Play with Your Food; Reimagine Our World
Jovida Ross, Food Culture Collective
The Cultural Power of Food
My mother always grew food. Though our lives together were often unstable and unpredictable, she implicitly transmitted that we are people who work the soil. I remember wondering if the tiny lettuce seeds I pushed into the soft dirt would sprout? It seemed implausible, but they did. I learned to weed and water the vegetables we grew, and she would send me out to clip leaves for our dinner salad.
There were no family stories that came along with this responsibility. I thought it was just a way to eat on the cheap! Now, I understand that, through food, my mother connected me to our celtic, germanic, and anglo family tree. Tending plants was a small, unspoken transmission across generations.
Thinking back, I’m not surprised that I didn’t recognize the value of these everyday acts. Like many people who grow up in the United States, my way of understanding the world was shaped by a dominant narrative that frames “the natural world” as inert and available to exploit.
This logic is explicitly connected with racial hierarchy: the invention of Whiteness was designed to justify Europeans' mistreatment of the peoples whose lands they colonized: to portray African, Asian, and Indigenous American people as less “human,” more “nature.” European colonizers also established the blueprint for our modern economy and food systems through violent land grabs and plantations, based on the same assumptions of extraction and exploitation. My family benefited by gaining access to land they farmed when they immigrated to North America.
That's how powerful implicit narratives are — they shape our assumptions and our cultural norms, so they shape the decisions and actions that flow from them. When not consciously supplanted with liberatory counter-narratives, dominant narratives tend to shape any solutions we come up with. This is true even when we seek to change inequitable systems and advance social justice.
I am incredibly grateful that my work in social justice movement-building brought me into rooms in which Black, Indigenous, and diasporic culture bearers and creatives shared wisdom about ancestral healing and revitalizing cultural traditions, often through food, story, and art. In these spaces, I came to recognize food’s power not only to connect me with my own cultural roots, but to actually guide us as we find our way through our current crises of climate and democracy. This led me to Food Culture Collective.
Food isn’t just a commodity sector or source of nutrition; it is fundamental to how we make meaning of our place in the world, and transmit culture. How we grow, cook, gather, and shape our identities around food offer a powerful way to affirm the practices, values, narratives, and systems we want to cultivate in the world.
Message from an Irresistible Future, press play to view full length animation viewable via Vimeo. Creative Direction, Story & Sound Design by Shizue Roche Adachi; Art Direction & Animation by Tony Manalo.
Nourishing Liberatory Power
Food Culture Collective is a community of food workers, culture-bearers, creatives, and friends working to reclaim and reimagine our relationships to food, land and belonging. Instead of “changing the food system,” we ground our values-based, arts-integrated work in narrative strategies — to change how we live.
This is not new work; it is a part of being human and is all around us. But it’s often interpreted through a reductionist lens, just like I interpreted my childhood experiences growing food. For those of us who have internalized supremacist and commodified ways of seeing the world, how do we release them to make space for life-giving ones to grow?
For Food Culture Collective, it began with listening; bearing witness to the people practicing liberatory, collective world-building through food. I’ll offer a few themes we’ve heard, as our community affirms food workers’ and creatives’ capacity to shape culture at large.
What we feed grows:
Socially engaged artist Jocelyn Jackson consistently evokes food as a source of connection. She does this in her work with the People’s Kitchen Collective, which she cofounded; as an independent visual and performance artist; and now as chef in residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. In Jackson’s Fixed Price Menu, a culinary installation with Ava Duvernay’s LEAP Initiative, she posed a particularly potent question: “What culture did Jeronimo feed from that would allow him to take a life so swiftly?”
Another example, in literary arts, is vegan advocate, scholar and novelist Breeze Harper, who invokes speculative storytelling and afrofuturism as a roadmap to a regenerative food future.
Food is relational, rooting us in place, community, past, present, and future:
Chefs who share the story of their peoples through their food challenge all of us to place ourselves in the story of food. Examples include Indigenous chef Crystal Wahpepah; the Vietnamese-American diaspora cuisine and storytelling of chef Tu David Phu; and the way chef Reem Assil uses her Arab hospitality to weave a more just community.
Michael Twitty, chef and author of The Cooking Gene, wrote, “Our foods tell us where and who we come from. They tell us not only about our ethnic origins, but where we are in history… I want you to look at the foods of your heritage and the foods you love as situating yourself in the history of humanity, and I want you to learn about where you are and who you are based on all of that.”
We all belong to the land:
In a roundtable conversation that Food Culture Collective hosted last fall, shane bernardo of Food As Healing reminded us that cultural foodways connect us to the lands our ancestors come from. The land stewards and seed keepers who have shared their cultural work with our community, like Rowen White of Sierra Seeds, Kirsten Kirby-Shoote of I-Collective, Kristyn Leach of Second Generation Seeds, and Pandora Thomas of EarthSeed Farm, affirm this. They show us that farming is a collaboration with the land, that it transmits culture through the practice of growing food.
These embodied visions and lessons can be understood as a living incantation: calling into being a world in which we all have what we need to flourish. In these prayers, we recognize that all life is interconnected; we live in reciprocity; we have the courage to face hard truths, and we exercise creative agency that nourishes the integrity of a greater whole.
Artist Aisha Shillingford’s interpretation of the Food Culture Collective Vision: We dare to dream of a world shaped by care for the lands, waters, and peoples to whom we belong. Follow Intelligent Mischief on Instagram for more from Shillingford.
Reclaiming Our Stories, Mapping Our Narratives
Play with your food, reimagine our world. Food Culture Collective embraces creativity and play as a bold tool to disrupt the status quo, a portal to radical dreams, an essential practice in collective sense-making, and a source of continued nourishment. We use story, art, and embodied, immersive experiences to compost supremacist cultural patterns, reclaim nourishing relationships to food and ecologies, and grow liberatory power in food communities.
Collage by Lizzie Suarez, created for Food Culture Collective’s Around the Table series. In addition to live story-sharing as an immersive experience, FCCltv works with a range of artists and media makers to activate our narrative strategy.
All of our creative media and community activations — live storysharing, playing in our cultural test-kitchen, audio storytelling through our podcast, our story facilitation training, fellowships, even our digital and social media practices — are rooted in an explicit narrative strategy to feed the cultures that we want to see grow.
We've intentionally grown an inclusive multiracial network that centers the leadership, joy, and nourishment of food culture workers and community members who are otherwise exploited and targeted in dominant culture, and who also carry deep wisdom about how to live in harmony with nature and one another.
Our participatory narrative development involved deep listening to the stories of Black, Indigenous, diasporic people of color, queer & trans, immigrant, women, and other marginalized food workers. What emerged from this listening, synthesis and shaping process was a constellation of core narratives to guide our work and hold us accountable to our community.
The narratives in our constellation are:
Food is relational – rooting us in place, community, past, present, and future.
We all deserve a home. We all belong to the land.
Nourishment is a right of all people, all bodies.
Care is the essence of all labor and all food and culture workers are essential, invaluable, and skilled.
Together, we have what we need to flourish; all people are powerful and innately capable of the deep, embodied work of collective transformation.
Food Culture Collective’s Narrative Constellation. Infographic illustrating liberatory food narratives through mutualism, belonging, and reciprocity. For the above content, we draw on Cyndi Suarez’s definition of Liberatory Power, which includes the ability to create what we want.
This narrative constellation is leading us into new territory; that’s what happens when we listen to stories as navigational instructions!
In December of 2021, Mohawk Seedkeeper Rowen White told our community: “The seeds of our ancestral wisdom are within us, just waiting to be rehydrated. Whether it's seeds, or food, in the kitchen, or art, or poetry, or whatever is your passion: you had ancestors that did that too… it's the way that you stitch yourself back into that culture.“
Sparked by this message from White, we are now collaborating with her and healer Weyam Ghadbian to incubate an emergent cultural organizing project at the intersections of food culture, narrative change, artistic engagement and social justice. The project will support food workers, creatives, and their circles to connect with their ancestral traditions as a cultural resource for navigating crises, healing, and growing community power. The intention is to nurture narrative and cultural transformation from the roots up: beginning internally and interpersonally, and rippling out to shape our world.
Seeding an Irresistible Future
Visionary author Toni Cade Bambara described the role of cultural workers as making revolution “irresistible.” The food creatives and culture bearers in our community are offering tantalizing glimpses of cultural transformation. They demonstrate that it is possible to live out liberatory values, that the embodied cultural ways, technologies and systems that support collective flourishing already exist, and that they can be strengthened when they are resourced and cared for. An irresistible future is possible. People are already tending the seeds.
Whether we recognize it or not, we all shape food culture. Everyone is part of creating the story of how we nourish our communities and care for our world. What food culture do you dream of? What future are you feeding?
A Food Culture Collective gathering in December 2022. Photo credit: Kristen Murakoshi.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Photo by Kristen Murakoshi
Jovida Ross (she/they) is a visionary facilitator and strategist who's spent decades working with story-sharing as a cultural technology that builds community connections and liberatory power. How do we organize ourselves towards a future in which we all flourish? This question has guided her work and collaborations with social justice movement leaders and creatives around the country for the last decade, and ultimately led her to her current work with Food Culture Collective as director and steward.
To learn more about Food Culture Collective, sign up for updates on our website: foodculture.org, and follow @foodculturecltv on Instagram + Twitter.
