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.

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is marking its centennial, celebrating the storied history of a stadium that will host an unprecedented third Summer Olympics in 2028. Famous for the graceful peristyle end that echoes the arches of the Colosseum in Rome, the vast stadium also has hosted two Super Bowls and a World Series, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, and all of USC football’s eight Heisman Trophy winners.

Pomona College has a small part in all that history, but a notable one: On October 6, 1923, Pomona played USC in the first varsity college football game ever played on the Coliseum field.

Although the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opened for other events earlier in 1923, the first varsity college football game in the stadium was between USC and Pomona on October 6, 1923, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

“Trojans and Sagehens Dedicate Coliseum Today,” read the Los Angeles Times headline that Saturday. Bleacher seats were $1, Los Angeles fans were instructed to take streetcar lines to the game, and a special train car traveled from Claremont to the Coliseum. The Student Life gave driving instructions that did not include the then-unimaginable 10 Freeway: “Go to Pomona, thence to Los Angeles over Valley boulevard. Proceed to Figueroa and then south to Exposition Park. Stadium is on west side of grounds.”

Pomona’s student body president, Ranney C. Draper 1925 P’60—the father of Pomona College Trustee Emeritus Ranney E. Draper ’60—not only played in the game, but “introduced a new wrinkle yesterday when he appeared at the University of Southern California during chapel period and expressed the belief that, while the Trojans have a fair sort of football team, Pomona will clean them today,” according to an unidentified newspaper clipping that spelled his first name as Rammey.

The Pomona quarterback was Earl J. Merritt 1925 P’39, already known as ‘Fuzz’ or variations thereof, who would go on to coach the Sagehens from 1935 to 1958 and for whom Pomona-Pitzer’s stadium, Merritt Field, is named. The Times called him “a quarterback who looked like the best signal-yelper in Southern California last year on the Freshman squad.”

Quarterback Earl “Fuzz” Merritt 1925 P’39, the second player from left in the top row of this photo of the 1923 starters from the Metate yearbook, went on to coach Pomona’s football team from 1935 to 1958. Pomona-Pitzer’s Merritt Field was named in his honor in 1991.

A TSL preview of the game written by George W. Savage 1925 displayed the colorful style of the sportswriters of the era: “Led by Captain ‘Herb’ Mooney, ten fighting-mad Sagehens, who have eaten horseradish for the last month in order to ‘horse’ the Trojans, will trot onto the fresh green turf of the nation’s largest stadium, prepared to meet all the wiles [Trojan Coach Gus] Henderson and his men have concocted, all the power and weight U.S.C. possesses, and ready to do their stuff as one of the two picked teams chosen to combat in dedication of the newest temple to the great American collegiate game.”

Mooney, the aforementioned team captain, would go on to become a doctor and round out his own personal Sagehen 11. His alumni record reads: Mooney Sr., Herbert 1924 P’55 P’57 P’59 P’65 P’77 GP’82 GP’86 GP’04 GP’07 GP’13.

The game itself was a disappointment for the Sagehens.

Ranney C. Draper 1925 P’60, left, the father of Trustee Emeritus Ranney E. Draper ’60, spoke at USC as Pomona’s student body president before playing in the game. Clipping courtesy of Ranney E. Draper.

“Trojans Trim Pomona, 23 to 7, Before 25,000 Fans at the Coliseum,” the Times headline read. “The U.S.C. Trojan swallowed the Pomona Sagehen, 23 to 7, yesterday but found the gravel-fed bird from Claremont entirely too tough for easy digestion.”

USC, of course, would go on to become a football powerhouse, claiming 11 national championships, and Pomona would settle comfortably into NCAA Division III. All told, Pomona and USC met 21 times on the gridiron. The Sagehens won four games—in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1914—tied four others and lost 13. The last meeting was in 1925, two years after the teams’ Coliseum debut, when an 80-0 Pomona loss relegated the series to history.

Above, a montage of protesters at a “Stop the Steal” rally supporting President Donald J. Trump in Phoenix on November 14, 2020, a week after his re-election bid was called in favor of Joe Biden by major news organizations. Photo by Stephen Marc

Of all the images Stephen Marc Smith ’76 creates, it is the ones of the people he has least in common with that may define him best.

A photographer, digital montage artist and Arizona State University art professor who adopted the name Stephen Marc professionally in 1979 after two other Stephen Smiths were accepted to the same exhibition, Marc recently published his fifth book, Street Cat Tales and Tangled Times: An American Journey Continues.

A photographic travelogue of more than 200 photos and digital montages, Street Cat Tales records the outpouring in our streets during a time of pandemic, racial and political division, gun violence and more. It is a follow-up to his award-winning American/True Colors, which recorded 12 years of life in the U.S. at some of its more fragile moments.

Whether he is photographing vibrant street scenes, a “Stop the Steal” rally or an immigration stare down, the way Marc gets the shot is part of the story. He is a Black man with a camera who has talked his way into white supremacist rallies, social justice protests and the hearts of Chicago gang members with his disarming approachability. His deft banter and innate friendliness have allowed him to capture a lifetime of photos that transport the viewer into the midst of volatile and sometimes disturbing situations.

“If I go and I photograph an event like this and then I simply leave with the photographs, I’m going to be illustrating a preconceived idea. I’m making some assumptions about what’s there,” Marc says. “If I interact, then I’m learning a little bit more about what’s really going on. I feel very fortunate when they share things with me.”

It is those unlikely connections that bewilder many people, including his wife, Ani Tung, who watched Jacob Chansley—the QAnon Shaman and January 6 rioter whose horned fur hat made him one of the most recognizable participants in the assault on the U.S. Capitol—bear hug her husband at a Trump rally in Phoenix.

