Welcome to Tech Care, where we explore what it means to build tech that cares, so that we can take care — of ourselves, our communities, and the world around us. You can find all past issues here, and join us here:
🌸 musings in full bloom today:
leaning into the philosophy of intuitive eating
bridging food, family, cultural identity, and love
stocking up community fridges
Hi friends,
Hope you’ve been taking lots of care. I took my own advice last weekend and gave myself some time to rest, and feel so nourished after a weekend of quality time and quality food with loved ones.
It got me thinking about what it means to nourish yourself with the food that you love, and share it with the people you love. Sometimes, nourishing looks like a grilled chicken salad and iced Jasmine green tea. Other times, it looks like a delicious slice of (guilt-free) Margherita pizza. However, for me nourishing always means putting away my phone at meals (after snapping an obligatory food pic, of course) to be fully present with those around you.
With this in mind, I’d love to check-in with you: how are you taking time to nourish yourself today? Feel free to hit reply and let me know, leave a comment, or share on Twitter via the check-in question below:
🍵 Conversations of Care: Nourish
Every week, we’ll use this section to explore what it means to practice self, community, and structural care, and if/how technology plays a role.
Inspired by this post, we’ll use a “circular” structure of care to help us unlearn the individualistic “pyramid” structure of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Inspired by this digital garden, we’ll use 🌱 to denote newly planted ideas, 🌿 for budding thoughts, and 🌸 for musings in full bloom. For potential problem/product spaces, we’ll use 💡 for food for thought.
tech x nourish x self-care
🌸 [Watch] Rowena Tsai on intuitive eating. Rowena has been my internet self-care soul sister since my junior year of college and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love this video on how her relationship with food has changed over time, and how she arrived at her current intuitive eating practice. As someone who has struggled with having a healthy relationship with food, this video was absolutely transformative for me.
🌿 [Listen] Following a diet of kindness. Similar to the philosophy of intuitive eating, this episode from The Happiness Lab podcast offers an antidote to diet culture and “healthy” eating fads. The key? Feed yourself like you would feed a loved one.
🌿 [Watch] Cooking in the Chinese countryside. This ten minute cooking video from Liziqi literally soothes my soul. It’s so beautifully filmed, and watching Liziqi and her grandma eat together after a long day of cooking makes my heart so full.
🌱 [Read/Try] A dynamic community cookbook curating the best of food online. I came across this incredible community cookbook on Twitter a few days ago from the foodsupplyxyz team and it’s just *chef’s kiss* 👩🏻🍳💋. If you’re looking to try new recipes from culinary creators that nourish your mind / body / soul, you have to check this out.
🌸 [Read] Bridging food, family, cultural identity, and love. In honor of the Michelle Zauner’s recent Crying in Hmart release, I wanted to share her New Yorker essay from 2018 of the same name, on the theme of food, family, cultural identity and love (warning: there will be lots of tears). As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, I’ve learned to deeply appreciate how food is our universal love language, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
tech x nourish x community care
🌱 [Read] Planting seeds of change with community gardens. A community garden is a shared piece of land that can be collectively used to grow anything from flowers to fruits and vegetables and beyond. The linked article does a great job of highlighting how community gardens can empower communities to not only plant and share food together, but also support their physical & mental health, educational opportunities, etc.
P.S. This is the energy that I hope to bring into a post-pandemic world :)
🌿 [Read/Try] Support your local food co-op. Back in college, I used to shop at the Swarthmore Co-op all the time without realizing how cool its internal structure was — essentially, it was a community-owned food cooperative with open membership and food sourced locally. The linked article does a great job of covering how food coops can help the rise of food deserts and fight food insecurity / inaccessibility. If you want to find a local food co-op near you, you can check out this online directory.
🌸 [Read/Try] Stocking up the Community Fridge. Community fridges are a place to give, take, and share food with your local community, building alternative structures to our current food supply chain. I recently found this fantastic interactive map of NYC community fridges, and it could be super interesting to see this map scaled to support other community initiatives upstream to the fridge as well — re: gardens, co-ops etc.
💡[Brainstorm] Bringing security to community fridges. As I was researching this week’s issue, I came across this tweet re: destruction around community fridges. It’s made me think about what it could mean to bring “security” to community fridges, without compromising on their foundation of shared trust. It’s tempting to think about using a “electric bike-sharing” model to bring accountability and security to community fridges, but concerns quickly arise: how would we ensure that user’s data is safe & secure? Who gets to determine who “gets access”? If you have any ideas/thoughts on this, feel free to hit reply and let me know!
tech x nourish x structural care
🌱 [Read] Understanding food security vs. justice vs. sovereignty. This article does a great job of highlighting the differences between the “corporate food regime” (food enterprise, food security) and “food movements” (food justice, food sovereignty). As someone who thinks about community care from the lens of food security & food justice, learning about food sovereignty added an entirely new dimension for me when it came to structural care via food. This quote really stood out to me:
“The challenge for food movements is to address the immediate problems of hunger, malnutrition, food insecurity and environmental degradation, while working steadily towards the structural changes needed to turn sustainable, equitable and democratic food systems into the norm rather than a collection of projects. This means that both reform and transformation are needed.”
🌱 [Read] Confronting the impact of eco-capitalism. I took a community-led course recently that introduced me to the contradictions of capital and the environment and it was incredibly eye-opening. This article does a particularly good job of highlighting where technology has been used as a vehicle for the ecological reformation of capitalism (in other words, maintain the status quo), when in actuality, this does more harm than good — capitalism is fundamentally at odds with environmental justice and ecological survival. To nourish ourselves and others at the structural level is to confront these difficult realities, and to care for Mother Nature as much as we care for ourselves. I know this particular article is pretty dense and complex, so if you have any questions and/or want to chat about this further, hit reply and let me know!
🌱 [Watch] Caring for Mother Nature and Abuela Grillo. This 12 minute video also highlights similar themes from the above article, weaving together how resource exploitation, indigenous wisdom and knowledge, capitalism, and the environment all come together.
🌱 [Read] Brenna Quinlan on Permaculture. Permaculture is a philosophy for more sustainable, self-sufficient, and natural land use and agricultural ecosystems. I’m a big fan of Brenna Quinlan’s art and activism, and love the below graphic on the ethics, principles, and actions for a more “permanent culture” a.k.a permaculture. I especially love the dimensions of earth care and people care she added!
🎁 Care.pkg — a community care package
Inspired by the concept of the Gift Economy, the goal here is to support and amplify anything you’re working on, thinking about, or want to share along the lines of tech x care.
If you want to be featured in next week’s issue, reply to this email and let me know!
👩🏻💻 Join a Writing Exchange, c/o Felicia. Felicia is a lovely soul in the Tech Care community, and working on launching a Writing Exchange via her newsletter, Two Pages Double Spaced.
About: “A writing exchange would involve bringing any new or old writing to the table (short form is best, any genre is welcome). We’ll have a good‘ol zoom meeting where we can discuss our writing in groups and pairs.”
Join: If you’re interested, sign up via this form!
📱Build healthy tech to nourish your “information diet”, c/o Sam. Sam is another kind soul in the Tech Care community, who is working on creating a “nutrition label” for tech products, to help us improve our “information diets” as much as we do our physical diets. If you’re curious and want to learn more or join Sam on this project, feel free to reach out on Twitter!
💌 Take care,
Michelle