How To Eat Better Through Ethnographic Diet With June Jo Lee

Welcome to Care More, Be Better, a Circle B podcast. Each week, I invite you to care more so that together we can create a better world. We’re just returning from my holiday break with our first episode of the new year. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be back in this saddle as I introduce you to our guest, my friend, June Jo Lee. I met June Jo Lee at the largest natural foods show in the industry last spring, Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim. There, she presented her very interesting, groundbreaking ethnographic research on how Generation Z connects with food.

June is a food ethnographer. She studies how and why we eat for food-related businesses. She calls food her portal to understand generational shifts and tracks early signals of what our future has entailed for us. She is also an author of some really incredible picture books, including Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix, which has become a favorite of my kids, as well as a co-founder of the publisher that brings you these works, including Farmer Eva’s Green Garden Life, which has also become another favorite of mine.

This work enables people to integrate their understanding of food and culture into the walls of their homes. Since she lives near me, we’ve had the chance to connect in person a few times since last spring, spending time browsing markets in San Francisco and enjoying some beautiful wild-foraged morel mushrooms that she grilled up for me at home. I even got a behind-the-scenes peek at what it might look like to explore food experiences when I attended an event at Google. She has served as their resident food ethnographer for the last ten years. June Jo Lee, welcome to the show.

Good to see you again, Corinna.

I have to say, I’ve missed you.

I have too. It’s fun when you have a friend who’s as into food as you are, not just personally through enjoyment, but also professionally through work.

Our Savory, Spicy, Significant Relationship With Food

We both put so much of our lives into this space, too, and really just to understand that you are bringing this message forward in so many different ways, through collaborations with executives and then also through your recent TED Talk, which I believe just got published about a month ago. I’d love to start our catch-up session there and learn what this whole experience was like. I’ve got the title here, Our Savory, Spicy, Significant Relationship with Food. I’ve watched it about four or five times. It’s great. What was it like?

It was very professional, and it was a special section of the TED Talks. I focused on climate change and the fact that we are at a crisis, so they did a special episode on food, and it was wonderful. It was in New York City at TED headquarters, and they gathered people from around the world who work in food. They had speakers, and I was included on the speaker list. Before we even started speaking, we went on field trips throughout New York City, arranged by this organization. I got to visit the Green Bronx Machine up in the Bronx. That was incredible, to see the work that people are doing throughout the city in all different ways, from education to growing and more.

June’s Work As A Food Ethnographer

Your TED Talk is essentially, I would call it, the condensed version of the talk that I got to see you give at Expo West 2024, which really helped me understand the relationship of food intergenerationally and how we can better even connect with our kids. I’m a mom, too, but my kids are a little younger than yours, they’re seven and ten. How do you really take on this work as a food ethnographer, and what might we learn from what you’ve already been able to put out into the world?

For me, ethnography has been my lifelong journey to listen. The first place where everyone needs to listen is to themselves. I was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1970, and I had very strong parents. I fought for the first quarter of my life to be heard. For me, my whole career as a food ethnographer, I started my professional career out in food at the Hartman Group in Bellevue, Washington, where I applied food ethnography to consumer research. That’s where I started learning how to listen. I started learning how to listen to what people wanted.

I never knew how to listen to what I wanted. What do I want? But I learned how to listen to what other people wanted. I formalized it somewhere in my 40s and was able to leave the Hartman Group and become a food ethnographer. This was also at a time when my kids were in their teens, in high school, and then transitioning to college. They would say to me, “Mom, you don’t get it.” We would have fights at the dinner table.

I didn’t get it. I didn’t get them. I decided to apply my deep listening skills to my kids, but it’s really hard to talk to your kids. I started asking other Gen Zers their age, “What is your flavor of home? What are your food rules? How are you learning to care more about food?” I started to learn about this generation, our children’s generation, and it became formalized into a cohort study. What I shared during my TED Talk was really how I learned how to listen, how I transformed my life through ethnography, and how I saved my relationship with my kids through my professional work.

How To Become A Better Listener

We have spent so long trying to learn to be heard that we somehow forget to listen. I wonder, was your approach, or coming at food ethnography and this type of research, did you get to better listening by learning to ask questions differently? What would you say are the methods that you employed? Because even as I listen to your TED Talk, you encourage people to ask questions like, “What’s your flavor of home? or How does this particular food from your culture and history make you feel?” and really to get at the core of not only somebody’s relationship with food, but culture and how they relate to one another through food. It caused me to really sit and reflect on that. Is it the questions we’re asking? What is it that helps you to become a better listener, just generally speaking? Because we could all apply this.

It took about eleven years doing consumer research, and the way the industry market research does consumer research is we have a recruiter who finds specific consumer segments that we’re interested in based on where they live, income, whether they are buyers of a certain brand or not, or a category participant. What Harvey Hartman did was apply cultural anthropology. Think about consumers through a cultural lens versus a psychosocial lens. Rather than asking about needs and aspirations as an individual, we started asking as cultural anthropologists, trying to see the shared and common patterns.

