Foodies Clan

“Cooking With Paris” does not take itself too seriously, and lulls you into doing the same

“Excuse me, sir? What do chives look like?”

Paris Hilton is trying to convince us that she’s never been to a grocery store before. And maybe she hasn’t. She’s wearing a pink gown and matching bedazzled mask, strolling down the aisle toward the Lucky Charms. While we open on a slow-motion glam shot, wind in her hair, the camera pulls back to reveal a production assistant fanning her with a board. And now she’s wandering around with a grocery cart next to the normies under bad lighting. The joke, and also the armor, is that everyone knows that the persona of Paris Hilton is artifice. She’s in on it, too.

Cooking With Paris, Hilton’s new show on Netflix debuting on August 4, is the obvious conclusion to a January 2020 YouTube video in which she haplessly cooks a lasagna. In it, she uses a too-small a pan for the meat sauce, stirs the ricotta with a spatula, and piles all the ingredients in a foil pan while her chihuahua watches on, wearing a bedazzled apron. The responses were what you’d expect. Some followed her recipe and determined it was not very good, while others delighted in watching Hilton do what she does best: perform herself.

Hilton has become the latest celebrity to turn to cooking as a way to extend their relevance. Cookbooks and cooking shows are now where famous people, especially women in their late 30s and 40s, can still find an audience when offers for movie and TV roles begin to fade. Or, on the other side of the career-success spectrum, it can be where celebrities go to extend their business empires. Gwyneth Paltrow, Trisha Yearwood, and Chrissy Teigen have seamlessly grown their cooking brands into yet another fruitful branch of successful careers. Meanwhile, Kristin Cavallari, Eva Longoria, and Alicia Silverstone have parlayed cooking into a low-risk way to remain in the spotlight and push lifestyle aspirations. Regardless of the celebrity, the story is almost always the same: Despite their busy life and riches, the person loves to cook. It means something to them, didn’t you know? It connects them to their family or helps them unwind or lets them create? Tabloids have long capitalized on stars being just like us, and what’s more relatable than Trisha Yearwood making a chicken tortilla casserole?

But for Paris Hilton, the story — and appeal of her celebrity — is different. Since becoming a paparazzi magnet in the early aughts, she’s made her career on being out-of-touch with reality and somewhat insufferable for it. In 2005’s horror remake House of Wax, co-starring Hilton, the movie was marketed with the slogan SEE PARIS DIE. The Simple Life was an entire show based around the premise of Hilton and then-best friend Nicole Richie wreaking havoc on small towns while continuously flubbing at low-wage, blue-collar grunt work. The real surprise, though, was that Hilton and Richie could also be charming and funny, like the time they worked at Sonic and made the sign advertise 1/2 PRICE ANAL SALTY WEINER BURGERS, then wrestled in a grocery store (see, she has been in one before!) while dressed as giant Sonic soda cups.

More recently, Hilton has revealed what many of us already knew. Her ditzy persona was an act, she’ll have you believe, complete with a fake baby voice. She acted like a shallow, dumb party girl because that’s where she found success. And of course, she’s older now. At 40, she’s considering starting a family with her fiance, venture capitalist Carter Reum. Her image has softened, but it hasn’t disappeared. She’s engaging her celebrity with a wink at the audience; we all know this is for pretend, but isn’t it fun to play around sometimes?

Cooking With Paris might be a perfect vehicle for the current iteration of Paris Hilton. Her hook is that she, surprise surprise, loves cooking, and she has “found some brand-new recipes” (which magically appear in her collaged recipe book) that she wants to cook with famous friends, who are all at least slightly better at it than she is and can teach her a thing or two. She makes frittatas with Kim Kardashian, caprese salad with Demi Lovato, and steak with her mom Kathy and sister Nicky. She is also trying very hard to make “sliving” (a portmanteau of “slaying” and “living”) happen, though it doesn’t have the same appeal as her former catchphrase, “That’s hot.” The kitchen is redecorated each episode to match the menu’s theme. The drawers are full of glitzy details like rainbow bowls, a cake cutter shaped like a high heel, and Swarovski crystal spoons and spatulas that do not seem in the least bit sanitary.

There are some things to be learned from Cooking With Paris. Her frittata makes me think I should really be using my blender to get some extra fluff, her roasted salsa has lots of char, and I would absolutely eat her mac and cheese, which is just a box of Kraft with extra cheese and butter thrown in. You can’t deny Hilton is charming and still very in on the joke. She teeters around the kitchen in her heels, pushing cherry tomatoes around a smoking pan or spilling edible glitter. Her guests poke fun at her fashion choices when she gets feathers in the onion rings. She laughs at her own limitations, often telling the audience where she messed up and joyfully digs into high-fat food like fries and French toast. Every episode there’s inevitably some utensil or method or ingredient she claims she’s never heard of — whisking, tongs, zest. At one point, she washes a whole turkey with bottled water.

Criticizing Paris Hilton is slippery. Though she was always a socialite, her launch into “famous for being famous” territory was because of a sex tape that was filmed when she was 20 and released without her consent. She’s also been open about the abuse she faced at boarding school, most recently in the documentary This Is Paris. We’re currently at a cultural moment where we’re rethinking the way we treated young women celebrities in the ’90s and 2000s, the era where Hilton’s fame and the hatred it attracted, were at pique.

Her immense privilege made her a target for ire, but it also protected her in many other ways. She says when she moved to the Waldorf Astoria hotel at 18, her family didn’t give her anything, and she had to make it on her own, using her wits to become the mogul she is today. It is true that people didn’t take her seriously and money doesn’t protect you from everything, but it’s still hard to rewrite Hilton as a scrappy, started-from-the-bottom-now-we’re-here upstart because that, too, is dishonest. And it’s also not what people come to Paris Hilton to find.

It’s obvious that nobody’s life is like Paris Hilton’s. In Cooking With Paris, she feeds caviar to her dog. She loses a crystal in a recipe. While perhaps an audience can kid themselves into relating to Drew Barrymore or Teigen, Paris Hilton’s whole schtick puts everyone in a bind. The spoiled, out-of-touch version of Hilton is mockable yet appealing. The down-to-Earth version is unbelievable given the celebrity and circumstance that led to the creation of this show. How do you balance being in on the joke when the joke is you? This is the question that Hilton and her fame will continue to hang on.

In lieu of an answer, we have Cooking With Paris, which to the credit of everyone (especially Hilton) does not take itself too seriously, and lulls you into doing the same. The show is absurd. Hilton knows it’s absurd, and she knows that you’re here to watch her be absurd so you can laugh at and sometimes with her. Everyone is in on the joke, I guess. Or maybe everyone is the joke. It’s 2021. Who can tell anymore?

If you’re only focused on the outrage, you’re missing the point.

A private chef spends lockdown cooking for Houston’s wealthiest.

Chefs and bakers are struggling to figure out how to make pandemic-born mutual aid pop-ups sustainable going forward

Aliza Sokolow is grateful to be working again. As a food stylist and photographer living in LA, things have been picking up, and she’s getting ready for her kids’ book, This Is What I Eat, to come out next year. It’s exciting, to be sure, but it leaves Sokolow wondering what to do with her mutual aid pop-up project, This Is What I Baked. Starting in April 2020, after work dried up and she “desperately needed an outlet,” Sokolow began baking challah, selling it to her friends, and donating the proceeds to charity and mutual aid organizations like World Central Kitchen and the Trevor Project. “It was sort of an accidental business,” she said.

