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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.

The Pollution Reporter app allows users to: (1) make a pollution report of something they see or sense, (2) search different polluters in Chemical Valley and access data on their emissions, (3) look up health symptoms and see what chemical pollutants might be linked to these symptoms, and (4) learn about specific chemical pollutants.

The workflows are meant to provide impacted individuals access to important information that can help them link health harms to specific polluters and chemicals from the nearby Chemical Valley. The reporting workflow also allows individuals to create reports, and thus their own data, on things they see or sense that might not be captured by industry monitoring systems. In this way, workflows both streamline access to important and relevant information while also enabling the capturing of experiential data.

The Pollution Reporter app includes data on: (1) polluters in Chemical Valley and a list of its chemical emissions, (2) health symptoms and the chemicals that are associated with that symptom, and (3) chemical pollutants that are emitted in Chemical Valley and the associated health impacts and polluters. Users are encouraged to search within these three categories and see the interconnectedness between polluters, chemical pollutants, and health symptoms. This helps users attach responsibility for health harms to chemicals and the corporations that make them. Users are also encouraged to submit their own data through a pollution report of something they see or sense. 

The Pollution Reporter App translates and connects government, industry-reported, and peer reviewed sources of data into accessible information about the known health effects of pollutants. The creators of the app recognized the limitations to government data in that it is (1) created by Industry, (2) disconnected from the health harms that pollution causes, (3) hard to get, (4) inaccurate, tending to underreport harms, (5) out-dated, (6) and usually organized one chemical at a time, not accounting for cumulative exposure of multiple chemicals. 

The key participation that the Pollution Reporter app supports is the ability for a user to report a pollution event, spill, or leak to the Ontario Ministry of Environment, making it easier for community members to report problems to the Spill Action Centre. The app assists in making the report, which is then sent through the users own email, and allows users to share on social media or keep a record of their reports.

This  reporting workflow is one of the main features of the app (one of four) and is located in the bottom navigation bar as the report icon (next to the polluters, chemicals, and health symptoms icons). 

“Enterprising attempts at incorporating local communities ‘on the margins’ into the ‘universal rationality of good business practice’ (Rajak 2011a: 17). In doing so, CSR activities seek to maintain low levels of resistance to corporate proposals.” p72. Also cites Welker2009_CorporateSecurityBegins. The Lord2016 is also a good example of this. 

An attempt to constrain critique with a survey of feedback about how to do the presentation of information of the scientists “better” and “more simply” 

“Members of the community, while criticizing the adequacy of scientific reporting as not telling the whole truth, accept to some extent the proposition that further information can be found, and that thereby they may possess this knowledge. However, focusing on technology as a form of knowledge and seeking to know its dimensions avoids questions regarding how things come to count as “knowledge and “not knowledge.” in the first place (Riles 2004). Insistence of better transparency allows for the possibility that transparency might in fact be possible: it “leaves the world itself intact. Intentionally or not, it depends on maintaining the absolute difference between representations and the world they represent” (Mitchell 2002:4).” p78

Policy brochures to publicize mitigation, “sustainable” activities, and community investment programs. Global companies often anticipate/precede the local government regulations. 

Use the fact that the government’s actual regulations are obscenely loose or nonexistent to say they are “Much more responsible than the law dictates” - a quote from a community liaison officer she interviewed. P71. Even if their levels are bad they can hide behind being “Better” than the standards. 

Signing the contract is a symbolic acknowledgement of the indigenous people’s rights to the land and to bargain with the company. (Though, of course, their water is still being totally wrecked, and the company lies to them). 

Lots of science - data - new technology to measure more accurately - scientists presenting, holding the reporting meeting

Tried to use photo evidence - but it was rejected because the indigenous people in the audience recognized that they were using the same photos from three years ago - which then caused additional “rejected the authenticity of the material that was being presented” -p75

Using the word “stable” (estable) to say it’s ok or that the impact is negligible - when in fact this can’t be known and it’s deeply improbable that it’s true - and even if the damage is “Stable” and not escalating, it is probably already at an unacceptable level. 

The manager of social relations person put his body in between the questioning indigenous person rejecting the truth value of the data and the scientist. 

Asking for feedback -because they know the community members are suspicious of their scientific data

The visit to the new drilling site - though it seemed like they were secretly extracting and they didn’t tell much and they couldn’t do anything about the fact that the corporation had already drilled way more than what they initially proposed they needed to drill to “monitor”

The interactions the corporation has with the indigenous people and the relationships they try to make are attempts to morally legitimate the extraction

They are giving the “gift of truth” about their activities with their reporting, they feel like they are conceding to their demands when they do the reporting and take them on tours, the investment in the community relations teams and the workshops to educate about science and having meals with the community members - I think the corporate actors are always aware that their goal is to quell resistance, but they might think that their presence is actually good for the indigenouspeople in in the long run once they start providing funds for community development and conceding to these demands and giving them “education”

“Company reporting on the environmental and social impacts of mining activities may by its very existence thus be projected as a “moral good”, an open gesture of asserted high moral value” p71 - cites a bunch of sources including Rajak2011_TheatresOfVirtue

Reporting to/ consulting with the community is one of the central “moral mechanisms” of CSR, and going to these reporting meetings is important to the people who are “impacted community” members. -  “The discourse of transparency is thus central to the moral framework of engagements between corporate actors and communities” -p72. 

Another way to say the same things: “Such CSR instruments - social accounting, community development investment, and transparency reporting - establish principles of “good business” and are used to make the claim of corporations acting as “agents of world benefit” (Maak and Pless 2009).” -p72 The source is a journal of business ethics. 

Standardization - “measures of fact and accounting assert that company activity is best made visible and internationally comparable (see also Li 2011)”. P72. The source is a Focaal article from the same issue as the Rajak. 

“Concerns with translocal legibility and universal administrative acceptability and the focus on rational economic behavior linked to audit have created an ethic of the visible, the transparent, as the highest standard of governance.” p72. She cites Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008, Peck and Ticknell 2002. 

The community people do think it’s an improvement to have any relationship with the corporation. They’re frustrated in part during their tour of the new digging that they won because only 2 people were there and one was a junior scientist and the other was from the contractors 

There’s parallel solutions on both sides (the tech, better info presentation vs participation in scientific monitoring, own experts) to increase participation and increase truth

In the case of Chile, to the extent that they exist, the laws for environmental mitigation/regulation are not really enforced. So any “responsible” actions are “lustered with voluntarily” and done totally on the corporation’s own terms. 

“social accounting” & “audit” techniques and institutions - they are “created by global business in concert with governments and civil society” . “performance requirements”