I got eleven years to practice with a whole lot of people all across America and beyond. As I was asking them these questions, I realized the questions that my clients were interested in, “Do they like this color? What do they want more of? Less of?” I could get consumers to answer in the last ten minutes, but the most important part was to build trust and rapport and go deep in. One of the questions that really helps me get deep in is to ask them about their past. Understanding their past context of what food was like growing up for them gave me a lot of threads to follow.

First, I was able to understand where they grew up, what their cultural or ethnic lineage was. If they grew up in a home that had a strong food involvement or not, it just reveals a lot. I somehow understood that when I deeply listened to them and followed the consumer, because they’re the expert of their own lives, rather than trying to educate them, they shared and revealed a lot to me.

I was able to ask all the client questions in about ten minutes at the end of the interview or throughout the interview, but I would get better results when I just listened and followed the consumer as they were starting to retell their story of their life through food. I realized when they do that, you learn so deeply about who they are. Also, you can start seeing the patterns of who we are as an American culture through the lens of food.

That’s beautiful. One of the things that gets me thinking about this, because I’ve also done a bit of market research, is that when you take an ethnographic or cultural perspective to a lot of this research, you often are following people and their habits. I’ve done ethnographic reviews of consumers of products for brands that I’ve worked with that literally followed them into their home to see what their patterns were like in different spaces, which is incredibly expensive to conduct research that way. Not all companies are willing to dedicate the amount of resources required to really do that, at least not until they get quite large. I wonder if your research took you from more of an interview perspective into their homes, or how it was differed.

During my years when I was at the Hartman Group, we didn’t do longitudinal qualitative research. You would want to speak to a unique consumer. We had about two and a half hours with them, sometimes a little more. Depending on the nature of the client’s questions, we would meet at a grocery store and ask them to shop a certain category, let’s say, boxed salads, and then really follow them and listen closely and see how they’re choosing, see their line of reasoning.

Why did they pick up one box versus the other? Which was their favorite brand?

This was in situ. Sometimes we would even follow them to their homes and have them prepare a meal, just to truly understand what’s in their pantry and how they make choices along the decision tree of how they get dinner on the table, for example. I remember another study, it was focused on convenience store foods, snack foods. And so I would ride in minivans with moms and see from the house to the store and back again, and see how snacks were used with their kids.

All kinds of ways to really deeply understand what was going on. Something that’s important is to not just listen, but to hear what’s not said and what’s not expressed. That’s where you get to deep listening. It’s not just hearing the words or the narratives or the stories people share. It’s also knowing what’s not said, what’s done. I love it when things don’t quite make sense, when there are gaps and little paradoxes, because that’s where you find a lot of interesting insights.

Certainly. The mélange of people’s flavors and tastes also comes from multiple perspectives. The reasons they like something, they may not even really know it. Maybe you can help them reveal that too, through your research. It’s really fun. As somebody who comes from a cultural anthropology background, I find it all fascinating.

Understanding The Benefits Of Ethnographic Diet

Through getting to know you, I’ve heard you suggest that the best diet, or maybe not the best diet, that might not be the correct way to state it, or I might be oversimplifying, but something like the best diet for you is your ethnographic diet. What is an ethnographic diet? How would you identify that, and how might this bring more to your life?

It’s really interesting. Let me show people. I have this very old copy of a 1955 Life issue.

Looks like a Norman Rockwell.

It was 20¢ an issue at the time, in 1955. It was post-war, and the person who gave me her copy, she was part of the Organic Standards Board, representing PCC. This ad, which is less fattening.

It shows three teaspoons of domino sugar contains fewer calories than three small tomatoes.

What the subtext is saying is that three teaspoons of Domino sugar is less fattening, is healthier than eating three small tomatoes. That’s when I started realizing, what is really healthy? It’s a cultural filter.

Power of advertising.

What we think is good to eat is really determined by our culture and what we collectively believe in. For me, the word healthy is a tricky word. I really don’t like the word healthy because, as I was interviewing consumers over my twenty years, I realized it’s a shorthand. It’s a way to stop being curious. You’ll ask them, “Tell me about your diet. How do you eat? How do you make food choices?”

Most people invariably say, “I try to be healthy,” and then it ends the conversation there. I realized healthy is also very culturally constructed. Fat was bad, and then fat became good, and carbohydrates and sugar became the evil. It really depends on what we think is good to eat. What we think is good to eat is determined by culture.

We did a lot of research on all the dietary lifestyles that started coming up, the whole gluten-free movement, paleo, vegan, raw. There are so many trends, dietary lifestyles. What I believe in is that when you examine your own food rules, it starts revealing a lot about who you are, what you believe in, and what you’re aspiring for what you want. We ask our food to do a lot of work for our lives. Food is often a place where people start when they’re trying to transform their lives or improve themselves.

I’ve heard you suggest in our time together that an individual’s best diet might be one that is their ethnographic diet. I’d love to better understand what makes an ethnographic diet and how we might personally identify what makes up ours.