As the pandemic dragged on, Sokolow adapted her operation. Demand for the challah rose so high she couldn’t bake from home anymore. “I had to start paying for assistants and kitchen spaces, and I all of a sudden had expenses,” said Sokolow. At first, she was donating 100 percent of proceeds to charity, but as she couldn’t foot the bill for ingredients forever, she lowered her donation amount to 50 percent, and now says she gives about a quarter to different charities. She’s not sure if she’ll be able to keep it going, or if she even wants to, after her book comes out and her other work picks up to pre-pandemic levels.

The beginning of the pandemic brought massive layoffs and furloughs, insecurity and uncertainty. It was a perfect confluence of people having a lot of time on their hands and a lot of anxiety about the world for a specific type of food business to grow, one which centered on giving back to the community and spreading resources around. There was a huge need for mutual aid, and both furloughed professional chefs and amateurs sprung into action, putting their skills to use. They cooked and baked and packed meals and donated the profits, or held free street cookouts and giveaways, all to make sure their communities stayed fed and funded.

But here are some truths about what the pandemic looks like in America right now. Less than 50 percent of the total population is vaccinated. The super-transmissible delta variant is quickly becoming dominant in the country, and cases are dramatically rising in places with low vaccination rates. The country, however, still has some of the lowest documented COVID cases since the pandemic began, and most states have all but abandoned safety regulations around which businesses can operate and at what capacity (some, however, are mandating indoor mask-wearing again, and there’s an argument to be made that vaccines should also be mandated for people dining indoors). Offices are reopening and jobs are coming back. The pandemic isn’t over, but it’s as close as it’s been.

Like Sokolow, the chefs and amateurs running these pandemic aid pop-ups are getting back to work, too, which means they have less time to dedicate to mutual aid. Customers are also turning their attention elsewhere. Creators are questioning whether to keep going, and if so, how to make that doable in a reopened country in which running a business and mutual aid work have often been mutually exclusive.

Listening to constant sirens outside of his Queens apartment window last spring convinced Eli Goldman, a nonprofit worker, the world was ending. It was April 2020, a month into being ordered to work from home, and New York City was still the epicenter of the pandemic. To cope, he started giving away groceries, and then baking bread, and then cooking barbecue to raise money for mutual aid networks and charity. “I think a lot of it was like, well I may be dead or witnessing the collapse of society within the next year or so, so I really should just try and help people on the way out.”

Despite his nihilistic predictions, the project is surviving and thriving. What began with Goldman lowering bread from his apartment’s balcony to friends below morphed into Tikkun BBQ, a “mission-driven pop-up” that has raised over $80,000 for organizations like the Astoria Food Pantry, the Ali Forney Center, and Safe Walks NYC. Goldman has spent the year honing his skills, setting up smokers in the Open Street in front of his apartment, developing his own sandwiches and sauces, and partnering with local businesses. It’s not uncommon to see a line around the block for his barbecue, or for it to sell out within a matter of hours.

He is adapting for what the future might hold, registering as an LLC in case he has an opportunity to participate in bigger food festivals. Like Sokolow, he has modified what percentage of proceeds from each event goes to any given charity; “Right now I have like $10,000 on my credit card, which is fine,” he said. “But that’s not a great way to do something long-term.” In the future, there may be fewer pop-ups, or a lower percentage of sales donated to charity. But in exchange, he could pay his volunteers a fair wage, or other vendors, especially women and POC, to participate. “We’re in a transition phase of, okay, it’s clear that the world is no longer ending. So how do we make this sustainable long-term?”

Rather than stick with a pop-up, some businesses are looking at brick-and-mortar. Ashley Hernandez and Sam Padilla, founders of Seattle’s Coping Cookies, have expanded from their home to a commissary kitchen, needing space to fulfill about 55 cookie box orders each week, with some proceeds going to mental health-focused charities. And rather than stay a pop-up, they are ready to make this business their focus. Padilla and Hernandez decided to return to their previous jobs part-time, so they could continue working on the cookies. They are looking into finding their own private kitchen space that they could turn into a community hub. “My goal is to have a very community-oriented type of space where we do bake out of our own space, but we also have a community pantry,” says Hernandez. “We might host other small business pop-ups and things like that... we love connecting with people.”

These businesses have relied on a regular influx of orders to keep things going, and at the beginning of the pandemic, there seemed to be no shortage. People were bored, worried, and ready to spend on a rack of ribs or a loaf of bread if they knew the money was going to help their neighbors. But now LA-based chef Heleo Leyva is considering winding down his community cookouts since monetary donations are starting to dry up. At this point, he’s given away about 7,000 free meals, cooked by volunteer chefs for those in need, usually in under half an hour. But many of his regular volunteers are returning to work, and as customers return to work as well, there’s less money coming in. “Every cookout, we collect on the lower end $300, on the upper end maybe $700,” he says, but “now it’s very hard to collect donations because people kind of assume that the pandemic’s over and they’re like, ‘There’s no more need.’” From Leyva’s perspective, there is still much need; people are lining up for free meals like they always were. But without donations, providing them is unsustainable.

Instead, Leyva wants to focus on his share-a-meal program, which he runs through his Los Angeles street stand Quesadillas Tepexco, where customers can pay a little extra to buy a free quesadilla for someone else. He notes the eviction moratorium in LA is expiring, so the economic impact of the pandemic will be felt in the communities he serves for years to come. “I have to develop something like a system where it says, ‘If you buy this type of quesadilla, a dollar from this price will go toward funding community cookouts,’” which could continue to happen once or twice a month. But after a year of giving away quesadillas and other meals, he foresees an uphill battle. “People already recognize us from giving free food... and people might expect to see free food [and be surprised to see a] price of, nowadays, like 12 bucks per plate,” he says. “It’s going to be a challenge, but that’s just how it has to be.”

The challenges these pop-up creators face highlight how our society was not built for mutual aid. A 40-plus-hour-per-week job does not leave much room for volunteering or running a food business, and the margins on those businesses tend to be so thin that few independent, homegrown operators have managed to build donations into a business model that also allows them to pay rent.

Demand is still there on both sides. Mutual aid networks are still in need of donations because people are still in need. Customers are still interested in buying barbecue and challah where proceeds support worthy causes. These projects may have been born when it looked like the world was ending, but now they could just be what the world looks like — if operators can figure out how to keep them going.

Marylu Herrera is a Chicago-based artist with a focus on print media and collage.

Galatoire’s is known for its exceptional seafood dishes and having one of the most iconic dining rooms in the country

Galatoire’s is an institution in New Orleans, known for its fresh seafood dishes, classic Creole flavors, and creative takes on breakfast for dinner. “This is one of the most famous dining rooms in all of New Orleans right there,” says executive chef Phillip Lopez. “There are more contracts, deals, handshakes done on the tables of Galatoire’s than in lawyer’s offices or churches. Weddings and divorces [etc.] are all celebrated here.”

Among the restaurant’s signature dishes is its take on oysters Rockefeller. Lopez sources his oysters from shucking champions at Dragos, a nearby restaurant. “There’s a camaraderie in the city, the relationships that we build, this is the kind of stuff that we want to keep going. We’re lending a hand to someone else, and they’re hooking us up with some awesome oysters.”

