With an artist’s flair and a dedication to fairness for South Asian farmers, Sana Javeri Kadri ’16 and her Diaspora Co. are shaking up the spice industry. Photo by Gentl and Hyers. Additional photography courtesy of Diaspora Co.

Black pepper, with its biting heat and piney taste, comes to many of us in the West in grocery store grinders and is used in cuisines throughout the world. Chocolate, with flavor profiles ranging from milky or bittersweet to notes of berries, often is associated with places like Belgium and Switzerland.

Top left, cocoa being processed into chocolate (bottom left). Top right, a man holding a peppercorn, which is dried and milled into black pepper (bottom right).

But CEO and spice merchant Sana Javeri Kadri ’16 and her business Diaspora Co. are here to remind us that the bulk of our spices aren’t native to Europe or America—and their true flavors and colors aren’t what we’re buying in conventional markets. Black pepper, for instance, hails from the steamy shade of the southernmost and very tropical state of Kerala, in India, and can have a more complex, fruit-forward taste, even coming in shades of purple.

1. Cacao, 2. Mace, 3. Nutmeg, 4. Aranya Pepper, 5. Baraka Cardamom, 6. Bindu Black Mustard, 7. Byadgi Chillies, 8. Chota Tingrai Black Tea, 9. Guntur Sannam Chillies, 10. Hariyali Fennel, 11. Kandyan Cloves, 12. Kashmiri Chillies, 13. Kashmiri Saffron, 14. Kaveri Vanilla, 15. Kudligi Moringa, 16. Madhur Jaggery, 17. Makhir Ginger, 18. Jodhana Cumin, 19. Nandini Coriander, 20. Pahadi Pink Garlic, 21. Panneer Rose, 22. Peni Miris Cinnamon, 23. Pragati Turmeric, 24. Sirārakhong Hāthei Chillies, 25. Sugandhi Fenugreek, 26. Surya Salt, 27. Wild Ajwain, 28. Wild Heimang Sumac, 29. Wild Cinnamon Quills

Javeri Kadri is here for more than a lesson, however. She is set on surprising palates with the taste of fresh top-shelf spices, and she’s determined to disrupt the spice industry by paying a living wage to Indian and Sri Lankan farmers.

Diaspora Co., established by Javeri Kadri in 2017 when she was 23 years old, has made a culinary splash in the industry, the media and home kitchens. In short order, Javeri Kadri was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for the food and drink industry for her successful entrepreneurship. She and her company have been featured everywhere from CBS Mornings to Condé Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine magazines and many more outlets. Whole Foods Market recently selected Diaspora Co. to be among 10 startup participants in the Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP), an initiative that launched last year offering mentorship, education and potential financial support to up-and-coming food and beverage brands. Over the years, Allure and The Cut have even detailed Javeri Kadri’s skincare and haircare routines—further proof of her celebrity spice trader status.

Throughout her time on campus, Javeri Kadri was heavily involved in the Pomona College Organic Farm.

Long before she was a rising star in the spice business, Javeri Kadri was a kid foodie. In nursery school she would go to the kitchen and eat all her classmates’ snacks—apparently without remorse. The running joke in her household was that if 3-year-old Javeri Kadri were kidnapped, she would be promptly returned home due to her insatiable appetite.

Her passion for food, which started as a toddler in Mumbai, inspired Javeri Kadri to study the slow food movement at an international high school in Italy. Then she arrived in Claremont. An art major, Javeri Kadri was profoundly influenced by Pomona College Art Professor Lisa Anne Auerbach and Art History Professor Phyllis Jackson, and eventually creatively combined her interests in photography and food justice.

But on Day One at Pomona, Javeri Kadri fell head over heels in love with the Organic Farm and agriculture. She spent virtually every day there, as a farmworker for the first two years and then teaching farming and cooking.

During her sophomore year, Javeri Kadri took a semester off to study regenerative agriculture and sustainable food systems. This wasn’t just a matter of interest; it was a matter of making a return on her parents’ investment in her.

“There was this feeling for me that being at an American liberal arts college was the greatest privilege of my life and the greatest expense my parents would ever incur,” she says.

Javeri Kadri knew she had to make good on her parents’ sacrifice. So while they never pressured her to pursue a particular major or vocation, they did impress upon her that it was critical she graduate with a clear plan. So during her semester leave she got a job at an urban farm, another job at a bakery, worked at a restaurant and found every single mentor she possibly could in New York. She says she returned to campus with all the tools she needed to start her long-term career journey, which she ultimately describes as telling stories around agriculture and food systems.

Sana Javeri Kadri ‘16, an art major at Pomona, keeps her camera close at hand in her travels. She is photographed here standing in a field on a Kashmiri saffron farm.

As a Pomona junior, she started the Claremont Food Justice Summit, which later turned into Food Week and brought in speakers from all over the country. This was certainly educational for The Claremont Colleges community, but it also was aspirational individually. Javeri Kadri says she networked relentlessly.

In the midst of the self-described hustling, Javeri Kadri also was working on her senior art thesis, which was about the effects of colonialism on food, specifically British colonialism on Indian cuisine. Javeri Kadri’s point of inquiry was chai. Through her thesis, she learned that spices on grocery store shelves are very old and very stale and that the industry doesn’t prioritize freshness or quality, she says. She also learned that spice farmers make almost no money. For at least four centuries, she says, the industry has been built to profit middlemen, not the farmers.

But economics wasn’t the only aspect that disturbed Javeri Kadri. Cultural whitewashing did as well. Situating spices in their indigenous contexts was critical for her.

“If a spice is coming from the hills of northern Kerala, people should know what northern Kerala pepper recipes are and how amazing they are,” she says. “It is partially about right or wrong, but it’s also delicious.”

Local farmers at a floating vegetable market on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir, India. Photography by Sana Javeri Kadri ’16 on a sourcing trip to visit saffron and Kashmiri chilli farm partners.

“Right,” “wrong” and “delicious” may be shorthand for Javeri Kadri’s philosophy of business for Diaspora Co., which promises that its farmers get a fair living wage and aims to disrupt the industry’s unsustainable farming practices and discrediting of culture, while also supplying fresh, delectable spices.

Origin, equity and—unsurprisingly for an art major—even beauty are paramount principles for Javeri Kadri’s business. Diaspora Co.’s Instagram profile (@diasporaco) and website (diasporaco.com) reveal stunning photography, much of it by Javeri Kadri, and thoughtful narratives.

There are photos of the intricate designs on Diaspora Co.’s vibrant marigold and raspberry-colored tins; a shot of Pahadi pink garlic, with its cream-edged petals, cradled in the hands of a farmer at the harvest in the lush mountains of Uttarakhand in northern India. There are videos to stimulate salivary glands, like a recipe for corn ribs with smoky chili-saffron butter and a chai masala cocktail, which is a combination of Diaspora Co.’s house chai masala, jaggery syrup and a black-tea infused bourbon. Another video traces the production of cinnamon, from tree bark to quill, in Kandy, Sri Lanka. A slideshow depicts a pile of sand’s transformation into a gleaming bronze mortar and pestle. Javeri Kadri, of course, is an installation artist by training, and she jokes this venture started off as one big art project.

“I’m not going to get into business unless I can build it the most beautifully and idealistically as I can. … Is it possible to build the most equitable form of the spice trade and make it beautiful?”

A professional food and culture photographer earlier in her career, Javeri Kadri is the artist behind many of the photos on Diaspora Co.’s distinctive Instagram. Check out other photos @diasporaco.

Evidently, the answer is yes. The art project evolved into a company that works with 140 farmers and pays an average of three to even 10 times over the going commodity price. Javeri Kadri acknowledges that Diaspora Co. spices fall on the luxury end of the spectrum, price-wise. According to a Los Angeles Times writer’s description, the taste also is premium—Diaspora’s Aranya pepper is not just peppery, “but also extra-ripe-strawberry fruity, and with some actual heat on the tongue.”

Javeri Kadri is quick to acknowledge that Diaspora Co. is not perfect, but what she appreciates most is her team and how they keep one another honest, accountable and forever on a growing edge. Her hope for her business is that what is now a luxury for a few will become the standard for the industry at large: better sourcing, better salaries, better spices.

Sourcing is among the most critical ingredients and challenges for their business. Pragati turmeric from Vijayawada in the state of Andhra Pradesh, in southeast India, was the first spice that Javeri Kadri sourced. Diaspora Co., which now sells 30 spices, only launches a spice after rigorous testing and tasting on two continents and once they believe it’s the best of its kind on the market. It took four years to find fennel that met its criteria. The quest for the finest dried mango powder is ongoing.

The transformational effect of Diaspora Co. on its farming partners is astounding, Javeri Kadri says. As the farmers’ wages increase, naturally their lifestyle does as well and there are tangible and significant markers even in the span of six years. After Year One, the farmers may buy a smartphone. After another year, they send their children to a better school. One more, and they are willing to talk about paying their workers more. After the fourth year, they start to think about how they can get similar returns on their other spice crops, since most are growing multiple varieties. Diaspora also has a farmworker fund divided amongst their three oldest farm partners (turmeric, pepper and cardamom farmers) and each farmer receives $7,000. These funds go toward building women’s toilets, establishing medical camps, setting aside land for a kitchen garden for the farmworkers, and other projects.

Diaspora Co. is a small company but for the farmers, it is a mighty one. Since 2019, Diaspora has paid out $2.1 million to 140 regenerative farms. In 2022, the company purchased 16 metric tons of spices. Diaspora started with a modest investment of $8,000 from Javeri Kadri’s parents and the entirety of her tax refund of $3,000. Over the years, it has been supported in part by family, friends and operator angels—angel investors who also are food industry mentors, including chefs and CEOs.

Even deeper than Javeri Kadri’s love for spices is her passion for social justice. It is arguably coded in her DNA. Her paternal grandmother started a nonprofit in the 1980s called Save the Children India (no relation to Save the Children USA), which became a large organization focused on serving underprivileged children and children with disabilities. Javeri Kadri grew up visiting the rural hospital her grandmother built.

“The family business is architecture, but it was also service,” Javeri Kadri says. Her father’s ongoing reminder was that they had great privilege, so much was required of them.

“I grew up upper class in Mumbai. It’s a lot. And then was able to go to the world’s best schools on three continents,” she says. “So how am I going to use that and how am I going to pay that forward?”

By dealing spices—with equity, beauty and, of course, taste.

Cathy Corison ’75, standing in her vineyard along Napa Valley’s St. Helena Highway, started making cabernet sauvignon before she had a vineyard or a winery of her own. Photography by Robert Durell

In a vineyard in full green flourish under a bright blue sky, Cathy Corison ’75 is caressing a cluster of grapes.

She’s showing off a little. Corison’s small winery and vineyard are tucked in among much bigger names along St. Helena Highway, the tree-lined central axis around which Northern California vino revolves. But these little green grapes, a few weeks away from ripening and harvest beginning in mid-September, are hers. They’re the beating heart of Corison’s if-you-know-you-know cult-fave cabernet sauvignon. And she takes very good care of them.

The vines in one of the Corison Winery vineyards are five decades old. “I so value these gnarly old ladies,” says Cathy Corison ’75. “It’s like a sculpture garden.” Photography by Robert Durell

The grape clusters hang from thick, twisted trunks, gray as driftwood, that seem to reach toward each other all along their martial ranks. The vines are five decades old, ancient by Napa standards. “I so value these gnarly old ladies,” Corison says, pushing a leaf aside. “It’s like a sculpture garden.”

Except it’s all alive, of course. A stalwart Napa winemaker, Corison is well known for spending a lot of time out among her vines. She works with simple parameters—loamy soil that holds the rain, so Corison barely needs to irrigate, and the Napa Valley climate, which is optimum for growing world-class cabernet sauvignon: hot days, cold nights. “We work hard to get the right amount of air and light in to the fruit for color and flavor development,” she says.

