In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I am joined by the wonderful Stacia Nordin – a registered Dietician, and co-founder of NeverEndingFood in Malawi where she has been living 25 years, after coming to Africa with the US Peace Corp to work in nutrition education with HIV sufferers .
Click here to listen to the Podcast on your chosen streaming service.
Never Ending Food focuses on permaculture designs with indigenous resources for sustainable nutrition. There are hundreds of indigenous resources in Malawi (and wherever you are, too) that are foods, medicines, fuel, fibres – and everything else we need for an active and healthy life.
Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.
Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.
Stacia has created an abundance of resources that make permaculture nutrition accessible – a freely downloadable Sustainable Nutrition manual, flyers and drawings. She has been a sustainable nutrition advisor to the world food program, the FAO, and USAID
I recently collaborated with Stacia (and others) to launch the global Permaculture Nutrition Network and webinar series . You can watch our first event here.
Stacia’s work is inspiring – and it is fascinating learning from her experience of applying permaculture for decades in places where it’s the difference that makes the difference.
I’ve known of Stacia’s work for a long time, so I’m delighted to be collaborating with her now in the Permaculture Nutrition place – a key focus particularly for the refugee communities I work with every day.
Read the full transcript here.
Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-Making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble, permaculture educator, and global ambassador, filmmaker, eco villager, food forester, mother, practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life, we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever and even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on, so our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection? What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking, community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.
Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the permaculture educators program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online jewel certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global PERMA youth programs. Women’s self-help groups in the global south and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the permaculture education Institute and our permaculture educators program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
In this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, I’m joined by the wonderful Stacia Nordin, a registered dietician, and co-founder of NeverEndingFood in Malawi where she’s been living for at least 25 years after coming to Africa with the US Peace Corp to work in nutrition education with HIV sufferers. NeverEndingFood focuses on permaculture designs with indigenous resources, for sustainable nutrition. Stacia talks about how there are hundreds of indigenous resources in Malawi and wherever you are to actually that our foods, medicines, fuel fibers and everything else that we need for an active and healthy life. Stacia has created an abundance of resources that make permaculture nutrition accessible, a freely downloadable, sustainable nutrition manual flyers drawings. And she’s been a sustainable nutrition advisor to organizations like the world food program, FAO and USAID. I recently collaborated with Stacia and others to launch the Global Permaculture Nutrition Network and webinar series. Stacia’s work is so inspiring and it’s fascinating learning from her experience of applying permaculture for decades in places where it’s the differencethat makes a difference. I’ve noticed Stacia’s work for a long time so I’m delighted to be collaborating with her now in the permaculture nutrition space, a key focus, particularly for the refugee communities I work with every day. I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Stacia Nordin. Welcome to the show Stacia. It’s really lovely to have you. Thank you so much for joining me. We’ve been meeting a little bit lately and that even though we’ve been kind of in similar work, we’ve never really met before and that’s surprising. So I’m glad. There’s so much that you’re doing that I would love to be able to share with all the people who listen to this show. And also just to dive in a bit more and understand a bit more about what it is that you do and how we can your mind a bit more in our work. So, welcome!
Stacia Nordin:
Thank you. Great to be here on two different time zones, I think we’re 8 or 10 hours apart.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Yeah. So for me, it’s a 6:30 at night time. You?
Stacia Nordin:
10:30 for me.
Morag Gamble:
So for those of you who are listening, Stacia Nordin is a dietician and a sustainable nutritionist with a deep passion for permaculture as well, and works in many different communities of practice, I would say from the local community, but through to government and agencies. And we’ve been exploring recently this concept of permaculture nutrition. And I know you’ve been in that space for a really long time and you’re based in Malawi. So maybe we could begin there. You’re obviously not Malawian. How did you end up there. I know you got there and then, what made you stay? I mean, that was like 1990s or something
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. We came in 1997. I came as a registered dietician to work on nutrition and HIV. So my main focus was HIV. I came with the Peace Corp with my husband. Uh, we met in Jamaica in 1992 in the Peace Corp where I was also a dietician. So I had two years of lessons that I had learned in Jamaica and on reflection things that I wanted to do better. Some things that I did very well but I wanted to build on that and I knew I was in a totally different place Peace Corp really teaches you to do a lot of the permaculture steps. They give us three months of training, almost three months of training and language and culture, and to get used to things. And then we have three months where they put us to, again, dive deep, be open. And as we were working in our communities here in Malawi, nobody mentioned HIV as an issue. Of course it was an issue and it was our job to help people see the connection between the symptoms and the deaths that they were seeing, and that it was actually the HIV. So that was going to take time to keep working on HIV. But the most immediate issue was food. And of course, as a dietician, I delved deep into where does food come from in Malawi? What is food all about? What are the issues? And that’s really what stumbled me onto permaculture was just study and research. I live in an agricultural research station Chitedze it’s about 20 kilometers outside the city, outside the capital. So it was a perfect placement for me as a dietician. I had access to the city of where I could go meet other nutritionists, talk to the ministry of education, agriculture, health, different NGOs, and find out what they were doing and then keep going back to them. I’m extremely organized. So I write everything down. I would just keep feeding back as I learned and grew and met more people and grew my networks. I realized Malawi is rich, both my husband and I. So my husband is a social worker and he really focused more on learning about our community and HIV. Well, I was looking more at the food nutrition side of things to help people living with HIV, live healthier. Um, it took about four years, three or four years before finally somebody with HIV came to me and said, Stacia I have HIV. She whispered to me through the bank thing. Cause I would just talk to everybody about what I was doing and just share, share, share. And she’s like whispers and I said, that’s okay and we became friends and that was the first person that I really got to work with HIV about. Before that it was so many diseases, can either be prevented or treated or improved with good nutrition. So I was just kept doing talks. Everyone can live longer and stronger with good nutrition.
Morag Gamble:
What were the diseases that you were seeing when you arrived?
Stacia : (10:33)
Diarrhea. Very, very common. People often think that a normal way of having your belly behave. Malaria. So a lot of things with water, malnutrition, rife, stunting. So stunting is a combination of growth factors on unhealthy environments. It can be nutrition, it can be diseases. It can be like micronutrient wise, you could be getting enough calories, but not enough of the micronutrients, or it could be both calories and micronutrients. So quality of diet, quantity of diets, could be care factors, could be knowledge factors. It could be access to food or the wrong foods. So there’s quite a combination of things going on. And of course HIV was the main reason we were there and or are here. But in 1997, HIV was still relatively unknown by people. So a lot of the symptoms of HIV, the wasting, bodily issues, like diarrhea or vomiting or skin issues, there also symptoms of other diseases. So helping people understand that.
Morag Gamble:
How’s it going there now with HIV.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, it it’s really improved. A lot more people know what the disease is and don’t blame it on witchcraft or, somebody has cursed me for some reason. People understand how it’s transmitted. A little bit less stigma, I think, but it did take a long time. I did work with nutrition and HIV from 1997 until about 2004 or so when I really felt like enough people understood HIV and nutrition and HIV, that I started venturing off into other areas outside the ministry of health and more into education and agriculture.