“So you know him, too,” she said of Chansley, who since has served time in federal prison for obstruction of an official proceeding. Marc told his wife he had a civil discussion about cultural appropriation at another protest with Chansley, who couldn’t understand why the Native American community was upset with him even though his attire had its roots in their culture.

A photograph of the Nishnabotna Ferry House in Iowa is overlayed with an 1838 letter (courtesy of John L. Ford) from a Mississippi slave owner ordering shoes for his slaves. Their names and shoe sizes cover the roadway (Passage on the Underground Railroad). Photo by Stephen Marc

For his previous book, American/True Colors, Marc traversed the country in an old car, landing at gatherings and protests of all sorts. Some of the most powerful photographs came from a 2015 Ku Klux Klan rally at the South Carolina State House a week after the Confederate battle flag was permanently removed from the capitol grounds following the massacre of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston by a white supremacist. Yet because Marc engaged with both protesters and law enforcement before the rally, Klan supporters did nothing to impede him, a Black photographer who was a mere sucker punch away.

The most striking shot may be the one he took from behind the shoulders of a powerfully built state trooper—a Black officer assigned to keep peace among the factions. More than a dozen waving Confederate flags define the background. To the side is a banner featuring hooded Klansmen and a jarring phrase: “The Original Boys N the Hood.” The photo is soul-rattling because it is from the perspective of a Black law enforcement official. Once again, Marc’s fearlessness allows us to become voyeurs, at a safe distance.

His other books have examined different aspects of the American experience and Black lives. In particular, Passage on the Underground Railroad tells the story of attempts to aid escaped and enslaved people from the South before the end of the Civil War. Marc gained unprecedented access to some sites, among them the birthplace of abolitionist Harriet Tubman, and created digital collages by melding 21st-century photos with historical documents.

This 2022 montage depicts a stare down at the 2018 Families Belong Together rally at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix. Photo by Stephen Marc

One location had particularly deep meaning for him: The town of Canton, Mississippi, is in the area where he is told his great-great-grandmother was enslaved. Marc’s great-grandmother also lived there, and his grandmother was born there. Standing on the grounds of the local courthouse—a place in many towns where slaves were sold—Marc photographed it as it is today. Later, he digitally superimposed the shirtless torso of a Black man on top of a tree stump. “Any kind of raised area—whether it was steps or a stump or a pedestal—people were auctioned off of, so people could see them,” Marc says. On the man’s chest, he added lettering from an 1846 token, as if the man had been branded. “The token is from Charleston, South Carolina, an auction house that sold slaves,” he says.

Marc’s path has been anything but predictable. One of his earliest inspirations came when he was 11 years old and living in Chicago. He befriended Ira Harmon, a neighborhood boy who already was a skilled cartoonist. Marc was blown away by his friend’s focus, drive and utter desire to research everything that he drew.

“I remember the first time I went to his house, his mother said, ‘I’m sorry, he can’t come out.’ So I said, ‘What’s going on?’ She goes, ‘What’s today, Monday? He’ll be out on Thursday.’” When he asked what his friend had done wrong, “She said he told her to leave him alone for four days. He’s drawing. They even had to negotiate family meals. Later on, I could meet with him for like 15 minutes at the front door.”

The moment left an impression about curiosity and work ethic, and to this day the men remain close friends.

Marc’s interest in capturing images developed after he took a photography class in high school, at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. He soon thought of that as a career pursuit, but when he went to Pomona College, his parents strongly suggested another path. Psychology became his new direction.

Though the desire to take pictures never left him, Marc didn’t take a photography class until his junior year. It was taught by Leland Rice, a highly regarded photographer and curator who inspired him and remains a friend and mentor. Suddenly, Marc found himself trying to pursue three different passions: photography, psychology and sports.

Competing on Pomona-Pitzer’s track team as Stephen Smith, he was an NAIA All-American and five-time NCAA Division III All-American who still holds program records in the 200 meters (21.32 seconds) and 110-meter hurdles (14.19). A two-time team MVP, he later was inducted into the Pomona-Pitzer Athletics Hall of Fame. He loved track. But he found something he loved even more.

“I mean, I was cutting track practice in the afternoon to go photograph because of the lighting,” Marc says. “You know, my friends were asking me where I was. I was missing meals. I fell behind in a couple of my classes. And that was not like me. So I sat down and tried to figure out what was really going on.”

Of all his loves, he realized that photography had the strongest pull.

Marc eventually received a master’s in fine arts from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. He taught at Columbia College Chicago for 20 years and has been on the faculty at ASU since 1998.

In 2021, Marc was named a Guggenheim Fellow in photography by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has won numerous awards, among them the 2021 gold medal for best photography book from the Independent Publishers Book Awards for American/True Colors. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati and the Chicago Cultural Center. He also has completed residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and at the CEPA Gallery, both in New York state.

Firefighters taking part in a 2022 anti-vaccine mandate rally in Washington carry the U.S. flag from the Washington Monument toward the Lincoln Memorial in this digital montage. Photo by Stephen Marc

Marc says he captures such powerful photos not only by researching his subjects but also by preparing for what he might encounter.

“One thing I tell my students is that when you go out and photograph, I don’t care what you’re photographing, just take a moment and look in the mirror,” he says. “Think about how somebody like you dresses and the kind of equipment that you’re carrying. … The photographer is always the bad guy. We’re always doing something we’re not supposed to be. And so you need to get ahead of that so that you are prepared for the questions and the challenges that you’re going to get.”