Shayla Blatchford and I became friends because of a enormous bag of chips. They were originally leftover from a wedding, and by the time I was gifted the trash bag full of corn chips, I was the third person to have them. These chips were especially delicious. Perfectly salted, divinely crisped. They also seemed to possess magical qualities: they never got stale. But there was a lot of them. So I posted the bag online. Anybody want some chips?
Turns out this was one of Shayla’s love languages, a siren call to her heart. Shayla adores chips. Eventually she took the bag of chips to another party, and the magical chips continued on their mystical journey. In the years that followed, Shayla and I have become great friends. Magic chips indeed.
But she isn’t just a chip lover. Shayla is a brilliant artist and activist. Through her Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, she works to inform us about the devastation that uranium mining has caused in the Southwest, and the ways it continues to wreak havoc. She was recently named a Creative Capital awardee, and has a new exhibition Church Rock Spill of 1979 opening August 1 at Center Santa Fe from 5-7pm. She will give an artist talk and counter-mapping workshop on August 14th from 5-8pm.
You can read our Q&A below.
First off, when and how did your love of chips begin?
I think I’ve always loved corn chips. I’m of Diné heritage so sometimes I joke that my love of corn is in my blood. But also growing up in Southern California and having access to free baskets of corn chips at all my Mexican food dining experiences really spoiled me. When I moved to New Mexico and had to start paying for chips and salsa, I started to form more of an opinion because I had to justify the cost. I became a chip connoisseur. It was during the pandemic that I really sharpened my preferences about what a corn chip should and could be. I had so much time on my hands so I started making fun of influencers and doing chip and dip reviews. Talking about criteria such as how many full chips are in the bag, is the seasoning consistent from bag to bag, what is the crunch and texture, is it stale, or chewy and overcooked, or is it mysteriously right in the middle. I would eat copious amounts of Red Hot Blues and then from there I needed to tone it down a bit on the seasonings. It’s easy to over do it. It becomes more work having to deal with the powdered dusty seasoned fingers. After a serious injury a few years ago, I started to think more consciously about eating healing foods so I started going for chips with simpler ingredients, like just plain blue corn, no salt. Fast forward to today. My go to bag now is probably Have’a Chips. Eating those takes me back to high school when I’d ride in my friend’s powdered baby blue 1966 VW Squareback to go surfing. On the way, we would pick up a bag of Have’a Chips in Laguna Beach where they were made. They used to have more seasoning than they do now. And I can’t find them as easily in stores as I used to.
You grew up in Southern California and spent your teen years surfing. What are some of your other favorite food memories from that time?
During the day, I’d take a break from surfing and get the surfer special at El Burrito Junior, a little spot right near the ocean in Seal Beach. This was two bean and cheese burritos, with a side of chips and an horchata. You’d go to this little window to order in your bathing suit, sandy feet, soaking wet.
After my day of surfing, I’d go to L.A. to see some bands play at a warehouse. One of my favorite things to eat were mulitas. They would be like my nightcap. A mulita is two corn tortillas with asadero cheese in the middle, and my meat of choice, especially from Taco Zone taco truck in Echo Park, was the suadero. It was my favorite. Or I would get an asada burrito, or veggie quesadillas. The salsas were dank. It was all ladies in the kitchen. My other favorite mulitas were the one’s my friend Manny made. He would just set up a grill on the side walk, and I was his biggest promoter. I have a scar on my right wrist cause I accidentally touched the grill one night.
You are often on the road for your work. How do you pack your cooler? What essentials do you bring?
I have some food allergies and sensitivities so I try to keep it to single food ingredients. Lots of fruit and veggies. Usually I’ll bring a giant mason jar smoothie. I make those with a handful of spinach, a cup of blueberries, a banana, a little bit of fresh turmeric and ginger roots, a tablespoon of cashew butter, some almond milk or yogurt, and a teaspoon or spirulina. That really keeps me going. I’ve always got a Lara Bar on me somewhere. I hate to advertise a brand but Snow Peak makes a coozie that has changed my life. It keeps my bubbly waters fizzy and cold for hours while driving around in the heat of the desert. Even when my AC stops working.
How did your parents influence your approach to food?
My mom could cook three things. Top Ramen in this creamy way that I loved. The fluffiest scramble eggs, and the most perfectly crisped bacon. Besides that my mom’s pallet was really bland. She would always salt things before even trying them and she couldn’t handle any spice, not even onions. My dad on the other hand was the youngest of five, and he learned how to cook pretty early on. So when I was about 5 years old he started teaching me. I always helped cook dinner each night, even if it was just watching. When my dad was too tired to cook, he would take me along for the drive to go in search of whatever he was craving. He’d travel distances for a good steak sandwich. I still love a good sandwich.
You don’t eat sugar or grains. How do you find recipes for things like your famous cookies?
If I haven’t cooked something in a while, I like to reference the “correct” way to do things. I will follow a recipe step by step, and then I like to make my adjustments from there the second time around. But I use the most common way of making a dish as a reference point first. When I search for things on the Internet, I usually type in “paleo” and that get’s me pretty close in regards to ingredients I can use. For instance, I recently saw a recipe for a popular Turmeric Lemon cookie with powdered sugar, but since I have to avoid processed sugars, I put the recipe title in a search with the word “paleo” to get other peoples’ modifications. Then I searched sugar free to find substitutions like using coconut sugar and arrow root. It turned the cookies a little beige, but they still tasted good. And its a fun way to nerd out and eat something a little healthier.
I love talking about food with other people. So if someone says they like to cook steak, for instance, I’ll ask, How do you like to cook your steak? What’s your technique? I recently got into baking. I used to be afraid of it—its so intimidating with so many measurements and steps that could easily go wrong—but I feel like I’m so hyper-aware of my potential to screw things up that I am overly cautious when I’m following recipes. This has become an advantage, and I usually nail it. Which has given me a confidence boost, and now I look forward to looking up new baking recipes. Things like chicken pot pie with a gluten free crust. Molasses cookies with almond flour. Sweet potato coffee crumb cake.
What were you like as a kid when it came to food?
Feral. Since I was an only child I was always out climbing trees and hanging out with my cat Bear Bear. My favorite activity was to make a cup of Top Ramen noodles in the reheatable styrofoam cup and climb up the tree in my front yard with my soup and my cat and watch the neighborhood from above. I still adore soup. That’s a whole interview on it’s own.
When I was 5 or 6, one morning my step-grandfather accused me of playing with my food because I was buttering my waffles very methodically, pulling butter out of the nooks and crevices. I didn’t want one bite that was more buttery than the others. I was performing quality control and wanted consistent butter to waffle ratios.
My parents would serve me dinner in a circular Tupperware container that was divided into thirds, and I remember there would often be steak in one and mashed potatoes in the other, and then some scary looking lima beans that I did not like. It got me into the habit of having my food divided and not touching. When we would go out to eat, I usually ordered pancakes, but if they also gave me, say, scrambled eggs on the side or some sausage, and either of those was touching the pancake syrup, I wouldn’t eat it, and would scoop them off onto my mom’s plate. There’s just something about sweets touching meats that I still can’t really handle.
I learned to cook as a kid. My parents got me a mixer and a non-stick cook pan. The first thing I remember cooking was my mother’s fluffy scrambled eggs. One morning in the third grade, I was on the way to school to pick up a friend. Her mother was still asleep and hadn’t cooked her breakfast. I was like I can do that, so I lit up the stove, got a little pan ready, and cooked up the eggs. Then her mom woke up and was so pissed, but I made us some great scrambled eggs.
What do you eat when you want to feel the most creative?
When I’m about to sit down and work on the Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, I’ll usually have a smoothie or often just a banana and cashew butter. But if I have time, and I really want to ground into the day, I’ll make a perfect matcha latte at my house or if I don’t want caffeine, I’ll do a hojicha.
If I want to just be in my house, my space, and feel inspired, and let some sort of intuitive creative process come to me, I’ll make my own breakfast tacos and tortillas which is really satisfying because I'm in charge of making the perfect corn tortilla. No soggy bits here. It’s still a learning process but I enjoy doing it better and learning new things each time I make another batch of tortillas. I want to try boiling the tomatillos and using that water for the tortillas. It’s supposed to make them more spongey.
Have you had any particularly pivotal food moments?
