The end of our autumn SPOTLIGHT column is upon us! We hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know some incredible change-makers working towards more feminist food systems. While our attention is now turning to the launch of our CELEBRATE issue, we’d love to do more work like this in the future, so please get in touch with us if you’d like to suggest an interviewee.

So far, we’ve featured:

• Damhee D. Hong (홍 담희) on culturally sensitive food studies methodologies

• Chiara Bergonzini on gender equity in urban food policy

• Ana Sarang (interviewed by Aysha Sana) on bringing women farmers into fair-trade supply chains

• Lama Obeid on her reporting on food culture under occupation in Palestine (this one is an audio interview!)

• And today, Naomi Robert on cutting-edge farming techniques with women and LGBTQ2+ farmers in a region affected by drought.

Naomi is a Senior Research Associate and Extension Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where she draws on her background in agricultural science and policy to bridge academic, practitioner, and community initiatives. She is also a PhD candidate (we share a phenomenal supervisor, Dr. Tammara Soma) and sessional instructor at Simon Fraser University, where her research and teaching focus on the impacts of neoliberalism in Canadian food and agriculture and how to centre equity and ecological integrity through economic reform.

As if she weren’t wearing enough hats already, Naomi is also a professional agrologist with the British Columbia Institute of Agrologists, co-chair of the Comox Valley Food Policy Council, and founder of Confluence Food Systems consulting. In late 2024, Naomi and her colleague Micheal Robinson launched the Pacific Coastal Dry Farming Collaborative, a farmer-focused research and extension project to build place-based climate change resilience through soil health.

In today’s multimedia interview, Naomi and I talk about the impetus for launching the project; the benefits and challenges of dry farming; how it’s going so far, and why working with women and LGBTQ2+ farmers is important for a more sustainable future. The interview starts with an audio reflection by Naomi on the impact of a changing climate on her local foodscapes, and concludes with reflections from Pacific Coastal Dry Farming Collaborative members on gender in agriculture. – Isabela

If you’ve enjoyed our SPOTLIGHT series, please consider supporting us as a premium subscriber.

Reflections on a changing foodscape by Naomi Robert

Isabela: Naomi, I’m so excited to talk to you about your work on dry farming. First, can you start by telling us how you got into this type of work?

I’m a Senior Research and Extension Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. We’re an applied research and extension unit that focuses on supporting regional food systems on “Canada’s” west coast. I live on the Unceded Traditional Territory of the K’ómoks First Nation, colonially known as the Comox Valley. For those familiar with the geography of the area, we’re about halfway up Vancouver Island, on its east coast.

My background is a mix of earth system science, agricultural sciences, and policy – food has always been at the centre. And, as many of us know, climate change is a real wild card for the food system. I’ve been increasingly interested in climate adaptation work in food and agriculture. Like many others, I believe that climate change adaptation work is place-based. What works in the Prairies, or the Mediterranean, will look different than the temperate rainforests of this west coast and vice versa. For those reasons, I’ve been increasingly interested in working in my own community. And in this context, the impacts of drought are being felt by farmers all over the Comox Valley. In 2023, we had a particularly acute summer drought here on the west coast and, anecdotally, I heard about some farmers’ wells or irrigation ponds running dry earlier than ever before. By late summer, the provincial government ordered about 45 forage producers to stop irrigating because low streamflow conditions were threatening fish populations.

During that summer, I spoke with a few farmers who were interested in whole farm approaches to drought resilience — what could be done above and beyond efficient irrigation that could drastically reduce the need for supplemental irrigation. There was also a strong interest in what was happening in other regions, like Oregon and California, who had relatively comparable climates but more experience with drought. From here, I connected with Oregon State University Dry Farming program, which has been working on collaborative dry farming (farming without supplemental irrigation) research in their communities for some time. They provided some helpful guidance on how they initiated their programming, and I started working with the local farmers institutes and intensively grant writing to start up some demonstration sites, or trial sites, locally where we could test some varieties, dry farming practices, and host peer-to-peer learning workshops.

Importantly, I also looped in my colleague Micheal (Mike) Robinson to co-direct the project. Mike is an agriculturalist who works in extension with new entrant farmers and farms himself on Vancouver Island. Our goal for this work was to collaborate with local farmers to trial dry farming in our region and build place-based knowledge for how this practice can support climate resilience in agriculture. Importantly, we know that there are farmers in our region who are dry farming, but understandably, rarely have the time to work extensively outside of their farms to do things like initiate a community of practice, or run a workshop series. We wanted to connect with local experience and develop peer-to-peer learning networks to increase regional capacity.

Isabela: I had never heard of dry farming before speaking to you about this project. Can you tell us what dry farming is, and why farmers are interested in it?

Dry farming as a term is somewhat problematic, or at least a misnomer. All plants need water to grow. However, dry farming aims to reduce reliance on supplemental irrigation by preserving soil moisture. This is achieved using a suite of practices, such as selecting drought-tolerant plant varieties, diligently managing weeds to reduce competition for soil moisture, spacing plants out more widely so they have a larger soil reservoir for themselves, introducing wind breaks to prevent water loss from transpiration, and mulching to suppress weeds.

Importantly, there is no “secret sauce” or formulaic approach to dry farming; the application of these practices and their relative importance will vary between farms. The goal for this collaborative research is to learn alongside farmers, deepen our shared knowledge of what practices work in the soils and climates of Vancouver Island, and strengthen our collective dry farming capacity.

We see dry farming as a tool for farmers to advance climate adaptation, which they can apply in a way that works for them. For example, in a situation where they have access to some irrigation water but not enough to reliably irrigate everything all season, perhaps some crops can be irrigated and some dry farmed. Other farmers may choose to entirely dry farm based on their site conditions and farm goals.

Isabela: How has climate change impacted weather patterns in the Comox area?

This region is a temperate rainforest. The majority of that rain falls in the winter months between October-April and summer have always been relatively dry. However, climate change is exacerbating this pattern, bringing hotter and drier summers. According to historical data, the region on Vancouver Island where I live would receive approximately 140mm of rain between the beginning of June and the end of August. This year our research weather station recorded approximately 70mm of rainfall over this summer period.

Temperatures are also increasing, and daytime highs above 30C, previously rare, are becoming more common during the growing season. It’s also important to note that melting snow in the mountains can be an important source of streamflow during the relatively hotter and drier summer months. However, snow is melting faster and earlier in the spring, which, in combination with higher temperatures and drier conditions, yields lower streamflow levels in the valleys where we grow food.

Isabela: Those are pretty significant changes. What have the impacts been on farmers in the region?

After the drought in the summer of 2023, we organized a regional dialogue session on drought where local farmers in the Comox Valley shared the scope and scale of drought impacts on their farms. Some of the major issues they noted were water shortages and crop and livestock health. Drought conditions were causing water shortages, yield declines, crop loss, and livestock reductions. Farmers conveyed that they were seeing noticeable decreases in yields and experiencing crop loss due to lack of irrigation water and low precipitation.

Farmers also said that the changing climate conditions were compromising their livelihoods, resulting in reduced revenue and increased production costs that put additional strain on farm businesses and farmer livelihoods. This was particularly true for livestock operations, as many needed to purchase off-farm feed. Many farmers who did not have sufficient access to water had to purchase water, often requiring additional storage infrastructure.

Finally, farmers saw their soil health deteriorate due to sustained hot and dry conditions. This compounded challenges for crop growth and soil moisture retention.

Farmers also noted that the changes spurred mental health challenges, as drought conditions increased the stress and anxiety farmers felt regarding the vulnerability of their livelihoods.

Although I primarily farm for my kids, I am currently dry farming because I couldn’t get a [ground] water license, which is a program relatively new to BC. We are on an ‘aquifer of concern’ and there are a few farms already drawing from the same ground water. Ground water runs out faster every year. One of the major rivers that farmers in our area depend on is also a river the salmon need for spawning. When the water runs low from irrigation use, the water warms to a point that it is too hot for the salmon. These trials aren’t just about our family or neighbouring farms, it’s for the ecosystem as a whole. – Jaclyn Kirby, Pacific Coastal Dry Farming Collaborative participant, Yellow Boot Farm, Comox Valley, BC

Isabela: How has the project been going? Is it proving fruitful?

This summer, my colleague Mike and I worked with three women farmers — Skye Larmour, Jaclyn Kirby, and Lisa Willott — to dry farm squash, tomatoes, and dry beans. Some farmers had been dry farming for several seasons; for others, it was their first time.

We learned so much this season alongside this incredible group of dedicated, knowledgeable and hard-working women. The farmers grew a significant amount of food without any supplemental irrigation, confirming that there are soils in our region with the capacity to dry farm. We installed soil moisture sensors at the beginning of the season at depths of one, two, three, and four feet. We used these to see how much moisture was in the soil and importantly how soil moisture changed throughout the season. While the top layer of soil dried out by mid-summer, I think the whole team was surprised by how much moisture was in the soil at depth. The plant roots were able to reach the lower depths to access moisture.

There was of course variation, both between sites and varieties. Some varieties seem to have performed better than others, and some sites seem to be more suitable for dry farming. We have a lot left to learn and this season raised so many questions about how to improve our systems. But still, by at large, I was quite surprised by how well these vegetables did without any supplemental irrigation. When we sampled some tomatoes during an end-of-season workshop, the whole group did that thing where you pitch forward suddenly to avoid having juice spill down your shirt. Even though we knew the plants were accessing water at depth, it still felt so surprising (and even a bit like a magic trick) to bite into a juicy tomato knowing they hadn’t been irrigated all season.

We have one season of trials and data under our belts, which in agricultural research is very little. But we have a team of inspiring farmers and I think we’re all feeling optimistic about what we can learn together, from each other, from the soil, and from data.

Isabela: I know that ensuring stability in this type of grassroots work can be tricky. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’re facing at the moment?

Securing funding is a perennial challenge for all of the research that we do, and this project is not an exception. I wrote six grants this past year to piece together the funds we needed to support farmers, research equipment, travel, seeds, staff time and workshop expenses. We’re extremely grateful that our two primary funders, the BC Ministry of Agriculture and the BC Centre for Agritech Innovation, saw value in supporting this work this year — but they, like others, have budgetary constraints and their capacity for ongoing support is uncertain at this time.

The value of this work increases the longer we’re able to do it. One year of agricultural research yields many more questions than it answers and really building our collective place-based understanding of dry farming can for this region and supporting peer-to-peer learning takes time. We need to secure funding that shares that long-term vision.

Naomi Robert is a Senior Research Associate and Extension Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, a PhD candidate and sessional instructor at Simon Fraser University, a Professional Agrologist with the British Columbia Institute of Agrologists, the co-chair of the Comox Valley Food Policy Council, and the founder of Confluence Food Systems consulting. She lives on the Unceded Traditional Territory of the K’ómoks First Nation, caretakers of the Land of Plenty since time immemorial. If you would like to engage further with her work, please check out the links at the end of this newsletter.

Currently, all of the farmers hosting trial sites for the Pacific Coastal Dry Farming Collaborative are women. Naomi asked them to share some reflections on how they understand the role of women in climate adaptation and food provisioning, and how their gender identities influence how they show up for this work. Here is what they said.

Lisa Willott, Farmfolk Cityfolk Seed Farm Hub Site, Sandown Centre for Regenerative Agriculture, North Saanich, BC

I think it’s both sad and uplifting that in the past 20 years of working on small-scale farms, those around me are predominantly women. It’s uplifting because usually the motivation behind wanting to work in food security or farming is based on an ethic of care and community responsibility, and working with anyone who shares these values feels meaningful to me. The part I don’t love about it, is that I think there are a lot more women who are willing to accept lower pay in order to do meaningful work, and because women still get paid less than their male counterparts in most careers, this normalizes lower wages and livelihoods. I hope that there will be a shift to valuing all people involved in taking on caretaking roles through their work in food sovereignty, agricultural climate adaptation and food provisioning.

Skye Larmour, Tardigrade Seeds, Salt Spring Island, BC

Women are unacknowledged leaders of an agricultural response to climate change. The nature of our climate crisis is neither technical nor structural; it’s about power and relationships. That makes women — and trans and non-binary folk — most capable of solving it.

I’m not surprised that the proportion of women farmers in Canada is increasing. A mentor of mine, a woman who won a top leadership award, told me once that she attributed her success to paying attention. That’s more than seeing and hearing. She listened between people’s words, processed information intellectually and emotionally and was broadly collaborative. She could articulate the needs, fears, hopes, and stressors of colleagues better than anyone. Her method was “applied relationships.” By paying attention, she created change in a system that resists it.

Women, trans, and non-binary folk are doing this. They’re quietly taking up the work that’s needed: an agricultural “revolution,” or, etymologically, the work of “rolling back” to a state of agriculture where relationship is fundamental.

I’m a transgender woman who has seen gender through the eyes of a man and a woman. Unlike the stereotype narrative, I was comfortable spending my first decades as a man. I inhabited male-dominated boardrooms and lived in “male culture.” Then I transitioned. I started paying attention. And preferred collaboration, not competition, as the first response to any problem. I glimpsed how both nature and nurture favour women for this challenge.

Climate change won’t be solved by high-level agreements litigated by mostly men. Answers will be nurtured by the powerful attention of women, trans, and non-binary folk.

Further links to Naomi Robert’s work:

Discussion papers and podcasts

• Robert, N., Gwun-Yeen Lennon, K., Mullinix, K. 2024. “Toward Ecologically, Economically, and Socially Beneficial Agricultural Technology Adoption in BC”. Richmond, British Columbia: Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, Kwantlen Polytechnic University. https://www.kpu.ca/science/isfs/agritech-policy-discussion

• Tatebe, K., N. Robert, R. Liu, A. dela Rosa, E. Wirsching, and K. Mullinix. Protection is Not Enough: Policy Precedents to Increase the Agricultural Use of BC’s Farmland. Richmond, British Columbia: Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, 2018. https://www.kpu.ca/science/isfs/agricultural-land-use-in-the-alr

• Handpicked: Stories from the Field: Season 3 Episode 6 - “Will the Pursuit of Limitless Growth Make Us Better Off?: Redefining Progress in the Canadian Food System Policy

Recent academic/peer-reviewed publications

• Robert, N., Soma, T., & Mullinix, K. (2025). Neoliberal growth vs food system democratization: narrative analysis of Canadian federal and civil society agri-food policy. Agriculture and Human Values, 42(2), 923–943. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-024-10647-3

• Robert, N., & Mullinix, K. (2022). Beyond GDP: Lessons for Redefining Progress in Canadian Food System Policy. Frontiers in Communication, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.762482

• Naomi Robert, & Kent Mullinix. (2018). Municipal Policy Enabling Regional Food Systems in British Columbia, Canada. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 8(B). https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2018.08B.003

Hello FFJ readers, and welcome to this edition of SPOTLIGHT — I’m Aysha Sana, an India-based food writer and researcher. Today, I’m teaming up with FFJ to feature an interview with Anuradha Sarang, the CEO of Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK), an organic farmers’ organization based in the Malabar region — part of the Western Ghats, one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots — in Kerala, India’s southwestern coastal state.

As a food studies scholar from the region and a frequent visitor to Kozhikode city’s Elements Organic Store and Cafe1 — the founder-promoter and trading partner of FTAK — I have been following FTAK’s work with great enthusiasm. I first connected with Anuradha in early 2024, when she was appointed as the CEO. We talked about the Fair Trade movement2 and various initiatives under FTAK, her new role, and possible avenues for collaboration.

FFJ’s SPOTLIGHT series was the perfect opportunity to speak with Anuradha more in depth about what the organization means for women and indigenous communities, and how trade justice is central to building an inclusive and equitable food system. In our interview, she reflects on the consequences of women’s alienation from the agricultural landscape and how bringing them back into leadership is crucial to undoing the many injustices embedded in the modern food system. – Aysha Sana

Aysha: Could you tell me a little about your own journey — what brought you into organizing around farming and food systems, and to Fair Trade Alliance Kerala (FTAK), where you now serve as its first CEO?

Anuradha: I trained as a civil engineer, but very early on, I chose to work in the development sector. I worked on ecological sanitation with Paul Calvert and with Indigenous communities in the Nilgiris, in the Western Ghats of India, at Keystone Foundation — a non-profit focused on livelihood security and food security, as well as land and community rights.

Later, for a big part of my career and life, I was part of Sarang3 in Palakkad, which was one of the first of its kind, whether in educational or agroecology experiments.

I have always considered myself an ally to smallholder farmers, who are at the core of sustainable food systems. Over the years, I have also served on the Managing Committee and the National Steering Committee of Organic Farming Association of India (OFAI) from 2010 to 2016, and was part of the Inter-Continental Network of Organic Farming Organizations (INOFO).

As a natural extension of my work and learning, I gravitated towards working directly with smallholder farmers. I find it exciting to work with and learn from not only farming families but also the fair trade supply chain, right down to the mindful consumer.

Aysha: For readers who may not be familiar with FTAK, could you share a bit about its origins, its vision, and the communities it works with?

Anuradha: Established in 2005, FTAK is an organization of smallholder farmers drawn from the hilly regions of the Western Ghats of Kerala, India. FTAK was born at a time when farming as an activity, and the peasantry as a social segment, were being relegated to the margins of society. Agrarian Kerala was then reeling under the double impact of a steep fall in commodity prices and crop failures. Agrarian debt mounted, and farmers were resorting to desperate measures, unable to cope.

A motley group of farmers — most of them representatives of mass peasant organizations fighting agrarian indebtedness and the devastating impact of neoliberal policies on the peasantry — came together on December 17, 2005, at the Elements Organic store and Cafe in Kozhikode, North Kerala, and formed FTAK.

FTAK’s mandate is to secure fair market access for its members’ farm products, using the enabling provisions of Fair Trade as a global movement for trade justice. Under Fair Trade principles, farmers are assured a fair price for their products, and sustainable farming ensures that agriculture protects and nurtures both the land and the workers.

Many of FTAK’s farmers reside within the Nilgiri Biosphere, a global biodiversity hotspot. The environmental sensitivity of our farming operations is critical for the future of a climate-challenged planet. Realizing this, as an organization we have been pursuing what we call the Fair Trade+3 mandate, focusing on three interconnected aspects of Fair Trade: biodiversity, food security, and gender justice.

Aysha: Women and indigenous communities form the core of FTAK’s members. Could you talk about how the roles they play in the food system have changed over time?

Anuradha: The southwestern coastal state of Kerala in India is known for its balanced homestead farm agroecological system. Pepper vines thrived in the homestead farms of the Malabar region, alongside probably a hundred other crops, each with immense nutritional, therapeutic, and nutraceutical value.

A homestead farm in Kerala was a veritable forest farm. In fact, it was a nuanced, evolved, and intricately engineered system whose nerve centre was the family kitchen. And the matriarch — the woman — was the dominant decision-maker: what grew, what was for the family’s consumption, what was to be stored for the rainy days, what was to be shared with neighbours, what was to be fed to animals, and what, if any, remained, the men could take to the market to earn cash returns. This forest farm, this treasure trove of biodiversity, this reservoir of food security, is what characterized farming — but is now a thing of the past.

What spoiled these dynamics? The market! The modern agricultural market, as we know it today.

Suddenly, the power equations in the homestead changed completely. In industrial agricultural production, women have little say in the affairs of the farm. The market dictates, and men are the mediators. A tangible assertion of women’s role in the smallholder farming economy cannot happen unless we recapture their position in managing the homestead farming system. The gender issue thus automatically becomes a biodiversity issue and a food security issue. Wars over food and water, higher tariffs, exploitation of human and natural resources, unfair trade, and so on — these are toxic masculine traits embedded in the food system.

Aysha: How are you working to address the barriers that women face in participating in a more equitable and inclusive food system? What challenges remain?

The ownership of farmland is considered the key eligibility criterion for membership in most farmer organizations in India. The organizational space of farmers’ collectives across the country — and in most parts of the world, no wonder — is still occupied predominantly by men. Patriarchal land ownership structures deny and hinder women’s agency in the management of the farm.

FTAK decided that it couldn’t wait for the larger structural changes related to land ownership for women to claim their rightful space in the organization. From its very inception, membership in FTAK has been open to any adult member of the farming family, irrespective of gender and land ownership status.

However, looking back at our initial years as an organization, we recognize that what we considered to be pathbreaking inclusive membership criteria has not ensured active participation of women. Further affirmative action, such as reserved positions in the Central Committee and the Governing Board for women, has only risen by a few notches above tokenism. We are aware of the serious gender imbalance in our organizational structure, and even more profoundly, in our organizational culture, and we are adopting various measures to bring about deeper gender balance.

For instance, with the aim of bringing more women to leadership roles, women now manage many of the produce collection stations. Another successful initiative of ours is the interest-free Fairtrade Premium Fund, through which women have been actively investing in and taking charge of their homesteads.

Aysha: Seed sharing and knowledge exchange have been central to FTAK’s work, including its flagship Seed Festival (SeedFest) event. What is the vision behind SeedFest, and what impact has it had?

Anuradha: FTAK has been hosting SeedFest under the overarching theme of Seed Swaraj (Sovereignty) since 2012. SeedFest has become an important part of the agrarian calendar of the Malabar region over the years, and it is well-attended by the sustainable farming community of Kerala, as well as seed savers across South India.

SeedFest emphasizes the message of trade justice, farmers’ rights over seeds, and the need for protection and preservation of indigenous varieties. It’s an occasion to exchange and buy indigenous seeds, acquaint themselves with the seed and crop diversity of the land, and get introduced to — and join — seed conservation efforts by organizations, groups, and individuals.

The event facilitates displaying, exchanging, and preserving all sorts of seeds, planting material, indigenous livestock, medicinal plants, and indigenous and wild trees. It is also a venue for discussions, where the community shares experiences and knowledge related to the preservation and propagation of indigenous seeds.

With SeedFest, we’re visualizing a plan for the near future — one that helps mitigate and repair the continuing damage to the delicate web of life on Earth, including finding ways to rebuild rural livelihoods. The festival is a place where rural and urban stakeholders can come together to make this plan a reality.

Aysha: The Western Ghats, where FTAK is based, are a vital ecological corridor but also a region under severe threat. How do these environmental challenges shape your work, and how does FTAK respond to them?

Anuradha: We are witnessing countless catastrophes — erratic weather patterns, natural disasters, depletion of soil, and disrupted social patterns — which could very well lead to the collapse of the world as we know it. For a grassroots organization like FTAK, working with farmers who are bound to be the first and worst hit, we must develop a counter-plan.

Components of this plan include: adoption of 100% organic farming systems; mapping boundaries between farms and forests; actions to understand soil health and nourish our depleted soils; training in ecologically sensitive farming techniques; and building a rapport with consumers to help elevate products like our Forest Coffee and Biodiversity Friendly Pepper.

Aysha: Looking ahead, what future do you imagine for small-scale farmers and for FTAK? And how can people who care about food justice and gender equity stand in solidarity with this work?

Anuradha: For small-scale farmers, the future will involve a complex mix of challenges and opportunities, influenced by climate change, technology, and evolving markets. While many will face pressure to adapt or exit the industry, leveraging new methods and networks will be essential for building sustainable and profitable livelihoods.

The future of smallholder farming — and efforts to make it a viable and dignified pursuit for the youth in the Global South — depends on institutionalizing three key income streams for crop-diverse homestead farms: ensuring fair prices for farm produce, monetizing the ecosystem services these farms provides, and recognizing the value of the topographical preservation they maintain. Achieving this will require policy-level interventions forced by coordinated peasant activism at a global scale.

As a grassroots-level organization, FTAK thus actively works to bring youth and women into farming, collectivize farming activities, restore soil health, preserve indigenous seeds and plantlings for future generations, and also adopt technology, like micro-weather stations, to face erratic climatic changes.

What you can do as an ally is to deliberate on your food choices. Zero in on choices that are healthy, safe, wholesome, environmentally sensitive, and considerate of those who grow, process, and distribute it.

Aysha: Is there anything else you would like to share with us?

Anuradha: The true cure for the challenges we are facing is care. Care deeply about the land, the people, and everything that makes up life around you, and take up any opportunity to act on it.

Interested in finding out more about products made by FTAK’s partner companies? Check out Pakka (Switzerland), Liberation (United Kingdom), Crowd Container (Switzerland), Ethiquable (France), Altra Mercato (Italy), Roellinger Epices (France), Equal Exchange (USA), TradeAid (New Zealand), Premsoul Biochai (Switzerland), DR Wakefield (United Kingdom), Amlachai (United Kingdom), and Halba (Switzerland).

Note: FFJ has not been sponsored to highlight these, nor is this an official endorsement of these products!

Dr. Aysha Sana is a researcher and writer whose work explores everyday politics of food—how food practices and narratives shape identity, belonging, and political expression. Aysha holds a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and serves on the board of the Indian Network of Food Studies, an interdisciplinary platform advancing food scholarship across India and South Asia.

Anuradha Sarang is the Chief Executive Officer of FTAK and is a community motivator, educator and writer. Before FTAK, Anuradha has been part of various grassroots level ecological organisations like Keystone Foundation. She has also served on the Managing Committee and National Steering Committee of Organic Farming Association of India and is part of global farming coalitions like Inter-Continental Network of Organic Farming Organizations (INOFO).

Chiara is a fellow PhD researcher and food governance aficionado whose work parallels some of my own research. While I examined how urban food policies engage with immigrant foodways, Chiara explored how they integrate gender equality objectives. Urban food policies are a relatively new phenomenon, and although they often claim to advance sustainable food systems, their approach to social justice remains under-explored.

In today’s interview, Chiara breaks down what happens when gender isn’t explicitly considered in policy-making — and how that omission can reinforce inequalities.

- Isabela

Isabela: Chiara, it’s so great to have the chance to talk about your work in greater detail; I always love listening to your conference presentations! We’re both interested in urban food policy, and your work focuses specifically on gender. How did you become interested in this topic?

Chiara: It was quite organic. I was working for an independent research center in Milan that focuses on transforming urban food systems. In the meantime, I came across Milan Gender Atlas, a book mapping various services around the city through the lens of gender equality.

I was so impressed. It underlined some aspects of daily life that I had never realized had such a strong connection to gender differences. For example, they mapped all the public transportation routes that are inaccessible with a stroller and argued that this impacts women much more than men because they are still very much in charge of care duties.

I started to make an effort to apply a similar perspective to the work I was doing. This helped me “train” my point of view; once you internalize this perspective, you see everything through this lens. At the same time I realized this approach was almost completely lacking from the urban food systems transformation discourse I was examining at work.

At the time, I was already considering pursuing a PhD, and I decided to apply by proposing a project focusing on this topic so that I could focus more deeply on it.

Isabela: For a journal article you published as part of your PhD, you looked at 20 urban food policies to see how gender was integrated into municipal food planning. Can you explain to readers what these policies do, and how gender perspectives were (or were not) integrated?

Chiara: I selected 20 of the world’s most well-known and regarded international urban food policies. In general, these policies aim to transform urban food systems towards greater sustainability (environmental, social and economic), while also addressing issues specific to the city.

For context, there’s a lot of research out there on gender inequality in the food system. Consumption behaviours, for example, are influenced by gender norms, with consuming meat often perceived as masculine and consuming vegetables as feminine. Differences also exist in what jobs men and women tend to do in the food chain: agriculture is perceived as more masculine, while working in the restaurant sector is more feminine (except at the top level of famous chefs).

Despite these known inequalities, only two urban food policies of the 20 I looked at — Barcelona and Zaragoza, Spain — included an explicit intention to reduce gender differences. And while these policies highlighted data showing that the cities’ food systems were not gender equal, there were very few proposals for action.

The other 18 policies fell into two camps. Some did not even mention gender differences; this could be because gender-disaggregated data is often lacking, and as a result, they remain invisible. Others only mentioned women’s experience of food systems in connection to their role in feeding households. This ultimately reduces women’s experiences in food systems to motherhood, and focuses on what women can do for others, rather than recognizing their own experiences as consumers, producers, workers, and people.

Isabela: What are the risks of these kinds of gender-blind policies? On the other hand, what can gender-progressive policies do to transform gender relations?

Chiara: Research on gender-blind public policies shows that failing to actively address gender inequalities risks reinforcing them.1 My previous example of urban food policies only accounting for women’s experience of food systems in relation to their role as mothers is a good representation of this risk. Culturally and historically, women have been disproportionately responsible for the reproductive labour of feeding households. Because of this, targeting women with food education initiatives and supporting their food intake while pregnant has a positive impact on population health and food security.

However, the very fact that most of these tasks fall on their shoulders, even as women’s participation in the labour market has increased, is one of the main gender issues in food systems. It means that women have to dedicate much of their free time to tasks such as grocery shopping, cooking, and trying to offer balanced diets to their households. Consequently, decision-makers can end up blaming them for children having poor nutrition, and assume that they should take on the burden of the family needing to “eat better”.

Many of the policies I analyzed framed the role of women in household and child nutrition as essential, without challenging the discriminatory and unequal division of this labour. A lone counterexample is New York City’s food policy, which explicitly states that both parents are responsible for the nutrition of their children. I’d like to see far more policies seeking to transform norms around food-related labour, by calling for actions that support co-responsibility.

Most policies also failed to consider other issues that women face in the food system during times of their lives when they are neither pregnant nor caring for their children. Women, for example, have a higher risk of eating disorders than men, and tend to work in more precarious food service jobs, but these issues went unaddressed.

Isabela: In the urban food policies that did mention gender, was it only in relation to women, or were efforts made to include the LGBTQ2+ community?

Chiara: Often, when policies mentioned “gender” as a sort of checklist item to consider (but then failed to elaborate), they also mentioned other dimensions of identity, mostly age (for example with policies specific for seniors or children) and migratory background. I do not recall any mention to LGBTQIA+ communities — although it was not my research focus, so I might have missed it.

I think interpreting gender differences in the limited sense of differences between women and men is often the first step towards a broader view that includes queer identities and sexualities. If anyone were to re-analyze these policies now through an LGBTQ2+ lens, I imagine you wouldn’t find much — these institutions just aren’t there yet. And in general, gender-disaggregated data collection techniques often overlook these nuances.

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Isabela: After doing your broader policy analysis, your research honed in on two specific case study cities, Milan and Barcelona, based on the fact that Milan’s policy was gender-blind and Barcelona’s had a gender equality-related objective. I understood you spoke to policy-makers in each city to understand if and how these policy differences played out on the ground. What did you find?

Chiara: Indeed, the City of Barcelona’s food policy lists “gender inequality” among the main challenges that must be tackled in Barcelona’s food system. Throughout the policy document, it includes other, more explicit goals, such as encouraging women’s participation in decision-making spaces related to the food policy and fostering female entrepreneurship in agroecological projects.

However, when it came to the policy’s impact, I did not find many differences related to the fact that Barcelona’s food policy had these gender-related goals. The policymakers I interviewed in Barcelona admitted that it has become somewhat expected to integrate a gender equality goal into public policies in Spain — but actually implementing it is another story. At least as of when I did my fieldwork in 2024, a strategy to implement these goals was lacking.

This could be considered as a spoiler of my PhD thesis that I am currently writing, but the most transformative actions in both cities tend to be the most grassroots — alternative food networks, including consumer groups, urban gardens, and agroecological cooperatives. These networks come into direct contact with communities, so they’re able to detect gender inequalities through experience, rather than because it is asked in a policy. For example, interviewees from several food aid distribution projects told me that most of the people who go to collect the food boxes are women, many of them immigrants. This observation suggests the need for intersectional programming that considers both reproductive labour and potential barriers that immigrants face to food access.

Since grassroots actors are well-positioned to identify these issues and trends, food policy actors should ensure there is space to dialogue with them, and seek to provide them with financial and logistical support wherever possible.

Isabela: You’ve clearly gleaned a ton of information from your analysis, and I heard that you’re now working on an analytical framework to account for gender in urban food systems change. What does this framework look like, and how do you hope it will be used?

Chiara: While doing my first gender analysis of urban food policies, I realized I did not know exactly what to look for or how to assess whether each policy integrated attention to gender in a comprehensive way. This is because no officially recognized framework lists all the elements that a policy should address to be fully gender-attentive.

In a recent academic article published with Francesca Donati, I did a deep-dive into Zaragoza, Barcelona and Valencia’s policies, as these are two that propose educational actions to raise awareness about gender equality. We created a framework based on what we found. It includes six main categories of gender discrimination: 1) access to assets, 2) access to agricultural markets, 3) access to technology and knowledge, 4) exposure to risks and resilience, 5) representation in decision-making, and 6) the division of reproductive labour.

Together, these cover all scales from global to local (and even the micro-scale of the household). We hope that people will use this framework to assess whether policies address each category of potential gender discrimination, and to identify policy areas that require special attention in terms of gender equality.

Isabela: Let’s zoom out a bit. I’m interested in how to navigate the tricky tensions that sometimes come up when doing fieldwork as a young researcher. Your presentation for AESOP, you mentioned that you struggled in some cases with pushback from interviewees who disagreed with the importance of gender mainstreaming in urban food policy. How did you navigate with this?

Chiara: When it comes to gender equality, unfortunately, many people are biased. There will be people — and I encountered them — who think that our cities are already gender-equal, or who dismiss the need for gender perspectives because the general perception is that food is available to women in Milan and Barcelona. I would always come to my interviews prepared with examples from the data demonstrating gender inequality in the food system, as a way of evidencing the importance of the research when people might discredit it. Doing this with data, rather than expressing my own personal views, made these issues harder to contest.

I also came across people who had simply never thought about gender differences in their own experience as actors in food systems transformation. However, this did not always mean that they disagreed with the premise. While some interviewees admitted to having never thought about it, they also expressed interest in applying this perspective in their work, and asked me for suggestions or examples of good practices to follow. In this way, the interviews also felt like a chance to spread the word among practitioners about gender differences in the food system — which to me is equally as important as my academic outputs.

Isabela: Speaking of gathering people’s personal views, in your presentation for AESOP, you mention how urban food policies are (at least partially) created by conducting participatory dialogues with residents. How representative are these dialogues of the general population? What influences the demographics of who participates?

Chiara: Food policies often involve participatory drafting processes — that is to say, processes that invite city residents to give input on food policy issues and solutions. However, the policy-makers and civil society representatives I spoke to all agreed that ensuring effective and meaningful citizen participation is very difficult, even if the organizations involved have good intentions.

Firstly, participating in policy development as a city resident requires investing one’s personal time and effort. For working people with inflexible schedules, or people who are also responsible for reproductive labour on top of their “regular” jobs, this means it may not be possible to engage. Also, these formal policy spaces can be intimidating for people who are’t used to them, particularly when there are technical background documents involved. Unless a targeted effort is made to include often-marginalized groups like youth, immigrants, and racialized communities, they may not have their voices heard.

Secondly, gender norms also influence participation. The topic of sustainable food systems is highly feminized; in the participatory process for Barcelona’s food policy, almost 80% of the 1,000 participants were women, reinforcing the potential for sustainable food systems change to add to the expectation that women shoulder responsibility for eating better and differently.

Finally, because participation requires people to dedicate their free time, facilitators often try to keep participatory sessions short. While this hopefully translates to making sessions more accessible, it means that they are often managed in a top-down, structured way, which can make it hard for everyone to feel heard or to deliberate ideas at length.

Isabela: You’re almost done with your PhD. What’s next for you?

Chiara: I hope to continue working in food systems research, spreading awareness about the importance of integrating gender into food policy, and further integrating an intersectional lens. My research has taught me that gender inequality is “never pure” (an expression I picked up from a 2020 report on gender in food systems; see pg.6). Most differences and inequalities that I encountered were based on gender, but also other characteristics, such as level of education, origin, socioeconomic situation, age…so yes, gender is a very influential variable, but it works with other dynamics, too, and I want to hone in on how these interact.

Isabela: Where can readers learn more about your work?

Chiara: My Google Scholar is usually up-to-date, but some of my papers are unfortunately not open access (this raises a whole other conversation about equality and power!). If anyone would like a copy, they can contact me on LinkedIn.

Chiara Bergonzini is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milan-Bicocca. Her research focuses on urban food governance and its potential in creating gender-just urban food systems, with case studies in Milan and Barcelona. She spent a visiting period at the University of Vic – Central University of Catalunya and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and she also collaborates with the independent research center EStà, located in Milan and specialized in sustainable urban food systems. Since May 2025, she has been the coordinator of the working table “Gender and food systems” of the Italian network for local food policies.

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Editor’s note: After a brief end-of-summer break, FFJ is back! We’re launching our new SPOTLIGHT mini-series: interviews with scholars and practitioners working on food justice topics through an intersectional lens. After that, we’ll be turning our focus to our forthcoming CELEBRATE issue, but we’d love to do more work like this — so please get in touch (hello@feministfoodjournal.com) if you’d like to be featured in a SPOTLIGHT, or know someone who might.

SPOTLIGHT is kicking off with an interview on participatory food studies methodologies with Damhee D. Hong (홍 담희), whom I was connected to last year by Jennifer E. Gaddis, after our interview about her and Sarah A. Robert’s edited volume “Transforming School Food Politics Around the World”.

In that interview, we talked a bit about the importance of ensuring that school food is culturally relevant and desirable — a theme I’m very interested in, as my PhD work is focused using participatory methods (namely Photovoice) to integrate immigrant knowledge into conceptions of “sustainable” food in the Global North. After our chat, Dr. Gaddis put me in touch with Dee Dee, a fellow PhD candidate who is doing boundary-pushing qualitative research on access to culturally relevant food on US college campuses. Dee Dee is studying at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara, and her dissertation also uses participatory methods — in her case, a culturally grounded method called “Gimbap chats” — to explore how campus dining environments can serve as sites of cultural affirmation and inclusion.

Dee Dee and I were able to connect on a Zoom call between Santa Barabara and Barcelona, and she graciously agreed to a short interview that we’re sharing here in Feminist Food Journal today! Please read on for more about how students navigate campus dining environments and whether institutional structures support or marginalize their food identities. Fundamentally, Dee Dee’s project examines the broader implications of food access for equity, inclusion, and student well-being in higher education settings in the US — asking critical questions in a time when institutional equity-promoting programs are under unprecedented attack. – Isabela

Isabela: Dee Dee, I’m so grateful we had the chance to connect! It feels like there aren’t many people tackling the nexus of culturally appropriate and sustainable food systems, and I’m so excited to see where your PhD project takes you. Can you tell our readers how you came to the idea of studying culturally appropriate food on university campuses?

Dee Dee: My passion has always been about supporting students and ensuring that institutions provide a truly supportive environment in every area of student life. That includes spaces that are often overlooked or not considered to be academic, like dining halls. For students who live on campus, university dining services might be their main or only source of food. That made me wonder whether these spaces were also helping students feel seen, supported, and valued.

As a 1.5-generation Korean American and a first-generation college student, this work is very personal. I moved to the US when I was nine, and when I went away to college, I remember how drastically my diet changed because I was now living on campus, where I was expected to eat — as my mom would call it — “white people food” all day, every day, for the first time. I was trying to figure out how to succeed in school while also learning how to feed myself in a food culture that felt completely foreign. Honestly, it wasn’t very long before my mom was hauling dozens of Tupperware full of Korean food into my little mini-fridge in my room.

Fortunately, I had great housemates in the residential halls who enjoyed trying new foods. I shared my mom’s Korean dishes with them and we created a sense of community through food. I have fond memories of us attacking my mom’s banchan with bowls of instant ramen, as late-night snack after spending a night out together as college students do. But I also had friends, many of whom were students with minoritized1 identities, who only ate their comfort foods from their rooms in private, alone by themselves. I started thinking about why that might be. It seemed like many students assumed that their university didn’t have space for food that looked or smelled different from the norm, or that their roommates from other cultural backgrounds wouldn’t appreciate the food.

That curiosity led me to this project. I wanted to find out whether students today are still having those experiences, and whether universities are doing enough to make students feel proud of their cultural foods. I’m especially interested in whether students feel comfortable sharing those foods openly with peers or if they still feel the need to hide them. I also draw from the Culturally Engaging Campus Environments (CECE) framework, developed by Dr. Samuel D. Museus, which identifies key environmental conditions that support the success of racially diverse college students. This framework guides my thinking about what it means for universities to create campus environments where students feel affirmed, validated, and can build meaningful connections through culture. The CECE indicators help me ask not just whether students are eating, but whether their experiences on campus with food reflect care, cultural relevance, and belonging.

Isabela: Why did you decide to focus on the Korean student community specifically?

Dee Dee: At first, I wanted this study to focus on all students of colour whose food traditions at home don’t align with the typical offerings in school dining halls. I did some preliminary study across different communities of colour, and found this to be a relevant topic with many different Black and Brown student communities. But since this is a dissertation project, I had to narrow my scope. Focusing on Korean American students made the most sense, because I identity as Korean American. I don’t believe that research can ever be truly neutral, and thought that by centering a community that I know well, I can bring more authenticity and cultural understanding to the work.

As a qualitative researcher, interviewing other Korean students allows for more fluid conversations. We can trans-language in the interview, going back and forth between Korean and English, and easily build rapport by talking about all our favourite Korean foods without having to explain what they are. I always tell participants that they can use whichever language feels most natural, and often start interviews by talking about our favourite foods from home. The common cultural background helps create a space where students can speak freely and share their experiences in more nuanced ways.

Isabela: Can you tell me a bit about your choice to use Suda (수다), or “Gimbap chats”, as a methodology?

Dee Dee: I’m so glad you asked this, because I love talking about gimbap. Gimbap is a Korean rice roll that has always symbolized care and love to me. It takes time and effort to make, and it’s nutritious and portable. My mom used to prepare it when she thought we might not have time to eat a full meal. In Korea, it’s often brought along on school trips or when hanging out with loved ones at picnics, so it’s a natural fit for gathering students for a shared, reflective experience.

In designing this study, I drew inspiration from anti-colonial research approaches that resist hierarchical ways of producing knowledge. I don’t view myself as someone who knows more than the students I interview. Their insights and experiences are valuable, and their time is something I deeply respect. While, like many researchers, I provide gift cards in exchange for participation, I also wanted to create a more reciprocal, culturally grounded experience. Sharing food is one of the ways I express care. So I started what I call “Gimbap Chats,” where I invite Korean American students to come together and eat gimbap that I make. I kept hearing that students didn’t have access to authentic Korean food near campus, so I wanted to create a space where they could enjoy it communally.

These Gimbap Chats draw from the suda methodology (Meacham et al., 2022), a Korean conversational practice that involves extended, meaningful dialogue rooted in care, trust, and cultural familiarity. As I thought deeply about how to position myself in conversations with students, I spent a lot of time learning from feminist scholars of colour, especially Chicana and Latina feministas who have long used pláticas, or unstructured “talks”, as a powerful method for relational and culturally grounded research. I have deep respect for their work and the community-centered frameworks they’ve created. For a while, I seriously considered using pláticas as my model. But as I reflected further on the cultural and linguistic context of my own study, I realized that the best would be a methodology that honours the specific histories and lived experiences of the Korean American students I am working with.

Then I ran into the concept of suda as a methodological practice at an American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, and quickly realized that it is the most fitting and culturally congruent methodology. Just as pláticas grew from and serve Latina communities, suda speaks directly to the kinds of dialogic, non-hierarchical, and emotionally resonant conversations that are familiar in Korean and broader Asian diasporic contexts.

As described by Meacham and colleagues (2022), suda is an ontological practice. The most common translation of suda into English is “chitchat”, which can come off as dismissive; in Korean contexts, it involves deep emotional exchange, mutual listening, and a sense of therapeutic care. It resists hierarchical structures and allows participants to share without a fixed agenda. It’s dialogic and open-ended. For many Korean women, suda is how we make sense of our lives together. It creates a sense of belonging and community, especially in spaces where we might otherwise feel isolated or misunderstood.

I think this fits my project well, because I am hoping that the Gimbap Chats will offer more than just a focus group setting — I want them to create an environment where students feel at home, where they can talk about food, identity, and belonging in ways that reflect their lived realities. I am currently doing data collection, and many students have told me that the gimbap chat was their first time eating Korean food on campus with other Korean students. That kind of space matters. It not only helps students feel more connected but also allows for richer, more honest conversations about how their food experiences shape their sense of belonging in college.

Isabela: Is it common to see these types of culturally relevant methodologies deployed in education research?

Dee Dee: Although culturally grounded research methods like this are still rare in higher education studies, they are gaining recognition as legitimate and important. The suda methodology reminds us that knowledge can be created in informal, caring, and community-centered ways. It challenges us to think differently about what research can look like and who it serves.

Isabela: Your project aims to inform DEI programs in higher education, but across the US, DEI programs are being dismantled. How do you see these dynamics impacting your research? How can universities continue to work towards these goals even under state pressure?

Dee Dee: This is a tough moment for equity work. Every day, I read about how more DEI programs are facing a lot of backlash, and that creates a chilling effect on campuses. But it also challenges us to get clearer about our values and more intentional in how we act on them. The needs of students haven’t gone away. If anything, this moment makes it more urgent to find ways to keep equity work alive and meaningful, to make our case with more urgency and emphasis than ever before.

My research is focused on showing that inclusion isn’t just about what happens in the classroom. It’s also about everyday experiences like eating in the dining hall. Universities can continue this work by listening to students, paying attention to the details of campus life, and investing in programs that make all students feel seen and supported. Even when political conditions make it harder to talk openly about DEI, institutions can still take concrete steps to create environments where students from all backgrounds feel welcome. That includes ensuring students can access foods that reflect their identities and cultures.

Isabela: Where can readers find out more about your work?

Dee Dee: Please reach out to me directly through email (damhee@ucsb.edu) or find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to connect with others who care about food justice, student well-being, and equity in higher education.

Damhee Dee Dee Hong (홍 담희) is a doctoral candidate in Education at UC Santa Barbara, where she studies how culturally relevant food access shapes belonging for Korean American college students. Her dissertation uses the suda (수다) methodology and the CECE framework to explore how campus dining environments can serve as sites of cultural affirmation and inclusion. Dee Dee has several years of experience in higher education and international education, including roles at Santa Monica College, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Northwestern University. She has published in Teaching and Teacher Education and The Elementary School Journal, and has presented her research at national conferences including AERA. She holds an M.S. in Higher Education Administration and Policy from Northwestern and previously served in the Peace Corps in Indonesia as a volunteer in the education sector.

Further reading

Locher, J. L., Yoels, W. C., Maurer, D., & Van Ells, J. (2005). Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey Into The Social and Emotional Significance of Food. Food and Foodways, 13(4), 273–297. https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710500334509

Meacham, S., Kim, J., Wee, S.-J., & Kim, K. (2022). Re Zoom^ⓒ ing Our Academic Home Using Suda (수다). Qualitative Inquiry, 28(6), 625–635. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211002771

Museus, S. D. (2014). The Culturally Engaging Campus Environments (CECE) Model: A New Theory of Success Among Racially Diverse College Student Populations. In M. B. Paulsen (Ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research: Volume 29 (pp. 189–227). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8005-6_5

Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2022). Unpacking School Lunch: Understanding the Hidden Politics of School Food (1st ed. 2022 edition). Palgrave Macmillan.

Wright, K. E., Lucero, J. E., Ferguson, J. K., Granner, M. L., Devereux, P. G., Pearson, J. L., & Crosbie, E. (2021). The impact that cultural food security has on identity and well-being in the second-generation U.S. American minority college students. Food Security, 13(3), 701–715. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01140-w

Writing from Ramallah, Lama tells us:

“On April 25th, the WFP announced that its food stocks had been fully depleted in Gaza after they had delivered the last of their stock to soup kitchens in Gaza. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society has also warned that their food and relief supplies in Gaza are nearly depleted. Videos have emerged of a woman cooking turtle meat to feed her family; whilst the people of Gaza are big on seafood, turtles are not a part of their diet, and they have only eaten them in desperation to sustain themselves. Other recent videos show a man sifting flour from the debris of his destroyed home, and two sisters sharing one loaf of pita bread with paprika to make it taste like a full meal.

The families that can afford to buy what is left in the markets are paying around US$75 to cook one meal (without animal protein). The people of Palestine in Gaza have a rich cuisine, yet they are being sentenced to famine. UN reports show that 60,000 children are suffering from acute malnutrition during the current blockade, and the Ministry of Health has reported that 57 children have already died.”

Lama’s writing simultaneously highlights these elements of hardship but expands beyond them, reminding us of the rich Palestinian food traditions and customs that existed and continue to exist even under siege. She sculpts this vital work into original and moving formats, including novel uses of the recipe, as well as video and poetry. In this newsletter, we’re sharing a few of her recent articles — and the link to her Substack — for readers who want to learn more about Palestinian food culture and the critical intersections of food and genocide.

We’re planning to host Lama on our podcast later this year, so if you have any specific questions you’d like us to ask her, please let us know by comment, email, or DM!

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In ‘War Maqlouba’, a moving piece of autofiction, Lama imagines a group of journalists in Gaza coming together to make a recipe for “war” maqlouba, with each step revealing the hardship experienced by the journalists and their families. “Neither does our food have flavour nor do our lives”, one reflects on the difficulty of finding ingredients. The piece opens with a window into journalists’ group chat — a very human portrait of the dark humour and quips that keep people going in unimaginable circumstances.

“Does anyone have something that makes a buck buck buckeek sound?” someone in the group sent hoping to find a chicken somewhere. “No, but I have half a chicken stock cube,” another replied. “At least it used to make a buck buck buckeek sound,” the requester said. It will do.”

In ‘Fatteh Adas during genocide’, Lama weaves family lore and collective grief of watching the war in Gaza unfold from the West Bank into a recipe for fatteh adas, using, as she says, “a Pyrex dish, or as our parents and grandparents pronounce it, ‘Byrex’ as the Arabic language does not have a ‘P’ (which is why we began boycotting ‘Bebsi’ and ‘Bambers’ at the start of the genocide).” The lyrical recipe, told, unusually, in the first-person plural, highlights the communality of Palestinian food culture, and like the recipe in ‘War Maqlouba’ above, documents the texture, joy, and pain of daily life in Palestine within each step.

We take a large circular tin sidr – a Palestinian tray – and place our Fatteh Adas on it, surrounded by our olives, spring onions, and lemons to squeeze onto our Adas before we eat. We do not want to squeeze the lemons too early or the “vitamin C will be absorbed into the air,” as our parents often warned us. We take the sidr and go back to the living room to watch the news and we weep over our meal as we watch the children of Gaza eating a stale piece of bread with no Shuwarabat Adas to soften it.

Along with translating the contemporary Palestinian experience into novel recipe forms, Lama is working to document and preserve existing Palestinian recipes. For The New Arab, Lama interviewed Palestinian chef Mona Zahed about her cookbook Tabkha: Recipes from Under the Rubble, which, incredibly, Zahed wrote from a tent in Gaza after being displaced from her home. The book is a testament to the resilience of Palestinian cooking traditions: as Zahed says, “Our recipes tell the world stories of our history, cause, and that we exist…Each time Palestinian food becomes a trend online and I see people from all over the world making it, I feel proud that the world knows Gaza and that we are not forgotten.” The second edition of the book is now available for pre-order.

Maintaining an archive of Palestinian food culture is also the focus of ‘Rescuing our recipes: Preserving Palestinian culture in times of war’, where Lama notes how “one hallmark of that Palestinian resistance is the preservation of its food”. Palestinians in diaspora have opened restaurants across the world, importing ingredients from their homeland and offering what Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan refers to as “Palestinian hospitality”, while Palestinians under genocide and occupation continue making traditional foods, even if they must be tweaked with the limited ingredients available. The reported piece also touches on the issue of appropriation of Palestinian dishes into “Israeli”, “Mediterranean”, “Levantine”, or ambiguous “Middle Eastern” cuisines, arguing that this serves as an erasure of Palestinian identity and resistance.

We’re looking forward to discussing these themes in more detail with Lama later this year on our podcast. In the meantime, we encourage you to support her work by sharing and subscribing to her Substack: .

Read Lama's Substack

Reminder: FFJ subscriptions cost just US$30 per year, and allow us to host writers like Lama on our podcast 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!).

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Other essential reading on food in Palestine (curated by Lama and FFJ — and please drop more suggestions in the comments!)

• Food sovereignty during occupation, genocide by Fathi Nimer for Palestine in America

• House of Meat by Rachel Hobley for

• ‘My Hand Over Your Hand’: Finding Freedom in Teta’s Kitchen by Jude Taha for Palestine in America

• Starvation, Resistance, Love by Maha Hussaini for the Massachusetts Review

• Starving Palestine by Manal Shqair for

• Stone and Seed by Mira Mattar for

• The Dates by Laura O’Connor and Jana Amin for Palestine in America

• What We Talk about When We Talk about Food Security by Jon Randall Smith for

• When Food Doesn’t Taste Like Home by Doha Kahlout, translated by Katharine Halls for

A final PSA: Our friends at the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) are hosting In the Field at Wakelyns for two days of all things agroforestry on 28-29 May! This is a unique opportunity to explore the legendary Wakelyns organic farm and learn from the cutting edge of the agroforestry community, with a full programme of dynamic workshops on offer. Spaces are limited, and a final few subsidized tickets are available, so book your spot now.

Isabela here. It’s been a few weeks since our MEAT issue ended, and we are on the cusp of launching our eighth issue, BODY. In the meantime, we have a rich read for you this week: an interview with Jennifer E. Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert, the editors of a new book entitled “Transforming School Food Politics Around the World.”

Featuring a foreword by the iconic Silvia Federici, the volume features case studies from around the world on what it means to “transform” the politics and systems that underpin school food programs.

I find this to be a fascinating topic. I grew up in Canada, the only G7 country to not have a national school food program (although the government has finally committed to creating one). My main experiences with school food were therefore absorbed through a screen, giving me the impression that it looked a lot like this:

Of course, not having a school food program impacted me, my family, and my community much more than I would have realized in an era where most of my intellectual engagement was with angsty teenage comedies. It was a lot of work for my mom to pack my lunch — and we were fortunate enough to not be worried about where our next meal would come from, or whether the food we ate would align with dominant health discourses, or violate social norms of aesthetics and smells.

The issue of school food is essential in our time of polycrisis. Who feeds kids, how, where, when, with what and how much — analyzing the dynamics of power that underpin school food programs and spotlighting potential ways forward can help to tackle many of our so-called “wicked problems”, such as the climate crisis, socio-economic inequality, and unequal gender relations. (Jennifer previously wrote a book entitled The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools.) The work involved in feeding children and teens is still highly feminized and racialized and therefore bound up in questions of reproductive labour. School food programs have uneasy links to imperialist development policies and dietary racism. At such a large scale, school food has a key role to play in shifting towards more agro-ecological food systems. And the personal-political continuum that school food straddles makes it a potent area to study the interface of policy, power, and grassroots activism.

To take a deeper look at these topics, I recently sat down with Jennifer and Sarah to discuss why school food is a feminist issue, and what we can learn from the case studies they’ve compiled. The following interview is an excerpt from our conversation and has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Isabela: Your book is called “Transforming School Food Politics.” Many people might not have thought of school food, or the work done by people closest to it, as political. Can you explain what you mean by “school food politics”?

Jen: When people think about school food politics, they often consider the conflict between corporations pushing ultra-processed foods into schools for lucrative contracts and shaping young people’s tastes for future market participation. Additionally, there’s a debate about whether school food responsibilities should fall under state social welfare programs or be managed at home.

Sarah: Our book highlights how the politics of school food involve significant material and symbolic power, often rendered invisible. This invisibility is tied to feminist politics and gender dynamics, particularly the overlooked forms of work and care within the reproductive economy. Taking care of, caring for, and even caring about humans, think children in schools, may be linked to the so-called productive economy, may be paid, but even so there remains this notion that reproductive care work is to “service” productive work. It is undervalued symbolically and in material terms. Related to school food, this refers to the feminine workforce—mostly women workforce—within K-12 schools (e.g., teachers/teaching) and specifically cafeterias (e.g., “lunch ladies’). It also refers to the feminized nature of the work or the relationship of working conditions-to-pay-to-training or credentials. 

Jen: We want to highlight how political decisions shape school food programs, which can lead to various outcomes. With this book, our goal is to create better food systems, joyful educational environments, and better jobs across the food chain. In the US, over $20 billion of federal taxpayer dollars are spent annually on school breakfast and lunch programs. This money can either reinforce existing power structures or drive positive change. By examining places with universal school meals and active public policies promoting just and sustainable food systems, we show that these changes are attainable. School food politics involves everyday participation in these systems to achieve these changes.

Isabela: The book’s introduction describes school food systems as “imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal”. Can you explain how school food is caught up in those oppressive systems? 

Jen: International agencies and colonial powers often provided students with food that didn’t respect local food traditions, displacing staple foods. For example, in Japan and South Korea, school programs introduced wheat and dairy products instead of traditional rice-based foods. Similarly, in African countries, westernized foods were donated instead of supporting local agriculture. The United Nations’ homegrown school feeding program aims to counter this by promoting local agriculture, as seen in successful models like Brazil. This approach helps create a market for local producers and familiarizes young people with traditional foods, integrating them into their diets.

Sarah: Many chapters highlight the racialized, colonial, and imperialistic origins of school food systems, particularly those imposed by the United States post-World War II. These programs often used surplus U.S. food as part of foreign policy, shaping food systems in recipient countries over the past 70 years. Now, there’s a pushback against this imposition, with local communities engaging in policy protagonism—actively participating in and shaping food policies.

Jen: In the US, fluid milk is the only reimbursable beverage in the National School Lunch Program, which some students and advocates see as dietary racism. This is because many racial and ethnic minority communities have high rates of lactose intolerance, making the program non-inclusive. Alternatives to milk are often only available with a doctor’s note for a diagnosed allergy, reflecting power structures in meal patterns and school policies.

Isabela: You frame your book within feminist theories of labour and care, even featuring a foreword by Silvia Federici. Why is school food politics a feminist issue? 

Jen: School food politics is a feminist issue because, whether in the home or in school kitchens and cafeterias, it is disproportionately women who do the work of feeding children. And whether it is paid or unpaid, this labour is typically undervalued, both economically and socially.

Sarah: And that work is unequally the responsibility of women. When considering the workers most involved or impacted by school food, we often think of women and feminized groups. This includes cafeteria workers, teachers, and mothers, who are primarily responsible for feeding and educating students about nutrition, foodways, and the experience of commensality. Given that most of these roles are filled by women, especially in the K-12 sector, this issue should be viewed through a feminist lens. Recognizing gender dynamics can help advocate for fair wages, better working conditions, and inclusive decision-making in political and economic spheres.

Jen: In the US, school food workers are over 90% women, while custodial workers are around 70% men. Despite both being support staff in the education sector, there’s a significant gender-based wage gap. Custodial jobs, which require less continuing education, often pay more and are more likely to be full-time and year-round. In contrast, school food service workers must meet annual professional standards and training requirements but earn less. This disparity is a feminist issue, as historically, custodial jobs were considered “breadwinner” roles for men, while food service jobs were seen as “mom jobs.” As more women become primary breadwinners, the need for fair wages and recognition of their skilled work becomes even more pressing.

Sarah: The treatment of school food workers and teachers by governing bodies, including the levels of regulation and training required in relation to work conditions, pay and benefits, raises fundamental questions of feminist political economics. This is a global issue, too, not limited to high-income versus low-income countries. The dynamics of gender inequality in school food work can be identified worldwide, as highlighted in the book through various case studies that transcend national contexts.

Jen: That reminds me that Jennifer Black, one of our co-authors for the Canadian chapter, recently sent me a new piece she wrote for The Conversation. It discusses the mental load that mothers, in particular, face when packing lunches for their kids. This issue highlights the difference between privatized responsibilities and what could be expected as a public good. When schools, as public institutions, are trusted to provide well for children, it alleviates some of the burdens on parents. However, when this responsibility falls on individuals, it can perpetuate inequalities based on what families can afford.

This situation also creates a space for competitive care and feelings of guilt and shame, especially among women. The connection between feeding their children and their self-perception as parents can be challenging. Women often strive to meet certain ideals of motherhood, which involves investing time, mental labour, and emotional energy in school meal provisioning.

Isabela: What would it mean to “transform” school food politics, particularly with regard to the aforementioned gender dynamics?

Sarah: School food isn’t just about the meals served to students; it’s about transforming the entire school food system. This includes national procurement, sustainable production, environmental care, and the well-being of farmers, farm workers, cafeteria staff, and teachers who educate about food and its values.

Jen: Approaching school food programs with a feminist lens shifts the focus from mere efficiency and calorie counts to broader questions about the systems and communities we want to create, as we see in a chapter authored by scholars and practitioners involved in creating Canada’s national school food program. Likewise, feminist agroecologists from Brazil, featured in another of the chapters, exemplify this by advocating for a change in our relationships with each other, the land, and food. School food programs, as centralized institutions, offer a starting point for these interventions, even in countries with limited state-sponsored food programs. In my view, transforming school food politics can foster a feminist food system where people experience joy and care for one another, the environment, and non-human relations.

Sarah: In the book, we highlight the role of school food programs in shaping community identity and cultural norms, particularly through the involvement of women. In the Peruvian case, women use school food systems to assert these identities and goals. Similarly, the Brazilian chapters on agroecologists emphasize that a feminist perspective on school food requires considering interpersonal and household dynamics. This perspective can lead to shifts in relationships within households, resulting in both financial autonomy and interpersonal power. 

Isabela: The book mentions that people who challenge school food programs have power, even in the face of systemic oppression. What power do people have in challenging existing school food programs, and how can they leverage it?

Jen: Opting out of a school food program is a form of agency. Young people can choose not to eat the food, and parents or caregivers can decide not to have their children participate. These choices impact the program’s culture and financial viability, but they are often uncoordinated efforts with unintended consequences. They don’t represent a collective, intentional effort to influence the system. The key to having power is collectively challenging the system, which involves actively confronting and demanding change.

Sarah: I understand power to be engaged with and utilized by different stakeholders, individuals and collectives. School food politics involves engaging with state or local governance, where power is exercised in multiple ways. This can include attending board meetings, talking to teachers or cafeteria staff, making demands, or offering suggestions. Such engagement allows multiple stakeholders to exercise power within the school food system, highlighting it as a significant site for generating change and influencing policy decisions. This concept underscores how policy is created and implemented.

Changing school food systems requires significant resources and community involvement. For example, a mother advocating for vegetarian, halal, or kosher meals for her children needs support and resources. The current model isn’t working for everyone, and change requires acknowledging diverse ways of thinking about and engaging with food collectively. 

Isabela: On that note, the book highlights non-traditional forms of knowledge that stakeholders hold around school food, including embodied knowledge and lived experience. Why is it important to uphold these forms of knowledge and what can we learn by doing so?

Jen: When considering school food programs as a form of care infrastructure, it’s crucial to value the embodied knowledge and lived experiences of participants. People can accept or reject state-sponsored care, and their experiences — whether feeling unwell from the food, not getting enough, or feeling ashamed — impact their willingness to participate. These emotional aspects must be considered in policy design, especially in feminist food politics.

Additionally, the experiences of workers in these programs, who may face difficulties due to policy decisions, should be acknowledged. Empowering those who experience the system firsthand to speak as experts is essential for addressing these issues and improving the programs.

When people share their lived experiences and highlight issues misaligned with their vision, it raises consciousness and fosters public testimony. This process helps communities understand different perspectives, resonate with shared problems, and negotiate system changes. In the Peruvian case, mothers in Amazonian communities exercise their power by adapting state rules to better serve their students’ needs. This collective action involves identifying targets for change and strategizing to implement these changes effectively.

Sarah: It’s also important to consider the knowledge held by youth. Policy makers can learn from the innovative ideas of young people, such as the concept of “Healthy Deliciousness.” Youth in Philadelphia came up with this concept to describe their vision for nutritious and tasty food.

Isabela: The volume contains case studies from countries like Japan, India, Finland, Peru, and Canada and highlights the differences in school food program goals and how programs are provisioned, governed, and funded. What insights are generated by bringing such diverse contexts into conversation? 

Sarah: The importance of those diverse discussions is that communities around the world can learn from them, and garner approaches to the policy protagonism concept that I mentioned earlier, that translates to their visions of school food programs. The book, especially in the introduction, provides comparisons of policy protagonism across different scales, different continents, embedded within different histories of school food and public education systems to suggest there is no one way to source, procure, prepare, or nourish students within schools. There are many successful models. (And perhaps no excuses for not rethinking school food programs.)

Isabela: What effective school food program strategies stood out to you from the case studies, and why?

Sarah: One important way to achieve change is by having civil society learn the ins and outs of the policy-making process and how to influence it. The Brazil chapters detail how the farmers had to demand from local governing bodies the ability to compete and ultimately win procurement contracts and later to hold local officials accountable for meeting the food needs of children in rural schools. They were able to change not only their own role within the school food system, but also the material conditions on the ground to serve more students healthy food grown through agroecological practices. This happened because they learned what the policy is and how it is administered or “works” on the ground and then demanded to be included in that process. 

The Korean case, which details rural-urban food procurement, also stood out as an example that I could envision in national contexts around the world to bolster rural-urban relationships and partnerships through much shorter supply chains that are culturally responsive and sustainable. 

Jen: We also see threads of that happening in California and Vermont, where coalitions have successfully combined advocacy around universal free school meals and farm-to-school procurement to holistically reshape the “rules” of how school food programs operate locally. Those two chapters are part of a subsection of the book dedicated to sharing tools and campaigns for systems change. I encourage folks to read them and learn more about how storytelling can help build empathy for change and the role of teachers' unions in helping drive forward positive transformations in school food systems.

Sarah: The case of Finland continues to resonate with me because it illustrates how school food programming, for example setting a menu, can fulfill the fundamental role of public education to cultivate students’ civic responsibilities and abilities to participate in democratic governance. The Finnish and US case from North Carolina also highlight how many opportunities for building collective power remain untapped. In North Carolina, school district transportation staff, school food workers, and classroom teachers worked together to create a dynamic summer program to nourish rural families, distribute reading materials, and build stronger community-school relationships. Likewise, in Finland, home economics and school food workers unite to educate students about food, civics, and sustainability. So many of the chapters highlight the power of “we,” presenting examples of how dynamic collective action can bring about positive change. We also see this in the chapter from Vermont (US) about how a very broad coalition achieved their “happy ending” of a free universal locally sourced school meal, by listening to a range of voices and working in a bottom-up way.

Isabela: My doctoral research focuses on culturally inclusive food system transformation in the so-called Global North – i.e., how can we bring in notions of sustainable and healthy food that recognize the diversity of food practices and value of food knowledge held by immigrant communities. What did the book teach you about how schools can feed culturally diverse student bodies in appropriate and just ways?

Jen: Cooking food from scratch gives schools more control over food sourcing and preparation, allowing for flexibility and customization. This approach fosters closer relationships between food preparers, students, dietitians, and administrators, and enables discussions about community preferences. Schools can adapt menus to reflect diverse cultures and demographics. For example, schools could do customizable grain or noodle bowls or crowdsource recipes from families or local restaurants that meet nutritional standards and reflect community foodways. This helps expose students to different cultures through food.

Sarah: Overcoming the idea that culturally affirming food requests only benefit a specific group is important. In fact, these requests can benefit a broader population by expanding knowledge of diverse foodways and improving cafeteria meals, disrupting the corporate food model.

Many colonial settlers have learned about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash). Many non-Indigenous students and families living on the Haudenosaunee lands know of, grow, and eat these staples, but the Three Sisters are not often a part of meals in the cafeteria. This disconnect highlights the challenge and potential of integrating culturally affirming and sustainable foods into school programs. It’s crucial to honour these living, present foodways while being mindful of cultural appropriation. To make this shift requires confronting and calling out the legacy of oppression that treats Indigenous peoples and their food systems (and migrant communities too!) as a relic of the past and undervalued. It requires a rethink of school food as part of a liberatory public education.

Isabela: You recently released a curriculum guide for educators to structure their teaching around the book. How would you like to see this book used in academia and praxis in the future? 

Sarah: Bringing together representatives from various stakeholders in school food systems to read relevant chapters that resonate with their local challenges can spark meaningful conversations. Using the curricular guide, these discussions can move beyond general reflections to practical applications in specific contexts.

Jen: As an instructor, I know that creating good activities and discussion questions outside one’s expertise takes significant time and effort. Providing resources can help facilitate classroom or community conversations, especially for those less familiar with the material. 

Isabela: What are some areas of further research related to school food that you’d like to tackle?

Jen: There’s a lack of research on school food labour across different contexts. I also think we need more comparative international research on places that are doing school food really well at very large scales. For example, in megacities like those in Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and India,  scratch cooking is the norm. We can learn a lot from these places, especially when they have very strong policy standards in place and ambitious aspirations for the future. In São Paulo, for instance, the government has set two ambitious goals: sourcing all school food supplies from producers who practice sustainable farming by 2026 and serving 100% organic meals by 2030. Understanding how these policies are implemented, including supply chain infrastructure and financing, is so important for transforming school food politics around the world. We talk about some of these ideas in the conclusion to the volume.

Sarah: As a teacher educator, I work with students becoming teachers and current classroom teachers. Food is always an integral part of school days and their work. Raising awareness among teachers and their unions about school food systems change and politics could lead to powerful and productive collaborations. 

There’s also a lot of potential for the type of analysis of and changes to policy-making processes that Jen just mentioned within the field of Policy Studies, particularly Critical Policy Studies. And, I suspect there is an important conversation to be initiated within Feminist Food Studies and Gender and Education about the paid and unpaid labour that school food politics entails. 

Jennifer Gaddis (left) is an associate professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools (University of California Press, 2019), which won book awards from the National Women’s Studies Association and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Her work at the intersection of care and school food politics has been published in multiple journals, including Feminist Economics, Agriculture and Human Values, and Radical Teacher, and she has written op-eds on school food politics for popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue.

Dr. Sarah A. Robert (right) is an international education and gender policy expert and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She is the author of Neoliberal Education Reform: Gendered Notions in Global and Local Contexts (Routledge, 2017), awarded the Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association. Robert co-edited with Jennifer E. Gaddis Transforming School Food Politics Around the World (MIT Press, 2024); “Intersectionality and education work during COVID-19 transitions” for Gender, Work, and Organizations (2023); Neoliberalism, Gender, and Education Reform (Routledge, 2018); and the award winning, School Food Politics (P. Lang, 2011).

This month’s Letter from the Editors is an interview by editor Isabela with Harley McDonald-Eckersall. Harley is an activist and anti-speciesist (more on that later) who recently relocated back home to Australia after spending two years in London volunteering with Animal Rebellion, a “decentralized, global movement for climate and animal justice,” where she focused on crafting their narrative and driving their strategy forward. Before working with Animal Rebellion, Harley co-founded the organization Young Voices for Animals and participated in numerous demonstrations for animal liberation in Australia. She also writes (wonderfully) on Medium about social movement theory and her experiences with social movements. 

I (Isabela) met Harley while doing research for a project analyzing campaigns against industrial livestock. I was hoping to get more information on Animal Rebellion’s communications strategy, and why they had chosen to deploy certain narratives around the issues at hand. In speaking with Harley, I was struck by the complexity of the challenges she had to navigate in her work: namely, communicating nuanced, interlinked issues in a way that resonates with a broad public while not obscuring the importance of the message. One of Animal Rebellion’s goals in the UK is to shift the mainstream discourse on animal farming, which requires it to toe a fine line of using accessible language and messaging while also pushing the boundaries of people’s thinking.

Afterward, I got to thinking that the end goal of Harley’s work, in a way, isn’t so different from ours at Feminist Food Journal, even if the means are very different. We’re also aiming to inspire change by shifting people’s perspectives, even minutely, on structural inequalities that are overlooked, inaccurately framed, or wrongfully accepted as the norm. I had the feeling that there was a lot we could learn by thinking about social movements and the ways that they work to create change. After all, none of this work operates — or at least should operate — in a vacuum. How can we learn from, and work more closely with, an ecosystem of change-makers towards the kind of world we want to see?

Harley’s experiences as a dedicated activist mean she is well-positioned to meditate on some of these challenges and I’m honoured to have had the opportunity to speak with her for a second time, this time through an email exchange. In the interview below, Harley and I discuss the importance of language in achieving freedom, the intersections between human and animal liberation, the ways that these linkages can be communicated to the public, and the need for building solidarity across and between social movements. 

This is a long read, but there are so many rich insights in here, and it would lend itself well to being digested over a few sittings.

“Capital-A” Animal: Harley McDonald-Eckersall on developing a language for liberation and frameworks for solidarity

Isabela: Let’s start off with the basics. You identify as an anti-speciesist. Can you give us an overview of what this means and how you got here?

Harley: I grew up surrounded by all different species in a rural farming community and, while I didn’t live on a farm myself, my viewpoint had very much been that we treat Animals with respect but that we are ultimately responsible for and superior to them. Although I didn’t really think about it to a great extent, I would have probably held the belief in some way that Animals were what humans made them. By that, I mean that I didn’t think much about the internal world of other species or about their status as what I would now think of as moral agents: Beings who have their own lives and value separate from their role in serving the emotional and physical needs of humans. 

I came to critically reexamine our relationship with Animals while studying a first-year philosophy unit at university. It’s a bit of a cliche, but there you have it. One of the texts we studied was Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics which covers similar themes to his breakaway publication Animal Liberation, the book largely credited for influencing the direction of the modern Animal rights movement. Of course, Singer was building on ideas and theories that had existed for generations and even centuries and in different forms across cultures. But for me, this was the starting point and it was the first time that I fundamentally questioned the relationship of domination and supremacy that characterizes most human/non-human interactions and relationships. 

It was comparatively easy for me to recognize that I wanted to stop eating and using Animals out of the belief that going vegan, which I did in 2016, was a pretty basic way that I could show respect for other sentient beings. It was a lot harder for me to challenge these really deeply held beliefs I had that Animals were here for us. Analytically, I broke this down pretty quickly but it’s definitely been a process to internalize it and over time, I’ve come to terms with the many ways that I have relied on the service of Animals in my life: from desiring the emotional support of companion Animals to the ways in which my language and thought processes are based on an extractive view of human/Animal relationships. So I would say that it’s a journey and a process. 

Isabela: What are some of the ways that you live as an anti-speciesist in your everyday life — both personal and professional?

Harley: I feel like I am constantly returning to the question of what it means to live in an anti-speciesist way and what this looks and feels like. The biggest way that being anti-speciesist shows up in my life (apart from being vegan) is in how I interact with other species now, compared to before I started challenging myself on this. I'm not sure how visible it would be to others, but I’m a lot more mindful of how my presence affects other species. For example, I sit on the floor if there's a nervous dog in the room to make myself less tall and intimidating, or I ask for the names of cats in the living room when I go to a friend's place, as I would for humans. There are also things that I would think of as more morally significant choices, like no longer riding horses, which I did for my entire childhood, and not killing flies and mosquitoes. I’m trying to puzzle out the ways in which my default behaviour leaves out the interests of non-humans and adjust my interactions accordingly.

Another way is in my language and the narratives that I try to build and deploy in my work.  This is everything from getting weird looks as I try to avoid using words that imply ownership when speaking about non-humans (e.g. “pet”, “livestock”, “my” cat) to exploring what stories we can tell that challenge and uproot the stubborn tenacity of human dominion and exceptionalism. We live in a world where exploitation and oppression are normalized to such an extent that it is largely invisible in so many aspects of our life. 

The most recent act I’ve taken is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I finally decided to take the Liberation Pledge meaning that, as well as living vegan, I no longer stay in spaces where animals are being consumed or exploited, unless I’m there to stand against this form of injustice. I struggled to take the pledge as I have a deep desire to make people feel loved and valued and I worried about how it would make loved ones who aren’t vegan feel once I no longer shared a table with them while they were eating animals. The biggest reason I finally made the choice to commit to this was that I realized that my entire worldview is built on the understanding that the world we live in is the way it is because enough people have consented to it being that way. I have made the choice to stop consenting to violence. 

Isabela: We recently published our WAR issue, which focused on the links between gender, conflict, and food. As part of this, we included content looking at war in a more metaphorical sense: the war on fat bodies, for example, that is being perpetuated by the medical establishment, corporations, government, and even the alternative food movement. Similarly, how do you think we could unpack the idea of there also being a “war on animals”? What does it look like, who is perpetuating it, and how does it manifest in our everyday lives?

Harley: For starters, I just have to say that I love this topic. I often avoid “fight framing” in my work as it can put people into an adversarial rather than a constructive frame of mind. But I think when unpacking these issues internally as a movement, it is such an important frame to use — because it really is what marginalized and minoritized groups are experiencing, a war against their very being where they have to fight against an entrenched, dominant society. 

There are so many arenas of war within the Animal movement. Of course, there’s the insidious, normalized violence against farmed Animals used for food and clothing which I think is hard to even see as a fight given that it involves routine, unstoppable violence and death against individuals who are trapped within its machine of brutality. What I mean is that it feels more like a situation where they are prisoners of war, and the actual war is elsewhere, being played out between those fighting for the Animals trapped in this system and the industries which, fundamentally, seek only to speed up the killing. By this, I don’t mean to imply that farmed Animals are passive victims. But I do mean to say that they are precluded from fighting. Their bodies are the battlefield and we so often have to try and fight for them, all the while knowing that our ability to do so is limited by our role as allies who don’t even share a species with those being oppressed. 

Another site of war against Animals relates to wild Animals living in “nature”, or Animals in the limited parts of the world which are not primarily shaped by human needs (I use quotation marks because I have issues with the word nature and the way it’s used to homogenize all life outside of human control.) This war plays out in so-called “management” and “control” of species and we see it often in debates around “invasive” species and “wildlife” management. I think this is an area we often neglect as Animal activists, maybe because we see it as more of a fair fight since those who war is declared against are seemingly free and don’t experience the same kind of obvious violence as Animals on farms and in labs. I feel like this is a site where we can really do a lot of work unpacking our inherent speciesism. A lot of vegans, for example, will feel conflicted about whether they support things like kangaroo or deer culls for “environmental protection”. This battlefield plays out both between the Animals who are hunted and murdered for daring to exist where they are unwanted, but also on a movement level with the question of who has the right to intervene in the world. Ultimately, if we compare the damage a large deer population does to the environment with the damage caused by humans in a single day, there is no contest. 

Isabela: What are the links between speciesism and human oppression, and conversely, how are human and animal liberation intertwined?

Harley: This is such an important question, and I’m going to defer to others who have explored this in ways that are more nuanced than I ever could. The thinkers who have influenced and inspired me on this topic are exploring their own lived experiences of oppression and the links they found between their marginalization in society and the way humans relate to other Animals. They discuss the importance of what is usually known as collective liberation: the belief that oppression in all forms is connected and we can’t hope to see liberation for one oppressed group without recognizing that it shares a root with all other forms of injustice. 

There have been three books that really informed my understanding of these issues. The first book is Aphroism by Aph and Syl Ko, two sisters and activists who explore the intersections between feminism, critical race studies and critical animal studies. This is the book that really grounded my understanding of “Animal” as a political categorization that goes beyond the species of an individual. They unpack the idea of “animalization”, which basically describes society as a hierarchy where “human” is set up as the optimal point of existence and is intrinsically linked to whiteness, maleness, and other historically privileged political categories in Western thinking. They explore how those not fitting into this definition of “human” experience minoritization and oppression. Their moral rights are deemed less important to society as a whole and their violation is accepted if it serves the “human good”.

For me, this framework really helped lay out the map of oppressions and how all these movements for liberation are really movements fighting against internalized narratives of dominance and exceptionalism. The same story that says humans are better than Animals plays out in the person who condones the imprisonment of refugees because they are “other” or who believes, even on some fundamental, subconscious level, that white people or male people or straight people, physically able people, cis-gender people, etc,. etc., are in some way superior to anyone else. 

My knowledge was further developed through the books Beasts of Burden by Suanara Taylor and The Oxen at the Intersection by pattrice jones. Both of these works explicitly paint a picture of these intersections of oppression, drawing on frameworks such as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s development and refinement of intersectionality as well as other theories around critical race, Animal, and disability studies. 

Isabela: One of your Medium posts, “Justice for Who? — Finding a Language of Liberation (Pt. 1)”, talks about your quest to develop “a language for liberation”, and as part of that, you recount your journey towards landing on capital-A Animal as a way of defining a political, rather than biological, category. Tell us more about that choice. Why is it important to re-politicize language frames that we’ve come to take for granted? 

Harley: This was a really important blog for me and something that I wrote at the very beginning of my journey to reconceptualize human/Animal relationships. I also wrote it when I was just beginning to explore the role language plays in allowing this shift to happen, both internally and on a societal level. I recently read it again and was pleased that I still agreed with the fundamental points — although maybe that’s a sign that I need to spend some more time challenging myself and developing my thinking! 

For me, the choice to capitalize Animal (which I try to stick to in my personal writing) came out of a lot of the learnings I touched on in the last question.  Our domination of Animals is often justified using a biological framework where we see ourselves as better than other Animals because they are members of a species we don’t belong to, and therefore cannot share an inner world with. While these biological rationales, like animalization, are often considered a “given”, the truth is they are in fact an inherently political tool used to justify and maintain oppression. Oppression and othering occur because they are essential to the operation of the neoliberal system that we live in, which is based on mass extraction and infinite growth. 

For me, what’s important is that we circuit break the identification of Animals as this homogenous group that exists only to be exploited or spoken on behalf of. One way to do this is to capitalize the A. “Animal” is a political category which I apply just as readily to humans who challenge the status quo as to members of other species whose lack of agency is essential for the smooth functioning of the capitalist machine. 

Isabela: How do we start to shift these structures of oppression, and what role does developing a language of liberation play in that?

Harley: To shift the structures, we first need to shift the narratives. A narrative is a fundamental belief about the world that we live in. I believe that our society is held in place by underpinning narratives that shape everything from our assumed beliefs about how the world works to how we relate to each other and find meaning and purpose in life. They maintain what we usually describe as the status quo; the set of core, foundational certainties that shape how we understand what is normal and what is fringe or discomfiting. For example, a narrative that exists in our society is that humans are morally superior to other species and that human interests matter the most. Narratives contain hundreds of micro-assumptions which hold them in place. These are the things that you have to accept in order to sit with the narrative comfortably in your mind. Using the example of good vs. evil, for instance, you have to accept that these concepts exist and hold some kind of common understanding of what categorizes each in order to accept that narrative as truth. 

Dominant narratives become entrenched in our society that to challenge them is seen as weird and radical. But even though a dominant narrative presents itself as common sense, narratives can and do shift over time. At some point, most of the narratives we now accept as normal were new, weird, or radical. One of my favourite quotes which I often use when talking about the power of developing new messaging frameworks comes from a fantastic report from the Narrative Initiative called “Toward New Gravity”. Authors Jee Kim, Liz Hynes, and Nima Shirazi state that “narratives are powerful. They can swing juries and elections. They can fill prisons. But they can also fill the streets.” This strikes to the heart of the work that I do and why I believe in it so strongly. What we say matters. How we say it matters. 

Language and communication have the power to fundamentally change the way we interact with the world and with each other. Friends and I will often find ourselves asking “is that speciesist” when coming across colloquialisms or sayings that contain implicit beliefs about Animals as negative or subject to human supremacy. I also find myself challenging implied ownership (I mentioned in an earlier section the use of terms such as “pet”), and in my work, I’m often finding creative workarounds for the commodification of Animals in the meat, dairy, fishing, egg, and clothing industries. This might look like using “cows” and “sheep” instead of “livestock,” “wild Animals” instead of “wildlife” and “aquatic/sea Animals” instead of “seafood.” Even better is actually naming affected species or telling the story of individuals, rather than using catch-alls. 

Isabela: You spent two years (January 2020-May 2022) volunteering with Animal Rebellion in the UK to drive forward their work on narrative and strategy. How did your journey to develop a language of liberation feed into this work?

Harley: To start, it might help to explain quickly some of the core elements of Animal Rebellion. Like Extinction Rebellion, Animal Rebellion was heavily inspired by the “Momentum” model of organizing which was popularized and developed by the political theorists and social change thinkers Mark and Paul Engler. Their book, This Is an Uprising - How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the 21st Century, presents a view of organizing which merges traditional structure-based organizing (think workers' unions and old school community organizing) and mass uprisings (e.g., Occupy wall street and the Black Lives Matter mobilization after George Floyd was murdered by the police). They offer a “hybrid model” based on the idea of a cycle of momentum where escalation and nonviolent action leads to building active popular support which then must be followed by absorption of new members into the movement. This model helps to explain Animal Rebellion’s fundamental goal during the time that I was involved, which was to bring as many people along with us as possible and to build this “mass movement” for food system change. Our goal was based on research by Erica Chenoweth which shows that at least 3.5% of a population is required to participate in a movement in order to achieve meaningful change.

When I joined Animal Rebellion, the group had a story that it wanted to tell, an understanding of the power of narrative, and a belief in how social movements could play a role in shifting the status quo. The messaging team focused on finding novel articulations of this vision to communicate it in a way that connected to people’s values. We did a lot of work on framing, which involved deconstructing dominant narratives and developing new frames. One example of this is the messaging that was developed around COP26, the political summit held in Glasgow late last year. We’d been doing a lot of work on exploring how to move past simply criticizing the system and, instead, use our messaging to build solutions to which people could say yes. A golden rule in our messaging team was to craft communications which were “one part problem, two-part solution”. 

We’d spent the whole year really pushing the message of meat & dairy = climate crisis (the main slogan for our campaign against McDonald's), but we were feeling, around the time of COP26, that we needed to find something new that more clearly showed who we are and what we want. After consultation across Animal Rebellion, we settled on “COP26: Invest in a Plant-Based Future”. This was the messaging on the banner which climbers dropped down the front of the UK’s Home Office and Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs. 

I think it’s a great example of the iterative process of finding new ways to communicate a vision of liberation, particularly from inside an organization which has a very specific and demarcated identity and purpose, such as Animal Rebellion.

Isabela: When we spoke back in May about campaigning strategies, you mentioned that although Animal Rebellion activists and supporters seemed to be motivated by arguments that laid out the linkages between human health, animal liberation, people liberation, and climate change, the general public seemed to prefer simpler messaging. What pieces of the puzzle tend to get left out when communicating to a wide audience, and why those pieces specifically? 

Harley: There are a few different components to this. I’ll focus on the fact that, in general, I don’t think we give the general public enough credit. I’ve had many conversations with people working on advocacy communications who have said that they would ultimately like to present a more “radical” perspective but that it would turn people away or make their supporters uncomfortable. I also read a really interesting report which looked at the communications of a number of Animal welfare and environmental NGOs and their motivations for avoiding the topic of diet change or going vegan. For the most part, the avoidance came from a belief that this would put people off. But these beliefs were based on nothing other than vague gut feelings and, likely, internalized discomfort with oppositional narratives. 

We are often bad judges of what people are ready to hear. For instance, studies that looked at public attitudes to the climate crisis and to climate justice messaging showed that the general public believed that climate change is a serious issue, that it is happening now, and that we need action to address it. Yet, even though one of the key things actually holding people back from taking action is a growing sense of “doomism” (i.e., “The world is fucked, so why bother trying to make a change?”), a lot of climate communications still focuses on trying to convince people of the urgency of the situation and how bad it is, rather than showing them how there is still hope and how they can be part of building a better tomorrow.

I’m heavily influenced by cognitive scientist and specialist in strategic communications for social change, Anat Shenker-Osorio. She says that: “Conventional wisdom says to meet people where they are. But, on most issues, where they are is unacceptable.” Instead, she proposes that “we uncover where people are capable of going and how to use our words, images, and stories to move them.” 

For me, this is the key thing we’re doing when we’re working on messaging. We’re always analyzing where the conversation is in relation to where it needs to be and looking for interventions we can make to push it that bit further. Messaging work is proactive, visioning work. It’s looking for those cracks in the dominant narrative where, if you provide pressure at the right time you can open up the door to a new way of thinking. It’s not creating messaging that is so inoffensive that no one cares. I’m not going to lie — that pathway is tempting, as it’s tough to have your words torn apart by those who oppose you. But ultimately, if we’re not riling up our opposition and firing up our base, our messaging isn’t really doing its job. We can’t shift dominant narratives without exposing society to new visions. Sparking debate, dramatizing the issue and tapping into the media are the most powerful tools we have as social movements to push this narrative shift.

At the same time, the game we are playing is how to communicate incredibly complex ideas in the two to three words that fit on a banner, or in the one to two sentences that people will remember from a press release. We’re seeking big ideas and small words.

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Isabela: One of your Medium posts aptly notes that one issue with grassroots organizing is that one needs to be able to make significant personal, social, and financial sacrifices in order to participate. As you point out, this in itself is a privilege. Where does the anti-speciesist movement stand on diversity and equity, and what else needs to be done?

Harley: I feel like I could write a whole essay just on this! I will also say that, again, there are many people who speak on this far better than me. I would really recommend this interview with Aph Ko where she talks about diversity in Animal Rights. A key point she makes is that “just because people of colour aren’t in a given space doesn’t mean they’re not doing the work”. For instance, data from Faunalytics show that more than 75% of vegans and vegetarians in the US are white. However, given the strong prevalence of plant-based diets in many non-white cultures, this to me likely indicates a failure of the label of “veganism” to connect with people outside a white, middle-class context, rather than a true reflection of the practices of black, brown, and Indigenous people in the US and across the world. In the interview I linked above, Aph Ko states that:

If the mainstream vegan/animal rights movement lacks diversity, that’s not really my problem, nor should that be the problem of any person of colour. There might be a good reason why we’re not there – and it’s because we’re too busy running our own movements.

This is such an important point because it cuts to the heart of our impulse to create these discrete labels and boundaries for work that is really being done across a wide spectrum. 

I think a deeper question is what we are defining as the anti-speciesist movement. Is it the mainstream Animal Rights/welfare NGOs (which are primarily led by white males, even though most of the work is done by women), or are we seeing the movement as being bigger than that? I think there’s an opportunity when questioning and challenging diversity to think about who we’re communicating with and what work we’re platforming. I think sometimes we can become more focused on what our organizations look like rather than how they’re interacting with and supporting the work being done by people of colour, women, queer folk, people with disabilities, and others who are fighting for their own liberation as well as that for all life and every species. 

I don’t intend this as a cop-out for having movements that consist purely of privileged people. I think if you’re a straight, white, educated person and you look around a room and only see people who look like you then, yeah, you have a problem. If you’re getting criticism from other social justice movements and people with different lived experiences leaving or not wanting to join there are probably some deep, fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, starting with what types of bodies and experiences your leadership is modelling. But I think organizations can quite easily cover up a lack of engagement with these deeper issues by focusing on cosmetic diversity. An example of this: someone was telling me about an organization that refused to post any photo on social media unless it had one person of colour in it. To me, this is the perfect indicator that a group cares only about their perceived diversity, rather than critically evaluating how they may be perpetuating injustice through their culture. 

As for what we can do about it, having these conversations is a starting point. Something else is what I touched on earlier and looks like building connections with the groups that are already doing the work. But, as a movement, we need to be honest that we carry a lot of baggage and we need to spend the time to unpack that and to really listen to what challenges are coming from other social justice groups. In my ideal near future, Animal Justice would be accepted as a legitimate social justice movement alongside those fighting for human and climate justice. But if we want to get there we need to build connections. We need to show that we care about ending all oppression and we need to stand up alongside other movements and say that we will fight with them. 

Isabela: On that note, I recently read ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle’ by Angela Y. Davis. In it, she highlights the importance of solidarity between liberation struggles, using the example of Palestinian activists tweeting advice for people protesting the murder of Michael Brown on how to deal with militarized police’s use of teargas — a global consciousness of liberation, so to speak. You exemplify this point on the connections between freedom struggles in your presentation at the Animal Activists Forum on Animal rights under occupation in Palestine. Why is it important to foster this global consciousness of liberation, and what are some effective ways of doing so?

Harley: Yes, I love this example so much. It reminds me of the wave of revolutions and uprisings that swept around the world in the early 2000s, from Serbia to Egypt, and how they inspired and gave each other a model for radical change. I’ve heard stories about different books and even leaflets on social change being passed around the world and giving people living under repressive regimes the chance to see how change could happen. 

At the same time, I think something like a global movement is a really hard thing to build. Even within the same country, we’re living under such different conditions and, in my experience, when you try and build a global organization it's a constant struggle to allow for differentiation while maintaining unity. I’m undecided whether we should be trying to build these global movements or whether we should be encouraging countries to learn and grow from each other to build their own movements.

What I do think is incredibly powerful, though, is global solidarity, and this goes beyond solidarity between localities. For me, the most powerful form of solidarity is cross-movement solidarity, when different groups recognize that their struggle for liberation is linked and join together across movements. An example of where I saw this in the UK was movements coming together to oppose the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill which was brought into place to essentially criminalize loud, disruptive protest, as well as targeting nomadic and Traveller communities in the UK. In response, there was a massive coming together of different social justice movements with the recognition that this issue affected us all. 

I’ve seen similar things happen within campaigns which embrace a framework of collective justice. With Animal Rebellion’s McDonald’s actions, for example, people’s motivation for taking part was varied. While Animal Rebellion was pushing the narrative of “meat and dairy = climate crisis”, we also mobilized around worker’s rights and the many other ways McDonald’s screws up the world. While these examples aren’t the same as this kind of global liberation that you mentioned, I think for me they capture this idea of building campaigns and movements which pull together the threads of injustice so that we can tackle them all together.

As for how to do it, I think social media has given us a powerful tool to expand our mindsets to include struggles from around the world. I think the more spaces we have to learn from each other the better and I’m a big believer in creating space for discussion, strategy, and brainstorming that are not tied to a specific outcome. What I mean by this is looking for opportunities to engage in dialogue outside of the very logistical conversations around what are we doing on our local level and how are we going to get it done. Conferences are great. Training is great. Sending people whose work you admire messages asking to have a call is great. And I mean this both on an individual level and on an organizational/movement level. Asking who else is working in this space and how can we connect with them is, I think, endlessly beneficial.  

Isabela: In a moment where we’re reeling from the overturn of Roe v. Wade, this type of broad consciousness when it comes to liberation feels more essential than ever because we need to be thinking about building robust social movements that can win at the ballot box, not just survive a falling gavel. This robustness will be built, in part, by joining together a range of interest groups. In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision, what opportunities are there to use reproductive rights as a framework for enhancing solidarity between intersectional feminist and anti-speciesist movements?

Harley: I think a lot of people are in a state of shock and grief right now following this outcome. I see a lot of fear, not just in the US but around the world, and also a lot of justifiable anger. I think this is a moment where the movement for anti-speciesism and Animal Liberation can prove ourselves as allies and fellow members of the struggle for collective liberation. 

I have, sadly, seen some people decide that this is the moment to try and point out people’s hypocrisy for caring about abortion rights but not caring about the sexual violence perpetrated against non-humans in the food industry. I don’t think you need me to say that seeing this has made me pretty disappointed in elements of our movement who are unable or unwilling to see how we can’t win this fight for liberation by advocating for other Animals in a way that alienates all other movements for liberation. Ultimately, at least in my mind, we fight for Animal Justice because we see them as equal members of the political and moral community that we are all part of. Their liberation movement is tied to that of all humans. 

While, on some level, I can relate to the frustration and anger that motivates people to co-opt the protests of other movements, I feel like we miss so many opportunities to build solidarity and create spaces for collaboration. The saddest thing is, at the end of the day, the people who lose here are the Animals who, for so long, have been excluded from moral concern, even within social justice spaces in no small part due to a historic unwillingness from the Animal Rights movement to embrace and understand collective liberation. 

I think  Roe v. Wade is an opportunity for Animal groups to show up for others in the social justice space. I know during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, some Animal Justice groups cooked free meals to distribute at protests, while others offered to support such as equipment, marshalls, and action planning. I almost feel like the groups that care about collective justice sometimes are so worried about co-opting that they forget that the opposite of that isn’t remaining silent. Our response can, and I believe should, be to offer tangible, needed support. We all know how hard it is to mobilize and organize people. When something like this happens it's an opportunity to take an active stance to help other movements without expectation of reciprocation but with the knowledge that the stronger we build relationships of trust and solidarity, the more likely we are to see people standing alongside us next time we act. 

Isabela: Finally, who are some of the foundational liberation fighters that changed the way you see the world? Who are you reading and/or listening to right now?

Harley: I actually wrote a blog post about this once which detailed five books that changed the way I think. I’ve mentioned three of them in this interview already! Aph and Syl Ko, Sunaura Taylor, and pattrice jones are definitely four thinkers that spring to mind as being hugely influential on my thinking. More recently I’ve been inspired by the writing of Danielle Celermajer who puts forward an idea of “multi-species” justice which I feel is exactly the model of an irresistible future that I’ve been seeking. 

On more of a narrative side, I would recommend looking up Anat Shenker-Osorio for schooling on how we can use communications for social change. I’m also heavily influenced by George Lakoff’s work on framing as well as work done by the Narrative Initiative, Public Interest Research Centre and Aran Stibbe’s work on eco-linguistics and reframing Animals. 

Right now I’ve been enjoying listening to “Radicals and Revolutionaries” which is an oral history of direct action and the Animal Rights movement presented by Jake Conroy (AKA the Cranky Vegan) and Tylor Starr. I also just brought the new book How Veganism can Save Us by the incredibly inspiring Emma Hakansson. It presents a lot of the topics that I’ve touched on here but in a much more engaging and accessible way so I’d definitely recommend buying a copy and reading it yourself and also giving it to friends and family! 

Finally — and it’s potentially a bit cringe of me to say this — my biggest sources of inspiration are non-human Animals who remind me every day what it looks like to fight for liberation. I’m inspired by stories of Animals who resist and fight back against their oppression but I’m also inspired by those who find moments of rest, joy, and care even in situations that can only be compared to hell. The way they keep fighting is what gets me up every day to try and do what I can to build a more just world. 

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