Corison makes artful, classic Napa cabs—lower in alcohol with brighter flavors and what the language of connoisseurship calls “structure,” an elegant and well-defined progression of aromas and flavors. But there is fashion in winemaking like anything else, and those kinds of wines went out of style in the late 1980s. The last few years at Corison Winery have been better, the awards and accolades (and sales) a vindication for her approach. But that was never a sure thing. Corison has always been an outlier.

“When I started this project, this wine was fully formed in my head. Power and elegance. Cabernet is always powerful, but is far more interesting to me at the intersection of elegance,” she says. “Good wine can be made by a committee. Great wine cannot. It reflects the hand of the maker.”

At Pomona, Corison was a competitive springboard diver. The school didn’t have a women’s team, so she joined the men’s team—lettered in the sport, even. Part of her training was tumbling on a trampoline, so when the opportunity came up for people in the campus community to teach short noncredit classes, she volunteered to instruct other Sagehens on how to take those big, bouncing leaps.

At the sign-up fair, at the table adjacent to Corison’s, a young professor was offering a wine appreciation class. This was John Haeger, an expert in the Sung Dynasty with a serious wine collecting hobby. (Today Haeger is a big-deal writer on the subject.) Corison was just 19, but beer and wine flowed more freely on campus back then. On a whim, she signed up.

The tastings were on Sundays at Haeger’s house. All the wines were French and delicious, and the classes were fun. For Corison, though, they were more than that. The agronomy of grapevines, sugar transformed by yeast into alcohol, the chemistry of wine production, the flavor of wood from barrels…she was hooked. “What really grabbed me is that wine is a collaboration among a whole series of living systems; the result is the alchemy that is wine,” Corison says.

She graduated with a biology degree, and two days after graduation, she went to Napa. This was almost 50 years ago; there were just 30 wineries in Napa then, but some of them were starting to make genuinely great wine—from now-iconic vintners like Robert Mondavi and Donn Chappellet ’54, himself a Pomona grad.

Cathy Corison ’75 earned a master’s degree in enology at UC Davis, where she also studied viticulture. Photography by Robert Durell

Then, a year after Corison showed up in Napa, Napa showed up in France. At a now-famous tasting at Le Grand Hôtel in Paris (today it’s the InterContinental Paris le Grand), nine big-shot sommeliers and restaurateurs judged—blind, meaning no one knew which glass held which wine—Napa chardonnays versus French white Burgundies, and Napa cabernet sauvignons versus cab-dominated red blends from Bordeaux. The results were all over the map, statistically and literally, but the boozy score at the end of the night was as undeniable as a hangover: The Californians—sacrée merde!—won. And a reporter from Time magazine was there to file the news. What came to be known as the Judgment of Paris made Napa into a world-class wine producer, and Corison was in the thick of it. “It was blind luck, but it catapulted the Napa Valley onto the world stage,” she says.

Corison started a master’s program at UC Davis, taking classes in both winemaking and the care of grapevines—enology and viticulture—still considered somewhat separate realms even today. And she started working at wineries, even though women were scarce in winemaking back then. She ended up heading the winery for Chappellet Vineyard. “She had both academic knowledge and also knowledge from working at Freemark Abbey and Yverdon, a lot of real-world experience,” says Phillip Corallo-Titus, one of Corison’s assistants at Chappellet’s winery and, today, the head winemaker there. “She just knew a lot about winemaking that I didn’t know, and she hadn’t been in the industry that much longer.”

She knew enough, in fact, to start making her own wine. In 1987, toward the end of her tenure at Chappellet, she began to buy grapes and barrels and make her own cabernet sauvignon as a custom client in other people’s wineries. Her brand was launched.

On the last day of 1995, Corison and her husband William Martin closed a deal on a broken-down Victorian house and an old vineyard that had been on the market for eight years. Both were fixer-uppers. The Victorian needed a new foundation, new wiring, new plumbing and a coat of paint. And the vineyard needed a lot of TLC. This is where they built a barn in 1999 to serve as the winery.

Corison had been told the old rootstock was a variety susceptible to phylloxera, the vine-killing bug that nearly crushed Napa in the 1980s. But it turned out to be the phylloxera-resistant strain St. George. “We had bought this for bare-land prices,” she says. “It was a miracle.”

With those old, badass vines, Corison had a vineyard of her own at last. After more than a decade of making wines under her label with other people’s grapes in other people’s wineries, she could keep making the classic Napa cab she’d learned to make in the 1970s—lean, balanced and complex—with the fruit of her own Kronos Vineyard. In 2015, she and Martin added the nearby Sunbasket Vineyard to their estate.

From the start, Corison harvested grapes weeks before many other winemakers. These early grapes’ lower sugar levels result in wines of lower alcohol, because the yeast converts the sugar to alcohol. “The grapes come into the winery with complex flavors, tannins that feel like velvet, and snappy acidity,” she says. “In a good year, farmed right, I can have all the flavors good cabernet produces, from cherries to plum to cassis to blackberry. By picking early, I preserve that bright red and blue end of the flavor spectrum. With time in the bottle, this turns into the floral perfume I so value.”

Winemakers make use of scientific analysis, sending samples to labs to test for qualities such as total acidity, pH, alcohol and sugar levels and to check for microbiological stability once in barrels. Photography by Robert Durell

But that wasn’t what Napa was making by then. The moneymakers were sweet, juicy sugar bombs with 15% alcohol or more. Some people like those—no judgment. Well, OK, a little judgment. More seriously, that style might have been popular not for its own qualities, but because of the idiosyncratic recommendations of influential wine writers like Robert Parker. “In the ’90s, the Robert Parker era, Napa maybe took it too far,” says Jess Lander, wine reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. “Big, concentrated fruit bombs, lots of oak, lots of structure and tannin. That’s what made Napa famous, I would say.”

So by the early 2000s, things were tight for Corison Winery. Corison’s neighbors were building multimillion-dollar visitor centers and tasting rooms, hosting tour groups, selling swag. Napa was changing; Corison wasn’t. She thought she might have to sell.

