What an Ear of Corn Can Teach You About America

Chef Mica Chavez on the Columbian Exchange, mechanized agriculture, and why your garden tomatoes taste better than the grocery's

We’ve spent all year leading up to America’s 250th anniversary, so choosing the next episode topic seemed important and tricky. I wanted something that would feel both fresh and connected, so I decided to call in a special guest.

Chef Mica Chavez taught me and 45 other Pantsuit Politics listeners to make a southwestern feast while we were on retreat in New Mexico. The food was amazing, but her storytelling was even better. I literally leaned forward in my chair as she talked about birds spreading chili from Bolivia to New Mexico. In this conversation, she takes us through 500 years of food history--from the three sisters to precision farming.

I loved this conversation because I think it shows how food is life. Food is violence and colonization and interdependence and love and belonging. It is all of it, and all of it has shaped modern America and the world. Chef Chavez delivers warnings and inspiration, and I think, going into year 251, we need both.

Topics Discussed

• The Columbian Exchange: how corn, chili, potatoes, and tomatoes reshaped diets on both sides of the Atlantic

• The science of nixtamalization — why New World corn didn’t wreck teeth the way Old World wheat did

• How chili peppers spread across the globe via birds

• The Irish potato famine’s surprising link to New Mexico settlement history

• Indigenous and Spanish foodways merging in the Southwest: acequias, sheep, and companion planting

• How mechanization and post-WWII food policy created the mass-produced, processed food system

• Precision farming, AI, and the tension between efficiency and sustainability

• What to cook this summer (hint: it’s pie)

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Episode Resources

• Tickets for the Pantsuit Politics live show in Minneapolis, Aug 29 (Eventbrite)

• Chef Mica Chavez

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Chef Mica Chavez: All I can do is what I do as an individual, and how do I see this? I shop the perimeter of my grocery store. I very infrequently go in the middle unless I’m looking for something like flour, sugar, or coffee. And going back to there are only a few corporations that are producing what we eat, that to me that’s scary.

[00:00:26] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Sarah is on her summer break this week. I’m here with a special guest who I’ll tell you about in just a moment. First, thank you so much for celebrating America 250 with us. I have been absolutely delighted by your murder mystery photos, your founder’s trunk stories, the way that you have shared our episodes and shared your family and friends with us. It’s been really meaningful to me. You all made my Fourth of July. So thank you so much. I hope that we were helpful to your Fourth of July as well, and I hope we can all keep the party going together in Minneapolis on August 29th at our one and only live show this year. Now, if you want to really hang out, grab a photo with Sarah and me, say hello to us in person, meet some new true and lasting friends, then we hope you’ll join us for the afterparty of our live show. Tickets are on sale now, but not for much longer, because the afterparty has food and music and lots of seating, and we just need to think and plan for every single person who comes, and we’re getting down to the wire on that. So this is your moment to grab those afterparty tickets along with your live show tickets. The link to snag all of that is in the show notes, and I hope to see you there.

Speaking of food, my guest today is a culinary expert. Chef Mica Chavez has cooked for presidents, and she has taught history to seventh graders. She’s been on CBS and CNN, and she has taught a group of Pantsuit Politics listeners how to make a Southwestern feast. That’s where I met her. Chef Chavez taught us at a Santa Fe cooking school, and as she was meeting our group and introducing the food to us, she told us about why corn and chilies are so important to New Mexican cuisine. The way that she wove food and history and culture and land together had me physically leaning forward in my chair, just hanging on to every word she said. And so that’s why I invited her to guest host this first show after our semi-quincentennial celebration, because I think food is one of the best ways to understand who we are. And as you’ll hear in this conversation, I think food has so much to teach us about who we are and who we can be. So I hope that you enjoy hearing from Chef Chavez as much as I enjoyed talking with her. I am so glad that you’re here. I have not stopped thinking about the way you described the Columbian Exchange to us in Santa Fe, and I just want to hear that story again and unpack it more with you. So will you take us back to, the 1400s and where our food journey begins in this country?