Morag Gamble:
So what did you notice too about the food system when you arrived. What was it that people were eating? What was going on in the food system? That was a little bit broken maybe.
Stacia Nordin:
Oh, very narrow, very narrow. Yeah. And very good. So almost everything is fresh. So where we live, 20 kilometers out of town is quite different than being in the city where there were a few supermarkets, but a lot of things were local. So that was good. And a lot of things were fresh. So in my society where everything is processed with that and sugar and thennutrients taken out and so much salt in them. I grew up in the United States. Yeah. And just refined foods and sheld foods are much more common than fresh foods, although that is changing too. Um, more people are realizing that fresh and local short distance foods give you a lot more nutrients, but that was the food system here. There wasn’t any plastic in the food system right around my house. You just go out, have your basket, get some fresh foods. Over time that changed. And plastic moved in and processing moved in and more sugar foods, but still you can pick quite a lot at the market. Maize is subsidized. So maize is cheaper than everything else. So when people want a cheap food, they go for maize and it’s also culturally ingrained. It was introduced into Malawi about 1800 and really forced upon the society that maize was the thing to grow and eat. So it’s been ingrained as a staple, even though it’s not the traditional staple.
Morag Gamble:
What was the traditional food? Sorry to interrupt.
Stacia Nordin:
That’s okay. Anytime, because I can go on and on and on.
Morag Gamble:
So many things that I want to pick up on them before you move on to the next one.
Stacia Nordin:
Jump in anytime. Millets, sorghums, yams were the carbohydrate foods, but what we try and teach about is all the six food groups. Which is the Malawi way of organizing foods to make a plan. But staple foods take up way too much of our diets. These carbohydrates in most countries, I’ve gone to people consider that kind of what should be filling you. And actually it should only be about 40% of the diet could even be less than that. So Malawi also had, has lots and lots of fruits I can say had in some cases, because it’s harder and harder to find these traditional fruits, vegetables as well. In fact, I’m working on a flyer right now, next week, there’s going to be a launch of a new nutrition. What would you call it? A nutrition strategy sort of, and they’ve asked me to help with the menu and bring indigenous foods into the menu, which is great. So in the database, this is the department of nutrition.
Morag Gamble:
From the Malawi government, federal government.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. Let’s make a note for that. And we’ll come back to that. So for these food groups, there are 148 different fruits on the database. Yet, very few fruits we find in the market, a handful. And then when you go and you look in villages, that’s where you find them and you can find them all year round, but it is getting harder and harder to find them. There are 50 different staples, 50 different starchy foods. Some people just have already forgotten about. You really have to talk with the the grandparents to find these. 218 vegetables. And when I say vegetable, I’m not saying just greens. A lot of people say, oh, indigenous foods, you know, there are a bunch of grains. I’m like, yeah, there are a bunch of grains, but there are fruits. There are roots. There are, mushrooms galore. We’re talking all different kinds of vegetables that can really give you a crunch that could give you the texture. And the flavors are 28 different kinds of legumes and nuts, at least 36 animal foods. But we know there are more because there’s multiple foods as well, different kinds of caterpillars, different kinds of beetles, termites, so many fish wild animals and then 48 different fats and oils. So Malawi is rich has all these foods.
Morag Gamble:
Narrowed down to maize, beans and probably a cabbage or something.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. And those are all exotic foods, a few tomatoes. Carrots we’re just coming in 25 years ago when I moved here, people turn their nose up at them. Now carrots are regular. For fruits, it’s bananas, pineapples and season mangoes and seasons.
Morag Gamble:
Everywhere else around the world. Really? Yeah.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. I could count 30 foods out of these 600 foods that are kind of eating on a regular basis. Cassava would be another one.
Morag Gamble:
You think it’s simply the fact that there’s subsidies for this food, that they’re getting it cheaper that they’re doing it, even though the other types of food often would have been grown, maybe in a food forest, it didn’t take terribly much maintenance. I suppose of parts of it. I know grain crops is different, but what was the shift? Where did that shift happen from this diverse polycultural food system to this monocultural food system and not just agriculturally, but psychologically so that, you know, I’ve heard in different places in Africa where they’re saying, you know, but that’s, that’s, that’s kind of like old food. Like if you want to be seen as modern, like you grow this. And so there’s this like a huge psychological shift that’s been pressurized. Like, you know, I can imagine that as the companies are going around with their sort of their salespeople like, well, this is the modern ones. This is going to get you, this, this will get you the money. I mean, that’s the kind of what I’m hearing and I wonder what your experience is is there.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, I’m gonna say to your readers, we have documented some of this in a sustainable nutrition manual on our website, which I wrote with the world food program many years ago. I think, we actually wrote it in 2005 and then revised it in 2016. But I think your question needs to be asked regularly because as culture changes, the reasons sort of change. But I do think a lot of that marketing is a huge mpart of the issue that we want to be modern, that these things are worthless. And that attitude goes back to before I came to Malawi and there was a dictator running the country from the 60s until the 90s, when I got here prior to him, it was the colonialists. So between those two foundations of saying things in Malawi, aren’t as good as what we have. People bringing in things without asking, what do you have here? You know, we know this, you should have this too. You know, this is, this is what you should be eating. But the dictator particularly didn’t think that people should be eating forest foods. You know, they were lesser than maize and he wanted everyone to be growing maize and to be known for me is the first years that we were here, when it was democracy, people would run on that platform. If you vote for me, you won’t have to eat forest food. It’s like, oh, the forest foods are wonderful and it is changing. So what I’m doing for next week is partnering with people that are marketing indigenous foods and trying to get them to be highlighted in the events. We’ve done this many times, but there weren’t products on the market. We would have to work with farmers or work with me or go down to the market to find people selling indigenous foods. You can find it, but you really have to know where to go get them, to be able to serve hundreds of people. 10 years ago, we fed 3000 people on indigenous foods, but we could only do a snack. But we did a flyer and we talked to people about, you know, these indigenous foods are actually much more nutritious and we gave some information on the difference between what you would usually get at a event versus what we’re serving you today. These foods aren’t packaged, we’re not having waste and the food is going into Malawian pockets. So good for the environment. Good for people, good for the local economy. And that’s what we continue to run on and try and raise the status. People often say, oh, you eat these foods, I’m like, yeah, they’re delicious. They’re easy to grow. They’re free. You know, do what we can to raise the status.
Morag Gamble:
You talk about forest foods. So my mind imagined like immediately goes to thinking about, well, there’s commons where people go to the forest to harvest, or are you talking about where the land that they’re, that they have on their farms was actually partly forested where they got it from, where is this food coming from? And what’s the land structure for that.
