Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day, Marine County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Often we understand terroir, the taste imparted to food by its environment, to be a synthesis of sun, soil, temperature,

and a touch of human tending.

It is a fine image, but terroir can also be an exclusionary space, uplifting ideal landscapes

and culinary spheres, while erasing foodways of other communities.

How do we conceptualize Turwar in landscapes that are polluted and plastic-filled,

dominated by human industry and excess?

If food is not merely a cultural artifact but an index of the life teeming around it,

how can we broaden our understanding of what we taste

to include the presence of all human and non-human influences?

In this week's narrated essay,

Food and Culture Scholar Lily Kelting

immerses us in the sounds of construction,

the presence of buffalo, and the

fragrance of marigold, smoke, and trash that flavors her home on the edge of Puna in India.

Feeling into the liminality of the landscape she inhabits with a taste of local milk, she

tunes our attention to the regenerative space

held within wastelands and no places.

...