Vaissnavi Shukl
How often do we really think about where our food comes from? I don’t mean the supermarket or the vegetable vendor where we buy it from but the place where it is grown or the kind of seeds that are sown and everything that concerns the cycle of crops and the resources that are involved in the production of food.We have what about two, three meals a day, and it’s not until somebody explicitly forces us to think about the origin of our food that we give it any attention.

Today, I turned to Mexican researcher, architect and activist in her own right, Adriana David, to talk about her work on seed sovereignty and how global environmental forces have changed the seeds that we sow and the food that we eat. She will also tell us why seed banks need to be democratised and how we can use creative tools to foreground the flaws in our food system.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Should we begin?

Adriana David
Yeah, let’s begin. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
Adriana, we’re going to talk a lot about food and seeds today. So let me begin by asking you what the term food sovereignty means. So for somebody who is hearing this term for the first time, how do you explain it to them?

Adriana David
Okay. Yeah, it’s a quite complicated term. It’s not used that much. Something that we hear a bit more often would be food justice, or food security, you know, because…Okay, let me tell you a little bit about the difference between food security and food sovereignty, food security talks about having food on the table, the UN, the FAO, they talk about having availability of food, but they never in the description of food security. They never talk about the health, the healthy part of the food, the economic part, or impact in the system, the political part, where does that food come from? Right. It’s just about it could be McDonald’s, it could be. It could be junk food, any kind of food, that would be the definition of having food security. Whereas when you talk about food sovereignty, you get to think about the whole network that collaborated or worked for your food to be on the table and that food. In that case, you’re considering the economical part. You’re considering, you know, the relationships in the, in the community, the community part, the political party, the healthy parts, the part about labour, about health, about land ownership, for example. So it talks about considering a bigger spectrum, you know, of justice and equality in terms of food. And so the first group of people who started it, who coined the term food sovereignty is this group called La Via Campesina, and they started talking about that in 1996, which is La Via Campesina is an international group of peasant and small scale farmers who wanted to, to respond and articulate like a common answer to neoliberalism and to the dominant market economy, you know, and so the objective was to defend their rights, then their rights to land and the rights to seed. Right. I’m gonna read a little, a very small part of this definition. So it says, this is from 2007, the Declaration of Nyéléni in Mali where they gathered together just to to declare food sovereignty, the definition of food sovereignty, and it says, “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods and the rights to define their own food and agriculture systems.” So basically, we’re talking about control. Control of the food that comes to your table, you know, because it could sound a little bit obvious, but you know, in 2022, most people, more than half of the population of this planet living in urban environments, we don’t know where our food comes from. It’s really crazy not to know because this is what feeds us and what keeps us alive, you know, and this is how civilization started. From hunting and gathering and studying agriculture, etc. And we were really it was like gold keeping seeds, right because it was our social food and then suddenly, capitalism and so many things political economical, colonialism, so many things just made us end up in in a place where we don’t really know how the meat that we eat was, you know, was grown or, or produced, how the, yeah, how the vegetables were grown and who was involved in that supply chain, right. So food sovereignty, that’s why that’s why I’m very interested in that it considers so many things. And when you start talking about researching a little bit more about food sovereignty, there’s, you know, Elizabeth Hoover, who you invited for Womxn in Design and so fantastic in how she explains indigenous food sovereignty for the US, because we’re talking about land tenure. And so who owns the land? So she says, “If you don’t raise your own food, someone else is controlling your destiny.” Right? So I think that very small sentence just explains how important having food sovereignty is in our communities and it’s a bit overwhelming because it’s considering so many things in this… in this network of suppliers in the supply chain, right. And it’s very complicated to understand it all. And she also at the end of the meeting, the lecture, I stopped for a while and I was asking, so this term food sovereignty is really broad, you know, like, how can we become food sovereign in the community like I’ve never heard, everybody talks about this concept in a very, like aspirational way like very dream, like we should all aspire to be sovereign. But how, a step by step guide, you know, do we need to save how much? How much water resources etc. I don’t know. If you just answered it depends because it depends on the community. It depends, on the scale… on the scale of the town, it also depends on I think, after a while of studying these, I understand that it also depends on the culture, of the space of the community. The storytelling to this, there’s this component that’s so beautiful and so sensitive about it. Not that this part of the chain, not that political, but it’s part of this network, where it considers Nature’s Right, right, you know, more than human communities, multi species like all these, this, this beautiful environment of multi species world. That includes soil that I love, you know.

Vaissnavi Shukl
We have a big question about soil later on. But what was striking about the definition that you read, and I think we don’t highlight it enough, especially in the day and age that we’re living in, is the definition said it’s culturally appropriate food. You know, we have a Japanese restaurant. Okay, well, nobody had heard the word sushi unless you’ve been outside till about maybe three years ago like pre COVID. Right? So it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Similarly, anywhere you travel you…. you get food from around the world and we’ll… we’ll talk about food, supply chains and demand and supply overall the world but we are facing a major crisis… food crisis in the world right now. Right. So both in terms of food shortage and unequal distribution, everything kind of spiralled down and got exacerbated with the war in Ukraine, disrupting the global wheat supply. And I mean, news publications have done tremendous coverage of what happened when the war started, not only in terms of like, gas from Russia that a lot of countries denied to us, but also Ukraine accounts for a large portion of wheat that is fed into global supply chain and when the war started, it’s just everything was at a standstill. Yeah. Now you work a lot with seed banks and seed libraries and have, even in a beautiful public installation in Mexico City with modular little terracotta seed containers. I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of seeds in the larger food system because we often don’t realise that whatever is growing wherever it’s growing, I mean, sure there’s a tree that will give you some stuff annually. But all of the seasonal produce that you see every winter, every summer is stuff that needs to be grown with the help of seeds, like somebody has to go sow the seeds, and then to the condition and make sure you get the produce.