I’ve stated it as the ethnographic diet, how to transform your life while eating the foods you love. I did a lot of consumer research during the time when lifestyle dietary trends started happening, from paleo to gluten-free to vegan and raw. I interviewed consumers who were following this, and they were so excited to start transforming their lives with the promise of self-improvement, better health, better relationships, better everything. I realized that these arbitrary rules that we start following really give us a sense of control over our lives. What it does is help us pay a lot more attention to food and slow us down as we start to make food rules.

Be it gluten-free or paleo, for most people, when you ask them, “What happened? Why did you decide to go down this route?” There is some sense of deep need to transform who they are. The food itself didn’t really matter as much as the fact that these dietary lifestyles enabled people to spend more time on themselves through the daily act of choosing what to eat, preparing that food. It also enabled them to break social relationships. When you’re on a really strict dietary lifestyle plan, it’s hard to socialize. It creates a lot of control.

You were the lead author in an article that was published in the journal Nutrients about how standard patient history can be improved using ethnographic food life questions. I wondered if you could talk about that for a moment and just tell us what you learned and perhaps how this might be reshaping a bit of how people approach medicine.

The article was inspired by David Eisenberg, who’s also a co-author. David is a part of Harvard School of Public Health. He is both a physician as well as a founder of Teaching Kitchens Collaborative. As a physician, he believes that so many of our unwellness, disease, and illness stem from chronic conditions around our relationship with food and that the current medical education system doesn’t reflect all the ways in which patients have a relationship with food in their lives. The way that medical education approaches food is through weight, height, and “Tell me a typical diet.” Maybe they’ll ask you to eat more fruits and vegetables, watch your sugar, watch your salt and cholesterol, but it’s a very quantitative approach.

Many diseases and illnesses stem from chronic conditions around our relationship with food.

It’s upholding and guilt-prone.

Can be. Typically, when you go see your physician, they start asking you these questions, and inside the thought bubble of patients is, “Why should I? Why should I tell you?”

Often, people don’t feel comfortable telling the truth about their habits because they fear judgment or that it will somehow impact the doctor’s perspective of them, when they only get ten minutes with them or something to that effect. There’s not as long of a relationship as our grandparents developed with their doctors. It’s a much different world now.

David and I and our other co-authors thought, “What if we had an ethnographic approach to asking these questions?” What if we built rapport and had the food history be a part of getting to know them, of building trust and mutual respect, and really started getting a sense of what was going on in people’s lives? Essentially, from my perspective, it is applying the techniques that market researchers, brands, and the food industry have used for many decades to understand the basic needs, desires, and aspirations of their consumer at a deep level in order to design, sell, and produce food products.

What if physicians started borrowing some of that way of getting to know who their patients were, through the portal of food? The way that we designed the three questions was to start in the past, have the patient reflect on something about their past,  “What is the flavor of home growing up?” Then bring them into the present moment, “What are your food rules or your approach to food? Do you have a food philosophy?” Which brings them into the present moment.

It’s not asking them what they eat on a typical week, but it’s starting to get into what they think is good to eat and what is not. It’s asking the patient if the physicians can join the patient in their journey of some future state. The third question is, “How are you learning to care more about food?” Because as researchers, we know people are always trying something, at least something new or different or have something in mind. Rather than telling the patient what they should be doing, it’s saying, “What are you thinking you might be interested in?” Some possibility of change, and asking for permission to explore that change with the patient.

This is what I was trying to get at with my question about what an ethnographic food is, or what an ethnographic diet might be, because in the time that I’ve known you, I’ve asked myself this question with relative frequency, what is an ethnographic diet? What does it mean? What would my ethnographic diet be if I was to line one out, something to that effect? When I think about food from that kind of a culture perspective, I was going to say, there’s a diet for each person that reflects on their culture. It really got me thinking about what comfort foods were to me, what foods I had discovered on my own in my life that I felt like somehow identified me separate from the path of my growing up.

What my food aspirations might be. Thinking about how this then layers into the person that I hope to become, or the person that I hope to help my children become, not only the way I feed them, but the experiences I’ve put in front of them, or how I teach them to cook and the types of spices that I might use that my mother never braved, and those sorts of things. As I discover cultures around the world and develop a penchant for Indian food and then decide I have to learn to make naan myself, as an example, because I love bread so much. It really caused me to think about separating myself from these ideas of guilt, even around bread as an example, because I also derive so much enjoyment from bread.

You’re told things like, “These are empty calories,” but a good whole wheat food like sourdough can be incredibly nutritious and also support good gut bacteria. We’re told so many things as these fads and trends come up, this is somehow villainized. You find out later that the tomato is a lot more healthy than the teaspoon of sugar.

This idea of healthy is so subjective. It really depends. Healthy has been used to push so much food, by grandmothers and mothers and doctors and food marketers. If you say it’s healthy, that’s a way to get people to eat a certain way. For me, the ethnographic diet is really starting to trust your own body, and to listen to yourself, and to listen to your family and your friends. Just to start by listening, without judgment.