Each box they recieve contains 14 dozen oysters, and the restaurant goes through about 12 boxes a day. That’s around 2,000 oysters, which shows just how popular the dish is. The dish has a designated chef preparing every portion. Each oyster gets piped with a spinach puree and herbsaint liqueur. The plates of six oysters are then broiled, and once they begin to brown, they’re removed to make room for the next order. “It’s a dance, all night long.”

That energy, dedicated to making every dish to perfection, is essential to Galatoire’s. “You walk outside on Bourbon street, and it’s just non-stop music and drinking and just revelry,” says Lopez. “That has to carry through into the dining room. So that chaos is really what makes Galatoire’s so special.”

Check out the video to see more on how the restaurant prepares its dishes, which are served to about 250 diners a night.

Although Oregon restaurants can serve customers inside without mask or vaccine requirements, some Portland food businesses have decided to stick to takeout and outdoor dining, hoping the delta variant begins to subside

On this episode of Gastropod, hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley explore THC’s growing role in how and what we eat

In July, Eater editor-in-chief Amanda Kludt announced our exciting new collaboration with Gastropod, the award-winning and endlessly informative podcast about the science and history of food.

Today we release the first fruit — or bud? — of that collaboration, one episode in a two-part series about cannabis edibles, from the very first “bhang” drinks enjoyed by ancient peoples to the culinary cannabis competitions of today. Say “high” and listen along with hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley as they trace the plant’s origins and use across centuries and continents, through prohibition and the fear of reefer madness, and the generational destruction suffered by Black and brown people during America’s “war on drugs.”

Along with guest experts, Graber and Twilley also explore the rise of the pot brownie as many American’s introduction to edible cannabis and touch on the D.A.R.E and “Just Say No” anti-drug campaigns that infiltrated U.S. classrooms in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In the past couple decades, a cultural shift has made marijuana both widely accessible and largely decriminalized (at least for white people; according to the ACLU, Black people “are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana” despite equal use), leading to cannabis cooking shows and mainstream experimentation with using THC as an ingredient in food that’s not just palatable like the “mulchy” brownies of the past, but actually delicious.

Despite still being federally illegal, marijuana has become a huge business, attracting celebrity investors (and prolific stoners) like Seth Rogen, Martha Stewart, and — perhaps obviously — Willie Nelson. Listen along as Graber and Twilley offer their first educational and entertaining bong hit of edible cannabis history and how we arrived at the current moment.

Subscribe to Gastropod: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn

New York City is the first to require proof of vaccination for indoor dining. It’s time for other cities to do the same.

On August 3, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced the U.S.’s first citywide mandate requiring proof of vaccination for indoor dining. If we ever want to move beyond the pandemic, this should become a mandate in every city.

Just three months ago, when the CDC announced that vaccinated people no longer had to wear masks in most indoor settings, it felt like a corner had been turned after a brutal year. But in recent weeks, the extremely contagious delta variant, paired with low vaccination rates in parts of the country, has shifted that trajectory in the U.S., and daily cases continue to rise on a trend that triggers memories of the spikes of this past winter when cases reached a fever pitch across the country — earlier this week, Florida broke its all-time record for COVID-19 hospitalizations, with more than 10,000 people hospitalized.

What sets the current spike in national cases apart from those of late 2020 is that it is — or at least, could have been — largely preventable. The rate of daily vaccination has been trending upward in parallel with growing fears of the delta variant, but nationwide only 50 percent of people eligible to get the jab have been fully vaccinated. Most of the new cases being recorded each day are in unvaccinated individuals — who, in July, also made up some 97 percent of COVID-related hospitalizations.

With delta on the rise, mask mandates, social distancing, and occupancy limits aren’t enough to make restaurants entirely safe gathering spaces — nor is it fair to require restaurateurs to indefinitely face the time-intensive and costly challenges of reimagining their spaces, their menus, and everything else about their restaurants. At this point in the pandemic, anyone who wants to eat indoors at a restaurant, and is eligible, should be required to show proof that they are vaccinated. (An obvious exception, taken into account by New York’s new mandate, is that until trials conclude and a vaccine is approved for children under 12, parents and guardians should be allowed to eat indoors with their families. Though this would mean some restaurant diners are unvaccinated, it would greatly diminish the number of unvaccinated individuals in a dining room at any given time.)

Some restaurants around the country have already started requiring proof of vaccination from those who wish to dine indoors. But much like individual restaurants and their staff having to shoulder the burden of enforcing mask mandates, this never should have been their responsibility in the first place. “Unless there is some concerted effort from the city, from the county, or from the state to help us enforce it, it’s just a paper tiger,” San Francisco restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit, who supports vaccine requirements but has yet to implement one at her restaurants, told Eater last week. “Until the city, the county, or the state comes up with some standardized way of proving someone’s vaccination record without violating their privacy, and also make it easy for us to be able to verify these things, then I don’t know how we’re supposed to do it.”

A vaccine requirement for indoor diners would protect restaurant workers as well as fellow diners — particularly as concern about breakthrough COVID-19 cases grows — allowing staff to focus on the jobs they were hired for, without the stress, anxiety, and legitimate danger that comes with being the enforcers of a scattershot health measure that has been so intensely politicized it has led to violence. Widespread mandates would also incentivize more eligible people to get the vaccine. Increasing vaccination won’t, on its own, completely temper the risk of new variants arising, but paired with social distancing and mask wearing, we can effectively lower the risk of the emergence of another new and more vaccine-resistant COVID variant.

To call for vaccination as a prerequisite for indoor dining and other activities when vaccination efforts first got underway this past spring would have been to reserve those experiences for only the most privileged: those who had the easiest access to vaccines. Though vaccine equity remains a concern, availability is now, by and large, widespread. In many parts of the country, one can walk into a local pharmacy or vaccination site and get the shot within minutes. That’s not to say vaccine distribution is perfect: There are still communities where vaccination is lagging because of structural access issues, and hesitancy due to medical racism, among other reasons. In making vaccination for certain activities a widespread requirement, government bodies would also have to own the responsibility of ensuring underserved and overlooked communities are adequately reached and served.

Requiring proof of vaccination for indoor dining would certainly highlight some of the unfairness that has colored this year. My mother, for instance, is among those who are immunocompromised, and though she was able to receive both doses of her vaccine, it is possible that her health condition will not allow her to receive future booster shots. These kinds of challenges for those who are ill, or otherwise legitimately unable to receive the vaccine, could prohibit them from dining indoors, depending on the scope of the mandate. But for those with weakened immune systems, or other severe illnesses, dining in close confines with unvaccinated individuals — particularly as accounts of breakthrough cases and more contagious variants ramp up — already makes indoor dining unrealistic and potentially life threatening. All indoor activities are higher risk for unvaccinated individuals, but this is particularly true in restaurants, where masks come off to eat. It will require truly curbing the pandemic, and bringing case counts down to single and low double digits again in communities across the country for people like my mother to safely dine indoors. This is unlikely to happen soon, without serious intervention.

It’s unrealistic to imagine a suggestion such as this would be accepted in every city or state, considering how hard some leaders have fought against COVID-related public health precautions thus far. But to act as if such a measure is not necessary, as we enter yet another spike of what is now, in large part, a preventable catastrophe, would be delusional. Some Republican leaders, and other officials who claim to be so deeply concerned with the freedoms of their constituents, must acknowledge that true freedom lies in being able to engage in public life without a high risk of COVID exposure. Though this truth may not be politically expedient, it can’t be ignored.

