“When I got big enough, it was my responsibility to break the soil, to remove the sods, to expand the garden, prune the plants, harvest them, cultivate them,” he tells Post Magazine.

Bernardo is still gardening but now does more with the earth’s bounty. For years, he has, as part of a variety of grass-roots move­ments, used food as a medium through which to mitigate climate break­down and affect social justice in the city of his birth.

“My parents moved [from the Philippines to the United States] in the late 1960s, after the National Immigration Act of 1965.” Bernardo’s mother had graduated with a degree in nursing and his father followed soon after, with a degree in engineering. Later, the family ran a small grocery store on the west side of Detroit in which Shane and his three siblings worked.

“I found out through working there that the staples we sold, like coconuts, bananas, plantains, yams, pineapple, taro and tropi­cal fruits, we shared with other commu­ni­ties and cultures. I started to see not just a connection through our culinary tradi­tions,” he says, of the family’s Southeast Asian, West African and African Caribbean customers, “but also the part that coloni­sation has played throughout the centuries, which has connected all of our stories and struggles.

“Food has become a way in which we preserve our culture and preserve our histories around surviving displacement both physical and cultural; as a way of preserving the wholeness in the diaspora.”

In 2010, Bernardo lost his father, a tragedy that fired his sense of justice. “He had diabetes and heart disease. He was still fairly young when he passed away. It wasn’t just his behaviour [that made him sick] but what kind of food was readily available to him and our family, which was what some folks might call the Western diet.

“A lot of these commodities come from an industrial food system that requires a lot of external inputs, and monocultures and plantation-type growing that’s destruc­tive to the planet and also destructive to our social fabric as it relates to farmworker rights and some of the harmful conditions they have to work in. The health of my father is connected to the health of the planet and the health of those of us who are cultivating, preparing and serving food.”

Living close to the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit with Windsor, in Canada, and is the busiest border crossing in North America, offered further insight into how food production affects the less privileged.

“I saw first hand how the North American Free Trade Agreement affected the liveli­hoods of people on both sides of the border and the way the industrial food system and our national economy is tied to producing a surplus of goods, and to cheap labour and extractive practices that lead to increased pollution [from trucks crossing the bridge, for example] in communities of colour, with Detroit being 85 per cent black.”

Bernardo co-founded the non-profit Food as Healing – he leads panels and workshops for community activists, interacts with urban farm volunteers and works with researchers and food system leaders – and Uprooting Racism Planting Justice, which addresses the fact that white growers in Detroit are given preferential treatment by the authorities.

He also co-founded the Detroit Filipino Supper Club, a meeting of people from the diaspora who wish to share stories related to their culture and traditions, as well as food from their homeland.

Asked to name a favourite of his own, Bernardo identifies lugaw, “a dish that connects me to my people’s traditions. Mostly because that’s the dish I more readily connect with my grandmother,” who was from the Philippine province of La Union.

“When I was young and I stayed home from school because I was sick, my grand­mother would take day-old rice, put it in the pot, make chicken stock and throw in garlic and some ginger, and that was a meal. I would consider it peasant food, but it spoke to being connected to a place, where we were connected to the land [...] and the other people we inhabited it with,” he says, explaining that rice had been introduced to the Philippines by traders from the East Asian mainland.

The Supper Club has been unable to meet since the state of Michigan ordered its citizens to “shelter in place” on March 24 and the restrictions are proving problematic for Bernardo, not least because he is unable see one of his brothers, who has cancer and for whom he was a carer.

As for gardening supplies, “There has been an uptick in people now interested in growing their own food because of the uncertainty this global pandemic has produced, which has diminished some of things I depend on to grow food, including seeds, soil and that sort of thing.”

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Nevertheless, he’s been busy, preparing as best he can for Michigan’s short growing season and banding together with friends and others in the food scene to give a helping hand to those on the medical front line.

