Analyze

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.

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

The film looks at the struggles of the doctors in MSF while on missions in third-world countries. These issues stem from lack of supplies, quality of the facilities, and high patient influx. The doctors in the film are burning out quick, with way too many responsibilities to tkae care of. The setting is in Liberia and the Congo during a period of war. The film also examines the tensions developed between the doctors due to differences in style, knowledge, and culture. The clash of personalities and reasons for being in MSF also contribute to the tension. 

The film largely plays on emotional appeals and drama. By documenting the interviews of the doctors, which often are about the other doctors, the viewers see just how hard it is to detach ones self from their work. There is a scene in which the doctors talk about how, despite all the issues they face in the medical setting, everything at the end of the day is about personal relationships. It even briefly touches on sex between the medical staff and how that contributes to the care given. Since the film is based on personal interviews, little to no scientific information is given about the disease and injuries seen; its all based on personal opinion. 

The stakeholders in the film would be the doctors, the local health ministry, and the patients themselves. The doctors were the most focused on, and they were put into a lot of situations in which they were the sole decision makers. However, many times the decisions weren't life or death, but death or comfort. For instance, Davinder was in a situation where a child was inexplicably swelling all over his body. The doctors weren't well equipped for diagnosing his illness, and thus the child was doomed to worsen and die. A nurse informed him that the mother had taken the child and left, to which Davinder remarked that he couldn't blame them. He believed the comfort of the child in somewhere without his care was worth just as much as, if not more than, his care in the hospital. This was quite different than Kiara's opinion that they needed to stay in the hospital. She blamed it on a lack of confidence in medical ability, while he saw it as being human.

Following the time on the mission, the doctors all had to decide what was next. Dr. Brasher left MSF to practice medicine in Paris, while Dr. Gill went to Australia to become a pediatrician, with no plans of returning to MSF. Dr. Lapora was promoted to Emergency Coordinator, and established three more missions in other parts of the world. Dr. Krueger still works with MSF and has been on a number of other missions. All of the doctors continued medicine, but their experiences in Liberia dictated their plans on whether to continue this service.  

Emergency responders as a unique group aren't discussed or portrated in the film. However, the doctors had to take on the role of emergency responders often, while not neccesarily being emergency doctors. The question in the film became whether or not the doctors were prepared for these roles, and if they had the energy to dedicate to them. Some doctors burn out, and others thrive, but regardless they are challenged to make sacrifices that emergency responders often must decide on. 

The film would have the most impact on the general population, like something that would be played on a news channel before prime time. The level of emotional appeal and interpersonal drama is enough to keep anyone intersted for the length of the film. The film does however paint the experience in a negative light, which could discourage professionals from pursuin mission worlk. Thats why the general population would be most receptive to the struggles. Its easy for them to say "I would do something like that if...." without having the ability to do anything.