In this series, we're sitting down with Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Faculty Profiles page.
Read on for an interview with Andrea Rissing, Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainability.
How did you become interested in food systems?
I didn’t grow up on a farm, so my interest in food systems really started when I was an undergraduate student at a small college in Iowa. I was an anthropology major, and I was also learning how to cook for the first time. I belonged to the Vegan Co-op, was starting to shop at my small-town farmers market, and was paying attention to food in a way that I hadn't before. As I started getting to know local farmers and taking classes about agriculture, it was clear that the landscape around me was dominated by massive monocultures of corn and soybeans. But at the same time, these experiences allowed me to have conversations with farmers who seemed like they were doing something really different. With my anthropology background, I knew that interesting things happen when different cultures come into contact with each other, so I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of this food system that had very large-scale, industrial corn and soybean production, interspersed with much smaller scale, agroecological farms, growing healthy (and delicious!) food. The crux of that is still what motivates me: exploring the surprising contradictions our food systems can create.
Can you share a glimpse of your current research and how it relates to food systems transformation?
I’m juggling several projects that all relate to food systems transformation, so I’ll briefly highlight three of them. One of them is the book that I'm finishing up, where I trace the roots of the dynamic that I was just describing — the juxtaposition between large-scale, industrial agriculture and small-scale agroecological farming. This book is based on my doctoral field work with beginning farmers in Iowa's alternative agricultural movement. It addresses the points of contention and tensions between these two food systems, but it also explores the complicated ways that the industrialized food system is supporting, by accident, the emergence of an agroecological food system in its midst.
Secondly, I wanted to highlight a project that I'm working on with some brilliant colleagues from Emory University in Georgia, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Ohio State University called Thriving Future Cropscapes. It’s a mixed methods modeling project that is trying to take more of a participatory approach to crop suitability modeling. My colleague at Emory is putting together quantitative models that predict where crops will become suitable and unsuitable over the next 30-40 years as the climate changes. But there's also a lot of other factors that can affect what crops are grown in which places, like politics, technology, and farmer values. So, we're taking these quantitative models being made at Emory, and using them to anchor focus groups with farmers to ask for their feedback on what we might be missing in our projections. After that, we’re going to revise the projections to include all those messy, human factors that models are traditionally not very good at representing, and then we'll show the revised crop suitability maps back to our farmer participants to get their feedback on how well we captured their concerns. The purpose of this is partially to get better predictions of where crops will be able to grow in Ohio, Nebraska, and Georgia. But it also lets us use the projected crop suitability maps as an anchor for larger conversations about what we want the future of agriculture to look like.
Finally, I'm also wrapping up a project with colleagues in the Southeast on farmers market management. The paper we're working on looks at how the food access push of the early 2010s, when farmers markets got funding to be able to accept EBT cards, fundamentally remade farmers markets in interesting ways. We’re using ethnography at farmers markets and conducting interviews with farmers market managers to look at the role of farmers market management in local food systems. A farmers market isn’t a magical marketplace where producers and consumers naturally find each other. Having that marketplace requires that somebody is doing things like reserving the space, directing traffic, and (the part that we’re really interested in) managing the bureaucracy of accepting SNAP. Our work is trying to call attention to that invisible labor, which is most often performed by women.
What’s an innovation in food systems you’re excited about?
I had to think about this question, because I am a little bit skeptical of things that brand themselves as innovative in food systems. I think that a lot of the most truly sustainable work in food systems, especially in growing food, isn't really anything that new. It reflects the knowledge and traditions that people who work close to the land have had for generations and generations. That said, one innovation that I am enthusiastic about is the Land Institute's work to cultivate perennial grains like Kernza. It ticks a lot of sustainability boxes. It’s a food crop, meaning that it’s something that's eaten by people as opposed to grains like corn and soybeans, which are most often used for consumer products like ethanol or eaten by livestock. It’s perennial and has very long roots, so it doesn’t need to be tilled and helps hold the soil in place, preventing soil erosion. It’s also a tremendous builder of soil organic matter. The farmers I know who have been experimenting with it are reporting great results, and they've been very happy with it as a tool to diversify grain-based landscapes. Friends of mine in Iowa are growing Kernza, and it's doing great. I got to visit it a couple of summers ago, and one of them even joined one of the classes that I teach over Zoom to share about it.
What’s your favorite weeknight meal?
It has to be bean tostadas. I'm a huge fan of beans. They’re a wonderful source of protein and deliciousness in meals, and when you combine refried beans or some type of soupy bean with corn tortillas, you're getting a complete protein. It's an excellent base, and then you can put whatever you want on it. So if I get radishes and lettuce out of my garden, they go on the tostada. If I get cherry tomatoes out of my garden, they go on the tostada. If I have bell peppers that are starting to turn a little bit soft in the fridge, they get sauteed with cumin, and they go on the tostada. If I have pea shoots from my local CSA, I can put those on there too. You can put anything you want on a tostada, and it is always delicious.