Sunday 12th April

3pm BST/ 8am PST/ 11am EST/ 4pm CEST

About this event

In this workshop we’ll think, discuss and write about playing with food, as well as explore ways to make a recipe for a fruit fool more foolish…

Steph Marsden from food/play/food and Amuse is a designer and greengrocer whose work uses food as a starting point to explore the complexity of food. She’s printed with squid and dared a bunch of academics to throw their food at a wall with the encouragement of Autodineur, a random automated poetry bot.

The event will include the opportunity to make a rhubarb or other fruit fool dessert. Ingredients will be shared with participants three days prior to the event for those who would like to join in. Please let us know of any special dietary requirements upon booking your place.

The workshop is suitable for participants aged 16 and above. No writing or creative experience is necessary for this event.

Due to the intimate nature of this event, places for this workshop are limited.

REGISTER FOR PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD EVENT

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FREE FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS TO ANY FFF PUBLICATION (see code at the end of this newsletter), STARTING AT $10 FOR EVERYONE ELSE.

This event is part of the Feminist Food Friends programme; a collective of food writers who formed to make the experience writing about food more communal and collaborative. In case you missed it, FFF is a new collective led by Isabela Bonnevera (Feminist Food Journal), Apoorva Sripathi (shelf offering), Clare Michaud (Beurrage), Devin Kate Pope (The Good Enough Weekly), Margaux Vialleron (The Onion Papers), Sarah Duignan (anthrodish), and Steph Marsden (Amuse). We hosted our first meet-up back in September and our second in December; we were delighted to see so many of you there.

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We learned to edit podcasts; designed merch; released a print edition; led the creation of a zine for the Young Southeast Asian Leaders’ Initiative in Manila; won a spot in the 2023 Break program for women entrepreneurs; became a media partner of the Oxford Real Farming Conference; survived successive tax seasons; navigated shipping regulations; given a home to vital writing from all over the world, and connected with so many like-minded spirits in our community, leading to the launch of our Feminist Food Friends collective. Outside of FFJ, we’ve changed jobs, moved cities, grown humans, and somehow through it all managed with our little laptops and phones to keep this thing going.

We are nearing almost 5,000 of you here now, and we’re so grateful for the continued appreciation and interest in our work — which, four years onwards, we feel just as committed to as ever. In particular, we’d like to thank our premium subscribers and BFFs of FFJ for funding just about everything that FFJ relies on to keep going.

If you’d like to become a premium subscriber, at $2.5 USD per month, we’re just about the cheapest Valentine’s date you can get. Subscriptions can be purchased for yourself, a lover, or a friend!

SUPPORT FFJ NOW

To mark the romantic occasion coinciding with our fourth birthday, we’re re-sharing a photo essay from one of our favourite issues, SEX, which was originally published in October 2022 (if you’ve been with us from the beginning, you might remember it as the home of banger illustrations/captions like the ones below).

Meanwhile in Paris by Thomas Jasper conjures what the author refers to “the visceral urges that drive us to lick, bite, and devour…to nourish oneself and to love onself: the most primal form of life.” So sit back, relax, enjoy some photos of sexy French food, and know that we’re tickled pink to have you here with us, four years on.

MEANWHILE IN PARIS

By Thomas Jaspers for our SEX issue

La food doit se comprendre avec ceux qui la font mais aussi ceux qui la consomment. C’est un passage, un témoin de générosité entre un émetteur et un récepteur.
S’alimenter est un acte oral, à l’instar de la parole ou d’un baiser, il s’agit toujours d’un allant vers l’autre. La bouche est essentielle dans toute communion.
Et pourtant manger ne relève pas uniquement du goût, mais s’arroge tous les sens.
Des orgies romaines au foodporn, la nourriture a toujours marqué son rapprochement à l’hédonisme charnel.
C’est ce prisme de la nourriture qui m’est le plus parlant et que je souligne dans mes photos.

Et malgré la fixation du vivant par l’image, malgré cette mort sur surface sensible, c’est la vie derrière.
Les pulsions ventrales qui nous poussent à lécher, mordre et dévorer les chairs qui nous entourent. S’alimenter et s’aimer, la vie la plus primaire.

Thomas Jaspers fait flamber les pellicules et les tappassiettes dans le restaurant Pantobaguette à Paris. Très présent dans l’univers food, ce photographe insuffle un vent de fraicheur à travers ces photos. Il est actuellement directeur artistique de plusieurs restaurants trendy et organisateur du festival La Douve Blanche, un festival qui rassemble haute gastronomie et musique.

As January comes to a close, we’re sharing the latest edition of our sometimes semi-, sometimes fully annual resource-roundup FFJ Recommends (you can find previous editions listed here) for our premium subscribers.

As with last year’s newsletter, we’ve sourced recommendations from our amazing community of writers, interviewees, and guest editors, including Lira Green, Apoorva Sripathi, Shena Cavallo, Naomi Robert, and Chiara Bergonzini.

If you’re not yet a premium subscriber, now is a great time to consider becoming one: for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per month, you can help us to pay our writers fairly and keep our work going. You’ll also get access to audio readings of most essays, as well as free tickets to all Feminist Food Friends (FFF) events.

Upgrade your subscription now

Isabela Bonnevera, founding editor of FFJ

I started the year off on a bit of a reading kick. I finished (late!) All Consuming, Ruby Tandoh’s excellent analysis of the forces that shape our food choices, and I am honoured to be among the first people to receive a review copy of The Spinster Cookbook, Eli Davies’ forthcoming meditation on eating and living as a single woman in a society that privileges couples and families. (It has great resonance with a piece on dining alone by Candice Chung forthcoming in our CELEBRATE issue.)

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We’re now accepting submissions for our collaborative issue around the theme of ‘the architecture of food’.

It’s not our usual one-word title, and it won’t be quite the same as our usual issues: published works will be shorter than usual FFJ style, and we’re even more eager than usual to solicit fiction, poetry, and visual essays. (Please send us pitches for non-fiction/narrative/reported essays; fiction and poetry should be sent as finished pieces.)

What hasn’t changed is that we’re eager to receive a wide range of interpretations of the topic. How does food relate to the material and invisible ways that the world is built? What nutrition, excess, power, wealth, class, and culture does this architecture contain?

From the hierarchical or democratic structures of a menu, meal, or food system, to how the architecture of a restaurant accommodates the navigation of multiple roles, classes, and worlds, and how recipes and cookbooks can help construct cuisines and cultures (or vice versa), there’s a lot to dig into.

To get your pitch-brain turning, here are just a few potential topics:

• The specific architecture/construction of a dish, a pantry, a grocery store, or farmer’s market; the interplay between food and architecture and how it influences our experiences of consumption.

• How prized utensils and dishes can shape a meal and our ways of eating.

• The changing or experimental architecture of food production and distribution, vertical farming, urban gardening, CSAs, food delivery and apps.

• How a meal is meant to be served within a culture or zeitgeist; the liberty of the lack of structured courses.

• What eating or [breast]feeding in public looks like: in parks, at bus stops, or on public transport. Is the city an architecturally inclusive space to accommodate eaters? What is the impact of the tech architecture of food delivery on public eating?

• The format, meanings, and impact of menus, recipes, cookbooks, and nutritional guides; the failures or possibilities of AI recipes.

• Colonial legacies of the architecture of food: which structures are valorized, seen as ‘proper’ or ’appropriate’, and the impacts of class, wealth, and influence.

• The architecture of a restaurant itself and how it’s built to accommodate diners and staff — especially from the perspective of service or sensory experience.

These are examples, but we welcome any ideas they spark for you about balance and excess, towering culinary structures and foods that fall flat.

The details

For this issue, we will pay $50 USD for poetry and $75 USD for prose.

Fiction: Short stories at a maximum of 1750 words.

Poetry: Maximum 3 poems per submission.

Nonfiction: Between 750 and 1750 words.

As mentioned above, for nonfiction/essays, please send us a short pitch and bio in the body of your email. For poems and short stories, please send the full piece as a Word document attachment using a legible font, size 12 with 1.5 spacing. List the word count and title at the top of the first page. Please provide only one submission per genre.

Please address your pitches to BOTH pitch@feministfoodjournal.com and chlorophyll.zine@gmail.com, and make sure the subject line specifies that the email is a pitch for the ‘architecture of food’ issue.

Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but please let us know as soon as your work has been accepted elsewhere. All work must be previously unpublished either in print or online.

Deadline: Midnight (wherever you are) on Tuesday, February 10.

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Event details

We are hosting an online holiday mingler and recipe swap on December 15th at 7 am PT/10 am ET/3 pm GMT/4 pm CET. The idea is that we will each bring a recipe that has meant something to us this year to spark ideas and conversation as we reflect on the highs and lows of a globally tumultuous year.

It could be a recipe for a staple dish you look forward to at family gatherings each year, a cocktail or non-alcoholic beverage that brings you a moment of joy or solace during the frenzied season, or a faithful comfort meal that got you through your roughest moments of 2025. It could be something you never got around to making, something you discovered you were allergic to, something that made you think about food production or systems differently — the choice is yours.

No time to prepare?

We know that a lot is going on at this time of year, so we want to stress that there is absolutely no “right” way to show up to this: there’s no need to come with full instructions to make a dish, and if you want to join and just listen, that’s fine with us too. This is simply an opportunity for people in our community to get to know one another, using recipes as a springboard. The FFF founding members will get the conversation going by sharing some of our recipes, and anyone else is welcome to take it from there. Consider it a cozy virtual holiday party, where you can skip the small talk and feed your soul.

For a bit of extra nourishment, we highly encourage bringing along a snack and/or drink of your choice!

Registration

Like our first (and all future) meet-ups, this one is free for paid subscribers to any of the FFF publications, using the discount code after the paywall in this newsletter. For all others interested in attending, tickets are offered on a super-affordable sliding scale that starts at just $3 USD.

JOIN THE EVENT

Looking forward to seeing you there!

About Feminist Food Friends

FFF is a new collective led by Isabela Bonnevera (Feminist Food Journal), Apoorva Sripathi (shelf offering), Clare Michaud (Beurrage), Devin Kate Pope (The Good Enough Weekly), Margaux Vialleron (The Onion Papers), Sarah Duignan (anthrodish), and Steph Marsden (Amuse). We hosted our first meet-up back in September.

PSA: This isn’t the only exciting event coming up in the calendar — our friends at the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) have just released the programme for their 2026 edition and it’s (unsurprisingly) incredible. While we hope to see some of you there in-person, if the journey to Oxford is a little far, don’t despair; ORFC offers subsidized online tickets that are free for Majority World delegates and starting at just £15.00 for others.

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WHAT IS FFF?

FFF is a new collective started by eight food writers: Isabela Bonnevera and Zoë Johnson (Feminist Food Journal), Apoorva Sripathi (shelf offering), Clare Michaud (Beurrage), Devin Kate Pope (The Good Enough Weekly), Margaux Vialleron (The Onion Papers), Sarah Duignan (anthrodish), and Steph Marsden (Amuse).

We envision FFF as a collaborative space for food-minded people. Through what we’re calling ‘Slow Collaboration’, we’re looking to learn from each other in ways that don’t feed into the culture of constant production that dominates algorithmic platforms and mainstream media. Our founding members have all orbited each other for a few years now; most of us have already worked together in some shape or form, steadfastly resisting the pressure to try and pull ahead, instead seeking to amplify each other’s work and accomplishments. Coming together within the container of FFF is our attempt to deepen our collaboration and expand this circle of curiosity and care. If you work with food, or are interested in the ways food sharpens and expands our understanding of the world — this collective is for you, too.

