Interview with Noemi Johansson-Miller

On Preserving Food and a Grandma's Memory

This week I interview my dear friend Noemi Johansson-Miller, Director of Practice Operations at Altais, about the creative activity of food preservation that she learned from her mom. Noemi describes how she has carried this tradition forward after losing her mom to cancer in 2015. She also shares about the importance of preservation more broadly, including keeping her mom’s memory alive for her 19-month-old son even though they will never get to meet. This interview touches on so many insightful and beautiful things, from memories evoked by magnolia trees to the bind we can face when a creative outlet is also a daily necessity—like preparing food—and how that outlet may look different during different seasons of life. 

Q. Tell me about the importance of food preservation in your life.

Well, let’s see, when I was in college or immediately post-college, my mom rediscovered making jam. She always liked making jam and canning tomatoes. She did a lot of that as a young person—a young hippie.

But when I was young, she had a lot of pressures on her, and she stopped for a while. She had a young kid unexpectedly; I was unplanned. Then she went to school and got her master’s in education when I was maybe two, and she started teaching. At that point, cooking became a chore; she didn’t really enjoy it. But as both me and my brother left the house, she found herself with more time, and she started making jam again.

We started making jam together every summer, mostly me and her (although she had a couple of other jamming buddies too). There was a prep day, which sometimes we’d do together and sometimes she’d do by herself. And then we’d spend a full day canning. My mom was very much a rule follower, and the way that I started making jam was based on her approach. Since then, I’ve been horrified to see how some people do it, not following food-preservation protocols. But I have also come to appreciate that there are many different traditions around food preservation, and it can be more flexible than I originally thought.

It started off as an activity to do with my mom that I enjoyed, but it eventually became a ritual that marked the summer. I’d rarely eat the jam myself; mostly, I’d give it away as gifts. It would set me up for the next year.  

Q. How did the days go, “jamming” with your mom?

We would be in her kitchen, which was small but bigger than mine. It was intense in that we would process a lot of fruit, so there was always a fair amount of activity. But it was also cathartic and repetitive, and there was a lot of space to chat and catch up. 

Q. Since losing your mom, how has food preservation continued to be a part of your life?  

For a few years after my mom died and after I met my partner Max, my canning projects mostly happened at his parents’ house. He and his mom would make apple butter in the summers because they had a big apple orchard. I thought their apple butter was way too sweet, so I attempted to change the recipe. I also made jam in my apartment in Berkeley—small batches in my tiny kitchen. For me, that was really important to maintain because it was a way of connecting back with my mom.

The last few years have been interesting because Max and I moved into a house together, and I had new kitchen to reckon with, which was a total disaster at first. I attempted to make jam our first summer in the house, the summer of 2019, and I had a horrible time of it because we had an electric stove and none of my canning equipment was compatible.

The next summer in 2020, I thought I had learned my lesson. I bought a gas crawfish-boil burner that people use to cook huge quantities of food. But that burner was too potent, and half the tomatoes cracked in the canner. That means you have to throw them away because you can’t have glass floating around.

Then in the summer of 2021, I was pregnant, and I had no energy to do anything. Oh, maybe my aunt came out and we did tomatoes. But something about our technique was flawed.

Q. How has having your son changed this creative outlet for you?

Last summer, I was determined to make use of the plums from the tree at our house. I did make a big batch of plum jam, but it was a terrible time. It was the weekend right before my son got really sick with croup and needed steroids. It was not enjoyable at all. I find that for kitchen projects, and especially these long format ones, to be enjoyable, I need to be able to space out and get into the process. That was very hard to do with other people around who were non-participating bystanders. I’d like to try it again this summer, but I’m going to lower my expectations—doing it only if it feels like fun and not like an obligation.

This is sort of indicative of a loss of personal things in my life that I have historically enjoyed doing. Nothing feels carefree anymore. But I don’t feel doomy about that because again, I’m following in my mom’s footsteps. She took 25 years off from these projects and found them again at a time when she was ready to partake.

Q. Something unique about food preservation is that the time needs to be right. That’s true each year, and it sounds like it’s also true for seasons of life. For you and for your mom, the time of life had to be right.   

That’s absolutely right. You can preserve food all year round, but summer is the time when there is most bounty available. And some years it just doesn’t work out. Part of the problem is that there is such a short window; you have to catch fruit at its peak. A big part of canning is to make use of an abundance of fruit when it’s at its ripest.

Q. Would you say that’s a family value you got from your mom, making use of what’s available to you?

My mom came of age at a time when it was part of feminism that you didn’t have to push away these types of activities. You could be a feminist and still enjoy making food for your family. Using what was available to you rather than just putting things on the table. I don’t think she ever grew what she was canning—she got it from farm shares and the farmer’s market—but the concept would have resonated with her. For me maybe more so than for her, I value not wasting food.

Q. Preservation has a deeper meaning for you as well, as you preserve your mom’s role in your life and pass it down. How are you keeping your mom’s memory alive for your son?

My son is still so young (he’s 19 months) that I feel the best way to do it now is to have those core values be there. But I think as he gets older, it will have to be more deliberate.

One thing that comes to mind is that my mom was such a proponent of sitting down together for dinner. That’s something that right now isn’t feasible for us, but I don’t want to wait too long. My childhood best friend Rachael was an only child with a single mom who worked all the time, so she often heated up food and spent dinners alone. She started having dinner at our house multiple times a week. Seeing how much she appreciated being part of that daily ritual made me realize how special it was. It’s something Rachael now prioritizes for her family, and I hope it’s something we can do to honor my mom.

I don’t know how people do this—or maybe I do because I never knew my grandma, my mom’s mom—but how do you teach your kid about someone who isn’t there? I’ve always been emotional about losing my mom, but these last few years becoming a mom myself have brought a lot of things back up. Being a parent brings my emotions right to the surface.  

Q. How did your mom talk about her mom when you were growing up?

Not a lot. She did talk about her food, her cooking. She had a recipe box. Most of those recipes were written by my mom, but they were my grandma’s recipes. That’s how she featured most prominently.

Sitting down to eat together was my grandma’s value too. My grandpa was off earning the bacon, and my grandma was home with kids. She was a really good cook, but she would say (like both me and my mom) that she didn’t particularly enjoy the chore of it. But she did food preservation too. She made plum wine in the closet.

Q. So she passed food preservation on through the generations.

Yes, and probably before that. My grandma lost her mom even younger than I did or my mom did. There’s an eerie tradition in my family of moms dying young.

Q. Where do you feel your mom’s presence most in your life now?

It’s largely a time of year. My mom had a magnolia tree that she planted in the backyard, and for the first couple of years it didn’t bloom. She went out one day and gave it a stern talking to, saying that if it didn’t bloom, she would cut it down. The next year, it had incredibly beautiful flowers. That tree typically blooms in early spring, which is February in the Bay Area. I planted one at my house too. When those flowers are coming out, it always reminds me of her.

With my son, I will get smacked in the face sometimes with the realization that I’m repeating things she would have done. My mom was such a patient, caring mom, more patient and understanding with us kids than with others in her life. That’s something I hope to continue.

Q. Anything we haven’t talked about that you’d like to add?

Just that the process of becoming a mother without a mother has been intense. It ties back to this concept of how to form your own identity as mom when that role model is gone. It’s brought up a different layer of grief having my son, which is in some ways not surprising. The thing that I was most afraid of about having kid was that—what it would be like without my mom.

Going back to your question about how do I keep my mom’s memory alive, I need to find positive things, not things that always make me sad. I won’t always have time to do the things that make me feel most connected, like food preservation, but I can find things to do that include my son.

Also, on cooking, I want cooking to be on my terms. Cooking under duress doesn’t feel particularly creative. There’s this bind that happens when home-related stuff is your hobby. It’s different than something like exercise as a hobby, which is really just 100% for yourself. You don’t need to exercise for someone else, but you do need to put food in front of your kid. That can so easily turn it from a source of joy to a chore. But I can find joy in smaller ways now. For my birthday this year, I had a bunch of people over for brunch and artfully arranged cucumbers and radishes on a platter. I took joy in that.

Dear Reader: You matter! If you’d like to share what you found meaningful or interesting in this interview, please respond in a comment or email me at hello@logansteiner.com. I’ll pass any kind words along to Noemi (and will do the same for any responses to past interviewees).

Also, please reach out by email if you are interested in being interviewed on a decision related to creativity in your life and how you are sorting through it.