That’s sort of the beginning of what ethnography is. It’s like, you suspend your own judgment, even analysis, and you listen deeply to someone else, without judgment, without trying to say, “Is that scientifically proven truth?” You suspend your own judgment about food. This is how you start. You just listen and try to imagine and feel and sense and taste what the other person is describing, without judgment.

You really enter into their experience, you embrace their experience, and you enter fully into their lives through food. What you realize is, it doesn’t really matter what we’re eating. It matters in how our relationship with food is. Are we experiencing joy? Do you have joy with the bread? With the naan bread? Is it the baking part? Why Indian food? What are the flavors? What are the spices that remind you of something that you’ve had in the past, or some moment in your time where maybe you experienced great transformation, like you grew and you learned, and that flavor is associated with a certain point in your life?

It does not really matter what we are eating. What matters is our relationship with food.

That’s why you like it. You start listening to these. As you start listening, you start understanding someone deeply. Hopefully, you can also start understanding yourself, because food is a reflection. It’s a mirror. A question that I often ask is, Mirror, mirror on your spoon, what is a loving mouthful? What is a loving spoonful? While I’m listening to you, I’m also thinking about that same sensation and love that I might have experienced sometime in my past. It’s this way of opening up conversation, to deeply listen and to deeply be heard. That’s the nourishment. What we decide is good to eat or not, we’ve all experienced this changing in waves, depending on what the latest, most best story about food is.

Cooking With The Flavor In Your Fingertips

As we just go through this conversation, I was thinking about the books that you’re bringing into the world, the stories that you’re working to tell, that are, in themselves, food ethnographies. The children’s book Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix, which is an exploration of a different take on tacos and how his whole story came to be, integrating not only his culture, but his love of food. This whole concept of taking something that is a bit of a comfort food, people love tacos in this way, and then bringing it to people through his taco trucks. And then telling the story in a very artful way, with his voice and with art, and bringing people on this journey to understand the flavors of cuisine that were brought from son-mat.

The flavors in our fingertips. It is the love and cooking talent that Korean mothers and grandmothers mix into their handmade foods, bringing these essences of culture, not only from a language perspective, but just the love of food, into the food that is being made, that is then being given out through his taco trucks around all of the Los Angeles area. This book, the reason I’m bringing this up, too, has become a favorite of my kids.

My son, Benedict, brought it out two days ago because he wanted to read it to his younger brother. He’s at a stage now where he can do that, and I feel really good about it, and he enjoys it. And then he asks me about this map, and “Where are these places? Can we go to where Chef Roy Choi’s trucks are?” Which, this week, caused us to go into a discussion about the fires in Los Angeles, and some of the other challenges that we might be facing.

I really would like to hear how you’re bringing story through these generations with individual features like that on Chef Roy Choi or Farmer Eva, who’s taking an approach to organic, regenerative gardening. Telling these stories, not only to the adults that might be reading them to their kids, but to this next generation.

When I was working at the Hartman Group, I would listen to a lot of people describe their approach to food, what they were avoiding, what they were seeking more of, how they were thinking about meals, how they were thinking about feeding their kids and their children, and I started just really developing a sense, my own sense, of food rules and an approach to food. I wanted to share it more broadly.

I couldn’t share it through the consulting work, because our clients were interested in very specific questions. But this general sense of What is good to eat? How should we be eating? I started thinking about it and learning from everyone I was interviewing. It really is pretty simple. I wrote Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix to share these profound insights that I was learning from the American consumer.

I connected it to my own background, being Korean American. It starts with son-mat. Son means hands, and mat means taste or flavor. It is cooking with son-mat. That means to cook from the flavors of your grandmas and moms and grandpas, cook with that flavor. How do your kids like things to taste? To make it to that taste rather than following a recipe online. Really deeply listening to what your family likes, for example, and cooking to that. Let’s start there.

Making it at home and having it be part of your experience as a family, as you spend time together. It becomes mindful by nature then, right?

That’s right. Cooking with son-mat. That is the first key that unlocked for me. If food is so important, and we put so much importance on the role of food in our lives, to transform our lives, to lose weight, be stronger, be healthier, avoid chronic illness, and yet we spend so little time in the actual preparing of food. The industry that I helped was a huge part of that because we like convenience. We like things to be affordable. We like quick and easy.

Slowly, people started cooking less. Everybody had to cook to people’s preferences because preferences became codified in these dietary lifestyles, or they had to be considered in terms of allergens and intolerances and all this, we’re just learning so much more about the effect of food in our lives. We lose confidence. We stop somehow relying on our own ability to listen to what we want, what our body wants, and what our family wants, taste-wise, and what would make our bodies feel better. That’s what I wanted to share through Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix, was cook more. Cook with the flavor in your fingertips.