“I’ve never met anybody so unwavering on their ideas,” Corallo-Titus says. “She stuck to a philosophy when maybe, at times, during the ’90s and 2000s, the industry was going in another direction.”

Maybe there’s a hint of critique in all the compliments about Corison’s unwavering faith. Either she’s as indomitable as her tough old vines or just too stubborn to survive in the modern Napa. She could have made wine that tasted like anything she wanted. Why not just make something people wanted to drink?

“All we have to sell is our integrity,” she says. “I just couldn’t make a wine I didn’t believe in.”

The thing about pendulums is that they swing back. “I’m hearing a lot of winemakers talk about acid and freshness and using less oak,” Lander says. “Cathy’s been doing that all along, and people are starting to realize that’s what they want to drink.”

What happened? Well, the sugar bombs of the 2000s aged poorly, Lander says. And wine criticism welcomed lots of new voices, especially on social media. Young, hip sommeliers started evangelizing Corison’s wine, too.

Cathy Corison ’75 and her husband built a new barn in 1999 to serve as the winery, which includes the large stainless steel tanks where fermentation occurs. Photography by Robert Durell

Corison herself isn’t sure what flipped the switch, but she definitely noticed. The New York Times started touting her in the 2010s. The Chronicle named her winemaker of the year in 2011. She got a couple of prestigious James Beard Award nominations. “That took 35 years,” Corison says. “It took 25 years for the business to be a going concern. It’s only been in the last 10 or 12 years we’ve been comfortable enough not to be terrified all the time.”

Napa might have changed again, but her wine hasn’t. The best answer to the question of how Corison turned things around comes while I sit across from her amid stacks of empty barrels, an array of quarter-full wine glasses on the table between us. Getting to taste wine with a winemaker is like visiting with an artist in their studio. She’s talking me through vintages from the 2010s forward, including a sip of the as-yet-unreleased 2020. That was a difficult year for Napa, when climate change-powered wildfires meant lots of vineyards’ grapes were tainted by smoke. Not Corison’s: Her earlier harvest meant she’d already brought in her grapes.

After starting her career at a time when women winemakers were still rare in Napa Valley, Cathy Corison ’75 was the San Francisco Chronicle’s winemaker of the year in 2011. Photography by Robert Durell

I also get a bit of her cabernet sauvignon from 1999, when the winery we’re sitting in was new. It’s extraordinary—the older wine is inky, with the same tart red-fruit-eau-de-vie lattice as the more recent bottles, but with an umami taste. And the ’20 has it too. It’s like time travel. What must have seemed like stubbornness tastes like continuity today. Corison’s wine is a big deal for the simple reason that it’s good.

It also, not incidentally, takes me back to the Napa reds my dad drank when I was a kid. I tell Corison this, and she smiles. That’s all she wants from her wine. “I want it to grace the table,” she says. “I want it to have a long and interesting life.” Take care of the grapes, and eventually they’ll take care of you.

On a warm afternoon, Kim Selkoe ’97 stands on a dock at the Santa Barbara harbor waiting for a local fisherman. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, she has a baseball cap pulled low across her forehead to shield her face from the sun.

Selkoe is there to buy fresh halibut for the 350 or so customers in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties who have signed up for Get Hooked, her local-catch-of-the-day seafood delivery subscription service. Morgan Castagnola, a fourth-generation fisherman, ambles up the dock and steps onto his boat. He and Selkoe exchange friendly banter as he tosses whole fish from the large receptacle on deck to a smaller tub nearby. He wheels the tub to the upper pier, where Selkoe’s pickup truck is parked. She hops onto the truck bed and transfers the halibut—50 pounds worth—to her cooler. She packs it all in ice, tamps down the lid and then completes the paperwork.

Thirty or so miles up the coast, Doug Bush ’94 moves easily among the rows and rows of fiberglass tanks that are the heart of his onshore shellfish farm. A thin layer of fog hangs over the canyon, and the damp dirt and gravel crunch beneath the weight of his heavy hiking boots. A partner in The Cultured Abalone Farm, Bush is raising the native Haliotis rufescens. Shaded from the elements and continuously refreshed with cool, clean saltwater from the Santa Barbara Channel, the tanks—400 in all—emulate the rock substrate of the abalone’s natural environment.

Bush and his team cultivate the mollusks—long prized as culinary delicacies—through their entire life cycle, harvesting live, market-size seafood, which the farm sells directly to restaurants or to home chefs and other abalone lovers via the farm’s online store. Selling upward of 35 tons of seafood per year, the abalone farm—one of only three in California—has tapped into an enthusiastic market. Upscale restaurants in Northern California such as Atelier Crenn, The French Laundry and SingleThread have featured the farm’s abalone on their menus, as do a few closer to home, including the famed San Ysidro Ranch, Lucky’s and Mattei’s Tavern. Occasionally, the delicacy is available to Selkoe’s Get Hooked customers.

Selkoe and Bush are making a splash in the sustainable fishery and seafood industries in Santa Barbara, but they have more in common than a shared passion for marine life. Both headed west for college—she from Massachusetts, he from Missouri—and both graduated from Pomona College with bachelor’s degrees in biology.

Kim Selkoe’97 displays some of the day’s catch. The seafood usually reaches her customers within two days of being caught. Photography by Jeff Hing

A native of Boston, Selkoe found her calling as a marine ecologist in California. “For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by sea creatures and the diversity of the oceans,” she says. A family vacation on the West Coast included a road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and she fell in love with the Golden State. “I knew I wanted to be a marine biologist and live in California,” she recalls, “and I became fixated on going to college there.”

Pomona College, with its strong biology program—and, by the way, springboard diving team—dominated Selkoe’s list of possibilities. The swimming pool, with its grand view of the mountains, was a major selling point. “It was really stunning for me, coming from Boston,” she recalls. “I thrived at Pomona, being able to pursue my passions of marine biology and springboard diving.”

