Farmer, Scientist, Activist, Chef: Hayden Kantor's New Advanced PWR Course
The last academic year featured considerable instructional innovation in PWR’s Notations, including in the context of our advanced electives. During spring quarter, Dr. Hayden Kantor taught PWR 91HK: “Farmer, Scientist, Activist, Chef: Communicating for Food Security and Food Justice” for the Notation in Science Communication (NSC). Hayden developed this course based on a course taught by former PWR Lecturer Dr. Erica Cirillo-McCarthy, although substantially revamped and rebranded with entirely new readings, new community partners, and the addition of “Chef” to the course title. This topic could hardly be more urgent. As Hayden puts it in his syllabus course description, “Food is the substance of life. It is also a crucial lens for understanding our moment—both a marker of ecological health and community connection.” To students, he asks, “How can you contribute to efforts to foster a healthy and equitable food system?” In the course, students partnered with food-related organizations in the Bay Area to develop a public-facing communication project that supports their mission.
The course received Cardinal Course designation by the Haas Center for Public Service as a service-learning course. Based on their interests, seven students partnered with five distinct organizations: Acterra, Conscious Kitchen, Project Reflect, Replate, and Valley Verde. At the Haas Center, Dr. Brandon Reynante, Director of Community Engaged Learning - Environmental Sustainability, was a crucial resource for developing the community partnerships. He made introductions to several of the organizations. The Haas Center also provided funding for the partnerships, field trips, and materials for student projects. Haas staff also visited class to lead discussions on topics like ethics, power, and positionality, although, as Hayden points out, “these students were not novices when it came to community engaged learning.”
The course centers students as writers composing in real-world genre situations. The first assignment for the course is a PWR 2-style project pitch. In conversation with their community partner, students define the parameters and genre of their main project. (Keep reading for some specific examples.). Students also completed weekly journals tracking the project as it developed, incorporating the same principles of peer consultation, revision, and reflection from PWR 1 and PWR 2. Students then presented their project as part of a symposium, to which all the community partners and guest speakers were invited to attend. Finally, students completed a “vision statement,” a creative assignment that invites students to reflect on their project and the course theme more generally.
Collaborating with NGOs and writing in real-world genres gives students the chance to practice developing their writing skills on a project that might have “some real force in the world.” “NGOs have an important role to play in catalyzing change,” Hayden says. “If you’re fine with the status quo when it comes to our food system, if you’re fine with where we are in terms of food justice, food security, and environmental sustainability, then there’s not much need for NGOs. But if you’re dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, if you want to advocate to make things better, if you want to test out new ideas, then NGOs can be an important vehicle for building more just and sustainable futures.” Working with NGOs, Hayden explains, “students could understand how their ability to make arguments fit into those larger efforts.”
Now for the fun part: the truly inspiring student projects. One organization, Replate, helps organizations comply with SB1383, a landmark California law “enacted to reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP’s), which contribute to global warming and affect human health” (Replate website). Basically, SB183 requires food service providers (including corporations, hospitals, and universities) to reduce food waste. Replate offers a food-based recovery service, literally bringing potentially wasted food to sites such as homeless shelters and food banks. One student, Dylan Hyun, made a video with 3D animation and visual effects to demonstrate the scale of food waste and its connection to climate change. Replate plans to feature the video on their website. (You can watch it yourself here.) Another student, Katie Dimock, wrote a white paper detailing Replate’s partnership with CommonSpirit Health. Replate requested this genre because the report could help them solidify their relationship with the hospital and communicate to potential customers how Replate could help them customize a program to help them navigate these new regulations.
Another project, YardFruit, a spin-off from Project Reflect, aims to connect neighborhood producers that have excess food growing in their yards with neighbors with whom they can share it. From this germ of an idea, Kamdin Gutierrez, another student in the class, developed the language, signage, and messaging for the project’s public-facing website. “Kamden turbocharged the project,” says Hayden. “They had the germ of an idea, but it needed to be fleshed out. They worked collaboratively to produce a lot of materials in a short amount of time. With Kamdin’s work, the project was nearly ready to launch.”
The vision statement assignment holds a special place in the course for Hayden, who shared (with permission) some examples from students. Each student took the opportunity to pair a creative piece (e.g., paintings, sculpture, photography, friendship bracelets, fiction) with a substantive reflection. “The projects were thoughtful and creative in ways that I never could have predicted,” Hayden says. “All of the students made meaningful connections between the class discussions, their projects, and their academic and personal projects beyond the course.” For instance, Anna Rose Robinson captured a moment during a memorable visit to an organic farm in Watsonville that illuminated her career path. Maya Passmore created a painting and wrote a letter expressing her vision for a healthy and sustainable food system. Lauren Rose Reyes made a painting and reflected on the meaning of sovereignty in terms of land and food with respect to her Indigenous identity. Leonardo Andrade built a bridge that symbolized his notion of community based growing up in a small town in California’s Central Valley.
