Season 2, Episode 09: Seeding the Future: Re-Imagining Our Global Food System, Henry Obispo
Hello, Everyone! Happy Sunday and welcome back to Brym - it’s Season 2, Episode 9! Today’s Climate Story focuses on re-imagining our global food system and comes from the amazing Henry Obispo: Website + Linkedin. This conversation couldn’t be more timely as the US rolls back Emergency Allotments of Food Stamps across the country… leaving low income communities scrambling for other options.
Before we dive in, here’s a quick update on how Brym is doing as an organization and what’s coming on the horizon.
On March 16th, the Brym Global Working Group had our third Session! 10 members attended from 5 countries, with the intention of sharing experiences and brainstorming potential projects we can work on together. This meeting was led by Arijit Reeves, Daniel Wildman, and Jen Cole, focusing on the themes of Community Energy & Water. Stay tuned for how we’re hoping to translate stories into projects, stemming from this collaborative Global Working Group Structure.
Next Up, in Session #4 in April, the Global Working Group will focus on the themes of Community Food & Land. Malik Saric, Forget Shareka and Steve Chiu will lead this next meeting, sharing about an amazing Community Garden project in the works - more to come on this!
Thanks so much for tuning into today’s Story! As always, feel free to follow along on Apple Podcasts as well! Hope you enjoy… There will most likely be 1-2 more episodes in Season 2, then we will be brainstorming ways to evolve the storytelling platform for Season 3 heading into the Spring/Summer! All ideas welcome…
Seeding the Future: Re-Imagining our Food System
Author: Henry Obispo, March 31, 2023
I was born in the Dominican Republic, where my childhood was filled with love and attention from my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and the people in my town. It was a true example of it taking a village, in one way or another, to support me as I grew up.
As a child, I engaged in wonderment with the closeness and proximity to nature, plants and the fruits that they would bear. It was the love of fruits and consuming them in their natural form or turning them into dishes at the age of three, where I began experimenting, making juices…
I was given the freedom to experiment, cooking and turning fruits and later nuts from our yard into candies. This gave me a level of dexterity and knowledge at a very early age, where I could now maneuver ideas based on experiences I had with food. I would pair flavors and textures in my head while learning along the way to understand cycles of how and when trees birth fruits/vegetables. This early engagement allowed me to become one with my environment and start to dream about how I could bring this knowledge into the rest of my life.
Currently I am working on building a decentralized food system that centers people and the needs of the people. For me, it’s all about food access and the ways that food can be a catalyst for economic development in under invested communities, like my own in the South Bronx.
Specifically, we are launching a network of farms that mitigates realities of food deserts and the lack of access to healthy food in certain neighborhoods, by promoting hyper-local production that meets the needs of communities and allows the public and private sector to join forces for the good of the planet and humanity.
My vision of the future looks like community and collectivity. That’s what I aim to create everyday with anything I decide to build or create. However, when it comes to the future of a more sustainable world, I do see the raising of consciousness in all of humanity that will allow for a true paradigm shift in how we engage with our natural world, with ourselves and with one another.
It is through a collective consciousness that we will be able to find true solutions to our most severe realities, specifically with climate and the threat of a looming mass extinction of animals and plant species that have every right to survive on this planet.
It is through awakening that we will find the brightest possibilities to overcoming the existential challenges of our time. I am optimistic and see a day where we’ve all come to a consensus around minimizing our impact on the planet and being agents that promote biodiversity instead of narrowing or limiting it. I do believe that in the future we can find our way back to truly understanding our role on this planet and the reason for our individual existence being tied to living a harmonious life with everything around us and ourselves!
We currently have one of the biggest opportunities of our lifetime facing us, our climate reality. This is a powerful moment for us to make a choice to engage and be representative of the solutions our communities need. If we choose that path, I believe we can head towards homeostasis for the planet.
Then, we will be able to transform ourselves. The reality of our climate imbalance is really a reflection of ourselves and our inner most fears, stemming from society and a system that is built on filling voids by engaging in reckless behavior. I’ve seen it all over the world from Cuba, to Brazil, to Mexico… our global dependance on extraction, of resources, culture, and sovereignty.
And so I ask all of you reading this, to join in collaboration with others, build, decentralize, engage and offer yourself and your gifts to causes that will expand our collective and forever shift our practice. In this spirit, I also invite you all, if you’d like, to engage with our work at ReBORN FARMS!
Reach out and let’s collaborate on the way forward.
Huge thank you to Henry for sharing his awesome story! Look out for our next Climate Story coming soon - and ideas for how this Storytelling platform will evolve heading into the Spring/Summer!
Have a great rest of the weekend, everyone!