Stacia Nordin:
So that’s, that’s another problem is that land is degrading. You know, it’s being cut down and changed into maize. Part of that is the subsidies. So people try and grow maize everywhere. Maize seed is given or subsidized, fertilizer is given or subsidized, all donor programs give maize seed and fertilizer. Almost. We have tried to get them to give legumes, but comparatively, you know, people get 10 kgs of maize seed and maybe a kg of, some kind of legume seed when a donor supports a garden, it’s tomatoes and cabbage, it’s all exotics, you know, and usually chemicals with it. So those are the kinds of things that keep pushing people in. Oh, well, if they’re giving this to us, this must be what people want. When I joined a program a few years ago, all the picture cards they had were of exotic foods. And we changed that. We have wonderful foods and we put out 65 cards of indigenous foods, and it really changed people to see their own pictures on a piece of paper. So that push keeps getting the forest cut down, making it harder to find these indigenous foods. So this generation is really hard to talk to about foods. We still don’t have indigenous foods strong enough in the curriculum. It might be mentioned now, but when I worked in the ministry of education, 10 years ago, we were really advocating for indigenous foods to be a part of the curriculum. Kids were learning about tobacco in the curriculum, instead of, you know, it’s the very big cash crop here is to grow tobacco. Um, but they were, they were learning all those things that were exotic and not learning about their own foods. Again, because of what you say, either people say, oh, people know about them. They don’t need to have that in the curriculum as well. I’m like, you’d be surprised, try and talk to the people and see if they really know them. Yeah. But it is fun to see people change and bring them back. I had a post today on social media and a guy said, oh, I love that video you just shared on permaculture. There’s a Kenyan, Caleb Omolo you seen it. It’s amazing. It’s his eight year plot. He says, but I can’t find seeds. I’m like, come see me. Here’s the permaculture network, you know? Yeah. So there’s a lot to do to bring those forest back and commons back.
Morag Gamble:
Is there support for that, like from a government level to actually reforest in terms of looking at regenerative agriculture’s regenerating water systems and thinking about this. Like where, where is it at in terms of that government support?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, there is, there’s a lot of good policies that need to get off the shelf and get into people’s hands and be monitored and tracked and really put some effort behind it. And I do think there are some good people trying to do that. Last week I was on a food policy discussion. A dialogue. We had a little over a hundred people, 150 people, but my small group had someone from the ministry of agriculture and he said, you know, there is climate smart agriculture, but it’s just small compared to the demand. I’m like you’re right. At least there are good things that we can build on, but it’s got to grow to be able to really keep up the pace of the problems that we’re facing. So we do try and do both.
Morag Gamble:
Does climate smart agriculture mean like permaculture or does it mean like a more high tech kind of ag? I’m just wondering, like, where is the push? What are you seeing push? Cause I know that you probably got in Malawi pressures from international communities and they groups and all different sorts of groups trying to say, we will help you solve the problem here. Here is more of a tech fix, whereas actually the resolution to this and the restoration is in the regenerating traditional practices and forests and blending that somehow, I suppose. What are you seeing? Is that kind of that push, pull thing happening?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, the same thing. I mean, even, you know, I call myself a sustainable nutritionist and there will be some sustainable people. And you look at what they’re doing is like, is that sustainable? You know, is that really, climate smart is, so it happens where the climate smart is using herbicides and people say, you know, this saves people time, it saves from erosion because the dead weeds just lay on the ground and it’s like, yeah. But what about the herbicide part that isn’t climate smart at all? It’s definitely helping people make better choices.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. I was going to ask you, have you seen much of an issue around the, can you see a direct correlation between the chemicals used and the health of people? Like are people using the chemicals safely or is there issues with skin or cancer or can you see that happening?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, I wish we could document things and be better with data, but I haven’t seen chemical poisonings here. Even links with cancer. I haven’t seen a study done that, links it directly in Malawi and to help educate people on why it’s healthier to use organic methods and not to have the facts behind it. I often have to borrow from outside the country. People are concerned with yield. So I quite often use the Rodale study and I’m like, oh, we need this study in Malawi. You know, you can’t always be pulling from other countries to do this.
Morag Gamble:
So I know that you did this manual. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that because it is kind of like a permaculture manual, but it’s not called permaculture manual. And so just want to, like, I’m really interested in this because often as a way to take concepts like permaculture further, you sort of kept them in a whole lot of other terms and they get accepted. So there’s sort of two questions in that. Tell us about the manual and the other one is, what is happening with permaculture in Malawi?
Stacia Nordin:
Okay. So this was the first copy of the manual. It was called low input, food nutrition security, eating and growing, [inaudible] less. And it was the world food program who had approached me, a really switched on woman, named Frank, who understood what they were doing. A world food program was very short-lived. They would provide, you know, there’s world food program. And then there’s the food and agriculture organization of the United nations, which is really the food agency for agriculture. World food program works on food security. So there’s this kind of overlap, but world food program doesn’t really have the expertise in terms of when it comes to gardening, but they wanted to support the approach so that people could have food security and they would provide seed packets and fertilizer and hose and a watering cans. And for six months there would be a garden. And when they would go back and check in a year, there was no sign of a garden anywhere. So they really wanted low input food and nutrition security that was, they felt was their issue was they were giving too many inputs. So it worked on a process of utilizing permaculture without saying permaculture. I worked with 60 of their partners who were working in the fields to take best practices and to start where they were and to build on it. And you could see permaculture throughout it. Um, and I think we might’ve even defined it. Um, but I don’t think we were ready quite then for a new terminology. And it doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s the point is we wanted more sustained gardens so that people could have more food from all the six food groups at their fingertips. When we reviewed it, 10 years later-ish, they asked me to come back and work with their partners again. The surveys we sent out, every single person said, we want permaculture. Just come out and say, and I wish we had just called it the permaculture nutrition manual, but we debated and debated and still weren’t sure if it was the right time to use the term permaculture. We almost called it never-ending nutrition. But it was too close to what our home is called, never ending food. So we went with sustainable nutrition and we beefed it up. So it’s now in three parts. We kept the focus on healthy humans to look at healthy humans and permaculture eyes, starting at the basics. How does our body work? How does our body break down food and make it into nutrients? Looking at the question you asked me, why do we eat the way we do? You know, what are the choices that go into making our diets? Because your body itself doesn’t really care about all those things. In the end, it wants those nutrients that are coming out of whatever you’re eating, and helping people build a relationship with food because it does matter to us what we eat. It brings joy and happiness and feels good as well as making sure that your body is healthy. And then the second part helps people understand, having a healthy environment. So it goes into healthy soil. And the whole time that we’re talking, we’re linking healthy humans and healthy environments because they’re very, very similar. So we’re talking about the digestive system of a human. We look at how soildigests, and absorbs its nutrients in the same way, even though it’s different nutrients and different kinds of teeth, teeth from animals or microorganisms, breaking things down. We also have chemicals within our body that break things down. So trying to build a relationship with nature as well, looking at water cycle, carbon cycles, and helping people think in circles instead of lines.