Adriana David
Yeah, so you know my love for seeds started, because my mom has an NGO that’s called Canasta de Semillas, so seed basket in Mexico, for a long long time. She is now… she’s retired but she used to create community seed banks in different places of Mexico and depending on the bioclimatic areas right of Mexico, and then so she would get funds from the government and for many organisations in Mexico and internationally. And because I’m an architect, she was constantly asking me and very honoured to design these setbacks, right. But she was like, but we have three months because we need to do these meetings with the funding people. So we need to be super fast. We don’t have time to design like you know these trawling, like always, running always like, not having time to really think about what a seed bank should look back… should look like today in rural areas, right. So I applied to these artistic grants in Mexico from the Culture Ministry of Mexico,to design a manual of seatback building sustainably appropriate and depending on may be built on straw bale houses or earth walls, etc. Anyways, along the road when I got the grant. And so I spent one year thinking about this issue and with my tutors, etc. And what we what we concluded was that we don’t need a new seed bank, a new actual building for that, you know how tiny seeds are, you know, we don’t really need a new a new building for that and, and because sometimes, like we all know that architecture can become very oppressive, you know, and very repressive with nature. But we said, but we need to communicate these problem, like the first thing it’s not. It’s not about building a new building. It’s about creating awareness of the big issue that seed diversity is dying. We’re losing so many, so many seed varieties in this world. So as Vandana Shiva says, and also FAO, etc. Before we used to rely on 8,500 varieties of food, you know, and after the Green Revolution and the Industrial Revolution as well. Now, we only really rely on about eight commodity crops, right, which is crazy and this diversity of seeds, you know it existed because because the world is different, or territories are different climates or environments or climate, and they were just adapting to these different climatic conditions, these diverse these, these different seeds and of course, with the evolution of the industrial agriculture, and the Green Revolution, etc. It was more, it was easier to have just one variety because you can harvest it at the same time. You can, you can order it, thanks to machines and you can use tractors and combine harvester and etc, etc. And it becomes all very, very much ordered classified, and of course that it’s a long talk, but it includes fertilisers, agrotoxicos and looking for productivity and high yield is that we have climate change. We have deforestation, you know all these fertilisers that go to the soil and then implement we have GMOs and we have GMOs and we have patents and we have lost these varieties of seeds that actually naturally adapt to the changing climate. Right. And this is what people before the Green Revolution and before the Industrial Revolution as well kept as gold because it was their source of food, their security, their food security for the next season. There’s beautiful examples of seed banks, pre Hispanic in Mexico seed banks, one that’s called Costco, Matt, they are from indigenous communities, and in Africa as well. Like there’s so many I’m going to send you images they used to, they used to save seeds in terra cotta containers because they recognise very… a great installation. Yeah, material for installation. And they would put it on the ground they were they would save it. They would separate it from… from the earth a little bit just to have a little bit of air and afford plagues and avoid animals etc. They would. There’s such a beautiful technology for saving seeds you know before these… these revolutions of the 20th century because they understood the importance of these seed varieties and how important a localised seed for every community was. I’m telling this story because because along like along these year when I was when I was starting, how to build the seed bank, the only thing I realised is how important and how we should just we should all save seeds, however we can. And we should all consume diverse, you know, and mostly now because of climate change and how these, conditions are changing. We need to be able to grow to still grow food in a changing environment and have seeds. You know, corn has 64 varieties, you know, and because one grows in Chihuahua and another one grows in the Mayan territory, and another one is adapted to these more humid soil etc. Like it’s not only about soil, it’s about the whole climatic condition and environment right. And we have lost so many… so many varieties, because of these and because we are also As consumers, we keep buying the same tomato, you know, and the same type of every produce, you know. So I became basically in love with the seeds because they’re also physical… It’s so beautiful that such a tiny living being creature can hold the information, you know, of a huge plant and the evolution of a climate and a soil so that it could adapt and grow better in the following season. And it could adapt to a plague and and and it’s continually you know, changing I don’t want to say evolving but just adapting to the climate and being resilient. So seeds in their beauty and their tiny beings they become… they honour origins, you know, and these origins are also cultural origins and so it relates to storytelling and talking to, to, you know, grandparents and, and the old people of the community and how they used to grow this food. It’s not about machines and how we understand it today. And that’s the question about machines that I’m really interested about, but maybe later we can talk about it.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean, you think of seeds of seeds and maybe you don’t realise that explicitly that it’s the seed and it’s saving or otherwise that leads to change in culinary traditions like an entire society, right. So once you stop growing a particular thing that once grew that it has a top down effect in terms of what you eat, what gets passed on, even in terms of like family recipes from one generation to the other. And it’s a seed from which the whole thing quite literally emerges. But I also want to tap into something that you mentioned early on about soil, and I have a whole question on this. So this comes from this very popular recent movement associated with an Indian spiritual guru by the name of Sadhguru. And he’s recently started an international campaign called Save soil. It’s become kind of a global movement now. So he was on a tour around the world on his bike spreading the message of saving soil and how with the day and age and the way we’re treating our land and the soil, it’s essentially losing its nutritional use and you know, we’ve been abusing the soil that we grew our plants and lay one so it kind of I mean, it’s it talks about soil health, but also climate change in a lot of ways because they’re kind of interrelated and the movement did catch people’s attention, right. So it got a lot of media attention. A lot of celebrities got associated with the movement. So you would have Yeah, you know, people change their Instagram profile picture saying save soil, people who are wearing T shirts, celebrities endorsing and reposting a and every time he would go to a different country he would have a proper rally there you will have an event with state leaders with NGOs and students with children. And it seemed to for once, shift the attention from the vague words of climate change, social unrest, war food XYZ to literally soil save so that it was like a two word message. Now you have researched and written a fair bit about soil and found this one thing you wrote in your thesis very profound in the document. You can ask yourself, “What is the soul of soil?” It’s very profound. Do you want to elaborate on that? Yeah, of course.

Adriana David
So I think there are many scales of let’s say, tackling No, like, just going to this… into this issue into this problem. Right and and I’m continually like, looking away looking for a way, a way to just for me to understand it, or maybe just take that extract the best of it to to to create the awareness like these became like my main objective, I think, the beginning of it, and you saw it with Counter Meal and also with the Seed Bank installation. It’s like I need to understand why we became so disconnected with our sole source of food, you know, and I’m trying to find a way to reconnect somehow. And, and I guess, because I also have, like this background, I just don’t do about in like in, in performance or in dancing. There’s something very bodily about sometimes the research that I do because I think that when you connect through…through your skin with some issues, it’s because it’s complicated to explain, and I’m sorry about that. But there’s something about the small-scale connection of human beings of nature that I’m really, really interested in.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s a… it’s a tactility… it’s that I don’t know if even tactility does justice to it, but I know what you mean. You know how, like, young kids when… when they go out to play, they often don’t need toys because they have their hands and you engage all of your senses. You know, your smell, your eyes, and kids also like to eat the sad, a little bit of that taste and you’re absolutely yeah, it’s a bodily experience.

Adriana David
It’s a bodily experience. It’s this like, we have a memory that we are also nature, you know, and that we are constantly talking about nature, like on the other side and off humans. And that’s, I think, one of the main problems in which we treat, of course, like we know that we treat nature like that, because we feel that we’re not part of it. Right. But, but we’re, we’re part of it and need it. I don’t know what to think about like these lemur ghoulies and this symbiosis understanding of the world that becomes where human beings become also part of these networks of mutualism. You know, we are also part of that and we can prove it because of the bacteria that lives in our guts and this interconnection, and you know, of many, many not only bacteria, like so many living beings that we don’t understand what we know that we rely on them and they rely on us. I think soil is like that, like I want to understand it. A little bit like that in… in the sense that agriculture was developed by men like human beings, right? And these, but it’s a natural thing that’s happening. So how do we connect like it started? It started with human beings understanding how we connect with nature, because nature gives us food. So and we give back it’s constant exchange. And in this exchange, and in this symbiosis, there’s also soil like we cannot forget about soil. So then I was… I was exploring how do we connect with soil and how do we understand that soil is alive? Right? And I think it’s also the argument the Save Soil campaign needs. We cannot think about soil as an inert thing. We need to think about it full of living beings and full of activities and full of exchanges of chemical energy, and nitrogen and phosphorus and bacteria and protozoa and like it’s like so overwhelming when you start researching how alive it is, you know, and it’s working constantly in these exchanges with with also the cosmos and etc. And we are a part of it because we started these agriculture thing. You know, growing, even if I mean, I don’t want to use the word domestication, but it’s part of we it’s part of a mutualistic work. And so finding the soul of soil was just trying to make trying to understand agriculture, I guess, in a democratic way like we are like no hierarchies, human beings, soil, plants, leaves, chemical energy. All the actors are part of the same democratic, you know, like level and balance. So I was trying to… to understand how that worked. And I ended up drawing a choreography, a score, you know, so that our bodies, that we could express this energy through… through a dance, but this is just an exercise. I guess, to understand, to understand that we’re all connected and we’re alive. Thanks to that we live and we die for that. That’s, I think that’s a beautiful quote. And I could… I could read that short poem that I wrote, wrote choreography.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Please do

Adriana David
So it goes like this- “The silent action of the greens versus human machines. We produce energy dissipated, transform it. We’re bones with cells metabolising air, starlight and water. dissipation of energy is what’s important. The land we inhabit is Cosmos made, not man made. There is silence. Silence of the greens transforming energy into different forms within this environment. In silence, the different nutrients travelled from element to element of Earth to allow for the becoming of each plant. In agriculture, there is never dormancy. There is constant activity initiated by human energy. However, it’s a free energy. The Greens create, transform and dissipate energy, each at a different pace. The movements overlap but never hinder. Each organism allows and supports the development of the other. This is not a solo dance. Dancers feel the likeness of movements. They float in a repetitive but precise sequence. When the sequence is over, the cycle starts again.”

