Underground Airwaves and Inheritance Stories Part 1

Role: Producer, grant writer

From 2013 to 2016, I co-produced a biweekly podcast focused on personal food stories and oral histories hosted by then farmer, now podcast producer, Chris Seigel called Underground Airwaves. Across nearly 50 episodes, we interviewed everyone from luminaries Wendell Berry to neighborhood backyard farmers, wine tasters to Black Panthers, cast iron collectors to farm workers, food activists to each other. Our goal was to create a platform for personal stories from our food community members. We believed that sharing food memories could help create a more complex and human picture of the people behind the food we eat.

We concluded our podcast run with an interactive multimedia exhibit we called Inheritance Stories where we specifically featured Latino voices on food and farming. We created a series of listening booths with interviews Chris recorded and beautiful portraits of the storytellers by photographer Nolan Calisch, and also set up a station where attendees could record and contribute their own stories, which we brought to various locations around Oregon. This project was funded by Ecotrust, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Oregon State University Extension and featured in The Oregonian and on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud.