In RECOMMONING, we are searching out a more open, collectively held world where, once again, land is held in common. A collaborative series with Dark Properties.
When I first reached out to LinYee Yuan, MOLD’s founder and editor, about doing an interview series together, I was a bit horrified to hear that the magazine would cease publication on this year’s summer solstice. Since starting Dark Properties, I’ve looked to MOLD as a model publication that, throughout its 12-year run, has aptly demonstrated how a niche topic (“the future of food”) can be both endlessly fascinating, as well as endlessly instructive.
Then, as we worked on our food-sovereignty series together, it became clear to me that LinYee herself needed to be interviewed. After all, she is shuttering MOLD in favor of practicing what the magazine has preached: The need to build local, relational foodways that center ecological resilience, Indigenous knowledge, and human connection.
As we talked about in her first interview for Dark Properties, LinYee’s newest venture, Field Meridians, is an artist collective creating tools for ecological resilience through social practice. And now, the organization has set forth the ambitious long-term goal of seeding a public food forest in central Brooklyn—something which LinYee herself describes below as “a bit unhinged.” But, I have faith, because if anyone can steer such a complicated and unlikely project, LinYee can.
I hope you enjoy our conversation, in which we discuss the decision to wind down MOLD as a way to divest from the internet, and invest in people, nature, and the future.
~ Willa
Willa Köerner:
Before we begin, I have to note that you’re the first person I’ve interviewed a second time for my newsletter—which says a lot about how much I admire your work.
LinYee Yuan:
I’m so honored!
WK:
To jump in, can you tell me about the decision to stop publishing MOLD, to more fully focus on Field Meridians?
LY:
Winding down MOLD is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. At the end of last year, I started feeling like we’d lost the thread with MOLD. I’d always envisioned it being my life’s work, because the intersection of food sovereignty and design systems is so integral to my orientation within the world. But then last year, I realized that the onslaught of AI was going to irreparably change the dynamic of online publishing.
When chatGPT was launched, my cousin who works in tech told me that by the year 2030, something like 99% of the internet will be AI-generated. That floored me. Right then I realized that despite MOLD being a very niche publication, we do use the internet as our primary platform for information sharing, and the trajectory felt grim. The internet no longer felt like a place I wanted to share ideas, or a tool I wanted to rely on for building community.
On the other hand, the work we’ve been doing with Field Meridians—which is completely rooted in my physical neighborhood—has reinforced my desire to build real, in-person community. And so with that, I made the decision to stop publishing MOLD on June 20th, this year’s summer solstice. We’ve been publishing MOLD for 12 years now, which means we’ve completed a full astrological cycle on the Chinese calendar. As a Chinese-American, zodiac-oriented person, that makes me feel pretty good.
WK:
And you’re also not interested in continuing the print version of MOLD?
LY:
No. The printed magazine was always intended to be six issues, and was conceived of as a side project of MOLD, which was launched as an online publication. So when we completed the print cycle, that gave us a sense of accomplishment that we’d done the thing that we’d set out to do in print.
[Editor’s note: Did you know you can download all six issues of MOLD’s print cycle, for free?]
The online publication, on the other hand, could have gone on forever. But again, I don’t think that people today read the internet in the same way that they read the internet 12 years ago.
WK:
Yeah, I’m not sure people read at all. [Laughs]
LY:
It’s interesting to hear you say that, because to me, the rise of Substacks and newsletters like yours indicates that people are willing to read long-form pieces, even without many bells and whistles beyond the text. And as somebody who’s been both a deep observer and engaged participant in media for my entire adult life, I’m excited about this, and curious about what’s going to happen next. Moving forward, where are we going to share ideas and find ideological community?
I’ve thought through so many different online platforms for community-building—like Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, community discussion boards, basically any kind of online digital wrangling—and nothing feels like what I want. So, Field Meridians was an attempt at carving out some sort of answer for myself around what it would feel like for a like-minded community of designers, artists, chefs, and farmers to congregate, and just be together in real space, off the internet.
WK:
You’re still using a newsletter and social media to help actually bring people together, right?
LY:
Yes, but we’re also printing out and distributing physical posters. My primary mode of broadcasting and communication is really print magazines and ephemera. I used to throw parties in my twenties, in the days of passing out flyers, and sometimes I still use that same flyer printer.
Of course, even as I keep saying “I’m done publishing,” I’m also like, “Field Meridians needs to start a community newspaper!” [Laughs]
WK:
Another thing I want to point out about MOLD is that you’re ending the project on a high note, before it runs out of steam. Many people think that in order for something to be successful, it needs to keep going and growing forever. But that’s really not the case.
LY:
Right. That’s a reflection of our capitalist markers of success, which tell us we should be forever scaling up, consuming, and accumulating. But I try to practice what I preach in the sense that as people, we have seasons, and it would be unrealistic to keep doing the same thing forever.
When we first launched the print magazine with the intent to publish six issues, people found that to be provocative—this idea that we were starting with the end already in sight. At that time there were a number of other independent magazines who were already publishing in this format, like Migrant Journal and Dirty Furniture in the UK. Seeing my peers embrace this kind of limited-run magazine format was empowering, because I was coming from within the machine of publishing where, if you couldn’t publish in perpetuity, you were deemed a failure. So seeing my peers say, “No, I just want to do five or six issues”—that emboldened me, and allowed me to dream within the space of just doing the thing I wanted to do, versus feeling like I had to be under the thumb of magazine ad sales, or under someone else’s definition of “success.”
WK:
This makes me curious about Field Meridians’ long-term vision. I saw on its website that you’re “planting seeds for a food forest in central Brooklyn.” Can we chat about that?
