State of the Human: Materializing
What ideas exist behind material objects? In this episode, we’re going to look at stuff—things we can see or hear or touch—to try to understand the intangible, like memory, history, and bias.
Transcript for Materializing (Full Episode)
Melina Walling: [00:00:00] One day, I was talking to my friend Regina. She lives across the hall from me here at Stanford, and I was in her room hanging out when I noticed this one well loved book with a ton of little post-it notes in it. So, I asked her what it was.
Regina: The book is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. It remains one of my favorite books to this day.
Melina Walling: It turns out that book really changed her perspective on life. It was her senior year in high school AP English class, and it's a book she continues to think about.
Regina: It just made me think very deeply about a single life is impacted by greater forces, by greater things.
Melina Walling: You are listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project.
I'm Melina Walling. Each episode, we take a common human experience, like dying or mythologizing, and bring you stories that explore and deepen our understanding of that experience. This episode, Materializing.
I haven't read The God of Small Things, so I asked her to give me a quick rundown. Basically, it's about these two children who are deeply affected by the society they live in.
Regina: They become really close with someone whose life is really restricted by his status in the Indian caste system. So something really-- I won't give it away-- but something really, really tragic and terrible happens to him. He's just one more victim in this greater narrative of history and religion and politics and all of these big forces that are outside of any individual person's control. And the twins as children don't really understand what it means.
Melina Walling: These kids were kind of like guides for Regina. They introduced her to a [00:02:00] person she never could have met, and she saw how this person's agency was limited by these invisible but rigid hierarchies that existed around him. And she realized that, in a way, that applied to her too.
Regina: You don't live just in a vacuum-- whether, whether or not you're aware of it, your life is also a materialization or a representation of so many greater forces that are outside of your control. Whether those be of history, politics, religion, power structures, colonialism. And it helps me to understand why I experience the world in the way I do.
Melina Walling: We can take physical objects and ask ourselves about the large forces behind them. Just like Regina's book, full of sticky notes, the spine cracked because she keeps rereading it. Books are perhaps the most obvious way of turning big, abstract forces into physical objects-- objects we carry around with us. And because of that, they hold a lot of power.
I started thinking about the other ways that those forces surround us every day. Things that we don't even realize can help us better understand the stories of the world around us. Today on our show, we're asking what ideas exist behind material objects. We're going to look at the tangible-- things we can see or hear or touch-- to try to understand the intangible, like memory, history, and bias.
And to start with the obvious, it's not that hard to [00:04:00] find physical things. You might've heard of Marie Kondo. She has a book and a TV show about pairing down the objects in our lives. She's having a huge pop cultural moment. Marie Kondo-ing is even a verb now. The KonMarie method resonates with so many people because it acknowledges something really simple: the material things in our lives have a lot of power. They can bog us down or they can bring us joy.
One of our producers, Yue Lee, realized just how much her possessions affected her. Moving out of her dorm-- well, faced with putting everything she had in boxes-- she began to feel uncomfortable about her own buying habits. So she took a trip to Berkeley to meet some people who think really differently about stuff.
Yue Li: I am at a place called Urban Ore. It's a giant warehouse. It's full of used goods. Everywhere I turn, there's a lot of things I never expected to see.
Yue Li, in Urban Ore: Motion activated candy dispenser with built-in sensor for 100% touchless operation. That's what I need in my life.
Yue Li: Like this over-engineered candy dispenser.
Over the years, I've accumulated so much stuff, and I only frequently use a small fraction of the things I own. That fact makes me really uncomfortable. I came to Urban Ore because I was curious: Could going to Urban Ore help me think differently about my stuff?
A few weeks ago, my boyfriend surprised me with a moon lamp. [00:06:00] It's a spherical lamp, the size of a fist with a rough plastic surface. It comes with a remote control so that you can make the moon change into whatever color you want. All shades of blue, pink, purple, orange. It was shipped all the way from China in a small cardboard box.
Maybe once a week, I'll use it as a nightlight for fun. It was funny at first, but now that the novelty has worn off, I've just been ruminating on where all the items go when I no longer need them.
Max Wexler [Urban Ore employee]: This is the gallery. It's rare items or antiques.
Yue Li: That's Max. He's showing me around Urban Ore today.
Max Wexler [Urban Ore employee]: My name is Max Wexler. I'm the operations manager at Urban Ore.
Yue Li: He's been here on and off for the past three years. Urban Ore sells practically anything you can reuse, from tables and chairs, to toilets and bathtubs.
Urban Ore has a lofty mission: to save the earth by getting people to give a second life to objects.
Max Wexler [Urban Ore employee]: What's in front of us-- this is a newly decorated lighting corrale, uh, power tools, more furniture, couches, cabinets, drawers, over 4,000 doors. There are dozens of categories of doors.
Yue Li: As I look around, I notice that there's an intention to where things are, even though there are thousands of often really uncategorized objects. The employees here don't just salvage objects-- they curate an experience of the objects. And they have a lot of fun doing it. Here's how Max describes Urban Ore.
