean missed the health she enjoyed in her host country, and the fresh fruits and veggies and the exercise she enjoyed there too. When she returned to the US, she had a difficult time with the processed foods from the Global Industrial Food System, and she did not enjoy them. She gained a lot of weight and felt unhealthy from re-entering this food system. Jay talked about peanut butter, making her own, and that what she considers appetizing here has narrowed due to having adapted to her community food system: [Other volunteers] would tease me about the peanut butter I made. It's just natural peanut butter. I still eat it that way to this day. The taste of Jiff now, just like, what even is this? It doesn't even taste like peanut butter. But yeah, I left [my host country] definitely with my favorite foods that I still cook now. There are some foodways that I still maintain, like my natural peanut butter and things like that. And I guess I have a greater appreciation of food and how much stuff really isn’t food. Jay still makes her own peanut butter rather than eating manufactured peanut butter and, notably, retains the narrowing in what she actually considers food. Jiff, for example, no longer counts. Notably as well is that as she related this, every other participant in her story circle emphatically nodded. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 114 Among the other narratives in common relevant to re-entering the Global Industrial Food System is difficulty with processed, manufactured foods. Some volunteers were disgusted by them, others were made sick by them, and Jay, along with presumably the participants sharing her story circle who nodded along, no longer consider some of these foods to be appetizing, or to count as food at all. The following section will explore how these narratives make sense relevant to three of the dominant narratives, also known as the root causes of the global crises of our time. Analysis: Contextualizing and Explaining Findings through the Dominant Narratives The narrative themes which arose through my coding of these stories can be better understood when considered within the context of the dominant narratives or root causes of coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism, and through systems theory which explains how they have formed the world we live in. The Role of Systems Theory in this Analysis Systems theory illuminates how these dominant narratives, also known as the root causes of global crises, have shaped how reality works because all of reality is made up of systems guided by shared narratives which are themselves ideas which exist as systems (Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Meadows, 2008). This includes Peace Corps itself and the Global Industrial Food System, as well as the context in which the community food systems which hosted my participants are situated (Akram-Lodhi, 2015; Figueroa Helland & Lindgren, 2016; Gonzales et al., 2010; Grosfoguel, 2002; Rice, 1985; Schwarz, 1991; Tilzey, 2016). Systems theory, again, explains how our ideas and narratives are systems too, and how all of them, including those ideas around food, exist within an unbalanced but contested landscape of knowledge (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Grosfoguel, 2002; Meadows, 2008). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 115 Systems Theory also explains how we are systems ourselves—made up of our experiences and memories among other important systems—and situated within contexts which act on us and change us (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2015; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Meadows, 2008). Changing the contexts in which we live means changing, to a significant degree, who we are as we learn and adapt to our new contexts. At first as we do this, we make sense of the new context through our past experiences, before learning enough of our new context to make sense of it through ideas learned in the new context itself. This may explain why loss of control was such a common theme in my participants’ stories because at first, they interpreted their new situation through their past experiences. Coming from the Global Industrial Food System, food is considered something that people control. Provided they work enough to earn money, the idea is that they can buy what and as much as they want. Notably, in the Global Industrial Food System, even when one cannot buy enough food, or cannot buy the food one wants to buy, this is still generally conceived of as a result of individual choice—one should have worked harder. So, when Emily first arrived in her host country for training and got sent to school with a Tupperware lunch made by her host mom, and the option to eat what was there or not eat, of course she felt a loss of control. She was still viewing her new food system through the lens of her past experiences. Later, my participants adapted and learned about their new community food systems, and in so doing, largely felt able to reclaim control over their food. Take Jay and her gourmet village experience. When she got going, no one could tell her anything. She’d collected sufficient experiences in her new system to understand how to successfully thrive. As a reminder, she lost 50 pounds during her first three months when she did not yet have the experience necessary to situate herself. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 116 Sometimes the reclamation of control experienced by the participants was an intentional acceptance of the change in their ability to control their own food, either due to their food environment or to the community-ness of their food. Betsy, in her personal mud hut, deliberately chose to prepare and eat exactly the same food as her community members, to the degree that they were shocked. She did hide her popcorn from them and only cooked it in the night. This too, was another form of reclaiming control which she was able to accomplish after gaining enough experience in her new system to orient herself and navigate it successfully. Coming back into the Global Industrial Food System, nearly all of my participants spoke about needing to reconcile being changed people in a food system that hadn’t changed. Halimatou put it well: “Coming back was more of a shock than going there, which was, like, its own shock. I was like, ‘Wow, this is weird.’” Systems Theory was helpful there too for illuminating their experiences. They were looking at the Global Industrial Food System through new worldviews which had been changed by their time in community food systems (Meadows, 2008). Therefore, reconciling wasn’t merely a matter of collecting new experiences and learning about their new environments to update their worldview again, because they already had, in most cases, decades of such experiences in the Global Industrial Food System before their time in community food systems. Of course, then, the Global Industrial Food System was not a new environment for them; rather, they were new to it despite those decades of life in it. Put simply, new worldviews had replaced their old worldviews, and that kind of growth was not something they could forget or unlearn—the only path was forward (Meadows. 