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.

Protests to demand inclusion as project-affected people

Oppositional mobilizations - “internal to the logic of the project” p153 - so people do not consider something less damaging to the land and animals or a way to do it with less extraction of resources and profit for elite people in Kathmandu or in Europe/the US/China who do not really have to bear any of the cost of it. 

The author thinks that information circulated about the shareholder model - financial education - would be helpful - he notes that it would have to be oversimplified and made into financial narratives even though it is a complex socioenvironmental decisions. But his final conclusion is more optimistic. I think this kind of corporate-led education is a big foreclosure.

The certifications, following through with trainings that were asked for, and doing the certification ceremony for an audience

Rhetoric of benefit-sharing

The high levels of buy-in; the quotes from locals themselves supporting the dam and the company, they can honestly boast strong local support of the projects - what better proof than that people have dug up their life savings from the ground to buy the stocks?

The corporate actors aren’t particularly fleshed out in this account. The World Bank people weren’t expecting the Nepalese people to come deliver demands in a very educated and efficient way 

Ah there was one part where the corporate actors feel like the Nepalese people who live near the dam sites are extorting them - in this case they don’t feel like they’re helping but rather conceding to unreasonable demands, the poor corporation has to be the government and the villagers have these crazy ideas about how much money the corporation has (the corporation does have the money… it’s extremely ironic)

We don’t get to know how the corporate actors feel about the shareholder model - do they begrudge the shares not being sold to their family or something like that, or do they recognize that this is really also a sharing of risk and cost, more than just being pure benefits in a ‘help’ way?

Power outages and material scarcity → moral and social authority for government and corps to act quickly - “Discursive momentum”

Hydropower has been reframed as a sustainable/green energy source, esp. With carbon finance, so now institutions like the World Bank are funding it - it is a responsible way to bring about development. In Nepal, the government is also trying to declare Nepal as “open to business” - the ethical thing to do is to let corporations in to build hydropower dams 

Local people are there with them - some people say they are willing to have their houses submerged, the government is the unethical party for blocking the development from happening - the quote from someone is ‘some foreign country should get Nepal and develop it’ (Rest 2012:113), p151 here.

This text has a lot on governance:

More people bought shares during Chilime Hydropower Company public offering in 2010 than voted in the recent national elections in that more remote district. 

“Hydropower is our government now” - p150 - there is a “vacuum of governance” - so “hydropower sector has become a major political force in its own right, at both the national and local scales, adn investment in the hydropower sector is seen as a bellwether of political stability. The Nepalese state is reforming alongside the political economy of hydropower - the production of the hydropower future ensures the economic and political coherence of the state, and vice versa” - p150 - hydropower sector and Nepalese government are mutually constructive

P151 - “role of hydropower companies seems to rival or eclipse the role of government as a provider of social services…” So when people get classified as project-affected they finally get services that the government has failed to provide - better entitlements, faster, more promising recognition. The corporations even complain about being treated as the government: “To them we are the government, they give us all their demands” p151

Not just the corporation, but “industry beholden to donor standards and international conventions is a much more effective” p152

“Neoliberal spaces of exception” - so the state has made a lot of exceptions and ceded a lot of power to the corps (this isn’t directly CSR) 

Corps can make competing territorial claims - people who are project-affected “now attempt to make claims as project-affected people with rights, based on the architecture of international conventions and agreements”  p153

P155 - the corporation collected data to determine who would qualify as “project-affected” - it was more detailed and recent than the census - they provided this data to the local government - the corporation made not only eligibility determinations but also about what counts as living there and what documents are good enough as proof

Villagers have specifically requested cooking classes for Chinese and European food because they expect the infrastructure to bring tourists. And they did indeed get the cooking classes - there was a ceremony to certify the women who did the 2 week class, they wore traditional Tamang clothes. 

“Shareholder model” - also known as “benefit sharing” - “local” people who are categorized by the company as “project-affected” have 10% of shares reserved for them. This model was also the result of a court case - the shares are typically sold to the people that Nepali politicians are friendly with, so an alliance of people living near where the dam was being constructed demanded a share of the benefits. And presumably, the Colonial country where the hydropower company is based, in the frequent cases where the company is international, gets a very healthy chunk of the 90% of unreserved stock. 

People are familiar with the logics of CSR and mobilize to get their demands - efficiently deliver their demands when they know world bank officials are coming. 

“People-public-private-partnership” - another way to describe it.

The purpose of this program is to help instill into nurses, doctors, social workers and more with the ability to mix their clinical practice with the ability to interpret, recognize and be moved by stories of illness according to their mission statement. This program is for those that want to improve the effectiveness of their care by increasing their familiarity with the skill of narrative medicine. 

Columbia University was one of the first medical schools to open a program in Narrative Medicine. This program was built within their College of Physicians and Surgeons. Rita Charon is the executive director of the program and is on the forefront of spreading the need for narrative medicine in the medical field. Colleagues of hers also believe that medicine has become too professional and clinical, and doctors focus on treating medical problems based off symptoms, not the patient. The educational program at Columbia created the opportunity to earn a Masters of Science degree in Narrative Medicine in 2009, making to one of the first programs devoted to only narrative medicine. 

This program is located within an institution, Columbia University's Medical Center and College of Physicians and Surgeons.