Analyze

Honolulu, Hawai'i

Misria
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INGREDIENTS

2 cups flour

3⁄4 cup water

1 tablespoon shortening

1⁄2 teaspoon salt

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Mix all ingredients together.

3. Turn onto a floured board and knead for five minutes.

4. Let dough rest for 10 minutes.

5. Roll out half of the dough to 1/4 inch thick.

6. Use the rim of a cup or bowl cut out 12 circles, each about 3" across.

7. Use a fork to prick the center of the circle a few times.

8. Arrange on 2 baking sheets and bake for 15 minutes.

9. Turn oven off and leave crackers in oven until completely cool.

In the context of panel 37, “Sensory methods for planetary survival,” I will offer a “tiny workshop” focused on Saloon Pilot Crackers, a form of hardtack manufactured in Honolulu by Diamond Bakery. This tasting is part of a multi-year arts-led project called Tasting History: Biscuits, Culture, and National Identity, takes taste as a research method for uncovering how ancient military rations cut across socioeconomic divides to become staples of mainstream diets. Diamond Bakery’s recipe uses lard to soften hardtack, also known as ship’s biscuits, army biscuits, cabin bread, kanpan, sea bread, and a host of other names. Hidegoro Murai, Kikutaro Hiruya and Natsu Muramoto founded Diamond Bakery in 1921. Several pilot cracker manufacturers have ceased production in recent years, including Nabisco’s Crown Pilot and Hilo Macaroni Factory’s pilot cracker. Diamond Bakery’s crackers are special, a little bit rare even. Hardtack arrived in Hawai’i with whaling and missionary ships. Saloon Pilot crackers carry material relations of multispecies environmental injustices experienced in these contexts. Crackers are also delicious and beloved, widely consumed, and adapted to cuisines around the world. Pilot Crackers are a site of everyday pleasures—for example, eating the crackers with guava jelly and condensed milk, or, as the author of the above recipe recounts, a childhood memory: “My parents would break the plain cracker up into a cup of coffee and milk and have it for breakfast.” Pilot Crackers are land and sea, whale and harpoon, they are more and more difficult to find and eat. They form digestive networks, following what Parama Roy describes as “the logic of permeability rather than of inviolability that often marks the workings of an alimentary order” (20). Writing about poi, Hi’ilei Julia Hobart describes the difference between tasting and thinking with the mouth and tasting and thinking with the stomach, finding that when eaters “think with their mouths, not their stomachs, …they consume a food rather than enact a genealogical connection” (143). Hobart’s distinction between consuming a food through the mouth versus enacting a genealogical connection through the stomach could model the how environmental justice might taste. Hardtack, often positioned as a bland and unremarkable substrate for other foods, has the capacity to juxtapose cultural practices of food and eating with genealogies and histories of injustice that can be tasted, felt, and digested.

References

Hobart, Hiʻilei Julia. “A ‘Queer-Looking Compound’: Race, Abjection, and the Politics of Hawaiian Poi.” Global Food History 3:2 (2017).

Roy, Parama. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Durham, NC: Duke, 2010.

Recipe by J-Ha7037: https://www.food.com/recipe/saloon-hard-track-pilot-crackers-351299

Source:

Kelley, Lindsay. 2023. "Taste Workshop: Daimond Bakery, Honolulu, Hawai'i." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Police Brutality in Kenya

pdez90
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Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan journalist and author tweeted: 'There were two anti-police brutality protests in Nairobi today. The one featuring white people made it's way to the US embassy undisturbed. The one led by working class and poor folks ended in teargas and arbitrary arrests.'

On March 25, 2020 the Kenyan government imposed a curfew to limit movement in Nairobi to prevent the spreading of COVID-19. In the ensuing months, the police 'enforced' the curfew by killing as many people as COVID-19 in Nairobi. The police have had a long and bloody history in Nairobi. Missing Voices Kenya have documented the shocking number of people who have lots their lives to police brutality over the years. Although groups in poor neighbourhoods such as Mathare have long held protests against police violence, the recent murder of George Floyd in the US has lent momentum to this movement. Thus, these groups took to the street to walk to the apartment where Yasin Moyo, a 13 year old playing on his balcony was killed by police, to demand that Black lives mattered- everywhere. The protests ended in the police tear gassing protestors.

A separate group comprising of many white protestors marched to the US Embassy to protest extrajudicial killings in the US and Kenya. From reports I have been reading about the protests on Twitter, these groups were left unharmed by the police. It is thus important that we recognize the the situatedness of protests agains police violence in different parts of the world, and the specific histories and contexts that shape each one of them, while recognizing their common themes.

pece_annotation_1474230362

joerene.aviles
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The report addresses how strained public health infrastructures can get in the face of large scale epidemics like in the ebola outbreak. It analyzes the responses of local government, health care workers, and MSF in the ebola outbreak, discussing what could have been done to prevent the spread and severity of the disease.

pece_annotation_1474232235

joerene.aviles
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The report implies that technical professionals have to be more careful when responding to large scale disasters; staff responding to emergencies need to have more training for the many internal challenges that would lmit care and assistance to victims. MSF discussed how they had limited man power, labs, and resources.

pece_annotation_1474234228

joerene.aviles
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In response to

The report has several small sections dedicated to possible ways the MSF could have responded better to the 2014 ebola outbreak; such as the medical challenges they faced, MSF challenges within the organization, and a "Looking to the future" about the importance of learning lessons from this epidemic.