2008). Next this analysis will break down how the context created by the dominant narratives, or the root causes of the global crises of our age, explains participants experiences of too much and too little variety and quantity of food. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 117 Context Explained: Too Much and Too Little Variety and Quantity of Food A common thread across participant stories and across narratives in common is experiencing a lack of food in community food systems and then experiencing overwhelming excess in variety and quantity of food upon re-entering the Global Industrial Food System. It is important to understand where lack of food and excess food comes from, and the context in which these community food systems and the Global Industrial Food System are situated. That context is coloniality, the reality which is a legacy of colonialism, and which perpetuates many of its harms (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Grosfoguel, 2002; McMichael, 2013). During colonialism, entire ecosystems which supported community food systems and their foodways were decimated and replaced with monocrops designed to provide colonizers with food and food products which could be manufactured into food (Gonzales et al., 2010; McMichael, 2013). Under coloniality, rather than remediating the swaths of monocrops or ceding them back to their people, capitalism took over as the colonial countries stepped back (Grosfoguel, 2002; Holt-Giménez, 2019; Tilzey, 2016). The Global North, the places which were built through colonialism, still benefit from imported food grown in the Global South, the places where people were suborned and ecosystems decimated during colonialism. This decimation of ecosystems and their replacement with industrial, commodity, agriculture—as well as the supply chains which create, move, and market manufactured food—are the handiwork of industrialism-developmentalism, which is how capitalism accomplishes its endless exploitation of people, animals, and land. Industrialism/Developmentalism, and practices like corporate and/or nation state land grabbing continue the practices of colonialism by excluding and continuing to displace people from their ancestral land, necessary to their lifeways and foodways. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 118 Is it any wonder then that people in community food systems often do not have enough variety or enough quantity of food? Is it any wonder that the Global Industrial Food System, rife with food import-concentrated from all over the world into the Global North and designed to be flashy, would be overwhelming for people who had adjusted to eating through a community food system? Of course, sometimes desperate food insecurity and overwhelming food excess would be the result. Of course, having enough would be a struggle in a community food system, as Jay realized journaling one day: “’I think, I'm hungry,’ and I was like, ‘I might be, starving.’ It was just like this slow, just kind of building feeling, you know?’” She asked us, “You know?” and many of us in her story circle did know that slow building feeling of starvation, and we, notably, were mere guests in our community food systems. And of course, overwhelm would be the result upon re-entering the Global Industrial Food System, as Emily said well: “Aside from the grocery store overwhelming, needing to vomit sensation, the food was just very, very, very, very, everything. Very hot, very cold, very spicy, very flavored.” Manufactured food, of course, would very, very, very everything, after having lived in a community food system. Vitally, assuming that food insecurity is a direct result of community food systems, would be an incredible leap. Those community food systems without enough food have simply been thoroughly suborned over hundreds of years. Notably, community food systems which are also Indigenous have and continue to produce some of the most abundant and sustainable foods that exist, because the food itself is an integrated, co-evolved part of ecosystems grown over generations (Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Gonzales et al., 2010; Grey & Patel, 2015). Next this analysis will break down how food hegemony explains my findings. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 119 Food Hegemony Explained: What Food is Appetizing, What Makes Quality Food, and What Counts as Food The narratives in common of what counts as food widening, what makes quality food, and what counts as food can also be better understood through coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism, as well as through food hegemony, which is an aspect of coloniality used by capitalism and spread through industrialism-developmentalism. Coloniality of knowledge, a particular aspect of coloniality, explains that colonizers not only dominated people but also their ideas, subordinating the ideas of the colonized to the point that they no longer counted as valid or as knowledge at all, while privileging the ideas of the colonizers (Grosfoguel, 2002; Figueroa-Helland & Raghu, 2017; Quijano, 2007). The subordination of some ideas and privileging of others is still very much an active and unaddressed force under coloniality—now driven largely by capitalism and industrialismdevelopmentalism—and this force is certainly used on food ideas and foodways (FigueroaHelland & Raghu, 2017; Grosfoguel, 2002; Grey & Patel, 2015). Take Silvia being given Coke repeatedly despite trying for months to get her community to understand that she really would have preferred their fresh fruit juices instead. She was working against Coke’s aggressive, global marketing campaigns which, it certainly appears, had thoroughly indoctrinated her community. They insisted on the best for her, their guest, and the best for them was Coke. Another name for this situation, one where few people possess and exercise power sufficient to control the ideas of large groups, even to the degree that these groups actively work against their own best interests, is called hegemony, and it has and definitely still is applied to food (Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018; Grosfoguel, 2002; Quijano, 2007). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 120 For my participants who grew up in the Global Industrial Food System, and its corresponding food hegemony, food is something that comes from a grocery store, or maybe from a farmers' market. It is presented in a particular way, often packaged, and often marketed as appetizing more so than it actually is appetizing. It is manufactured to sell and sell again, as a commodity that one can earn by participating in the economy. In the Global Industrial Food System, food and what counts as food, is mediated through ideas which have likewise been manufactured by powerful people for their profit, and fed to the masses. This is vastly different from the food of community food systems, which is created by the community to sustain the community, and where the community itself decides, drawing on intergenerational knowledge despite very real outside pressures (particularly the developmentalism part of industrialism-developmentalism), what is appetizing and what is food. So, when someone leaves the Global Industrial Food System, they are leaving its food hegemony, which is an important piece of, or factor concurrent with, adaptation. Of course, what they would consider to be appetizing would widen, as would what they would count as food. They got used to their new food systems, even as food hegemony lost its hold on them. Halimatou alone ate a sheep’s eyeball, termites, fried live maggots, dogs, and more, and enjoyed nearly all of them at the time, and, with the exception of the dogs, all of them in retrospect as well. Similarly, what my participants accepted as quality food—and food prepared satisfactorily relevant to the manner and/or environment of preparation—also widened. This should be no surprise either since standards of cleanliness, sanitation, and perfection around food are also hegemonic ideas, which, notably, are actively spread by Peace Corps (Rice, 1985; Schwarz, 1991). Emily poignantly disclosed the lack of concern she had developed about these: ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 121 Everything was so contaminated and just gross when I think about it. The way food was prepared, the way it was served. My host grandmother had a dirt floor, a dirt hut where she prepared food and a kitchen inside. Like a small stove kitchen with guinea pigs running around on the floor, and just barefoot. A knife that's half broken and barely works, and everything with her hands. Then she goes to the bathroom, doesn't wash her hands, comes back, keeps preparing the food. So, I got really used to not washing my hands, as gross as that sounds because it was the least of our problems. And it took me a while to get back into washing them here. Outside of the Global Industrial Food System and its food hegemony, handwashing was simply not a priority for her or for her community. Finally, of course, upon returning to the Global Industrial Food System after having been outside of its food hegemony, some of my participants were no longer impressed by manufactured, marketed food, found it less appetizing, and sometimes no longer even counted it as food. Onyiye described a moment when she pierced through the food hegemony: Instead of seeing the actual foods that I normally would buy, I started seeing just like soybean oil. And then, I actually saw it for what it was, and it was just sugar. And I was like, wow, like we really eat this stuff…I'm like, man, this is crazy. She pierced through the food hegemony, and realized it was crazy. It is certainly not uncommon here to actively support the most unhealthy of manufactured food, even as doing so is definitely against one’s best interests. Analysis Recapped It is clear that the dominant narratives, or the root causes of the global crises of our age— having created the Global Industrial Food System and its overwhelming excess of food, as well ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 122 as the context in which many community food systems struggle with less quantity and variety of food than they need—explain why my participants related so many narratives in common about lack of variety and quantity in community food systems as well as narratives in common about intense overwhelm upon re-entering the Global Industrial Food System. Similarly, it is clear that the food hegemony present within the Global Industrial Food System—food hegemony also supporting and supported by the dominant narratives—explains why my participants shared so many narratives in common about experiencing a widening of what food was of acceptable quality, was appetizing, and of what counted as food, after having left this food hegemony, as well as narratives in common of dissatisfaction with manufactured food upon re-entering the Global Industrial Food System having shed at least some of the food hegemony they were raised within. Please see Chapter II for more detail on these dominant narratives, systems theory, and the harms that they have and continue to perpetrate. The following section will recap Chapter IV. Conclusion The question my research explored was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? I found that encountering a community food system meant losing control due to the food environment and community-ness of the community food system. I found that adjusting to these community food systems meant reclaiming control and undergoing a widening of what was appetizing and of what counted as food. I found that returning to the Global Industrial Food System meant reconciling re-entering it as a changed person, being very overwhelmed by the ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 123 food landscape, and experiencing a new narrowing of what was appetizing and of what counted as food. This chapter concluded by explaining these findings relevant to the dominant narratives of coloniality, capitalism, and industrialism-developmentalism, and noting that these dominant narratives—the root causes of the global crises of our age—must be understood before attempting to draw conclusions from these findings about community food systems or the Global Industrial Food System. Chapter V continues to recap this thesis, draw inferences from this research for community leaders working to build community food systems, and make suggestions for future research. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 124 Chapter V: Conclusion Chapter V will recap the reason for the research, the research question, and the methods used to explore this question. It will continue by outlining inferences relevant to the reason for the research and provide suggestions for further research. It will conclude with my thoughts on community as hope. We live in a world characterized by crisis, and the Global Industrial Food System is one such crisis (Amin, 2012; Figueroa-Helland & Lindgren, 2016; McMichael, 2013). This system has already contributed to the violation of five planetary boundaries—phosphorus and nitrogen biogeochemical flows, land use, mass extinction, and climate change—even as it continues to grow and displace other ways of life and the people who practice them (Amin, 2012; Stockholm Resilience Center, 2023). Alternatives to this system still exist and, as those of us who live within the Global Industrial Food System must transition away from it or transform it in order for life to continue to exist, stories of what it is like to adapt to alternative systems and then readapt to the Global Industrial Food System have value. This research elicited stories from Peace Corps Volunteers who grew up in the Global Industrial Food System, lived in a community food system for two years or longer, and then returned to the Global Industrial Food System. This group was chosen not due to a particular interest in Peace Corps, but because most Peace Corps Volunteers have had these experiences of food system adaptation and readaptation, and because I am in group with Peace Corps Volunteers because I was also one. The research question was: What are the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers who have eaten with others in a community food system and returned to feeding themselves in the Global Industrial Food System? ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 125 This research explored this question through non-directive qualitative inquiry, specifically story circles, to elicit stories of food system adaptation and readaptation (Roadside Theater, 1999). I asked participants to brainstorm together about what it was like to enter a food system new to them and what it was like to return to the Global Industrial Food System, and then to share their whole, personal Peace Corps food journey stories. This was the extent of the facilitation, and otherwise, I joined the group. During the brainstorming section, each participant was empowered to ask whatever follow-up questions they wanted to of any other participants, and, during the personal story sharing section, each storyteller told their own story—whatever that was, however they wanted to tell it, and without interruption, as the other story circle members listened carefully. These stories were then analyzed through emergent coding. Despite using a participatory and non-directive method, distinct and robust narratives in common arose across stories and across story circles. Upon entering their communities, most participants told of experiencing a loss of autonomy around their food, with less control over what they ate, how much they ate, and how they ate. Most participants shared that things which were not appetizing before became appetizing, even to the point that things which were not food before became food. Upon reentering the Global Industrial Food System, participants told of reconciling who they now were within the Global Industrial Food System and of experiencing intense overwhelm especially in grocery stores. Participants also told of how things which had previously been appetizing, particularly processed foods, were no longer appetizing and that some such food no longer counted as food. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 126 Inferences for Community Leaders Working to Build Community Food Systems Applying these narratives to the larger question of what people might expect as they transition away from or transform the Global Industrial Food System, one might infer that these people may have similar experiences, although it cannot be understated that the context in which and methods by which people form community food systems will be integral factors which this research did not speak to. After having eaten through grocery stores, where, mediated by product availability and money, one can buy whatever one wants and as much as one wants, eating only what oneself and one’s community has produced might mean encountering less variety in food, and perhaps less food altogether. This would likely be mediated by the ecosystem the community was in and by the methods of food production the community utilized. Depending on how influenced they are by food hegemony, it may be that things which weren’t appetizing before would become more appetizing, and things which would not have been food before would become food. Similarly, too, after having adapted to eating through community, one might have to reconcile their changed self when encountering food from the Global Industrial Food System, which may be overwhelming in both variety and quantity. Some of this manufactured food may no longer be appetizing or count as food. Community Organization I partnered with San Antonio Metro Health for this research. Its Healthy Neighborhoods initiative “helps residents revitalize their community for better health” through asset-based community development and individualized action plans co-created between community leaders and Metro Health community health workers (San Antonio Metropolitan Health Districts, 2023). ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 127 One such community health worker is building a food forest with her community and its leaders, and has been my subject matter supervisor throughout the planning, conducting, and analysis of my research. Additionally, she was actually a member of my cohort in Peace Corps, and learned alongside me there, since, and as I have elicited stories from other Peace Corps Volunteers about what it was like to adjust to a community food system and return to the Global Industrial Food System. I have provided her with my findings and with the inferences I have drawn from it, and she has taken these and used them to demystify what her community partners may experience as they build their community food system with a food forest at its center. She has shared these findings further with her network of other community health workers who are developing their own asset-based community development projects with their communities and community leaders. Metro Health holds that the most important asset in asset-based community development are the people, and they view their role as providing their community members with resources and support (San Antonio Metropolitan Health Districts, 2023). My findings are now in their repertoire and will remain there as a resource and as support as they continue to work to build food through community and community through food—by investing in and living out community food systems together. Future Research Future research around adapting to community food systems might more directivity explore not just the challenges but the benefits that people from the Global Industrial Food System encounter upon entering community food systems. For example, a few participants ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 128 talked about the security that they felt being part of a community able to feed itself, and how this was strikingly different from being alone and solely responsible for their own sustenance. Further research might also explore the connection between communities and their land, and what that land means to them, and whether that relationship informs the sort of food that they produce with their land. This would be relevant because many of the harms from the Global Industrial Food System exist due to its mismanagement and exploitation of land. Research conducted through a decolonial lens in partnership with Indigenous communities tied to their Land, could be particularly beneficial. Finally looking into the values of a community and how they show up in that community’s food system would be a meaningful extension of this research, its basis in systems theory, and the body of work that ties and even explains the Global Industrial Food System as connected to and grown from dominant narratives or global crises, which are themselves undergirded by problematic values such as the domination of other living things. Conclusion We may live in a time of unfolding crisis, but it is my opinion that in understanding these crises—their history, how they manifest, and how they work—lies the potential to act with others to cease perpetuating them, address them, and live out alternatives to make a difference for the better. The future is made up of the actions we all take now, and I refuse to believe the future is inevitably grim. I believe, as belligerently as necessary, that it is possible to feed ourselves and our loved ones, and to do so in a manner that repairs rather than exploits our communities, ecosystems, and Earth. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 129 I believe, while difficult, that doing so is actually very simple: all we need is to live for our communities, ecosystems, and Earth—rather than dominating them. At which point, how could we do anything other than grow community food systems in which we will not just survive, but thrive? ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 130 References Aguila-Way T. (2014). The Zapatista “Mother Seeds in Resistance” project: The Indigenous community seed bank as a living, self-organizing archive. Social Text, 32(1), 67-92. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2391342 Akram-Lodhi, A. H. (2015). Land grabs, the agrarian question and the corporate food regime. CFS/RCÉA – Special Issue, 2(1), 233–241. https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2.94 Alfred, T. & Corntassel, J. (2005). Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism. Government and Opposition, 40(4), 597-614. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.14777053.2005.00166.x Alonso-Fradejas, A., Saturnino, A., Borras, M., Holmes, T., Holt-Giménez, E., & Robbins, M. J. (2015). Food sovereignty: Convergence and contradictions, conditions and challenges. Third World Quarterly, 36 (3), 431–448. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1023567 Altieri, M. A. & Nicholls, C. I. (2012). Agroecology scaling up for food sovereignty and resiliency. Sustainable Agriculture Reviews, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-0075449-2_1 Amin, S. (2012). Contemporary imperialism and the agrarian question. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1(1), 11–26. http://doi.org/10.1177/227797601200100102 Blay-Palmer, A., Sonnino, R., & Custot, J. (2015). A food politics of the possible? Growing sustainable food systems through networks of knowledge. Agric Hum Values. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9592-0 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 131 Brewis, J. (2014). The ethics of researching friends: On convenience sampling in qualitative management and organization studies. British Journal of Management, 24(1), 849-862. http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12064 Busch, D. S. (2018). Service Learning: The Peace Corps, American higher education, and the limits of modernist ideas of development and citizenship. History of Education Quarterly, 58(4), 475-505. https://doi.org/10.1017/heq.2018.28 Cabrera, D. & Cabrera, L. (2015). Systems thinking made simple: New hope for solving wicked problems. Odyssean Press. Capra, F. & Luisi. P. L. (2016). The systems view of life. Cambridge University press. Cavicchioli, R., Ripple, W. J., Timmis, K. N., Azam, F., Bakken, L. R., Baylis, M., Behrenfeld, M. J., Boetius, A., Boyd, P. W., Classen, A. T., Crowther, T. W., Danovaro, R., Foreman, C. M., Huisman, J., Hutchins, D. A., Jansson, J. K., Karl, D. M., Koskella, B., Mark Welch, D. B., Martiny, J., Webster, N. S. (2019). Scientists' warning to humanity: Microorganisms and climate change. Nature reviews. Microbiology, 17(9), 569–586. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-019-0222-5 Denton, T. (2020). Virtual story circles facilitation guide. Listening in Place: A project of the Vermont Folklife Center. Vermont Folklife Center. Diekmann, L. O., Gray, L. C, & Thai, C, L. (2020). More than food: The social benefits of localized urban food systems. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 4(1). http://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2020.534219 Enthoven, L. & Van den Broeck, G. (2021). Local food systems: Reviewing two decades of research. Agricultural Systems, 193(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2021.103226 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 132 Figueroa-Helland, L.E., & Lindgren, T. (2016). What goes around comes around: From the coloniality of power to the crisis of civilization. Journal of World-Systems Research, 22(2), 430–462. Figueroa-Helland, L. E. & Raghu, P. (2017). Indigeneity vs. civilization: Indigenous alternatives to the planetary rift in the world-system ecology. In J. Smith, M. Goodhart, P. Manning, J. Markoff (Eds.), Social Movements and World-System Transformation (pp. 198-211). Routledge. Figueroa-Helland, L. E., Thomas, C., & Aguilera, A. P. (2018). Decolonizing food systems: Food sovereignty, Indigenous revitalization, and agroecology as counter-hegemonic movements. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 17(1), 173-201. https://doi.org/ 10.1163/15691497-12341473 Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (4th ed.). Routledge. Gonzalez, C. G. (2011). Climate change, food security, and agrobiodiversity: Toward a just, resilient, and sustainable food system. Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons. http://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/faculty Gonzalez, C. G. (2015). World poverty and food insecurity. Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, 3(2). http://elibrary.law.psu.edu/jlia/vol3/iss2/6 Gonzales, T., Machaca, M., Chambi, N., & Gomel, Z. (2010). Latin American Andean Indigenous agriculturalists challenge current transnational system of science, knowledge and technology for agriculture: From exclusion to inclusion. In V. Tauli-Corpuz, L. Enkiwe-Abayao, R de Chavez (Eds), Towards and Alternative Development Paradigm: Indigenous People’s Self-Determined Development (pp. 163-204). Tebtebba Foundation. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 133 Grey, S., & Patel, R. (2015). Food sovereignty as decolonization: Some contributions from Indigenous movements to food system and development politics. Agriculture and Human Values, 32(1), 431–444. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9548-9 Grosfoguel, R. (2002). Colonial difference, geopolitics of knowledge, and global coloniality in modern/colonial capitalist world-system. Review, 25(3), 203-224. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40241548 Grosfoguel, R. (2011). Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political-economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq Herrero, M., & Thornton, P. (2013). Livestock and global change: Emerging issues for sustainable food systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(52), 20878-20881. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23761824 Holt-Giménez, E., & Altieri, M. A. (2013). Agroecology, food sovereignty, and the new green revolution. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 37(1), 90-102. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/10440046.2012.716388 Holt-Giménez, E. (2019). Capitalism, food, and social movements: The political economy of food system transformation. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.091.043 Korten, D. C. (2015). Change the story, change the future: A living economy for a living earth. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Lather, P. (1986). Issues of validity in openly ideological research: Between a rock and a soft place. Interchange, 17(4), 63-84. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 134 Mayo, P. (1999). Gramsci, Freire, and adult education: Possibilities for transformative action. Zed Books. Mayo, P. (2014). Gramsci and the politics of education. Capital & Class, 38(2), 385-398. http://doi.org/10.1177/0309816814533170 McMichael, P. (2013). Historicizing food sovereignty: A food regime perspective. Presented at Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, International Conference, Yale University, 2013. Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. Chelsea Green Publishing. Mekonnen, M.M., Hoekstra, A.Y. (2012) A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animal products. Ecosystems 15(1), 401–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2015). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation (4th ed.). John Wiley & Sons. Mignolo, W. D. (2007) Introduction. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 155-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162498 Noy, C. (2008). Sampling knowledge: The hermeneutics of snowball sampling in qualitative research. Social Research Methodology, 11(4), 327-344. Peace Corps. (2022). About Peace Corps. Retrieved November 22, 2022, from https://www.peacecorps.gov/about/ Peace Corps. (2022). Volunteer openings. Retrieved September 13, 2022, from https://www.peacecorps.gov/volunteer/volunteer-openings/ Reinsborough, P. & Canning D. (2017). Reimagining change: How to use story-based strategy to win campaigns, build movements, and change the world. PM Press. Quijano, A. (2007) Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 168 — 178. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 135 Rice, G. T. (1985). The bold experiment. University Press of Virginia. Roadside Theater, (1999). Roadside Theater’s story circle methodology. Retrieved September 13, 2022, from https://roadside.org/sites/default/files/storycircle.description.web_.2012.pdf Saldaña, J. (2019). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage Publications. San Antonio Metropolitan Health District. (2023). Healthy Neighborhoods. Retrieved June 26, 2023, from https://www.sanantonio.gov/Health/HealthyEating/HealthyNeighborhoods#262593259how-it-works Schwarz, K. (1991). What you can do for your country: An oral history of Peace Corps. William Morrow & Co. Stockholm Resilience Centre. (2023). The nine planetary boundaries. Retrieved February 24, 2023, from https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetaryboundaries/planetary-boundaries/about-the-research/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html Student Experiences & Engagement at Oregon State University. (2020). Story circles toolkit. Oregon State University. Taylor, K. & Marienau C. (2016). Facilitating learning with the adult brain in mind: A conceptual and practical guide. Jossey-Bass. Tilzey, M. (2016). Global politics, capitalism, socio-ecological crisis, and resistance: Exploring the linkages and the challenges. Colloquium Paper No. 14 presented at the Global Governance/Politics, Climate Justice & Agrarian/Social Justice: Linkages and Challenges, An international colloquium, The Hague, The Netherlands February 2016. Weis, T. (2013). The ecological hoofprint: The global burden of industrial livestock. Zed Books. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 136 Appendix A: Consent Form and Resource List Westminster College Institutional Review Board (IRB) For the Protection of Human Subjects The Research: This research aims to raise up the food stories of Peace Corps Volunteers adapting to eating in community-based food systems and reacclimated to eating in the US, and to raise up their current and/or aspirational food stories. The findings will have the potential to increase understanding around experiencing food system change at a time when the industrial food system needs to be transformed. The Process: Your participation in the research will consist of a virtual story circle in which participants will discuss experiences around food and tell stories about adapting to different food systems during and after their Peace Corps Service. The virtual story circle will take place over Microsoft Teams and last no longer than 145 minutes, with breaks included. Story circles are a group experience, so it is important that we all have our videos unmuted. After the circle, I will transcribe the video and code the transcriptions. As I code I will contact willing participants to clarify what they said and ask for more information. Risk and Benefits: Participation in this research poses little to no risk. Story circles, as a medium to be heard and listen to other’s stories around similar experiences, can be affirming and helpful for participants. Story sharing also has the potential to raise up unresolved trauma. I will ask each participant to help me create a compassionate, supportive environment for sharing and listening, but I am not a mental health professional. Please consider thoughtfully as you decide whether to participate, and do not hesitate to refer to the resource list I have compiled and attached. As a participant, I understand that this research study will be submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Community Leadership at Westminster College. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 137 I understand that my participation is voluntary and can be withdrawn at any point with no adverse repercussions from Westminster College, the co-investigator, or the principal investigator. I understand that I may withdraw my consent for any or all of what I have shared to be included in the research up to the publication of the research. I understand that I will be asked to provide a pseudonym by which I will be referred to in the research, and that I may choose to use this pseudonym in the story circle. I am aware that all records will be kept confidential and password protected by the researcher, and that the results of this study may be used in formal publications or presentations. I agree to keep my video unmuted and to do my best to contribute to a compassionate, affirming environment for sharing and listening. I agree to audio and video recording of the story circles on Microsoft Teams and understand that the recording will only be used for the research and will be destroyed afterward. Additional consent:  I agree to be contacted with a request to clarify what I have shared and/or to provide more information. If you have any questions about this study or wish to withdraw, please contact: Investigator: Dr. Shelley Erickson Email: [e-mail] Co-Investigator: Kelton Whittaker Email: [e-mail] If you have any questions regarding your rights as a research participant, please contact: Chair of IRB: Sheryl Steadman Email: [e-mail] If you feel that you have received a satisfactory explanation as to the risks and benefits of this study as well as your rights as a research participant and you would like to participate, please sign and date below. You will be given a copy of this form for your records. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 138 ______________________________________ ___________________ Participant Signature Date ______________________________________ ___________________ Co-Investigator Signature Date ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 139 Resource List National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Dial 9-8-8 in the United States https://988lifeline.org/current-events/the-lifeline-and-988/ Find Help Near You: United Way 2-1-1 Dial 2-1-1 from the United States or Canada to be connected to local resource specialists https://www.211.org/ National Center for PTSD Decision Aid https://www.ptsd.va.gov/apps/decisionaid/ National Eating Disorder Helpline Dial or text [phone] Online chat https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/helplinechat https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/ ANAD: Free Eating Disorders Peer Support Groups and Services Dial (888)-375-7767 https://anad.org/ Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Support Services https://www.peacecorps.gov/returned-volunteers/support-services/ ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 140 Appendix B: Story Circle Guides Guide for First Story Circle Hello, Everyone! I’m Kelton. Thank you for joining today. Let’s jump right in and go over informed consent. As a quick reminder, this session is being recorded. I am guaranteeing confidentiality, so when I make a transcript of today’s meeting I will change all of your names and refer to the region of the world in which you served instead of identifying your host country. If you all talk about what we learn together here after the fact, you have agreed to hold yourselves to the same standard of confidentiality by omitting identifying details. If something is personal, I think it’s important to ask permission to share it even with identifying details removed. You are welcome to cease your participation at any point, and if you decide you would like anything of what you say here removed from my record, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Let’s talk a bit about the guidelines for the conversation today. The general format is that we’ll have a conversation around food, guided by some questions, to help us get warmed up and jog our memories, and then tell our story. Those of us not speaking during the storytelling are meant to listen carefully so that we can be informed by the other’s stories when it’s our turn. Story circles are meant to be conducted in a circle when completed in person, so we can all be present with one another. So, to get as much of that experience as we can, please turn on your cameras and select “all members view” so we will all be able to see every member. I will facilitate but also be in among you all sharing as well. During the warmup, please feel free to jump in and talk ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 141 among yourselves, then during the story sharing section I will call out names so we can share one at a time. You are welcome to pass when I call your name and we will come back to you. The big themes we’ll be looking at are community and food and what it’s like to be immersed in new ones for us before becoming reimmersed back into the industrial food system. Our talk will be organized in a beginning, middle, and end. So first we’ll zoom in on food and eating with our host communities (first chatting, then storytelling), then we’ll talk about what it was like to come back to the industrial food system here, first meals, grocery stores, things like that, first chatting then telling our bigger story of readjusting, then we’ll talk about how we live out our food stories now and, how we might wish we could live them differently than we do, if that’s something we wish. How does that sound to everybody? Any questions? 1st Round Let’s go ahead and get started, first with introductions. Tell us a little bit about yourself and about what country you served in. Next, could you tell us about the food system in your country? Tell us more by going through a typical day getting food and eating in your community? Or by telling us something that surprised you that you had to do to feed yourself? Now for our broader stories. I’ll go ahead and post this question in the chat, then let’s take a minute to think about it without taking notes, then we’ll begin, and I’ll go first to show you all ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 142 how it could be like when you go: Tell us about your journey as you adjusted to getting food and eating in your community. Before we move on to talking about life and eating following service, is there anything else anyone would like to share about food community in country? Or any comments about what we’ve heard so far today? 2nd Round Thank you everyone, let’s go forward now to what it was like right when you came back to the US. To get us thinking, what was everybody’s first meal like? First grocery store experience? What did you miss from your community? What were you eager to have again? What food things did your people here do for you to welcome you back? Great, great, thank you everyone. Let’s take a minute to think about this next one before we share: What happened next in your food story, after leaving your Peace Corps food system and community and returning to the US? Before we move on to talking about the food stories we’re all currently living out, is there anything else anyone would like to share about readjusting post service? Or any comments, feelings, or thoughts about what we’ve shared and heard? ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 143 3rd Round Thank you everybody, I really appreciate what you’ve had to share. We’ve had our beginning and middle to what this is all like, let’s go into the end phase of our shared experience. For the chatting phase, What ways of eating and getting food from Peace Corps are still part of your food story now? What ways do you wish you could be, if any? Are there barriers you face to doing this, what kind? Now for the last story round, let’s take a couple minutes again to think about what we’ll share: As you have digested these experiences, and continue to do so, what food story are you living out now? What other food story, if any, would you like to be living instead? Thank you everyone, I really appreciate what you’ve shared today, and that you’ve shared. Before we close, is there anything else anyone would like to share? I’d like to open some space too to share how this experience has been for you all. Thank you, thank you, really. As a reminder, you are welcome to contact me at any point to remove any of what you have shared with me from my records. If any of you would be willing to be contacted with questions as I code next semester, I would appreciate it. If you know others who would be willing to share their stories in my next session, please feel free to pass along my contact information. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 144 Thank you again, everyone! Bye now, goodbye. *waves* *Ends call* Primer Document/Guide for Second Story Circle Story Circle Primer About Story Circles: The research will be conducted using story circles, which are sort of like focus groups. • A story circle consists of around five people sitting in a circle—first chatting and then telling stories to one another based on a common experience they have shared. • Story circles have a defined, agreed upon purpose, are bounded by time, and are guided by structure. • I will facilitate the sharing and keep the conversation on track, but also share and join in the conversation myself. Holding Story Circles Virtually: • Virtual story circles work best when they mimic in person circles as closely as possible. • It is important that participants keep their cameras on whenever possible so we can talk to each other’s faces and listen with our faces too. • The beginning will include a brief technology primer to make sure everyone knows how to use the chat in case there’s an audio problem. Overview of Our Story Circle: • The story circle will last about 3 three hours. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES • 145 The first half hour-ish will be personal introductions and overviews of our sites and what eating and getting food involved. • The next 30-60 minutes will be free-flowing conversation and anecdotes. o I have some questions to facilitate this. • Then for about 10-15 minutes we’ll take a break and jot some things down to get ready to take turns telling our Peace Corps food journey. o After this we’ll set our pens down, divide up the remaining time so we can be sure not to go over, and get busy sharing out stories. (It’s okay to repeat things you’ve already shared, and certainly okay to let what you’re hearing inform what you share.) • Tell us, physically, mentally, and emotionally what it was like to: o Adjust to a new food system in a new community o Come back and readjust to eating and getting food here o And then wrap up your story by telling us how these experiences of adjustment and readjustment have shaped the food story you’re currently living out, how you would like it to be, and what barriers you face, if any, to eating differently currently • Then we will finish with final thoughts, thanks, and if it is like the last circle, share pictures of pets who joined us during the chat. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 146 Appendix C: Recruitment Scripts Script for Facebook Groups and the subreddit r/peacecorps: Hello everyone! My name is Kelton Whittaker. I’m a G16, I served in Georgia (not the state!) from 2016-2018. I’m in graduate school and my capstone research is collecting stories from RPCVs around what it was like to find themselves in a new food system. If you were a volunteer who got more than half of your food from outside of corporate grocery stores, I would really love to hear your food story. I’m using story circles, so as you share your story, you will also be able to hear and learn from others. We’ve seen a lot, and eaten a lot, and I think we ought to share it! If you’re interested, register on this Eventbrite or email me at [e-mail]. I would be happy to answer any questions. If you know other volunteers with food stories which should be shared, please feel free to pass along the Eventbrite and/or my contact information. Thank you! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/what-is-your-peace-corps-food-story-a-qualitative-researchproject-tickets-468114652527?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utmmedium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=escb Script for Facebook Groups admins: Hi 👋 My name is Kelton. I served in Georgia (not the state!) from 2016 to 2018. I’m finishing up my Master of Arts in Community Leadership from Westminster College in Sugar House. For my thesis I’m eliciting stories of food system adaptation from RPCVs. Many of us have gone through some serious food system adaptation, and I think that's important experience. ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 147 Could I post on your page to see if Utah volunteers might be interested in sharing their stories? Sharing will be through story circles, sort of like focus groups, so they’ll be able to hear other volunteers’ food stories too. I’m more than happy to answer any questions you might have. If you’d like to see the post beforehand, I have it written up already and would be happy to send it along. Thank you for your time! კარგად იყავი Script for Facebook Messenger or Texting: Hi! It’s Kelton. I’m in graduate school about to finish up. I just have my research left for my capstone. I’ll be collecting stories from RPCVs around what it was like to eat in a community food system before returning to eating in the Industrial Food System, and I wondered if you might be interested in participating. I’m using story circles, so as you share your story, you would also be able to hear and learn from others. Does this sound like something you would be interested in? I’d be happy to tell you more about it. Also, if you know of others who have food stories which should be told, could you pass along my contact information to them? [e-mail] Thank you! ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES Appendix D: IRB Approval Form and NIH Certificate 148 ELICITING FOOD SYSTEM ADAPTATION STORIES 149 Whittaker_Kelton_approval.pdf APPROVAL of a thesis/project submitted by Author(s): Kelton Whittaker | Advisor: Shelley Erickson School Department: School of Education Title of Thesis: In a Pickle: Eliciting Food System Adaptation Stories from Peace Corps Volunteers Chairperson, Supervisory Committee: Shelley Erickson Approved on 07-07-2023 Dean of School of Education: Matthew Neves Approved on 07-10-2023 Whittaker_Kelton_permission.pdf STATEMENT OF PERMISSION TO DEPOSIT & DISPLAY THESIS IN THE INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY Name of Author: Kelton Whittaker | Advisor: Shelley Erickson Additional Authors: | | | School Department: School of Education Title of Thesis: In a Pickle: Eliciting Food System Adaptation Stories from Peace Corps Volunteers With permission from the author(s), the staff of the Giovale Library of Westminster College has the right to deposit and display an electronic copy of the above named thesis in its Institutional Repository for educational purposes only. I hereby give my permission to the staff of the Giovale Library of Westminster College to deposit and display as described the above named thesis. I retain ownership rights to my work, including the right to use it in future works such as articles or a book. Submitted by the Author(s) on 7/7/2023 2:06pm The above duplication and deposit rights may be terminated by the author(s) at any time by notifying the Director of the Giovale Library in writing that permission is withdrawn.