A Taste of Thai: Celebrating Food, Culture, and Communities

by Stephanie Rudeen, Grant Writing Intern

Often when an organization enters an impoverished community, it is easy to put aside the country, the culture, and the people that have existed there before the organization, and will continue to exist after. Even for any person, when he or she presses the donate button on a webpage or places a few wrinkled dollars into a Haiti relief jar, it is easy to focus on the immediate problem, and not think about the rich history and past of that community or group of people as well.

While many things make up the complex and rich culture and history of countries and communities, I can’t help but always be enraptured by a community’s food. For me, food is a complex and vital component of any community, and a looking glass into a community’s very structure and survival. Plant With Purpose sees the complexity of cooking and food to a community, and does its part by offering fuel-efficient stoves to many of the communities it works in. Beyond even the environmental, economic, and health benefits of these stoves, fuel-efficient stoves also help marriages grow since husbands spend more time with their wives in the kitchen because there is less harmful smoke. Recognizing the importance and complexity of cooking and the kitchen is recognizing that the heart of a community lays within what has been there all along – the traditions and culture of that community.

One of my personal favorite foods is Thai, a country that Plant With Purpose has partnered with to bring about lasting change. Although I often go to Thai restaurants, I had never researched the traditional foods of Northern Thailand, the part of Thailand where Plant With Purpose works. According to asiarecipe.com, “the northern breakfast [is] known in the local dialect as khao gnai consisting mainly of steamed glutinous rice. Cooked in the early hours of the day, steamed glutinous rice is packed in a wicker baskets made from bamboo splints or palmyra palm leaves. The farmer takes the packed basket to the working rice field and eats the glutinous rice as lunch, known in the dialect as ‘khaw tom’. Dinner or ‘khaw lang’ is served on [a] raised wooden tray or ‘kan toke.’”

As a child I would often watch my own mother bake pie at home, her specialty, and watch her while she delicately pushed the tissue paper thin crust into the bottom of the pan. Yet, as I grew older, I stopped helping and observing my mother as she cooked and baked, and I began to stop recognizing the art that exists within the kitchen. I believe it is important to recognize and observe the art of cooking, and it is also important to listen to the story and culture that is behind each flaky piecrust and grain of rice.

I feel as if lately, an American food staple has been take out from a local chain restaurant, and my mind cannot help but wander off to thoughts of my own family’s cooking. There is no comparison between a greasy, pre-made hamburger wrapped in yellow wax paper and served in a brown bag, and the complex and intriguing story that emerges from each bite of one of my mother’s pies or a grain of cooked rice in Northern Thailand.

Plant With Purpose strives to help communities grow, while at the same time not interfere with what makes each community unique. So next time you press the donate button, also take some time to get to know a different community, because every aspect of the culture, even just a bite of its local food, represents a community with a complex and fascinating story to tell.

Oaxaca Wednesday: Food for Families

by Aly Lewis

For Oaxaca Wednesday I’d like to tell you about my favorite Plant With Purpose project: family gardens. Family gardens grab me from the get-go. I like families. I like gardens. What’s not to like?

What is a family garden?, you ask. Well, a family garden in the Plant With Purpose context is a small vegetable plot that families (usually women) garden in order to provide food for their families and income from the vegetables they sell. These gardens consist of vegetables, medicinal plants, fruit trees, nitrogen-fixing trees, and small animals such as chickens, sheep and rabbits.

For this project, Plant With Purpose teaches women how to create gardens that will diversify the family diet, better use the limited space available for growing food, and improve the fertility and production capacity of their plots. Our agronomist, Raul, conducts the training on topics such as composting and fertilizing, grafting, crop rotation, animal care, soil preparation, nitrogen-fixing plants, harvesting, and food storage. Plant With Purpose also partners with local health clinics, which have unmatched credibility in rural areas, to conduct nutrition seminars. Those topics include the importance of having a balanced diet and the nutritional value of vegetables.

Since the first family vegetable gardens were implemented in Oaxaca in 2002, hundreds of Mixteco families have benefited from the increased nutrition of a more varied diet. Four hundred and fifty-four family gardens have been established to date, producing a wide variety of vegetables supplemented by proteins from meats.

This all sounds well and good—because it is—but I didn’t understand the radical impact of this project until I visited Oaxaca and saw for myself what a difference they’re making in the lives of the farmers and their families. Without family gardens, most farmers only grow corn and beans, meaning they’ll only have corn and beans to eat unless they produce enough to sell extra. If that doesn’t sound unvaried enough, last year a drought caused farmers’ corn and bean crops to fail—dead cornstalks haunted the steep hillsides—and the price of corn and beans skyrocketed. Farmers didn’t grow enough to eat or sell and they couldn’t even afford to buy their staple crops. Even before the drought, doctors estimated that as many as 90% of Mixteco children younger than 5 years old suffer from malnutrition. The devastating effects of malnutrition include stunted physical growth, arrested brain development, and inability of the body’s immune system to effectively combat disease.

But there is hope. Plant With Purpose’s family garden projects make a huge difference in the lives of these children who would otherwise only have corn and beans to eat. To combat drought, Plant With Purpose works with families to construct cisterns to collect and store rainwater during the rainy season so that there is water available to nourish the plots and ensure vegetables—and improved nutrition—year round!

So there you have it, my favorite Plant With Purpose project. Families. Gardens. Improved nutrition. Better lives. What’s not to like?

To donate toward family gardens and help a family improve their nutrition and quality of life, Click here.

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Aly Lewis is Plant With Purpose’s Grant Writer. She researches funding opportunities, writes proposals, and submits progress reports on funding received. She also writes the content for Plant With Purpose's Sponsor A Village program.

Fast Food vs. Planting Trees

By Mackenzie Miller

I feel like lately all I see are fast food ads. Seriously. At first, I thought I was crazy. Then, I thought I was hungry. But after my roommates reassured me that yes, billboards, radio stations and commercials are all blasting the same message – EAT! – I came to a new conclusion. Maybe it’s this “economic downturn” that has McDonald’s and Taco Bell so proud of their dollar menus.

I mean, its genius, really. People are stressing out about money right now. They’re mood is down because they can no longer afford the finer things in life. They’re staying in more, and likely watching T.V. for entertainment to save money. And then, a vision in grease appears: a juicy hamburger! Right on the screen – for only 99 cents!

Greasy, cheesy fried food makes people feel good, as does actually being able to afford the products from advertisements. What a nice remedy for the economy-blues! Cheap, and comforting – sounds like a win/win situation, right? Wrong!

Downing that super-sized meal may be the perfect pick-me-up, but the happiness it leaves fades after digestion. And then what do you have? (Besides a stomach ache and onion breath, that is.) Nothing. Not even your dollar.

I wish I could make a value menu for PWP. A tree, for a dollar? Sounds like a steal to me. Think about it: instead of an incompetent teenager asking you “if you want fries with that,” heartburn, and post-meal, caloric guilt, you could help save a village. Save an economy. Save the environment. Save lives!

As far as I’m concerned, that’s about the only thing a dollar can buy that will make ME feel better than devouring a plate of nachos ever could.