Nourishing Resistance Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid

193 Pages·2023·17.794 MB·English

by  edited by Wren Awry

Praise for Nourishing Resistance
“This collection of essays offers invaluable frameworks and
inspirational models on how to get food out of capitalist markets
and into the hands and stomachs of all. They fiercely demonstrate
how the harvesting, growing, preparing, cooking, sharing, and
eating of food has shaped and reshaped our cultures, created the
social conditions for conviviality, and helped to break the seclusion
and alienation that racist, capitalist patriarchies organize. A must-
read for all who dream of keeping practices of commoning alive.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Re-enchanting the World:
Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
“A thoughtfully assembled, refreshingly global
collection of radical voices who urge us to reimagine
the meaning of the phrase ‘food is political.’”
—Mayukh Sen, author of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant
Women Who Revolutionized Food in America
“Prepare to be nourished by this book. In these essays, contributors
share personal and collective stories of grassroots food activism
from around the world. From community kitchens to queer
potlucks to critical analyses of public space, diet culture, and
property—you’ll witness how they reimagine food beyond
the food-enterprise status quo. Each essay is intimate. As the
authors revisit what community, sovereignty, radical, and other
concepts mean, they address concepts that are often taken for
granted in food-related activism and scholarship. While lifting
up the significance of food in social movements, they make
fresh connections between movements whose stories are often
told separately. There are no prescriptive ‘solutions’ here, thank
goodness. This collection is a reminder that kitchen-sink food
activism is taking place everywhere and is happening now. By
sharing their stories, the authors invite us to reconsider our
commitments, our assumptions, and what we think is possible.”
—Naya Jones, assistant professor, University of California Santa Cruz
“This beautiful and thought-provoking collection of essays brings
together reflections on the role of food in Indigenous land defense,
immigrant ritual, international social centers, queer belonging,
and so much more. I finished the book reinvigorated to bring
radical attention to the ways in which our meals truly make our
movements. Nourishing Resistance reminds us that any project
toward liberation has a common root: the need for nourishment.”
—Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme
“This book is delicious in all seven colors of the rainbow, as we say
in South Africa about a balanced meal that is diversely nutritious.
It is the queer potluck club where new friends bring casseroles of
dangerously loving inscriptions of a future that is free and freeing.
It is a buffet of radical imaginations of past, present, and future
cooperatives fighting for new arrangements of society that facilitate
self-determination, intersectional justice, and equity. This meditation
and manifesto on food brings into focus how food—its presence,
its cultures, its systems, and its work—is vital to any liberatory or
emancipatory agenda. Food is not only essential for cultivating
multigenerational connection and community outside of the nuclear
family structure, as one writer notes, but also for prying apart all sorts
of binaries to release new possibilities and futures. When you are
done, lick your fingers. They will taste like canned beans left along
migrant trails in Arizona, homemade sourdough that stood up against
coal giants, and the stew that was a tool to foster closer bonds in the
migrant residents of Constitución. There will be nothing to waste.”
—Kneo Mokgopa, writer and artist
“Reading Nourishing Resistance fills me with a feeling of
possibility and a renewed appreciation for the transformative
power that exists in the simple act of sharing food with those
around you. This collection of essays shifts the paradigm away
from the binary of frontlines work and support work and toward
a view of movement building that sees everyone’s contributions
as absolutely essential to the health and viability of the whole
movement—from scrubbing dishes to creating a blockade,
from jail support to boiling rice. To me, there’s nothing more
empowering than seeing tangible examples of people using their
gifts to cook up unique and life-giving contributions to the social
movements around them, and this collection is full of those.”
—Ciro Carrillo, Mutual Aid on Lockdown podcast
“Like a song that makes you feel like you can take on the world, this
collection of interviews, poetry, essays, and story is a chorus of
activists, academics, artists, farmers, writers, sex workers, teachers,
and other disruptors, whose writings teach, inspire, and challenge in
offering new visions for what can be when we act on aspirations for a
world in which every person’s right to food, love, and dignity are taken
for granted. The many notes include historical and contemporary
pieces on topics that range from radical farming and food sovereignty,
the solemnity and pleasure of eating and feeding, fat activism
and emerging unapologetically from the margins, immigration
and the politics of care, capitalism, and revolution to celebrating
queer joy. Each voice puts a finger on the deep personal and shared
relationships we have with food and shows how those can be put in
service of creating collective commitments that better sustain our
hearts, minds, and hands in connection with the land that gives us life.”
—Dr. Jennifer Brady, registered dietitian and director of the
School of Nutrition and Dietetics at Acadia University in Mtaban/
Wolfville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia, Turtle Island/Canada
“The collection of rich stories, analytic accounts, and thought-
provoking interviews in this book is a wonderful read for anyone
curious about or working toward liberatory food cultures today. These
activist-writers take us through inspiring and intriguing examples of
food as mutual aid, food in practices of decolonization, and food as
deeply embedded with rebellion. A beautiful and provocative set of
pieces that whet the appetite for cooking up revolution and care.”
—Michelle Glowa, assistant professor in the Anthropology and Social
Change Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies
“Nourishing Resistance transports us from the coalfields of West
Virginia to farmer protests in India and far beyond, reminding
us of the global role of food and collectivism in the fight against
oppression and injustice. A truly humanizing and nourishing
anthology that reminds us of the inherent politics and power of food.”
—Debbie Weingarten, journalist
Nourishing Resistance
Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid
Edited by Wren Awry
Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid
© Wren Awry
This edition © PM Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without
permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–992–5 (paperback)
ISBN: 978–1–62963–996–3 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943234
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
Contents
Foreword ix
Cindy Barukh Milstein
IntroductIon 1
Wren Awry
On Feeding Others as an Act of Resistance 4
an interview with Cheshire Li
Cooking Revolutions in the Popular Pot 14
Virginia Tognola
The Contentious Biryani: Rice, Nation, and Dissent 22
Paridhi Gupta
La Morada: When a Restaurant Is a Sanctuary 29
Alyshia Gálvez
The Way It Could Be: Toward Food Sovereignty and against
State Dependence 36
Luz Cruz
The Anishinabeg’s Call to Protect the Moose 42
Laurence Desmarais
On Farming as a Practice of Abundance and Liberation 49
an interview with mayam
“Remaking the Commons”: A History of Eating in Public 56
Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma
From “Building the Bases for a Different Life: An Interview with
Hong Kong Anarchists Black Window” 66
Lausan Collective and Black Window
The Wine Bottle’s Intrinsic Blight 80
Lisa Strid
Plastic 86
Katie Tastrom
On Fat Activism and the Power of Being an Outsider 90
an interview with Virgie Tovar
Everywhere That Feeling Lived: Making a Queer Food Podcast 99
Nico Wisler
Queer Potlucks Offer Food for Capitalist Critique and
Collective Action 102
Lindsey Danis
The Hearth of Revolution 107
Shayontoni Rhea Ghosh
Rehearsing for Rebellion: On “Bella Ciao” and Italy’s Radical
Rice Weeders 112
Alessandra Bergamin
On the Food of the West Virginia Mine Wars 120
an interview with Mike Costello
Notes on Utopian Failure in the Commune Kitchens 131
Madeline Lane-McKinley
Abundance and Other Lessons on the Lower East Side 138
Wren Awry
Uthando Luvunwa Apha: A Postcapitalist Love Story 148
te’sheron courtney
Are You a Kindergarden Abolitionist? A List of What’s Possible
in the Next Economy 157
sumi dutta
Seeds Planted by Nana Tota 161
Nelda Ruiz
Acknowledgments 164
About the Authors 165
Foreword
Foreword
Cindy Barukh Milstein
It might seem paradoxical for someone who can’t cook to write a fore-
word for a collection of pieces—a hearty stew, as it were—about food.
I used to dread, for instance, as I suspect my housemates did too,
when it was my turn to make dinner for an anarchist collective of some
twenty people. I’m also that person at potlucks who brings an uninspired
store-bought item, sneaking it onto the table out of embarrassment when
no one’s looking, rather than a home-baked delight like a yummy vegan
casserole with ingredients from one’s own garden or a scrumptious seven-
layer cake decorated with foraged edible flowers. And even when Wren,
during the chilly days of the pandemic, warmly snail-mailed me their
“foolproof” recipe for antifascist eggplant parm, handwritten on a note-
card, the result of my kitchen labors was a gloppy, unappetizing mess.
Yet as I read through the stories in Nourishing Resistance, I realized
that food, as rebelliously understood in this anthology, has little to do
with whether one has culinary skills or not.
It’s enough, say, to immerse one’s hands in soapy water and be that
person, aka me, who gladly does the dishes or leaps into setup and cleanup
for big communal gatherings. It’s enough to scavenge for salvaged food-
stuffs as part of a mutual aid project, or ladle out entrées at an outdoor
Food Against Fascism share or pipeline encampment lunch, or leave
jugs of water and cans of beans in the desert borderlands as gestures of
hospitality as well as solidarity for undocumented travelers, or concoct
the prefigurative spaces of collective care, autonomous community, and
intimate connections that happen when we include the simple act of
“breaking bread” together. It’s enough to recognize that food is not only
life; it is one of the key ingredients in us cooking up lives worth living.
As my own lack of cooking skills attests to, though, having various
ingredients on hand doesn’t necessarily add up to a nourishing repast.
ix