Morag Gamble:
There’s food over there, farming over there. There’s kind of an environment over there. And, and then there’s like the whole cultural side, but as well, it’s all sort of in little pass. So I think this, so how do people get ahold of this book? Can they..
Stacia Nordin:
It’s online. Yeah, it’s online. So there’s a basic one of the nature cycle we use constantly. And all these hand drawings that my husband did and artists partnered with me to revise them all. And then we focus group tested them to make sure that people understood them. Then the last part is on sustainable, healthy design. And that’s where the permaculture side really comes in. But it is permaculture throughout this time, we define permaculture. We talk about the ethics. We talk about the principles, but written in a different way. So I’m working with extension workers to speak English. So it’s all in English, but written quite simply, but you can pick up the book and use it to implement in your house. We made it less of a teaching manual where this first one has teaching lessons throughout. It was based on a one week training that we used to do. The new one takes out all the teaching and speaks more to you as an extension worker and use the person that has a house, has a school, has a church, has a community, has a commons that they want to create and design a space for sustainable nutrition. And then the back of it is just loaded with lists of foods and lists of people, ways that you can get involved. Yeah, now I would love, I’m trying to transform it with partners so that we can get it out more because it really hasn’t been printed. It’s been printed very little compared to just electronic sharing.
Morag Gamble:
Those plants that you talked about earlier, all those different indigenous fruits and mushrooms, and are they in the book as well, or is that something else that you’re working towards creating a separate book of all those things?
Stacia Nordin:
So the way I learned about those things or from books and from people. So in 1938 to 1944, Malawi did a study called the Nyasaland survey papers. UNICEF came in and did the first big food nutrition study. The botanist on that group was keen on nutrition and she wrote a separate book called useful plants of Malawi. And that is my baby. That was my book. I carried it everywhere with me that I went. Essentially, the way I started is just to reorganize her work. It was written very technically and in scientific order. I broke it apart and did it in food group order. I also refer to that for medicines, for certain species that will like make soap. She pulled out things that grow from truncheon, which is a great way. So you just kind of stem off a tree and you stick it in the ground and it sprouts. It’s a great way to start up a forest very quickly. So I was interested in both the agriculture environment, health and nutrition side of things, but I did focus on the foods more than anything. And then I cross check those references with modern scientific literature and made corrections and wrote all over my book and updated it. In 2006 or so they contacted me because I was keeping in touch with all the people around the book and they said, we’re updating it. Can you give us feedback? So I went through all my notes and I helped rewrite the book. And I got my name in the front of the book. I was so excited. This one
Morag Gamble:
The useful plans of Malawi. Fantastic. Oh, brilliant. Where do we get a copy of that? I would love to see.
Stacia Nordin:
Very hard to access and it’s all line drawing. So it’s still very scientific. What I would love to do is with our collection of pictures and with other people’s collection of pictures, whoever wants to partner, is to put out books of the useful plants of Malawi and pictures. So I’ve been able to do it in my various jobs. When I worked with food and agriculture organization, we put together cards and you can download those on our Dropbox. I keep a public Dropbox for people to access. We did recipes. The person I worked with in the ministry of agriculture at the time, her name was, is [inaudible]. And she was one of those who really pushed the envelope. So she with her staff cooked a bunch of the indigenous foods and put them on plates and took pictures of them. And then on the back put recipe cards, some traditional recipes, some, new, you know, merging indigenous with modern ways of doing things. So those are also on the website. There’s a person, that has translated some of it into a little booklet. So that’s also there. Yeah. So if you have web access, which very few people in Malawi do, but I would love for donors to, with their donor funding, support this kind of initiative instead of exotic.
Morag Gamble:
Absolutely. So just on saying that about a lot of people in Malawi don’t have access to internet, how are you seeing people accessing information about permaculture type things? And is there, is that through the extension offices, doing the sustainable agriculture, sustainable food systems, sustainable nutrition, is that, is it sort of going village to village?
Stacia Nordin:
It’s taken a while to get there. So when I worked in, people started hearing it early on, but using it in a way that, really wasn’t permaculture, but they heard the word and knew it was linked to its sustainability and we’ll put it into things. They’d be like, oh, Stacia, permaculture, help us understand what it is that even got into the curriculum without people really knowing what it was. So
Morag Gamble:
High school or primary school?
Stacia Nordin:
Primary. So that would be 14 year olds, 15 year olds learning it.
Morag Gamble:
What were they learning about permaculture at that age?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. What they put in there is more like how you would put pieces together into mixed farming. They have a little bit on soil health, but it’s very, very short, but it has been an opportunity for innovative teachers to reach out to permaculture in their area where they know that I know we get classes coming to visit our house and I’ve seen it in the permaculture network. But when we started, when I moved here in 97, permaculture had already come to Malawi in 1994 from South Africa, a group of 30 people had been trained. I found out about it from our library. Somebody had written a book. Her name is June Walker, and it was called Dimalakumpanda – a garden near your house inside the fence. And it was written generally, but in English and Chichewa, but it was based on permaculture. So we wrote her immediately and we went to visit her and were totally sold. It put all the pieces of what we had been, trying to learn in Malawi. We put it together. I don’t know how many people got that book. I don’t know where those 30 people went. I kept in touch with four of them. Once I learned that there was this training. I wrote to all of them and tried to see where they were going with it. And there were just a small core of people that kept in touch letter writing really that’s all it was. But the very, we were with the peace Corps and they funded a permaculture training. So we were doing it at home and our boss was like, this is really cool. We really need to see people. So it was just excitement person, a person within our office. And then, within our network, within the nutritionist that I was meeting within the HIV community got interested. So ministry of health got interested and put it in one of their plans to include permaculture. And then yeah. Came to find out what it was. And so just trying here and there and WFP found out about it because I would raise it at national level meetings. I would say that there is sustainable ways. There is indigenous food, even if I didn’t say permaculture, I would talk about sustainability. It was slow. It was slow growing back then, without any phones, without any, you know, we were just writing letters and meeting and doing what we could and spreading a lot of visiting.
Morag Gamble:
So now people do have phones and they have access to networks. Is there something that started to share about these things through that? Like, are we jumping sort of past just doing it, you know, a computer and straight into the mobile technology and is our groups sharing stuff like WhatsApp groups.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, we went through a very quick email phase here, but really jumped to whatsapp. Once the phones started moving here, but it was our work in the ministry of education, after working with world food program and saw what we were doing, sorry, German International Developments, it’s the government’s aid program. So they asked me to come and work in the ministry of education for two years, they called it a quick win. They wanted to very quickly help people improve their food in schools. And when I looked at what they were doing it first in the project proposal, it was to feed people maize every day. So I knew I had my job cut out for me in terms of, you know, let’s understand what a quick one is and how we can feed in, do something quick, but also feed into developments. And they really liked it. So they extended us for four more years after the first two years. And that is really what helps permaculture. Permaculture really became rooted in teachers, in schools. It’s still running, it’s called school, health and nutrition, but there’s also a permaculture program in schools. And like I said, in the curriculum, you know, at least the word is there at least, there’s a lot more people to work, reach out to, we were able to train thousands of people during those six years. And it just left seeds throughout the country that are still growing today. And, we always have stayed in touch the school. We called it the sustainable school food nutrition program to start with, but very quickly it just changed to the school permaculture program. That really helped things.