“We’ve been working with hospitals and ER rooms and departments in the metro Detroit area to provide meals that are sourced from local restaurants and chefs who have been particularly hurt by the shelter-at-home policy.” The operation is coordinated under the hashtag #feedthefrontlinedetroit.

Bernardo and his group are helping restaurants to stay productive and under-pressure medical staff to eat nutritious meals; food activism at its spontaneous best.

Lilian Liu, sustainability strategist, Futerra

“If we are not delivering change, we are not doing our jobs,” Lilian Liu’s new boss told her when she joined Futerra “I remind myself of that constantly in this job.”

That job sees the New York-based sustainability strategist helping some of the world’s largest and most powerful companies improve their operations (Futerra’s motto: “We join the magic of creative and the logic of strategy to make sustainability happen”). One assumes her father, who grew up in a “simple family” in Shanghai, must be proud of how far his daughter has come.

“Back in the 70s, my dad got the highest score on the university exam [gaokao] in Yangpu district, when he was 17. This meant he was one of the select few that could go to university. He had happened to score really high in English, and so the government basically told him that he was going abroad, to a country called Sweden.

“Nobody had money back then. We lived in one of those longtang alley areas and from my childhood spending summers there I recall we had asphalt floors indoors and no water toilets.

“My mom and dad met in Shanghai a few years after he had moved to Sweden – it was too lonely for him over there, being one of a handful Chinese students in the country – and she joined him in Sweden, where I was born and raised.

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“Sweden is a society that is very progres­sive and egalitarian in some areas – such as gender equality and providing free educa­tion for all. Meanwhile, I would witness the growth miracle of China – not always a balanced or fair development. I became inspired to balance these two worlds, which is how I got into sustainability.”

Liu also launched Fauna, a Brazilian eco-friendly fashion e-commerce platform, with a friend from Rio de Janeiro (“We wanted to prove that sustainable fashion does not have to be ‘eco’ and boring and expensive, it can be fun and gorgeous and affordable”). And beyond apparel, she helped companies with their sustainability planning while working with the United Nations Global Compact, which she left last year.

“The UN Global Compact is the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative,” says Liu, who is fluent in Mandarin, English, French and Swedish. “We helped companies take action on the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I worked with a number of industries, ranging from transport to fashion to finance.

“Sixty-nine of the top 100 economic entities are corporations rather than governments, so it’s clear we need business on board to change the world for the better. We need change at scale and we need it fast, so the idea is to work with some of the leading companies in the world to set a new standard for others to follow.”

Much of Liu’s work has been delayed by the Covid-19 restrictions. She cannot give many details regarding ongoing Futerra projects but does say that she and her team are finalising a water-sustain­ability strategy for one of the world’s largest tech companies. “I can’t say which yet but they have nine products with over a billion users.

“We are in a water crisis and are operating beyond our water means. Most fresh water in the world is used for agriculture and industrial purposes, so companies have a big responsibility. For big tech, they are already getting called on things like water use to cool servers, producing micro chips, and so on.”

Having been confined for almost a month, at the time of writing, Liu says, “I am very lucky to have a job I can do remotely – the work I do mostly requires a computer and a bit of brainpower.

“I really miss being able to see my family and friends, though – it’s hard to leave New York if you don’t have a car at this stage. I am dreaming about a weekend out of the city, in nature.”

Anthony Myint, co-founder, Zero Foodprint

“Mission Chinese Food has decided to close temporarily and I’m focused on non-profit outreach,” says Anthony Myint, who, at the time of writing, is “sheltering in place” in San Francisco. Not that the chef was spend­ing much time in his restaurant, the seed of which can be traced back through several establishments to a taco cart he and his wife, writer Karen Leibowitz, operated on the streets of San Francisco. He now has bigger issues to confront.

Before the coronavirus, Myint, the son of ethnic Chinese parents who had fled Myanmar in the late 1960s, spent just two nights a week at Mission Chinese (“We serve weird Chinese food and some of the most popular dishes are Thrice Cooked Bacon and Rice Cakes and Kung Pao Pastrami”), leaving time to pursue climate solutions.

With the Perennial Farming Initiative (PFI), which Myint runs with Leibowitz, he is aiming to create a renewable food system that extends from healthy soil to sustainably run restaurants.

“We always had a charitable agenda and [as restaurateurs] mostly benefited food pantries and hunger-related causes,” says Myint. “Sustainability was kind of a latent interest, but really became a primary focus about eight years ago, when we had a daughter and started to think more about the future and climate change.”

There’s only so much that can be achieved at that end of the food chain, though. “The reality is that restaurant operations are nuanced and while there’s always some room for improvement, the remaining carbon footprint is best addressed by funding carbon farming,” says Myint, by which he means working land that both produces nutritious food and sucks carbon out of the atmosphere.

“We’ve been learning a lot about how food and farming can reverse the climate crisis and lower global temperatures by transforming bad atmospheric carbon into good soil carbon.” The aim of another of PFI’s projects, Restore California, is to transition acres of farmland by, for example, helping fund the purchase of seeds and compost.

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“You can view this in the same way that certain cities and countries are now making renewable energy available to citizens; not by installing a wind turbine or solar panel on the roof, but by letting citizens fund efforts to improve the grid.

“We must view farmland as its own solar grid that we can transition from extractive to renewable practices with a few cents per meal,” says Myint, referring to the fact the ZFP programme encourages restaurants to add a 1 per cent surcharge to diners’ bills. That source of funding may have dried up for the time being, but Myint sees reasons to be positive.

“We hope that a long-term silver lining from the disruption will be a prioritisation of social responsibility and resilience as part of the new business as usual.”

Myint’s gastro-activism won him the 2019 Basque Culinary World Prize for impact beyond the kitchen and his quest for a better world has only just begun. Might Restore California one day spawn Restore (Other Places)?

“Absolutely! Potentially in the coming months, fingers crossed.”

Thanushka Yakupitiyage, US communications director, 350.org

“I feel very privileged in this moment to have a job that was already remote, to have a home, to have a partner,” says Thanushka Yakupitiyage, who is sheltering in place in Brooklyn, New York, a city that has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. “We are fine and trying to do what we can to help by donating to places and supporting our neighbours, especially the elderly.”

Before joining 350.org, in 2017, Yakupitiyage worked for the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC).

“My pivot from on-the-ground immigrant-rights work to global climate work was a hard choice to make, but I felt it was an important thing to do. I don’t think that movement work can exist in silos and I believe we have to show the connections between all movements for social justice because it makes our advocacy and our calls for human rights and dignity stronger.

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“I organised dozens of marches and advocated for immigrant rights to health care, language access, housing and more. As an immigrant myself to the US, I feel really passionate about this work.”

Sri Lankan Yakupitiyage grew up between Colombo and Bangkok, Thailand. “I moved to the US when I was 18 to attend university,” she says. “My mom still lives in Colombo and my dad lives in Bangkok. I have family in both places, including little half-brothers in Thailand.

“The connection between migration and climate change is pretty clear,” says Yakupitiyage. “It is estimated that by 2050, there will be 200 million people displaced by climate change. Communities in the global south in particular, who have had the least impact on the climate crisis or emissions, are faced with devastating impacts.”

With luck, says Yakupitiyage, the world’s youth may yet save the day. “I’ve had the privilege of working with youth in both immigrant rights and the climate movement. And it’s been amazing to watch youth climate activists grow in their power and voice over the last three years. Young people have the boldness to get right to the point about what the problem is and what the solutions are.”

Yakupitiyage also has an artistic side. “I know it must seem insane that I’m involved in so many things but honestly it keeps me feeling active and grounded. Art to me helps to envision the world we want to see. Since so much of my professional work is about fighting injustice, I find my art and DJ practice are ways of bringing celebration and joy into very difficult work.

“I’ve watched how music moves people in ways that no march or rally, no speech can do. I’ve watched people loosen up, get to know those around them, build a community. “When I moved back to New York in 2010, I started in night clubs as an opening DJ. Eventually, I started throwing my own events. I helped run an immigrant and people of colour-centred party called iBomba from 2011 to 2018.”