For those who can not currently be vaccinated, safety will only ever arrive when enough people who can be, are. This will serve both to flatten the curve and take pressure off of our health system, and to mitigate the risk of this virus continuing to mutate, plunging us into a never-ending cycle. And for those who have made the conscious and voluntary decision not to be vaccinated, indoor dining remains an incredibly high-risk activity. Though they may perceive a vaccine mandate for indoor dining as an infringement on their personal freedom, preventing these people from eating indoors while a pandemic rages on is the most life-affirming and fair measure we could take. The sooner we do, the sooner each and every one of us can safely return to our favorite corner table.

Pan frying, steaming, and boiling are just the beginning

The first thing I see when I open my freezer is a stack of frozen dumplings. Whether they’re round and filled with kimchi or square and stuffed with chives, they always come in handy when I want to eat well with no effort. I can pan fry, steam, or air fry them (which has been my go-to method lately), drizzle them with loads of chile crisps and a dash of ponzu, and I’m happy. But, sometimes, I want more.

So I began to research fun ways to up my frozen dumpling game. As expected, the Internet didn’t disappoint: There are so many creative dishes that I never considered using dumplings for, but that I’ve now added into my rotation. The common denominator is that frozen dumplings can do so much more than what the package tells you — the key is to think of them as a blank canvas, similar to pasta, rice, or noodles. And since they’re already filled with meat and/or vegetables, it doesn’t take much additional work to make them into a truly impressive dish.

If you’re in the mood for something saucy:

Treat your frozen dumplings like you would any type of protein, like chicken or tofu. Dumplings are already packed with seasoned fillings, but when they get baked or coated with sauce, they become something completely different. I suggest making rice to serve alongside to help sop up the sauce, but these recipes are all flavorful enough that no other add-ons are really needed.

Dumplings with hot pepper sauce: This recipe is inspired by kkanpunggi, spicy, garlicky fried chicken with vegetables. It’s one of the most beloved Korean-Chinese dishes, famous for its balance of spicy and sweet flavors. Instead of fried chicken, you can use crispy dumplings as a vehicle to carry that delicious sauce to your mouth.

Dumpling gyudon: Gyudon is a classic Japanese rice bowl, and there are several variations with eggs, beef, and even frozen dumplings. Microwave your frozen dumplings with a splash of water for a minute, just so that they are not completely frozen. Then treat them like you would a protein using this recipe from Just One Cookbook. As they cook, the dumplings will steam and soak up the sweet-and-salty mirin and soy sauce. Topped with a velvety soft-cooked egg, the steamed dumplings make an easy, comforting rice bowl in minutes.

Dumplings in alfredo sauce: Alfredo sauce is an easy way to elevate frozen dumplings. Treat them like pasta and cook them in the simmering sauce; sliced onion, chopped garlic, or bacon are all good additions for extra flavor. If you don’t have jarred sauce on hand, milk or heavy cream can be a quick fix.

Dumplings gratin: Dumplings are fantastic with tomato sauce and cheese. All you do here is break them apart into bite-sized pieces, pour tomato sauce (or even marinara or vodka sauce) over them, add a few vegetables like corn, onions, and mushrooms, lay some cheese on top and heat the whole thing up in the microwave or in the oven.

Gochujang dumplings: Crispy dumplings, preferably cooked in the air fryer, are great coated with the sauce here, which is heavy on gochujang and gochugaru. Although it packs a lot of heat, the sauce is sweetened with corn syrup (or honey), which creates a balanced, savory flavor. Serve the dumplings with a bowl of rice to make it a full meal.

If you’re in the mood for something more hearty:

Sometimes I feel like something’s missing if I’m just eating dumplings for dinner. I always have to pair them with something else, like crispy scallion pancakes or peanut noodles, to make a complete meal. But these recipes are so hearty and filling that they don’t need anything extra — just your appetite.

Dumpling jeongol: Jeongol is a term for a Korean-style hot pot. With frozen dumplings, you can put together a show-stopping centerpiece in minutes: Just arrange all your vegetables, make the seasoning paste, add the dumplings and the broth, and you’re done. The beauty of this dish is that there are no exact rules for what to add, as long as you make the seasoning paste. Just mix and match whatever vegetables you have in the fridge with different types of dumplings, and enjoy this super-filling dish.

Dumpling quesadilla: A cheesy quesadilla is one of the easiest and most satisfying snacks you can make quickly, and smashed steamed dumplings can give it an extra-savory layer of flavor. Just load up one side of your tortilla with the dumplings, sprinkle them with plenty of cheese, crisp up the tortilla, and sauce it with anything from hot sauce to mayo.

Dumpling fried rice: You can make fried rice with pretty much anything, and frozen dumplings are no exception. Because they’re already filled with seasoned meat and vegetables, you don’t need to prepare a lot of other ingredients, but I’d add a splash of oyster sauce to tie everything together. Don’t forget to finish with a yolk-rich, fried egg on top.

Spicy cabbage slaw with crispy dumplings (bibim mandu): Pair crispy dumplings with tangy, spicy cabbage slaw for a dish that’s both refreshing and satisfying. The slaw gets mixed with gochujang, soy sauce, and vinegar, bringing together spicy and tangy flavors. I recommend combining dumpling and slaw into each bite to enjoy the incredible textures. It’s the perfect drinking food.

Dumpling egg pancake: When pan frying dumplings, you can mix water and starch into a slurry to form a starch skirt, a thin, crispy layer that forms around the dumplings as they cook. But how about using eggs? Your dumplings may not get those super-crispy edges, but you’ll get a halo of fluffy, silky egg around them instead. Top it off with fresh scallions, drizzle some furikake for garnish, and you’ve got yourself an impressive two-ingredient dish.

The citywide mandate may be the first of its kind in the United States

The global thirst for palm oil has never been more ravenous. Caught between it and a multigenerational war on Thailand’s poor are the farmers of the Southern Peasants’ Federation, who simply want a piece of land to call their own.

It was the morning of February 11, 2015, when Somrudee Boonthonglek first saw the two men outside her shop. They were dressed as construction workers, with black masks that guarded their faces against the dust. Only their eyes were visible as they passed by on a motorbike. Around 6 p.m. that evening, Somrudee was making dinner when the two men returned. Sauntering through the door of her shop, they asked to buy some beer. Somrudee’s father, Chai Boonthonglek, 61, who had been attempting to soothe her crying six-month-old son, passed the child off to fetch the drinks. When he turned around, one of the men pulled out a .357 pistol and fired six shots, striking Chai in the head and torso. By the time the police arrived an hour later, his body was cold.

“I was two steps away from my dad when they shot him. Then they just walked away and got on their motorbike like nothing happened,” Somrudee says. Her son, now a rambunctious five-year-old who squirms in her lap as she speaks to me, has no memory of his grandfather.

“My dad loved this place so much, so I am staying here to fulfill his dream,” says Somrudee, now in her early 30s. Since 2009, she has lived in Klong Sai Pattana, a 160-hectare farming community of 70 or so families in Surat Thani province in southern Thailand. Klong Sai Pattana is the largest of five neighboring communities that make up the Southern Peasants’ Federation of Thailand (SPFT), an advocacy group for land rights. Most of SPFT’s members are like Somrudee and her parents, Chai and Usa Suwannaphat, who followed her in 2011 — ordinary people who never owned much of anything, drawn by the promise of a plot of earth where they could grow enough food for themselves and their children. For Chai and Usa, after nearly 30 years together scraping by on manual labor jobs and sorting through recyclables for pocket change, operating a tiny general store and having 10 rai (about 4 acres) to call their own felt like a small miracle.

