Text by Meivy Andriani
Cover image by Fajar Riyanto and Bakudapan
Last month, Bakudapan Food Study Group organized a two-part focus discussion group session entitled, “On Food Resistance and Utopias”. This relates to Bakudapan’s work, currently exhibited in Selasar Sunaryo as a part of the Turning of the Fifth Age exhibition in collaboration with Taipei Contemporary Art Centre (TCAC). The main questions we used to guide the series are: what does food sovereignty mean in the perspective of the state? How is food sovereignty built by common people? How does food policy influence agricultural practices and knowledge from the grassroots and indigenous?
On the first focus group discussion, we sought to learn about how local food knowledge preservation is envisioned as a path to food sovereignty. In this lens, food sovereignty is then not only understood from the state’s point of view, but rather from the grassroots who understand the context the best. We invited two practitioners: Diah Widuretno from Sekolah Pagesangan (ID) and Mr. Walice from Wild Vegetable School (TW) to understand their practice of organizing two informal schools to encourage local people to relearn their ancestors’ food knowledge.
Both Sekolah Pagesangan and Wild Vegetable School share similar concerns. The first one being that formal education today estrange us from our living surroundings. As humans, Mr. Walice says, we have to be connected to our land and nature, but today, schools teach us the opposite. In the case of Sekolah Pagesangan, formal education and dependence on cash have made students in Gunungkidul area unwilling to be farmers in their own land. Instead, they would rather be urban workers.
This situation is further exacerbated by food policies implemented by the state, such as favoring imported food products. In turn, the price of locally produced products are uncompetitive and its diversity is marginalized in favor of more standardized products. This entails another major problem: farming traditions are going extinct.
Stories from Sekolah Pagesangan hit close to home for Mr. Walice. He, too, was seeing how formal education is oriented to urban areas and industry. That way, to live in the urban areas as laborers is the goal students often envision in their head. As a person of indigenous descent, Mr. Walice knows that certain indigenous communities in Taiwan do not have a written language system. Therefore, verbally telling stories and histories are the main means to transmit values from one to another. However, this is no longer possible due to modernization, more and more people are moving to urban areas to earn cash. As a consequence of losing touch with nature, we also lose touch with the true value and the hard work put into the food we eat.
Another adversity they face is neoliberalism penetrating their daily lives. As investors and more investments are made in Gunungkidul, local people are often forced to sell off their land to make ends meet. In line with Diah’s story, Mr. Walice also found that with the scale of development today, there are numerous problems that arise, such as environmental pollution, ecological imbalance, amongst others.
Up until today, Sekolah Pagesangan and Wild Vegetable School attempted to revive local food knowledge by inviting people to study collectively. There is an urgent need to reproduce knowledge so it can be accessible to more people in the future. The learning model Sekolah Pagesangan and Wild Vegetable School used is similar. Members and students learn informally through experiencing first hand what they are learning about. This makes learning a sensory event, as it is not purely guided by text books or the like. They eat, cook, and learn how to cultivate the land together.
Aside from that, Sekolah Pagesangan and Wild Vegetable School also raise funds in similar ways, such as organizing experience camps or live-in programs where people from outside of the community can learn about farming traditions and wild vegetables. They also sell products gathered from their practice, such as thiwul and other processed wild vegetable products.
Although both initiatives attempt to revive local food knowledge, there are differences in their practice. Sekolah Pagesangan employs a contextual education model; members think about the problems closest to them and solve the problems in their capacity. Wild Vegetable School, on the other hand, approaches the vanishing local food knowledge by opening the opportunity to a wider audience. WVS is not driven by problems faced in the community in real time, but invites people to be reintroduced to nature. The three main points WVS is working on are: knowledge about wild vegetables; biodynamic farming methods, and educational courses.
With the work Sekolah Pagesangan and Wild Vegetable School do, the biggest challenge they face today in their initiative is a matter of regeneration. With urbanization, development, and neoliberalism thriving today, many youth are hesitant to take on farming for their livelihood. It is undeniable that cash is very important in our lives today, and to farm for a living could not guarantee its availability. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the people involved in these two initiatives are not plenty. Mr. Walice, for instance, expressed how the organizational system in Wild Vegetable School still needs to be consolidated so each member can have a strong relation with one another. Similarly, not all alumni of Sekolah Pagesangan eventually take up farming for a living. However, there are few who stayed and continue to work with the community. These few people are the seeds we sow to hopefully extend local food knowledge to the generations to come.
From their discussion, we learned that building a system or organisation to preserve local food knowledge should start from one’s own community because they know their area best. Preserving local food knowledge can start from a simple act of familiarizing ourselves with our land, the living beings around us, and our food. We may not be able to know everything about our past farming traditions today, but Sekolah Pagesangan and Wild Vegetable School show us how important it is to start sharing the knowledge we have today to children and to build a firm foundation of local food knowledge for the next generations.