I think so much of my life before I truly learned what my own cooking style was, was to go to a cookbook and always grab the recipe and feel like you couldn’t deviate from it. Like, “I have the recipe,” or “I get my meal kit in the mail.” You have all the ingredients that you’re supposed to use, only to learn that my family doesn’t like to use quite so much sour cream in a dressing, or they like it a little bit more spicy, or maybe I don’t want to use cilantro, and I’ll substitute something like parsley. When I started to allow myself, in my own kitchen, a little bit more creative freedom, everybody liked the food more.

How did you learn that? What did you do?

It was as simple as, when I grew up with my mom cooking, she seemed to be stressed about following certain recipes if she didn’t know how to cook something very well. It was very regimented, and she’d have all the spoons and cups out and things like that to measure the quantities of things that you would put in. It made it a nervous thing for me. When I realized that I could make any soup pretty well, and I would use the inspiration of, “Some of my vegetables in the crisper drawer are starting to look a little rubbery. It’s time to do something with them.”

I can go ahead and make a really great soup stock with some of this stuff still, and start to experiment with some spices. I will tell you, sometimes I made something that didn’t taste very good, or that the texture wasn’t right, or ended up being a waste, but maybe it would have been waste already anyway. I just started allowing myself a little bit more freedom. I also acknowledge that I really don’t like heavily laden, fatty foods very much. Many of the recipes that call for a lot of heavy cream or crème fraîche or something like that, I just lighten them up a little bit, like not put quite so much of that thing in there.

I just liked it a little bit more. Put a little bit more acid. I liked more of that, perhaps a sour kick with my foods. My palate isn’t super deep, French, creamy, lots of butter. I prefer things to have a little bit more tartness and a robust flavor, and some spice to them, and some heat. I do have to tone that down a bit for my kids, but they’re learning to explore with me. As I step into learning to make Indian food, because I’ve shifted my own dietary habits to be more aligned with plant-based eating, just less meat.

I’m looking for creative ways to bring more proteins in. I love garbanzo beans, and I love creating different kinds of hummus, and have even begun experimenting with my own recipes there. I’m soaking some dry garbanzo beans right now, upstairs. This is an example. Learning that I don’t like canned garbanzo beans. I prefer them that way.

You can taste it.

The texture is different, and the flavor. If, for instance, I’m going to be making an Indian-inspired, and I say inspired because I have made it my own but a lentil stew, and I’ll cook it in my slow cooker. I do wash the lentils. I do use garbanzo beans. I don’t like using canned beans, because it cooks for so long that the canned beans end up being mushy. They already start out mushy, but they become more mushy.

I use the dry beans. I can get them organic, and they’re relatively local to me. That’s all great, too. The spice mix that we integrate, I find I don’t like as much of the cardamom. I use less of that. I use more of the turmeric. I will dive into a bit of anise and throw some star anise in there. I’m developing it and bridging it into something that I both have a better taste preference for, but that my kids will also eat, because it’s not quite as earthy with the spices that are in there, or I haven’t put quite as much of the cayenne pepper.

From the other vegetables that I include, it’s got the celery, carrots, and onion that I would typically have in another soup stock. It has some of that more traditional stuff coming in. I’m also not using a chicken stock to get me started. It’s vegetarian, and it’s all fresh. Limiting, at the same time, the amount of salt that I use, because I don’t like super salty soups. The end result is something that my older son absolutely loves, and he will eat with me all week long.

My younger son will have maybe once. My husband has a distaste for it. You can’t please everybody all the time. I can’t customize this kind of a meal, because it takes four hours to cook to each person. Anyway, developing something I love, that my older son also loves, and that my younger son is developing.

Something that I’ve been thinking about is how lonely recipes are. When you look a recipe up, and then it has all the ingredients and the quantities. That’s how modern recipes are written these days.

One teaspoon of this, and half a teaspoon of that.

You can get maybe a food app that turns it into a shopping list. You go by yourself, shop for the food, and then you cook by yourself. Following this recipe, you’re not considering what you like, what your older son likes, what your younger son likes. Possibly, your husband, or, for him, he’s going to have to eat, according to my taste, this meal. You’re not considering that. You’re just cooking it, following this recipe.

I love the way you cook, Corinna. That really is son-mat. That four hours is truly self-care for yourself and your family. You’re learning about yourself. Your family that comes around and shares the meal, they know how much effort, maybe they know how much effort you put into it. That love you’ve put into it, and you’ve put it in. Everybody enjoys it. It might not be their favorite meal, but they still gather around the table and enjoy it.

Personal Thoughts About Food

I know the thing that would solve it for my husband is if I just stuck a whole chicken in there, he’d be fine. He doesn’t like plant-based food so much. I’m not eating as much of the meat. I’ll do something else for him, which is easier, simpler, and he’ll be fine. He’ll have a little bit of the soup, but eat the other thing. Also, just understanding that I’m trying to focus on what we were talking about earlier, real foods, not just something that comes in a box on a shelf and that is pre-prepared with some variety of spices that are somewhat middle of the road.