As part of FFF, we’ll take turns hosting online workshops every other month. These workshops will be free to paid subscribers of any of our publications, using the promo code in the email header (also listed below the paywall).

JOIN OUR FIRST MEET-UP ON SEPTEMBER 29

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Our first FFF event will be a panel all about getting to know the people behind the publications and our shared vision. Mark your calendars for September 29, 7 am PST/10 am EST/3 pm GMT/4 pm CEST!

REGISTER FOR OUR FIRST WORKSHOP: FFF MEET-AND-GREET — THE STATE OF WOMEN IN FOOD WRITING AT https://luma.com/a4mibq9c. FREE FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS, STARTING AT $3 FOR EVERYONE ELSE.

Isabela Bonnevera, the co-founder of Feminist Food Journal, will facilitate a conversation about what it means to be a woman in food writing, and where we go from here. We’ll discuss what FFF means for its founding members and what we’re aiming to achieve. We’ll share how we (try to) balance writing our newsletters alongside other responsibilities, such as jobs, care work, and tending to our own health needs, and how that influences the logistics of working together across a vast swath of time zones.

Most importantly, this first event is as much about introducing ourselves to you as it is about your presence: What would you like to see from FFF? How would you like to participate in this space? How can we support your work, too? This event will be about 90 minutes long and have plenty of time dedicated to audience Q&A.

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If you’re looking for a sense of community amidst the fractures of the current political moment, this is it! You can expect FFF meet-ups to be gentle, playful, and potent moments to come together with like-minded people from around the world. The option will be open for anyone part of FFF (not just the founding members) to host their own talk or workshop — although this by no means mandatory!

WHAT’S NEXT?

Here is taste of the other kinds of workshops you can expect in the next few months:

• The Politics and Potential of Food Zines by Devin (The Good Enough Weekly)

• How to host a banging dinner party — and why it matters by Isabela and Zoë (FFJ)

• Book talk: Alone In the Kitchen with an Eggplant by Clare (Beurrage)

• Dough Therapy: A pasta and creative workshop hosted by Margaux (The Onion Papers)

• No-Bullshit Nutrition 101 by Sarah (anthrodish)

Again, these workshops will be free for paid subscribers who support the work of at least one member of our collective; for anyone else who would like to join, they will be ticketed on a sliding and ultra-accessible scale. The promo code for paid subscribers is in the email header, and also paywalled at the end of this post. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber to FFJ and/or any of these publications, now is the time!

Become a paid subscriber now

MEET THE FFF (SO FAR)

Some of us are already friends, IRL or online. FFF will be a process of getting to know each other, and getting to know you. If you aren’t familiar with some of us, we’ve taken the liberty of saying hello below – each introduction is written by another member of the collective.

Isabela Bonnevera and Zoë Johnson (Feminist Food Journal):

I remember the excitement of first discovering Feminist Food Journal, staying up past bedtime to read the early issues on MILK, WAR, and SEX! FFJ blends the rigour of an academic journal with a playful, engaging tone that is more accessible to a larger audience than traditional publications. Founders Isabela and Zoë, both storytellers with academic backgrounds in food systems/policy, met serendipitously. Crossing paths with them, I quickly saw how friendly, talented and hardworking they are. Dedicated to their vision, FFJ prioritises collective voice over individual ego and constantly challenges, innovates and inspires. I’m excited for the FFF project to bring that same spirit to life - building bonds, meaning and intimacy through a desire to nurture food system change. – Steph, Amuse

Clare Michaud (Beurrage):

Clare’s writing met me at a time when I needed it most in life, exploring themes that challenged notions of linear time, grief and healing, body politics, and productivity through the lens of baking and kitchen spaces. As a writer and baker from Wisconsin, her dedication to locally-grounded solutions and the opportunities that baking present is evident through her gracefully crafted essays. Clare’s Beurrage newsletter showcases the possibilities of life through her expositions of laminated doughs and the patience and gentleness required of them. To read Clare’s work is to feel like time has stopped just long enough to inspire a sense of awe, and I am so thrilled to work alongside her more for FFF. — Sarah, AnthroDish

Devin Kate Pope (The Good Enough Weekly):

Devin is a talented essayist, whose work is engaged and a true show that, as Devin says, ‘building a just and sustainable world requires all kinds of work’. From her dispatches sent from Zine fairs to her entries about what she is reading and cooking and essays about food systems, climate, labour and poverty, I never miss an occasion to get thinking and doing with Devin’s Good Enough Weekly newsletter. We haven’t had a chance to meet yet, but I know that I’d enjoy being in the kitchen with Devin. – Margaux, The Onion Papers

Apoorva Sripathi (shelf offering):

Apoorva is a true polymath — a writer, editor, illustrator, and cook whose skills in each area always take my breath away. Her work is tender yet incisive, and I look forward to her essays every time I see them in my inbox. Not to mention, she’s a kind, loving, and genuinely funny person. I’m so grateful that she chose to pitch us for our first issue, MILK, back in 2022, as having her as both a professional and personal confidante since then has helped me feel less alone in the world of online publishing. – Isabela, FFJ

Steph Marsden (Amuse):

Steph is a wonderfully talented and kind person whose work as a writer, designer, and researcher constantly leaves me in awe. Reading her writing is the equivalent of hearing a friend talk about their endless, fascinating projects and thinking 'you are fucking amazing' (or maybe without the swearing)! Her new guest column in her newsletter Amuse, is a generous and thoughtful offering for writers; it is a thought for change and I think that sums Steph up so well: she is an agent of change for the good. I had the privilege of collaborating with Steph on a writers' group, Big Feelings, a loving community where women food newsletter writers nourished each other, and the calls Steph and I would have about that slowly turned into such a meaningful friendship. – Apoorva, shelf offering

Margaux Vialleron (The Onion Papers):

I first came to Margaux’s writing through our shared interest in baking and in using baking to think about time, space, and existence. Her writing, whether through fiction (The Yellow Kitchen and most recently, Breaststrokes) or her reflective essays, is welcoming, intimate, and generous. Margaux brings readers closely along with her as she shares the food she’s been cooking, philosophies that have been swirling around her head, and the artists’ and writers’ lives that hold her interest alike—and this never fails to hold my interest. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity through FFF to get to know her more. – Clare, Beurrage

Sarah Duignan (anthrodish):

Sarah deftly weaves facts, figures, and stories into a whole new–and better–thing, bringing her full experience as an anthropologist to the table. I appreciate both Sarah’s rigorous critiques of fraught issues of our time, like protein and Ultra-Processed Foods, as well as her personal essays about motherhood and pregnancy. Anthrodish is one of my essential reads for thinking about food, culture, and identity with nuance, and Sarah is a delightful and confident wayfinder. – Devin, The Good Enough Weekly

REGISTER FOR OUR FIRST WORKSHOP: FFF MEET-AND-GREET — THE STATE OF WOMEN IN FOOD WRITING AT https://luma.com/a4mibq9c. FREE FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS TO ANY OF THE PUBLICATIONS BELOW USING THE PROMO CODE IN THE EMAIL HEADER/BELOW THE PAYWALL.

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I just wrapped up the book a few weeks ago (I set myself back by accidentally ordering a paperback version that wasn’t going to arrive until February 2026!). It was an invigorating read, which manages to be deeply political but also personal, moving, and despite the seriousness of the subject matter — fun. As a reader, you feel that your presence is considered; in some places, you are spoken to directly, and Anna’s razor-sharp wit makes you want to get to know her in real life! We highly recommend the book for anyone looking to better understand the complexity and vitality of East Asian or South East Asian (ESEA) identity in the UK.

Get the book now

Anna Sulan focused her PhD on investigating storytelling practices of the Iban, a South East Asian indigenous people of which she is a part. To coincide with Gawai, the Iban harvest festival that took place throughout May and culminated in a government holiday in Sarawak, Malaysia, earlier this week, Anna has synthesized this short piece for FFJ. It draws on both writing from her book and elements of her PhD research to explore how Iban culture informs her understanding of gender and identity.

We’re so proud to feature Anna’s words and hope that you enjoy them. The piece weaves in links to our BODY issue through its discussion of gender identity, and also makes a great appetizer for our forthcoming CELEBRATE issue! Anna’s publication, SOURCED Journeys, also recently had a season focused on celebration, and we highly recommend checking that out, too. – Isabela

‘Everyone dreams of gods and omens’ by Anna Sulan Masing

This week marks the official ending of the Gawai festival, the most important time in the Iban calendar. Traditionally, there were various “gawai”, but now the most celebrated is the gawai focused on the harvest. It is the indigenous people of Sarawak’s harvest festival, akin to new year celebrations in other cultures. The Sarawak government made Gawai a public holiday on June 1, 1965, but it can be celebrated at home any time around this period. But to hold a Gawai celebration, you must first dream about hosting one. So much of Iban culture is based on dreams and omens; there is a fluidity to it.

My PhD research had a focus on Gawai: I considered it a starting point to look at Iban culture, performance, and storytelling practices. Most importantly, Gawai is a way to teach, share, and pass on collective identity. The stories and performances associated with Gawai include understanding gender identities, war-making, and crucially, knowing how to party!

***

I don’t know when I first started understanding a binary gender divide, or when I rejected the idea of it and challenged the idea of a binary lens on other aspects in my life. But I do know that — although I use she/her pronouns and am cis-het — the idea of multiple gender identities seems incredibly normal to me.

Iban stories in my childhood set up a world for me outside the colonial and capitalist structures that enforce binaries. When you look closely at a world that is based on nature, that looks at the environment and landscape, it is impossible to find hard binaries and linear systems. And within Iban culture, there has always been what anthropologists have referred to as the “third gender” (see the note at the end of this piece for an elaboration on terminology), and I have known women within Iban communities who now might identify with being trans or gender non-conforming.

These “third gender” people hold a particularly sacred space within Iban folklore. Traditionally, they were the highest level of “shaman”1, referred to in Iban as manang bali. In stories, manang bali were charged with taking gifts to the gods to invite them to the Gawai feast.

The centrality of manang bali in Gawai festival folklore is just one way that Iban culture embraces a more expansive understanding of gender identities and roles. Looking into the Iban farming systems for my PhD made me rethink my relationship with gender and race. The Iban are a farming society and are structurally fairly egalitarian (at least, traditionally) with regards to class and gender. There are gender divides, particularly in tasks around war, for example: no one can go to war unless a blanket has been woven, a task performed by women, making weaving women’s “war”. Everyone farms, drinks, dances, dreams of gods and good omens, and can be a community leader. It feels like a practical society. I get to see my gender — alongside other genders — as having a place to belong and be part of a community, not as a commodity. (In my recent book, ‘Chinese and Any Other Asian: Exploring East and South East Asian Identity in Britain’, I have chapters on gender and art and culture that delve into this topic in much more depth.)

I write this knowing that I have a nostalgic lens on Iban culture. I have done my growing up mostly in the West, and it’s easy to miss the complexities of the everydayness of a culture. But I also know that part of the colonial project was to bring a Christian god to native peoples, to instill a commodities-based economy, and drum out any blurred edges, fluidity, and a multiplicity of Indigenous beliefs. I can’t begin to imagine what our world would be like if European powers hadn’t tried to eradicate those ways of living from us; it could’ve been beautiful. This isn’t to say that all or any ESEA cultures are utopias of equality and fluid gender identities and expressions — far from it. But looking into our heritages and the various nuances of our different cultures can help us find ways to exist; to be ourselves, and be comfortable in ourselves. We can be un-tick-box-able. We must be un-tick-box-able.

