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We don’t know our food. Are dying languages the answer?
Sofia Perez Chapter 2 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring begins like this: “The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.” By asserting this fact, she is also asserting an often-overlooked reality: connection. This means that the myth of the world being divided between humankind and…
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Sorry to Snakes: The Good, The Bad & The Truth
Sofia Perez I have always been in love with paradoxes, from simple ones like Jumbo Shrimp, to the deepest philosophical questions of human nature, to the poor life- or death, or both- of Schrödinger’s cat. Recently I have invited a new conundrum into my heart’s library of contradictions: ethnoherpetology, which is the study of the…
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Greta Thunberg’s Got It Wrong…But We Can’t Get It Right Without Her
By Sofia Perez Outrage is a gritty and relentless pandemic, necessary yet temperamental, and easily carried past its usefulness. Make no mistake. I believe in the power of outrage. However, I also believe it must be tamed. It draws attention, but what use is attention without a plan by which to solve a problem? This…
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The Joy of Words & Food
Sofia Perez I want to have something to say. But what is something-to-say? It’s that thing we only allegedly earn once we have a Phd in astrophysics, have wrestled five tigers with only one arm, have skipped seven grades for being a child prodigy, have survived world wars, or lived shipwrecked on a tiny island…
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What if we spoke Hawaiian?
Sofia Perez I vividly remember the first garden that was truly mine. It was a rectangular wooden planter that was situated in the back of my grandmother’s backyard, right in front of this peach-pink wall and to the right of the thick trunk of a palm tree. It contained lavender, blueberry, basil, rosemary, and a…
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Aloha in Agriculture
Sofia Perez Now at the midpoint of my month-long dabble with Hawaiian, several delicate linguistic idiosyncrasies have come to my attention. Firstly there are the grammatical differences between a Polynesian language and a eurocentric one, from the way verbs wrap around nouns to the way letters- many of which are vowels- interact with each other…
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When Words Die
Sofia Perez We are raised on a steady diet of acceptance when it comes to the circle of life. I wonder though, how often we think of the life cycles of cultures themselves. These seemingly eternal forces that dictate so much of life for so long and for so many people…can die? As chilling as…
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Dirt, DNA & Declarations of Rights: Why is food so tricky?
Sofia Perez The mouth is an underappreciated organ. It is the place where our voices leave our bodies, where food enters in. It allows us to give; it allows us to take. Think of all the interactions that happen there on a daily basis and how they influence your life. To narrow it down to…
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Building The Future With Mycelium
-Written by Sofia Perez I’m going to tell you a story. I’m an invisible man. You’re in a lavish restaurant, poking impatiently at a hunk of steak that’s cooked just the way you like. It’s a little pink, a little raw…just like you. You’re raw and emotional, sometimes a bit erratic, which you hope to…
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Why Mushrooms & Not Steel or Concrete
We tend to associate ‘looking up’ with hope. ‘Down’ is quite the opposite. If we delve deep into the earth, we find dirty things, and eventually, at the Earth’s very core, it was once believed we would even find Hell. However, if you were to ‘look up’ in a different sense-perhaps by looking down at…
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Beauty of Mycelium
Use is in need of beauty to survive. Beatrix Potter was the renowned author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and one of the first ground-breaking female mycologists. In her study of fungi, she produced hundreds of sketches of fungi in their natural setting as well as collecting several herself. She was a model of ambition,…