Hi'ilei Hobart: Ambient sovereignty and the question of temperature control (ep379)

Written By kamea chayne
“When it comes to refrigeration, so many of us have just come to accept that that’s how things are done. But I think in the food sovereignty conversation, those dependencies can sometimes be overlooked when we’re talking about what it means to become sovereign.”
— HI'ILEI HOBART

In this episode, we welcome Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), who is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Her first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment is a recipient of the press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award.

Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the symbolism of ice and shaved ice in Hawai’i, the establishment of the cold chain as an integral part of the global food system, provocations about the anthropocentric desire to control ambient temperatures, and more.

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Transcript:

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hiʻilei Hobart: One of the things that I tried to be really clear about in this project is that it's not a history of how ice arrived in Hawai'i, because it's always been in Hawai'i.

Snow accumulates at the top of some of our highest mountain peaks, and some of our most sacred spaces. Because of that, ice and the cold always played a very substantial role in Moʻolelo, or the storied histories of Hawai'i.

Hawaiians had highly articulated understandings of temperature—broadly speaking, and ice factors into that.

So when ice arrives in Hawai'i, it doesn't arrive to surprise per se, but it arrives for the first time as a comestible good—meaning that the ice that first began to arrive on Hawai'i's shores is part of the North American ice trade of the 1900s, [and] it arrived in order to cool down things like soda waters and cocktails, for Honolulu's elite. I always found this really striking because of the enormous amount of expense and effort put into being able to offer somebody a chilled cocktail in Honolulu, in the 1900s.

Not a ton of ice arrives by ship to Hawai'i around 1850 to 1860. That's when these shipments came. They came really sporadically, and were really a minor part of the major North American ice trade, that pretty much dominated export markets from Maine and Boston, to places like India, to the Caribbean, and to the American South. To get to Hawai'i, it had to go down the South American coast, around the Cape Horn, up to San Francisco, often for a stopover, and then across the Pacific. It would travel an enormous distance, constituting a fair bit of loss, but a surprising amount of ice retained in that shipment.

Not very many years after this blip in commodity ice trade, ice machines start to arrive in Hawai'i. And once the ice machines arrive, things explode from there. A lot of it happens in tandem with increased tourism and business trade in Hawai'i. People were relaxing after doing business, with ice creams and cocktails. When that starts to happen, it begins to articulate a lot of things that are being imported from the West, about race, particularly race in connection to who is imagined to be a leisured person, and who is imagined to be a laboring person. And refreshment gets reserved for those who are not doing the laboring.

And these are some of the ways that Hawai'i gets connected to other plantation economy spaces, though the racial landscape is distinct across those spaces, but they have some connections with how whiteness and refreshment play out across each of those areas.

[In regards to shave ice,] ice cream gets intensely valued, by the end of the 19th and early 20th century. And this happens at the apex of American territorialism and the civilizing of Hawai'i. By the mid-century, when the US is really gunning for American statehood for Hawai'i, and a lot of local communities are also in support of statehood. the coldscape shifts a little bit, and we see not the arrival of shave ice, but the valorization of shave ice. It skyrockets from this really mundane plantation store refreshment, to something that starts to symbolize Hawai'i, in really important ways.

I found that really interesting, because when you think about what shave ice is, it's essentially ice and sugar. These two colonial enterprises in Hawai'i. One of the reasons why shave ice becomes so popular is because it's not a white person's refreshment. It is a local person's refreshment. And its attachment to the plantation communities is really important to telling the story about Hawai'i's emergence as a multicultural state. Shave ice illustrates this in really powerful ways, because of the color of the syrups that often get drizzled on top of it. Shave ice is essentially an edible rainbow.

And the rainbow becomes one of the most potent symbols of the multicultural state in Hawai'i, as it starts to pick up steam in the 1960s and 1970s.

People start to think about Hawai'i as this multi-ethnic paradise. One of the issues with seeing Hawai'i as such is the way that it obscures the really particular political subjectivity of Native Hawaiians under American occupation.

Kamea Chayne: You often talk about how in discourses on food sovereignty in Hawai'i, people will share this statistic that Hawai'i imports 85-90% of food, despite having near year-round growing season and histories of abundance. People also often attribute the expensive prices of food to the costs of transporting foods across the ocean from elsewhere.

And, while that is part of the story, another story you've been keen to highlight is the energy infrastructure, controlled by energy monopolies, needed to maintain the food during its transit. What should we understand about what you name the cold chain in this context, and a need to interrogate the energy intensiveness of this food system itself, as well as an overreliance on this monopolized energy infrastructure?

Hiʻilei Hobart: You're right, these statistics about the overreliance on imported foods in Hawai'i are highly circulated. They're super alarming and often attributed to the cost of having to bring food such long distances to get to Hawai'i. But when I started drilling down into the data, I was both surprised and affirmed in the information showing me that it—and it's more complicated than what I'm giving you here…

It doesn't cost a lot of money, necessarily, to ship goods. But what is super expensive is keeping goods temperature-controlled.

This is really important when it comes to food. Hawai'i pays some of the highest prices for energy in the United States. They pay a lot more than the next most expensive state, which I understand is Alaska, in order for their energy, for things like refrigeration and electricity.

So it's super expensive to ship food and keep it cold. Once it arrives in Hawai'i, it still must be kept cold. And once it moves into people's homes yet for longer, it must be kept cold. And those should be seen as part of the bundled cost of being able to eat in Hawai'i.

Some of the things that I find most striking about this system or the extension of the cold chain, how refrigeration and thermal control facilitates the movement of goods across broad spaces, is that when this starts to become part of the everyday way that people in the US, and elsewhere, provision themselves with foods, it also shifts the temporality of how we eat. You can go shopping at the grocery store once a week, put things in your fridge and eat out of that for the rest of the week. And the temporality of food provisioning was really different when you had to worry about keeping things from spoiling.

Kamea Chayne: While your focus has been on Hawai'i more specifically, I think this general understanding of the cold chain is applicable to many other communities around the world as well.

And I had been thinking a lot about this, because in a lot of discourses on climate change and energy, I would say the vast majority of that has centered on how we can switch the source of energy, but while maintaining the same energy intensiveness of the system itself. And I say that as a spotlight on individual energy use, although I think we should each do what we can. But there's a need to recognize how the energy-intensiveness of our day-to-day lives have been the result of concertedly developed systems that we are now a part of.

For example, a lot of workers need to drive daily to work to make a living because of where they can afford to live and what types of transportation are accessible or not. Or, given that communities are increasingly reliant on imported foods due to a host of different reasons unique to each context, or how mass-produced imported foods are often cheaper than responsibly grown local foods, how that also makes people more reliant on goods for survival made possible through an energy-intensive system, where oftentimes similar industrial foods are exported and then imported to enrich the food giants exploiting land and labor on both sides.

I'd be curious what else you might add to this invitation to look beneath the surface and to make visible these parts of our lives that we may often accept as the norm—particularly in light of how integral the cold chain now is to a lot of people's lives. And even how necessary it has become for a lot of people's survival, particularly for lower to middle-class families who may find the sense of security of refrigeration to be even more important.

Hiʻilei Hobart: One of the ways that I've approached this is thinking through what infrastructure hides, and when infrastructure becomes visible to us. A number of years ago, a scholar named Susan Leigh Star did a bunch of work around infrastructures, and essentially said that functional infrastructures tend to disappear from sight. Once they become embedded in our everyday, we start to forget that they're there and lose sight of the fact that they profoundly structure how our lives are made to work. Another theorist, Brian Larkin, followed up not very many years later and said that infrastructures become invisible for those that they are designed to serve.

People that infrastructures are not designed to serve, are actually usually really keenly aware of it.

So when it comes to refrigeration, I think that so many of us have just come to accept that that's what needs to happen in our lives. That's how things are done. A lot of us are incredibly dependent on it. But I think in the food sovereignty conversation, very little attention has been paid so far to what that means for food sovereignty in general. Like how those dependencies can sometimes be overlooked, when we're talking about what it means to become sovereign.

Kamea Chayne: To go deeper into what infrastructure hides, something else I've been thinking about are all of these new emerging labels and certifications in food, in other agricultural products like organic cotton for textiles, or other labels denoting certain standards in the manufacturing process.

And, I'm not saying that we should do without these labels because given the types of market-dependent options many people have today, these certifications help people become more informed consumers. But, especially as I think back on my conversation a while ago with Rebecca Burgess of Fibershed, I also wonder whether we might understand this constant increase in more labels and ceritifications to denote trust, also is a reflection of a loss of community. And perhaps an increase in a sort of disconnect.

Hiʻilei Hobart: I agree with that completely. I'm glad that you are bringing up these different types of certifications and labels, because I think that on the one hand, they are designed to guide consumers in particular kinds of ways. It's also really important to notice that they are guiding consumer, not people who are just out there in the world, but people who are investing capital in particular types of companies. These are people with wallets and dollars to spend. And it's also marketing. And we have to rely on that often, in order to try and make educated choices for ourselves.