Morag Gamble:
Do they have gardens in their schools as well? Is that part of it? Yeah.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, kind of. So, you know, schools with their school break, it’s hard to maintain a garden during that time, but usually, there’s enough time every school term to grow vegetables, but getting the trees back in getting the water, harvesting, from the roof and rethinking how to use space around the school. So it’s another cultural thing that we haven’t talked about. Every morning kids will come to school with a broom and they just cut a branch and they come with a little shrub and they sweep the school ground bare. So any leaf, any shred of anything trying to grow gets cut out and thrown in burns or, you know, put inside a pit. So it’s taking that same energy and it kids now come to school and they mulch, they tend to tree, they may sweep a little bit, but the sweeping is reduced and the energy has changed around the school.
Morag Gamble:
It’s something that’s also around the house. Isn’t it. So I guess like taking that same idea of like, how do you get gardens in around schools where people sweep it to death at how do you get a garden around a house when the same kind of sweeping is taking place? So you’ve got a school mobilizing that energy. Has the same thing happened at households around house? Are you seeing a kitchen garden movement? Is there something that’s coming out of that or is it still very much, you know, your house with the bare patch and the farm down the road with them, with the maize? What does that look like?
Stacia Nordin:
Well, the house is really where we always started. There wasn’t really a program back then. They would say, you know, a kitchen garden, but not really the integrated newness of permaculture. So when I was with the world food program, somebody had started an integrated homestead farming. I think they called it. Um, and we put together a team of people to put that on paper and develop a little book. And that also has stuck. It’s in its second edition. And yes is now a formal program to have integrated homestead farming around everyone’s house. So essentially we would call it zone zero one and two, and a little zero, zero thinking of internally inside the person as well. So yeah, it’s there. And the exciting thing about this school program, when we started it, one of the districts was able to document something like 175 homes, just from the children, leaving school and taking the ideas back to their homes. I don’t know if it was sustained past the pilot, we would encourage it, but we didn’t have the capacity to track it. But one person decided to track it in one place and that’s what it was. And I knowthe German program still runs and they’ve tried to continue to find ways to scale up, to reach more. And then they decided to work within communities to help the school instead of working with the school to reach out to the community. And that also had, had promising, effective more ownership on the school as well. And last week I was at a talk from USDA, the United States department of agriculture. And they also have a program here in Malawi, but it’s working more from the community and having them affect the school. So there’s so many right ways to do it, you know, as long as we get the kids well fed and that they’re understanding food security and nutrition. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
So what about the seed what’s happening with seed there? I know in other countries it’s a super challenging topic because there’s,seeds have been withdrawn and there’s only hybrid ones available and actually accessing seeds. You know, like some of the refugee camps that we’re working with, they’re finding it really hard to access anything, but the ones that they can buy in the store.
Stacia Nordin:
Right now it’s networks of people coming together to share. But the same thing is they’re trying to make it happen here where only certified seeds through a certain process can be sold in markets. And in some ways I agree with it just in a way that we all share high quality seed, but I don’t ever want to see a law or a policy blocking me from selling or sharing my indigenous seed. That, crosses a line that is taking power of our food systems away from us. So I’m hopeful. Malawi has a seed policy. We fought very, very hard and it’s too bad. I have to use that word fight because it started in 2010, 11, 12. I know I was an FAO at the time, going to all the seed meetings. And at first it was just a oh, indigenous seeds are missing. Oh, well, this seed policy is only about the formal system. I’m like, why do we have to divide it into formal and informal? We have a seed system. Let’s look at all seeds. And we said, we, we at a minimum, wanted them to be clear about that. You know, that what you’re saying does not block people from sharing seeds. So the language got toned down. It’s a little wishy, you know, it depends on how you read a sentence and what it means, but it does say at the beginning, what they mean is this commercial seed system. But I also want indigenous seeds to be commercial. So we have some new, we have some more documents coming out. We’ll see this year, what language they use and if we embrace and celebrate indigenous seed systems as well, I hope we do because I think we can have both. Um, and I think we can have high quality seeds from both. And the only way that we’re going to really succeed in environmental health, economic health, around agriculture and seeds, and definitely achieve nutrition, security is with a huge diversity in our seed system and food system.
Morag Gamble:
I wonder. Um, so do people who have these kitchen gardens around their homes, do they have their own, do they save seeds? Is this is saving seeds still a thing that people do?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. definitely. They do. You have to, and they will sell it in the market sometimes, but you’re asking a question again, that will depend on me and my experience, but what may not be right. You know, it’s right for my experience, but we don’t have the data to answer your question. You know, we don’t even know how many people have a kitchen garden, or here instead of a kitchen garden. There’s a lot of low-lying swampy areas that get turned into gardens and that’s also considered a home garden, kitchen garden. It’s very difficult to grow gardens around your house because there’s no management of animals and cows and pigs and goats, especially will just come and eat anything around your house if you’re not well secured, but we don’t know how many people have a garden at home. We don’t know what’s in that garden. We don’t know if they saved their own seed or if they buy seed. Yes. We, we saved them. Yes. Culturally definitely. Um, clay pots are often used, things that are a fruit. So like, there’s a local tomato, it’s a little tiny tomato. They’ll swipe them on a wall and let them dry on the wall with the little sticky stuff or different melons or local cucumbers. They’ll yeah. So just save them in that way and smear them on the wall and then they dry up, pop them off.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Cool. That’s so cool
Stacia Nordin:
Hanging so your millets and your sorghums, you can hang them like where you cook, which of course you’re trying to change that as well. Cause we don’t want smoky areas, so trying to work on sustainable energy, but we still hang our seeds and it keeps them good for a year. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
So with the cooking, I mean, what is the, is the population rapidly growing in Malawi? And is this a problem in terms of accessing fuel for cooking with timber? Are people still using wood for cooking and is therestoves? Is that a common thing? Like what’s what are people using for cooking mostly?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, that one has been studied. So we do know that charcoal in the cities and firewood some sort of biomass in the rural areas, but the bigger problem is not planting. You know, it’s just not managing your field supplies and cutting a whole tree instead of trimming a limb, having the fuel efficient stoves, most people I don’t think have fuel efficient stoves. I’d have to look up the data to see what percentage have a lot of donors promote them. I think we’re doing much too little in this area to help people understand sustainable energy sources and that you can burn firewood efficiently, you know, and in a stove that produces almost no smoke. There’s so many waste products that are in the market that just get hrown and either just burned in a pile, or waste, I say waste because it’s not, it’s a by-product, there is no waste if we don’t waste it, you know, we keep using things in a cycle.