***

These days, with so many Iban families living away from their ancestral longhouses, many “go home” to the longhouse for Gawai and create festivities together, hosted in collaboration.

My memories of Gawai are of “open homes”. A family will open up their home for the day, and friends, colleagues, and family will stop by. There is food cooked throughout the day, much drink (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic), dancing, music, and probably some karaoke at night. Open homes are not exclusive to Gawai; they happen for Hari Raya, Chinese New Year, and other celebrations. It is about experiencing each other’s cultures in a collective manner.

At the back of my dad and stepmother’s house in Kuching is an open fireplace, a barbeque spot, where we gather with family and friends. My stepmother has planted pandan, turmeric, cangkok manis (leaf greens), kantan (torched ginger), and bungkang along the side, and the space has become more and more organized over the years to the point that my dad put up a sign on the tree above his chair that said: “dad’s shed”.

It is a space I think of often. When the summer sun shines in London, I try and recreate it in my garden, with an open-fire barbeque, friends and family. Most years, I host Gawai. It is a party-like ceremony to bring people together with the excuse of eating, and that feels like what being Iban means to me. I am laying claim to the idea that my right to eat and drink — to party — is a cultural heritage. (I add tuak2 to the mix!)

Bringing Gawai into the space of London allows for a fluidity of space and identity, of bringing multiple homes into one place. This isn’t a conflation but an inclusion. By having Gawai in my chosen home, I get to be multiple; I get to be complicated as I choose to blend together an English summer with both strawberries and durian. It is a reminder of the multiplicity of identity. We — myself, family, and friends — get to celebrate this festival together, and it anchors the stories of my childhood and ancestry in my current home. It reminds me that I can choose other ways of living, outside of the capitalist, binary structure that the Western world presents to me. We can be rebellious in our celebrations; these are the stories we are telling each other about ourselves.

Author’s note: The term “third gender” is used mostly in reference to non-white cultures, particularly Indigenous communities, and I find it problematic. While attempting to capture something outside of the gender binary, it still alludes to a linear concept of identity or hard definitions, ironically reinforcing the binary as a norm — when in reality, gender encompasses a great deal of its fluidity, spectrums, and grey areas. “Third gender” often seems to be a white, Western, academic label placed on non-white bodies.

While I’ve used it here in the absence of a more clearly understood alternative, I hope we can find language that better encapsulates non-binary ideas. American cartoonist Alison Bechdel — who conceived the Bechdel Test, a quick feminist litmus test for films — was interviewed for the Guardian in 2023 and spoke about the Western perceptions of queerness and the ability for change. “If humanity even survives another 100 years, which I’m not so sure of, I think that there’s going to be a lot less attachment to sexual or even gender identity,” she said. “I think it’s going to be much more fluid and we’ll be fine with it.”

This move to be more fluid in how we think about gender will also help untangle how we look at race and identity as a whole: beyond boxes and towards multiplicity.

Dr Anna Sulan Masing is an academic, poet, and journalist. She co-founded SOURCED, a public research platform that explores our global food and drink systems; and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Cheese magazine. Anna Sulan’s 10-part narrative podcast Taste of Place, by Whetstone Radio Collective, explores colonialism and nostalgia through the history of pepper; and her 2025 podcast To Be Delicious: a cultural context of MSG in Britain by Lecker, looks at ESEA food culture, diaspora, racism, and the future of msg and umami. Her debut book, Chinese And Any Other Asian, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in February 2025.

Reminder: FFJ subscriptions cost just US$30 per year, and allow us to spotlight writers like Anna Sulan by covering our production costs! Please do consider supporting us if this is within your means. We will shortly be launching our Feminist Food Friends club in community with other food writers and we offer many other perks, like audio readings done by writers themselves (not AI robot voices!).

Support FFJ now

Modern Chinese Foodways explores the multifaceted experiences of Chinese culinary modernity both within and outside of mainland China from the mid-19th century to the present. It argues that Chinese food and foodways are very much modern — despite the many voices that insist on emphasizing its ancient roots — in ways that both recall the experiences of other cultures, as well as in ways unique to China's own historical trajectory. In this way, the volume demonstrates the significance of modern Chinese foodways to the phenomenon of culinary modernity writ large, which is still largely shaped by Euro-American perspectives and priorities.

Among other changes in the Chinese culinary sphere, the editor highlights the creation of new culinary identities based on gender, ethnicity, and nation. Michelle’s chapter, “Domestic Cookbooks and the Emergence of the Female Culinary Authority in Twentieth-Century China”, investigates how gender norms around Chinese food evolved from positioning gastronomy exclusively as the domain of men to a field in the remit of housewives across the nation. (Writer Alison Wong explored similar dynamics of whose food labour is deemed gastronomical in her piece for our CITY issue, Happy Family.) Michelle unpacks this history in more detail below.

Modern Chinese Foodways is available now for pre-order.

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By Michelle T. King

For today’s home cooks, imagining a world without an astounding selection of food media is nearly impossible, from the Food Network to on-demand programming, to blogs, vlogs and TikToks, to every variety of cookbook imaginable for every type of cuisine. With regard to Chinese food alone, which is my own area of interest, there are at least a dozen websites that do a marvellous job teaching users how to cook (two of my favourites include the Woks of Life and Made with Lau). But we often forget how very recently this proliferation of food media emerged, particularly in the realm of Chinese cuisine — and how it heralded a new role for women as public culinary authorities.

In the 1950s and 60s, almost a dozen Chinese cookbooks appeared in Chinese and English, in Taiwan and the United States, titled with the names of their female authors, such as the Yuanshan Cookbook (1954), The Joyce Chen Cookbook (1962), or the Pei Mei Cook Book (1969). In today’s culinary marketplace, none of this self-branding seems remarkable, but when placed within its historical context, this mid-century wave of female-authored Chinese cookbooks represents a monumental shift in the gendered conventions of Chinese culinary authority. I explore the historical background of these cookbooks in a chapter published in a new edited volume, Modern Chinese Foodways, co-edited by Jia-chen Fu, Jakob A. Klein, and myself (MIT Press, 2025).

For millennia, Chinese cuisine had been an almost exclusively male realm — at least in print. Within the traditional hierarchy of Chinese food writing, the ideal pairing consisted of a male gourmand and his male cook, with the exquisite tastebuds of the former guiding the hands of the latter. Chinese women, of course, had been involved in food preparation all along, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century, for the most part, that women were addressed as either the authors or the audience of Chinese food writing. These Chinese cookbooks of the 1950s and 60s suggest a totally different culinary pairing, that of the expert female cooking instructor and her female students, who were housewives themselves. The rise of the modern Chinese cookbook, then, authored by and for Chinese women, also signals the emergence of the new figure of the postwar housewife, who was solely responsible for the physical and emotional well-being of her nuclear family.

The research contained in my chapter grew out of my interest in the extraordinary life and career of Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004), Taiwan’s pioneering food television celebrity and bilingual cookbook author, who also owned her own cooking school and traveled the world teaching people how to cook Chinese food. In 1971, the New York Times called Fu the “Julia Child of Chinese cooking”, but in Taiwan it would be more accurate to call Child the “Fu Pei-mei of French food”, since Fu has occupied that space as the touchstone against which all other culinary figures are measured.

I’ve been researching Fu Pei-mei’s career for the better part of a decade, and recently published a book about her called Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024). In the chapter for our edited volume, I wanted to put Fu’s cookbooks into a broader perspective with other female cookbook authors of her generation. There has been little research published on either the contemporary history of Chinese cookbooks or the history of Chinese housewives, so my chapter was an attempt to address that gap.

The twentieth-century gendering of culinary authority is but one set of experiences of Chinese culinary modernity explored in our edited volume, Modern Chinese Foodways. In it, we identify some of the major processes by which Chinese food and foodways have become modern, with a focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We highlight four prominent areas of change: commodification of food production; the scientization of expertise and the development of new food technologies; the creation of new culinary identities based on gender, ethnicity, and nation; and the circuits of migration taking place since the nineteenth century. We insist that not only are Chinese foodways modern — not a given, in light of the many voices always insisting on their ancient roots — but also that in order to understand culinary modernity itself, we have to acknowledge and incorporate Chinese experiences, instead of defaulting solely to Euro-American models of development. The volume includes chapters from thirteen leading scholars, with editorial essays on the past and future of Chinese food studies. We’re excited to share this cutting-edge research.

Modern Chinese Foodways is available now for pre-order.

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Michelle K. Ting is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can find her on Instagram @michtking, at www.michelletking.com, or contact her directly at mtking@email.unc.edu.

It’s hard for us to believe it, but Feminist Food Journal turns three today. Well, formally three — while our first issue, MILK, launched on February 15, 2022, we’d been hard at work behind the scenes since July 2021, when we started building our first website and thinking about our business model.

It simultaneously feels like time has flown by, but also like we’ve covered so much ground. Longtime readers will have this roll-call down pat by now, but our back catalogue consists of:

MILK | WAR | SEX | EARTH | CITY | SEA

MEAT | BODY | and, soon, CELEBRATE.

We’re so proud of this work and encourage you to browse through them whenever time allows. And while we’re pained by the current state of global affairs, we feel more committed to our mission of sharing intersectional and global feminist perspectives on food and culture than ever. As Natalie Adler quoted David Lynch in a recent Lux newsletter: Fix your hearts or die. It’s go time.

We promise to take that intentionality into our fourth year as a publication. And because we know that celebration is a radical act, to celebrate our third birthday (and the release of our call for pitches for our ninth issue, CELEBRATE), we’re re-sharing a short essay and original cocktail recipe with our premium subscribers.

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Created by our in-house FFJ bartender to honour the life and work of bell hooks, who passed away in 2021 shortly before our magazine launched, it’s the perfect recipe for a Friday toast, whether you’re celebrating the power of romantic or platonic love post-Valentine’s Day or even just the fact that you’ve survived another week.

Wounds of Passion: a cocktail honouring the life and writing of bell hooks

Women and alcohol. Associations between the two abound, and Sophie Lewis’ excellent review of Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol by Mallory O’Meara for the London Review of Books offers a double-layered analysis of their fraught, passionate, and pleasurable relationship. From the effective campaign to paint entrepreneurial beer-brewing women as witches to the radical subversion hidden in the stereotype of the drunken 1950s housewife, questions of if, why, how, and for whom women drink have been policed and contested for thousands of years. These questions are, of course, framed by wider systems of racism and misogyny and answered with resistance, control, and exploitation.

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Learn more about pitching FFJ in our guidelines.

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“Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.” – Martin Luther

We’re calling for pitches for CELEBRATE, Feminist Food Journal’s ninth issue. Through the lens of food and gender, CELEBRATE encompasses celebration in its various definitions: “to take part in enjoyable activities in order to show that a particular occasion is important” and “to express administration or approval for something or someone.”

CELEBRATE is born from three sentiments we’re sitting with as 2025 unfolds:

First, there’s no denying that the current moment feels grim. From watching a genocide unfold in Palestine to witnessing the escalating impacts of global heating to staring down a four-year political apocalypse in the US, the ramifications of which are already reverberating across the world — it’s been a lot, and we’ve struggled with feeling hopeless. Yet, we need hope to keep working towards building the worlds we want to live in. And to have hope, we need to experience joy, to know that we still have things worth celebrating. We’ve chosen a verb as the theme for this issue to emphasize our agency and power in what can feel like a powerless time.

Second, we love a good celebration — and in our view, there’s nothing vapid about this. We have experienced so many potent moments around dinner tables, at dance clubs, in community spaces, and at family gatherings. These moments feel even more sacred in times when spaces for people with marginalized identities to experience them are under attack. Coming together in pleasurable forms, and celebrating oneself through pleasurable practices, is intentional and important, even if it’s not all there is to the work. (A recent Reductress headline, ‘Joy Is an Act of Resistance!’ Says White Woman Who Engages in No Other Acts of Resistance, highlights the insidious absurdity of self-indulgence without political organization.)

Third, we’re celebrating the fact that later this week, FFJ will be turning three — a milestone in the tumultuous world of online publishing and one that we couldn’t have made it to without your support.

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With CELEBRATE, we want to look at celebration — conviviality, commensality, the elevation of the everyday, and the reverence of the sacred — as a radical act: an act of self-care, of community-building, of political resistance. We’re curious about how to harness the power of celebration for wider change, but also how celebration makes a difference at a micro-level, including for how we feel at home in ourselves. At the same time, we want to know more about how celebrations can serve to demarcate differences and separate us from our communities or societies, or to distract us from the real work at hand.

In general, we’re looking for pitches that use the theme to make wider points about the culture and politics of the present day, covering topics like:

• The power and politics of dinner parties — conversations that have changed your life, for better or worse

• The gendered dynamics of celebrations — emotional labour, food labour, social labour

• Convivial commensality (i.e., the act of eating together in celebration) as a tool of political organization and resistance

• Convivial commensality (i.e., the act of eating together in celebration) as a tool of exclusion and oppression

• Being forced to celebrate a holiday, because you feel you should or someone is pressuring you

• Dynamics of family, culture, and identity through the lens of gathering for celebration

• The politics of joy, pleasure, and taking a break

• Untold, lesser-known, or misunderstood stories of cultural celebrations

• Untold, lesser-known, or misunderstood stories of people or foods that have been celebrated at some point in history (by wider society, certain communities, or just by you!)

• Anniversaries, birthdays, and rituals and why they matter (to society, or just to you!)

• Celebrations as self-care, investigations of self-care in an era of commodification

• Crazy parties (we are big fans of these)

• The intersection of club culture, food (Eisbar? Rave candy? Cake sitting?), and gender/power/sex

• Celebrations without food! What can we say about the absence?

• The aestheticization/Instagrammification of celebrations and celebratory food (cutting into a blue cake for a baby’s sex reveal party?)

• Interviews with DJs, party curators, or caterers

This rambling list of topics is, as always, just a starter. We are open to — in fact, ravenous for — other creative interpretations of the theme. Remember that celebration does not have to be the piece’s main focus; it can also be used as an entry point to explore other facets of politics and culture. However, all stories should incorporate a link to food and power in some way.

Not pitching, but still want to support our work? Become a premium subscriber now! Feminist Food Journal is turning three on February 15 and your support would be a generous gift.

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We publish stories in myriad mediums and formats: personal essay/memoir, long-form narrative, recipes, poetry, interviews, podcasts, videos, photography, and digital art works. In your pitch, please let us know what format you’re planning to work with and the piece’s approximate length (words if written, minutes if audio). Remember that a topic is not a story; your pitch should make the “so-what” of your idea clear.

For more information, you can find our full pitch guidelines here. We pay a flat rate of USD$130 per piece and $50 for shorter works/poems. As of February 2025, we have nearly 3,500 subscribers, and we put a lot of care and time into working with writers to find their voice.

Pitches will close at midnight CET on Friday, February 28th. Please send all pitches to pitch@feministfoodjournal.com, and make sure the subject line specifies that the email is a pitch for CELEBRATE.

If you know someone who might be interested in writing for us but didn’t receive this newsletter, please do pass it on!

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We were honoured that Feminist Food Journal (FFJ) was invited to ORFC as a media partner this year, and I’m so glad that I was able to make it to the conference in person. In the past, I’ve left conferences focused on “sustainable” development feeling drained, and frankly slightly cynical — but I left ORFC feeling quite the opposite. It was inspiring to attend an event that so integrally wove questions of gender equity, racial justice, and neurodivergence into its program — both in terms of session content and the support available for attendees.

I was also impressed by the exceptionally diverse array of professional backgrounds represented in the crowd at ORFC. Not only did I appreciate the conference’s commitment to bringing in a massive contingent of farmers, but I loved meeting journalists, chefs, academics, entrepreneurs, and more. Outside of FFJ, I’m in the third year of a PhD focused on inclusive food systems transitions and I do consulting work related to food policy and advocacy, so I was super excited about having the chance to connect with many people that I have only or mostly met online — including my beloved consulting clients Feedback Global, the ORFC dream team, and brilliant (and fun) food systems researchers at TABLE.

It made me beam from ear to ear to see FFJ’s logo printed on the back a programme carried in nearly 2000 sets of arms — clutched against chests as people hurried down the high street or set down on table tops while they fuelled up at cafés.

The conference takes place in venues disbursed around Oxford, which has the triple benefit of 1) keeping things exciting, 2) allowing you to get your steps in, and 3) acquainting you with the city. Zoë did her Master’s degree here and I loved imagining her running around to exams in her black robes and hat (people who study at Oxford actually do this!). Despite the chill, a shock for me coming from Barcelona, I found the city quite charming. Next year I’ll take more time to explore.2

The rest of this newsletter is a recap of the seven ORFC sessions I attended, including photos, audio recordings, and links to further resources. There were so many exciting things happening simultaneously that it was hard to choose which to attend, so I’ve also hyperlinked to a few sessions I didn’t make it to. That way, if they also sound interesting to you, you can find out more about the topic and speakers (if there’s no hyperlink, look them up in the programme for more information). And because it feels like there was just so much to say, this email is best read in a browser with the footnotes!

A perk for premium subscribers…

This summary newsletter is available to everyone but if any premium subscribers are interested in my full notes from any panels, please get in touch with me at isabela@feministfoodjournal.com and I will share them (I’ll do my best to make sense of my unintelligible scrawl). I would also be happy to schedule a more general food systems chat on Zoom!

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THURSDAY

MORNING

What I attended: Roots of Resistance: Farming in Palestine (Speakers: Lina Isma’il, George McAllister, Cathi Pawson / Chair: Muna Dajani)

This session was totally packed. I turned up right at the start time after filming a short interview with Jackie Turner from TABLE, and we couldn’t find seats! Jackie and I ended up watching the livestream first sitting on the ground in front of what we soon were told was a fire escape, and then, more respectably, from a quiet room for participants around the corner.

The panel centred around the stories of women farmers in the West Bank and Gaza, and looked at how for Palestinians, food is about more than just nutrients or availability — it is about connection to the land. The brutal conditions imposed by Israeli occupation and genocide have led to rising enthusiasm for agri-tech solutions that claim to improve efficiency (much like we see in the West in response to the climate crisis); however, these threaten to displace ancestral knowledge in Palestinian agriculture. The panellists discussed how, against this backdrop, there has been a resurgence in interest in food sovereignty among young Palestinians. While food is often missing conversations on what the “day after” the current genocide in Gaza looks like, whether the scales tip should tip towards “climate-smart” high-tech agriculture or agroecology is a critical part of them.

Further resources:

• What’s Next for Gaza’s Food Systems? Rooted Magazine, August 2024

• Zaytoun — ethically sourced foods from Palestine

What I wished I could have also attended: Rituals for the Land (Speakers: Manchán Magan, Angharad Wynne, Hop, Eddie Rixon / Chair: Rachel Fleming)

What I attended: Growing the Rainbow: LGBTQ+ Perspectives in Landwork (Speakers: Ali Taherzadeh, Umulkhayr Mohamed, Anna Barrett, Ben Andrews, Shane Holland / Chair: Vera Zakharov)

This session offered queer perspectives on land movements and farming in the UK. Its panellists included representatives from land alliances, Slow Food, and the head of the LGBTQ+ farmers’ network Agrespect, who spoke about the importance of re-establishing links between queer people and the land. Much of the discussion focused on how to reframe the countryside as a vibrant, tolerant place so that queer people aren’t forced to choose between living their full lives in a city or hiding their identities as farmers. Homophobia in rural spaces must be challenged through political education and advocacy movements, and interwoven with our struggles for a more sustainable food system: as Farmer Ben put it, “Why should people ‘buy British’ if they think the food’s origins are homophobic?”

When an audience member asked about how more queer people can gain access to the land, one panellist noted that there’s much room to innovate: much like queer perspectives have done for concepts like the nuclear family, people can look at forming co-ops, collectives, or working out of urban areas. “It’s about bringing radical ways of thinking into farming,” said Umulkhayr Mohamed. They noted that queer experiences of marginalization can help us to appreciate the marginalization of more-than-human beings in our ecosystems, and bring this appreciation into how we grow food.

Further resources:

• Agrespect: Promoting and supporting diversity in the countryside

What I wished I could have also attended: Disobedient and Convivial Approaches to Transformation (Speakers: Michel Pimbert, Sagari R Ramdas, Alejandro Argumedo, Nina Isabella Moeller, Grazia BorriniFeyerabend, Dee Woods / Chair: Colin Anderson)

and Cultured Meat — Gamechanger? Disruption? Or Just Hot Air? (Speakers: Jonty Brunyee, Andrew Court, Pat Thomas / Chair: Lisa Morgans)

and Farmworker struggles in Britain: Voices from the Frontline (Speakers: Catherine McAndrew, Valeria Ragni, Júlia Quecaño / Chair: Tara Wright) — but thankfully FFJ reader Anoushka Zoob Carter was there to summarize it instead:

This session aimed to inform attendees about the abuse of seasonal migrant workers in the UK agriculture sector. Júlia, who is from Bolivia, bravely presented her — and many other workers’ — mistreatment as a farm worker on a UK fruit farm called Haygrove in Herefordshire. Julia’s testimony, and those of many others across farms in the UK, is an indictment of the UK’s Seasonal Worker Visa scheme. Alongside 88 Latin American seasonal fruit pickers, Julia staged the UK’s first-ever wild strike by workers on seasonal visas, over wage theft, discrimination, racial abuse, and harassment. Julia is mobilizing under the slogan “justice is not seasonal: from the farm to the table, we are all free and equal”, and she and her comrades will be taking to the streets on the 25^th of January to mark the beginning of a campaign that will involve an Employment Tribunal claim.

AFTERNOON

What I attended: What does an anti-fascist farming movement look like? (Speakers: Alex Heffron, Tom Wakeford, Sagari R Ramdas / Chair: Sophia Doyle)

I have less cohesive takeaways from this session, as I ran into Jonathan Nunn from and was so excited to chat that I left my notebook in a bag across the room. But this panel did an excellent job of situating discussions around the food system in our wider, largely right-lurching political contexts. Panellists discussed recent calls for farmers to defend British farmland from immigration — including with this nauseating quote from UK TV commentator turned Conservative-farming icon Jeremy Clarkson — and the links between fascism and farming, including the birth of organicism and its origins in conceptions of racial and corporeal purity.

Sagari R Ramdas critiqued the world’s largest experiment with agroecology in Andhra Pradesh, India. Despite the veneer of progress it suggests, Ramdas says that at its core, the agroecology program is a mechanism of fascist Hindu state control to perpetuate caste inequalities, including (in)access to land. In her view, any “sustainable” solution that leaves Brahminical-patriarchal capitalism untouched is not a true solution — and food must be at the core of any anti-caste movement, given that unequal land access and dietary norms are both key ways that caste inequalities manifest.3

Somewhat tangentially to the panel but vital to the overarching theme, an audience member noted how the so-called “green transition” in the Global North itself often imposes great injustice on people in the Global South, highlighting the bloodshed, land-grabbing, and labour violations resulting from mining in Africa to make batteries in electric cars.