One of the things that I've been casually following are the Maine State Food Sovereignty Laws, which are super fascinating. So maybe ten or so years ago, a bunch of farmers and food producers in the state of Maine lobbied the state legislature to permit this particular food sovereignty law, which essentially exempts small producers from having to abide by USDA food safety laws if they are trading goods or selling goods within their own county—so essentially to their neighbors. And the idea is that the state of Maine, as a largely rural state, has depended on this for their food economy for a really long time. You go down the street to buy raw milk from your dairy farmer neighbor, and that raw milk is going to be safe because there's a social contract there, and that social contract gets lost when you start trading goods across long distances. This becomes one of the impetuses for the pure food laws of the early 1900s in the United States.

Kamea Chayne: And certifications are based off of certain standards. But who gets to set those standards? You gave a really fascinating talk on the microbiopolitics of poi, which really inspired me to rethink the concept of food safety, who gets to define it, and whose cultural foodways it works against or even criminalizes.

For instance, you share of poi, a traditional Hawaiian fermented food made from kalo or taro: "You can find industrially made poi at most grocery stores in Hawaii, but truly delicious poi is a handcrafted food, that fundamentally goes against the Pasteurian sensibilities of the modern American state, which has come to prioritize sterility over the flourishing of microbial life. Poi is, in the words of Heather Paxson, “a microbiopolitical object”, a food subject to hygienic, regulatory governance, concerned with health and so-called safety." How would you elaborate more on the nuanced politics and legality of food safety here, maybe using poi as an example?

Hiʻilei Hobart: One of the things that I was really trying to trace was the genealogies of these laws. Laws don't come out of the ether. They're not just made up—they have really fundamental genealogies to them. And we have to think about the formation of these laws in context. In Hawai'i, these laws get imported over in the early 20th century, just after the territorialization of Hawai'i, when US food laws start to impact the Hawaiian foodscape, these laws enter into a society that is racially divided.

It enters into a society where there's a lot of consternation about bodies and people of color, particularly Native Hawaiians and white settlers, coming up with all kinds of ideas about Hawaiian lasciviousness, lack of cleanliness, relaxed morals.

There's a deeply racialized and moralized subtext to laws that start to prioritize sterility and purity. And poi becomes one of these foods that comes really quickly under fire because of it being a handmade food.

You touch this food, it ferments as it comes into contact and is prepared by the hands of the maker. It's a live food.

In the last 15 or 20 years, there's been an increased attention to fermented foods in the American marketplace that I think have sometimes lost sight of this legal landscape that made them taboo or illegal, historically speaking.

Kamea Chayne: And this is really interesting because poi, along with other fermented foods, have historically and to this day helped communities to be less reliant on refrigeration for food safety, because fermentation has been a way of preserving foods while enhancing their nutritional qualities specifically through how they engage the microbial world.

I certainly don't want to overgeneralize but I do wonder if there's an element of truth in seeing a need and in some cases imposed need for refrigeration as control, as people systemically have become more and more reliant on a centralized food system with globalized supply chains, as opposed to communities, particularly Indigenous communities, being able to practice their diverse, traditional place-based foodways that are much more reflective of the diverse characteristics and seasonality of the land bases and water ecologies themselves.

Hiʻilei Hobart: I completely agree with that. And I think control is a big part of this conversation. A lot of the fermented foods that we consume today is probably along the lines of kombucha, which is now regulated by the FDA for public consumption as well. So there's a limit to the liveliness that is often permitted about these foods.

The other thing, which I think sometimes gets lost in the discussion of cuisine and valuing particular foods for what their benefits may be, is that sometimes, and particularly when these are Indigenous foods, people forget that these are incredibly political conversations.

Indigenous politics is a huge cornerstone for why we need to advocate for particular types of foods.

Food sovereignty also has to do with negotiations with the settler state. It's not just determining what one's food system looks like because somebody wants to grow something. It's also land use laws, its water use laws. It's so much more complex than a particular fermented food having health benefits.

Kamea Chayne: I want to bring in this quote from you, in a talk on this subject: “There’s also the more subtle dimensions of knowledge and power that drive western dietetics that often treat digestive health as separate from political contexts, rather than expressive of them, as native Hawaiian epistemologies helps us to understand.” I do think there's often this separation of diet and health, from the political context that have helped to shape how people perceive things like food safety and what it means to, for example, consume a healthy diet.

Here I want to pivot into what you call, “ambient sovereignty”. Across your work on the ambient, is this theme of a desire to control our ambient temperature. Especially as we consider the luxury or need for air-conditioning, or the craving or need for something as mundane to the American culture as ice water. And of course, there is this fine line or sometimes a little overlap between needs for survival and desires for comfort and pleasure, but perhaps contrary to what we might believe, in a sense both can be cultural constructs and the products of the systems we live in.

Can you expand more on how we might recognize our desires for certain things or tastes for pleasure as not necessarily innate to us but rather cultural products, and speak more broadly about how you've thought through people's, or particular cultures’ desires to control temperature, and what that signifies?

Hiʻilei Hobart: First, with thinking about ambient sovereignty is, in my investigations into the thermal. I had to kind of map out, what does cold mean? What does hot mean? And when I initially came to the project, I was thinking about these two things at either end of the spectrum, which I think is generally how we think about temperature. And as I was digging into Native Hawaiian epistemology about temperature, one of the things that I kept noticing is that hot and cold were occasionally used interchangeably, or hot and cold became part of a similar expression of anger or love, so intense emotions. And at the other end of that spectrum was neither hot nor cold, but ambient.

And that was really useful to me, for reframing how we might think of temperature.

What is allowed to happen when we let go of control over environment and over temperature?

What happens when we let things settle and calibrate to its environment? That is a little bit of an ungrounded proposition, but I think it lets your mind go someplace other than the spectral overbearance of temperature, to think about what happens when we just relax into things.

In terms of how this works with our bodies in space. When I first started doing this work, and I started in the final quarter of the 19th century, which is pretty ice cream heavy. So I'm giving these presentations on ice cream and all of the ways that it becomes this complicated food in the Hawaiian foodscape at that time. People would always stop me and ask, weren't people just eating this because it's really delicious? Aren't people just having cold drinks and cocktails because they're super refreshing and they feel good? Isn't this a very natural reaction for a human body to have and for a human body to desire?

That required me to step back and really think about what gets learned, naturalized and normalized, as part of cultural performance. I had to dig into the science a little bit, and I'm not a scientist, so I'm sure somebody listening would probably be more than happy to correct me, but when you consume cold things, it actually doesn't measurably change one's body temperature. So if you're drinking something cold to cool yourself down, you're actually not cooling your body in any significant or substantial way. Scientists, as they tell me, say that instead of cooling, the body receives a sense of thirst satiaty—this is actually what they say we're feeling.

But of course, we know that you get hydrated the same way, if you're drinking a gallon of warm water or if you're drinking a gallon of cold water. When they conducted studies on temperature preference for drinks, they find that it actually changed across cultural contexts. And so, for example, Europeans who are accustomed to drinking room temperature tap water, actually prefer room temperature tap water, even if they were super hot. And in the US, where people have become accustomed to having their glasses filled with ice and drinking ice water, would prefer it that way, showing that cultural preference is a really important factor in how people desire particular thermal objects. So it's learned.

Kamea Chayne: It’s really fascinating to consider how a lot of people see our preferences and desires as being self-determined and innate, when in reality, a lot of that actually has been shaped by our cultural and social conditioning.

And, I think this conversation is provocative in some ways because especially as the climate crisis leads to more extreme weather conditions and temperatures around the globe, and at the same time, as people's bodies become more accustomed to more controlled and limited ranges of ambient temperatures and therefore less adaptable and more limited in our conceptions of comfort, it also creates a greater need for more people to turn to technologies like air-conditioning or heating for their well-being and survival.

Now, of course, the ‘how’ is a big part of this equation, like what practices are people engaging in to stay cool or warm, or what is the source of energy being used to create more comfortable ambient temperatures?

And then there are also broader questions about how certain solutions to the climate crisis, which I see as a symptom of a planet in distress calling on us to listen to those symptoms to change our ways, have instead been about doubling down on controlling the climate through things like geo-engineering, so that we can maintain the dominant culture’s ways and extractive economies.

But anyhow, how might we consider a lot of our desires to reign in climate change to keep the temperature rise under some level, because that, also, in a sense is about control in order to maintain our human-centered comforts and desires.

Hiʻilei Hobart: I think your question in itself tells a really important story, which is that when you change the scale of the inquiry from the personal to the national to the geopolitical to the infrastructural, the frameworks for understanding pleasure and necessity start to shift.

[And I] think [this question is] really tricky because very often in questions about climate change, there's like a royal "we", that gets invoked that is a completely false royal "we". And so what are we going to do about climate change begs questions about who's responsible for climate change, who has the latitude to do the most in regards to climate change. There's a huge gulf between people that are trying to survive and people that are making themselves comfortable, as things become more volatile and more uncomfortable in the world.

Kamea Chayne: I feel like people often perceive “progress” as an improvement in our quality of life, with comfort being a part of that. So I can see people acclimated to tightly temperature-controlled spaces, with temperatures maintained within a very small range considered “room temperature”, not being willing to give that up. And instead, wanting for everyone to be able to enjoy those same comforts.

And here I wouldn't be referring to situations that would be a matter of survival. But more so just the daily comfort of not even feeling hot enough while sedentary to sweat, or not feeling cold while sedentary without a sweater on. Or strangely, in many indoor spaces, it might even be the conditioned comfort and sense of luxury of being cool and even cold, requiring people to wear sweaters inside while it is actually nice and warm or hot outside.

But still, I'm just thinking about this idea that people with justice in mind may not reach the conclusion of, let's stop controlling our ambient temperatures because it requires a lot of energy to do so and is a luxury for many instances, but rather conclude, let's help everybody to be able to their ambient temperatures—perhaps presuming that the ability to do so is universally seen as desirable.

Hiʻilei Hobart: That's kind of the rub, isn't it? So often I think that progress is a top-down proposition. Progress has been used to invoke all types of things like westward expansion in the Americas, the development of the transcontinental railroad refrigeration, all different types of technologies that have political effects.

Instead of top-down progress, what I'm more interested in is listening to communities in place, that know best what their particular needs are going to be and how those needs might be met.

So what I advocate for is self-determination within communities themselves, to think about how they might want to approach and address climate change, knowing that the vast majority of climate change is beyond our control, that people are going to be grappling with extreme temperatures in ways that historically they may not have. That's not something that a community can necessarily control, but they should be listened to when it comes to their ideas of how it can be mitigated.

Kamea Chayne: Well, we're nearing the end of our time together. I know that the Kanaka Maoli-led resistance against the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea has been, for you, where your personal and professional lives converged. And in light of this, you've offered a call to expand our perspectives of food sovereignty that I found to be really potent, particularly as people might point out the disconnect between Native Hawaiians asserting sovereignty and self-determination and the types of reliance on industrial and centralized foods that these camps from such immediate mobilizations might still have.

So, as we take a step back to consider the seeming necessity of the cold chain today for people in Hawai'i and beyond, and the goal of food sovereignty, how would you connect the dots here, and what are your final takeaways for our listeners as we think more deeply about our food systems through the lens of control and power?

Hiʻilei Hobart: I write a little bit about being at the encampment at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu. And I only went for a few days. And I wasn't even thinking about this at the time, but I started volunteering in what was essentially the camp's refrigeration section in the kitchen. It wasn't until many months later I was like, oh my gosh, I've been writing a book on the cold—how did I not make this connection? But I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the kitchen looked like at the camp at that time. People were just bringing what they had. What they could pull out of their pantries, what they could grab at fast-casual restaurants, what they could pick off of their trees in their backyards. And you got this full spread of like what community resource looks like.

And not all of it was what folks might recognize as a decolonial diet or foods that reflected a bunch of the food sovereignty ideals that are often discussed in the literature. But what it was, were people making it possible to have bodies in place in a space of resistance? And for me, that became so much more important than picking apart whether or not this or that was industrialized food, or whether or not there was this reliance on the cold chain.

What does it take to get bodies in place and to get communities working together in resistance? For me, that's really the bigger picture to pay attention to, because that is where sovereignty lies.

*** CLOSING ***

Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

Hiʻilei Hobart: This summer I read Leanne Simpson and Robyn Maynard’s new book, Rehearsals for Living. And it's I think it's one of the most beautiful things that I've ever read. The book is a series of letters written back and forth between these really important thinkers in both Black studies and Native and Indigenous studies. And they're about resistance, and crises. They're basically political love letters, that are just really gorgeous.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Hiʻilei Hobart: One thing that I always ask myself at particular junctures where maybe self-doubt is holding me back from going for something, is I've started just telling myself like, why not me? And this is really important because I think as women, as Indigenous people, we talk ourselves out of putting our hat in the ring because we have been led to imagine that we don't belong in the ring. So I've started asking myself, why not me? To hype myself up for going for it.

Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Hiʻilei Hobart: Right now I'm working on a new project that is at a really different time period than I'm used to. It's stuff that was happening in Hawai'i in the late seventies and early eighties, right before I was born. And so my source of inspiration right now is getting a chance to talk to elders who were there at these particular moments in time and capturing their recollections, knowing that they're getting on in their years. And that's been a really special and fulfilling thing for me to do.

Kamea Chayne: Hiʻilei, what a fascinating conversation for me here. And we're so excited for the launch of Cooling the Tropics, publishing in December of 2022. Thank you so much for joining me here today. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?

Hiʻilei Hobart: I don't know if I have wisdom so much as I have gratitude. I'm just really grateful that people are interested in dialoging with me and helping me think through these ideas. I consider myself so much of a learner, so it's really exciting to get to think aloud with you and with the listeners.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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