Vaissnavi Shukl
So it’s… it’s talking about a cyclical movement, right? It’s…it’s in constant motion. It has its own life and what I really like about your work, Adriana, I want to emphasise this enough so that it’s, you know, that you use so many different mediums and methods and instruments to really talk about the things that you read about right. A part of your work, of course, is really technical and scientific, I mean when you… when you look at Chasing Milpa, it’s a proper methodological research project about ‘the three sisters’. It’s corn, squash and… corn, beans and squash. So a lot of your work is looking at the formal systems in place and utilising back to the changes in the economy and all of that. But you’ll also often use artistic methods to connect to the subject and its topic and this is a perfect segue because I couldn’t let it go without talking about the Counter Meal which was a wonderful performance in the Kirlkland gallery at the GSD. It was a dining table where you and I think it was Ines,  a beautiful meal and menu and it was a performance where you are serving food but was also… you send us one of the images that we’ll use for promotion. So that image of the Counter Meal, we’ll put it out there. There was a table with, I remember, I didn’t make the cut for the dinner, but I… I saw it in the weeks after the table had seen it spilling across it and he was serving meals like it was a proper course dinner. And I think you’d already put the seeds in… in the soil and then you let that table be in that space for the next few weeks. I happened to be there. I had one of my classes there for 40k. But I happened to see it a couple of weeks later, when after the performance is that these green little shoots that were already coming out of the seeds. And that table had almost transformed into a mini farmland of sorts like you know, that soil with that seed had needed a live area. It was just a table. Soil and seeds together had a soul and you had to clean seedlings outside. Do you want to recap the idea behind Counter Meal and just, I think also broadly, the larger question here is using whatever tools we have at our disposal to really spread the word and draw attention and highlight the issues that are often at the background, you know, in the background, simple question like where does your food come from and this is a question even somebody else in the episode when he’s talking about a speculative design project were in India he’s saying 50 years later, what if a city like Delhi became an agro city? And he also begins in his episode talking about how most people don’t know where their food comes from? We have a search idea.

Adriana David
Yeah, we have no idea we don’t care. It’s really impressive. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
And this is why I think I’m maybe now getting a little bit. This is food security because we have the food, but it’s just like we don’t know where it’s coming from.

Adriana David
Exactly. Absolutely. So that was the whole point. Because when we started thinking about that, that performance dinner Counter Meal, when I started thinking about it was like my objective was to communicate this issue, like how do I communicate that what we eat is not what we think that we eating, you know, that is full of fertilisers that it full of it’s full of agro toxics. It’s full of injustice. It’s full of inequalities, it’s full of so many things, no, and at some point, I was thinking, should we should we use organic produce or or agro ecological products but then it was very complicated to find it first of all, and second, and in any ways, it would be another podcast but organic food is like sometimes it’s not as part of the food sovereignty, you know, proposal.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It’s problematic?

Adriana David
It is problematic because it’s like it has become so, so economic that it relies on monoculture with a little bit less agro toxic, you know, because the policies right now in the United States and everywhere in the world, they say that you can grow you can call your food organic if it has a little bit less of these agro toxic and of these foods, but it doesn’t mean that he has zero fertiliser. I mean zero agro toxic. You can use natural fertiliser of course, but it doesn’t mean that. So the people who start growing it, it’s the same thing: monoculture is one seed, one type of it is and if we start looking into the labour that works in these organic farms, you know, in California for example, etc. It has nothing to do with… with food sovereignty. You know, it’s but anyways, my point with Counter Meal was we said well and Krzysztof was my tutor at the time, Krzysztof Wodiczkoat, that point, you know? And he’s bought, of course, bolder, and he said, “You need to bring the, you need to bring these agro toxic that we keep talking about and that is, should be should be forbidden because of the cancer issues and like not only for human beings but before the whole environment where it is sprayed, which is called Roundup glyphosate. You need to bring it in”, and so we said at the same time I wanted, as I told you before, I wanted people to, to with tactile with to touch soil right. Thoughtful to touch this, just…

Vaissnavi Shukl
A little interjection here. But when because you’re talking about the agrotoxicos. This was a few months before COVID. And we had no idea what was coming and you were dressed in a hazmat suit, there was clearly had no idea what was coming.