I want to create something new. I also have found this world where people get meal kits delivered, there’s not a lot of wiggle room in these recipes. They ship you things like, “There’s this many pouches of sour cream, and here’s the spice packet, and here’s this, and here’s that.” A lot of the time, it just says, Italian spice blend or something hot blend or whatever. You don’t know what’s in those things. Even if you loved it, you couldn’t identify, “That was a mix of cayenne and this other spice that I also love,” and then learn to cook with that, because they almost want to build a reliance on the product that they’re selling.

You’ll just keep coming back to this thing, and you won’t develop, necessarily, the skills to learn to cook. Allowing exploration, allowing yourself to fail, it also makes food more interesting. That’s just what I love about it. I will say, I probably am addicted to sourdough bread. Anything that I can have with sourdough bread, I would love.

Why do you feel guilty about bread?

I think because for so long, it’s drilled in as something that, especially white sourdoughs, you learn, gluten, and it’s not very nutrient-dense, might be stripped of the germs. The things that have a health benefit in there aren’t as present. It goes to this whole world of healthy. Even though I really enjoy it. I know, also, that sourdough in particular has healthy bacteria in it that support your gut health, that it’s something that brings me joy, with a little bit of butter on it, or soaked in that soup that I’m going to be consuming later. That alone is its own health benefit. It brings beauty to your life, if you really enjoy it.

It’s strange that we have to justify reasons why we like certain foods or not. I’m just curious, why do you like bread?

It is strange that some people have to justify why they like certain food or not.

I don’t know. Just always have.

When are the moments when you reach for bread?

It’s something that has come with most meals. My father’s Italian, Sicilian and French. My mom comes from this Dutch-Germanic background. There’s some form of bread with just about every meal. My mom also had this thing that she would make, and I don’t think I’ve heard about this from other households, but she would take a really good sourdough, cut it up, and put it in a milk glass, and pour milk in it, and stick it in the freezer for a while. Eat that almost like you would ice cream, but not when it was fully frozen, just when it got this crust on the top, like it was this thing that she just liked to do.

I’ve never heard about other people doing this, but it was something that became a bit of a comfort thing for my little sister and me when we were growing up. I’ve tried it since, I don’t like it, but it was this interesting thing that was unique to our household. There’s an obvious connection for my mother to breads when I was growing up. I also learned about things like lavash and tortillas and just flatbreads.

I loved every bread that had that kind of texture to it, that could almost be torn and that might be on its way to being a cracker in a way, if you left it out, it might get a little stale and then be like a cracker. It’s just related to all of this history. Also, portability, functionality, it goes with almost anything. From, “You can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with your crackers if you wanted to,” but sourdough goes great. It also goes great with soup. It’s versatile.

When did bread become tricky for you?

Probably teen years, because you start to worry about your waistline or something like that, self-critical perspectives. The other piece is, I have full awareness that when I cut out bread, I’m leaner. If you want to be leaner, if I cut out bread, I’ll be leaner.

All of that is tied to it, isn’t it? I love rice, maybe as much as you like bread. I grew up with a rice culture. I remember someone had asked my friend, who’s a nutritionist, but she’s Japanese, I said, “Japanese eat so much white rice. What’s with that?” As a nutritionist, can you recommend white rice? She said, “Rice is precious for her and her culture. They just eat a small amount. The rice enables you to eat all these other vegetables that come with the fiber and all the things that are supposed to be healthy for us, that we should be eating more of.”

It just makes the meal so much more enjoyable and pleasurable. I realized, we have these ideas. It keeps us from fully enjoying the way we want to eat. Does it really make sense when you realize all this whole wheat that they’re selling to make whole wheat bread is fractionalized? It’s separated anyway, and it’s just reconstituted. How whole is that? We have these ideas that whole wheat is better for us, and we should be eating more whole wheat. It neutralizes our guilt about eating carbs. When you dig a little deeper, and most consumers don’t even know this, that that’s how wheat is stored. It’s separated from the germ and the bran. It’s reconstituted to fit specific fiber requirements on the nutritional labeling package.

I even do that. I have wheat germ and wheat bran. I will do things like make Dutch babies on the weekends for my kids, and I’ll add that to it.

A little extra.

I just add it back in because it’s not in the flour that I like to cook with. This is probably because I came from a family that baked. I’m very particular about my flour, just a certain quality. I do care about if it’s organic because I don’t want to be responsible for more glyphosate in our environment. I know enough about that to know it’s a bad thing. Buying quality, organic, well-milled flour, it’s not as simple as just going to Safeway. You have to go to a specialty store of some sort, usually. You could probably get a bag of flour for $3 or $4. I’m spending $10. It doesn’t really shock me or challenge me because I don’t use so much of it that that $10 feels like it’s an overspend, if that makes sense. I’m not a baker of breads.

That’s funny, because I know we spend all this time talking about bread, and I love bread. I’m more of the person that will bake the cookies for the household or make banana bread when we have too many ripe bananas or make something like dumplings for chicken dumpling soup from scratch, as opposed to getting Bisquick, because I don’t buy Bisquick. Doing those sorts of things with flour, or using it to make a gravy of some sort, just fun stuff that I like to make.

Learning To Care More About Food

How are you learning to care more about food in your life, Corinna? What’s interesting to you?

I’ve been on this journey of being mostly vegetarian for the last year. I’m starting to consider what other foods I want to bring in. With what consistency, I’ve decided I’m going to eat shellfish periodically. Most of my reasons for not eating meat aren’t purely for animal welfare. It’s eating for the climate, eating for the earth. I’m shifting away from so much on the meat side or the dairy side. I feel great.

I feel like I’m getting a really strong nutrient profile, could almost refer to it as a nutritarian approach to eating. This is something that, a term that few doctors are now using, which is really trying to entice my tastes, and discover new flavors, and discover new ways of cooking.

Why are you eating for the climate? How did that happen?

I’ve been a sustainability advocate for my whole life, it seems, and diving deeper with this podcast has been one of those avenues. I’ve learned quite a bit about regenerative agriculture as well. I’m not saying that animals don’t have a place in the whole food cycle. I just personally don’t feel the desire or need to keep eating them.

It’s this deep and continual exploration of how we can build a more sustainable future for all people. To understand that there are medical doctors who are also out there saying, “Eat a wide variety of foods.” One of the surest ways to eat a wide variety of foods is to really seek to experience different flavors and not eat the same ten meals every week, because so many people just eat the same ten meals every week, and they don’t really vary much.

Trying to get a variety of foods, exploring food in a different way. If you’re going to consume meat, looking at it, perhaps, more as a condiment, so it’s not the main thing on your plate. You’re eating more different foods, like more vegetables, more fruits. Maybe you’re trying a long-grain rice from a faraway place or maybe you’re diving into a bread pudding that you’ve never experienced before, some recipe. Just trying something different. That’s really where my exploration is leading me. I’m presently also studying for my PhD in sustainability. Again, I keep learning more about what it’s going to take to feed the 8 billion people on our planet that could grow and peak around 10 billion. We have to get more creative. We have to think differently about food. That means also opening ourselves to different types of foods.

Teaching The Young To Eat Better

How are you teaching your boys to eat? What kind of eaters do you want your boys to be?

I want them to love all food. That’s really it. I want them to experience it. I don’t want them to feel like it’s something that’s guilty. That’s the one thing I would hope to have erased from my youth, for them, at least. My mother stopped buying Kix cereal when I was little because they started adding sugar to it. The moment they added sugar, we no longer had it. It meant that when I went to a friend’s house, I’d be like, “I’m getting Froot Loops.” This was such a vice, it became a vice.

I don’t want food to be a vice for my kids. I want them to experience it. I will buy Pop-Tarts every now and then, just so they can experience a Pop-Tart. It’s not a villainized food. I will make dumplings at home, but we’re going to go out and eat, and they’re going to have something that’s been made with Bisquick. I don’t feel a need to cook with it myself. That sort of thing, just not making it something that becomes evil in any way.

If they eat in this way, who do you hope your sons will become as adults or as human beings? How are you developing them?

It’s gregarious, loving, and accepting. Willing to explore, see the world, not be limited by ideas of what it should be.

Integrating Sustainability Into Food Relationship

I’m just really curious, you’re pursuing a PhD in sustainability. That’s a huge commitment. Is this sustainability in food or sustainability generally?

The degree is at Prescott College, and it’s sustainability education specifically as the PhD program. I’m looking at the intersection between food, sustainability, and how we educate. For instance, if you look at how we even talk about food, how we market food, how we bring forward ideas to the marketplace as a whole, how do we decide what is good? All of that, really looking at the intersection of those questions.

This is going to be really interesting.

I figured that we would have an opportunity to potentially collaborate on some of this, especially reviewing your article that is also looking at how the medical system even considers food as part of that.

I did my first sustainability project back in 2007, and it was for a group of farmers’ co-ops. They started hearing about sustainability, and they wanted to understand how important it was for consumers. When I led that project, most of the consumers that I talked to didn’t even know what sustainability was as a word. They had to look it up in a dictionary, or they took it to mean basic, like sustain life. We often ask consumers, and I was running groups for this project.

Sometimes we do groups, and I asked them to do something that represented sustainable food. They would bring something like a garlic, because garlic makes food taste better. It sustains my desire to eat because I need to eat to live. Or they would bring an apple to represent food, that you need food to sustain life. We’ve just come a really long way since 2007 in terms of how we understand sustainability. I’m curious, what does sustainability mean to you?

That’s a question I ask everybody I talk to.

What have you learned?

For me, I feel like it’s a very personal word. One of my frustrations with the entire category of sustainability now is that there are people that work in this space that essentially don’t like the word anymore. Even in interviewing Paul Hawken on this podcast back in 2021, he had just come out with a book, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, he said he didn’t like the word sustainability. Like, “Why are we even using it? We want to sustain this? This is not sustainable.” That’s a really cynical view.