Max Wexler [Urban Ore employee]: A highly interactive, adaptive, constantly evolving art exhibit.
Yue Li: They have an artist in residency program, too.
Max Wexler [Urban Ore employee]: Every month it rotates to show art that has a reuse component or [00:08:00] recycling component to it.
Yue Li: Then Max takes me to his favorite exhibit.
Max Wexler [Urban Ore employee]: He made this Vapor Wave display. This is a very particular aesthetic. It's a combination of Greek statues with faux plants and a sort of '80s microwave tech blend.
Yue Li: In front of me is a display filled with fake bushes, Greek busts, old keyboards, and computers placed on a shelf above the used technology section.
I am starting to realize there's a joy in curating the ephemera in our lives.
I'm back at the home renovation section when I run into Jimmy. I ask him what he's looking for.
Jimmy [Urban Ore shopper]: Oh, we're just looking at stuff. But in particular, I like to build fairy houses. Uh, built little fairy houses and then other people in the neighborhood liked them, and so I just started making 'em for them.
Yue Li: Jimmy has made about 20 fairy houses so far in his neighborhood. He's shopping for pieces that he can use to create tiny tables and tiny chairs for the fairies. He's crafting wonder and light out of scrap.
Jimmy [Urban Ore shopper]: The fairy house is a little miniature house about a foot high or less that just sits on the curb.
It was just kind of therapy. Just, you know, I, I'm good with my hands.
Yue Li: It's a reminder for me to reconnect with the small wonders of the mundane world, and maybe even sprinkle a little magic.
Older woman [Urban Ore shopper]: Today I'm looking for fabrics. I'm looking at different pieces that I can integrate into new construction and bring some history into.
Yue Li: Sometimes objects can make a deeper kind of magic in our lives. I meet Sally and she tells me:
Older woman [Urban Ore shopper]: I lost my home just recently to a sewage, uh, flood where everything is gone. To lose everything in your home that you've [00:10:00] acquired through the years and tried to bring beauty into your home... and, you know, some of these pieces look old and awful, but when you repurpose them into, like, a pantry door, or something like that, they would look beautiful.
Yue Li: She can't bring back what she's lost, but she's here today to try to build a new home with objects that feel like they've been lived in, because secondhand objects have a story. What is it like to work at Urban Ore and see these stories pass through every day?
I pose this question to Sarah. She's been working here for a few months, and she tells me:
Sarah [Urban Ore employee]: I remember when I first started working here, I was, like, going through the photos and, like, notes section. And it was noted this guy, Keith, had died and all of his-- all of the things that he had kept had been donated here.
And it was, like, it chronicled his whole life and, like, his relationship with his two daughters and, like, his alcoholism. And it was just like, I was piecing together all these things based on like the pictures and the like notes that were there. And it was like really crazy that like, I'll never really know who he is, but like, I'd know a lot about his life, weirdly, just because, like, of this place.
Yue Li: And seeing all of these things, I start to realize: buried in some areas of Urban Ore are really, not so much objects, but just memories. It's a celebration of who we once were, and if you dig around a little, you might find stories, glimpses of who someone else was.
Our stuff reflects a lot about who we are. What we choose to cherish, buy, and throw away-- it all paints a picture of our lives.
Our stuff kind of makes us immortal. Our histories are in our clothes, books, VHS tapes, photos, doors. [00:12:00] And if your stuff ends up here, it might just get another life.
How will I be remembered when my stuff survives past me? Will my moon lamp that my boyfriend gave me bring as much happiness and sentimentality to someone else, as it does to me?
I wonder where this, and all of my other stuff, will end up.
Melina Walling: That story was produced by Stanford student Yue Li. Speaking about an excess of stuff, here's a fact about Philadelphia. There's something like 91 statues in the city just of Ben Franklin. I first moved to Pennsylvania in middle school. I moved from Las Vegas, which on the timescale of US history is a pretty new city, but I've always loved colonial history.
So I couldn't get enough of those 91 statues of Ben. I have this picture of me from when I was 13. I'm sitting next to this statue of Franklin that's seated on a park bench. I'm excited. My arm is around his shoulders. I'm holding up a recently purchased feather quill, and I have a giant grin on my face.
I had read about him in books, but this made him feel like a real person. It was almost like I got to really sit next to Ben Franklin. It seemed so natural when I was a kid, but as I got older, I started to question why there were so many statues of Franklin and not of anyone else. Around that time, some family members came to visit.
We took them downtown to do all the classic colonial history stuff. Independence Hall, Betsy Ross's house, the Liberty Bell. And then, I really started to wonder about statues because they don't just appear out of nowhere.
[00:14:00] Statues are the materialization of a whole lot of effort from people. Philly is a pretty diverse city with lots of public art, but the statues are still mostly of white men like Ben Franklin.
In summer 2017, Philly put up a new statue of someone named Octavius Catto. It was a big deal because it was the first statue of a Black man on public property in the city. When I heard about the statue of Catto, I went to find him.
I'm in downtown Philly to see a protest and to meet someone. Groups are gathering all around me, all here to protest a visit from Vice President Mike Pence. But the gathering place turns out to be that someone that I wanted to meet. A statue of one: Octavius Catto.
He's a tall bronze figure on a small pedestal, raised slightly above the ground. His arms are stretched out behind him. He's leaning forward. Behind the statue, there are all these tall marble tablets around him, saying things like, "activist," "athlete." There's a ballot box in front of him. This is the first statue in Philadelphia of a Black man on public property.
It was put up in 2017 in front of City Hall.
There's police, barricades, protestors with megaphones. There are silent women dressed in red cloaks-- costumes based on The Handmaid's Tale. I love art, and I want to get a closer look at this new statue. I'm curious why it's the gathering [00:16:00] place for these activists. But it's noisy and crowded, and I'm a bit overwhelmed.
I tell the statue of Catto, I'll get back to him. And I duck into a Starbucks across the street.
Melina Walling, ordering at Starbucks: Can I get a tall, just like--
Melina Walling: The baristas don't know who Catto was, even though his statue is just down the street.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing at Starbucks: The statue down by City Hall of Octavius Catto--
Woman being interviewed at Starbucks: Oh, I don't know anything about that. Oh, I don't know anything about that.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing at Starbucks: You don't know anything about it? Okay, uh--
Women being interviewed at Starbucks: The statue on, who is that?
Is that, that, that, that big statue of that guy that's gone like that?
Yeah.
Melina Walling: I don't know who he was either, even though he's right outside my city hall. Although, I use that "my" loosely. I'm not exactly from Philadelphia. I live in a rich, white suburb called Wayne.
Why is Octavius Catto here? Now? Today? And why do I feel like he's speaking to me?
Octavius Catto, voice at African American Museum: Well, I was educated at the Institute for Colored Youth, here in Philadelphia.
Melina Walling: Statues don't talk much. So now, I'm standing in front of Catto at the African American Museum. Really, it's just an actor in a talking portrait. It's cheesy, but it's the closest I can get to him, like I'm having a fuzzy phone conversation with the past.
Still, it kind of feels like listening to him, and trying to talk to him about his life.
Catto tells me about his childhood, that he was born in 1839 to a free black family in South Carolina and moved with his family to Philly when he was 11.
Here, further north, there was a free Black middle class population.
He tells me about his education: first, at segregated primary schools, and later, at the Institute for Colored Youth, a Black university.
But when Catto [00:18:00] was 22, the Civil War broke out.
Octavius Catto, voice at African American Museum: With the help of Frederick Douglass and many others, I formed the recruitment committee to raise 11 regiments of colored troops that we equipped, trained, and sent off to war.
Melina Walling: Catto seems stately in his three piece suit. He was also a relentless activist. He was so committed to desegregating public transit, that one day, he took matters into his own hands. He sat on a trolley car and refused to get off. The conductor stopped the trolley car, abandoned it, and left Catto there by himself.
Catto stayed there all night in protest. And in the morning, a crowd of supporters gathered around the abandoned car. In 1865, soon after this protest, the Union League of Philadelphia passed a bill that prohibited segregation on transportation systems in the city.
Octavius Catto, voice at African American Museum: But politics are my true passion. As through the votes, we can change so much of what is unjust in our society.
Melina Walling: On October 10th, 1871, Catto left his house for the polls on election day.
Octavius Catto, voice at African American Museum: We encouraged the Pennsylvania legislature to pass the 15th Amendment to the Constitution that gave Black men the right to vote.
Melina Walling: It was just after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed, which abolished slavery made former slaves citizens and granted Black men the right to vote. But Catto tells me about yet another obstacle he faced:
Octavius Catto, voice at African American Museum: Oh, it's the Irish who will be the most difficult today. Democratic to the core, they're under the control of Mayor Daniel Fox, who has no interest in supporting a peaceful election process.
Melina Walling: Radical lower class white voters, including some Irish, didn't like that. They considered the Black vote a threat.
Octavius Catto, voice at African American Museum: It will be a most dangerous time for us, and it is my duty to prepare [00:20:00] my brigade in case we're called upon the right--
Melina Walling: Walking to the poles, Catto carried a revolver in his pocket for protection. He walked up the street dodging white men who would sometimes harass him. But before he could reach the poles, a radical Irishman named Frank Kelly walked up, and point blank, he shot Catto dead.
Catto had a fiance at the time he was killed. She never remarried.
She did carry on his legacy by working to further Black education in Philly.
Kelly went on the run but was found and brought back for trial in 1877. He was not convicted for assault or murder. A jury of his peers acquitted him. He got off scot free.
While I'm walking down the street where Catto was shot, a car engine backfires.
It is a scary feeling, like I'm hearing the gunshots that killed Octavius Catto.
Philadelphia is trying to bring Catto back to life. Would Catto feel like his life's work is reflected in Philly's streets? I wonder, where else is Catto alive today?
I'm walking down South 15th Street when Catto appears again. I look up ,and there's his face taking shape on a wall. A giant mural. This mural is so massive, they're using a genie lift to install it.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: Hi, how are you? Hi.
Melina Walling: Seems like Catto reappeared in a bigger way than I realized.
Keir Johnston: So I'm standing about 15 feet off the ground, looking down on you.
Melina Walling: Keir Johnston is one of the lead muralists on the project.
Keir Johnston: We're in a lift, [00:22:00] we're installing. We're on the 1500 block of Catherine, in between Broad and 15th Street, on the north side of the middle of the block. Working on a 70 by 120 foot wall.
It's one of the most complex and complicated murals, I would say in the city at this point.
Melina Walling: Keir tells me that designing the mural was not the biggest challenge. It was where to put it.
Keir Johnston: --That we were working with. We tried to get this mural off the ground then. In his old neighborhood. But his old neighborhood, it's not a black neighborhood-- it's, it's a majority white, bourgeoisie neighborhood.
Melina Walling: Gentrification is changing the makeup of this historically Black neighborhood.
Keir Johnston: And the whites, let's just say, were not ready.
Melina Walling: They were trying for years to put up this mural, but it wasn't until the city recognized Catto in the statue that they got permission.
Keir Johnston: You know and-- you know, there's-- all the walls that we were talking to, they, we got no, no reception.
And so, fast forward, um, sculpture goes in...
Melina Walling: The statue made Catto important. It brought him back to life, which was why I found out about him.
Keir Johnston: There was all this new public knowledge of who Catto was as a figure. He wasn't this obscure guy anymore. Yeah, we were able to get this off the ground, and then...
Melina Walling: But, to me, this mural makes his life even more present.
I wonder why Catto was the specific face that they chose.
Keir Johnston: We're talking about somebody and the struggles that he had to endure in what's called the first Civil Rights Movement. Because a lot of what happened in the Civil Rights Movement was predated by what happened, almost verbatim, in this era.
He's still out here. This man right over here, Eddie, he's been watching the process all along and...
Melina Walling: We crossed the street to Eddie's house, a small row house with an open garage.
Keir Johnston: And I would say at least a third of the days that we've been out here, he's, he's raised his garage, parked himself [00:24:00] right here, and watched the whole process go down, you know.
Melina Walling: I ask Eddie what it's like to live right across from a mural. Watching it go up for weeks on end, larger than life.
Eddie: Fascinating. Fascinating. I've been getting those snapshots of it from the very beginning when they put up the first piece way up there. You know...
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: What was the first piece?
Eddie: When I saw the eye, that was one of the first pieces that went up.
When I saw the eye go up-- the left eye-- I knew it was Catto. I really started studying him when they put the statue down City Hall, you know, and that's when I kind of looked into his history.
Melina Walling: I ask Eddie how that feels, seeing Philly's first statue of a Black man.
Eddie: It's kind of like looking at me. That's the emotion, you know?
Melina Walling: I've never really considered what it might feel like to live in a city where none of the statues looked like me. I'm biracial, half white, half Indian. And as a white passing person, a lot of art already looks like me.
Eddie: My mother first came here developing, we talking about over 30 years ago. And, uh, the neighborhood was rough.
It was really, really rough. But, um, over the years, uh-- well of course you had a gentrification, and, uh, it changed quite a bit. But, back in those days, it's funny how everything was dirt cheap back then. But I remember those days, and the days of the Black Panther Party, and Rizzo lining up a bunch of black men along a wall naked, right?
Melina Walling: For Eddie, simply living in his neighborhood meant dealing with a legacy of tensions between his community and the police.
Eddie: I came up in that era, so I know it all well, you know. And, uh, I knew Rizzo's reputation, well back then...
Melina Walling: Frank Rizzo was the police commissioner in Philly in the late '60s. He later became mayor.
He is known to many as a symbol of police brutality.
I want to understand Eddie's era better, [00:26:00] so I decide to head to the historical society.
Kim: It's pretty still fresh and recent.
The African American community has still faced, uh, a lot of repression here in Philadelphia.
Melina Walling: I'm talking with Kim, a young Black historian.
I want to know what Eddie's Philly was like back in the '80s. She tells me about a radical civil rights group called MOVE that was active in the '70s and '80s.
Broadcaster voices: All trained and equipped...
Twenty-five years ago, America's war against Black nationalism came to a head.
Kim: MOVE was an African American, uh, civil rights group that was really kinda aggressive in the way that they went about gaining civil rights.
Man's voice speaking to a crowd: The Africans didn't get it by sitting in. They didn't get it by waiting in. They got it through nationalism.
Melina Walling: They were notorious in their neighborhood for being rowdy activists.
Kim: Really, they were a community. They were kind of, uh, communal. They lived together.
Melina Walling: Not everyone loved their confrontational tactics. They used a bullhorn to shout at passers by day and night. They disrupted the neighbors.
Kim: There had definitely been things in their neighborhood where their, their neighbors were kind of complaining about them in regards to noise, things that were kind of taking place.
Woman's voice broadcasting: The movement shifted its compound to a residential Black neighborhood. MOVE turned the home into a fortress against the possibility of police shootouts and raids.
Melina Walling: But when the police got involved, something terrible happened.
Kim: And so really it was just kind of accumulating. You know, accumulating, accumulated till bam-- the bomb happened.
Melina Walling: The police dropped a bomb.
Woman's voice broadcasting: In 1985, the Philadelphia police responded with a bomb. The blast destroyed 61 homes and left the militant organization shattered.
Kim: Where many of them died, like-- that the Philadelphia police actually like [00:28:00] dropped a bomb onto their home.
And it didn't just burn down their home. It really kind of burned down the surrounding homes as well. So many people lost their homes, as well as many members of MOVE died.
Melina Walling: Eleven people died, including five children. No one was held accountable. I can't help but think of Catto. How the person who killed him got away with it, and this has happened over and over again.
It's in the national spotlight, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement, but it still keeps happening.
Kim reads me a speech Catto's friend Jacob C. White gave at the Institute for Colored Youth.
Kim: So this is, um, a quote from Jacob C. White, um, who was Catto's best friend. So it says, "We here at the ICY, we have been preparing for that day when you are ready to talk about racial equality. We will be ready."
I don't think Philly's ready.
Melina Walling: Which makes me wonder: am I ready?
I haven't had to face Philly's history of discrimination directly. Maybe that's why I never dug this deep into questions about race before. But now, I'm starting to see how race affects life all over the city. Kim thinks Philly's not ready to talk about racial equality, but now that Catto's statue and mural are here, could that change?
Could we look at police brutality and gentrification with more urgency?
Speaking of gentrification, I want to go back to the Starbucks, but this time not for a drink. I want to talk to the baristas again.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing at Starbucks: Gentrification-- i'm sorry, I don't know quite where we left off.
Woman being interviewed at Starbucks: I don't know where I left off either.
Gentrification has just been a very big problem in our city. I mean, I don't wanna say that it's a problem that people want to move here, because [00:30:00] Philly is a nice place, but it's a problem when it affects poor, like urban Black people of color. Like, we are greatly affected by the change in demographic.
Melina Walling: I think about the neighborhood I was just in, about Eddie, about how people are being pushed out. Because I live in the suburbs, I don't see what's happening here every day.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: And did, did this happen in your neighborhood?
Woman being interviewed at Starbucks: Yes, of course. It, you know, it always starts with, um-- see, recently my great grandma died, uh, God rest her soul.
So she, before she died every day, I would come over there would be a "sell your house now," and she's one of the only people on her block at this point who has not sold her house.
Melina Walling: I go back to see Catto at City Hall again. On this day, there are no protestors by the statue of the activist. There are homeless people camped around it.
What Catto was fighting for is unfinished. Catto wanted people of all races to have equal access to education, housing, and economic opportunity. I stopped to talk to people near the statue of Catto, who otherwise would've just passed by without really seeing him.
Tim: People really don't pay attention to statues.
They too, too much going on in their life. No...
Melina Walling: Tim's waiting for his wife.
Tim: And here's my wife.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: Okay, thank you so much. I'll let you go--
Melina Walling: But she has a different idea.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: Thank you for talking. Do you know anything about the statue? I'm just doing a podcast.
Tim's wife: Well, I read about it, and um, then I read what they have around me, so I think it's great that they are honoring this man.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: Yeah.
Tim's wife: It's wonderful.
Melina Walling, switching to interviewing on the street: Yeah, I agree. And your husband was just saying, he thinks that not a lot of people really pay attention to statues, and it's...
Tim's wife: Well, you know what, passing here in the morning and evening, I do see people stop here and they'll read. And they'll stand here and take a picture, so they are-- some of 'em are paying attention. Because it's the first Black statue I've seen.
Melina Walling: There's still so much I don't know, [00:32:00] but I can keep learning. I'm glad that Catto is in Philadelphia again, and this time, I hope we're ready to listen to what he has to say.
On my way out of the city, I pass by the statue of Catto one last time. I tell him, we'll talk again soon.
This podcast is dedicated to the memory of Willis Nomo Humphrey, co-lead artist on the mural of Catto, Remembering a Forgotten Hero
That story was produced by me, Stanford student Melina Walling. So far, we've learned stories about objects that will last a long time-- things like a piece of plastic, or a statue. Those could last for thousands of years. But Twinkies? Those might last even longer. And as it turns out, there's a reason for that. A reason besides the preservatives.
In our next story, producer Isabella Tilley looks at how the policies of one institution, the US military, materialized into the super processed food we find on grocery store shelves today, and what that means for the rest of us.
Isabella Tilley: My mom is a little bit of a health nut. She's not, like, into SoulCycle or anything, but while I was growing up, my sister and I would get into fights with her about how we apparently weren't eating enough vegetables. While she was gardening or cooking, my mom would always be listening to podcasts about the sugar industry, or the dangers of processed food, or gastrointestinal health in the microbiome.
But even though she knew a lot about health, and fervently believed that we should always be eating at least half a plate of vegetables, my mom still gave into the temptation of processed food. It's everywhere. Which makes me wonder, where does all of this [00:34:00] junk food come from?
Advertiser on TV: Eat Wonder Bread.
Hannah LeBlanc: There is a, a journalist who writes about this. She says that she thinks it's 50% of grocery store items have some kind of military roots.
Isabella Tilley: To help me answer this question, I talked to someone who studies the history of food science.
Hannah LeBlanc: I'm Hannah LeBlanc. I'm a PhD candidate in the Stanford History Department.
Every time you eat like Fritos or sliced bread, those all rely on technologies that the military at least had a hand in.
Isabella Tilley: What Hannah found in her research is that the US military has had a lot to do with the way we think about food and nutrition today. It started in the 1930s, when scientists started to learn more about vitamins.
Hannah LeBlanc: The first vitamins were discovered in the teens, but the '30s sees this huge wave of new research into vitamins and minerals. And also a lot of hope that actually, these vitamins might solve problems that we didn't even know were nutritional in the past. So maybe things like stamina, or um, courage, or morale were actually linked to vitamin deficiencies.
Isabella Tilley: Those nutritional problems became a lot more important when the US entered World War II.
Hannah LeBlanc: The war makes the, makes it, uh, an urgent problem.
Isabella Tilley: The military's priority was to make sure soldiers weren't hungry.
Broadcaster on TV: Stout hearted eagles who fly for Uncle Sam are the best fed pilots in the world. The food experts who plan the cadet's meals wisely see to it that they get enough protective foods, including plenty of milk, butter, cheese, and ice cream.
Isabella Tilley: It wasn't easy to serve a hardy meal to soldiers on the front lines, though. They had to figure out a way to pack a lot of [00:36:00] nutrients into foods that would last a long time. So military food engineers partnered up with academic labs and industrial labs to develop long lasting foods that would keep the soldiers full.
Hannah LeBlanc: These partnerships invented one of the key technologies for keeping sliced bread from becoming stale. And in World War II, they actually-- they had these mobile bread units that would follow the front lines and crank out like thousands of loaves a day. But the conditions were really dangerous, right? 'Cause you're baking bread on the front lines. So long lasting sliced bread is, was a really big innovation.
Isabella Tilley: Eventually sliced bread made its way out of the military and to grocery stores.
Hannah LeBlanc: Industry was not likely to, to spend a lot of money on research that wasn't going to be profitable to them beyond these military contracts.
So they really sold this as things that could also be sold to the public.
Isabella Tilley: The military's research on food did more than just give us sliced bread and other processed foods, though. It also shaped the way we even think about nutrition.
Hannah LeBlanc: In World War II, it's all about vitamins. That's actually when you get the kind of ancestor of the pyramid. It's the "basic seven" is what it's called. It has seven food groups based on their different vitamin content.
Isabella Tilley: Group one was green and yellow vegetables. Group two was oranges, tomatoes, grapefruit, and raw cabbage, and group three was potatoes. The other groups are things we're more familiar with today: grains, meat and poultry, and dairy, which was separate from butter.
Hannah LeBlanc: I really like it because butter is its own food group because it, uh, was high in vitamin A.
Isabella Tilley: During the Cold War, the health of the general public became a priority for the military.
In 1956, Eisenhower created the President's Council on Youth Fitness.
Broadcaster on TV: Introducing the president's all America physical fitness team.
Isabella Tilley: Later, [00:38:00] Kennedy changed it to the President's Council on Physical Fitness because he wanted to include all age groups.
President John F. Kennedy: I think that mental and physical health, mental and physical vigor, go hand in hand.
A country, uh, is as strong, really, as its citizens.
Hannah LeBlanc: In the Cold War as a whole, society competing against the, the Soviet Union. And so the fitness of everyone really mattered. The, the President's Council on Fitness, it's definitely related to this fear that Americans are not gonna hold up to their Soviet counterparts. They're thinking about the next war, and preparing the country for a war that could come at any moment.
This is the era of nuclear weapons, so it would be fast and hugely destructive. They actually want the civilian food system to look as much as possible, like the military food system. So if that war came, the conversion would be seamless.
It's a very deliberate strategy to bring those military food technologies into grocery stores.
Isabella Tilley: The US government wanted people in other countries to resist communism, so there was a push to change foreign food systems too.
Hannah LeBlanc: Nutritionists came up with this theory that linked malnutrition-- um, not just hunger but actual protein malnutrition-- to susceptibility to communism. And so, nutrition in the third world became framed as a national defense issue.
Americans eat a lot more meat than most of the world, and so there's a sort of an assumption that everyone should be eating more meat. I actually found like packets of, of this fish flower, um, which is made out of whole fish that have been dehydrated and pulverized. And the idea was that this would be a high protein supplement for poor consumers all over the world to sort of raise their protein levels.
One, uh, fish flower manufacturer wrote that fish protein can turn the red tide in Latin America.
Isabella Tilley: Bringing processed food to civilians had been a way to make the [00:40:00] military's food research profitable. But during the Cold War, bringing processed food to people around the world became part of an American national defense strategy.
Today, one of the latest developments in military food engineering is pizza that doesn't go bad.
Hannah LeBlanc: So just last year, they came up with shelf stable pizza, which was always considered the holy grail of rations. It was the most requested meal in the field, and really difficult to have a pizza that lasts three and a half years without refrigeration.
Isabella Tilley: I wonder, will this shelf stable pizza end up in our grocery stores one day? And what does it mean that so much of what's in our food aisles has been developed by and for the military?
Hannah LeBlanc: So one of the things that happens with national defense as a priority in nutrition is that it's important that everyone has enough to eat, but there is less focus on people having access to really good food.
Things like health, or equity, or sustainability-- it just hasn't been a priority in our food system or in food science, really.
Isabella Tilley: Millions of Americans live in places where healthy, unprocessed food is out of reach, both locationally and financially. I'm super lucky. Sure, I'm tempted by junk food, but it's not the only food I have access to. Still, it's really hard to eat healthy when the government doesn't prioritize things like health, equity, and sustainability.
At any grocery store I go to, there are a ton of processed snacks. Each time I open a bag of potato chips, I literally eat the materialization of food politics.
I am in college now, living across the country from my mom. I talk to her once a week, and she always asks me [00:42:00] if I've been exercising and eating right. Sometimes she wants to know what I've been eating, and I tell her: at least half a plate of vegetables, some grains, and some protein, just like she taught me.
Melina Walling: That story was produced by Stanford student Isabella Tilley, with help from Yui Li and me, Melina Walling.
So far, all of our stories have been about physical stuff, the knick-knacks in our homes, statues, grocery store food. But our world is more than just the stuff that we surround ourselves with. We also surround ourselves with less tangible, but still real things, like the pitch and tone of our voices when we talk to certain people. The makeup we use or don't use. How we choose to carry ourselves in a room when we're nervous.
And just like all the other stuff we've talked about, these little things that we do can be vessels for bigger ideas about who we think we are and how the world sees us.
In our final story, a young girl has a big idea about herself, specifically about what she wishes the world could see her as. And to materialize that idea into something real, she decides to turn it into something that people can hear.
Adesuwa Agbonile, interviewing Esther: Okay, so if you could just introduce yourself first of all.
Esther Omole: Hi, I'm Esther Omole. I am from London, England.
Adesuwa Agbonile: This is Esther. As a kid, she was a peak Londoner. She had the obligatory pictures in front of Big Ben, bought shoes from Bloomingdale's that had little British flags on them. She was as British as it gets.
Except for one thing.
Adesuwa Agbonile, interviewing Esther: Now if you could just like, really introduce yourself, who you actually are.
Esther Omole: Hi, I am [00:44:00] Esther Omole. I am from, um, just outside Miami, Florida, and I'm a sophomore.
Adesuwa Agbonile: Esther's family is from Nigeria, a country in West Africa. She was born and raised in South Florida, and she did go to London when she was six years old, but only for two weeks to visit extended family.
But while she was there, everyone Esther was around-- her cousins, her aunts and uncles, even her mom-- kept on telling her that being British was better. British people were cleaner and crisper than Americans, more respectable.
In the fall, after she visited London, Esther started first grade and enrolled in an art program for kids called Young Rembrandts.
Rembrandt is Dutch, not British, but it was close enough for Esther. On the first day, the art teacher gave them all an assignment: go home and draw a flag from where you're from.
Esther Omole: And I was very prepared for like this, obviously. Having been to England recently, I knew which flag I was drawing.
Adesuwa Agbonile: So, Esther went home. She got out her crayons, and she began to draw.
Esther Omole: I had to go online and look at the different crosses 'cause they were very difficult to draw.
Adesuwa Agbonile: But she figured it out. And then the next day, she came back to school with her British shoes on, carrying a British flag. The teacher went around the room, every kid presented their flag, and then, they got to Esther.
Esther Omole, montage pretending to be British: Hi, my name is Esther. I'm from... this is the British flag... to see the London... we went to go shopping... to Piccadilly... we went to see Big Ben... about 4:00 PM, and a lot of things that British people do is they... tea...
Esther Omole: I think I was just [00:46:00] giving any, like factoid I've ever heard about England.
My accent is bad now, so I know when I was younger my accent was really bad, but um, that's how I sounded, that's exactly what I said.
Definitely, it was pretty brazy what I did, when I was just like, I am gonna surprise everyone. I'm British. You didn't think I had this cool, great thing about me, but I do. So it was kind of like, you thought that I was just Black, but I'm cooler than that.
Everything my mom said was true. British English was better, and being British was better. If people looked down on me for being Black, then people would look up at me for being British.
Adesuwa Agbonile: And after Esther left the art class, she didn't stop. She took this British version of herself home, and she ran with it.
Esther Omole: Whenever I remembered to do it, I would do it. It wasn't just for class, but yeah, I, I woke up and I was like, "okay, good morning, everybody"-- probably said it in my normal accent. And then once I remembered, I was like, "oh, it's such a beautiful day today, mum."
I don't think that I thought that I was faking, really. I was like, I'm just catching a British accent.
Adesuwa Agbonile: Everything was going great. And then, Esther's mom caught on.
Esther Omole: And she saw my British shoes and my British flag and all this stuff, and she was like, "that-- you can't imitate my accent anymore. You are American. You speak like an American. Speak how you speak."
I think that I was confused about why my mom of all people thought that it was wrong. My mom was always like, "oh, if you have the choice between two things, do the thing that's better." When I talk about it logically, I wanna go back to my six-year-old self and say like, "honestly, like you are wrong for that, and [00:48:00] you shouldn't be ashamed of where you're from," but at the same time, "your, your logic makes sense."
But I think that the problem was I wanted to get away from what I was and be something else.
Being loud and Black definitely had its own connotation, 'cause then you were like, like you were always in trouble.
Here are the problem kids, and they look like you.
Adesuwa Agbonile: But if you talk in a British accent, even if the problem kids look like you, they can't be like you.
When I was little, I used to be convinced that my life was a dream, and that one day, I would wake up and be a 10-year-old white girl. I was around five or six at the time, and being 10 seemed impossibly old. It seemed like the age where dreams would come true. One night, I told that story to my roommate. She's also Black, and I was expecting her to tell me that it was ridiculous, but instead, she told me that when she was little, she thought that if she worked hard enough in school, one day, she would wake up and be white.
No one had ever told us outright, but just like Esther, we'd intuited from the people around us-- our classmates, our teachers, our parents-- that the world saw us a little differently.
People expected us to be loud and rude in class. They thought we were the problem kids. And so, as impossible as it sounds, we wanted to hide that part of ourselves-- to choose to become something else.[00:50:00]
Esther Omole: There's just this choice between being rowdy and being polite. So I was just making choices, and I think that if I really simplify it, it was really easy to decide like, "okay, how do I be a step up from that?" Or like, "how do I present myself in this space in a way that's gonna make people respect me and like me, or be unexpected and be cooler, be better?"
The switch is really easy to make. It becomes more of a instinct and less of a lie.
Adesuwa Agbonile: Esther is 20 now. When I talked to her, she was wearing plain white sneakers and had traded out her British math workbooks for architecture design sketchbooks. She doesn't talk in a British accent anymore. But she still has different voices.
Like, for the past couple of minutes, you've been hearing her interview voice. But before we officially started the interview, we were talking about something that had happened to us the other day. We ran into a mutual friend, and while the three of us were talking, the girl got our names mixed up. She called Esther, Adesuwa, which is my name.
Here's how Esther sounded before the interview:
Esther Omole: And that's the problem. Like, I understand like the fact that we look really similar, but at the same time, like... and, you know, I think I'm bothered about it because I had a dream about it, so I know that like, it's bothering me. The thing is like, I like her and all and I think she's great, but at the same time, like I've been told you my name, my name is Esther. Why are you confusing me for Adesuwa? We look nothing alike. My hair is different. Like, I've already started on a, a rant tonight...
Adesuwa Agbonile: That went on for like 10 minutes. That's how Esther sounds when we get lunch, or [00:52:00] when I run into her on my way to class. But she also has a voice for when she's talking to professors.
Esther Omole: I'd like to discuss the internships that I'm doing over the summer. I had a question about the homework. I'd really like to talk about it further. I enjoyed the lecture so much. Have a good day.
Adesuwa Agbonile: All of these different voices could seem really similar to six-year-old Esther's fake accent. But to 20-year-old Esther, it's different.
Esther Omole: It is really clear from far away that I'm a Black woman. There's so many aspects of Black womanhood that I've gotten used to, that someone else would be like, "oh, that's like pretty sad that you have to do that." Like, I think that yes, it is sad that, you know-- what we're always taught is like be yourself. Be your most vulnerable self, and be yourself always.
I genuinely believe that like, it's cool to be yourself, but sometimes yourself is a lot-- like there's certain things that people don't need to know about you. I understand that this person needs me to be me, but at this level, they don't want everything.
I think if racism didn't exist, or if like anti-Blackness didn't exist, I would feel like, "okay, people can handle me at my anything." But I definitely think that that's not the case.
Adesuwa Agbonile: To Esther, putting on these different voices, it's not lying or hiding. It's just choosing what she reveals, and when she reveals it.
But at the end of the day, under all of these different layers of voices, there's one that feels the most comfortable.
Esther Omole: I do like the idea that I don't always speak like the version of myself that's speaking to my professors, because, [00:54:00] though that version is very-- you know-- clean, I do not-- I would not like to sound like her all the time.
Adesuwa Agbonile: She likes sounding like herself.
I like how she sounds, too.
Melina Walling: That story was produced by Stanford student Adesuwa Agbonile.
You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project. This episode was produced by Adesuwa Agbonile, Val Gamao, Yui Lee, Jenny March, Isabella Tilley, and me, Melina Walling, with support from Tiffany Naiman and Jonah Willihnganz.
For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Office of the Vice President for the Arts, and Bruce Braden. You can find this and every episode of State of the Human through our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.