One faculty member in particular, the late biologist Larry C. Oglesby, stands out to Selkoe for the impact he had on her as a student, as a researcher and, ultimately, as the leader of two large, complex organizations—Get Hooked and the nonprofit Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, where Selkoe serves as executive director. “I developed a strong relationship with Professor Oglesby, and he really guided me,” she says. “In his classes, for example, he focused on synthesizing research—you have to choose five research papers on a topic and then write one paper that brings all of them together. And that’s exactly the kind of work I did in grad school and the work I do now.”

So, with a strong foundation in marine biology, Selkoe “hit the ground running” when she commenced her graduate studies at UC Santa Barbara (she completed her Ph.D. in marine ecology in 2007). “I really understood how science papers are written,” she says, “and how research gets distilled down into a paper and how that fuels the next generation of questions in science and pulls the field in different directions. And I learned that in my science classes at Pomona.”

Those skills became central to work Selkoe did as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and as an independent researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, where she continued her studies on the population genetics of kelp forest species. “We wanted to understand how much connectivity (immigration and emigration) there is between the different habitat areas—in this case, the kelp forests of Southern California and Baja Mexico,” she explains. “The question we were asking was, can you manage California and Mexico fisheries separately, or do you have to consider them as completely integrated and interdependent?”

The short answer: They are quite interconnected. “There is a little bit of a bias toward Southern California as a repository of fish from Mexico, so our fisheries here are much more impacted by what they do in Mexico than fisheries down there are impacted by what we do here,” Selkoe notes.

In reality, she adds, the globalized seafood industry makes everything interconnected.

A Farm to School grant will help Selkoe and her team provide salmon patties like these to selected area schools. Photography by Jeff Hing

At the same time, Selkoe began a side project, the Santa Barbara Sustainable Seafood Restaurant Program, which sought to put sustainable seafood on the menus at local restaurants. “I ran the program for six or seven years, and I learned a lot,” she says.

When she crossed paths with Stephanie Mutz, a local sea urchin diver and then-president of the Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara, they put their heads together and began to look at how they could promote local seafood. They were familiar with the community-supported agriculture movement and how farms and even some fisheries were creating subscription programs. “So, we created a community-supported fishery program and called it Community Seafood. It was a great success.”

Meanwhile, Selkoe’s association with Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara continued. Mutz eventually moved on, a new president was named, and Selkoe became the organization’s executive director. Incorporated in 1971, Commercial Fishermen of Santa Barbara has a threefold mission: to provide healthy, high-quality seafood to local and global markets, to ensure the economic and biological sustainability of fisheries, and to maintain California’s fishing heritage. “As much as I love research, academic research paper writing was less interesting to me, and I wanted to get more involved full time in the fishing community,” Selkoe says.

Fast forward, and Community Seafood has been replaced with the more robust seafood subscription service Get Hooked, which Selkoe co-founded with Victoria Voss, a Santa Barbara native who also has strong ties to local fisheries. “We focus on buying direct from our fishermen and we focus on diversity, which allows people to taste all the different seafood available here,” she explains. “In a given year, we’ll have 40 different species of California-caught seafood.”

But Get Hooked does more than deliver fresh seafood to its subscription customers. With Selkoe at the helm, Get Hooked is growing and expanding its reach. “We started renting out our commercial kitchen to other fishermen. We started a wholesale program. We’re developing meal kits,” she says. “Our fish, with our Get Hooked label, is in grocery stores in the Bay Area.”

Rock crabs, are caught year-round. (The Dungeness crab season usually opens in late fall.) Photography by Jeff Hing

In addition, Selkoe and her team have partnered with local farms and garden centers to turn their fish scraps into soil amendment, and they are spearheading a pilot project—courtesy of a generous Farm to School grant—to develop kid-friendly fish burgers and fish sticks that they’ll bring to selected school districts in Ventura County.

“What I love is that the ecosystem is raising our food for us without the fossil fuel and land conversions you get with land meat and even vegetables,” Selkoe says. “There can be some habitat impacts when we fish, but they aren’t wholesale habitat destruction.

“The things we’re harvesting from the ocean are packed with nutrients in a way we can’t get on land,” she continues. “It’s a beautiful thing that we can have this wild harvest. And our planet is 70% ocean—it’s big enough to support us if we manage it properly. If we fish sustainably and harvest sustainably, we can meet the protein needs of large numbers of people on the planet. With Get Hooked, we’re giving people an option they can feel good about.”

That’s a philosophy Doug Bush can get behind, and a philosophy he brings to his abalone aquaculture.

Doug Bush ‘94 is a partner and general manager of The Cultured Abalone Farm, one of only three abalone farms in California. Photography by Jeff Hing

“Nothing is zero impact,” he says. “It’s a matter of choosing what’s best, and that’s enormously complicated. But we can affect only what we do, and we do a really good job growing native California red abalone.”

A biologist with an interest in history and anthropology, Bush has a deep, personal connection not only to Dos Pueblos Canyon, the land along the Gaviota coast that is home to The Cultured Abalone Farm, but also to the way his work is intertwined with place and history. “Abalone is an iconic California seafood, but it goes way back,” he says. “It’s well known that the Chumash occupied this area but, in fact, there have been humans living not just in California but on the dirt where we’re standing for, according to some estimates, 14,000 years.”

Under Bush’s guidance, The Cultured Abalone Farm is committed to creating a sustainable regional food system. “Seaweed is a tremendous, underdeveloped resource for nutrient capture, carbon sequestration, unique nutritional compounds for both humans and animals, and forage for vegetarian marine invertebrates like abalone,” he explains.

The unique microbial community of the abalone digestive process converts seaweed into one of the most nutritionally complete sources of protein that can be found anywhere, Bush says. “This process is a natural subsidy, and our job at the farm is simply to try and harness it and manage it to create a food source in a repeatable way,” he continues.

The farm has a standing inventory of roughly 1 million abalone, ranging in size from 10 millimeters to market size, which, according to Bush, is “about the size of your palm.”

