Making Community Miso
Role: Co-event creator, producer, and organizer
Beginning in spring 2018, two Japanese community organizers—Yuri Baxter-Neal and Sakiko Setaka of LIFE Sampling and Soen—and I began hosting an annual miso making event with community members.
Our first year we made miso by hand with 30 people, sharing our living cultures, literally and figuratively, to create something more complex than our individual components. The following year, we unearthed the miso we made together, extended the circle to 30 new community members, and made a larger batch.
Miso is a celebration of life and aging. For everyone involved, this project is intended to wake us up to culture as a shared endeavor with other people, microbes, animals and plants as well as through and across time. What begins as an interactive Japanese cultural experience teaching food traditions becomes a bridge to personal exploration. As Yuri likes to say, what we do creates links in a living chain. The fruit of our collaboration (the miso we make and then ferment for nine months to one year) becomes our cause for celebration. We hope this project marks the establishment of an annual tradition that grows, evolves, and lives new lives beyond our view. For our community writ large we are building greater cultural connection, holistic empathy, and personal empowerment that will reverberate through our web of relationships.
There’s a common saying in Japanese, 'Temae miso wo naraberu.' ‘Lining up homemade miso.’ It’s something you say before boasting and it means, 'please forgive me in advance for what I’m about to say, but I can’t help it, I like my miso best.' It comes from a time when every Japanese home made its own miso, and no two tasted alike. Miso is a very deep, very powerful food that's been with us, humans, for millennia. Each miso is an extension of the people who touch it and the place where they make it. Our relationship with it can feel prideful, personal, like love. The artists working on this project have experienced that sensation and that inspires their involvement. On the surface, miso is simply a healthy probiotic, but that’s only a refraction of its true magic. What makes miso so powerful is that it's literally alive, filled with our living cultures, filled with the choices and bacteria of people who came before. If our experience of culture is a constant translation of the past with the personal, miso is the flavor of that dynamic interaction. We believe this project offers a holistic and fun way to engage with complex ideas: Who we are as individuals within cross-cultural communities? What it mean to be in a constant state of transformation in a world teeming with life? Every component of this work is a reflection of its heart: many artists, many voices, many microflora, celebrating and sharing life together, building our own musky, magical, life-giving culture.