Sustainability as a word has its own clear definition. It’s just been so often co-opted and greenwashed that it’s essentially started to lose meaning, but that happens with every word that happens in language as it exists. The hot word, the buzz on the street, is all about regeneration. It’s not just to sustain, it’s to regenerate. I appreciate that. However, to me, sustainability means all of the things that regeneration means, all of the things that circularity means. It is a word that encompasses truly respecting life cycles, truly respecting what it takes to create a flourishing environment, to create something that can exist for generations.

That, to me, is everything that regeneration says it is too. They’re simply different words for the same general concept. Sustainability just became too much of a buzzword for people, that they essentially stopped resonating with it, and, in my own way, I just fall more in love with the concept. I’m not eschewing sustainability. I believe it means things like removing things that are unnatural from the environment, like limiting plastics. It means not relying on petrochemicals for things like the creation of fertilizers. Why are we using oil to fertilize? This doesn’t make sense. Why are we creating chemicals like glyphosate that we use as drying agents, not even as pesticides, so we can harvest wheat all at the same time? Why can’t we just take a step back and look at things a little bit more holistically, which to me, is also what sustainability is about? I think it’s a powerful word.

I agree. I think it’s a powerful word too. At its essence, it means to sustain life. Some might look at how the consumers were interpreting sustainability back in 2007, to sustain life, literally. We need to educate them about what sustainability means. For me, I thought they were getting to the essence of it.

It’s what it means to you. I really do. I think it’s powerful. I like that Prescott College hasn’t decided to change the name of its program because it’s become a less popular word. We are working to build more sustainable systems. When you start to look at our entire education system and overhauling that, the word sustainability means a lot there, too.

I have a current client. They are Organic Valley Cooperative. Back to farmers, I’m so happy. They’re based out of Wisconsin. My client took me to show me around the area. They were telling me 51% of their farmers are Plains people, Amish Mennonites. He said, “We got to go see Amish Walmart.” He drove me to the Amish Walmart. Basically, it was a general store selling salvaged goods. They had organized all the handles, in all the old milk glasses. It was so neatly organized, but nothing was new.

It was interesting. It was a Walmart.

Let’s go to Amish Walmart.

I would shop at that store. That’s great.

It was incredible. Nothing was new. In a sense, that truly is sustainability, when you’re reusing something for a long period of time. I love the word sustainability. How does sustainability taste in your mouth? Could you describe a dish that tastes sustainable?

This is a really interesting question that I might not have time to dive into today. I’ll give you the 30,000-foot view. My first course in this PhD program was on sustainability in theory and practice. We had to, as part of this course for our final project, really discover the food print. The footprint that your meal would make. I’ve been on this recent journey, and because this lentil soup that I make never tastes the same, every time it’s slightly different because I always put something different in it.

I wanted to make it as local as possible. I went to a local CSA that grows all of their produce in a regenerative capacity here in Santa Cruz County, and I got purple potatoes from them. I sourced lentils from up near Chico, and also the dried garbanzo beans that I found are also from California. I was really trying to make a meal that came from within 100 miles of my door.

I feel like the most sustainable meal is one that looks that hyper-local. It might just be the fruit that you buy at your farmer’s market. That meal, if it’s a meal of fruit or food that you buy at your local farmer’s market, or something that you painstakingly sourced like I did, to make something that could have come with ingredients from all across the globe, to make it with love, and to enjoy it and respect every ingredient that went into it. That’s the most sustainable meal for me.

To me, you just answered the question you tried to ask me, which I had such a hard time answering. That is exactly how to the ethnographic diet. It’s being curious, and it’s about transforming your relationships and eating foods you love. All of this, like what tastes good, what’s good to eat, what’s sustainable, healthy, regenerative, all of this is what we feel is good.

Ethnographic diet is being curious and transforming relationships by eating food you love.

It’s what, if it feels good to you, I think it is good for you.

I agree. That’s it.

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

That’s a perfect place to wrap. I really appreciate your time. This interview has been perhaps a little nontraditional and back-and-forth. You are so comfortable in the ethnographer seat. It’s fun to be asked some of the questions myself.

Thank you. We need more of your kind of work in the world, Corinna. I’m so excited to see what will come out from your studies.

It’s going to be a lot of fun. I’ll tell you more about it very soon. Thank you.

Bye.

To find out more about June Jo Lee, her work in food, ethnography, children’s books, and her journalistic work as well, I encourage you to visit the links that we provide with show notes in this blog episode page. It includes the video version of this episode, complete transcripts, and links to resources and past episodes that we discussed today. While you visit CircleB.co, please visit our newsletter page. Join the newsletter.

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• June Jo Lee on LinkedIn
• Natural Products Expo West
• Green Bronx Machine
• Hartman Group
• Organic Valley Cooperative
• Circle B
• Readers to Eaters
• Wunderland Kitchen
• Our Savory, Spicy, Significant Relationship with Food – TED
• Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix
• Farmer Eva’s Green Garden Life
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation