Nourishing Resistance - Stories of Food, Protest and Mutual Aid

"From the cooks who have quietly fed rebels and revolutionaries to the collective kitchens set up after hurricanes and floods, food has long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid. Until very recently, food-based work--steadfast and not particularly flashy--slipped under the radar or was centered on celebrity chefs and well-funded nonprofits. Adding to a growing constellation of conversations that push against this narrative, Nourishing Resistance centers the role of everyday people in acts of culinary solidarity. Twenty-three contributors--cooks, farmers, writers, organizers, academics, and dreamers--write on queer potlucks, BIPOC-centered farms and gardens, rebel ancestors, disability justice, indigenous food sovereignty, and the fight against toxic diet culture, among many other topics. They recount bowls of biryani at a Delhi protest, fricasâe de conejo on a Puerto Rican farm, pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively-run Hong Kong restaurant, and lemon cake cooked in a New Jersey disaster relief kitchen. They chronicle the communal kitchens and food distribution programs that emerged in Buenos Aires and New York City in the wake of COVID-19, which caused surging food insecurity worldwide. They look to the past, revealing how "Bella Ciao" was composed by striking women rice workers, and the future, speculating on postcapitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered beside highways."--

List of contents

Foreword—Cindy Milstein
Introduction—Wren Awry
Seeds Planted by Nana Tota—Nelda Ruiz
On Feeding Others as An Act Of Resistance—Cheshire Li
Cooking Revolutions in the Popular Pot—Virginia Tognola
The Contentious Biryani: Rice, Nation, and Dissent—Paridhi Gupta
La Morada: When a Restaurant Is a Sanctuary—Alyshia Gálvez
From “Building the Bases for A Different Life: An Interview With Hong Kong Anarchists Black Window”—Lausan Collective & Black Window
The Anishinabeg’s Call to Protect the Moose—Laurence Desmarais
On Farming as a Practice of Abundance and Liberation—mayam
The Way it Could Be: Towards Food Sovereignty and against State Dependence—Luz Cruz
“Remaking the Commons,” A History of Eating in Public—Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma
The Wine Bottle’s Intrinsic Blight—Lisa Strid
Plastic—Katie Tastrom
On Fat Activism and the Power of Being an Outsider—Virgie Tovar
Everywhere that Feeling Lived: Making a Queer Food Podcast—Nico Wisler
Queer Potlucks Offer Food for Capitalist Critique and Collective Action—Lindsey Danis
The Hearth of Revolution—Shayontoni Rhea Ghosh
Rehearsing for Rebellion: On “Bella Ciao” and Italy’s Radical Rice Weeders—Alessandra Bergamin
On the Food of the West Virginia Mine Wars—Mike Costello
Notes on Utopian Failure in Commune Kitchens—Madeline Lane-McKinley
Abundance and Other Lessons on the Lower East Side—Wren Awry
Uthando Luvunwa Apha: A Post-Capitalist Love Story—te’sheron courtney
Are You a Kindergarden Abolitionist? A List of What’s Possible In the Next Economy—sumi dutta
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements

About the author

Wren Awry is a writer, editor, and archivist whose work ranges from researching and writing about the role of food in labor strikes, mutual aid projects, and revolt to helping with community dinners at their local, collectively run social center. They’ve written about food for publications including the Rumpus, Entropy, and Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry; and have facilitated various culinary writing classes, including garden poetry for first graders and a community workshop on queer food writing. Most recently, they’ve been digging through radical, labor, and zine archives to find materials related to food and cooking, and are learning to build archives on their own and in collaboration with others.Cindy Barukh Milstein, a diasporic queer Jewish anarchist, author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism and Anarchism and Its Aspirations, and editor of anthologies such as Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy, and There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists. Long engaged in anarchistic organizing and social movements, Milstein is passionate about shaping and sharing magical do-it-ourselves spaces with others, such as the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking’s Anarchist Summer School and the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, being a doula for books and mourning, and embodying as much solidarity, collective care, and love as possible.

Summary

From the cooks who have quietly fed rebels and revolutionaries to the collective kitchens set up after hurricanes and floods, food has long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid. Until very recently, food-based work—steadfast and not particularly flashy—slipped under the radar or was centered on celebrity chefs and well-funded nonprofits. Adding to a growing constellation of conversations that push against this narrative, Nourishing Resistance centers the role of everyday people in acts of culinary solidarity.

Twenty-three contributors—cooks, farmers, writers, organizers, academics, and dreamers—write on queer potlucks, BIPOC-centered farms and gardens, rebel ancestors, disability justice, indigenous food sovereignty, and the fight against toxic diet culture, among many other topics. They recount bowls of biryani at a Delhi protest, fricasé de conejo on a Puerto Rican farm, pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively-run Hong Kong restaurant, and lemon cake cooked in a New Jersey disaster relief kitchen. They chronicle the communal kitchens and food distribution programs that emerged in Buenos Aires and New York City in the wake of COVID-19, which caused surging food insecurity worldwide. They look to the past, revealing how “Bella Ciao” was composed by striking women rice workers, and the future, speculating on postcapitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered beside highways.
Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central, intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.

Product details

• Authors: Wren Awry
• Assisted by: Wren Awry (Editor), Cindy Milstein (Foreword), Cindy Barukh Milstein (Foreword), Milstein Cindy (Foreword)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.03.2023
• EAN: 9781629639925
• ISBN: 978-1-62963-992-5
• Subjects: Guides > Food & drink > General, dictionaries, tables; Humanities, art, music > Education > Social education, social work; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; COOKING / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, COOKING / Essays & Narratives, Cookery / food & drink etc, Cultural studies: food and society, Cookery / food and drink / food writing