OK, so I’d say one of the most pivotal and memorable food experience I’ve had was when I was maybe 23, and I was visiting some friends in Berkeley and staying at their anarchist co-op Cloyne Court Casino and Hotel. We had gone out on quite a psychedelic adventure for the majority of that evening and when we got back, I was the only one who was hungry. So I asked if I could ravage the kitchen and kind of just make myself comfortable, because once I saw the like 4 to 6 industrial size stoves, I got pretty inspired, and knowing that there was two walk-in refrigerators full of local produce, and these other giant refrigerators with just all the cheeses and everything you could ever imagine. And there was like a floor to ceiling spice rack. So the fact that I had everything at my fingertips, I was like a little Ratatouille in the kitchen, and I decided to make everyone breakfast sandwiches. It started with heating up some oil and seasonings, like paprika and rosemary, and this was in prep for a seasoned and toasted sourdough bread crunch exterior. Following that was some fluffy scrambled eggs, then sautéed onions, mushrooms, spinach in butter. Everything was just in butter. Sautéed a beef steak tomato. Because, again, this wasn’t your average produce. It was hyper-local, hippie-grown, Berkeley produce. I put some mayonnaise and mustard on the bread, too. Once it was all done, I stacked everything gently in between these two toasted breads. It’s all about the ratio, so the finishing touch was cutting the sandwich on the diagonal and being able to see that beautiful cross-section of balanced ingredients. I think that’s when I knew I loved to cook.
How do you feel about eating alone?
I was intimidated by it for a while. But when I was working downtown on the Plaza for about seven years, I started going to the Shed on my lunch breaks and sometimes after work to meet friends. But like with most things, I got tired of waiting on people so I started going by myself, and I would sit at the bar. It also helped that there was always a friend working there as a bartender. Someone to talk to and ease the awkwardness of sitting alone and choosing not to scroll through my phone or reading a book or making small talk with the curious tourists next to me. Another thing the pandemic revealed for me was how important comfort food was, and the Shed stayed open during a lot of that time period. It was a really nice consistency and comfort for me to be able to go there. Now going to eat alone at the bar at the Shed is a routine part of my life. I go about once a week and embarrassingly sometimes up to three times. But to be fair, usually that third time is when someone else suggests it or someone is visiting from out of town and they need to go there. In those cases, I usually sort of awkwardly slink in because I’m embarrassed. But truly the red chile there has healing powers, so it’s worth it.
What do you think we need more of in our food future?
There was only one time so far in my life that I had a vegetable garden. I had a house that had space at the time and a job that gave me some sort of routine so it made it really easy to make sure that the plants were getting watered at the right time, and I was able to check on everything. I really wanna get back to having a garden, not just because we are seeing the prices of groceries going up and the instability of everything, but it feels like an easy and accessible entry point for us to have some independence from capitalist structures. Growing our own food is one of the smartest things for us to know how to do right now. And it really is so simple. It doesn’t take much time and the food really does taste better, and once you’re growing it, you’re also more inspired to cook with it and share it with others. So it brings more people into your world. It feels like a really healthy thing that’s worth all the time and work, not just in regards to nourishment of like nutrients in your body, but the overall human experience. Being able to grow your own food is empowering and inspires us to find other ways to break free from destructive systems that attempt to have power over us. One of the most satisfying things that I planted in the garden was corn. Watching it grow to be strong, growing vertically, and practicing the whole traditional process with how you dig and plant the seeds with intention. It just was a whole new experience for me. Seeing all the hairs coming out of the little husks and then finally seeing the kernels grow and the different colors and just wanting to like eat the corn raw off of it, just cause you’re so happy and proud. It was really, really beautiful, and it was right outside my kitchen window so every morning when I washed the dishes, I’d stare out into the garden. Every day I would see the tips of all the three little heads of each stalk, like children, and watch them grow a little bit every day until they were taking center stage. It was really sweet, and I ended up making some elotes, which is also another one of my favorite corn based dishes.
Find more of Shayla and her Anti-Uranium Mapping Project on her Instagram or website. You can also support her project by donating here.
Who should I interview next? Send me an email at ginarae@substack.com
Lots of love,
Gina Rae
Thanks for reading Feed Me Figs!
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