For more than a decade, three of SPFT’s farming communities have been locked in brutal land disputes with oil palm plantations. Most of these plantations were created after a 1964 law allowed 30-year farming concessions on state-owned land; these leases were initially given to powerful individuals, and after the concessions expired, many of the plantations remained or, in some cases, expanded well beyond their original legal borders. In 1997, one of Thailand’s more transparent governments issued the Official Information Act, which enabled land rights activists to access troves of documents that proved the scale of the illegal occupations. A public outcry to redistribute some of the expired concession areas to the country’s estimated 8 million landless poor grew in the years that followed. In 2009, after a court case determined that one palm oil corporation, Jiew Kang Jue Pattana, had illegally occupied its land for decades, the plaintiff, the Agricultural Land Reform Office (ALRO), allowed a group of farmers from SPFT to settle in the area that is now Klong Sai Pattana. The community has existed in the shadow of Jiew Kang Jue Pattana’s oil palm trees ever since, separated from the plantation’s by a narrow dirt road.

Jiew Kang Jue Pattana may not have had a right to the land, but multiple human rights groups say that the company showed no remorse about spilling blood to reoccupy it. According to the SPFT, between 2009 and 2018, the corporation kept up a steady stream of intimidation in an attempt to force the farmers to vacate Klong Sai Pattana, including bulldozing about 60 homes. Human rights groups also allege that gangsters hired by Jiew Kang Jue Pattana repeatedly fired automatic rifles into the village and killed four of the community’s members, including Chai. Less than two years after his death, more gunmen attacked Somrudee’s husband, who escaped with a wounded arm and a pickup truck riddled with bullet holes.

After a court ordered Jiew Kang Jue Pattana to vacate the state-owned land entirely in 2018, the corporation officially folded. But there has been no justice for the people of Klong Sai Pattana — who are not the only community in SPFT’s network to suffer violence and harassment. A short drive away, Santi Pattana and Khao Mai Pattana are also embroiled in conflicts with palm oil companies. On October 20, 2020, Dam Onmuang narrowly dodged a bullet when an attacker snuck into Santi Pattana and fired at him at 1 a.m. while he was on security duty. Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur, and Agnes Callamard, the then-UN Special Rapporteur, released a letter implicating United Palm Oil Industry in the shooting. (United Palm Oil has not responded to a request for comment as of publication.) Dam, who is 69, says the attack has made him fearful of leaving his home and that his health has declined dramatically as a result. He is currently awaiting the results of the verdict hearing on August 26, 2021. If his attacker is convicted of attempted murder, it will be the first time that any of SPFT’s assailants face any legal consequences.

The attacks on the villagers of SPFT are far from isolated incidents in the broader struggle over land rights in Thailand: At least 70 land rights lawyers and community activists have vanished or been confirmed dead over the past few decades. And Thai governments have often been less than sympathetic to the country’s landless poor, particularly in the wake of the 2014 military coup d’état. The Thai government has not only turned a blind eye to the attacks, but it has at times actively worked to displace peasants on behalf of oil palm plantations and other large agribusinesses. After initially promising that the farmers could remain in Klong Sai Pattana, ALRO has repeatedly threatened to redistribute the land to corporate interests, according to the members of SPFT. (ALRO has not responded to a request for comment as of publication.) In 2017, more than a dozen members of the federation’s Nam Daeng Pattana community were charged with criminal offenses, including trespassing on a mining company’s land; seven served jail sentences.

In the case of Chai’s alleged assassin, the Provincial Court in Wiang Sa District of Surat Thani Province ruled that it must have been too dark for Somrudee to see clearly and dismissed the charges without further investigation. Members of the community have urged Somrudee and Usa to flee, but they refuse to leave. Together, they care for Somrudee’s youngest son and the garden that Chai left behind. Usa knows there is little chance of justice for Chai, but she continues to tell his story. “I lost my husband in the fight for this land,” she says. “This is the land we fought for with our blood. We fight for it with our tears. This is where I have decided I want to die.”

Thailand has the eighth-largest economy in Asia, but its wealth gap is vast and ever widening. In 2016, the country had the third-highest economic inequality in the world, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, with its 50 richest billionaires having a net worth equal to 30 percent of the country’s entire GDP. By the 2018 edition of the report, Thailand had beat Russia and India for the greatest degree of wealth inequality in the world, with the top 1 percent of the population owning 66.9 percent of the country’s wealth. That same year, 55 percent of the population worked in the informal sector, many living one illness or missed paycheck away from starvation; some 6.5 million people did not have enough to eat. Nearly a third of the population works in Thailand’s agricultural sector, often as near-indentured servants to the corporations that control the land they tend. A 2020 report by the World Bank found that the number of agricultural workers earning less than the poverty line of 90 Thai baht (about $3) per day has been climbing since 2016.

In a country that relies heavily on agriculture, land is everything, and nearly 80 percent of the land in Thailand is controlled by just 20 percent of the population. According to a 2019 case study conducted by Focus on the Global South, “land ownership has become concentrated in the hands of a small number with access to information, capital, and connections to authorities.” ALRO, which is in charge of land distribution, is famously corrupt; its officials have historically made little effort to hide their interest in bribery. According to Pornpana Kuaycharoen, a coordinator at Land Watch Thailand, when many of the oil palm concessions were first handed out in the 1960s, anecdotal reports of graft ran rampant, with local officials allegedly handing off parcels of land to powerful friends for as little as 10 Thai baht (33 cents) per rai (0.4 acres).

Since May 22, 2014, when Thailand’s democratically elected prime minister was arrested in a coup d’état and the National Council for Peace and Order, a military junta under the leadership of General Prayuth Chan-o-cha, seized power, inequality in Thailand has steadily worsened. As prime minister, Prayuth Chan-o-cha has an abysmal human rights record: Since his rise to power, his administration has eliminated political opposition and authorized the use of water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets on crowds of civilian protestors in Bangkok. It has also doled out hefty prison sentences for violations of the country’s lèse majesté law, which forbids anything that could be broadly interpreted as defamation of the monarchy — in multiple cases, the crime in question was a Facebook post.

Less than a month after taking control, on June 14, 2014, the junta launched its Forestry Reclamation Policy, the stated purpose of which was to reforest a sizable swath of Thailand in order to combat global warming. Although the government claims that this was an environmental initiative, activists say the goal was always to draw corporate investment to land that had been occupied by rural communities. Since 2015, more than 8,000 households have faced forced eviction, while the Thai government has leased out 999 hectares of the reclaimed land to agribusiness firms for growing oil palms, eucalyptus, and rubber trees, as well as to mining and cement companies. Those being forcibly removed are invariably subsistence farmers, many of them Karen or other ethnic minorities. “The Forestry Reclamation Policy allows for tremendous dispossession,” says Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand. “[The junta] argue it’s to keep land from being further degraded, but if you look at who has been displaced and prosecuted, it’s another way to target people who are already living in the margins of society.”

According to Land Watch Thailand, between 2014 and 2017, the Thai government brought 20,200 lawsuits and criminal court cases against nearly 4,300 defendants, mostly on trumped-up charges of trespassing on their own homes. Soldiers have torched villages and marched elderly inhabitants off of the land at gunpoint that they have farmed for generations. In one instance, near the beginning of the campaign in 2014, Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, described the areas to which more than 1,000 villagers were forcibly relocated as “uninhabitable.” Political propaganda and television commercials depict soldiers in full combat gear standing over unarmed villagers as though celebrating a heroic victory. “What is happening in Thailand right now is nothing short of a war on the poor,” says Pranom Somwong, Protection International’s representative in Thailand.