Several guest speakers also helped to make PWR 91HK a unique learning experience for students. Daniel Donguines, Executive Chef of Lakeside Dining at Stanford, spoke with students about how Residential and Dining Enterprise strives to incorporate values of environmental sustainability in its sourcing and workflow in the campus’s dining halls. His visit was impactful for students because all of them were familiar with the dining halls and had a lot of questions. One detail that left an impression on students—and also on Hayden (and me)—is that Stanford pre-purchases the entire annual salmon yield from a village in Alaska, in order to support an environmentally as well as economically stable fishery.
Another important collaborator in the course was Angela McKee-Brown, Founder of Project Reflect, “a food systems design lab that develops and builds meaningful, just, and joyful food experiences with communities” (Project Reflect website) and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford this year. When Hayden asked Angela in her guest lecture to reflect on how she has handled challenging professional moments at various points in her career, she offered a series of memorable examples of learning to “fail forward.” “She impressed upon students that it’s possible to build on failure, and indeed the value of iterating based on it.” According to Hayden, “this is an important perspective that our students really need to hear, especially because many of our students have been told they could not afford to fail once.”
The work of the class culminated in a final symposium, where all the community partners met with PWR 91HK students in Sweet Hall 020 (over food, of course) and students had a chance to share their work. “The symposium was a great day because it allowed the students to shine,” Hayden says. He was excited by the quality of the presentations, which all followed a focused, tripart structure: framing a problem, explaining their deliverable, and outlining next steps. “We rehearsed during the class session before the symposium, so the students had a chance to get feedback from their peers about how to explain their projects. The final presentations were really on-point.” Beyond the student presentations, the aspect that made the symposium exciting was creating the forum for all the students and the community partners to interact. One takeaway is that “conversations about equity and sustainability are not just confined to academic spaces. There’s a range of practitioners who are deeply invested in this work. You can make changes in all kinds of places.”
Where does PWR 91HK fit into Hayden’s broader research interests? Hayden, whose Ph.D. is in anthropology, is a scholar who publishes on the foodways of rural India. His research focuses on food and farming practices in the Indian state of Bihar. “In India, Bihar is notorious for its poverty and underdevelopment,” Hayden explains. “When it comes to its political economy, it’s often written about in terms of hunger and corruption. But people and their food practices are not singular or one-dimensional. People in the village where I worked cared about lots of things: Of course, they cared about providing enough to feed their family. But they also cared about the taste of foods they cooked and the quality of ingredients they used, they cared about eating a balance of macronutrients, they cared about eating organic foods free of pesticides, they cared about which cow or buffalo their children’s milk came from, and they cared about eating culturally significant dishes during different festivals. Often in food studies, scholars are prompted to select a single lens: justice, health, environment, economics, ritual. My objective is to put these different themes and considerations into the same frame, and to unpack the connections and productive tensions between these aspects of food and rural life. In doing so, I try to challenge existing narratives about how we tell the story of a place and a people.”
Hayden also has previous experience working in non-profits and consulting, developing projects “not dissimilar” from those that students created in his course. “It’s important for students to see that, across a number of realms and fields, what they are often going to do professionally is work on developing projects, incrementally and collaboratively. This requires ideation, figuring out the scope and framework of the project, honing the messaging, and then substantiating their approach through research or gathering evidence. These are the skills I want students to develop, because I’ve seen the value of them in my career.”
Talking with Hayden about PWR 91HK, the overwhelming impression I was left with was how incredibly student-centered every aspect of his course is. But the story of the course’s development, as Hayden tells it, is indebted to the influence of several members of our PWR community who helped make it possible. Dr. Cirillo-McCarthy’s concept launched things. Dr. Emily Polk, Dr. Christine Alfrano, and Dr. Jenne Stonaker all provided crucial support and resources. Dr. Jennifer Johnson provided an idea for a reading jigsaw that quickly introduced critical concepts like food security, food sovereignty, and food justice. Hayden is particularly grateful for the labor of Cristina Huerta and Michelle Bercow, without whom all the logistics for the partnerships and symposium would not have come together. “It took a year’s worth of preparation to get it to the opening class. From there, students brought their own interests and ideas and charged forward to make the most of the opportunities. It was such a privilege and a pleasure to engage with them on these issues.”