Morag Gamble:
And then there’s those, you know, you could make briquettes out of those sorts of materials as well. Different.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. Yep. So it’s there, but again, it’s very small compared to the need. So now the government is really pushing for fossil fuel, natural gas, that LP gas in a metal thing. I just think it’s the wrong thing to subsidize. I think we continue to subsidize unsustainable.
Morag Gamble:
Away from the oil and gas industry, you know, like just bypass that, go to something different.
Stacia Nordin:
I know, I know. I got a message from another friend who was like, ah, but Stacia don’t, don’t hold people back from these things. I’m like, I’m not holding people back from anything. I want us all to try and work towards sustainability and have access to sustainable things. If we’re going to subsidize something, subsidize something that’s sustainable. In the short term, in the interim, I’m like, yeah, but he’s been saying that for the 25 years I’ve been here and you’re still interim, why are you still stuck at interim?
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. I mean, the subsidy is a huge, I mean, as soon as you shift a subsidy from one type of agriculture to another one type of fuel system to another, where everything, you know, it it’s those drivers that can really, just pivot systems. And I think, you know, what you’re doing there is an amazing thing. And to have all those policies in place and have all those conversations happening at the government, I mean, I’m imagining a lot of people listening to this and thinking, oh my gosh, you know, only the Australian government, for example, would be having these conversations. You know, not even they wouldn’t even know what permaculture is or they’d probably think, oh, that’s like some sort of nice little gardening hippies.
Stacia : (59:02)
That always hurts me to hear that since Australia is the one who started all of this wonderful permaculture business.
Morag Gamble:
I shouldn’t be saying this cause this is going out live, but we have an intensely embarrassing political system at the moment.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. I have, I have friends from Australia. Um, now I have you as a friend as well. Thank you, Elizabeth, for introducing us. Um, but yes, I keep up a little bit on what’s going on in Australia. Yeah. Around the world. I mean, we have a lot of similarities and that’s where networking with permaculture around the world does help. Um, we can share solutions and ideas with each other.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. So come back to this term, permaculture nutrition. So do you, what does that mean? What does permaculture nutrition mean? If you were to define them, you were walking down a hallway with someone you had to quickly define what permaculture nutrition is, what would you say?
Stacia Nordin:
Wow. I’ve never, I’ve never been asked that. Let me put myself in a hallway. I mean, of course it’s, it’s easy to say you because you know, permaculture, but I would have to start with permaculture. If I was walking down the hall with permaculture nutrition. It’s about sustainably designing so that you have the foods you need for a healthy life, but you need more than food. You know, you have to think of water, you have to think of sanitation. You have to think of energy, but it’s thinking about all of those things, so that we can eat and drink and cook. Yeah. And live off that’s all it is. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
A whole systems approach to, to the wellbeing of people within the context of the wellbeing of the planet, I suppose, would also be a real.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. And often, often permaculture is done for good and healthy food. Even if people don’t call it nutrition, but permaculture is an environmental approach. So it’s taking care of the earth. Uh, and then the care part of people, I mean, you can go into medicines, you can go into other, other parts of care, but quite often it is nutrition. So to me, it’s redundant to say permaculture nutrition, but many nutrition, many permaculturalist that I find. And I don’t know if you find this as well or not working on indigenous roots. Like when I see the list of what they’re doing, it’s always free and greens that I’ve heard of and whatever I’m like, what about the indigenous foods in your area? Um, are those there? And yeah, I would love to see a lot more indigenous get into it. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
And really locally, locally contextualizing everything that we do within permaculture. I think, I think it’s interesting that you should say that permaculture nutrition, like saying that is, is redundant. And I love that you said that because I also feel the same thing around sort of social permaculture. You know, like for me, the whole thing is around about approaching things in a way that is bringing forth those ways of working together. So itself is, is redundant. But what it does is it gets us to step away from maybe how we’ve described permaculture before in that gardening way or in a landscape designs way that it kind of, it just kind of helps us to pop out of that, that paradigm and to just see it a bit differently. And maybe that’s it all is within the whole. And that’s kind of one of the things that I really love about permaculture. Cause it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come in at it from you, you kind of use a permaculture lens to look at your way of thinking and your way of life. And so it keeps getting described if different, every new person who comes into it, the field of permaculture just kind of expands because the perceptions of the different ideas of it, the different ways of applying it in all these different places, all these different plants with all these different cultures just keeps growing. And I think what I do like about it is it becomes something that connects. So, you know, I often hear people talking about that sort of the idea of it being permaculture generalism. And I wonder whether maybe you could just chat about that a little bit, because what I’m hearing you say is it doesn’t feel like that there.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. It sure shouldn’t be. Um, and it just came up on our listserv actually. And I have to remember the different places people are with learning in and in their permaculture journey. But that definitely has reminded me to be careful where I drop the word without maybe saying a little bit more. Um, and so my answer to this person who talked about aren’t you imposing permaculture on someone, it was some comment like that and like, no, or aren’t you proposing a solution? I think it was I’m like, no, no. The whole process of permaculture is about going through steps and helping people design for themselves. I don’t design for them. You know, I can get hired to design for someone if that’s what they want, but I would never design for someone that can design for themselves or wants to design for themselves that’s the least thing I want to do. So it’s building on local knowledge and being very respectful of local knowledge, you know, not, not sharing things and secrets that don’t people don’t want shared. But it’s building that relationship and understanding with someone. So, yeah, I hope, I hope we never impose anything on anyone. I mean, I came here to work with HIV. We had a good friends lose pretty much most of their family to COVID. It’s been family, person after person, after person. And you know, they were, they were anti-vaccine family, you know, anti mask and it’s like, gosh, you know, we tried, there’s only so much we can do to read the facts, try and keep up on them on ourselves, do the best we can and also share with other people. But I’m not going to go put a mask on your face. I’m not going to make you get a vaccine. So, you know, we can talk and share and I can encourage, I can, even my daughter, you know, I only have so much control over my own child. You try and guide and you know, I listened to you and you listened to me. But when we were working with HIV, I used to tell people, you know what I’ve learned about HIV, I’m preventing HIV. I’m not gonna come to your bedroom and put a condom on you, but if you do want to prevent HIV, that’s one way you could do it. You could have abstinence. There’s many different ways. If you understand HIV, how to prevent it. And then how to, if you do contract it, how to live as long as possible with HIV. So it doesn’t matter what topic, I mean, you can talk about Malaria. You choose, do you want a mosquito net or not? If you don’t, well, you’re at risk of getting malaria, but I can’t, I can’t do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. And that’s where I think colonialism pushed it. We enforced, you know, we pushed and we said, this is the only way to go. And I think that whole attitude was wrong.
Morag Gamble:
I wanted to ask you about, about COVID how it’s going there. Like, is it, I haven’t heard about what the situation is in Malawi.
Stacia Nordin:
Amazingly strange, amazingly strange. So the first time it came around. Like everyone, we were nervous. Didn’t know how long it could live on surfaces. Didn’t quite understand it. We made it through the first wave almost too easy, you know? And everybody’s like, ah, Malawi we’re, you know, we’re blessed by God. Yeah. We’re not, we can’t, we can’t get it here. Then the second one came around. And that was not pretty for a month. Our hospitals were full, they were expanding hospitals. We thought this is it. We’re getting the wave. It was gone all of a sudden, just peaked and gone. Now we’re in the third wave when we thought, okay, here it is, you know, Delta’s around probably. And um, yeah, went up to, you know, daily, we get messages and it’s down again to almost very few a day, but a lot higher death rates, but our hospitals aren’t overflowing. I don’t know what’s going on, but, uh, yeah, it doesn’t seem to stick here so far, fingers crossed, you know, a lot of us are outside bright air, sunshine. Hopefully that’s part of what’s keeping us and we are, I mean, I’m respecting distance. I’m wearing my mask properly. I do, you know, wash my hands or have sanitizer if I am stuck somewhere. I’m respecting all those things and I hope enough people are keeping distance between each other. Cause it doesn’t matter if it’s sunny and windy, if you’re inches away from each other and, exchanging breath or.
Morag Gamble:
Is there a response from nutritionist to COVID?
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah, we got together last year, between wave one and two and we, we have a nutrition society of Malawi. So just like permaculture little by little has gotten organized and it is now registered. The nutrition society slowly got registered, both took 18 years of my life, 20 years of my life to get to the point where we are, but I’m thrilled that there are two associations now, one for nutrition and one for permaculture. So we partnered with the Kenyan coalition for action on nutrition who had drafted nutrition and COVID flyer and we’ve vetted it together. And then we kind of went off on our own and vetted it as we have a group for nutritionist and we have a group for dieticians. Dieticians just tend to work more in the clinical field where nutritionists work more. I mean, they can work anywhere. But dieticians have a certification. So you know that you’re getting high quality nutrition from a dietician. So yeah, we, we published, nutrition and COVID just a short, flyer for professionals so that people understand what foods. And then we went through the manual and we pulled out foods that are high in those nutrients. So there’s a list of foods as well. We were hoping to transform that as well into pictures. And, but really, like I said, COVID, didn’t stick. And then when the third wave started, there was a big rush, oh, we should do something. And then it was kind of gone again. So we’ll see if we take that further. So people are so interested in nutrition. we could capitalize on it and help people pick up more foods. Unfortunately, people are still going exotic and importing things like chia seeds and chia seeds are great, but I’m sure if we researched our own foods that we would see we had our own chia seed or yeah.
Morag Gamble:
The type of nutrition and diet, dietetics or diet, is that, is that a word dietetics? Did I get that right? That you talk about is something quite different from what I hear in the kind of the standard form. And I wonder is the type of nutrition that you’re talking about in any kind of tertiary education, where do you see this way of thinking, rippling into that type of education? Or is it something that happens once you’re on the ground and you really kind of swimming around in the supervision?
Stacia Nordin:
Okay. So when I went to school, I graduated in 91 with my dietetics degree, medical dietetics. I did not learn anything about the food system, had nothing on gardening, nothing on agriculture, but that’s changed. I mean, it’s one of the first things that when I got out and made the own connection for myself, but honestly it took me coming to Malawi six years after I graduated to really make that connection. Even though I had a garden in Jamaica and then I’ve lived at home in the United States for a short while we have a garden there, I still wasn’t really a food systems person. I was a dietician, you know, and things came from a store and markets and it is changing. People are making that connection between food systems and nutrition, which it’s just, I don’t know, it’s not like I didn’t believe it, but I didn’t realize how great the need was for people to make that connection between food systems and nutrition. So when I first started doing permaculture nutrition talks for my registered dietician friends, the very first session I did, everyone was like, oh, great, great, great. On the evaluation, the last one was something about, the connection to dietetics. They’re like, oh no, I don’t see a connection to dietetics. And I’m like, well, I didn’t cover that because I assumed that we all knew that. So from then on, you know, I, I made sure that I start with, what is the connection? Why do we care about,
Morag Gamble:
Well, I often fall into that trap too, that I assume that there is a obvious relationship made. And I think for want of sounding a bit repetitive or oversimplifying, like, I think it’s a really important place to start. Isn’t it like connecting fields that you’ve connected that maybe that thought hadn’t come before because you know, like you said, you didn’t really see it until you’d have you experienced it and you could see the relationship, you know? So I think, yeah, I think it’s really important to start there. I think that’s,
Stacia Nordin:
I didn’t realize it. And so Malawi where they’re so agriculture based, and if you don’t grow it, you don’t eat it. Or if you don’t raise it, you know, plants, animals, trees, it’s, you get everything from around you. And that’s where it really was in my face, how important it is. And we’re lucky in Malawi, our main nutrition school was an agricultural school. It’s kind of changed throughout the years but it’s still an agriculture nutrition school. And then there’s a dietetics program that started up a few years ago, but I was also part of the team and the people on the team. I was an advisor, the team, or a colleague or something. It wasn’t, you know, officially linked to them. But I did a lot with their curriculum. I’ve interacted with many of their students and taken them on as apprentices and whatever job or intern. So we do have that agriculture nutrition overlap here already in food, but it’s still, it’s still a little bit weak where, when one of the last students I had, I was working purely in agriculture nutrition. So the agriculture sector, making sure that nutrition was part of the food system from the beginning to our mouth and back to the soil, again. Trying as hard as I could. My main job was agriculture coordination, but I was bringing in that side of environment, nutrition. Um, I also was looking at making sure that women and youth were part of our system. So one of the students I had, I had him placed with a school. And, he said but this isn’t nutrition. And I had to actually say, and this is a dietetic student. And I’m like, okay, let’s talk again about why this agriculture is nutrition, but there is still a thinking process that nutrition is ministry of health that it’s about, you can advise about foods, but if you’re growing those foods, that’s not, that’s, that’s agriculture, that’s nutrition, that’s not nutrition. I’m like, but somebody has to advise people on what to grow and how to plan and to make sure, and that has to come from a nutritionist to help them understand it until they embraced it on their own.
Morag Gamble:
It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because we do have the, because we have these silos in government because we have the silos in our education. It’s like the stuff that happens in the in-between in that liminal space, like who’s making decisions for that. Who’s doing the education around that. Where, where does that happen? Like it, it’s such, it’s kind of where the gold is. It’s where that richness is. That’s gonna,
Stacia Nordin:
It’s just between them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
Morag Gamble:
You know, the more that, like you’re saying, getting the full cycle or doing interdisciplinary type of work or cross departmental type of projects, but are they, are they happening or is it just simply from people like you, who pull in and grab people from all different areas?
Stacia Nordin:
Well, my job in the last five years was to make it purposeful. So all these clusters of people who are working side by side is to have some purposeful overlap, not between one person sitting between education and agriculture, but a few people having those linkages, all the circles and knowing it and documenting it and managing it and taking advantage of it. So really having clear coordination, who’s doing what, where how, and documenting it, having mapping and databases and people that understand that. And then within that, who should we be collaborating with so that we reach common goals, you know, and who should we not be collaborating with? Because there are areas that are totally different to your own thing. That’s fine, but there are areas. So yeah, it’s building community and doing that. So I was until last week I was working on feed the future. It’s a USAID program around the world and it has different activities aiming to feed people today, but also tomorrow. So feeding the future in our parts, I worked with the university of Illinois to run a program on strengthening agriculture, nutrition extension. So focusing on coordination and collaboration. So we worked in almost half the country to help mostly agriculture reach out to other people, but then there’s also a nutrition coordinating body. So you asked earlier, who’s doing this launch next week. It’s a department of nutrition. And that department of nutrition when I came to Malawi in 1997, was sitting in economic planning and development, which is the perfect place for nutrition to sit. And it had the job of coordinating with all the other sectors. Gender has some nutrition. So looking at women in youth, youth in sports, the sports had a nutrition focus. Trade and economic or trade in a industry, had a nutrition focus, agriculture health education. So having the lead nutrition, coordinating body in economic and development was perfect. Unfortunately, the person who was leading it passed away, there were only two people in the department and the other one moved on somewhere else. And we kind of lost that. It wasn’t until 2004, when government put in a nutrition department again, and they put it in the office of the president and cabinet, which again, a perfect place to sit. That’s where you, yeah. So one of the presidents came in and really understood how important nutrition was to achieve our development. And of course we, as nutritionists were meeting since 2000, trying to form a nutrition society, which finally happened in 2018. But one of the big things we wanted was the department re-instituted. So having that department there, actually, it was okay that we waited to work on ourselves as a profession because it was more important to help the government get nutrition in all the sectors. So that’s what they did. They got a nutritionist in 10 different sectors to sit with any sector. And then their department just oversaw the coordination. And we worked on strategies and plans. It really, really helped. Then one of the donors said, you know, OPC the president and the cabinet, shouldn’t be working on these technical things, which is true, but it was a perfect place to have a coordinating body. So they abolished it. They moved it to one of the sectors. They moved it unfortunately to ministry of health. I love you ministry of health, but, to, you know, it just reinforces the thinking to people that nutrition is health, that’s not all of these other things. Luckily they have a coordinating department. So it is still seen as a coordinating department,
Morag Gamble:
But, you know, I hope the fact that it has been in those other places that it gives it that sense that it is more than just a subset of
Stacia Nordin:
Oh yeah. Yeah, it still is. So we have this department of nutrition in the Ministry of Health, but we still have all those other nutritionists in the other department. So we’re still really good when it comes to nutrition for Malawi, we are going to see things change.
Morag Gamble:
That’s remarkable. So glad we got to that point of detail of asking, because that’s a phenomenal way of approaching how governance happens by really valuing something so central and so connected in its tissue, like the connective tissue of things that is, that is nutrition, and that connects us to the soil and to everything. I’ll take the permaculture nutrition approach, whatever that be called. Then. Wow. Yeah.
Stacia Nordin:
Yep. And if we can do the same thing with permaculture, you said earlier about permaculture helping people think beyond gardens because permaculture is beyond gardens. A lot of people think, oh, it should go in the ministry of agriculture. I’m like, it’s okay there but ministry of education is very important to permaculture. I mean, the name of your Institute is permaculture education Institute. You know, it’s, it’s about energy. We need permaculture within that the energy.
Morag Gamble:
It’s about city planning. It’s about transport. It’s about all different sorts of things.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. Yeah. So if we can help get permaculture or whatever they want to call it, sustainable design, climate smart. But really make sure that it is climate smart, you know, and criticize and critique ourselves about is this really climate smart? Are there new things coming up that we could do better? You know, there’s a billion things in my life, even around me. I don’t love even the computer I’m talking to you on or the cell phone that I have here. It’s not the best thing for the environment. And I hope technology continues to evolve and that we don’t cause electronic waste as much as society is right now. Yeah.
Morag Gamble:
Well, we’ve been talking for, well, truly over an hour now. Thank you so much for your time.
Stacia Nordin:
Oh my goodness! Can’t wait to meet you.
Morag Gamble:
We’ve got to leave something because coming up soon, I mean, probably somewhere around the time that this podcast is going live, we’re, co-organizing a permaculture nutrition event, which is a way that we can bring together lots of people in this space to have a conversation around this and explore. So I really looking forward to working with you on that and really rippling these ideas out further around the world and creating more conversation around it because I just, yeah, like you’ve just been saying there it’s so much part of the, the connective tissue and if we have a focus, then bring it back into, you know, very much into our lives and into our bodies and into, and how that relates to that whole systems approach of as being in a, you know, sort of a one planet way of living. I think it’s a very personal approach to dealing with things that we’re all facing in the world right now. And it brings it back into something that we can actually relate to, but then very like it’s personal, but it’s political, it’s agricultural, it’s educational, it’s all those things, but it roots it right back down to a very direct relationship between us and the food that we consume on a daily basis.
Stacia Nordin:
Yeah. I hope as we do talk about permaculture nutrition that I help my permaculture friends see the value they are adding to nutrition and a little bit more that they could do by focusing on local resources and reaching outside the permaculture community to nutritionists, to agriculture, to a wide variety of people, to show them the value. And I’ll be talking to my nutrition colleagues, my registered dietician, licensed nutritionist and helping them see that sustainable approaches to nutrition are possible and encouraging them to reach out and look for people that understand sustainability and design and helping them understand it themselves. You don’t have to become an expert in it to be aware of what’s available and to support, you know, with those partnerships and relationships. So the only way forward for me is partnerships. We can’t do everything, but we can do something. Yes.
Morag Gamble:
Thanks for your time today, and it’s been lovely to just dive into all that richness of the context that you’re in and to, to ask you those questions because it’s. I think that’s where we get, I find it really exciting is when, you know, you this whole world of the permaculture in Malawi and international you’ve been working with, and I’ve got all this world that I’ve been working in and just starting to see how those, those, like the Malawi effect, when you start to overlay them, it’s super exciting, super exciting.
Stacia Nordin:
I’m excited to see what your, what your listeners give us feedback on, and maybe we can do it again and build off what they want to hear more about.
Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Great idea!
Stacia Nordin:
Yes. All right. And have a wonderful day.
Morag Gamble:
Bye bye! So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you like a copy of my top 10 books to read, click the link below, pop in your email, and I’ll send it straight to you. You can also watch this interview over on my YouTube channel. I’ll put the link below as well, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a comment. And if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider giving me a star rating. Believe it or not, the more people do this. The more podcasts bots will discover this little podcast. So thanks again. And I’ll see you again next week.