Since its foundation in 2008 in Surat Thani province, the SPFT has advocated for the landless poor, who seldom have a voice in Thai society. After an investigation by the Southern Poor People Network (SPPN) found that oil palm plantations were illegally occupying approximately 11,200 hectares of state-owned territory, mostly in the south of Thailand, members of SPFT moved into the disputed areas and began to work the land. From the beginning, it was a bold social experiment, a radically democratic society struggling to survive within an increasingly authoritarian one. Among the organization’s principles are that anyone can lead, that all leaders must be elected by popular vote, that women should hold just as many positions of authority as men, and that the communities should be good stewards of the environment for future generations. Every household of SPFT is entitled to an equal amount of land — 10 rai (4 acres) for planting crops and 1 rai (0.4 acres) for building a home — provided they practice sustainable farming methods and sow a diverse mix of seeds. Community members are expected to take their responsibilities to the land and to one another seriously — if they fail to do so, they are asked to leave after a trial year. At the core of it all is a deep-rooted belief that everyone deserves to live with dignity, free from fear of hunger.

For Kusol Chuaywang, that idea was immensely appealing. Although originally from Surat Thani province, she worked in Bangkok for many years as a contract driver for a van company. Each day, after she paid for gasoline and the van’s rental fee, she walked away with no more than 200 Thai baht or 300 Thai baht (approximately $6 to $9). That left barely enough to cover the 2,000 Thai baht ($63) she paid in monthly rent for an apartment on the outskirts of the capital. Decades of unchecked development — defined by a glut of luxury condos and high-end shopping malls — have rendered Bangkok effectively unlivable for workers like Kusol. Since 2014, the Thai military junta has accelerated the city’s gentrification by supporting the displacement of lower-income neighborhoods and reducing access to affordable food by destroying night markets and systematically evicting many of the city’s 20,000-plus street food vendors. “In the city, I just survived day to day, nothing more. It was always a struggle to make ends meet,” Kusol says.

Kusol was in her late 40s when she decided to begin a new life in Klong Sai Pattana. “When we first started to cultivate the land, it was difficult. Most of us had to use our own savings [in the beginning],” she says. “Now, there is always enough food…nobody has to worry about starving here.” Even at the height of the violence in those early years, she was one of the few villagers who steadfastly refused to leave. “My dream was to have my own land,” she says. “Here, I have hope.”

While SPFT members like Kusol joined to start over, for Surapol Songrak, an SPFT executive committee member, the movement for land rights is tied to a lifelong quest to build a more equitable society in Thailand. “We believe that our struggle will free the land from the corporations and the billionaires and return it to the people,” he says. A round-faced man in his mid-50s with wisps of salt-and-pepper hair, he speaks quietly but carries himself with an unmistakable air of authority. “We are not the only group that has been fighting for justice and equality in this country, and we are not the first group that lost our members,” he says. “There are already several incidents in Thai political history of people’s movements fighting against authoritarian powers. Each movement may look like it’s the same, but the conflict evolves.”

The roots of that conflict in Thailand run back to the 1970s. It was a period of intense upheaval, one in which an authoritarian government brutally suppressed attempts at social and political reform. With the Cold War underway and Communism spreading through other parts of Southeast Asia, paranoia among Thai landowners and government officials was running high. In 1972, security forces slaughtered as many as 3,000 civilians in Phatthalung province who were accused of being Communists. The incident came to be known as the thang daeng, or Red Drum, Murders, since detainees were burned alive in 200-liter oil drums. Witnesses remember that soldiers revved the engines on their trucks to muffle the screaming. “The official reason [for the violence] was to eradicate Communism, but it extended further than that,” says Haberkorn, who publishes in English and Thai and writes about the incident in Getting Away With Murder in Thailand. “‘Communist’ was defined as anything that was dissident, so it ended up including socialism, radical democracy, and essentially any progressive political thought.”

Among those branded as social dissidents were the members of the Farmers Federation of Thailand (FFT), an organization founded in 1974 to advocate for the rights of landless peasants. Over the next five years, many of the organization’s leaders were assassinated or simply disappeared. While some of the names of the victims were recorded by the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand, as with the Red Drum Murders, state records regarding the incidents remain sealed. Thailand’s pattern of displacing rural communities and quashing resistance has continued through decades of regime changes. Between 1990 and 1992, the military launched a plan to evict up to 5 million residents, mostly in the country’s rural northeast, and hand the majority of their land to commercial eucalyptus plantations. Phra Prachak Khuttasjitto, a former Buddhist monk, led the region’s villagers in protest, wrapping trees in strips of saffron-hued fabric typically worn by monks as a form of symbolic ordination. In retaliation, soldiers arrested him, demolished houses, and opened fire on crowds.

“Many other people lost their lives for the land,” Surapol says. He and SPFT’s other leaders have taken lessons from past land rights movements with the hope that they can prevent history from repeating itself. The political players may have changed, but he sees numerous parallels to Thailand’s past in terms of rising inequality and state-sanctioned violence. In some cases, even the methods of oppression mirror those dark times: When Porlajee Rakchongcharoen, a Karen human rights activist, vanished abruptly in 2014, the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) refused to investigate the disappearance. His burned remains were found five years later in an oil drum.

“The threat to equality, justice, and who has access to land is similar across both times,” Haberkorn says. “The difference with the rise of agribusiness is that the risk of ecological devastation is greater. In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, the primary risk was one of further entrenching inequality. Landowners back then weren’t planting palm trees where they shouldn’t be planted, and they weren’t using as many toxic chemicals as today.” Among the pesticides still commonly used on Thailand’s palm oil plantations is glyphosate, a restricted substance in much of the United States that one study found may increase the risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 41 percent. Although the Thai government took steps in 2019 to ban glyphosate — along with paraquat and chlorpyrifos, two highly toxic chemicals previously found on Thai oil palm plantations — it reversed the decision under pressure from the U.S. government and Bayer. Workers on oil palm plantations and any villages downstream of their contaminated water supply suffer the effects. As has historically so often been the case, the Thai government prioritized powerful corporate interests over the well-being of the poorest members of society.

Palm oil is the most consumed vegetable oil in the world, with nearly 10 percent of the globe’s permanent crop land dedicated to its production. As agricultural products go, it is astonishingly versatile. In its unrefined form, red palm oil has a rich, intensely earthy flavor that is essential to cuisines from West Africa to Brazil. When processed, palm oil gives ice cream its scoopable, luscious texture; keeps peanut butter from separating; and ensures that chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. As a shelf-stable fat solid at room temperature, it’s an invaluable component of most processed foods. After June 2018, when the U.S. instituted an official ban on partially hydrogenated oils, or trans fats, usage of palm oil as a substitute soared, and it now appears in about half of all products on grocery store shelves. Palm oil is also a key component in cosmetics, shampoos, bioplastics, and biofuels, driving global consumption from 16 million metric tons in 1996 to 60.7 million in 2017; if the industry continues on its current trajectory, palm oil consumption could quadruple again within the next 30 years.