Adriana David
We had no idea it was like five days earlier for the lockdown and I don’t know why I threw away those…those suits. But anyways, so what through the idea of of communicating the problem and feeling and trying to bring in you know, the land, the fields, the seeds, for people to feel what it is, you know, and not having it across, in rural areas and across you know, so I covered what I did is I organised a dinner with a course meal and each course it was six or seven courses want six courses.

Vaissnavi Shukl
It was elaborate. 

Adriana David
Yeah, it had a special message, you know, on where it comes from, how it was grown, you know, and Ines helped me with these… with these. Because Ines, she’s a great cook, and an amazing artist as well. And we have people sitting in a table full of foil, full of seeds for them to touch for losing, you know, fear of soil because sometimes we are very nervous of touching soil. We’re not like babies as you say, but there’s… there’s this instinct still that we look like we need to recover in this passion for looking at things growing. You know, when we had like, these exercises at school of growing up being, you know, in cotton, that’s not great, but everybody’s passionate about like, I don’t know, one single person that can tell me, “I hated this exercise. I hate looking at things growing.” That’s not true. Like we love it. There’s love inside of us. So we covered the table with soil and wood seeds and then we put the agro toxics on top of… on top of the table, you know, roundup huge, you know, and it’s like, you shouldn’t eat close to that, you shouldn’t open it. It’s very toxic, you know, but it’s still legal and it’s patented, and that’s the full story. Probably Professor Vandana Shiva will talk about that because you know about patenting seeds, and etc, which is a huge problem. But what we just…what I just wanted to talk about is, you know the word Guacamole that you’re reading, there’s a huge problem in public policies. And there’s deforestation in Mexico because Guacamole, became part of these huge trends and there’s Superbowl Guacamole, there’s so many subsidies for that, and for importation of avocado that that’s so detrimental to Mexican forest right and, and also there is a narco issue in this in this problem that is very long, but it’s because of the demand, you know, of, of avocado. And then we have ‘NAFTA Maize Tortilla’ and I started talking a little bit about what NAFTA was. So in how it’s so how it changed. It changed the way people were growing food in Mexico because it became easier and cheaper to buy corn from the United States because of these international policies of free trade. You know, and so people peasants in Mexico stopped growing corn for…for their animals. So it became such a huge social conflict that we didn’t know about you know, it’s very complicated to understand it when you are just eating a tortilla. So I think it was important for me to explain it. Let me see we had,  ‘Trump Guacamole’, then we have ‘Lorsban Lemon Beverage’ and Lorsban is one of the most widely used pesticides in the US, all the lemon is spread with that. Then we had milpa squash, and in that part, I talked about the Milpa, which is ‘the three sisters’ for Native American people. and the importance of these, well the agroecological part of growing them together. You know, and then we had ‘Blight Potatoes’ and I talked about this, the staple crop in Ireland. The potato in the 18th century that was feeding almost the entire population of Ireland and… and then suddenly they got these, how to say in English, blight is a disease that you know that exactly then infected the crop and because they had only one variety of potato. So it was… it provoked a big famine and almost a million people died of a food shortage. So that’s the importance of diversity, you know, and variety. I think that’s what I wanted to communicate. If we continue to grow diverse, it’s not… it sounds very complicated, but it’s, it’s I mean, I think the answer is simple. You know, it’s consuming, diverse, growing diverse. This is the most resilient act that we can… that we can do to tackle…It’s not about tackling but to be…to adapt to climate change. And we don’t have to be afraid we just, we can do it like we can act in which is just about changing a little bit of the way we eat and returning the love and as you said, like the culture and the identity of each seed and each recipe, you know, and this is what Chasing Milpa talked about. Because we are not… this is not new. This is just we had a century of, of changing the way we understood food. But if we try to forget about the 20th century, we go back and try to understand how Native communities understand the relationship of food with human beings and diversity. I think that’s such an important part to adapt to climate change and be resilient.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, and I think that’s also something that Dr. Shiva talks about in her organisation which is called Navdanya . That actually means nine different types of grains if I’m not wrong, and this also has a symbolic relation to the nine planets of the universe. Anyway, what I was looking for when you were talking about avocados was this Netflix series called Rotten. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there is an episode on the ‘avocado wars’. This is season two, episode one. And it talks about the shift in the global perception of avocado as this trendy food