The abalone are raised in a land-based seawater tank system designed to accommodate them through each stage of development. In addition, Bush cultivates on-site the two types of red seaweed that comprise the abalone’s diet. “We also harvest giant kelp from the nearshore,” he says. “Kelp harvesting is among the most sustainable of all marine harvests. We harvest only 15 inches below the surface from the perennial kelp plant, which remains intact and continuously grows new fronds.”

While Bush, who has a master’s degree in animal science from UC Davis, grows red abalone exclusively for commercial production, he also is part of a group led by the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory that seeks to restore the critically endangered white abalone.

Red abalone, shown here, have been successfully farmed after overfishing and environmental factors devastated the ocean population. Photography by Jeff Hing

“We collaborate in the technical husbandry aspects of maturation and spawning of a small number of captive adult white abalone,” he says, “and then also participate in the group effort to successfully raise the larvae of a successful white abalone spawn into small, competent individuals that can be planted in offshore locations.” This is all in the hope of re-establishing a self-sustaining population of white abalone in the wild.

But how does a guy from the Midwest end up in California raising abalone? Quite simply, Bush says, it was the “enduring appeal of the Golden West.” Like Selkoe, when he began researching colleges and universities in California, he hit upon Pomona College. It was the right place.

“I loved my time at Pomona College,” he says. “I learned how to be a student, how to teach myself to learn. I’m not sure I would have done as well at that in a different environment. And I never felt like I was forced into some artificial exclusivity—like being on a biology track meant I wasn’t welcome to take art classes or history classes or literature classes. I was given the opportunity to be a whole human intellectually.”

Relationships with faculty members, including Oglesby and Bush’s freshman advisor, botanist Sherwin Carlquist, who died in 2021, inspired and motivated him. “Both were fundamental to my enjoyment of biology, and both encouraged me to apply that enjoyment in a way that was personally meaningful,” Bush says. “They taught me a lot about trusting myself, but also being accountable for my assumptions. For both, there was a certain joy in the subject matter of the natural world that really affected me.”

Selkoe and Bush didn’t know each other at Pomona but met at the Saturday Fishermen’s Market in Santa Barbara. Photography by Jeff Hing

After graduating, Bush joined the Peace Corps and taught biology to high school students in the East African nation of Malawi. “Near the school where I taught was a little agricultural development project site,” he says. “It was a fish farm with a couple of ponds, and I used to take my students over there to learn about nutrient cycling and food webs. The fish would get dried on tiny racks, and you’d see them in the local trading center market. And I remember being struck at the time that this is a local market-driven ability to provide a protein source in a community that is protein insecure.”

Returning from Malawi, Bush sought ways to pursue his new interest in aquaculture. A fellow Pomona College alumnus got him started. “I happened upon an article about David Leighton [’54], who had been raising abalone in a small lab in Carlsbad,” Bush says of the San Diego County biologist, who died in 2017. “I called him out of the blue and he invited me to come help out around the farm, which he shared with a small mussel-growing business and another few incubating farming ideas.” Bush jumped in, doing all manner of dirty, cold, wet work. He spent his days cleaning out filters; swimming rafts of bay shellfish between their lines; and building prototype cages, bags and specialty containment systems.

“I maintained a close relationship with David throughout my professional development,” Bush continues, “and he was a good friend to The Cultured Abalone Farm and a great resource once I landed here in Santa Barbara.”

And that’s a boon for Selkoe, whose post-college association with Bush began at the Saturday Fishermen’s Market at the Santa Barbara Harbor. One thing led to another, and they discovered their shared connection to Pomona College. Now they are also colleagues, and both together and separately are helping build out the future of sustainable fisheries and of a seafood industry that can feed the world as it supports the planet.

Professor Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a 2023 James Beard Media Award winner, holding a Strawberry Fluffy Matcha at Tea Maru in Arcadia, California. Photo by Jeff Hing

On Boba
Gelatinousness in the Bones

Originally published by the Los Angeles Review of Books in the April 2022 issue of LARB Quarterly and reproduced below with permission.

My first encounter with boba was not my first encounter with the gelatinous food objects that have come to occupy my imagination for so many years since. But because it took place my very first week in the United States in 1998, boba drinks, which are actually Taiwanese, have come to be associated for me almost entirely with California.

Gelatinousness was in my bones long before I moved from Toronto to California, a state in which crispness is a sanctified culinary value. By contrast, I grew up with collagen-rich food that often included ingredients like cow feet and tongue and other usually discarded bones and body parts. I met boba that first week in the U.S.—still reeling from the shock of moving from East Coast to West Coast; of encountering a culture so car-centered you couldn’t even walk across a road to get groceries; of suddenly walking through the TV screen called the 49th parallel and finding myself in a Truman Show–esque landscape of U.S. flags on every corner—when my assigned grad housing roommate, a fellow international student from Taiwan named Wen-pei (“call me Wendy”), got a friend of hers to drive us to a local boba shop so that I could try something she associated with home.

I remember the drive to get there through the suburban eternal of small-town California; I remember the white and blue and pink of the store; I remember feeling relief at finding myself in a store full of not-white people. I distinctly recall the tannic pucker of black tea syrup on the tongue, how concentrated black tea makes your taste buds feel concave and how the sweetness and milk bring them back. And I remember the chewy spheres and how I took to them immediately.

I guess there are people who don’t like boba or tapioca or any food that resists the tooth. I guess there are people who don’t want to eat cow’s foot. I am not one of those people. Boba for me, then and now, tastes like a kind welcome from a new friend to a strange country, even when that new friend is a stranger, too.

If I were to name my country now, almost a quarter-century of emigration later, it would still not be the United States; but it would definitely be Los Angeles. I have come to love L.A. with the fullest of hearts. My Los Angeles is, like everyone else’s, severely circumscribed by My Commute, the topic of constant conversation here. This is another way of saying that my L.A. is circumscribed by how the limits of time have shaped how far I can drive on a given day and still attend to the basics of getting things done: working; being with my son; writing; domestic labor. And thus, my L.A. is not the cinematic L.A. of the West Side and Beverly Hills. It is not even the consciously unglamorous new money of Downtown L.A. with its lofts and weekend scene, nor is it the studiously louche energy of the Silver Lake creative class with their elaborate artisanal take on everything that should only cost $3.

Largely, my L.A. is everything to the north and south of the 210 artery that runs between the Inland Empire, where I work, and Altadena, where I live. All along my commute, lying to the south of me in the huge space of land between the east-west rush of the unlovely 10 freeway and the brown and frowning imposition of the San Gabriel Mountains that lie on the north side of the 210, is the great gift that is the multiethnic and transnational checkerboard of neighborhoods called the San Gabriel Valley. Much has been spoken and written by people who think about eating a lot, including David Chang and the late Jonathan Gold, both of whom recognized the SGV (“the Ess-Gee-Vee”) as the center of the widest range of and the very best multiethnic Asian restaurants in the United States. Part of what defines the SGV is that you take freeways to get there but the freeways don’t really take you there; instead, you take an off-ramp and then drive actual streets to get to actually anywhere, a long romp through a lot of space to get to a singular place. This, I think, keeps the SGV less shiny than other parts of L.A. but more human and more complex: You have to either work to get there or you have to be from there to enjoy finding yourself there.

Another way to say this is that the best parts of L.A. are those areas where other immigrants do their living: the arid and dried-out streets with not enough trees on them; the parched stucco of the ordinary bungalow; nearly identical strip malls that seem to repeat themselves block after block after block until you’ve lived here for at least half a decade and your vision sharpens to the differences between them. Also the not-choice real estate that you find along highway frontage lanes in which the greatest enemy of your sleep isn’t the aquatic swoosh of freeway sounds but the hideous roar of police helicopters chasing down cars for reasons you never can find out.

Boba drinks were born in Taipei, either at the Chun Shui Tang Teahouse in Taichung or at the Hanlin Tea Room, both of them in Taiwan. Since the 1990s, boba, a tiny bubble of refined and boiled cassava paste that sits at the bottom of a sweet and fairly complex drink, has become one of the most globally recognized food and drink commodities of Asian origin. Its stores are gathering places for youth of all demographics, but particularly, the studies tell us, of Asian teens from multiple transnational diasporas.

Cassava has a long and interesting history as a global commodity that, like most modern commodities, found its first foothold in the circulations of modern capital that emerged out of the Western colonial project. Cassava, food historians tell us, is indigenous to Brazil but was exported around the world, first to feed enslaved Africans as they were transported to the ships that stole their lives to the Americas.

Food anthropologist Kaori O’Connor tells us that what we know as tapioca (originally a Tupi food), boba, or cassava was originally known as manioc. Poisonous in its root form, in order to be eaten manioc requires days of soaking and fermentation to extract the possibly lethal amounts of hydrocyanic acid from its fibers. After a long soak, manioc is then vigorously pounded or grated to produce the meal and then flour now known in Portuguese as farinha. In precolonial times, what the West would now recognize as tapioca was then made from the liquid left behind when farinha was extracted. Between the cultivation and consumption of manioc, including drinking fermented tapioca drinks and hunting animals, the preinvasion Tupi diet was well organized to supply enough carbohydrates and meat for survival.

Boba drinks, sometimes called bubble teas, are creative concoctions that might include tea, milk, fruit juice, sugar and other flavors—and of course, the smooth pearls of tapioca known as boba.

Deracinated from Tupi culture and exported abroad as the European invasion and markets expanded, cassava became a central provision provided by enslavers to enslaved peoples: Though labor intensive to produce, it also provided carbohydrate calories to fuel cruel amounts of labor and energy extraction and was flavorless enough to adapt to multiple cuisines and locations. Cassava was transported to inland Africa to feed enslaved peoples as they were stolen and put on forced march to the vessels that would sever them from their worlds. It was taken to the sugar colonies to provide plantation and plot provisions. Cassava was, in other words, one of the most important sources of caloric fuel for the colonial world.

Processed cassava is smooth, chewy and soothing. Its neutral flavor allows it to live peacefully alongside almost any flavor continuum from spicy to herbaceous; its gelatinous quality makes it a splendid preservative. Mixed with milk, it was used to create English puddings that kept dairy from spoiling; in Jamaica enslaved people reappropriated cassava to invent the divine and irreproachable coconut-milk-soaked fry-bread called bammie.

Cassava finally arrived in Taipei directly from Brazil in the hands of the Portuguese, either in the 17th or 18th centuries, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that boba left Taiwan to become a global drink phenomenon. But is boba necessarily a drink? If you read boba cookbooks or watch videos about how to make boba, you come to understand that it is really just another kind of noodle, albeit one with a particularly resistant visco-elastic bounce in the mouth.

Much has been written about “Q,” the elusive mouthfeel so favored in Taiwanese cuisine, and a lot of that writing circles in wonderment around the idea that a particular mouthfeel could belong to a particular place. We are used to thinking about flavor profiles geographically: It is taken for granted for instance that butter, white wine and lemon are French, that turmeric, cumin and curry leaf might signify a cuisine touched by the Indian Ocean; that ginger, garlic, scallion and soy generally accompany a number of East Asian cuisines across borders.

But those are flavors: Mouthfeel is something else altogether. How does a desire for a particular experience along and against and between the roof of your mouth and the length of your tongue emerge as a cultural phenomenon? I once spent a year in Boston and came away with the sense that, except for steamers and lobster and the impeccable genius that is chowder, basically everything I was eating was unnecessarily fried or topped with mayonnaise; two different kinds of too oily. Growing up Moroccan, I came to believe that we, as a culture, like our food wet and even sticky. Someone who had only eaten couscous in a restaurant wouldn’t know that at home, couscous comes with a small pitcher or bowl of broth to keep it from getting dry. Even our salads are cooked.

What is taste? Over 25 years ago, I attended a food history conference in Fez where I heard the chef, restaurant owner and food scholar Fatéma Hal talk about how Moroccans in general do not eat chocolate, and that it simply isn’t a commodity with a great deal of pull in the country. That insight stunned me: It had never occurred to me that one might belong to a food desire, as one belongs to a nationality.

There is such a thing, then, of a geography of the palate, if we define a palate as a set of flavors, aromas, textures, sounds and memories agreed to be desirable or disgusting. A shared palate develops out of necessity, by force, because of ecologies, as a result of invasion and theft or because communities have been colonized or invaded. It’s not always a bucolic or pretty history, and a short trip through the muck and mess of the past delivers you directly away from your wishes for anything like an “authentic experience.” But palates are always particular. And they feel particular: They feel like they belong to the us-ness of us, the me-ness of me, the here-ness of wherever you came from.

Palates live in the mouth, but they can also travel. Palates change.

If cassava is a global commodity that illuminates Asian and hemispheric American commodity chains and leisure cultures in the form of the boba tea joint, linking dispersed colonial history and late-modern national projects to each other, so too do the coffee, tea and sugar ingredients that make up the drinks. These energy sources shape the sensory everyday into which our bodies are plugged and fuel the jagged experience of working under capital.

Boba drinks, especially when made with tea or coffee, feed the body’s particular caffeine/sugar/carbohydrate addictions that plug us into work and study schedules, but its pleasures are leisurely, too. Boba can roll out in phases, and in the more artisanal of boba drinks there is no mouthful that has not been designed with mouthfeel in mind, every layer an event: the chewiness of the balls at the bottom of the drink; the crystalline coolness of an ube slush, the meringue density of cream cheese topping. Are there any boba drinkers that mix the layers together? I’ve never seen that and it seems almost taboo: Boba drinks seem to assume a palate that wants to be entertained, every layer a different texture game. Boba, in short, is fun: a ball pit at the bottom of a cup that is eminently photographable, improved by any Instagram filter, an invitation to restage childhood games in your mouth.

The resistant gelatinousness of boba, the elusive “Q” texture, has variously been described as “springy and chewy” or, as one writer translated from the words tan ya—“rebound teeth.” Gelatins are solid liquids, substances that are able to bind water, thickening and holding their shape, and, interestingly, often suspending aroma and taste for a slow release such that the experience of flavor unrolls slowly in the mouth and nose. The best gelatins—which is to say the smoothest and the clearest gels—promise an evanescent physics of recoil and release: scientific food at its best, where it meets the quotidian productions of street and small shop food production, transcribed into a multisensory event.

If I could write this essay as a letter to other lovers of the gelatinous, I would extol the pleasures of these drinks as they happen in slow motion time. Some boba drinks contain multiple jellies: boba followed by basil seeds followed by lychee or grass jelly, followed by a fruit drink or a tea. Some bobas at the slushy end of the drink menu are layered with flavors like ube and coconut milk. Driving around the SGV with my son during the pandemic, trying to get away from the hygienic pandemic containment field defined by masks and car windows and windows and doors and fences, we drove to Rosemead to Neighbors Tea House to try the smashed avocado and durian drinks as well as the mung bean drinks, none of which we had with boba but which seemed boba-aligned in their indifference to any cultural line between drink and food.

We tried The Alley’s Snow Strawberry Lulu and Brown Sugar Deerioca as well as the exquisite snow velvet muscat black tea, each of them a meditation on the kind of symphonic experience that sweetness can make musical. At the Boba Guys, we tried the perfect candy drink banana milk, the smoky black sugar hojicha, and their highly photogenic strawberry matcha latte and strawberry rice milk drinks. We tried the peach tea and the strawberry fruit teas at Dragon Boba in La Cañada, and ogled but did not try the boba doughnuts. By far some of the best boba we had was the housemade boba at Tea Maru in Arcadia, where we tried the Strawberry Fluffy Matcha, layered atop a berry jam bottom, and the brilliant Okinawa Slush that flips the whole paradigm and puts their homemade brown sugar boba on the top of the drink.

Boba’s pleasing categorical and sensory promiscuity is summed up in the boba shop’s ubiquitous wide straw, so completely opposite to the anemic straws of Western fast food. The former are made to not just let a liquid through but actually to let in food-like drink. This confusion of eating categories is perhaps what some people can’t take about boba drink culture: If Claude Lévi-Strauss long ago proposed a culinary triangle that elevated the West from the Rest via a differentiation between the primitive Raw and the cultured Cooked, Western food cultures tend to assume the difference between food and beverages, with the exception of the historically virtuous smoothie. Boba drinks are food and drink, or along another line, drinks that are more complex than a quick sip that slides down the throat. Boba tea from a really quality boba shop insists on a complex and interesting sensory experience that is visual as well as flavorful, that choreographs layers of texture that are as casually beautiful as they are sensually complex.

How does one find a resting place in a culture that is not one’s own? Is there a way to approach a world of difference without stealing from it? There are many bad racial subjects in food culture, just as there are in the world: the appropriators, the people who lift ingredients and transport them to other foods without understanding or appreciation for local food technologies; the cosmopolitans, so eager to recite facts and knowledge about food cultures not their own; the thieves who take recipes from their original knowledge holders and reproduce them deracinated and unrecognizable. And in turn there are the “good” racial subjects, who write only about their own lineages and cultures. The immigrants nostalgic for a taste and feel of home, banking on recreating their memories as closely as they can approximate.

One shorthand way to talk about the politics of difference in food has been through bell hooks’s cannily marketable phrase “Eating the Other,” in which usually white consumers devour exotic difference metaphorically and figuratively, while not paying attention to the people whose lives and complexity they commodify. These are the slings and arrows thrown so easily around social media debates on race and difference and eating, and some of them land where they should, and it is all so very tiring. We are in a tiring time.

A more generous and gentle take might be that there are places and histories where people and their desires cross each other—where touch happens, where the sensory congruences that shape each of our innermost senses of having private desires and tastes in fact overlaps and resonates, as history or as a shared present. It is harder work to get there: History is dense and chewy that way.