LY:
Field Meridians started with the idea of wanting to do the work we were writing about in MOLD, in our actual neighborhood. Then last year, I became fixated on the idea of planting a food forest in Crown Heights after experiencing a food forest for myself in Seattle, at the Beacon Food Forest. It was much more magical than I ever dreamed, and I wouldn’t have been able to understand the possibilities of a food forest without actually being in that space.
I was in Seattle for six weeks with my kids, and visited the food forest five or six times. It felt like this golden period to be there, when all kinds of berries were ripening, and different kinds of artichokes were coming into season. It was an incredible thing to witness and taste, and it cemented my belief that we need to be working towards something similar in our community.
Planting a food forest in Brooklyn is a pretty absurd and ambitious thing to do, though. Plus, we don’t have money, we don’t have land, and we’re trying to do it in central Brooklyn—a place that has less tree coverage than the average of New York City. It just feels so unhinged in many ways. [Laughs]
But, I like a challenge. So I was like, “We need to make a one-sheet.” With my marketing background, I know it’s important to create a clear proposal. And I thought, “Well, I could put a proposal together myself.” But going back to the original impetus for Field Meridians, I felt like even the proposal needed to be a community project. Our neighbors want to know each other—so we ended up making the proposal together through a weekly open-call meeting.
From December to April of last winter, Field Meridians hosted a weekly meeting at our local bar, inviting people to participate in the community-visioning project. We asked: How are we going to plan a food forest in our neighborhood? What should it look like? What are our values? How can we organize ourselves? We tried to answer all these different questions together, and I have to tell you, I was so humbled by the experience. Over the course of 14 weeks, more than 300 people came through, and now we have a beautiful one-sheet, not to mention a larger 50-page proposal, which we’ve been using for outreach to our elected officials.
WK:
In your own words, can you describe what a food forest is? It’s not too dissimilar from a permaculture garden, in that you’re trying to establish ecosystems that are geared towards human use, but in a more ecological, self-sustaining way—is that right?
LY:
Yes. A food forest is basically a way of planting and tending to the land that mimics natural forest ecology. “Forest garden” is another way of saying it. It’s also a way of recognizing that Brooklyn was originally a food forest tended by the Lenape and Canarsie people. Much of the Northeast of the United States was an edible food forest. In fact, maybe the entire contiguous United States—and broader Turtle Island—was a food forest. So even though much of this land, including water bodies, is now paved over in New York City, there’s an idea of returning the land to a shape that’s more familiar to how it once was. And we want to honor that.
In my mind, our food forest would feel like a combination between a natural forest where you might forage for native black currants, rose hips, stinging nettles, and other medicinal and edible plants. But then we’d also bring in non-native perennials, like blueberries. Exactly what we plant will be for the community to decide. As one example, maybe we’ll plant callaloo, to honor the Jamaican community here. We want to think and talk about it in a way that it feels like a collaborative social sculpture. How can we world-build together?
One of the things that’s been wonderful about this process is that we are in community with other stewards of food forests in New York City, and we can work with them to learn about their processes, too.
WK:
What are some of the other food forests in NYC? Is Mary Mattingly’s Swale still going?
LY:
The Swale project still exists, but the plants that were originally on the barge are now part of the Bronx River Parkway, which is stewarded by a wonderful human named Nathan Hunter, who we’ve learned so much from. Then there’s a woman named Candace Thompson, an artist who stewards a food forest in Stuyvesant Cove Park, which is a public-private partnership. And there’s a food forest-y space that’s also a community garden in Long Island City, called Smiling Hogshead Ranch.
So, there are a handful of people who are doing this work already. Casey Tang—who worked on Swale, and who was interviewed for your series with Are.na—he’s been telling me about food forests for over a decade, and I just did not understand what he was doing. And now, fast forward 15 years, and I’m like, “Casey, I’m ready to talk about food forests now!” [Laughs]
Casey’s been really helpful in understanding some of the issues with planting native food forests. As he sees it, the problem is that there aren’t a lot of perennial plants that we know how to eat anymore. It’s not that they don’t exist; it’s that we no longer find them appealing, because we’re used to eating the fruits and grains we can find at the grocery store.
WK:
I guess if you really wanted to live off the land without planting annual summer crops or non-native species, you’d be eating a lot of roots, leaves, and strange berries.
LY:
Right. But they’re only strange to us because we’re so entrenched in our globalized food system. It’s deeply cultural.
I was just daydreaming this weekend about how, if we actually do this thing—which I believe we will, eventually—how cool it’d be to be in conversation with people doing this work in Jamaica, or in Yemen where some of my other neighbors are from, or in Trinidad. There are so many ways to draw on Indigenous knowledge from other places to help us navigate local issues around culture, taste, and ecology.
WK:
Do you feel like there’s support within the city for this kind of initiative? And are there existing blueprints or models to help you navigate the local set-up process?
LY:
There are a lot of great models, including a very well-organized community garden program here in NYC, which was started by neighborhood activists whose shoulders I stand on. There’s also the Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture.
I’m also a new board member of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust (BQLT), an incredible organization that stewards about 32 community gardens across Brooklyn and Queens. During the Giuliani administration in the early aughts, he tried to sell a bunch of community garden lots to developers—but the gardeners came together to oppose that, and a handful of organizations were born out of that, including BQLT. They went through many years of legal action, and it was very wild. But yeah, I always feel like librarians and community gardeners are the most radical people in our communities, and so I am very proud to be aligned with both of those groups and to really lean on their knowledge, leadership, and organizing models.
WK:
As a last question, how can people get involved with the food forest project?
LY:
People can join our coalition to say that they support the idea of a food forest in Crown Heights (email projects@fieldmeridians.org to join). They can also donate to Field Meridians, which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Another huge thing would be to help us find land for the food forest.