Adriana David
Avocado toast and avocado everything. Yeah,

Vaissnavi Shukl
It talks about its rise to popularity, and also focuses on a whole different side of the avocado which deals with the mafias and the cartels involved in the avocado distribution cycle. So you should watch it. It’s a good episode. 

Adriana David
Yeah, I’m gonna watch it. Yeah, definitely.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And, you know, just to go back to what you were talking about in terms of food sovereignty. The episode also shows this other side in terms of especially in a place like India where avocado is not indigenous or is not a part of any of our cuisine. But we can still get an avocado here if you want. A lot of people have started growing it and it’s not a cheap item to buy. It’s expensive. If you trace it back just the amount of resources into the production of avocado. They don’t necessarily trickle down to the farmers the price that eventually adds up in the end.

Adriana David
Yeah, it’s very interesting and for every ingredient, it becomes the same. So the one I’ve researched the more the most is milpa so, corn beans and squash and how, you know, because corn is part of the grain that fed the continent of the American continent, you know, since I don’t know 8000 years ago when corn in the state of corn instead of to see which was the the original crop evolved and changed and the way American consumption in terms of the United States have shifted into wheat. For example, because wheat was… was brought during colonialism, you know, and they just sent corn to feed the cows and to feed the animals cattle. It changed it…It changed completely, our demand of corn and our demand of wheat, you know, and then we have countries like Ukraine, which is on the other side, growing wheat for other countries. And it’s also because of the demand and of course it’s grains, you know, and we need to talk about grains and the other seeds because grains have a more intense set of nutrients. You know, like rice, wheat and corn. So it’s different that we depend on them to survive, but it’s very strange how these trends and these companies and history have made us the way we eat, you know, and the food that comes from it’s crazy.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And last question for you. Adriana. What’s next for you and what are you working on?

Adriana David
Um, you know, I really liked my… my last research that I… I got to do thanks to the Mellon Grant which is called the Architecture of Food Sovereignty. How I started, I started with the research of Milpa in Mexico City, and really trying to… trying to understand physically and in terms of architecture, built environment, what does it mean to be food sovereign? And what does it mean not to be… not to have food sovereignty? So I’ve been researching in Mexico City. I’m very interested in the way buildings and architecture can become so oppressive and change the word food supply chain in the city and how it can become oppressive with peasants. Because they don’t, they cannot. In Mexico City, there’s a wholesale market called Central Devastators, which is huge, and it receives 325 tonnes of food every day. 50,000 trucks like so much food enough to feed Berlin or Madrid, every every day, and you know, only the big, the big industries of food can arrive and can get to sell the food in these places because small peasants, they can’t even afford to pay for the truck to bring their food because they have so such a little and small scale production, you know, that it’s not economically it economically doesn’t work. So I kept thinking, what did we end up designing and building this wholesale market? You know, and this is a very important architect in Mexico who designed it, and I think we have a responsibility as architects. You know, to think about a non-S programme and to think about a democratic and adjust architectural programme for the buildings that we that we work on, you know, and try changing the way things work and if this architect had thought about or had proposed, maybe another way of having food supply in Mexico City that allowed for small peasants to arrive to another types of wholesale places or storages maybe would have been different than, you know. So I’m thinking of focusing my work on these architectural places, you know, and thinking about an architecture that is more food sovereign.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, it was great catching up with you, and I thank you so much for sharing your work. Hopefully see you soon in person.

Adriana David
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. This is such a beautiful project.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.