For a decolonization of the global food system: the Masala y Maíz model. Conversation with Saqib Keval and Norma Listman

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War terms emphasise the vigour of an action or a person, used even when there is no violence and no deaths, their application is legitimised by metaphor. Norma Listman and Saqib Keval are not one of these metaphors. Their battle is real, they do not make victims but fight for them. They are guerrilla fighters living in Mexico. They have multiple weapons and a restaurant.
They can be called fighters. No metaphor in that.
The weapons are up-to-date: the photos, knowingly always a clash; the menu, no ideologies and many ideals in the form of ingredients.
They must be called fighters.

 

Norma Listman: We are definitely fighters. Choosing to work with food the way we do requires us to be fighters. The stakes are too high. We fight hard to be a restaurant that focuses on labor rights, food justice and social change. We fight to use our platform to create a better restaurant industry for all.
Saqib Keval: Food has historically been used as one of the first weapons in colonization, control and state-sponsored systemic violence, but it is also an equally powerful tool of rebellion and resistance. Food has the unique ability to create spaces where we can gather, nourish and share. It’s in those spaces that we can create change and spark resistance.
There is a neo-liberal fallacy of bringing people together around a table, as if a shared meal can heal all wounds. It’s not enough to bring people to the table if they are not vested in each other’s wellbeing and humanity. As we see all too often in the world, food can be used as a weapon to steal someone’s identity, to steal their recipes and their history. To rebrand their recipes and resell them as your own.
The table can become a map of that theft. One of the ways that we use food to create change is through using our kitchen to uplift little known stories and center the voices, experiences, resilience and dignity of the global south. We want people to know where the food comes from and why. Sometimes that narrative can challenge the diner’s understanding of the world. People expect that dining should always prioritize the comfort of the diner because they are the ones paying. But what happens when that diner does not care for the people cooking the food? Or the communities whose ingredients, recipes and histories they are consuming?
Norma Listman: We know our restaurant isn’t for everyone, and we recognize that it can make some people uncomfortable. We cook with our politics and our commitment to speaking truth to power. It’s in the food. Sometimes people don’t like that, and we kindly welcome them to dine somewhere else.

Norma Listman: We met in 2016 in the Bay Area in California.
Saqib Keval: We were working as cooks and artists and activists. I had founded a project called People’s Kitchen Collective and Norma was a frequent collaborator. Norma brought elegance, artistry and an incredible talent to the project. I always got excited when I got to work with her.
Norma Listman: I was working as a cook and had an art practice where I used food as my primary medium. I focused a lot on Mexican foodways and history, especially to challenge the dominant understanding of how Mexico created so much of California food history, and has influenced much of how the world eats. Saqib used to work with me on some of my catering and art projects. He was always so fearless with his ethics and unapologetically political. We connected on that.

Norma Listman: As cooks, we always centred culture and community in our work. I worked at restaurants that pushed the envelope of change in the industry and was always inspired to do better, make more lasting change and do it in my own way.
Saqib Keval: While I worked as a cook, I was also working in food justice movements and in labor organizing. Food and politics were always connected for me. The more I worked in restaurants, the easier it was to identify the deeply rotten roots of white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy in the restaurant industry. I started dreaming early on of a decolonized restaurant model. I was inspired by the work of the Black Panther Party and many other resistance and food sovereignty movements of the global south, to re-envision how a community led food system could work. This was the inspiration behind People’s Kitchen Collective, but is also very much at the heart of what we do at Masala y Maíz.
Norma Listman: We came together because of our shared belief in the potential of radical hospitality and the responsibility we have as chefs to use our kitchens, dining rooms and public platform to push for change. The restaurant industry, and the larger corporate food system as a whole, works hard to invisibilize the labor of the Black and Brown bodies at the heart of producing, processing, transporting and preparing the food. The system is deeply racist and exploitative. We recognized that if we wanted to change the industry, we needed to change how a restaurant operates from the very core. The previous work we did as artists, researchers, activists and cooks helped us hone our skills for critical thinking in how we approach the restaurant industry. We needed to imagine a new reality for restaurants, and a new future for our food system. It’s this practice of radical imagination that grounds our vision for change in our restaurants, and our approach to our local food system.

Saqib Keval: Masala y Maíz started as a research project looking at the migration of cooking techniques, ingredients and political movements between South Asia, East Africa and Mexico. Our dishes are created through research and lots of time spent exploring our respective cultures and family histories.
Norma Listman: Our kitchen decentralizes Eurocentric techniques and kitchen culture. We work to highlight cooking techniques of the global south. For too long the restaurant industry, and food world as a whole, has upheld Eurocentric cuisine and French techniques as the ideal. It’s a practice steeped in colonization and white supremacy. Our creative process is a practice of decolonization. We want to not only share our culture’s techniques, but also protect our customs and culinary traditions from being white-washed, commodified and stolen. We demand that people value our culinary techniques and we want to tell people about the rich history and complex techniques that come from the global south. An example would be in our moles: we know the mole is ready when the sauce starts to break and separates, forming a mirror of oil on the top. This is antithetical to the French sauces and techniques that are often upheld in the European culinary canon. We value our techniques because we value our culture and our people.
This translates to how we source and work with our ingredients. Of course our ingredients are hyper-local, seasonal, organic and so on. But much more important to us is that they are grown by farmers and producers who have good labor practices. We buy directly from our farmers and build lasting relationships with them. The ingredients we use are dictated by the season and the farmer. We don’t want to strain the farmer and their lands with our demands, but rather cook what they are able to harvest. We adapt our respective family and cultural recipes to present dishes that exist at the crossroads of our cultures, but are still accountable to the land where we are cooking them and the farmers who are producing the ingredients.
You can see this approach best in our focus on corn, an indigenous Mexican ingredient that has changed the world. Corn is going through a dangerous moment where there is so much focus on it as a trendy crop, but not on the farmers growing it. International markets are turning corn into an exploitable commodity crop, where multinational corporations are creating bubble economies manipulating and exploiting Mexican farmers to export their best heirloom corn to foreign markets, leaving very little for national consumption. This means that farmers lose out on eating the biodiversity of their own fields and that their cultures, which have traditionally been so closely tied to their corn crops, are being changed.
Saqib Keval: It is useless to talk about sustainability, and being environmentally friendly, if we are not including practices that prioritize culture and the sustainability of the people working the land and producing the food. It is not enough to pay a just price for the corn crop, or any other ingredient, if consumers are not invested in the wellbeing of the farmers and their communities. Being sustainable and environmentally friendly is creating genuine relationships with the farmers, to ensure that they are able to protect their seeds, their culture and continue to have their cultural ingredients as a central part of their diets and communities.

Mestizaje Rebelde

Norma Listman: Mestizaje is a term unique to the Spanish language and the context of Mexico, but we can also use it as a framework to understand much of what happens to food cultures in the Global South. Mestizaje speaks of the blending of cultures over time. While mestizaje can happen during a horizontal exchange between people, it can sometimes occur as a result of colonization and occupation. We use the term because it does not hide the fucked up histories, but also acknowledges the resilience required to survive in these times. Mestizaje is how new cultures are created under shared circumstances, often as a survival strategy.
Saqib Keval: Mestizaje Rebelde is the rebellious nature that can exist in mestizaje. It’s a term we use to say that it’s not just about our cultures and people coming together, but also how we are supporting one another’s liberation movements and struggles for justice. It’s a rebellious mix of people and culture.

Saqib Keval: We never wanted to open a restaurant. We had each opened many restaurants for other people and, after so many years in the industry, we knew how broken and hopeless it can be. But we also saw the possibilities of what a restaurant can achieve in community. Norma had moved back home to Mexico City, and I would come and visit her often, and we’d cook together. We had been offered the opportunity to open a restaurant, and we reluctantly took it.
Norma Listman: We didn’t have many options at the time, and knew we didn’t want to keep working in other people’s kitchens. We knew we could create a restaurant that pushed for change in our industry. We worked to create a global south feminist restaurant that put workers and farmers first. We created a model that prioritized the wellbeing of the workers and community around the restaurant and put people over profits.
Saqib Keval: Our restaurant operations focuses on radical transparency and involves the whole team in reviewing finances and important decisions. We invite our customers and public to review the restaurant finances as well, and have input in how we exist in the community. We involve our neighbors into our day to day operations, and work hard to make our restaurant a resource to the workers and neighbors. It has been a long process since we first opened. We knew we would make mistakes along the way, but we also knew that a restaurant like this, rooted in community, was one worth opening.

Norma Listman: We use our restaurant as a tool to advance social justice movements, share political education and build awareness of the role of food in the liberation struggles of the global south. The restaurant is a platform to speak truth to power and enact change. We work to highlight the intersections of food system change and social change. This means that our politics need to be involved in every aspect of the restaurant operations and that we, as a restaurant group, need to constantly work to make sure our actions are coherent with our ethics and politics. It is a constant process of making mistakes, learning and self critique. It is something that every member of our team takes seriously.

Saqib Keval: Our ethics and values are woven throughout our business model. Our golden rule is that any decision we make as a restaurant group must first care for the workers. Conventional restaurants prioritize everything over the workers and their quality of life, which leads to higher operating costs as a result of increased staff turnover, more waste, breakage, lower sales and a more exploitative management style. With our restaurants, we wanted to demonstrate that good ethics and treating workers and farmers well is good for business and lowers our overall operating cost.
Norma Listman: We practice open book financial management, where our staff reviews the financials together. This results in more staff involvement in decision making, and more agency in taking care of the bottom line. We offer a strong benefits package, a 1:1 coaching program and many avenues for growth within the organization, which results in a more engaged staff with better overall staff retention. We run a kitchen that actively seeks to lower food waste and rewards initiatives that achieve our weekly set objectives. We pay our farmers well and build genuine relationships with them, which leads to us getting better quality ingredients. Our team sets weekly objectives for lowering food costs, labor costs and operating costs while still protecting our group’s values and ethics. We have a very tightly run restaurant that maintains healthy operating costs without sacrificing food quality, service or labor rights. We are able to be the strong business that we are because of the highly invested staff and leaders within our organization. We measure our success by our own internal metrics and standards. We know we are successful when we have high team retention. When our staff are able to build sustainable and enriching careers within our restaurant group. We know we are working well when we see personal growth happening amongst our team members.

Saqib Keval: Growth for us is not horizontal. We do not want to open more and bigger restaurants. We want to work vertically. We want to grow down. To the roots. We are not looking for physical expansion but rather intellectual expansion, and growth of our culinary and hospitality techniques, and critical understanding of our industry. This is why we brought on a full time team coach as one of the directors in the restaurant group. In our process of creating the coaching model with her, we were able to put our theory of change into practice and better implement it in a way that impacts every member of our team. This, for us, is growth.
Norma Listman: Our next goals are more time off for everyone on our team, a better benefits package, a childcare program, higher wages and more travel and international learning opportunities for everyone involved in our restaurant. We also are working towards a housing stipend to combat the effects of gentrification on our team members and their families.

Norma Listman: Change is happening and it makes us feel hopeful. More and more people are standing up to demand change, and are actually putting the work in to make it happen. We are seeing food system change happen at a more localized level. We are seeing change in the restaurant industry happen across the board with independently owned restaurants trying out new ways of working and existing.
Saqib Keval: Dobbiamo inoltre ricostruire il sistema alimentare per dare priorità alle necessità delle persone più vulnerabili, e ciò può avvenire solo attraverso impegno critico, condivisione di competenze e un attivismo costante. Dobbiamo fare pressione sulle multinazionali che hanno devastato il nostro sistema alimentare e chiederne conto. E dobbiamo smettere di idolatrare le celebrities del cibo.

Norma Listman: Il cambiamento è in cammino, e questo ci fa ben sperare. Sempre più persone prendono posizione nel chiederlo, e si impegnano concretamente per realizzarlo. Stiamo intravedendo un cambiamento del sistema alimentare a livello locale. Stiamo intravedendo un cambiamento nel settore della ristorazione, grazie ad attività gestite in maniera indipendente che sperimentano nuovi modi di lavorare e di esistere.
Saqib Keval: We are seeing more cooperativism and more power building and solidarity work happening amongst movements in the global south. It is slow, but very impactful. We are in no way where we need to be, but we are hopeful to see this progress happen.

 

www.masalaymaiz.com