Belinda Ramírez
Urban Food Producer and PhD Researcher
Hi there! Okay, first & foremost, let’s start with your story. How did you get to where you are today?
It’s been an interesting journey! I recently joined the Slow Food Urban San Diego board as Food Justice Co-Chair, serving alongside Nathan Lou. The past decade of my life has revolved around academia and the university setting. I studied anthropology as an undergraduate and then entered the PhD program in sociocultural anthropology at UC San Diego in 2014. My first research interests as an undergraduate took me to northern Thailand, where I lived for about five months. There I fell into studying a small religious sect among Hmong refugees. Wanting more research experience and to get to Latin America, where my dad’s family lives, I went to Ecuador to study the language and culture of Kichwa-speaking folks living in the Amazon. I was immediately struck with the unique worldview among forest-dwelling peoples, particularly as it manifested in their relationships to animals, plants, and nature. I wrote my Master’s thesis on the ways Runa (a group of people who speak Kichwa) folks approach growing food in their chagras, or family-inherited small agricultural plots, and how that relates to Runa cosmologies.
Captured during Belinda’s work in Ecuador.
Wanting to branch out on more local-to-me topics for my dissertation research, I decided to take some of what I’d learned in Thailand and Ecuador and apply those concepts to the San Diego-Tijuana area. This has materialized as an investigation into urban agriculture in this metropolitan region, particularly as it intersects with questions of race and politics. Doing this local work, mixed with advocacy and activism efforts, has introduced me to all kinds of great folks doing good work on the food and agricultural fronts in San Diego, including many of the current Slow Food Urban San Diego board members. I have also had the opportunity to work as the food production manager at Mt. Hope Community Garden, run by the food justice-oriented non-profit Project New Village. Being engaged with this work through multiple working groups, internships, courses, etc., I have come to get a good understanding of the state of the food and (urban) agriculture scene in San Diego and Tijuana and am excited to be witness to and take part in its expansion.
As a PhD student in Anthropology, how do you connect your research to the food systems?
My research looks into the lived experiences of those engaged in urban agriculture--both food producers and organizers, and particularly people of color. I’m interested in the struggles and everyday conflicts these folks (myself included!) go through while trying to shape the world according to what they think is a better way of living and being, and how they negotiate making compromises when their ideal world views don’t match up with the reality we’re faced with. In this way I hope to highlight the very real hurdles producers and organizers are confronted with so that we can have a clearer idea of what needs to be addressed for true systemic change to occur. For instance, making a living off of small-scale agriculture is a really difficult thing to do. But not only that, it’s also fraught with all kinds of ethical quandaries, particularly for growers who have a leaning toward social justice. For example, how can you benefit a low-income community with little access to healthy food while you’re constrained by the higher costs associated with growing organically on a small scale? Furthermore, there are loads of cultural and historical barriers to there even being a market for this kind of food in some areas of San Diego. Even if those engaged in urban agriculture see local food production as a way to equalize the imbalances of the food system, not everyone might agree. Confronting these challenges and realities head on, I think, is the best way to actualize a (hopefully) better reality.
Who or what [company, group, chef, flavors, farmer, etc] inspired you?
Growing up, my family would sometimes go up to Oregon to visit my mom’s side of the family. I always loved those trips--Oregon was this green wonderland, full of trees and life. So many people, including my extended family, were gardening at their homes. Front yards, backyards, chicken coops, community gardens--growing food seemed to be a way of life there in a way I just didn’t see in suburban Southern California. Helping my aunts and uncles garden really made an impression on me, as well as gardening and farming experiences in the Amazon. But it wasn’t until about 5 years ago when I started gardening on my own, and it was this personal experience that really solidified my current trajectory. My academic research was a way to get closer to growing food and learning about the complicated nature of such an endeavor. So, to sum it up, I’d say my biggest inspirations have come from family; Runa folks I’ve gardened with; academic-types like Alison Alkon, Teresa Mares, Julian Agyeman, Eric Holt-Giménez, Robert Gottlieb, Julie Guthman, Monica White, and Gail Myers, among many others; famous-to-us growers like Leah Penniman and Curtis Stone; and of course the people I’ve met in San Diego engaged in this work--in particular, folks from Wild Willow Farm and Education Center and Project New Village.
SlowFood strives for “Good. Clean. Fair.” foods. Why are these things important to you? Or choose one that is the most important for you.
To me, “good” refers to the positive nutritional qualities and health benefits that can be offered by certain foods, like something we might deem to be “healthy”. “Clean” means that that good food has been grown, processed, and prepared in ways that strive to steer away from the overuse of technology to “enhance” our food, which really just serves to hurt us and the earth in big and small ways over time. Like the use of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers to grow crops. And then “fair” for me points to an awareness of how that good and clean food was produced (i.e. who produced it), how it was distributed (and to whom), how much it costs to purchase and consume, and how well everyone along the supply chain was compensated for their labor (particularly the producers). Overall, all of these elements of food are super important to me because of their ability to teach a generally unknowing public about where food comes from--it inspires critical thinking about how that vegetable ended up on your plate, and we most certainly need more of that kind of thinking in order to really get to food that is good, clean, and fair.
Choose one of our SlowFood Urban San Diego Pillars (Engage. Enrich. Empower.) that your work relates to the most and why.
I think that the imperative to “empower” resounds most with me and my work, if nothing else at the aspirational level.
If we don’t strive to bolster up people doing fabulous food work in San Diego, what are we here for? No one of us--organizations, groups, or individuals--can push the food movement forward alone.
All of the different angles the food movement takes, from agriculture to restaurants to fisheries, are vital elements of a larger goal to radically change the way we think about getting, selling, distributing, and eating food. So for me, the significance of Slow Food Urban San Diego lies in adding another important voice to the mix in order to create connections between these various facets of the food movement in San Diego. As a more holistic and all-encompassing organization, we are in a prime position to empower the other groups under the food movement umbrella so that we can all march slowly and steadily forward toward better food for all.
I hope that my work as a researcher, a food producer, and in my capacity as Food Justice Co-Chair can be empowering for those engaged in the urban agriculture movement--producers, organizers, and advocates. I tend to approach problems with a deep awareness that it is very unlikely that I am the first one to confront this issue, so I might as well learn from what others have gone through so as not to reinvent the wheel. I also know I won’t be the last to have said problem, so it feels like a service to others to make it known what I learned from the process. I firmly believe that communication can help advance us further along our goals than if we’re all working siloed and disconnected from each other. So I want my work to reflect this kind of approach and serve to bolster the voices of those not normally seen within the food and urban agriculture movements.