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Then art took more prominence than the decks. In 2018-19, Yakupitiyage was the artist-in-residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and was given a grant to produce an audiovisual piece for New York art institution The Shed. “I produced a short film called MigrantScape about the lives of four immigrants in New York and El Paso. The film was both a narrative and sound piece,” she says, adding that it will be streaming again soon on The Shed’s website.

“Everything I do is rooted in a sense that we deserve a better world, one rooted in joy, where human rights are respected, and where the most vulnerable in our communities have dignity and opportunity. Particularly now, as we face this global pandemic, we need to be thinking about what kind of world we want to live in. Do we really want things to ‘go back to normal’? Or do we want to evolve into a better world?

“Art and music right now are super crucial for us to be able to imagine the world we want to live in. I’m really moved by places like Milan, which is planning more bike lanes and pedestrian paths as the city recovers, as opposed to going back to the way things were.

“I hope we’re able to think about what justice and dignity looks like for all of us coming out of this.”

Audrey Lee, vice-president, energy services, Sunrun

Sunrun (aim: a planet run by the sun) is a San Francisco-based provider of residential solar electricity. The goal of its vice-presi­dent, energy services is simple. “Basically, I’m working to close down fossil-fuel power plants,” Audrey Lee told the listeners to an Energy Central podcast last year.

Lee’s parents were born in China, her mother in Jiangsu province and father in Hunan, before moving to Taiwan. They wouldn’t meet until they were in Hoboken, New Jersey, though, and Audrey was born in the US. Lee is keen to keep the next generationacquainted with their roots. “My children are in a Chinese immersion public school in San Francisco, where they learn Cantonese. They are also enrolled in a Mandarin after-school programme.”

Having modelled global energy systems at the US Department of Energy and armed with a PhD in electrical engineering, Lee now focuses on creating partnerships with utilities, grid operators and energy markets to enable energy to flow in two directions, including from end users back to the grid.

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“More and more households are choosing to install solar on their roofs and put batteries in their garages,” she tells Post Magazine. “They’re doing it to save money, make their homes more resilient, and to be part of the solution in creating a cleaner, healthier environment.

“Last fall, Pacific Gas & Electric, an electric utility company in California, proactively shut off the electricity grid to reduce the risk of sparking a wildfire. Sunrun customers, equipped with our Brightbox solar battery, kept their lights on while the grid was down for more than 36 hours on average.”

The pandemic is proving to be another period of instability during which Sunrun is providing certainty for its customers, says Lee, who is currently working from home.

The company also assists people for whom solar power may otherwise be an unaffordable luxury. “In 2018, we estab­lished a goal to develop 100 megawatts of solar on low-income, multifamily housing in California over the next decade,” says Lee. “In July 2019, we won a contract to help replace a jet-fuel peaker plant with rooftop solar and batteries on low-income housing in West Oakland and the surrounding area.”

The company’s biggest project involves 5,000 homes. “Last year, Sunrun won a bid by New England’s electricity grid oper­ator to deliver home solar and battery energy to the market starting in 2022. By connecting home solar and battery systems across the region, New England residents will help to keep the lights on for house­holds and com­munities across the region as we shift towards a more people-powered, clean electricity grid.

“At times when electri­city is scarce, like during a polar vortex, heatwave or other extreme weather events, bundled home solar and batteries will [...] send stored power back onto the grid.”

This project “represents the first time that home solar and battery systems have competed head-to-head against more pollu­ting, centralised power plants”, says Lee.

And what of the future? How much of the planet may one day be run by the sun?

“At the Department of Energy, I ran national and global energy models out to 2020, 2030 and 2050. We could not have predicted then the demand and cost declines for rooftop solar and battery storage that we’ve experienced in recent years. It’s been exciting to witness and gives me hope that solar will continue to supply a greater amount of the world’s electricity.”