Further resources:

• A Little Book of Legacies: Organicism and Fascism in the UK

• Ramdas, S. R., & Pimbert, M. P. (2024). A cog in the capitalist wheel: co-opting agroecology in South India. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 51(5), 1251–1273. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2024.2310739

FRIDAY

MORNING

What I attended: Smash Imperialism! For A New Trade Framework Based on Solidarity (Speakers: Anuka De Silva, Edu H. Nualart, Carson Kiburo, Sophia Doyle / Chair: Alex Heffron)

This session focused on how free-trade agreements perpetuate neocolonial forms of extraction, dispossession, and violence and recreate imperial relationships between the Global North and South — a “death-bringing colonialist system” with food at its core. I wanted to attend it as I recently wrote a comprehensive report on this topic for Feedback EU: ‘Trading Away the Future? How the EU’s agri-food policy is at odds with sustainability goals’, which looks at how trade in commodities like soy encourages the growth of a climate-wrecking livestock herd in Europe while enabling deforestation, land-grabbing, and the use of dangerous agri-chemicals in origin countries. These injustices have gendered impacts, given women’s unequal exposure to pesticides, specific reproductive health risks, traditional dependence on forest resources and more precarious access to land and capital.

Speakers on this panel included a woman farmer from Sri Lanka and a Maasai lawyer from Kenya, who shared how trade frameworks have impacted their communities by forcing unwanted products on them or disabling their traditionally pastoral ways of life. A representative from Slow Food spoke about reforming World Trade Organization ruling and frameworks to avoid perpetuating these harms.

Something I loved at ORFC2025 — perhaps inherent in the interdisciplinary nature of food systems work — was the unexpected twists and turns many panels took. In this one, we spent quite a bit of time discussing language. Why is it that migrant farm workers in Europe are not referred to as farmers, despite the fact they work the land and hold valuable knowledge about doing so?4 Why do we call ourselves the “alternative” farming movement, when in fact, we could take a leaf from the conference’s book and brand ourselves as the “real” farming movement? Would that help to legitimize and emphasize agroecology — or rather detract from momentum by erasing the movement’s radical, “outsider” position?

Speaker Sophia Doyle also made some fascinating points on how the agroecology movement, by articulating its demands through the language of citizenship and bureaucracy of the state, is reinforcing and legitimizing the hegemony of racist-neocolonial state power (at whose borders in Europe, for example, an average of five migrants die every day).5

Further resources:

• ‘Trading Away the Future? How the EU’s agri-food policy is at odds with sustainability goals’, Feedback EU (researched and written by me!)

What I wished I could have also attended: Radical Honesty in Action: Paving the Way for Food and Racial Justice (Speakers: Roshni Shah, Nicola Scott, Dawn Dublin / Chair: Idman Abdurahaman)

What I attended: Eating and Shaping the World: Writing New Narratives (Facilitators: Carmen Posada Monroy, Charlotte Dufour)

This workshop was an interactive session focused on creating new narratives for understanding, conceiving, and reshaping food systems. As co-facilitator Carmen Posa Monroy noted, “narratives shape the world”, and define how we should feed it — something we think about a lot at FFJ. How can we use narratives to define what is normal, and to move that normal away from heavily industrialized agriculture?

To guide us through our thinking on this, the facilitators had us choose one part of our more-than-human ecological web to focus on; my group chose wheat. We then were tasked with writing “letters of gratitude” to our being of choice, and finding common ground in our letters to craft a narrative using prompts from the “Eating and Shaping the World — Conscious Food Systems Guide.” While my group got productively sidetracked introducing ourselves, our work, and our dietary intolerances, I managed to get a few sentences down. It is more a reflection on the ubiquity of wheat as bread, how it’s just always there, and how despite my stereotypical pandemic-era obsession with sourdough, I don’t often stop to appreciate it:

As a group, we agreed that our new narrative on wheat would focus on repairing our relationship with it, done in three catchy steps: apologize, democratize, idolize. We must first apologize to wheat for altering its molecular structure without its consent, as well as repair the harms done to Indigenous and Global South communities in the name of wheat monocultures; we must then bring bread back to the people (not just yuppies like me baking sourdough for two months) through the simplicity of its ingredients, and finally, we must also recenter wheat in our celebrations. After all, what is conviviality without the breaking of bread? If we’d had enough time, I would’ve loved to translate this three-step program into a short poem or story.

Further resources:

• Eating and Shaping the World — Conscious Food Systems Guide, convened by UNDP

AFTERNOON

What I attended: The Rise of the Planet of the Chicken (Speaker: Diane Purkiss / Chair: Tamsin Blaxter)

Chaired by TABLE’s Tamsin Blaxter (who wrote an excellent piece for our MEAT issue), this might have just been my favourite session of the conference. Food historian and literature professor Diane Purkiss had the audience enraptured — I wish I could sit in one of her lectures — by an anecdote about a childhood pet chicken who never recovered from having her eggs harvested. She then narrated a fascinating history of how chicken went from a “weekend treat” to a profane weekday meal in the course of just a few decades. She also highlighted that white “breast” meat has long been seen as something “for” women, perhaps due to the now outdated and inaccurate myth that breast meat is lean (in actuality, she says that breast meat has become 150% fattier since World War II). I scrambled to record Purkiss’ answer to an audience question on the gendered dimensions of chicken-eating, which you can listen to here:

A really interesting part of this conversation was Purkiss’ argument that while we may feel powerless in the face of the seemingly entrenched industrial food system, food cultures can actually change very fast (as the broiler chicken boom evidences). In Purkiss’ words: “That is both a bad and a hopeful thing.”6

Though it is not directly related to chicken, I was fascinated by Purkiss’ recounting of the trials of recreating recipes from antiquity and the Middle Ages. At the time, instructions were barebones (to say the least: she recounted one instruction along the lines of “take a goose and add flour, enough”) and most of our contemporary ingredients have radically changed (including flour, which has far more protein content today than it did in Shakespeare’s times).

Further resources:

• English Food: A People’s History by Dianne Purkiss

What I attended: Transition to Agroecology — What Role Does Ecocide Law Play (Speakers: Jojo Mehta, Martin Lines, Rob Percival / Chair: Sarah Langford)

I’ll be honest here — by this point, my attention was flagging. Tamsin from TABLE and I had tried to attend a session on the sentience of insects and what this means for the future of food (Tamsin has done some amazing work on animal welfare and ethics) but it was too full by the time we arrived from her Planet Chicken panel. Instead, we managed to get into this one about 10 minutes late. Panelists Jojo Mehta, Martin Lines, and Rob Percival discussed the possibilities of a new ecocide law put to the International Criminal Court, whose draft wording reads:

This pioneering international law is not designed to catch every environmental harm everywhere but rather to define the parameters by which ecocide can be understood and to promote the use of national laws to prosecute it.7 While organizations involved expected that they’d need to campaign aggressively to receive public buy-in, a recent survey found that 72% of people in G20 countries believe that ecocide should be a crime.

Thanks to an audience question, I learned that criminal laws — including this one proposed on ecocide — are purposefully worded vaguely so that crimes can be situated in context and to limit loopholes. In the words of Mehta, “If someone attacked me, their crime wouldn’t be conditional on the amount of bruises that I have”; similarly, using terms like “widespread” and “long-term” harm ensures that perpetrators can’t get off the hook for polluting 17 kilometres of a river rather than 18.

The same audience member who noted in the fascism session on Thursday that green transitions are also embedded with forms of neocolonial extraction raised the point again and also highlighted how speakers from the Global South were underrepresented at the event. This was completely true and is both a symptom of geographic location8 and the power inequalities that remain very much present in food systems decision-making. (Hence why I wish I could’ve attended the session on racial justice in food systems change!)

Further resources:

• www.stopecocide.earth

• https://ecocidelaw.com/

What I wish I could have also attended: What Might Insect Sentience Mean for the Future of Agroecology? (Speakers: Andrew Crump, Vicki Hird, Cristina Amaro da Costa . Chair: Natacha Rossi, Beth Nicholls)

As mentioned, the session was sadly full — so I’ve made do with this article published last week in the New Yorker. A lot to think about there.

That’s all for now! Get in touch (by email or comment) if you’d like to discuss any of these topics further, or have any questions about the conference. As mentioned, I’d be happy to organize a call with any premium subscribers.

— IJbV

In Wedu’s words:

Read RICE now

What is RICE?

In 2024, we were contracted by Wedu, an organization focused on empowering women leaders, to teach storytelling skills and help produce a zine for the 2024 U.S.-ASEAN Women’s Leadership Academy for YSEALI.

The YSEALI academy has a different theme each year, and the 2024 edition was focused on food security. Around 60 women food security leaders from across the region1 participated. These women hailed from a variety of professional backgrounds, ranging from plant scientists and marketing analysts to food business owners and farmers. Most participants had no prior journalism experience.

The zine was one of the academy’s key outputs, and Wedu had the great idea for it to focus on rice — a staple food in the region whose production, distribution, and consumption are deeply entangled with politics and culture. Our goals for this project were twofold: 1) to create a compelling and engaging zine that captured some of the complex food security issues being discussed by participants during the academy, and 2) to support participants in learning journalism skills they could take back to their day jobs once the program ended.

The project took place both online and in person. We kicked things off with a series of online workshops:

1. Workshop 1 — Ideation and formats: How to come up with story ideas and translate them into different formats (e.g., reported piece, personal essay, op-ed)

2. Workshop 2 — Research and interviewing: How to determine credible sources of information, keep track of research, conduct solid interviews, and make use of feminist research methodologies and epistemologies

3. Workshop 3 — Storytelling: How to use narrative techniques and devices to make a story come to life

From these workshops, we created “cheat sheets” highlighting key information, including a bonus edition on pitching stories to magazine editors, as resources participants can refer back to as they continue to practice these skills.2

In between the workshops, participants worked in teams to produce story drafts for the eventual zine. Each team used rice as a lens to investigate a different area of the food system, including rice farming; marketing, distribution and transportation, and consumption and food waste disposal.

Read RICE now

In April, we travelled to Manila for the in-person YSEALI Leadership Academy week to workshop the drafts and facilitate a practice round of pitching stories to a wider audience (we wrote in-depth about that experience here.) The story drafts that participants shared were moving and accomplished — one pitch left many of us in tears.

After our trip to Manila, we got to work curating the final zine. RICE features 10 of the 16 stories originally submitted by YSEALI participants. We wanted the process to be participatory from start to finish, so the article drafts were first edited by a group of YSEALI volunteers, who then received feedback and support from FFJ. In the editing process, we strove to let writers’ unique voices — and their lived experience and professional expertise — shine through as much as possible.

Read RICE now

After that, we turned the drafts over to the Wedu team for design and approval. The zine was designed externally by Anna Denardin; FFJ co-founder Zoë Johnson contributed to the cover imagery.

What next?

Working on the zine was an absolute joy; we were honoured to help participants find their voices on the page, especially those who hadn’t had many chances to write for an external audience.

We would love to do more consulting work on feminist storytelling, either for individuals or organizations. We’re skilled at building both stand-alone stories and cohesive magazine issues, and we are passionate about storytelling in both writing and podcast formats. If you know anyone interested who might be interested in these services, please send them our way.

Also, this experience reminded us that we love doing editing work outside of FFJ! If you are interested in having us edit something — for a newsletter, blog, zine, podcast, etc — get in touch to discuss our rates.

Check out the zine!

We’re sharing the Letter from the Editors from the zine and its table of contents below but you can also check out the full zine here, and consider donating to Wedu to fund their incredible programming on gender equity in leadership.

Read RICE now

Read RICE now

We’d like to extend one heartfelt, final thanks to Wedu for choosing us to work on this project — we couldn’t have dreamt up a more perfect collaboration.

Over and out! We’ll be back in two weeks with our next BODY essay.

Isabela & Zoë

REMINDER: The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) 2025 is starting in just two days! You can still get an online ticket, which gives you access to an amazing array of online discussions focused on the future of food and food justice. Online tickets start at £35 for a general ticket; farmer and subsidized tickets are available for £25 and £15. Bursary tickets are free to all delegates from majority world countries and to all who would not otherwise be able to attend — no application required. Get your ticket here. We’ll be attending in person!

A reminder that premium FFJ subscriptions are 20% off (just US$24, or $2 per month) for the holiday season! Most of this newsletter is for premium subscribers only, so whether you’re looking to gift FFJ to a friend, or simply to upgrade yourself, now is an excellent time.

20% OFF FJJ

Until the end of the year, all premium subscriptions come with a personalized holiday card and illustration that we’ll send by email. A premium subscription also gets you access to audio versions of many stories (here’s a taster) as well as BTS content and membership to our Feminist Food Club, a series of online meet-ups launching in 2025.

Isabela here from FFJ! It’s time for our biannual resource round-up. But first, one last attempt at a sales pitch (sorry):

The crux of this newsletter, a resource round-up from our recent pool of writers, is for premium subscribers only. If you’ve been paying attention so far (and no hard feelings if you have not — my eyeballs are personally fried for the year), you’ll have seen the plug at the top advertising the fact that premium FFJ subscriptions are just US$2 a month/US$24 a year and we really need your support to keep going and yes, every single newsletter is saying this and we know nobody has much money including us but we’re trying anyway ok I’ll stop.

In more chill news (if you know me in real life, you’ll have a good cluck at this, because I haven’t been chill since the day I came shooting into this world), we wanted to look back on 2024 over here at FFQ HQ.1 And because we’re extremely creative but somewhat slow, we’re doing it in the form of Spotify Wrapped, which everyone was sharing over two weeks ago. Surprise!

2024 FFJ WRAPPED

• 2 new magazine issues released

• 23 newsletters published

• 6 audio stories recorded for premium subscribers

• 365 pitches received

• 5 journalism training sessions and fever dream trip to Manila delivered

• 936 new free subscriptions

• 4 more premium subscriptions

• 5 collaborations with other organizations and newsletters (Famerama, TABLE, Beurrage, AnthroDish, ORFC 2025, and shelf offering) published

• 13 original illustrations drawn

• Most liked story: Bottomless by Shena Cavallo

• Longest piece: The Labour of Lunch, an interview on school food politics with Jennifer E. Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert

• Shortest piece(s): poetry by Taylor Hunsberger, A.J. Parker, and Natasha Matsaert

• 268 combined hours of editing

• 564 emails opening with “we hope this email finds you well”

• 3 joyful months spent together at home in Vancouver

• 5 chaotic weeks spent together in Berlin

• 23 hours of voice notes sent to each other on WhatsApp when apart (13 hours of which is us apologizing for having sent such long voice notes)

What FFJ stories stood out to you from this year? What do you want to see more or less of? We’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email (hello@feministfoodjournal.com).

Numbers aside, it truly was a great year for us at FFJ

Our premium subscriber count may barely have moved, but like has said, metrics aren’t it. We finished last year having just launched our merch store, which offered our first-ever print magazine edition; we remain so proud of these products and the fact that we’ve built a back catalogue worthy of capturing on paper. And we’re beyond honoured to have nearly 3,100 of you subscribed.

This year, we finished SEA, published MEAT, and started BODY. We had the chance to be interviewed by one of our favourite food systems podcasts (hopefully coming out soon) and again by one of our favourite food writers. We published so many stories that made our hearts beat faster and learned a lot about new topics on the way.

We joined Big Feelings, a community of other food writers on Substack led by and that immediately felt like home. We were contracted by Wedu Global to lead journalism training and the creation of a magazine focused on gender and rice with a cohort of food security leaders from Southeast Asia, and had the chance to travel to Manila to meet these incredible women in person.

Luck had it that we were both in Vancouver while we worked on the Wedu project, which meant that although we had to give webinars from 3-5 am PST, we also got to work together in-person and get fed by our benevolent parents while doing so. Not to get too sappy here, but our relationship as founders is a huge driver of our dedication to FFJ, particularly in those moments when we’re wondering if our work has enough impact to merit the sweat and time we put in. I learn so much from working with Zoë and I’m proud of we’ve evolved as editors, writers, illustrators (in Z’s case, most definitely not mine), and business owners (although you wouldn’t have known it from how badly I freaked out during tax season).

FFJ will be turning three soon, and we’re still having the time of our lives. Now it’s time to rest and recuperate over the holiday season, so we can hit the ground running in the new year (attending ORFC 2025 and launching our new Feminist Food Club!). We’ll also be back in January with new BODY essays that we can’t wait to share.

FFJ Recommends: books, podcast, movies and more

Here are FFJ’s recommendations for vegging out on the sofa, whether you’re in the mood to pick up a book, your AirPods, or the remote. We’ve done something a bit different for this edition of FFJ Recommends: crowdsourcing recommendations from writers who have written for us in the last year or so.

We have suggestions from Annie Dabb, Megumi Kowai of , Mwinji Nakamba Siame, Clare Michaud of , Taylor Hunsberger, Shena Cavallo, Amelia Cookson, and Zoya Naaz Rehman. They have curated diverse and fascinating recommendations: feminist Japanese poetry, Zambian fiction, “slutty chef” content, activist cookbooks, climate essays, and much more.

Reminder: our recommendations as co-founders are available to everyone, but if you’d like to check out the rest of the list, premium FFJ subscriptions are currently 20% off.

20% OFF FJJ

Zoë Johnson, FFJ co-founder

• Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon — I stumbled across this book when looking for inspiration for our RICE zine project and was completly entranced by the beautiful way recipes are used in telling this heartbreaking story.

• Can I microdose veganism? from — I think I reccomend something from this podcast almost every time we put together one of these lists (sorry I’m so predictable) but this episode came out shorlty after we sent our Letter from the Editors for our MEAT issue so the topic was very top of mind when I first listened. As a vegetarian and wanna-be-vegan, I was particularly intrigued by Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey’s argument that if you care about animals, “you're better off eating beef than you are eating eggs and dairy”. Warning: the first part of the podcast about throwing turkeys out of planes is pretty hard to listen to.

• Ridiculously Easy Focaccia: This recipe was shared with me by a family friend last December and it’s been the recipe of 2024. It really is ridiculously easy and I’ve yet to have a batch not turn out delicious. I’ve made it for big crowds (for both a 30th and a 60th birthday party), as a housewarming gift (does anyone else love giving bread and salt?), and for countless less remarkable breakfasts, lunches, and dinners at home. If I have it, I throw in a bit of sourdough starter and reduce the amount of yeast and usually skip the butter, opting to grease the pans with olive oil instead.

Isabela Bonnevera, FFJ co-founder

• Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller — an August birthday gift that I’m just diving into now. Already obsessed with the chronology of evil twinks and tops across history, as well as a historical analysis of how we developed sexuality into identities that defines us.

• The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood — read as inspo for our BODY issue and even more prescient given the recent US election results and regression of women’s bodily autonomy in some parts of the world.

• Whale Politics and Offal Conundrums — shamelessly promoting my own work! But I’m really proud of these two podcasts, which I recorded for FFJ in 2024.

Annie Dabb, author of “British Beef vs. French Foppery” (MEAT)

Behind the Bastards: Hosted by Robert Evans, this podcast looks at various “villains” in different contexts: historical, cultural, political and etc and basically makes fun of them. It’s very explicitly left wing so perhaps I enjoy it so much because it’s just a bit vindicating, but it’s a great way to learn more about different figures and trends and the conversations are pretty funny.

Rehash: Hannah and Maia’s podcast looks at internet culture in various capacities in order to “rehash” certain topics that they think deserve a revisiting. Covering things like “ballet core” and “gymcels”, as well as a series specifically about sex culture in online spaces, this podcast just feels like listening to your mates have a chat about something you’d love to learn more about but maybe haven’t had the time to verify your sources or do your own research. Maia and Hannah are super funny and chatty and really well-informed about online culture!

Cunk on Earth: Presented by actor Diane Morgan, who’s also starred in Motherland as a young wine-drinking single mum, and as the leading eponymous role in Mandy, Cunk On Earth is a non-chronological mockumentary series which is explores different aspects of British history and culture. In each episode she asks hilarious questions to confused academics with a deadpan expression and covers topics like William Shakespeare or the Renaissance and it is genuinely laugh out loud funny.

Han Kang, The Vegetarian: Simultaneously one of the most visceral and traumatising novels I’ve ever read and also one of the most brilliant. I re read this novel this year after first picking it up ten years ago after reading Kang’s latest ‘Greek Lessons’. It had even more of a gutteral impact on me than it did the first time. The Vegetarian follows the story of Seong-Hye who decides to stop eating first meat and eventually everything. The prose is fluid and uncomfortable, with a deeply disturbing insight into Seong-Hye’s psyche, caught in a battle between familial convenience/subservience and true desire/morality. Definitely not an easy read but absolutely worth it.

, author of “Tender Seas” (SEA)

Reads

• My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? I love a good profile/first narrative from chefs — and this one in particular was a real stand out one. The ultimate doing what you love in a very critical sense

• I found the absolute OG Japanese feminist prose by Akiko Yosano. She was a part of the woman's magazine published in 1911 and for her to write something so beautiful and moving back then, is something I would love to share with everyone. (This translation is similar to the original — but it's only part of it.) The prose starts with "Women were the sun".

• My favorite British female chef: Slutty Chef. She wrote a piece on Instagram to speak up against the up and coming London restaurant Strakers Instagram post that indicated it to be “a white boy’s club.” She writes in British Vogue often and is a great laugh. If you follow her on Instagram, you can get a good idea of what it’s like to be a woman chef in a professional kitchen setting. This one also being culturally relevant commentary. As A Woman Cook, I’m Well And Truly Done With The Fetishisation Of “Chef Daddies”

• I've finally read Nora Ephron's Heartburn. As heard, it's the most delicious book ever. Filled with the most beautiful recipes. I remember I even cooked a hard boiled egg her way, and it felt like it tasted better. Books that are filled with personal recipes are my favorite.

Recipes

• I've been pretty obsessed with this super easy home made cereal by Molly Baz

• Also another heavy routine! Dad's Sunday brunch Salad by Eden Grinshpan’s cookbook Eating Out Loud is my routined salad, esp during the summer.

• This smashed pea toasts with ricotta from Cup of Jo is absolutely great. The best is that you can do it in 5 minutes

Mwinji Nakamba Siame, author of “To Speak in Two Tongues” (MEAT)

Perfect Marriage is a sometimes giddy and other times deeply reflective literary romance about the relationship between a man and woman that are opposites in their views on tradition and family. Though the story is culturally particular and the author speaks to a specific Zambian lineage in which women take pride of place as the conservators of relationship wisdom, the story still shimmers with universality and the writing with humanity.

, author of “Questioning Lumps” (BODY)

I recommend Human Flowers of Flesh (2022, dir. Helena Wittman). This is a visually stunning film, that, through drawing nuanced connections between body, spirit, water, land, time, and place, feminist and ecological questioning of the legacy of French colonialism unfolds.

Taylor Hunsberger, author of “Esophageal Yearning” (BODY)

The League of Kitchens is a wonderful organization that hosts cooking classes run by immigrant women right inside their own kitchens in NYC. They recently released a cookbook filled with recipes created by their instructors with intros about each of the women and their heritage. It's a really wonderful collection that I highly recommend, especially at a time of year that is dedicated to creating and fostering community.

Shena Cavallo, author of “Bottomless” (BODY)

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. I think it does a good job of balancing bodily horror with the quiet deterioration of a relationship and the heaviness of grief. It's also linked to climate issues in a way, because the lead characters are facing the challenges they face due to what is seemingly a desire to exploit the sea (and workers) to the max.

Amelia Cookson, author of “Fish farming and food colonialism” (SEA)

I recommend Ben Okri's book Tiger Work — it's a collection of poems, short stories and essays inspired by climate activism. I was lucky enough to hear Ben speak live at an event in London a few years ago and listening to him speak so poetically about some really emotionally challenging topics surrounding living in a time of climate breakdown gave me goosebumps which led me to buy the book. It's a beautiful little book which looks lovely on any shelves or coffee table which is always a win. But more importantly the poems and stories contained in this little book are deeply moving, motivating and thought provoking.

Zoya Naaz Rahman, author of “A Fistful of Salt” (SEA)

I really enjoyed this article by Sharanya Deepak. As with all of Sharanya Deepak’s work, this piece is a joy to read and flows like pure poetry. Love how she takes us through the phases of her life marked by different people and their cooking styles before she arrives at a sort of coming of age. Almost reminiscent of a food memoir.

Premium FFJ subscriptions are 20% off (just US$24, or $2 per month) for the holiday season! A premium subscription gets you access to audio versions of most of our stories (here’s a taster) as well as BTS content and membership to our Feminist Food Club, a series of online meet-ups launching in 2025. Whether you’re looking to gift FFJ to a friend, or simply to upgrade yourself, now is an excellent time.

20% OFF FJJ

2024 is winding down, which means that the 2025 Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) is soon approaching, and we can’t wait!

ORFC brings the alternative food and farming movement together every January, attracting farmers, growers, activists, policymakers and researchers from around the world. We were lucky enough to attend in 2023 and were blown away by the diversity and calibre of panels on offer. We also collaborated with the organizers on an essay about feminist agroecology which highlighted takeaways from the 2023 edition.

Join us at ORFC!

This year, we aren’t yet sure if we’ll be attending in-person (does anyone in Oxford want to host one of us for a night on January 9?!) or online, but that’s one of the great things about ORFC — they offer incredibly affordable online tickets, so that you can tune in from anywhere in the world.

Get your ORFC ticket

Online tickets start at £35 for a general ticket; farmer and subsidized tickets are available for £25 and £15. These tickets make an excellent holiday gift for any food-minded friends in your life (along, of course, with a premium subscription to FFJ).

Additionally, bursary tickets are free to all delegates from majority world countries and to all who would not otherwise be able to attend — no application required.

Delegates joining online will have access to more than 35 livestreamed sessions covering a wide array of topics from practical farm advice to food policy, land justice, Indigenous wisdom, and much more. Online delegates will also have the opportunity to directly interact with session speakers and other ORFC delegates, allowing for connections and community-building at the start of the New Year.

Programme highlights

There are a ton of sessions on offer at ORFC 2025, so we’ve curated a shortlist of panels that we’re particularly excited about:

• Roots of Resistance: Farming in Palestine

• Growing the Rainbow: LGBTQ+ Perspectives in Landwork

• Workers and Farmers United for the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty

• Rooting for Diversity: Cultivating Farms for Neurodiversity To Thrive

• Building an Alliance of Food Growers in Displacement

• From Ubuntu to Kapwa: Earth Wisdom and Regenerative Design in Food Systems

• Smash Imperialism! For a New Trade Framework Based on Solidarity!

• What Does an Anti-Fascist Farming Movement Look Like?

If you get an online or in-person ticket, let us know so we can make sure to link up one way or another.

There’s one big-ticket new perk this year. Soon, we’ll be launching an online feminist food club, where we’re planning to spotlight the work of community members in online meet-ups. These meet-ups will be for premium subscribers only, so if you’d like to join or know someone who would, don’t sleep on getting a subscription. You can find more details on the full FFJ for a Friend offer below.

GIFT FFJ NOW

WHAT’S THE OFFER?

FFJ for a Friend includes a discounted premium FFJ subscription and special holiday card. Until December 31, we’ll be offering 20% off our usual premium subscription price — going from US$30 to US$24 a year. This makes the monthly cost of a premium subscription just US$2.1 (See a list of premium subscriber benefits in ‘Why should I get it?” below.)

As part of the deal, we’ll be emailing all new premium subscribers with:

• A personalized thank-you card, accompanied by a special illustration from co-founder Zoë Johnson. We’ll also include a high-res version of the illustration that can be printed and framed!

• A rundown of all the perks that premium subscribers to FFJ can expect, including becoming a member of our new Feminist Food Club (see below for more details!)

• If the subscription was a gift — an acknowledgement of who bought it!

GIFT FFJ NOW

WHY SHOULD I GET IT?

FFJ for a Friend is not only a screaming deal but also a wonderful way to support independent feminist media — we rely on our premium subscribers to bring underrepresented global voices to the food media space. Along with knowing you’re helping to power FFJ, as a premium subscriber, you’ll get access to:

• NEW FOR 2025 — community meet-ups! We’re putting the final touches on the launch of our Feminist Food Club, where we’ll be hosting online events to spotlight the work of members in our community and exchange on topics related to food, gender, and power in real-time. These will be available for premium subscribers only.

• Audio versions of most magazine articles, read by the authors themselves and available on your usual podcast player. These add so much texture to our stories; we’ve just removed the paywall on this one by Zambian writer Mwinji Nakamba Siame so you can see what we mean.

• Exclusive behind-the-scenes content, which also often includes recipes and resource round-ups!

• Our WhatsApp group dedicated to feminist food topics and resources, moderated by one of our editors.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

First of all, click this link. If the subscription is for yourself, there’s no need to change anything. We’ll reach out after your purchase with your holiday card, and more information on other perks!

If you’re opting to gift a subscription, just click here, and select the “gift” option at the top. Substack also lets you choose what time and date you’d like your gift to be delivered to your recipient.

Shameless beg: If you’d like to give more than US$30 per year, you can select the “Best Friend of FFJ” option and insert any amount above US$30. This tier comes with additional perks, like a direct shoutout on our About Us page!

After that, all you need to do is reach out to us by email at hello@feministfoodjournal.com to let us know when you’d like us to send your recipient their personalized thank-you card, and if there’s any special information you’d like for us to include.

We hope to see many of you join our premium community in 2025!

With love and appreciation,

Isabela & Zoë

We have a few updates to share…

First: Thanks to everyone who supported our summer merch drop!

Our merch store will be closing in a just few hours — if there’s still something on your list, order now to avoid disappointment.

Second: We’re concluding our MEAT issue!

We will soon send our usual Letter from the Editors with our takeaways and thoughts. In the meantime, we’d love to hear yours: what did you like about and learn from MEAT? Which pieces stood out? What common themes came up? Leave us a comment or email us at hello@feministfoodjournal.com.

Third: We’ve put together a summer edition of FFJ Recommends!

While we meditate on MEAT, we wanted to share a summer edition of FFJ Recommends. It’s been a while — seven months in fact — since we last sent one and we have half of 2024’s worth of reading, listening, recipes, and more to share.

But before we start…

Some of this newsletter is available for everyone, but we have a special treat for our premium subscribers at the end. Zoë’s partner recently published his first book, and to celebrate, he hosted a magnificent party serving up five original summer cocktail recipes illustrated on a printed drink list by Zoë. We want to let you in on the ingredients so you can try them out yourself! We’re also going to share the cake recipe Isabela recently used for her fifth wedding anniversary party in Berlin…it’s probably becoming quite clear that we’ll seize any reason to throw a party.

Annual subscriptions are very affordable ($2.50 a month!) and we cannot run FFJ without the support of our readers. Please consider supporting us if you can.

Become a premium subscriber now

This summer, FFJ recommends…

FICTION

• Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki — the vivid descriptions of food will leave you drooling (Isabela ate plain rice with butter and soy sauce every day for a week after reading it).

• Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi — a moving tale of food, queerness, familial love and redemption across Nigeria, Canada, and Europe.

• The Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang — it’s a page-turner! Set in a dystopian future where smog has made the cultivation of food impossible in most of the world, this novel tells the story of a chef hired to work for an “elite research community” experimenting with the de-extinction of edible plant and animals. The Guardian calls it “a startling prose hymn to food and sex, love and violence”.

NON-FICTION

• Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala — Zoë gave this to Isabela for Christmas and serendipitously covered it in her book club earlier this year. A razor-sharp collection of essays on food and culture in Nigeria that doesn’t hand information to readers on a silver platter but rather requires one to engage, dig deeper, and navigate through potential culinary unfamiliarity.

• Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy by Arthur Evans — Isabela stumbled across an anarchist reprint of this seminal 1978 book at a book sale and found the historical connections between paganism, sex positivity, and queerness and their repression by Christian-industrial forces stunningly illuminating.

• Transforming School Food Politics around the World, edited by Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah Robert — this edited volume looks at how school food programs can be a vehicle for community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Excitingly, we will soon be featuring a longer interview with the editors to share their main findings! In the meantime, you can check out the accompanying curriculum guide or read the digital version of the book (which is open-access).

• The $16 Taco: Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification by Pascale Joassart-Marcelli — recommended to Isabela by an anonymous reviewer of her journal article forthcoming in Agriculture and Human Values. This book presents a wealth of empirical work on what the author terms “the contested food geographies of immigrants and people of colour” whose lives and labour form the backbone of urban food economies that they are increasingly excluded from.

• The Menopause Manifesto by Dr Jen Gunter — who Isabela, Zoë, and Zoë’s mum saw speak when we were all back in Vancouver earlier this year. Although we’re not nearing our menopause transition just yet, this was the first of Dr Gunter’s books to become available at the library — and it turned out to be a fascinating read for people of all ages.

PODCASTS

• Around the Table: Exploring the relationship between food, belonging, spirituality and social justice through dinner dialogues — a community-engaged research project and nine-part podcast series featuring conversations with community leaders from across Turtle Island about shared meals, dialogue, spirituality, and social justice. If you’re curious about the growing trend towards curating intentional dinner dialogues (in simple terms, bringing people together to talk over food!), this is an excellent listen.

• Novara FM: London’s Endless Appetite w/ Johnathan Nunn and Amardeep Sign Dhillon — a captivating discussion about the history of food and eating in London and the book London Feeds Itself, with its editor Jonathan Nunn (of Vittles fame) and a contributor, Amardeep Singh Dhillon.

• Fairwork Podcast Episode 007: Gorillas — a shameless plug for the podcast made by the team at Zoë’s new job. All the episodes are great but this one discusses work at the grocery delivery company, Gorillas.

RECIPES

Finally, as promised…

Read more

Our (self-declared) cult classic merch store is back for a limited time! Wherever you are in the world this Northern Hemisphere summer — sweating it out under the heat dome somewhere in North America or cowering under awnings to dodge the daily thunderstorms in Berlin — we’ve got a few things to keep you at least looking cool.

Take me to the shop!

If you missed out during our winter merch drop, now is your chance. It’s been such a treat for us to watch our merch travel the world (tomato hat at Victoria Falls! Oyster tee at Yosemite! Double-sided tote in Manila!) after our online store’s first life this winter, and we wanted to give the chance to many of you who said you wanted more.

So along with a chilled glass of white, may we recommend…

• Our best-selling tomato hat to keep your face from turning into one

• A statement oyster tee (which surprisingly many people feel the need to confirm: “Is that a vulva?”) or our “peachy cheeks” (but nobody ever asks if this is a bum?)

• A double-sided tote that, like a mullet, is one-part business, one-part party

• Stickers to adorn your water bottle (nothing says “stay hydrated” like this juicy set)

• Our classic apron to keep your bikini clean while grilling at a pool party

• Our print magazine aka the ultimate beach read, featuring gorgeous illustrations and highlights from our first four issues (MILK, WAR, SEX, EARTH)

We hope you’ll check it out. Send us an email hello@feministfoodjournal.com if you have any questions or special requests! But don’t wait too long…like Cinderella’s carriage, our store will be turning into a pumpkin at midnight about a month from now.

SHOP NOW

P.S. Don’t forget to send us pictures once your merch arrives!

What makes a story? How do you tell it? Who do you want to tell it to?

There are endless ways to tell a story, to spin words into worlds that you hope will stay with those who read them long after you’ve left them behind. So of course there are so many different stories we could tell you about working on the 10th U.S.-ASEAN Women’s Leadership Academy for the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI), a forum that brings together women leaders from Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. This year’s theme was food security, and we were brought on as a partner to help participants produce a digital zine about rice.

One version starts in July 2023, with an email that piqued our interest and a call that seemed too good to be true: did we want to take on a paid opportunity to work with women food security leaders on storytelling skills? Another began far longer ago: Two Vancouverites, strangers to each other, one trained in food systems and the other in journalism, both dabbling in global development work. After starting to work together at the same consulting firm, they quickly realized their shared passions for gender equity, community engagement, good food, and storytelling ran deep. FFJ was born. Several years later, through more serendipitous connections, they found themselves working on another dream project straddling these themes.

Whichever version of the story — opened with any of the ledes in the gif above — you choose, you’ll inevitably find us, jetlagged and downing free buffet coffees, in a bright hotel conference room in Manila. Having flown in from Berlin just half a day prior, we were jittery from a combination of caffeine, imposter syndrome, and the excitement of it all — after all, we were about to start a pitch competition for 64 (extremely impressive) women.

The women were familiar to us, as much as people can be from Zoom quadrants. We’d hosted three monthly online sessions since February, starting with the basics and guiding the WLA participants through the process of producing eventual story drafts for the zine.

• Ideation and formats: How to come up with story ideas and how to translate ideas into different formats (reported piece, personal essay, op-ed, etc.)

• Research & interviewing: How to determine credible sources, keep track of research, and conduct solid interviews

• Storytelling skills: How to use ledes, character, conflict, and place to make your story sing (and tailor it to your audience)

Because we were both at home in Vancouver at the start of this year, all three workshops ran from 3-5 am Pacific Time. It was a slot that, though painful, quickly morphed into an unexpectedly cherished ritual: we’d text each other “U up?” at 2:35 am and comment on how cold our extremities were in our respective living rooms, dark and ironically devoid of life. We genuinely enjoyed ourselves in all three workshops — and we hope we managed to look alive despite the hour — but crawling back into bed afterwards, only to wake later for a second time, made them feel like a dream.

It was similarly surreal to be in Manila. We ran into participants in the hotel elevator who recognized us right away, even though of course we couldn’t identify them yet since the webinars had been so packed. At first it was a tad uncomfortable, perhaps due to the aforementioned imposter syndrome and our profound awareness of global power dynamics. But after a few minutes of face-to-face time, all awkwardness melted away. This was a group of highly capable, highly engaged women, and they’d already had the first day of the conference to bond: all we needed to do was channel that energy into a structure worthy of their attention.

In the 36 hours before the workshop, as we flew across the globe, we’d been frantically reviewing participants’ story drafts. We had 16 pieces — and would be hearing 16 pitches — prepared by teams of four people, each focusing on a different part of the food systems cycle. Some teams were assigned climate change, others advertising, some food security and others on farming. Drafts touched on everything from new carbon sequestering technologies to using rice water as a baby formula in the wake of rising food prices to the Filipino practice of pagpag, foraging for discarded or expired food and reselling it into hygiene-poor meals for low-income communities.

We’re used to receiving pitches by email (as is standard practice in journalism), but for this workshop, we asked that pitches be given orally, both so that the women could practice their public-speaking skills and be able to hear about each other’s stories. After pitching, we held a vote and asked women to imagine: if they were the editors of this rice zine and could only commission three stories, which would they choose? We encouraged them to consider the same criteria we use at FFJ — the diversity of writers and their identities, a spread of topics that still offer productive resonances, and of course, the perceived quality of the stories on offer.

It was a rambunctious, buzzing 2.5 hours. So many pitches were impeccably delivered, with mesmerizing hooks and strong finishes that came in just as we called “TIME!”. Two stories emerged as clear crowd favourites, with stickers clustered on their sign, but participants also complimented and commented on many others. Afterwards, everyone conversed enthusiastically, took group photos, and exchanged contact information. We came away feeling like the workshop had been a success.

The workshop was the reason we came but in actuality, it ended up being just a small part of a meaningful trip. We had dinner with the amazing host organization Wedu and partner AGREA; we visited Duran Farm a few hours outside of Manila, and even found a spare hour to dash just us two to Binondo, the world’s oldest Chinatown. Founded in 1594, Binondo has a complex colonial history that we could only briefly absorb through succulent Shanghai-fried siopao and juicy, juicy mango from a street vendor that left us stereotypically sighing with delight.

Sleep deprivation was the theme of the week: since we’re usually spread between Barcelona and Berlin, being together was a treat on par with the Binondo snacks. Each evening, as it came time to wind down amid bold claims of unsurmountable fatigue, we stayed up gabbing late into the night. We even did the same into the wee hours of Friday morning, as our twilight goodbye loomed. Isabela’s alarm went off at 4:45 am for a flight to Seoul and Zoë graciously raised her head to offer parting words. It was a fever dream from start to finish and we’re so grateful to Wedu for bringing us on.

So there you have it: our Manila story. But, of course, this is just one perspective, centering, as stories tend to, what we saw from behind our own dazed and dry eyeballs. Each of the 64 women in attendance will have their own version of the story, which encapsulates far more than just FFJ. We hope they came away from the week as bursting with joy, inspiration, and energy as we did.

Our work on the zine continues. We will now start editing participants’ drafts and selecting stories for the final zine, to be hosted by Wedu with some tidbits shared here, too. Some participants will continue to work with us as volunteers on the final product, and we’re looking forward to getting to know them more deeply. What we love most about working on FFJ is being able to help writers — mostly women, and often from underrepresented communities — find their voice and effectively tell their story. It’s exciting to do this with a new pool of writers, for a different audience.

And just to put it out there: we’d love to take on more projects like this. If you have ideas of people, corporations, or organizations that might be interested in learning more about or getting support with, feminist storytelling, please send them our way. Beyond FFJ, we’re both experienced facilitators and independent consultants, and we want to further merge these skills with our editorial work in the future.

If you’d like to find out more about the YSEALI project, our inboxes are always open at hello@feministfoodjournal.com. Otherwise, we’ll be back with MEAT in our usual slot, two Tuesdays from now.

Happy birthday to us! Two years ago, we published MILK the day after Valentine’s Day — our romantic gift to our then-nascent community which covered milk from what felt like every angle imaginable. A few days later, we hosted an online launch party with live readings and Q&As with the authors (and threw a wild after-party in Berlin afterwards). Those were some of the most exciting weeks ever.

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The night that we published MILK, it dawned on us that we should make some “content” of the moment to share on social media, which has never been our forte (see the video below of Zoë struggling to open the celebratory pet nat and Isabela suddenly being overcome with the idea that it would explode like champagne).

We’ve since made peace with us not being Content Queens and instead channelling our energies into bringing you the most meaningful stories about gender, food, and power that we can. We’re so grateful for every writer who has worked with us over MILK, WAR, SEX, EARTH, CITY, SEA, and soon, MEAT. And we are grateful to you, our readers, for your support, comments, likes, emails, and in some cases, friendship.

Actions speak louder than words, of course, so we’d like to demonstrate this gratitude by having a birthday sale. This week only, we’re offering premium subscriptions (for you or a friend) at 50% off. That means that a year of FFJ Premium is just US$22.50 a year on annual plans or $2.50 a month on monthly ones — less than the cost of a bad cup of coffee, or the equivalent of 25 ten-cent candies from the convenience store, which we remain quite partial to even as adults.

REDEEM BIRTHDAY OFFER NOW

What do you get as a premium subscriber to FFJ?

• Warm, fuzzy feelings: if you love FFJ, this is a great way to show us your support.

• Access to our WhatsApp group for premium subscribers, which has a few other amazing food writers in it!

• Paywalled audio readings of most pieces we publish; some of our recent faves include “Tender Seas” and “Vera Town”.

• Bonus content! In the last six weeks alone, we’ve shared an interview with us and of , reading/listening/cooking recommendations for the new year, and a round-up of SEA ideas that we couldn’t commission, all for premium subscribers only. For our last issue, CITY, premium subscribers got access to three CITY-related recipes: sea spaghetti, orange marmalade, and lobster Cantonese-style, all accompanied by short essays. And we have much more bonus content planned for MEAT.

All of this to say — we’d be thrilled to have you join us in a more intimate capacity. Never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined taking FFJ from these little doodles next to Isabela’s permaculture notes (you can see why Zoë assumed the role of illustrator) in January 2021 to a publication with thousands of subscribers today. And it’s all thanks to you!

Shop Now

Maybe you got swept up in the inevitable chaos of the holiday season and forgot to place your order; maybe you’re a new subscriber and this is the first you’re hearing of our merch store, or maybe you already ordered some cool feminist swag and keep thinking about how you wish you had more — in any case, we’re here to tell you that now is your moment! Our much-loved FFJ merch store will be closing as of 23:59 CET on Sunday, January 28th.

We’re hoping to be back at some point with future drops of new exciting items around the holidays — but for now, this is your last chance to get your hands on some of the products we’ve had on offer for the last few months, from the stickers, hats, and t-shirts, to the wall art, aprons, and of course, our very special, first-ever print magazine edition of FFJ. (We’re especially proud of this last one.)

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We had so much fun designing these items and we’re grateful to everyone who bought something! We’ve seen tomato hats on the streets of Barcelona and Berlin, heard of oyster tees gifted in Joshua Tree, and sent our print magazine to coffee tables in London, the UK AND London, Ontario. If reaching both Londons isn’t the definition of success, we don’t know what is, and it’s warmed our hearts to know that FFJ was part of your holiday festivities in some way or another.

If you miss the closing deadline but need a special something, it will remain possible — though much less convenient — to buy select items from us via email after the store closes; please reach out to hello@feministfoodjournal.com if you have inquiries.

In the meantime, get those orders in before it’s too late!