12: La Semilla Food Center, Anthony, New Mexico

In this episode of EPFV, Meredith E. Abaca speaks with Marleen Yañez, Education Coordinator for La Semilla Food Center Organization. La Semilla, founded in 2010, is a nonprofit organization located in Anthony, New Mexico. Its mission is to create healthy, self-reliant, sustainable and fair food systems in the El Paso del Norte region. In this conversation with Marleen, we learn about her personal life-changing relationship with food and how this let her work with La Semilla. She shares the history of the organization and its multiple programs that range from teaching about food cultivation using a system of “agroecology,” which refers to both methods of production and a food movement of food, gender, and climate justice, to cooking lessons and culinary storytelling gatherings. The process of remembering and relearning Indigenous/ancestral gardening and cooking techniques are a central component to the food systems work. Through the storytelling program, for example, the goal is to change the dominant narrative in the El Paso del Norte region that mostly defines Mexican food as unhealthy, in order to remember the nutritional, spiritual, and cultural benefits and values of ancestral ways of cooking. La Semilla is committed to sharing and learning from community members. Through a number of different programs form fellowships to community partnerships, La Semilla functions as a resource to teach agriculture on its farm property, space donated by Sierra Vista Growers, to help organizations such as schools develop sustainable community gardens. In addition to hands-on projects that impact food habits at an individual level, La Semilla also has a policy program that works to enact governmental based policies to assist in the development of long term sustainable food systems changes. La Semilla Food Center, therefore, works on both local and global methods for creating food systems that are motivated by a holistic approach that interconnects food, gender, class, ethnic, and climate justice.