While there is a growing demand for ethically sourced palm oil, much of the current supply chain is mired in human rights abuses. Indonesia and Malaysia together put out 85 percent of the world’s supply. Their economies depend heavily on the commodity, whose low-cost production has been incentivized both domestically and by globalist financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which views it in part as a poverty eradication scheme. The resulting environmental devastation — it is a key driver of deforestation worldwide — and rampant human rights violations, which include trafficking, slavery, child labor, and widespread sexual assault, have been well documented in both countries. “There is a high demand for palm oil in processed foods and other consumer products primarily because it has been grown so cheaply,” says Robin Averbeck, the agribusiness campaign director at Rainforest Action Network. “That low price point comes largely as a result of palm oil corporations stealing land from rural communities and labor from workers.”

For more than five decades, the Thai palm oil industry has been marred by rampant exploitation, violence, and corporate greed. Thailand is the world’s No. 3 producer of palm oil. Although almost all of its crop is meant for domestic consumption, the Thai government has invested heavily in biodiesel and views palm oil as the key to energy independence, with production ramping up steadily since the mid-1970s. Unlike Malaysia and Indonesia, where large corporations dominate the palm oil industry, Thailand has hundreds of smaller plantations that employ approximately 300,000 workers total.

Harvesting the crop is notoriously dangerous labor. The fruits grow on the tops of trees that can reach more than 60 feet high. Workers stand on the ground with thin metal poles and attempt to dislodge the oil palm fruits, each of which sports a spike-encrusted shell, weighs 10 to 12 kilograms, and falls with such ample kinetic force that it can kill a man. Dam Onmuang — the SPFT member who was shot at last fall — once saw a tree fall and crush a fellow worker to death on an oil palm plantation.

Originally from the part of Surat Thani province where Santi Pattana is now, Dam was forced to leave after United Palm Oil Industry Public Co. Ltd. illegally muscled into his village in 1976, setting fire to their crops and rice supplies. Desperate to feed his children, he took up logging, clearing forest land, and other jobs for another oil palm plantation, often for as little as 100 Thai baht (approximately $3) a day. “At that time, there were five members in my family. I have three children, my wife, and me. It was not enough to live on,” he says. “[My children] were not starving, but it was not a pleasant life. We were very poor.” Like Dam, those who have chosen to work for substandard wages on the oil palm plantations often find themselves trapped in what some describe as modern-day serfdom with no hope of social advancement. Wages hover around 0.50 Thai baht (about 2 cents) per kilogram of fruit picked. On a good day, a team of three might collect 1,000 to 1,500 kilograms, meaning each person walks home with 200 Thai baht ($6) or less, below even Thailand’s modest minimum wage of 313 Thai baht to 336 Thai baht (about $11) per day.

In 2008, the year SPFT was founded, oil palm plantations occupied 320,000 hectares of land. Since a government policy was established to expand the oil palm industry in 2005, that number has risen steadily, particularly in the south. The current regime has plans to increase it by an additional 50 percent by 2026. If that happens, SPFT’s already precarious position is guaranteed to worsen.

Since 2010, when gunmen allegedly hired by Jiew Kang Jue Pattana came through Klong Sai Pattana at dusk and murdered Somporn Pattaphum, 53, members of the community have lived under constant threat of attack or eviction. When that first death failed to scare away residents, the violence escalated. By 2012, Klong Sai Pattana had become a war zone: Often before the sun went down, villagers saw men in military-style camouflage gear or black clothes running into the bushes near the edge of their territory. After dark, the farmers huddled in a bunker while bullets thudded against the earthen walls. No one knew which direction they were coming from or if they would stop. Members who patrolled the area around the bunker learned to find their way without the luxury of electric light for fear of being seen. “Every night, I heard gunshots. We had to be careful. We had to be in a state of constant alert. We had to travel in groups,” Kusol says. Even during this time, she volunteered to stand guard, walkie-talkie in hand in case of trouble. “Sometimes when I had the night shift, I could tell from the shots that the attackers were right by us.”

As the death toll continued to rise in Klong Sai Pattana, the Thai government continued to expand the palm oil industry, both by seizing land from villagers and by spending billions of Thai baht on cash subsidies for plantation owners. In 2014, not long after the coup, Colonel Sombat Prasarnkasem of the Surat Thani Provincial Internal Security Operations Command stormed into Klong Sai Pattana with 50 soldiers carrying assault rifles. Without a search warrant, the military officers began interrogating members of SPFT. The officers forced Prateeb Rakmangthong, Klong Sai Pattana’s leader, to the ground with an M-16 pressed against him and his hands tied behind his back, then demanded that he and the other farmers of Klong Sai Pattana vacate. When describing the incident later, Prateeb would say that he felt like a prisoner of war. He admits that he was afraid, but he knew that if the farmers left Klong Sai Pattana, they would have little hope of returning, so they had no choice but to ignore the order.

From an airplane, Surat Thani province resembles a patchwork quilt of spiky palm fronds and spindly, silver-trunked rubber trees stretching to the horizon in orderly rectangular plots. In July, at the height of Thailand’s rainy season, I climb into a pickup truck with Sutharee Wannasiri, a human rights activist and translator, to visit the members of Klong Sai Pattana. Jugkarawoot Thuwaratkeeri, an SPFT member, cranks the ignition and we set off down the dirt road that marks the boundary between Surat Thani and Krabi province. On either side of the divide are rows upon rows of evenly spaced oil palm trees planted by Jiew Kang Jue Pattana.

At one point, the car stops and Jugkarawoot points to a stretch of sun-dappled road. It was here that, on November 19, 2012, villagers from Klong Sai Pattana found the bodies of two women from the community, Pranee Boonrat, 50, and Montha Chukaew, 54, ringed with assault rifle shells. Our vehicle slows down as we approach a raised bamboo hut that stands watch over the entrance to Klong Sai Pattana. Everyone who enters the community must pass one of these four guard stations, and no one is allowed in or out after 6 p.m. After a motion from our driver, the watchman on duty swings the wooden gate open. As we exit the truck, a pack of skinny, stray dogs greets us with lolling tongues and wagging tails.

Seated across a table laden with platters of bamboo-smoked sticky rice and fried bananas with a syrupy glaze is Prateeb. Now in his 60s, Klong Sai Pattana’s elected leader has been involved in Thailand’s fight for land justice for decades. According to Protection International, there was once a bounty of 300,000 Thai baht (about $9,500) out for his assassination. “In the past, many land rights groups were not able to hold on to the land in the long run. We want others to see that we are the alternative,” Prateeb says. “The constant threats and intimidation tactics were part of our decision to network. The landless and the poor should have the right to community. We believed that if we are united, we are more powerful when we speak.”

Prateeb and the other leaders of SPFT have met with dozens of journalists, human rights activists, and politicians at this table. There is always food present at these meetings, both as a gesture of hospitality and as a canny PR maneuver: While some Thai politicians who have visited in recent years, including the minister of agriculture, initially balked at eating “peasant” food, the experience of sitting down for a meal together changed the conversation. A crucial legal component of land ownership in Thailand is that the land must be used; a heaping table is proof that the people of Klong Sai Pattana have transformed the soil, once depleted by the oil palm plantation’s heavy use of pesticides, into fertile farmland. Dragon fruits, bananas, durians, lemongrass, cassava, and more vegetables than I can name now grow here. The farmers have also experimented with coffee trees, as well as a variety of mountain rice that does not require paddies. Some of the plants grow in orderly patches, while others crop up seemingly at random.

