Gigi Berardi is one of those lucky individuals, someone who has successfully mixed professional interests with personal passions.
For more than 30 years, Berardi has studied agriculture and food, obtaining a BA in biology from the University of California at San Diego and then a master’s and PhD degrees in natural resources from Cornell University. She has been a professor since 1995 at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University in Bellingham, focusing on community vulnerabilities and cultural ecology. Before joining the faculty at WWU, she taught at The Evergreen State College, and is also an affiliate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
For three years, Berardi directed WWU’s Resilient Farms project, working closely with staff and community members to identify vulnerabilities in food systems and search for ways to increase resilience. She has taught courses on such subjects as eco-gastronomy, agroecology, sustainability and rural development, environmental toxins and environmental studies, and created WWU’s popular Food Studies in Europe program. She is a regular contributor to food and agriculture blogs.
Although food is definitely a lifelong passion, Berardi is also avid about dance. She holds a master’s degree in dance from UCLA and has been a writer and dance critic for decades, with more than 300 articles and reviews in print. Her 2005 book on dance, Finding Balance, looks at how fitness, training and health must be integrated in order to maintain a sustainable lifetime in dance.
In the summer, Berardi homesteads with her family on 25 acres in the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle, where she grows her own vegetables, raises lambs and makes cheese. Her latest book, FoodWISE: A Whole Systems Guide to Sustainable and Delicious Food Choices, was published in January by North Atlantic Books. The following interview is based on details Berardi shared in her new book.
Tell us a little bit about growing up in California.
My father was part of a large Italian family. My mother was born in Arkansas and grew up in Oklahoma. As a teen in 1922, she moved to California by herself. She was a great cook and started a new life for herself in Hollywood, where I was born. She no longer raised crops or loosened soil, but she did marry an Italian romantic and nurtured my sister and me with arguably the world’s best food.
So your interest in food started at an early age?
There were often parallel meals going on in my household. My mother would cook whatever my sister and I were craving. Then my father would come home and cook some Italian dish like roasted fennel or vermicelli and anchovies. I saw that the possibilities for sampling and experimenting never ended. Not only did the cooking captivate me, so did the shopping. Going to the market as a little girl was a great adventure, although nothing compared to going to the new Vons supermarket in Burbank, with its colorful aisles and huge delis.
When did food become a research study?
My professional interest in food started with a year abroad at the University of Sussex outside London in the 1970s. I was studying biology, and food activism was big during those years. From there, I went to Cornell University where I co-founded the Coalition for the Right to Eat. I lived with Amish farmers and researched what was just starting to be called organic agriculture. Then I studied soils and did my doctorate on dairy farmers who were struggling economically with poor soils and low prices. I received an environmental Fulbright scholarship – one of only two given — and went to Italy to study. At that point, my professional path was set: I continued to study and work in food and food systems throughout my academic career. And I learned Italian.
FoodWISE has been called the food-lover’s guide to making the right choices. Tell us more.
How our food is grown is critical to leading a wise and rich life in a socially and economically just world. The word “WISE” in the book’s title is an acronym for Whole, Informed, Sustainable and Experienced. As consumers, we have the wisdom to do the right thing to produce food, process it and consume it. Experience gives us a choice. Being informed gives us the information we need about food systems, such as which ones are efficient to use and which ones are sustainable.
Many people promote diets that are healthy and good for you. I prefer to think of diet in a broader sense, meaning a way of life. Today, I eat things based on what tastes good. Every bite connects me to the greater agricultural web of sun, soil and seed, of distributors and sellers, of buyers and eaters. We are all part of this greater web because we eat.
This message seems particularly timely today as we struggle with global upheaval caused by the pandemic.
There are many choices we have around food. There are foods we know we should eat, like green leafy vegetables. And there are foods we try to avoid for health, moral or ethical reasons. Our food beliefs were formed by nurture and the eating environments of our childhood, or adopted through experience and reason in adulthood. These deeply held beliefs and convictions can drive our decisions about food more than actual hunger, facts about nutrition or ultimate cost. In fact, questioning my own ideas about food is what got me to write this book.
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