[00:03:18] Chef Mica Chavez: Absolutely. And actually, our food journey in this country begins way before the 1400s. And I’m going to try to stick with New Mexico because that’s where I’m living. This is home. And this being the capital city of the Southwest, I feel that corn and chili is a really good place to start. So I am also a history teacher in addition to being a trained chef with over 40 years of experience. When I first learned about the Columbian Exchange and how that pivotal journey changed everything for the world that we live in, it took me down a rabbit hole that just ended for me in Spain about a year and a half ago. A student in one of my classes asked me where oranges came from. And I didn’t know. And I don’t like not knowing things, so I started researching. And as with a lot of research-- I know that you’ve gone through higher ed as well-- you don’t necessarily find answers; you find better questions.

[00:04:12] Beth: Right.

[00:04:13] Chef Mica Chavez: And that was definitely the case for me. So oranges came to us from Valencia, Spain. Prior to Valencia, Spain, they were in Southeast Asia as a very small sour fruit. And when the Spaniards were traveling, they would bring things that they thought that they would need in order to plant fruits, vegetables, and they brought protein with them when they got to where they were going so they would have something to eat. And this is something that has been done by different cultures in different ways as long as people have been traveling. There’s a school of thought that thinks that chickens were brought to the New World by Samoans. We know people were traveling. The reason that Columbus got the press that he did was because he traveled with a journalist. He traveled with a scribe. And not too long after he got back to Spain on either his first or second voyage, the printing press was being used for more than Bibles. So his timing was really pretty fortuitous for him. The Columbian Exchange would’ve happened at some point, and it may have had somebody else’s name attached to it. We don’t know. We know there was Viking presence off the coast of Newfoundland. We know people were moving. He was just the first one to get the credit. When Spanish boots hit the island of Hispaniola, life in this world changed forever. There was an exchange of biological agents, technology, and language that we call the Columbian Exchange. One of the things that I tell people in my classes at the School of Cooking, and I probably told you this as well, is try to imagine for a moment what life was like in the major cities of Europe in the 1400s. It was probably pretty bad. Yeah. And so one of the reasons that Columbus was looking for a westward route to the East Indies was for black pepper primarily, and so that really launched all of the successive voyages of exploration and discovery.

[00:06:12] Beth: Do you know why black pepper?

[00:06:14] Chef Mica Chavez: Black pepper is one of the world’s most ubiquitous spices, and most of it is still grown in India, and we know that the Spanish and the Portuguese had big presence off of India. And so he figured that he could probably get there without too much ado, not taking into account there were a couple of continents in the spices were the first global empire industry and it started with the Dutch and their the East Indian Trading Company and a lot of a lot of traffic through Southeast Asia and certainly the New World bringing things back. But when we talk about corn, it’s really a man-made miracle. It was created by ancient peoples cross-pollinating and hybrid- cross-pollinating and hybridizing different kinds of grass. One was teosinte. I don’t remember what the other one was. And over a period of time they created corn. So corn for us in the New World, nothing here happens without corn. But if you look at each cob of corn or each ear of corn, each one of those kernels is protected by a plastic-like coating called a pericarp. Now, the pericarp protects it against birds because birds are destructive, but it doesn’t allow our bodies to break it down. So when you eat raw corn, it basically just travels right through your body. Your body can’t access the primarily niacin that’s in the corn.

And so in Mexico, somewhere about 9,000 years ago probably, they figured out a way to soak corn in water with an alkali, and that removes the pericarp, makes it more digestible, and makes the corn safer because the alkalinity of the water kills bacteria.Now, here’s the thing I just put together the other day. About six years ago, seven years ago, I was in Pompeii, and I was doing a culinary tour of Pompeii. And this woman that was leading the tour led us over to where they would grind the wheat for bread. So they had this big... It was very phallic looking. It was like this big pole, and there was this big cap that went on top of the pole. And in the middle it was shaped like an hourglass. And in the top part of this cap there was a hole in there, and they would put a pole in there, and either slaves or donkeys would turn this around in a circle. In the top of the cap, they would dump wheat berries, and the wheat berries would trickle down through and then the grinding motion would grind it into flour. Here’s the thing. A lot of the residents of Pompeii had no teeth. Their teeth were completely ground down from eating bread with pumice in because the wheat berries take off so much of that volcanic rock.

[00:09:08] Beth: Yeah.

[00:09:09] Chef Mica Chavez: Here in the New World, we were also using volcanic rock to grind our staple grain, corn, but the corn was soaked, so it was soft. So it didn’t take off a lot of that pumice, and the people here had really good teeth because we weren’t eating bread full of pumice.

[00:09:28] Beth: It’s just wild to think about this. This Old World, New World distinction and divergent methods is on my mind because this morning I was reading a piece to prepare for this conversation, and the professor who wrote it was talking about how, okay, we start with one supercontinent, and then we have millions of years that separate us, and we’re separated so completely that you see rattlesnakes on one side of the Atlantic and vipers on the other. We’re going down these parallel but divergent tracks.

[00:09:58] Chef Mica Chavez: Completely divergent.

[00:10:00] Beth: And then through human travel, and especially because of Columbus, who it sounds like has the 1400s equivalent of a great publicist, we get this exchange where you start to bring together the way that corn is sustaining a people in the New World, and wheat is sustaining people in the Old World.

[00:10:19] Chef Mica Chavez: And then you have rice in China. Rice in Asia, not just China. Rice in Asia. You have millet, sorghum, and teff in Africa. Every major ancient culture had some sort of staple grain, because where you had culture, you had agriculture or you had no culture.

[00:10:35] Beth: Yeah.

[00:10:36] Chef Mica Chavez: Corn is mentioned in nearly every Native American creation story. I’ve traveled through Mexico pretty extensively, and when you look at a lot of Native American codex and some of the carvings in Tikal or Chichen Itza or in the museums of Mexico City or in Oaxaca, people presented in silhouette or in profile, and the corn is coming out their nose in the profile because your breath comes out your nose. Without breath there is no life. Without corn, there is no life.

[00:11:07] Beth: Wow.

[00:11:08] Chef Mica Chavez: So it really was everything to the people here. And then probably about the same time, chili began to make its way onto the scene. And chili started out as a really small berry growing on bushes in Bolivia. And primarily through birds, chili spread. And if you’re wondering why birds, I’m going to tell you. Chili, as it ages, turns bright colors. It goes from green to orange, yellow, and then eventually red. Birds are attracted to red. I’ve got chickens, and if one of them gets a cut, you have to put like this salve on it that’s brown so they don’t attack each other and the red. They’re drawn to red. All poultry, all birds have grit sacs in the front of their breasts. This allows them to break down their diet, which is based on seeds. It’s also what makes your backyard chickens the closest living relative to dinosaurs you’re ever going to encounter.

[00:12:10] Beth: I love facts like that.

[00:12:11] Chef Mica Chavez: I know, isn’t that crazy? And then lastly birds don’t have salivary glands, so they’re immune to capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili. So a bird can sit and eat as many of these little berries as they want and then fly away. And when it does what birds do when they fly away, and the seed comes flying out the business end of the bird, it has everything it needs to be successful before it ever even hits the ground in terms of germination. So we know or food historians know that the African piri piri, the Thai bird’s eye chili, and the chiltepin, which was growing wild up here around the Santa Fe, New Mexico area, were all spread by birds. Everything else was spread by humans, and Columbus gets that distinction. Because as far as we know, he was the first one to come into contact with chili.

[00:13:00] Beth: So Columbus brings plants and animals, like ushers in this era of livestock coming in, dairy comes with the Spaniards, as I understand it.

[00:13:14] Chef Mica Chavez: Yep.

[00:13:14] Beth: I read about how the Spaniards believed that communion had to be wheat and grape based, and so they’re worried about bringing that stuff in. But then we’re exchanging in the other direction, too, right? So I know corn. Can you talk about what else left the New World and entered in the Old World and Asia from here?

[00:13:33] Chef Mica Chavez: Oh, girl. Yeah, absolutely. Tomatoes. That was a big thing. England was considered very Puritanical. Virginia was named after the Virgin Queen. When tomatoes first went back to England, we think the first tomato that made it back to Europe was a golden tomato. In Italian they’re pomodoro, pom d’oro, golden apple. Now when they made it to England, the English wanted nothing to do with it. They considered it the devil’s food.

[00:14:05] Beth: Tomatoes were the devil’s food?

[00:14:07] Chef Mica Chavez: Yes, ma’am. Okay, you’re living in a Puritanical society.

[00:14:12] Beth: Yeah.

[00:14:12] Chef Mica Chavez: Think about all of the characteristics of a tomato. It’s red. It’s juicy.

[00:14:17] Beth: Yeah.

[00:14:18] Chef Mica Chavez: Can’t have that.

[00:14:19] Beth: It’s just delight. Just delight on a vine.

[00:14:21] Chef Mica Chavez: A hundred percent. So it took a bit for the English to to get their mind wrapped around tomatoes. The food that made the biggest impact I think, at least upon the Irish, was the potato There were hundreds, if not thousands, of varieties of potatoes that grow throughout the Andes Mountains. Only 10 varieties of potato made it back to Europe, and only two made it to Ireland. Now, prior to the Irish potato famine, the average Irishman ate 13 to 14 potatoes a day. It was the diet. Because it’s a really cheap, easy source of carbohydrates and energy. But at the time that all of this was happening, 1600, 1700, 1800s, much of the UK was considered a feudal system. So tax assessors went and assessed taxes based on what they could see, and they can see a corn crib or a granary full of wheat or rye or barley. That’s easy. But when you plant potatoes, not even you know what you have until you start digging them up.

[00:15:29] Beth: Yeah.

[00:15:30] Chef Mica Chavez: So potatoes were perfect in so many ways. Had all 10 varieties of potato made it back to Ireland, the potato famine never would’ve happened and millions of Irish people would probably still be in Ireland, and the Irish community here would be much, much different. Now, in New Mexico, there was a movie filmed here in the ‘80s or ‘90s called Young Guns. It was Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen. Lou Diamond Phillips. That was filmed about 30 minutes from where I’m sitting right now, and that movie was based on a real happening here in New Mexico called the Lincoln County Wars. Now, the reason I’m bringing this up is because all of the characters that were portrayed in that movie all had Irish last names, O’Donnell and Murphy, O’Brien. I can’t prove this, but I think that those people may have been the children or the grandchildren of the people that left Ireland trying to escape the potato famine. Because millions of Irish people or hundreds of thousands of Irishmen came here, came to the US trying to start a new life.

[00:16:33] Beth: So you have this real sort of negotiation and melding of culture going back hundreds of years. I just love thinking about the fact that we wouldn’t have oranges here, and Italy wouldn’t have tomatoes.

[00:16:48] Chef Mica Chavez: Right. Imagine Italy without tomatoes.

[00:16:49] Beth: It’s wild to me to think about. And there’s something really beautiful in that, even though this is happening against just a really horrific background of colonization and theft and slavery, plays a huge role in all of this.

[00:17:05] Chef Mica Chavez: Slave women or African women used to weave rice in their hair because if they got captured, they knew there was a chance they were going to get captured, if they got captured, they would have this rice so that they would be able to plant it when they got wherever they were going. There are still people that live off the East Coast of the US, I think off the Carolinas the Gullah, I believe they’re called. They still maintain their African heritage. But manifest destiny, colonization, slavery, those were some of the worst things to happen to this country and to the peoples of faraway lands that were dragged here against their will. All of those ethnic groups have left an indelible impression on our country, and it would be nearly impossible to remove them now from who we are as a nation. We’re a nation built on the backs of people of color who came here against their will, some especially from Mexico because there were programs here that brought workers in the early 1900s, the Bracero Program. So people have been moving, and when people move, whether it’s through their own will or against their will they bring with them their cultures and their traditions and their foods. And try and take out of Louisiana. No way. Not going to happen.

[00:18:21] Beth: When you think about the development of Southwestern cuisine as it exists today, I’m really interested in the sort of interplay between indigenous foodways and what the Spanish brought to that area. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:18:38] Chef Mica Chavez: The Spanish presence in the Southwest was that was tolerated for a bit. Because when the Spanish got here, they brought horses, and horses changed Native American cultures forever, especially with the Comanche and the Cherokee. They became master horsemen and basically dominated the plains. The Pueblos that were here tolerated the Spanish for a bit because they gave them protection against raiding tribes. And that was good until it wasn’t. I don’t think we need to cover the atrocities that happened in the Southwest at the hands of European cultures. That being said, once there started being intermarriage, intermingling, interweaving of communities, it’s nearly impossible to remove indigenous culture from the Hispano culture that now exists in New Mexico. As a matter of fact, I think it was about a year ago that The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times ran an article about some of the Spanish dialects that still exist in Northern New Mexico that only exist here because of our rural remoteness. And at this point, you cannot extract one culture from the other. We are one people at this point. And in terms of foodways, if it weren’t for the native cultures that were here, the Spanish probably would’ve not done very well in terms of being able to grow their own food. Farming at altitude is a challenge, and farming in high desert altitude makes it even more so. When the Spanish got here, they found a thriving Pueblo population. In many cases, the Spanish and the Pueblos worked together to form foodways, and let me give you an example of that.

There is a method of irrigation that is used here in Northern New Mexico called acequias. An acequia is a gravity powered ditch of like a stream. And these acequias run all through northern New Mexico, southern Colorado, and they were named acequias by the Spanish. Now, in many cases when new towns would be built, they would build the acequia first before they would even start building buildings because they had to have water first. So the acequia system is still alive and well here, and it is a tradition in the spring with men. It’s a tradition among the men here that they go out and clean the acequias every spring to get ready for the water release. So there may be 60 or 70 families living on some of these acequias. And they’re not little is what I’m saying. The person in charge of the acequia is called the mayordomo. And the mayordomo is an elected position; they have the responsibility of regulating the water. So the water for some families may flow on Monday for three hours. So on Monday at 10 o’clock in the morning, you lift your head gate and you let the water flow for three hours, and then at one o’clock you put the head gate down and you’re done till the next Monday. If you water on a day that’s outside your permission, you will lose your watering privileges for the season. And in a place like here we were at 6% humidity last week.

[00:21:42] Beth: Wow.

[00:21:43] Chef Mica Chavez: A place like here you’re done. So the Spanish brought weaving with them. There’s a little sanctuary about 35 miles northeast of Santa Fe called Chimayo, and it’s a valley. And this valley when the Spanish got here, they found Puebloan people living out there. It’s along this beautiful stream. It’s green. It is so incredibly beautiful, that valley. But they brought sheep and they started raising sheep and shearing the sheep and making wool. And there are still weavers out in the Chimayo Valley. So how that affected other cultures here, the Navajo are master sheep producers. The Navajo Nation raises sheep. They call them the churro sheep. They came over with the Spanish. And during the summer, you take your sheep up to the high pastures in the mountains. During the winter, you bring them back down. They shear, they card, they dye, they spin the wool, and they make rugs. Navajo weavers are some of the best weavers in the world. Their rugs are beautiful. So all throughout, New Mexico and other states in the Southwest, you’re going to see intermingling of cultures. And depending on what pueblo a given town is close to, their Spanish may be influenced by the language spoken at that pueblo. And there are still nine native languages spoken in New Mexico outside of English and Spanish.

[00:23:20] Beth: It’s so hard for me to bridge the gap between this period of time and these cultures where food is life, it is spirituality, it is related to social status and who you feel bonded to today where we have through governmental policy and industry really focused on food that is abundant and inexpensive and safe to eat by some definition, but it just feels like such a broad gap. And I’m wondering how you think about that gap and what you think took us from that place where, as you said, corn is part of faith tradition. And even the Spanish with the importance of what is communion made of? Like, how did we get to this place where our food is so processed, so mass-produced, and it feels so compartmentalized from the rest of life?

[00:24:20] Chef Mica Chavez: A lot of this had to do with mechanization and World War II. And whenever you start to get bumps in population, you get bumps people need more food. As humans, we have created the kind of food that works for our mechanization. So example, corn is one stalk with two ears. Corn fields are consistently flat. Each plant looks exactly the same. We’ve made it work for the machines that we use to harvest our food, or harvest our plants. And in the ‘50s, women spent an hour and 15 minutes making dinner every day. How long do people spend making dinner now?

[00:25:03] Beth: Yeah.

[00:25:04] Chef Mica Chavez: And I’m guilty of this, and I don’t know what the answer is in terms of bringing it back to a more locavore movement. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t have that answer. All I can do is what I do as an individual. And how do I see this? I shop the perimeter of my grocery store. I very infrequently go in the middle unless I’m looking for something like flour, sugar, or coffee. And going back to there are only a few corporations that are producing what we eat. To me, that’s scary. It’s such a big issue. Food should not be a luxury. Eating well should not be a luxury. If you are very wealthy or very poor, you eat well. Very poor, because you probably have a garden, or you’re living on a farm and you’re raising what you eat, and you’re shooting your cow and butchering it out in the field and bringing in that fresh meat for your family. That’s how we did it 150, 200 years ago, and we’ve gotten away from that. Do I think everybody should go back to that? Absolutely not. It’s not possible. During World War II, victory gardens were a thing. During COVID, people started gardening again. Plant a tomato. Develop a relationship with a plant. Watch that plant grow. That’s what I’d suggest. And when I teach sixth and seventh-grade history, and I always try to incorporate a little bit of gardening in my history class. So for when we cover the Mediterranean, I give each kid wheat and peas, because that’s what they grew there. When we do the New World, I do corn, beans, and squash. When we do Asia, I do rice and soybeans. We all had a grain and a legume that we depended upon to keep us healthy. And am I suggesting everybody be vegetarian? Absolutely not. Starting with myself, it ain’t happening. But maybe eating less meat.

[00:26:49] Beth: Yeah.

[00:26:50] Chef Mica Chavez: Maybe focusing on rather than buying two or three nights worth of an animal protein, maybe buy one night and buy a local animal protein. There are little things you can do that don’t cost much that can maybe help in a small way to help support local farmers.

[00:27:10] Beth: Mechanization is a really helpful word. Just thinking about the corn as the one stalk with the two ears and the way a machine can process that field, versus the three sisters planting method, where you have the bean actually winding around that stalk of corn and the squash growing out over the soil. I feel like a lot of people have heard of the three sisters, but don’t really understand why the three sisters worked so well together from an agricultural perspective.

[00:27:39] Chef Mica Chavez: Absolutely. And companion planting is done with lots of different plants all the time around the world. This is just one of the better examples that pertains to the Southwest. Corn grows into stalk, and beans need something to wrap around as they grow. It supports them. Beans are also nitrogen fixers, and so they pull nitrogen out of the air and they transfer it into the soil, and that helps all of the plants grow better. Squash has really big leaves, and squash has really pokey stems. If you reach into a squash plant, you’re going to pull out your arm and it’s going to be scratched. That keeps rabbits and deer away. It also shades the root ball. And then the way the leaf is, it faces down, and then there’s a channel down the middle of the stem. So the water can run down the leaf, down the stem, and it ends up right at the root ball where it does the most good. And as a gardener, I’m a rabid gardener, here’s what I have found over the years. When I do companion planting, everything does better. So for example, I plant tomato plants with basil and garlic. The pests that like tomatoes don’t like basil and don’t like garlic. When I plant carrots, I plant onions because the little bugs that eat the carrot greens don’t like onions. So my garden is planted using companion planting. I plant peas near where I plant tomatoes because peas are also nitrogen fixers. And peas they’re starting to die out right now, and the tomatoes are just coming in. So I’ve got all that nitrogen waiting in the soil for those tomatoes, which are heavy feeders, and the peas are going to start to fall down as the tomatoes start to go up.

[00:29:22] Beth: Yeah.

[00:29:23] Chef Mica Chavez: So that has worked. But with corn, beans, and squash, you get less pests, all of the plants are healthier, and which means you get better yield out of each plant. But the kind of uniformity that you see in commercial agriculture, that kind of uniformity doesn’t exist in nature. It just doesn’t.

[00:29:41] Beth: Yeah, I can attest. I planted basil in between my tomato plants for the first time this year. I’m amazed already at how different my garden looks, how much healthier my tomato plants look. It’s wild to see the difference that makes in it. And it helps me understand when you read about the importance of the three sisters, the spirituality attached to that, like the art that was created around it I get it. Because it is visually stunning to see what a difference it makes just to have those plants working harmoniously together. And just so divorced from an agricultural policy that focuses on one commodity at a time, and subsidizing particular commodities instead of thinking through what is the overall output? What are we making at the end of the day for everyone, and then how is that contributing back to what we’re able to do next year?

[00:30:37] Chef Mica Chavez: And I think the lesson that we should have learned from the Irish potato famine that seems completely lost on our decision-makers is diversity is what’s going to keep us strong.

[00:30:47] Beth: Yeah.

[00:30:48] Chef Mica Chavez: Diversity is what’s going to help keep our plants strong. And I fear that probably in our lifetimes we are going to see food shortages because we are going to chemical ourselves into a mess that we are not going to be able to chemical our way out of. And we’re seeing algae blooms in places like the Gulf of Mexico. We’re seeing it here in local rivers, and streams and lakes because nitrogen-heavy fertilizers wash into bodies of water. And when you don’t have fresh water coming in and sunlight, you get algae, and where you get algae, you get dead fish, and you get dead water basically because the sunlight can’t penetrate through. So we’re creating issues that we are not going to be able to fix. And I hate to sound gloom and doom because I feel like there’s enough of that already, and I feel like there are enough organizations globally that are working toward more sustainable growing methods and keeping diversity alive. Unfortunately, we’re not getting that in the US and not on a big scale. And I think that’s really scary.

[00:31:57] Beth: What do you think about precision farming? I’ve been trying to learn about the way that some European countries in particular are using artificial intelligence to monitor the temperature of the soil and the amount of water exactly that plants need and doing these vertical gardens. I think it’s all really interesting, and then a part of it just aches for me a little bit because it feels very soulless. So I’d love to know what someone like you who thinks about food all the time, how you view that.

[00:32:29] Chef Mica Chavez: It’s not just food I think about. I think about plants all the time.

[00:32:32] Beth: Yeah.

[00:32:33] Chef Mica Chavez: I’m a rabid gardener, and I compost. I constantly drive around rotting vegetables. I’ve got to go out and turn my compost in a little while. Science is a tool, and I believe that we should use these tools for the greater good. Do I want to be the one that defines greater good? Absolutely not. That’s for somebody a whole lot smarter than me. If it is helping farmers growers produce food that’s going to keep this planet fed, sure, okay. But when you talk about AI, you’re talking about data centers. And when you talk about data centers, you talk about massive uses of water and electricity, and how are we generating that electricity? Are we using coal? Are we using water? What are we using to generate that electricity? I tend to take it a step further, and ask where are we getting the power? Where are we getting the water? Are we getting this from sustainably generated sources? Awesome. Use it. Are we getting this from sources that are going to kill us eventually? If that’s the case, then maybe we use less of that.

[00:33:34] Beth: Yeah.

[00:33:36] Chef Mica Chavez: We didn’t have this 500 years ago. And what I have realized recently is between 500 years ago and 5,000 years ago, life didn’t really change that much. Our methods of transportation were the same. Our methods of growing food were the same. Our methods of movement of people were pretty much the same. But from 500 years to now, look at how fast life has moved and how much and how fast our world is changing, and the changes just seem to be exponentially faster. I don’t know if it’s good or not. I don’t know. I think an end of the summer tomato grown in my yard from my compost, I know where that dirt came from, doesn’t taste anything like the tomatoes I buy at the store.

[00:34:21] Beth: Yeah. I hope that these advancements that we make in the way that we understand soil composition and energy production and the taste of food. I hope all of those factors converge in a positive way. In the meantime, another thing I keep thinking about from your cooking class is just having respect for the ingredients and really valuing what’s in front of you. I keep thinking every time because I eat a lot of corn, about you telling me to get the juice out of the corn by flipping my knife over and scraping the cob extracts so much more flavor, and it’s incredible. It’s incredible. So I wonder what other ways you think we can practice having that kind of respect for the ingredients and loving the food back that way?

[00:35:21] Chef Mica Chavez: I think a lot of this just goes back to care and concern overall. We just need to slow down.

[00:35:28] Beth: Yeah.

[00:35:29] Chef Mica Chavez: Put your phone down.

[00:35:30] Beth: I need to slow down.

[00:35:31] Chef Mica Chavez: I am so guilty of this. Put your phone down. Pay attention to what you’re doing. And food is more than just something that we eat. Food needs to be enjoyed and celebrated. And in the US, most of us have enough to eat. And for that I am extremely grateful because I know that is not the case in other places. And I’ve been fortunate to travel some and look forward to traveling a whole lot more. And every time I go to a country where things aren’t as good as what I have here, I’m grateful to come home to what I’ve got. And that gives me the underlying, and I guess obvious respect for my ingredients and my environment because so many people have so much less than what I do. And I am so grateful for everything I’ve got and every opportunity.

[00:36:19] Beth: Me too. Thank you so much for walking us through this. As we wrap up, Sarah and I always ask an Outside of Politics question. This isn’t really outside of food; it’s still in food, but I’m curious, what do you think we all ought to cook this summer, just to do that slowing down and appreciating what we have?

[00:36:37] Chef Mica Chavez: You know what? Almost every place in this country has some kind of seasonal fruit that we get during the summer, like Rainier cherries, or peaches, or apples, or I don’t know, whatever the fruit happens to be. Make a pie. Go make a pie. Sit down, find a recipe, make a pie. Who doesn’t love apple pie, cherry pie, blueberry pie, peach pie, pecan pie? And we could take this on a run. We could be like turning into the Forrest Gump of pies.

[00:37:09] Beth: Yes. I do love a pie. I love trying to make a pie crust too. I think it is surprisingly challenging to make it as pretty as I want, and surprisingly easy to make it taste as good as I want. I like that mix of things.

[00:37:25] Chef Mica Chavez: I did some pastry classes in France a few years ago, and my big takeaway from that was French butter, European butter.

[00:37:31] Beth: Okay.

[00:37:32] Chef Mica Chavez: American butter tends to run much lower in butterfat. And what the cows eat makes a huge difference. So the butter that I have found that I use the most domestically is Kerrygold, the Kerry gold unsalted butter. If you put that up against a Land O’Lakes, or your store butter, or whatever else, the color is so much more vibrant, and you can smell the butter. It’s got an aroma to it. It smells good. It smells like food.

[00:37:59] Beth: Yeah. It smells like food.

[00:38:01] Chef Mica Chavez: Buy ingredients, make food. Don’t buy food.

[00:38:04] Beth: Yeah. So European butter. Anything else that will help us with our pie crusts? I’m on a selfish quest now.

[00:38:11] Chef Mica Chavez: Okay. So when you make your pie crust, measure out your flour. Flour, sugar, probably maybe a little bit of baking soda or baking powder. You want to use very cold butter. Cut it into small pieces. Don’t let it melt. So when I would do my pie crust, I used to do it with my fingers, and what this woman in France was doing it with two forks. I’ve never done it with forks. I know that the old ladies in the South do it with the forks. I have never done it with the forks, so I did it like that and it didn’t melt the butter.

[00:38:40] Beth: Yeah.

[00:38:42] Chef Mica Chavez: And I used really cold water, ice water, and then put it in there. Held the ice, dumped the water in, and then just used barely enough water to bring it together. But you got to keep everything really cold, and your pie crust will come out a whole lot better.

[00:38:58] Beth: Okay. I’m inspired to go make a pie. Thank you very much.

[00:39:00] Chef Mica Chavez:  All right. You have my information. You just let me know how it comes out.

[00:39:04] Beth: I will, thank you. This was a lot of fun. And I think there’s just so much wisdom to take from food, and the way that food grows, and the way that food has been prepared, and just how delicious the food in the United States is because we have negotiated, and melded, and taken all the good that everyone’s brought to our literal table.

[00:39:25] Chef Mica Chavez: I completely believe that’s true. And wherever people landed, they brought their food traditions with them, and as a nation of immigrants, I’m really grateful for every single group of people that brought that with them because we are better for it. Our diet is better for it.

[00:39:39] Beth: Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you to Amiga Chavez for her time and sharing her expertise and her passion with us. I will be back here with you on Friday with Lauren Pinkston, who is an independent candidate for governor in Tennessee. I’ve already heard from many Tennesseans that you are really excited to hear from Lauren on our show, so we’ll be back with you for that on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.

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