Virtually everything is edible, as I learn later while walking with one of the community’s sustainable-farming leaders, Nittha Noosoma, a sharp-eyed woman in her 30s with a bob cut and a T-shirt depicting Uncle Sam that reads DOWN WITH AMERICAN IMPERIALISM. At one point, Nittha hands me a fistful of cashew leaves, explaining that SPFT’s core belief in food sovereignty means that everyone has the right to food that is safe; it’s okay to snack directly from the ground because the community strictly prohibits the use of pesticides or herbicides in any of the residential areas. The leaves have a bitter, astringent quality that lingers on the palate.

A key component of SPFT’s sustainability efforts is upholding a high degree of biodiversity. In order to join SPFT, prospective members must commit to growing at least 10 kinds of crops. After witnessing how large corporations like Monsanto have wrought havoc with Southeast Asian agricultural systems through the use of patented terminator seeds, SPFT steers clear of GMOs altogether, fearful of losing control over another aspect of their livelihood to agribusiness. “If you rely on GMO seeds, then you must always go back to the corporation for more,” Nittha tells me. As a safeguard, SPFT has been building a seed bank. “When we visit grassroots movements in other regions, we ask for their local seeds and distribute them to our members. The five communities within SPFT also exchange seeds.”

As we walk, Nittha points out pigs, ducks, cows, chickens, and the former irrigation ditches left by Jiew Kang Jue Pattana where the farmers now raise tilapia and catfish. All of these resources are communal — the valuable herd of cattle is the closest thing the farmers have to a collective savings account. In order to raise money for larger expenses, including legal fees and organizing costs for SPFT, members also sell a small number of cash products, including canned fermented bamboo shoots and flash-fried banana chips.

Over the past several years, the farmers have invested in another commercial resource: They have started growing oil palm trees of their own, pooling the harvest of four communities and selling it through a cooperative. Since their oil palms are still dwarfed by their towering counterparts across the dirt road, the cooperative collects a relatively modest haul. Nevertheless, they have high hopes of creating a more equitable model for the industry, one in which they are owners rather than employees. “In our system, all of the profit goes back to community members. What we plan to do next is to provide a welfare system. We hope to be able to provide travel expenses for members to go to the hospital and for family to visit them,” Thonglue Yothapakdi, who runs the cooperative, tells me. More solemnly, he adds, “We want to be able to provide burial expenses.”

Near Klong Sai Pattana’s central meeting hall is the memorial for the dead, a concrete obelisk topped with a steel coil and three stars — red, green, and yellow. “The red star is for the blood of the fallen workers, the green for the land, the yellow for virtue,” Surapol explains. “The coiled spring is symbolic of a social evolution theory based on Marxism. Each rotation of the coil builds on top of the previous ones; it doesn’t come back to the same origin.” At 7 a.m., members of the community gather around the statue, as they do every morning, to pay their respects and dance. Slowly they begin to clap, before breaking into song in one unified voice. They sing workers’ songs of solidarity, of overcoming, all while swinging arthritic knees and joints. The scene resembles an aerobics class crossed with a Pentacostal revival service. “This statue reminds us that the people who have fallen are still protecting land for those who are living,” Surapol says. “Even if their physical bodies are gone, the spirit of their sacrifice continues. Even though they are dead, they continue to inspire the ideology of the next generation.”

When I meet Surapol for the last time early on our final morning in Klong Sai Pattana, the sky is pale, the air thick with the promise of rain. He places a moka pot on a propane canister, and we both wait for the smell of coffee. “In the past, there were other farmers and community leaders who were murdered because of the work that they do,” Surapol says, his voice flat and hard. “There was often no systematic documentation and records of what happened to them, but they are a part of our history and a part of how our society has evolved.”

Surapol has spent years trying to track down the families or the stories of some of the victims, often without success. For the most part, the government has done little to acknowledge that atrocities such as the Red Drum Murders ever occurred. Surapol remembers a time when he fell into despair, when he was ready to abandon the idea that anything could ever change. Then, in 2004, a trip to Brazil to visit the leaders of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers’ Movement, changed his mind. He left with a deep conviction about the importance of creating pragmatic solutions and records so that the names of the dead would never again be erased. “What is most impressive about the MST movement is that they had transformed these abstract theories into practice,” Surapol says. So he set about learning the tactics of nonviolent resistance — how to choose your words when speaking out against authority, how to form alliances with other advocacy groups, how to stand united when your adversaries come for you.

The result of all those years of study is an effective organizational network that has survived in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds through a campaign of global outreach. SPFT has made sure that, this time, it will be harder to forget the names of those they have lost. Despite the efforts of the Thai government to shut it down, a photo exhibition titled For Those Who Died Trying, by photographer Luke Duggleby, features the portraits of Chai Boonthonglek and Klong Sai Pattana’s other murdered land rights defenders and has traveled to the UN headquarters in Geneva as well as all around Thailand. Noting that revolution and systemic change in Thailand, from the 1970s to the pro-democracy protests of today, has almost always begun with the country’s youth, Surapol takes heart in the fact that thousands of students have shown their solidarity at peaceful protests. “You know, in Christianity, they believe that after you die, you live happily in a fertile garden,” Surapol says. “We believe that you can have that in this life if you join the struggle for land. You don’t have to wait until after death.”

SPFT’s struggle is far from over, but a turning point may be within reach. On March 19, 2021, after eight years of awaiting a verdict, the Thai Administrative Court sided with the farmers of Santi Pattana and ordered the Department of Land to remove United Palm Oil Industry Public from the land it unlawfully occupied. While this does not guarantee the long-term security of the community, it gives them the right to remain for now and ensures that both the people of Santi Pattana and SPFT’s other communities will have a stronger standing in future court cases. After 13 long years, the dream that drew so many people to this land no longer feels impossible.

Usa Suwannaphat did not attend the morning exercises on the last day of my stay, so after the crowd dispersed, we returned to her house later in the morning to pay her a final visit. Although she tries to go every morning, sometimes her diabetes and blood pressure get the better of her. When she awoke, she felt dizzy and decided to stay home, sitting on her porch beside several dozen papaya seedlings she had just finished planting. “If I can plant at least five trees today, I will be satisfied. I want to be able to grow something every day,” she says.

Usa’s knotted fingers clutched the only photograph of her late husband that she owns. It’s a blown-up ID portrait set on a backdrop of hard cerulean in a chipped gold-painted frame. The face inside is solemn, the features too low resolution to betray any hint of personality. But Usa remembers Chai’s happiness when he tended to their rows of jackfruit trees, lemongrass, and bird’s eye chiles. “Chai loved this place,” she says. “He planned that we would grow old here, peacefully and quietly, just me and him in this small house.”

Usa says that after Chai’s death, her daughter and the other members of Klong Sai Pattana were what kept her going. Maintaining the garden by herself becomes more of a challenge with each passing year, but she could not imagine going anywhere else. “For us elderly people in Klong Sai Pattana, sometimes it’s hard to keep fighting. Our knees don’t always cooperate,” Usa says with a smile. “I am not strong enough to do all of the work that Loong Chai used to do. I’m getting old. I am tired, but I am not going to give up.”

This story was funded in part by a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from the Pulitzer Center.

Diana Hubbell is a food and culture journalist. Previously based in Bangkok, she has spent more than a decade reporting on Thailand.
Aaron Joel Santos is a photographer based in Bangkok.
Translations by Sutharee Wannasiri
Fact checked by Tal Milovina
Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein